Penmarric by Susan Howatch

The original hardcover image from 1971.
Sadly my copy was missing the dustjacket.

“I was ten years old when I first saw Penmarric and twenty years old when I first saw Janna Roslyn, but my reaction to both was identical.”

One of the big fat books I meant to read this summer was Penmarric, an epic family saga set in Cornwall. Between Daphne du Maurier and the Poldark series (not to mention Doc Martin) I've developed a small fascination with Cornwall, though I've never actually visited. I do love a good multi-generational saga and the setting absolutely sold it for me. I was at The Strand bookstore in New York a couple of years ago and picked up a vintage hardcover for about $7. My edition was more than 700 pages but I had no trouble finishing it in less than a week.

First published in 1971, the book begins with the historic estate of Penmarric in dispute -- daughter Maud Castellack thinks she should inherit, but naturally as a woman in the late Victorian era, she can't -- with no immediate male heir her father has willed it away to a cousin. Maud won't give up, trying desperately to win the estate for her elder son Mark, narrator of the book's first section. On a trip to Cornwall to finally meet his cousin, young Mark Castellack sees a beautiful widow in a desolate churchyard and is instantly smitten. 

A 1980s mass-market reprint

Janna Roslyn is ten years his senior and has her own slightly checkered history, but Mark becomes obsessed with her, eventually winning her as his bride. The narrator changes for the second section of the book and we get Janna's POV.

So we learn Janna's history and it moves on to the next generation of the Castellack heirs to Penmarric. The book spans about fifty years, ending just before World War II, with five different narrators, and includes four generations of the extended family. It's definitely not literature, but nonetheless I enjoyed it. It reminded me very much of the historical family sagas I read when I was a teenager, like Evergreen by Belva Plain and The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough, though both of those were published a bit later, in the late 1970s. 

A Penguin reprint from 1989, very Gothic!

I wouldn't call it a bodice-ripper, it's definitely a step up from Judith Krantz or Danielle Steele, but I can see that it's very much of its time. Even though it's mostly set in the first half of the 20th century, there are some story elements that would have been a lot more timely in the 1970s. It's not especially graphic but it would have been far too scandalous if it had been written earlier. 

I particularly liked the setting, as always, and the descriptions of Penmarric and the bleak Cornish countryside. I also really liked how the first-person narration shifted. Three of the narrators were from the same generation so the reader got two different perspectives of what was happening, which I liked. For the most part, the characters are pretty awful, but the author made me (mostly) sympathize with them while I was reading their point of view. 

Paperback copy of a French-language edition from1972. 
Nice image, but it doesn't quite capture the same feeling as the other covers.

I realized after finishing that Penmarric was inspired loosely on Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, and there are epigraphs between each chapter which would make sense to anyone who knew the history or had bothered to read them. (I tend to skip over those bits so I didn't get it at the time.) I do love a great epic novel and I was in a bit of reading slump, so this was just the thing for late summer (can I call it a summer read since I finished it after Labor Day?) Susan Howatch has written several other books and a couple of them are still available at my library. There was also a BBC adaptation in the late 1970s which you can find on Youtube. 

So -- a very entertaining, retro read, absolutely perfect for the summer. If I were on a vacation on the Cornish coast, this is the book I would bring with me.

Crossriggs by Jane & Mary Findlater

Not a great cover image, but the only one I could find.

I don't know who I can credit for recommending Crossriggs -- I'm sure it was someone in the blogosphere, and I wish I knew so I can thank them. (Updated: it was Furrowed Middlebrow!) This book is exactly in my wheelhouse, including : 

1. A Victorian(ish) time period 
2. Set in Scotland
3. A strong female protagonist 

Basically, a trifecta of all the things I love in a book. Published in 1908, Crossriggs is the story of Alexandra Horn, a woman in hear late twenties/early thrities, living with her father in the village of Crossriggs which is "about an hour's train ride from Edinborough. Besides the Horns, there are three or four other families of note around which the story is centered. Alexandra, known as Alex, has been living rather quietly with her father, an educated man with interesting and progressive ideas (but not much money) when her recently widowed sister Matilda arrives in tow from Canada with her five (!) children. The eldest daughter is 13, then there are three boys in a row, and finally a baby girl. 

Of course this throws the whole house into turmoil, but Alex and her father take it all in stride until they realize they will be more financially strapped than ever. Her father borrows some money from a close neighbor, Mr. Maitland, but Alex is aghast and vows to find a way to earn some ready cash. She begins by reading every day to a blind neighbor, the retired Admiral Cassilas, who is kind but somewhat gruff and snobbish. The admiral's only living relative is his grandson, Vanbrough, who has just finished school and is about twenty-one. 

A better image of the cover artwork. 

It's "Lady in Grey" (1859) by Daniel Macnee, National Galleries of Scotland

Young Van is bored staying at gloomy Foxe Hall with his grandfather, and the two don't always see eye to eye. He quickly strikes up a friendship with Alex and spends more and more time with the loud and boisterous Hope family. Eventually, his grandfather starts parading a succession of eligible young women around Van, and Alex's sister is pressuring her to accept the hand of James Reid, who is good steady but whom Alex finds dull. And Van is jealous of her friendship with their neighbor Mr. Maitland, who seems excessively fond of Alex, who is married with a sickly wife. Eventually this love triangle (or quadrangle?) comes to a head, and after a dramatic turn of events, there is a tragedy.

I really enjoyed this book -- it reminded me a bit of Jane Austen, but also a little bit of Anne of Green Gables. I really liked that Alex was trying to make her way in the world without just husband hunting -- she seemed like a new modern woman. The plot moved along nicely, and though it's almost 400 pages long, it seemed shorter, probably because the Virago edition had very wide margins. 

This book had some interesting plot twists. There was a lot of foreshadowing about the three men who seemed interested in Alex, so I had strong suspicions about how it would all end up -- and I was right about some of the events, but not the characters I was expecting, if that makes sense. And I was amused by Alex's father, who was a "fruitarian" -- basically, a vegetarian who made the family eat crazy things like nuttose, an early meat substitute developed in the late 1890s. They were also forced to eat carrots, of all things! Apparently this was a vegetable only fit for horses. 

Aside from some cringey racism, I liked this book very much, though the ending was a bit rushed. I did like how Alex's story was wrapped up, which was not how I expected. I would like to read more by the Findlater sisters, who wrote books individually and together. Sadly, I don't think any of their other books are readily available. Crossriggs is currently out of print, but there are used copies of the Virago Modern Classic edition available at a reasonable price online. And I've just discovered it's available as an audio on BBC Radio 4!  

I'm counting this as my Classic with a Place in the Title for the Back to the Classics Challenge and for my UK Classic for the European Reading Challenge. 

Father by Elizabeth von Arnim

The Italian cover. Great photo, but wrong era, it's off by about 50 years.

"There came a moment, she imagined, in the lives of most unmarried daughters, and perhaps in other people's too, when they must either bolt or go permanently under." 

It's funny how some authors are so strongly identified by a single work, when they often have lots of other books which are largely ignored. I feel like Elizabeth von Arnim is one of those authors.  She's so well know for her delightful novel Enchanted April, yet so many of her other books are hardly discussed and mostly out of print.

Author Elizabeth von Arnim

One of those novels is Father, published in 1931. It's sadly fallen out of print, like many of her novels (except in Italian -- most of her books seem to be in print int Italy -- because of Enchanted April ? Of course I'm only guessing.)

Anyway, I've now read nine of her books and Father is near the top of my rankings, by far one of my favorites. Set between the wars, it's the story of Jennifer Dodge, the thirty-three year old spinster daughter of a famous writer. On her mother's deathbed some 12 years before, Jennifer promises to look after her father. Inevitably, she give up her youth and possibilities of any of her own hopes and dreams, devoting herself to Father so that his work is not disturbed.

The only image I could find of an English-language edition

All this changes when Father comes home one day and announces that he has remarried -- to Netta, a nineteen-year-old beauty, a girl young enough to be his granddaughter. Naturally, Jennifer is stunned -- then elated! With a new wife, surely she will be in the way? Now she can escape and have a chance at her own life. Though her father never paid her a cent for her hard work, Jennifer has a tiny income of her from her late mother, and decides to find a tiny cottage where she can garden and live happily in the country.

Minnie, the cook, suggests her home county of Sussex, and Minnie's copy of the local church paper provides two possibilities. After has Father whisked Netta off on a Norwegian honeymoon, Jennifer gets on a train to explore two cottages owned by neighboring vicarages. The first attempt is a disaster, and at the second, the spinster sister of the vicar agrees to rent Rose Cottage to Jennifer, simply out of spite to her brother, with whom she's just had a tiff.

Great cover, but it doesn't represent the characters AT ALL.
These people are far too glamorous and sophisticated.

Alice Ollier, the vicar's sister, quickly regrets her decision when it occurs to her that is distinctly possible that her brother James might fall in love with Jennifer! There's almost a bit of screwball comedy involved as Jennifer begins to settle into Rose Cottage and Alice attempts to thwart her. What would happen to 40ish Alice if James brings home a bride? Meanwhile, Jennifer's idea of a peaceful existence is frustrated by the sudden appearance of the child bride Netta -- apparently there's trouble in paradise. Jennifer's father is also none too pleased at her decision to -- gasp -- want a life of her own! The nerve!

Parts of this are quite funny, but there's an undercurrent of sadness in this novel, as it's mostly centered on men's expectations of the women in their lives, and people trying to manipulate one another. The character of the father in particular made me want to jump into the book and throttle him -- I have rarely read such a well-drawn, frustrating character. He is absolutely self-centered and self-absorbed. And I wanted to give Alice a good talking-to as well.

A French-language edition.
She looks like a dutiful daughter, but about 20 years too early.
This is clearly Edwardian.

I chose this book off my stack because I thought the title would make it a perfect fit for the Classic About a Family category in the Back to the Classics Challenge. It didn't turn out to be quite what I expected -- it is about families, but it's just as much as about the Olliers as it is the Dodges. I hope I'm not giving the impression that I didn't like this novel, because I really liked it, and it will probably be one of my top reads of the year.

I'm counting this as my Classic About a Family for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

The Dinner by Herman Koch

I've read hardly any contemporary fiction the last few years -- I looked back on my 2016 reading and I think I average only about a book a month that was published in the last ten years, and quite a few of those have been nonfiction. I think that reading the classics has sent me on a reading path where I keep finding so many older books and authors that I'll never catch up.

The Dinner was a huge hit when it was published a few years ago, but I never got around to reading it. However, I'm always intrigued by books in translation, and now that I'm living in Europe, I feel like I should read more Euro-centric reading, which is partly why I signed up for the European Reading Challenge. The base library has a decent selection which included this book (which I've actually checked out several times before I finally took a crack at it the other day.

I don't want to give away too much of the plot, as there are some pretty big reveals and twists in this book, as there are some real shockers. Set in Holland a couple of years ago, this is the story of two couples having dinner together, ostensibly to discuss their respective teenage sons and a particular troubling incident. Most of the action take place during one evening at an upscale restaurant, with a number of flashbacks, and we get a lot of insight into the narrator, Paul, and his family dynamic. It raises a lot of questions about parenting, marriage, and personal responsibility. This is definitely a book that I would love to discuss with someone but I don't want to reveal too much -- a major plot point was actually spoiled for me while I was searching for books set in the Netherlands. I thought that would ruin the book for me but there's so much going on it actually didn't, though I definitely would have preferred not knowing ahead of time.

It's not a very long book, but there's a lot happening, some of it quite shocking. It's one of those books like Gone Girl or Girl on the Train that would be great for a book discussion group (though it's definitely far superior and more plausible than either of those.) Once I got started, I could hardly put it down because I needed to find out what happened, and I was easily able to finish it in a few hours. However, once I was done I wanted to return it to the library right away because it made me really uncomfortable having it around. How far should people go to protect their children, and where do you draw the line at personal responsibility? This book was really insightful in parts, but it's also quite disturbing. However, I am glad that I read it.

I'm counting this as my book set in the Netherlands for the European Reading Challenge.

Skylark by Dezso Kostolanyi

I'm a big fan of NYRB Classics -- they are really attractive and I'm always a fan of re-discovered classics. Skylark by Deszo Kostolanyi is one that had been on my to-read list for several years, and I was determined to read it this year because it dovetailed perfectly with the European Reading Challenge. 

Written in 1924 but set just before the turn of the century, Skylark is the story of a family living in a small Austro-Hungarian town called Sarszeg (inspired by Kostolanyi's own hometown of Szabadka, in which is now present-day Serbia). It's a dead-end place where not much happens. The Akos family consists of a husband and wife, Akos and Antonia, and their 35-year old spinster daughter, nicknamed Skylark. Akos is in his late fifties and is retired, spending much of his time researching ancient lineages and family histories. Skylark does most of the cooking and housework, and basically life revolves around her. Life is dull and routine, but one week in late summer 1899, Skylark takes the train to visit family for a week, and Akos and Antonia are left on their own.

This is another one of those book in which not much happens -- and yet, everything happens. Without Skylark, Akos and Antonia do things they haven't done in years. They eat out in restaurants and attend a performance in the theater, which never happens when Skylark is around, since she her cooking is better than any restaurant meal. Akos visits his gentleman's club, drinks, smokes cigars, and plays cards with his cronies -- before, Skylark wouldn't have approved.  Antonia plays the piano, which has barely been touched in years, since Skylark never really took to playing.

This description makes it sound like Skylark is some kind of tyrant, but I don't think she is. Kostolanyi is up-front about the fact that Skylark is a spinster because she's unattractive, which is why she's never married. While she's away from her parents, all three of them face some painful truths about themselves and their relationship, and I really found it rather sad, especially because that was an era when women had so few choices. Skylark is educated and hardworking, and in another time, she could have had a career -- even 15 years later, she could have been a nurse and served during WWI.

The publisher described this book as magical but I just found it really sad.

I'm counting this as my Hungarian read for the European Reading Challenge.

The Claverings by Anthony Trollope

I cannot believe that The Claverings is the 25TH BOOK I've read by Anthony Trollope! (24 novels so far, plus his Autobiography.) When I started reading Trollope back in 2008, I never imagined I would read and love so many of his novels. Granted, some are better than others, but there are only a few so far that I didn't love or really enjoy.

And The Claverings is definitely near the top of the list -- it's been described as one of his best novels and sadly, I think it gets overlooked compared to the Barsetshire and Palliser novels, and his more famous stand-alone novels like The Way We Live Now (The Claverings has a mere 361 ratings on Goodreads, compared to Barchester Towers which has more than 10,000!). But it is a nearly perfect novel -- a great love triangle, some villainous characters, a couple of angelic young women in need of husbands, comic relief -- it has everything wonderful and comforting I have come to expect in a Trollope novel. 

But I suppose I should give some information about the plot. At the beginning of the novel, Harry Clavering is a young man from the poorer branch of a titled family (his father was the second son of the aristocratic Clavering family; his uncle has died and his cousin, Hugh, is Lord Clavering, head of the family. Harry's father, like so many second sons, joined the clergy and holds the living at rectory).  Harry is in love with his cousin Hugh's sister-in-law, the beautiful Julia Brabizon. But there's no money, so Julia marries an older rich man, Lord Onger, instead, breaking Harry's heart.

About a year later, Harry has decided he doesn't want to follow in his father's footsteps in the clergy and decides to become an engineer instead. He joins a family business and falls in love with the youngest and brightest daughter, Florence. She's not a great beauty like Julia but is bright, steadfast and true and will make Harry very happy, and they become engaged. Harry would like to get married soon but Florence puts him off until they can afford it. . . aaand there's trouble in paradise, because Lady Julia Onger is back in the picture as a beautiful, wealthy widow whose abusive and alcoholic husband has luckily died quickly, though not before stirring up trouble with Julia's reputation. Now Harry faces a quandary -- should he throw over the charming and faithful Florence for the love of his life? Does Julia still have feelings for him, as well as her 7000 pounds and a life interest Onger Park, her late husband's estate? 

This is classic Trollope, and I enjoyed every minute of it. Florence is sweet but not saccharine and pointless like so many Victorian ingenues; Harry's sister also has a doomed love affair with a poor curate; and there's comic relief with Lord Hugh's feckless younger brother Archie who'd love to get his hands on Julia's fortune. There's also a sleazy European Count Pateroff who's wooing Julia, and his shady sister Sophie who pretends to be Julia's best friend. 

Even though the ending was predictable, I loved this book. It's one of his domestic novels, so no politics like the Pallisers novels, which might put some people off; and though Harry's father is a vicar, there's not a lot of religious hierarchy which I sometimes find confusing. This would be a great introduction for someone who wants to try Trollope but doesn't want to start a six-book series, or someone who's daunted by a whopping 800-page triple-decker like The Way We Live Now.  

Bloggers, have any of you read The Claverings? And what are your favorite Trollope novels?

The Conquest of Plassans by Emile Zola

I'm getting near the end of the Back to the Classics Challenge and I'm much farther behind than I planned. The other day I was looking for a good short book and I decided it was time to read something in translation. It had been more than two years since I read anything by Emile Zola so I chose The Conquest of Plassans -- partly because it was short; partly because it was French; and partly because I loved the cover (and I've actually seen the original painting from that edition, The Orange Trees by Gustave Caillebotte. It's at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston).

So. Set in the provincial town of Plassans in Provence, this is the story of Abbe Faujus, a mysterious clergyman who arrives in town with his mother and rents rooms from the Mouret family. Monsieur Francois Mouret is related to the Maquarts, and his wife, Marthe, was a Rougon. There are a lot of gossipy characters with nothing much to do other than speculate about the lives of their neighbors. Somehow Abbe Faujus manages to say very little about himself and yet others start talking to him and spill all kinds of secrets.

Eventually Faujus is able to gain the trust of the townspeople and local church hierarchy. He begins to claw his way to the top politically and socially and gain power over many of the locals, some of whom don't appreciate his influence. In particular, Francois Mouret becomes jealous and suspicious regarding the influence Faujus has over his wife Marthe, who becomes incredibly pious and obsessed with religion. 

Meanwhile, Faujus shady sister Olympe and her ne'er-do-well husband also arrive in town and threaten to expose all kinds of family secrets. They ingratiate themselves in the Mouret household which doesn't bode well. This being a Zola novel, a lot of these characters are basically train wrecks. 

The Conquest of Plassans is the fourth in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, and the eleventh of the series I've read so far. Normally I tend to read series books in order, but when I started reading Zola about five years ago, some of the earliest books in the series weren't available in good English translations. (Luckily, Oxford World's Classics has been publishing excellent translations, like the one  I read). I'd heard that most of the books are really stand-alone novels that are loosely linked.

I'd already read the second and third novels, which are set in Paris, but this novel is set in Plassans, which is also the setting of the very first novel in the series. There are a lot of references to events from the first book especially in the endnotes. If you don't want any spoilers for the first novel, I would definitely recommend reading it before you read this one -- I was really regretting not having read The Fortunes of the Rougons first, especially since my library in Texas owned a copy. But buying a copy of the first book from Amazon didn't seem practical since the mail takes longer now that I'm overseas.

This book was OK but it won't rank with my favorites in the Rougon-Macquart series. I think some of his later books are really better. This one felt like it was kind of all over the place plot-wise. There's a whole sub-plot about political intrigues that basically went over my head, and I don't know if I just wasn't paying close enough attention, or if I should have done more research about the Second Empire, but either way I found it confusing. In general, I thought the drama centered around the families was the strongest part of the book, but I tend to enjoy stories about domestic life.  I also didn't like the way most of the female characters were portrayed. To be fair, the male characters were also awful, and Zola is a product of his time, but a couple of the women's portrayals were pretty sexist and made me really uncomfortable. 

I think in a way I put off reading this book because my last experience with Zola was not great -- a lot of people love Nana, but I really disliked it and it kind of put me off Zola for a while. I'd read ten of his books and I think I was worried that I'd read all the good ones already and the rest would be disappointing. Maybe there's a reason that some of Zola's novels don't have many good English translations. And in general, is it better to read an author's best work first, or should you save it for last? Bloggers, what do you think? 

I'm counting this as my Classic in Translation for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

The 1947 Club: Sisters By a River by Barbara Comyns

In honor of The 1947 Club I bought not one, not two, but three books published in 1947. I hope to complete all three of them this week, but let's start with Sisters By a River by Barbara Comyns.

Sisters By A River is a semi-autobiographical story narrated by the middle of the sisters growing in a rather odd household. They live in a country house near the River Avon, in the early part of the century, I'm guessing between the wars though it never really specifies. Their father is quite a lot older than their mother, who married him quite young and then went deaf when the girls are fairly young. There are a succession of servants and governesses, but overall these children seem to run quite wild.

It's not so much a story as a series of vignettes about their lives as seen through the eyes of a child, with all the misunderstandings and misspellings you'd expect if she was telling you her life stories in bits and pieces. Many of the tales are just a couple of pages long, and some of them start out as amusing stories but wind up finishing with a sentence that's quite dark and sometimes unnerving. I couldn't figure out the point of the book until after I'd finished it and went back to read the introduction, which I normally leave until last for fear of spoilers. It all made sense when it explained that this is based on her own life; hence, the lack of plot. It also mentioned that Comyns was a terrible speller in real life (obviously due to her sketchy education) and the publisher left that in and even added to it to make it seem more childlike. 

Sisters by a River is Comyns' first novel, but it's the fourth of hers I've read so far. I think it's safe to say her novels could be described as quirky.  All of her books are quite short, and some of them have surreal elements. I think I've read all of them simply based on recommendations from other bloggers, mostly Simon of Stuck in a Book and Thomas from Hogglestock. So far my favorites by Comyns were Our Spoons Came from Woolworths and The Skin Chairs. I've also read The Vet's Daughter which is definitely surreal, but I didn't like it nearly as much as the others since it has a much darker tone.

With the exception of The Skin Chairs, those books are all still in print, but it's not difficult to find Comyns' other books online as some of them were published by Virago. She wrote eleven books altogether and I'm definitely hoping to read more of them, though it might take a little searching.

Bloggers, have any of you read anything by Barbara Comyns? Which do you recommend? And are you enjoying The 1947 Club? 

Phineas Redux by Anthony Trollope

I'm really trying to read only books from my own shelves, and I know in my head it would be so much faster if I read all the short books so that the unread number would be smaller. But sometimes, I just get a craving for a big fat Victorian triple-decker that will just totally absorb me. And that's when it's time for some Trollope. 

I originally picked Phineas Redux because the audio was available on audio download free from my library -- it's a three-week checkout, but seriously, in a city of a million people, who else besides me would want to read it? I wanted a good classic on audio for dog walking, and I figured I could stretch it out for awhile. Well, I got completely hooked on the story and zoomed through it in just a couple of weeks. I was so pleasantly surprised, because this book is just brilliant. I knew the Pallisers were supposed to be as great as the Barchester Chronicles, but of the four books I've read in the series, this one is by far my favorite. It has satire, romance, politics, intrigue, and lots of my favorite characters from previous novels in the series. 

I should back up a little. Phineas Finn, the eponymous Irish politician from the second Palliser novel, is back in London after several years out of public life. At the end of Phineas Finn, he left Parliament, went back to Ireland, and married his childhood sweetheart Mary. She tragically died shortly after their marriage, leaving him childless, and he is approached by some MPs to see if he wouldn't consider attempting to try for a seat in a  borough which could be won without much trouble or financial output. Phineas has a little money and no family left, so he has nothing to lose. 

Of course, he's thrown back into society with three of his old paramours -- Lady Viola, now happily married to Lord Chiltern; her sister-in-law, Lady Laura, who is separated from her husband, the cantankerous George Kennedy; and Madame Max Goesler, the rich widow who proposed to Phineas and offered to support his political aspirations. (Madame Goesler very nearly became a Duchess when the elderly Duke of Omnium proposed to her, but she turned him down, since she could very well have been the mother to the next Duke, thereby ousting the heir apparent, Plantagenet Palliser. She sensitively turned him down rather then incur the wrath of of her friend Lady Glencora, Palliser's wife). Following all this so far? This is just the setup!

At first, I thought this was a pretty standard Trollope. There are love triangles, and proposals, and broken engagements, plus the aforementioned political machinations. (There's also the reappearance of the devious Lady Eustace from The Eustace Diamonds, who has a small but pivotal role.  However, just about halfway through, there's a pretty significant plot twist, and what I thought was a minor quarrel turns into a murder, and much of the book is taken up with the trial and its aftermath.  Although I suspected it would all turn out alright in the end, it was still riveting.

One thing I really love about Trollope is how great his female characters are -- unlike Dickens, who tends to write females as either brainless ingenues or comic older women. In this book alone, there are no less than six strong females with fully realized characterization. Of course, most of them had already been introduced in the previous books, but the female characters are the heart and soul of his books. Lady Glencora, Madame Goesler, and even the detestable Lizzie Eustace are all worth reading about. I just love that about Trollope -- the women get just as much time in the books as the men, or nearly so. (I wish some graduate student would do a study about this!)

My only quibble with the novel is that I'm really starting to see an anti-Semitic bias in Trollope that makes me uncomfortable. There's a character who is painted as an absolute villain who is Jewish, and there are some pretty derogatory remarks made about him. Also, one character is terribly jealous of Madame Max Goesler, who is a foreigner, and there are a couple of nasty jabs from her rival as well. I remember a minor Jewish character from Rachel Ray that had some anti-Semitic remarks about him, but at the time I read it, I was unsure if Trollope was satirizing anti-Semites or was one himself. I'm starting to think it was Trollope. I understand this is just a reflection of the times, but still, it's disappointing because I love Trollope's books so much. Even Charles Dickens responded to public pressure about Fagin and wrote a much more sympathetic character in Our Mutual Friend.

I also wish I had read it a little closer to Phineas Finn -- it had been almost a year, and some of the details from the first book were a little fuzzy. I suppose chronologically it comes after The Eustace Diamonds, but I certainly don't want to wait an entire year to read the final two books in the series!

I'm counting this as my 19th Century Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge. I'm also thinking about reading more Trollope for the other Back to the Classics categories -- I do have some unread volumes of his short stories, and I also have a couple more Trollopes that might qualify for the Classic With a Place in the Title category.

Has anyone else read the Palliser novels? Which are your favorites? How's everyone else doing with the Back to the Classics Challenge? 

Austen in August: Mansfield Park

I know that many, many people in the blogosphere are writing about Mansfield Park this year, mostly because it's the bicentenary of its publication.  This is my second reading of the book, though technically, it's a listen, since I have the wonderful Naxos audiobook version narrated by the brilliant Juliet Stevenson (who played Mrs. Elton in the 1996 version of Emma).

If you don't know the set up, here's the short version:  Fanny Price is the poor cousin of the wealthy Bertrams who live in Mansfield Park.  She's the daughter of one of the three Ward sisters -- the one who made a crap marriage and is living in Portsmouth with a drunkard and a passel of kids.  One of her aunts married a wealthy landowner, Sir Thomas Bertram, and the other married a clergyman who got the living at the local parish.  This sister, known as Aunt Norris, gets the bright idea to take one of her sister's kids off her parents hands, though she actually pawns her off to her sister and wealthy brother in law -- brilliant!

So young Fanny comes to live in a strange house at the age of ten, and every one pretty much treats her like crap, except the second brother, Edmund, who's actually nice to her.  Things get interesting when Fanny turns 18 and Aunt Norris' husband dies.  The living is assigned to another clergyman, Dr. Grant, who brings his wife and is shortly followed by Mrs. Grant's half-sister and half-brother, Mary and Henry Crawford, who proceed to stir up all kinds of trouble with the Bertrams.  Henry flirts with both the daughters, Julia and Maria (who is engaged to a wealthy but boring guy), and Mary sets her sights on Edmund, to the chagrin of Fanny, who's secretly in love with him.  So, lots of love triangles in sight.

I hadn't actually read this in several years -- I actually tried listening to the audio last year, but I got so disgusted by the dishrag personality of Fanny Price I got bored and gave up halfway through.  I only gave it another go because I'm gearing up for the upcoming Annual General Meeting of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), which I'm attending in October.  This year the theme is Mansfield Park, so I though I'd better give Fanny and company another chance.  And I was very glad I did, because I liked it so much better this time around.

Frances O'Connor as Fanny and Alessandro Nivola as Henry Crawford.  

I was really inspired to try it again after reading this wonderful essay by Paula Byrne, author of Jane Austen:  A Life in Small Things.  Byrne points out that instead of an innocent girl going from the country to the big city and being corrupted, the Crawfords come to the country and corrupt everyone around them.  It's also Austen's sexiest novel.  Mary Crawford makes her infamous quip about "rears and vices;" also, there's a lot of symbolism when Henry is trying to corrupt cousin Maria.  So, I gave it another try, and was very glad that I did.  Yes, Fanny's a little wimpy, but she's really a product of her environment.  Nobody except Edmund has paid much attention to her, other than to treat her as a de facto servant, like Aunt Bertram or Aunt Norris, or to constantly put her in her place, like Julia and Maria -- and Aunt Norris, who spends the entire book trying to beat her down.

The lovely Penguin clothbound classic.  Those are the gold chains that Fanny wears to her first ball -- will she choose the one given to her by her cousin Edmund, or by Mary Crawford?

This time, I really enjoyed Austen's dry wit as she describes Aunt Norris' hypocrisy, the self-absorption of Aunt Bertram, and Edmund's starry-eyed adoration of Mary Crawford.  All the faults and foibles of the Bertram clan are filtered through the eyes of Fanny, the novel's moral center. Sure, sometimes she's a bit too wimpy for my taste, but all the other characters are so well developed I can give her a pass.  Lord Bertram is a lot nicer than I remembered, and Aunt Norris is by far one of the most delicious villains in English literature.  Henry Crawford is kind of charming yet sleazy, and I kept wanting to shake some sense into both Fanny and Edmund.  If I liked Fanny's character better, it would be one of my top novels by Austen.

And now I'm going to have to watch one or both of the Mansfield Park adaptations available on DVD.  Years ago, I fell in love with the story after watching Patricia Rozema's 1999 film adaptation (before I'd actually read the book).  After becoming a devout Janeite, I discovered that many people pooh-pooh this version though I can't see that the more recent 2007 version is any better.  I still think the casting in the 1999 version is spot-on, though Frances O'Connor plays Fanny as a little spunkier than she is in the book.  The casting of Billie Piper as Fanny in the 2007 BBC miniseries is just wrong, though Blake Ritson is pretty dishy as Edmund.   There's also a 1983 version which I've heard is just awful, though it stars Anna Massey, which intrigues me.  I actually own an entire box set of 1980s BBC adaptations of Jane Austen novels, but I've never gotten around to watching it.

So -- how does everyone else feel about Mansfield Park?  Like me, can you put up with Fanny because the rest of the novel is just great?  Do you love Mary Crawford and wish she was the heroine?    And has anyone seen the 1983 BBC version of Mansfield Park?

Peyton Place by Grace Metalious

Scandalous!!

Grace Metalious blew the roof off the image of the quaint New England Town in her 1956 shocker Peyton Place. Ostensibly set in the late 1930s and early 1940s, but with more of a 1950s feel to it, Peyton Place is the story of three women: Constance McKenzie, a beautiful widow with a Deep Dark Secret; her 13-year old daughter Allison, a budding writer coming of age in a small town; and Allison's best friend, Selena Cross, a beautiful girl who is growing up in squalor on the wrong side of the tracks with her mother, half brother, and stepfather, the town's creepy drunk.  

Peyton Place covers all the dirty secrets of small town life, including murder, suicide, child abuse, incest, illegitimacy, and abortion It was groundbreaking for its time, though it's probably pretty tame compared to Fifty Shades of Grey.  

I'm a big fan of stories of life in small-town America, and this is like a really sordid version of Gilmore Girls, with much less witty repartee. There were lots of interesting and colorful side characters -- the upright and beloved town doctor, the uptight school teacher; the rich, unscrupulous mill owner and spoiled son; and the new principal who comes from the big city.  There are a whole slew of characters from various generations, all with their own back story.  Some times I did wish Metalious had included less characters and given the reader more about less people.

I found it to be quite the page turner -- I finished the entire book in a weekend, and I really enjoyed it.  I did have trouble keeping some of the characters straight, particularly the colorful old-timers who sat around at the diner and played poker with the doctor and the town newspaper editor.  Some of the threads were left unresolved; there's a whole plot thread about Allison's childhood sweetheart Norman and his creepy mother, who seems like an eerie precursor to Norman Bates, but we never really find out what happened to him; also, I didn't care for the ending, which seemed somewhat tacked on.  I would love to read an entire book about Allison and what happened to her after the events in the book ended.  There was a sequel, Return to Peyton Place, but I've read it isn't that good, so I may skip it and just imagine for myself how the character's lives would have continued.  

Now I want to read more books about small-town American life -- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis has been on my to-read list for ever; also, I want to read some more mid-Century fiction.  Another one on my to-read list is The Group by Mary McCarthy, which I've returned unread to the library three times at least!

Bloggers, which other books about small-town life do you recommend?  Which banned books do you love?  And has anyone ever seen the Peyton Place movie or TV adaptations? 

Rachel Ray by Anthony Trollope

Among the twenty books by Anthony Trollope that I own is Rachel Ray.  It's not one of his most famous books compared to the Barchester series, the Pallisers books, or even The Way We Live Now, which is a shame, because it is mostly delightful, with one quibble.  It is also blessedly short, just about 400 pages, compared to some of his 800 page chunksters.  

Rachel Ray is 18 and lives in Baselhurst with her widowed mother and her sister Dorothy, who is ten years older and also widowed.  Both widows were previously married to clergymen, and Dorothy is very devout and evangelical.  Trouble starts one night when she reports to her mother that she has seen her younger sister doing something scandalous . . . walking alone with a man!!!  Shocking!  

This young man is in fact Luke Rowan, who is a guest of the Tappitt family.  Rowan is the heir to a portion of the local brewery, and came to Baselhurst to try and work out an arrangement with Mr. Tappitt.  Mrs. Tappitt had great hopes that he would marry one of the three unwed Tappitt daughters, who are friends of Rachel.  Rachel was visiting her friend Cherry Tappitt, and was walking home when he overtook her and caused this minor scandal.  

Meanwhile, Mr. Rowan has all kinds of ideas about improving the brewery and the beer.  Mr. Tappitt thinks he is a young upstart, and Mrs. Tappitt is smarting because Luke had the nerve to fall in love with Rachel instead of one of her daughters.  Luke is a little hotheaded, and he Mr. Tappitt can't get along.  Meanwhile, there's a local election which causes the town to start taking sides, partly based on the whole Rowan/Tappitt feud, and poor Rachel is caught in the middle.  The story follows the courtship of Rachel and Luke, and is a social satire about gossip, hypocritical evangelicals, and local politics. 

I mostly enjoyed this book.  The characters are charming and interesting, and Trollope gets in some good digs, especially about the overly pious Dorothy and a suitor who is mostly interested in her money.  The only part of the novel I didn't enjoy was an aspect of the local election -- the current MP is challenged by a local businessman who is -- gasp -- a Jew.  He's not a bad character, but some unpleasant comments are made about him by other characters (mostly his political opponents) which made me uncomfortable.  I'm not sure if Trollope himself was anti-Semitic, or was just trying to make a point about people of this time period, but I really wish it hadn't been included.  But it's otherwise a nice portrait about life in a small town during Victorian period, and a very easy read.  

I'm counting this as my 19th Century Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family by Mary S. Lovell

Sometimes when I read books off my TBR Pile Challenge list, it's kind of a slog, and I wonder why I bothered keeping this book around.  However, more often than not, I've been so pleasantly surprised by a book I'm annoyed at myself for waiting so long to read it.  The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family is the second type of book -- a sheer delight and one that I couldn't stop reading.  

I'd never heard of the Mitfords until I watched the BBC adaptation of Love in a Cold Climate around 2006.  I was so enchanted by the story that I quickly bought the book (a combined volume with The Pursuit of Love.)  I loved them both so I was delighted to find The Sisters, which I promptly put on my to-read shelf and then ignored, though I moved it from house to house.  I'm really glad I finally read it -- it's both a chatty tell-all and a fascinating biography of a the intertwining lives of six sisters from an eccentric aristocratic English family.  

This is one of those stories that is truly stranger than fiction.  The eldest sister, Nancy, became a bestselling author; the third sister Diana was a reowned Society beauty who married an heir to the Guinness fortune and then left him for Oswald Mosley, a right-wing politician who became an infamous Fascist (both were imprisoned without trial for three years during WWII); another sister, Unity, was one of Hitler's groupies and was rumoured to have been his lover.  The next-to-last sister, Jessica (nicknamed "Decca") eloped with a distant cousin Edmond Romilly, a nephew by marriage to Winston Churchill.  Romilly had fought against fascism in Spain and they were both Marxists.  The youngest sister, Deborah, became Duchess of Devonshire.  So, you can just imagine that this book is just packed with interesting characters and history, mostly set during my favorite period, the inter-war years in England.  I will note that there's quite a focus on Unity's friendship with Hitler, which is really quite creepy.  There's also a lot of discussion as to whether or not some of the sisters were anti-Semitic. I know that this wasn't uncommon among the upper-class British at the time, but it sometimes makes for some uncomfortable reading. 

All of the sisters (with the possible exception of Pamela, the second sister) were real characters, and they were all smart and witty -- sadly, they had very little formal education (some of the sisters never forgave their parents for denying them higher education).  Most of them had writing talent, and besides Nancy, Decca and Deborah also published books -- Deborah published a memoir called Wait For Me! back in 2010.  

I really enjoyed this book -- it's just chatty and gossipy enough to be fun, and includes enough history and politics to be informative, without getting bogged down in too much politics and jargon.  And I was surprised that I never had any trouble distinguishing between all six of them -- they had such distinct personalities.  I only had a few quibbles with the book -- there's not much about the second sister, Pamela, for one thing; also, I did have trouble keeping track of all the many houses the families lived in -- a map would have been incredibly useful, to go along with the family tree and extensive endnotes.  

Overall, though, it's a great biography and I'm very interest to read more of Lovell's books.  She also wrote a biography of Beryl Markham called Straight on Till Morning; The Churchills: In Love and War, plus several others.   The book has really piqued my interest about the Mitfords.  My TBR shelves still include  Hons and Rebels, Decca's memoir; Nancy's book Wigs on the Green, a satire about the fascist sister Unity; and a 700-page volume of Decca's letters.  Hopefully I'll get to some of them before the end of the year.  And now I'm halfway through my TBR Pile Challenge -- I've finished six books in six months, so I'm right on track. 

The Earth by Emile Zola

Classics Spin #4!!!

I was so happy to get The Earth by Zola as my random selection (I was convinced it was going to be The Old Curiosity Shop by Charles Dickens).  I couldn't wait until the end of December to read this, so I've been sitting on this review since before Christmas.  And once again, Zola blows me away.

The Earth is #15 of the twenty novels of the Rougon Macquart series; but like most of the series, it's essentially a stand-alone novel. Set in the 1860s in rural France, not far from Paris, this is the story of two families living in a farming village, Rognes, and the plot seems loosely based on the Shakesperean tragedy King Lear.  The Rougon-Macquart connection is introduced to the readers with a day laborer, Jean Macquart, who has come to the village after serving in the Army.  Jean befriends a young girl, Francoise, who lives with her older sister Lise.  Lise is pregnant by her boyfriend, Buteau, but he refuses to make an honest woman of her.

Buteau's family quickly becomes the focus of the novel.  Buteau is the youngest child of three, and the primary action centers around Buteau's parents.  His father, Fouan, owns a good bit of land, and has decided to split it between his three children now, instead of after his death, to avoid inheritance taxes.  In return, Fouan and his wife will continue to live in their house and receive an annuity until they die.  Sounds generous, right?  Wrong!  The three siblings -- Buteau;  his drunkard brother, Hyacinthe (nicknamed "Jesus Christ") and his sister Fanny (and her husband Delhomme) can't come to an agreement about who gets which plots and how much their parents deserve to be paid for the rest of their lives (which would include firewood, wine, and various other allowances).  It's all very petty and they're haggling and bickering about it. Finally it all seems settled.

Meanwhile, Jean becomes closer to Lise and Francoise, but things take an interesting twist.  He's in love with Francoise, but feels obligated to marry Lise because she's older and has an illegitimate child.   Basically, everyone is greedy, jealous and bitter about the land they didn't get, they're all trying to wheedle more money out old Fouan, and there are several love triangles, some of them sort of icky.  The other people in the neighboring farms are just as unpleasant.  Since this is a Zola novel, things quickly spiral out of control and go from bad to worse, but it's still fascinating stuff.  Even though most of the characters are awful, I couldn't stop reading it since I absolutely had to find out how the story would turn out.  And two of the characters, Lise and Buteau, are some of the worst creations in the entire Zola canon.  Seriously, I cannot recall a nastier pair.

For the record, this book is really not for the faint of heart, or those easily offended.  This being a rural community, there's a lot of barnyard humor, much if it centering around reproduction (both animals and humans) and bodily functions.  Plus, Zola doesn't mince words, at least not in this modern translation -- I read the Penguin classic translated by Douglas Parmee.  This must have been shocking stuff back in the 1800s -- there's quite a lot of sex and violence for a classic novel.

Zola considered The Earth to be his greatest work.  I don't think it's nearly as famous or popular today as Germinal -- not that I'd call any of his works terribly popular, at least not in the U.S.! When I checked Goodreads, there were only 586 ratings for The Earth, compared to more than 10,000 for Germinal and more than 8,600 for the next most popular, Nana, which I still haven't read.  I'm hoping Zola will get the attention he deserves -- The BBC television series "The Paradise" is based on The Ladies' Paradise, which I read last summer, and I noticed there were quite a few people on the waiting list for it at the library.  And there's another Rougon Macquart novel in a new translation!  Money (L'Argent), the 18th book in the series, is schedule for publication by Oxford World's Classics in March, so I'm looking forward to that.

Did anyone else read Zola for the Classics Spin?  Did you like your Spin selections? And most importantly, when is the Classics Club going to do it again?

My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok

I wish I had the discipline (and the time) to review each and every book I read, as soon as I finish it.  I finished My Name is Asher Lev, back in June.  Other things, other books, other reviews just got in the way.  It is a bad idea to wait an entire month to review a book, but I'll give it a shot.  To the best of my recollection.

Anway -- Asher Lev was a gift from my good friend Amanda, who used to blog about books but now mostly blogs about other things.  I put this on my TBR 2013 Challenge list because I didn't want the entire list to be books by authors that had been dead for years and years (Potok did pass away in 2002, but he's pretty contemporary compared to the rest of this list).

So, Asher Lev is an artist, and he begins his story by telling the reader that he is most famous for creating a painting of a crucifixion, a blasphemy for an observant Jew.  He's not just an observant Jew -- Asher was raised an orthodox Jew, a Hasidic, very traditional and conservative.  Asher lives in New York and was born shortly after WWII, and it is the life's work of his father to help other Jews in Europe, so that they can practice their faith safely.  His mother is studying Russian to be able to help persecuted Jews in Russia.

However, young Asher has different ideas.  As long as he can remember, he's been obsessed with drawing and painting.  It's part of him, he can't stop doing it, much to the chagrin of his father, who believes that he's just wasting his time on frivolity -- Asher's father wants him to do something to glorify God and help other Jews.  Every day, Asher struggles with his need to create art against his family's wishes -- he wants to please his father, and win his love, but his art is a part of him.  This is the story of his coming of age, as a young man and an artist, and how he tries to reconcile the two.

I wasn't sure I wanted to read another book about an artist after my disappointment with The Masterpiece by Emile Zola, which I finished a couple of months ago.  In that book, the main character was so obsessed by his art he lets it ruin his life and the lives of the people around him.  This book is quite different.  Asher is really struggling to satisfy his need to create art and his need to please his family.  It's a really interesting character study.  I'd never read anything by Chaim Potok, but the writing was excellent and the characters interesting and well-developed.  I took a few art history classes in college but I really don't know much about modern art.  I don't think Asher is necessarily based on a particular artist, but I tried to imagine what his art might have looked like.  I was also quite pleased that I recognized most of the real artists and works of art mentioned in the book, like Chagall and Modigliani, and Picasso's Guernica.

La Mariee by Marc Chagall.  

I've also been very amused this summer as many high school students came to the reference desk at my library looking for this book!  Apparently it was on the summer reading list for a local high school -- the choice was My Name is Asher Lev or The Count of Monte Cristo!  I still haven't read Monte Cristo but now I can definitely recommend Asher Lev.