Challenge Link-Up Post: Classic Humor or Satire

 

Please link your reviews for your Classic Humor or Satire here.  This is only for the Classic Humor or Satire category. This can be any novel that is humorous or satirical; since humor is subjective, it's up to the reader to decide. If you think Crime and Punishment is funny, go ahead and use it, but please explain why in your post.

If you do not have a blog, or somewhere public on the internet where you post book reviews, please write your mini-review/thoughts in the comments section.  If you like, you can include the name of your blog and/or the title of the book in your link, like this: "Karen K. @ Books and Chocolate (Three Men in a Boat)." 

Poor Caroline by Winifred Holtby is Poorly Titled

I only have one book left to finish for the TBR Pile Challenge, a massive omnibus of short stories by Katherine Anne Porter. (I keep buying short story collections but find them really overwhelming and unwieldy to read in omnibus collections; also, I never know how to review them.) So I thought I would take the easy way out and read an alternate, Poor Caroline by Winifred Holtby, a mere 266 pages in paperback. However, it took me nearly three weeks to finish this book, compared to a mere five days to zip through the nearly 500 pages of South Riding, Holtby's most famous work.

Published in 1931, Poor Caroline is Winifred Holtby's fourth novel, and was an instant success. Unlike her other novels centered around life in Yorkshire, Poor Caroline is a satire set in London, and follows the lives of several people who become attached to the fictional Christian Cinema Company, devised to create "clean" British cinema for the masses (this is just before color films became popular; I can't remember if the films in question are talkies or not). 

Nevertheless. The corporation is basically started by a Caroline Denton-Smythe, a 70-ish spinster living in genteel poverty who has decided it his her lot in life to find causes. She is joined in this endeavor by Basil Reginald Anthony St. Denis, a dilettante war veteran and minor aristocrat; Joseph Isenbaum, Jewish businessman looking to get his young son enrolled at Eton; Hugh Macafee, a curmudgeonly film inventor; Eleanor de la Roux, a distant cousin from South Africa who's inherited a little nest egg. Other side characters include Caroline's vicar, Roger Mortimer, and Clifton Johnson, a somewhat shady scriptwriter. 

The book begins and ends with two cousins who have just returned from Caroline's funeral. The rest of the chapters alternate between the characters, giving the reader back story about how each of them become involved in the project. Every chapter ends with someone saying, "Poor Caroline," from whence the title came, but I think it's a terrible title. 

This book seemed to take forever -- I almost felt like the chapters were short stories, rather than a single narrative. It also didn't help that I kept putting the book down because I really wasn't that interested in the characters, or quite frankly, the idea of Christian cinema. (As a former librarian, I'm not a big fan of public censorship). Taking so long to read the book really made it hard to keep the characters straight, and I found Caroline herself to be really depressing -- my favorite characters were the South African cousin and the vicar. The cranky film scientist was interesting, but he was such a sexist jerk that I wanted to throw the book across the room. 

I so wanted to like this because I loved South Riding and really enjoyed the other Yorkshire novels.  Overall I think it was just OK -- maybe I just didn't get the satire. I just have one more of her novels unread, Mandoa, Mandoa! which is another satire, set in a fictional African country. I'm a little hesitant because I think I prefer the Yorkshire novels. Well, it's one more Virago crossed off the list. 

Crome Yellow: If Barbara Pym Visited Downton Abbey, But Not

A couple of years ago I found this Vintage paperback while shopping at Shakespeare and Company. It was short, it was by Aldous Huxley, whom I knew only as the author of Brave New World, and it was about a country house in England in the 1920s. Sold! I finally picked it up last week because it had a color in the title, and because I had recently read Civil To Strangers by Barbara Pym, one of my favorite authors. In the introduction it mentioned how much she'd loved this book. 

So, I thought this might be a little like reading a Barbara Pym book set in Downton Abbey, but most likely with fewer vicars and less mentions of cauliflower cheese. Published in 1921, it is the story of a Bright Young Thing named Denis Stone, who has been invited to spend some time over the summer at a country house called Crome, owned by the delightfully eccentric Wimbush family. Denis is smitten with the owner's daughter Anne, and spends his time struggling to woo her and write more poetry. The house is filled with various other guests, including historians, artists, and philosophers. The novella has a meandering pace in which not much happens except for witty asides, snark, and long tangents which includes sermons, and the back story of the family who owned the Crome estate. Here is one of my favorite examples:

As reading becomes more and more habitual and widespread, an ever-increasing number of people will discover that books will give them all the pleasures of social life and none of its intolerable tedium. At present people in search of pleasure naturally tend to congregate in large herds and to make a noise; in future, their natural tendency will be to seek solitude and quiet. The proper study of mankind is books.

(Aldous Huxley wrote this in 1921, clearly not having anticipated the invention of smart phones.)

Some of the book is eerily predictive and insightful -- a pastor predicts the coming of another Great War. Another segment is a spot-on commentary that would not be out of place in the current Time's Up Movement; in it, the host's daughter, Anna, defends herself to an amorous visiting artist:

You feel one of your loose desires for some woman, and because you desire her strongly, you immediately accuse her of luring you on, of deliberately provoking and inviting the desire. You have the mentality of savages. You might just as well say that a plate of strawberries and cream deliberately lures you on to feel greedy. In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred women are as passive and innocent as the strawberries and cream.    

I think I liked this book more in theory than in its execution. This is normally exactly the sort of book that I should love yet somehow, I did not. I didn't have any patience with Denis and his pathetic attempts at romancing Anne when she was clearly not interested. Some of the side characters were amusing, particularly the uncle who has devoted himself to the history of Crome, but I did get somewhat bored with the philosophizing which often went on for pages and pages. For such a short novel (only 170 pages), it took me a surprisingly long time to finish it. Also I was annoyed to realize that I could have easily downloaded it for free instead of paying 12 euros for it. I also wished I could have just read Barbara Pym for this challenge instead -- I still have A Few Green Leaves on my owned and unread shelves (published in 1980, so it didn't work for this challenge). Well, I have crossed off my list if nothing else.

I'm counting this as my Classic with a Color in the Title for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

Lemuel Gulliver Never Learns To Stay Home

I don't know WHAT I was thinking when I came up with the Classic Published before 1800 category for the Back to the Classics Challenge last year. Give me a long-winded Victorian triple-decker and I'll devour it, but any time the publication predates 1800, it is a real struggle. Years ago I read Shakespeare in college for a literature credit, and liked it, and I truly enjoyed Candide, but this category was a real struggle for me. I originally meant to read Jane Austen's Love and Freindship (sic). JA is possibly my all-time favorite author and I still couldn't get into it. But I did own a beautiful Penguin Deluxe Hardcover Classic of Gulliver's Travels, published in 1726! Not a woman author, but a book from my own shelves -- plus, it's not too long, a bonus in December!

So. All I knew about Gulliver was that he was shipwrecked and wound up in Lilliput, where everyone is about four inches tall. There are images everywhere of Gulliver tied down by tiny people, so this was not a surprise. But I was surprised to learn that Gulliver is his last name (his first name is Lemuel).

Gulliver  quickly learns the language and eventually wins the trust of the people. In one memorable anecdote, he even saves the tiny palace while it is engulfed in flames, using, um, a very practical if questionable method. 

Yes, Swift doesn't shy away from describing how Gulliver copes with the day-to-day issues of life as a giant. (I found this surprising but I admit I did wonder about how the Lilliputians would feed him).

However, I didn't realize Gulliver's stay in Lilliput is only about a quarter of the book. Things eventually take a turn for the worse in Lilliput, and eventually, Gulliver makes his way back home to England. And I figured from the title that he had some more journeys, but seriously, though, wouldn't you have learned your lesson after the first shipwreck? Better to stay home. His wife must have been most displeased. 

His second voyage leaves him stranded in the land of Brobdingnag, where Gulliver has the exact opposite problem -- now he's the tiny one, in a land of giants! It's interesting to see Gulliver experience life from the Lilliputian perspective, and I think this was my favorite part of the book. He's basically a moneymaker for the family that find him and care for him, until he makes his way to court and becomes a plaything for the Queen until circumstances return him back to England.

Again, you'd think he'd stay off ships. But nope, back he goes again in Part III, visiting the strange lands of Laputa, Balnibari and . . . Japan! (This was rather disappointing, as I've actually lived there. Gulliver doesn't find it particularly strange, though they ask him to renounce his Christian beliefs and "trample on the crucifix." I don't think Swift actually ever went there.)

Despite his vows never to leave England, he makes one last journey, and the ship is overtaken by pirates who dump him in the land of Eventually, he makes his way to the land of the Houyhnhnms, a race of intelligent talking horses who are served by the sub-human Yahoos. He lives quite happily there for years as the only intelligent Yahoo, until forced to return home to his disappointment.

Overall I mostly liked this book but I did find the third section really dragged, mostly because it was a lot of politics and satire, and I'm not that familiar with that era of history and philosophy. I do prefer everyday life, which is why I liked the first half better.  I did quite like the final section where he lives with the intelligent horses. And I do always find it a little jarring when a book is published in the original 18th century Style in which all Nouns are Capitalized. (Fun fact: this is still the correct writing style in Germany, though my German is very poor so it's really not an issue).

Anyway, I'm glad to have finally read this -- and I probably won't be including this category in the Back to the Classics again!

Classics Spin #11: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis

I'm down to the last few books on my Classics Club reading list, and I was pleased when the most recent Classics Spin chose my latest read: Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis, a satirical look at life for a hapless college lecturer who can't help getting his professional and personal life intertwined, with disastrous results.

Set in the early 1950s, the protagonist, Jim Dixon, is a lecturer of Medieval Studies at a nameless British university. He's desperately trying to hang on to his job, and a weekend at a his supervising professor's house throws him in company with the his boss's son Bertrand, a pretentious artist; and Bertrand's latest conquest, a charming bookseller named Christine. Dixon falls hard for Christine but a series of embarrassing mishaps pull Dixon deeper and deeper into a spiral he can't escape. 

I'd heard this one was one of the funniest books of all time, but it actually took me three tries to finally make it past the first chapter of this book. I think I had a hard time with this book the first two tries because Dixon himself is not a very likable characters -- he seems to be someone who's always just getting by without putting any effort it, something of a slacker. He's only teaching Medieval studies because no one else wanted it. 

Amis does really have a knack for making every situation seem real, no matter how contrived and bizarre, starting with a hilarious incident in which Dixon is trying to cover up damages he's done to his guest room on the initial weekend. Things eventually go from bad to worse Dixon becomes embroiled in a series of love triangles which are unfortunately entwined with his professional life.

I really disliked Dixon's character at first and thought it was just a book about disaffected and annoying academic types, but about halfway through the book, I really started to root for Dixon. I don't want to give anything away, but something changes his life and makes him start to be a better person. There's an extended scene in the middle which turns the whole story into something great.

The first American edition of Lucky Jim

I ended up loving Lucky Jim. In a way, it's kind of the flip side of the academia one finds in Barbara Pym, and a very little bit like Wodehouse, though Dixon is much snarkier and has a mean streak you won't find in Jeeves and Wooster. It's a different sort of British comedy than I'm used to reading and I'm very glad I gave it another try.

I'm also counting this as my 20th Century Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge. 

The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from the High Mass.

The Towers of Trebizond has been on my to-read shelf since 2007.  It popped up on some classic book list, possibly The Guardian's list of 1000 Books Everyone Must Read (it's one of the 100 Comedies -- I've read 37 so far).  Plus I really liked the cover of the NYRB Classic edition, above, so I bought my own copy which promptly gathered dust for about seven years until I picked it up the other day.

Published in 1956, this is ostensibly a humorous tale about some unlikely companions traveling around Turkey -- the narrator, Laurie, who is a companion and assistant to her widowed Aunt Dot as she embarks on a journey which is part research for a travel book, part missionary work to convert infidels to the Church of England, and part social work to empower women in a highly traditional and sexist culture. They're accompanied by an Anglican priest, Father Chantry-Pigg, and aunt Dot's nameless camel.  

It's quirky and the wit is mostly very dry:

It is not, therefore, strange that we should have inherited a firm and tenacious adherence to the Church of our country.  With it has come down to most of us a great enthusiasm for catching fish.  Aunt Dot maintains that this propensity is peculiarly Church of England; she has perhaps made a slight confusion between the words Anglican and angling.  To be sure the French fish even more, as I sometimes point out, and to be sure, the pre-Reformation monks fished greatly. "Mostly in fish-ponds," said Aunt Dot.  "Very unsporting, and only for food." 

After a time, the group ends up separating and Laurie spends much of the trip alone with the camel.  There are a lot of funny observations, but Laurie does a lot of soul-searching about the nature of love and religion -- a lot of the book discusses the differences between the different sects of the Church of England, not to mention the Roman Catholic church and Islam.  There's a lot of discussion about the plight of women in Turkey and whether they can be emancipated and empowered.  Laurie is actually an agnostic, and spends a lot of time pondering about the nature of religion.  This book spends a LOT of time discussing religion.  Parts of it are satirical, including some digs at Billy Graham, but some of it is just thoughtful.  

There were parts of the book I found delightful and quirky, and there are a lot of lovely travelogue-y bits when Laurie travels on her own through Turkey on the back of the camel, mostly in places where she can barely speak Turkish and few of the locals speak English.  Still, she gets by quite well, which is surprising for a woman traveling on her own in a Moslem country in the 1950s.  But the end of the book turns quite serious and I did find the ending very melancholy.  I went back and read the introduction of the book after I'd finished, and it was easy to see how some of the events in the book were inspired by author Rose Macauley's own life.   

This book was extremely popular in the late 1950s when it was published -- apparently people went around quoting the famous first line.  I do think that it is definitely a product of its time -- there are some parts in this book that definitely made me uncomfortable, which  some readers could find very offensive.  However, I do think it was satirizing many religions, not just Islam.   

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

Kipps by H. G. Wells

Last year, when I was making up my TBR Pile Challenge selections, I picked several books that I had been dreading for one reason or another -- Lady Chatterley's Lover; The Good Soldier Svejk; Giants in the Earth; and, finally, Kipps by H. G. Wells.  As it turned out, the first three were much better than I expected, but Kipps kept getting pushed back to the bottom of the stack. 

Back in 2005, I began my quest to read more classics -- I realized how few I'd read.  Anyway, around that time I went to the St. Petersburg Festival of reading and got a bunch of books signed.  I mentioned to one author that I was trying to read more classics and she recommended Kipps, which I'd never heard of.  Oddly enough, though, I'd actually read another book by Wells back in college, Tono-Bungay, which hardly anyone else has read.  I did remember that I disliked Tono-Bungay; in fact, I really disliked the entire class, which was a modern British history class that everyone was dying to get into for some reason.  [Did I go to entire college of Anglophiles?  The professor was awful].  

Anyhow, I somehow ended up buying Kipps and then ignored it for about eight years.  Well, this was the year -- I was down to my last three unread books from the TBR Pile Challenge, and I packed Kipps into my carryon luggage for Thanksgiving vacation.  I thought if I finished all my other books, I would be forced to read this.  And it worked!!  Kipps turned out to be a hidden treasure, my favorite book by H. G. Wells so far.

Published in 1905, Kipps is a social satire, the story of the rise and fall of a young man, Arthur Kipps.  The story begins in the 1870s, when Arthur is a young boy and he is sent off to live with his aunt and uncle, who run a small draper's shop in a town called New Romney.  He doesn't know anything about his father, and has only vague memories of his mother.  When he's fourteen, he leaves school and is sent off to Folkestone to apprentice at a larger draper's shop.  After four years, a chance encounter one night leads to a series of events; the upshot is that Kipps finds out that someone is looking for him, because he's about to inherit a nice sum of money.  Kipps is an heir; the father he never knew died years ago in Australia, and his paternal grandfather was a gentleman and has left him twelve hundred a year. 

Overnight, Arthur's life changes.  He goes from being a common shop assistant to a well-to-do man, and he has a hard time adjusting to his new situation -- is he a commoner now, or a gentleman?  What about his old friends?  His aunt and uncle?  Arthur quickly finds a social-climbing fiancee and a new circle of friends, but doesn't quite know how to mix in Society.  I kept wondering if these new friends were real or whether they were just trying to bilk him out of his newfound fortune -- it reminded me of all these horror stories I hear about when people win the lottery and how it actually ruins their lives.  

There was one part in particular that really embodied Arthur's experience: he's in London, famished and trying to find a restaurant to have lunch.  He's too shy and embarrassed to go to an upscale restaurant -- to afraid to make a faux pas.  He decides to turn down a side street and go into the first working-class restaurant he sees.  He finds a fish and chip restaurant and is about to go in but realizes that now he's too well dressed, and won't fit in there either!  It's really sad.  

Naturally, Arthur's life isn't a fairy story, and as you'd expect, things take a bad turn.  But Kipps isn't so much about Arthur's financial situation as it is a social commentary, about class-consciousness, which is apparently far more rigid in England that it is in the U.S. -- I always read in books and see bits on British TV about people knowing their place.  (Don't get me wrong, we still have class-consciousness in America, but I think people just pretend it doesn't exist.  It does.  Plus racism is alive and well, but we don't need to go into that).  

Towards the end, I was eager to find out how Kipps' story would resolve.  I'm happy to report that it came as quite a surprise, but in a very satisfying way.  Arthur Kipps is a delightful character and I loved his story.  Another success from the TBR Pile Challenge!

The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek

The Good Soldier Svejk was probably the book I was most afraid of reading from this year's TBR Pile Challenge, and, at long last, I have finished it -- all 752 pages!  Finally.

I'd first heard of Svejk in a book called The Novel 100 by Daniel S. Burt, which lists the Best Novels of All Time.  I really like The Novel 100 because, it's not just about The Best Books, it's really more about the most influential books, so it includes books like Gone with the Wind and The Three Musketeers.  It also includes books in translation, like The Princess of Cleves and Dream of the Red Chamber, and it has very interesting and readable essays about why each title is included.  [There's also an appendix with 100 runners-up, some of which I believe are in the updated and expanded edition of the book.]   

Anyway.  Svejk is long, it's about war, it's in translation, it's Eastern European -- a quadruple threat --  but it's actually a very easy and amusing read, though it did take me several weeks to get through it.  Basically, this is a picaresque novel about an everyman named Josef Svejk.  After a series of misadventures, he ends up fighting on the Austro-Hungarian side of WWI.  Svejk is either a complete idiot or an absolute genius.  He's constantly getting in and out of scrapes, and his superiors, the police, and medical professionals can't decide if he's really as dumb as he seems, or is just faking.  The book satirizes the futility of World War I, the military bureaucracy, etc.  It's kind of a WWI version of Catch-22, but much longer, and as if Yossarian traveled all over Europe.  (Which in fact he may have done -- it's been several years since I read Catch-22 and my memory of the plot is a little fuzzy).  I have heard that Joseph Heller may have been influenced by Svejk, but I haven't done enough research to be sure.

One of the illustrations from The Good Soldier Svejk.  Svejk is the character on the right.

It's quite funny in spots, and the translation I read was very easy, but it was hard for me to read more than a few pages at a time.  (It's not quite as long as it seems because there are lots of cartoony illustrations.)  Basically, Svejk travels all over during the war, telling funny anecdotes about other people, and the author pokes fun at pretty much everything.  There's a lot of drinking and gambling and carousing, and all the other kinds of trouble soldiers get into while waiting for war to happen. (There's also a lot of descriptions of bodily functions and numerous descriptions of food, including what the soldiers are eating and what they're dreaming about during wartime).  It was probably really shocking for its time, and I'd be surprised if it hasn't been banned or censored.

Svejk was pretty amusing to read it bits and pieces but since it was planned as six volumes, it goes on a long time.  There aren't even any actual battle scenes for the first 500 pages.  It's kind of the same thing over and over, but with slightly different settings and characters.  I could see this would be a good read if it was serialized, which it essentially was, being originally published in parts.  I actually got a little bored with it around 450 pages and put it down for awhile.  To be honest, the last 300 pages or so were a bit of a slog.  And the story is unfinished!  Svejk was planned as a six-part work, but Hacek died before he could complete it.  It's still one of the most famous works of Czech literature, and was also adapted into a movie.  He's kind of a cult anti-hero in Eastern Europe; apparently there are statues commemorating Svejk all over the place:

A manhole cover of Svejk from Bratislava

Just for fun, while reading this book I decided to do a Google blog search for Svejk, to see what other people thought about it.  I was delighted to find a blog posting about a Svejk Cafe in Riga, Latvia.  If you read the description, there's a link to a PDF of the restaurant's menu, which is extensive.  Some of the dishes are named after characters in the book, and if you look closely, you can see Josef Lada's illustrations imprinted on the menu's pages.  If I am ever in Latvia I'll definitely have to go.

Having finally finished it, I have a little more courage to read some of the other books from my TBR shelves that scare me, including Moby Dick, Les Miserables, The Jungle, and To The Lighthouse.  Maybe I'll even tackle some of the Russians -- I've never read Dostoevsky or Gogol, and I need to read something Russian for the Back to the Classics Challenge.  Any suggestions?  And has anyone else read Svejk?

The Ladies' Paradise by Emile Zola

Slowly, but surely, I am working my way through the entire Rougon-Macquart cycle of novels by Emile Zola.  My eighth effort was The Ladies' Paradise, the eleventh novel in the series.  Loosely based on the famous Bon Marche department store in Paris, this is the story of Denise Baudu, a poor shopgirl of twenty who has come to Paris from the provinces, hoping for a job.  Her parents have both died, and she has two younger brothers to support -- Jean, 16, who's a bit of a ne'er-do-well and already a womanizer; and little Pepe, who is only five.

After her parents passed away, Denise was promised a job by her uncle, who owns a draper's shop in Paris.  Unfortunately, by the time Denise arrives unannounced, business is very bad, mostly because of the expansion of the nearby department store complex, Au Bonheur Des Dames (aka The Ladies' Paradise) which is swallowing up nearby small businessmen, then undercutting them and putting them out of business.  (Sound familiar?)  It's owned by Octave Mouret, the playboy from the previous novel, Pot-Bouille.  He's now a widower who inherited pots of money from his late wife, and has invested all the money into the store, creating a store like no other, at which you can get absolutely everything you need.

Jean has an apprenticeship and goes off on his own (and repeatedly gets into romantic entanglements); Pepe is boarded with some neighbors, but Denise is forced out of desperation to take a job at the evil incarnate, Au Bonheur des Dames.  Her uncle is furious but what can she do?  Mouret has also gone back to his playboy ways, and has his eye on Denise, who blooms as she becomes a skilled shop worker.

Like the train in La Bete Humaine, the main character in this book is the department store itself -- it's basically a satirical look on consumerism and the rise of the very first big-box stores.  I could not help thinking of Wal-Mart as I read this, and how it has squeezed on so many independent retailers.  Zola uses the novel to satirize consumerism, greed, and the rising power of women in the retail market.   I was also struck, over and over, how history is repeating itself with big box stores like Wal-Mart, though I'm pretty sure the employees at Au Bonheur Des Dames are treated better than Wal-Mart employees!

However, the characters themselves aren't that well developed, and I found Denise in particular to be a little too good to believe, too forgiving and long-suffering.  I've seen a lot of this type in Trollope novels lately and it's beginning to get on my nerves.  I suppose it's a Victorian trope, though at least the young women in Trollope and Zola aren't nearly as bad as the ones in Dickens' novels.

The Paradise series on BBC.  

The Ladies' Paradise (#11 in the series, and the eighth I have completed) is fairly popular for a Zola novel, though nowhere near Germinal or Therese Raquin.  You'd think the subject, shopping and commercialism, would make it more popular.  I was inspired to pick this up by my recent binge-watch of Mr. Selfridge -- the entire series had been taking up space on my DVR for several months.  I've also heard that The Ladies' Paradise was adapted into a BBC series called The Paradise, and I've just discovered it will begin airing on PBS here in the States on October 6!!  The folks at BBC know how we Yanks love those British period dramas!

Anyway, it was interesting and entertaining, but not nearly as good as Germinal or La Bete Humaine, which are my favorites by Zola so far -- I'd rank it as a second-tier Zola novel, closer to The Belly of Paris or Pot-Bouille.  Still, worth reading, especially if you like shopping and fashion, or if you're in withdrawal from Mr. Selfridge.  I have a feeling I'll see more blog postings about it in the fall after the TV show starts to air.

The Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome

Before I started reading Victorians, I thought they were all so long, and so serious, and had so many words. . . . and a lot of them do.  But I was really surprised to people had a sense of humor back then. If you haven't read Jerome K. Jerome, he's hilarious -- his most famous work, Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) is one of my all time favorites.  If you haven't read it, it's the story of J., a slightly dimwitted Victorian man known as J.,  who takes a boat trip down the Thames, with two equally clueless friends and a hyperactive fox terrier, Montmorency.  (I've often compared it to Jeeves and Wooster -- if Bertie went on a trip and took a dog along instead of Jeeves.  Hilarity ensues). 

I'd never seen anything else written by JKJ, other than the sequel, Three Men on the Bummel, in which the friends reunite and take a bicycle trip through Germany, though I still haven't read it.  However, I was poking around Half-Price Books a couple of years ago and found a Nonsuch classics copy of Diary of a Pilgrimage, which I'd never heard of.  It was by Jerome K. Jerome and it was only $4, so I couldn't resist.  (It then sat on the shelf with all those other books I HAD to buy, then promptly forgot.)  The Victorian Celebration was the perfect time to re-visit Jerome.  

The setup is very similar to the other books -- basically, a travelogue is the excuse to make witty observations about life and travelers thrown in different situations, with some witty asides.  In this story, the narrator and his friend "B" take a trip to Oberammergau, Germany, to see the Passion Play, a traditional seven hour play about the life of Christ, which the locals have put on every ten years since 1634, during the height of the bubonic plague. 

Though the Passion Play is the purpose of the journey, it's mostly just an excuse for Jerome to make funny comments about travel and tourism, and life in general.  For example, after he's invited on the trip, the narrator considers the invitation:

I pondered for a moment, looked at my diary, and saw that Aunt Emma was coming to spend Saturday to Wednesday next with us, calculated that if I went I should miss her, and might not see her again for years, and decided that I would go.

Jerome also pokes fun at tourists, packing, railway journeys and saving seats, maps that are out of date, and things of that nature.  I was delighted to discover that Jerome's journey from London to Bavaria was nearly identical to the route that I took many years ago with my sister -- we were poor students and took the Trans-Alpino from London to Berlin, an overnight journey of 22 hours which I will never forget.  We took a night train from London to Dover, changed to a ferry, and then we went to Ostend, Belgium -- just like Jerome.  In the middle of the night we switched to a train which took us to Cologne (Jerome talks about the famous cathedral towers, which we sadly missed).  Jerome's journey was about 100 years before mine, so the trains were slower and his trip lasted several days; he and B. stop several times to do sightseeing and stay overnight in inns, unlike my sister and me.  Still, it was fun to read about someone in a book take nearly the same route as us.

This book is short, less than 200 pages, and my edition was a cute little paperback, only about five by seven inches; plus it had illustrations so it's a very quick read.  It's broken up into short chapters so it's easy to pick up and read a bit when you have time.  It's a really nice antidote to some of the heavier (and longer) Victorian on my to-read list.  If you're looking for a short Victorian, it's just the thing.

Making Conversation by Christine Longford

The beautiful endpapers
from Making Conversation

I'm slowly but surely making my way through the Persephone books list.  I recently received four new Persephones as belated Christmas gifts -- even though they arrived in January, I can still count them towards part of the TBR dare, since they're technically Christmas gifts. (I will make exceptions due to the slow arrival of the mail because of weather and holidays.)

Anyhoo.  I put this on my Christmas wish list back in December, and now I can't remember why.  The description in the Persphone catalog says it's a comic novel, in the vein of Cold Comfort Farm.  Well, I don't know if it's because I'm not British, or because I'm not educated enough, but I just did not get this novel.  It's about a young woman's education just after WWI, and about conversations in general (which you might have gathered from the title).  The book is full of Martha's conversations.  In fact, the whole book is mostly conversations, and not much action.

The novel begins in the 1910s, when Martha Freke is a young teen.  She's being raised by her single mother, since her father, a former military officer, has done a runner.  Her mother has been forced to take in lodgers (it is NOT a boarding house!) who are mostly students, so Martha gets an unconventional education from the interesting people who seem to drift through her life.  It certainly seems better than the school in which she's enrolled which sounds just horrible.  She's forever putting her foot in her mouth and there are lots of misunderstandings, one of which ends up getting her kicked out of school. Nevertheless, Martha is bright enough to get a scholarship to Oxford, where she has lots of other conversations, mostly with female students since they appear to be quite segregated from the men.

I suppose this is supposed to be satirical in some way, but I just didn't get it.  I know that Cold Comfort Farm was poking fun at the pastoral novels of the era, and I really enjoyed it, even though I didn't get all the references.  I also loved Decline and Fall by Evelyn Waugh (and if you've read Brideshead Revisited, this is nothing like it.  Brideshead has its great moments, but Decline and Fall is just a hoot).  Maybe the humor in this is too subtle for me, or too specific, or maybe I would have gotten much more out of it if I'd read classics or history at an elite British university (for the record, I majored in journalism and history at a well-respected university in the Midwest, so I'm not a complete moron).   I was hoping the introduction would give more insight, but it's mostly biographical information about the author.

Anyhow, I'm not saying this is a bad novel.  I just didn't really connect with Martha or her friends, most of whom I couldn't keep straight, and I didn't find her story particularly interesting or compelling.  It was an easy read, but I wasn't at all excited about it the way I have been with most Persephones.  I'm mostly just disappointed because I've really liked most of them so far. If anyone has read this novel and can help explain it to me, please do.

Candide by Voltaire

I'm lucky enough to be in a face-to-face, in-real-life book group that only discusses classics.  Every year, the group leader, Amanda, does a great job of balancing all the books we read -- male/female authors, books in English vs. books in translation, and also different time periods and style.  Not only that, we're limited to titles that have enough copies in our public library, so no one has to purchase books. 

Our August read was Candide, which covers several categories -- first of all, it was written in 1759; it's translated from French; and finally, it's a satire.  Great pick, Amanda!  If you're like me, and normally run in fear from an 18th century novel, you should consider it.

This was my third reading of Candide.  The first time was in my junior year of high school, for World Lit.  (Slightly surprising, seeing as how it's a little racy -- it's an 18th century book but there's quite a lot of sexual innuendo.  Maybe none of the parents had read the book and had no idea.)  I read it again a few years ago for another book group and remember enjoying it.

 Basically, this is a satire about a young man, Candide, who grows up as an illegitimate child on a Baron's estate.  He's in love with the Baron's beautiful daughter, Cunegonde, and their tutor, Pangloss, has convinced them that they live in the "best of all possible worlds." (Pangloss is a satirical representation of the philosopher Leibnitz).  Candide is thrown out in disgrace after kissing Cunegonde, and must make his way in the world.  It's a picaresque novel, in which our naive hero encounters disaster after disaster -- earthquakes, wars, shipwrecks, and more -- but he manages to survive and is determined to reunite with Cunegonde.  No matter how terrible his life is, he is eternally optimistic and hoping to find his lost love.  He meets all sorts of people, many of whom are based on historical characters and philosphers, all skewed by Voltaire.

Apparently, Voltaire was both celebrated and reviled for his satire, and was exiled more than once.   This book satirizes philosophy, various governments, religion -- no wonder he was drummed out of France.  I'm sure the Catholic Church hated him, he takes some real shots at the Jesuits and at the Inquisition.  I wish I knew more about philosophy and the Enlightenment, so I'd know more about what he was satirizing.  It's a fast, easy read, and parts of it are really funny.  If you'd like some more background, click here.

Somehow I just didn't enjoy Candide as much this time around.  I know it's a satire, but I got a little tired of being reminded of all the terrible things that have happened, tsunami and earthquakes and rapes and murders and theft and torture.  Maybe I'm just taking this book too seriously.  The terrible things seem to be outweighing the funny bits this time.   I suppose I've been reading too much world news lately, all the terrible war crimes and disasters.  But for an book that's 250 years old, it's surprisingly enjoyable. 

Amanda at the Zen Leaf also reviewed Candide (yes, the same Amanda who leads my book group, and who inspired me to start blogging.)  You can read her review here.