Re-reads

Dom Casmurro – Machado de Assis (Portuguese)

This novel, published in Brazil in 1900 and written by a grandson of a slave, is strange in both its approach and its construction. Machado first tries to make it seem that Bento, the main character, is speaking to the reader. All first-person novels take this tack, but not with the insistence found here. Bento often comments on what he’s telling us. One example, from the second page: when explaining how he got the nickname of Casmurro, he tells us, “Don’t look it up in the dictionary,” for the definition there, he finds, is not fitting. He explains what it means in his case, which is “a quiet person who keeps himself to himself.” This quiet person, a man in his sixties who lives alone, is going to tell us the story of his life solely because he wants to relive the past. Or, more specifically, to evoke “a celebrated November afternoon that I have never forgotten.” Then he adds, “Read on and you will understand what I mean.” So I read on and was soon introduced to Capitu, a neighbor girl he had known and played with since childhood. But he has reached the age of fifteen, she fourteen, and feelings change. He combs her hair on that celebrated November afternoon, and a kiss follows. A kiss he will never forget. Capitu is a very strong character. She seems, from what she says and by her actions, to be intelligent, determined and manipulative. More of a woman than a girl. The two vow to get married, but there’s a hitch: his widowed mother’s first child, a boy, had been born dead, and she had made an oath to God that if her second child were a boy, and lived, she would destine him for the priesthood. Since Bento is an obedient and loving son, there’s that dilemma to be solved. It is, eventually, and he and Capitu get married. But I wondered, from the beginning, how Bento reached old age alone and isolated. The answer emerges late in the narrative; in between there are many digressions, side issues – too many. And there’s a skipping of huge gaps of time; an abruptness sets into the narrative. Capitu largely disappears as the vibrant presence she was for that one scene (a fact which may have significance). The novel is considered to be a masterpiece of Brazilian literature. I found it original and engaging, but in some vital way frustratingly inexplicable. In the end I didn’t understand Bento – the man “speaking” to me. 3

A Member of the Wedding – Carson McCullers

It took McCullers five years to write Member. In a letter she told her husband “It’s one of those works that the least slip could ruin,” and that she had worked over some parts “as many as twenty times.” In my opinion, she should have spent another month working to delete whole sections. All of Frankie’s ultra-sensitive musings needed to go. No human being ever indulged in such delusional thinking. Even the whole premise of the book – Frankie’s intention to live with her newly married brother and his bride, for them to be a threesome – is such a silly idea that I can’t believe any twelve-year-old girl would ever entertain it. Also needing deletion is the whole business with the soldier – again, no twelve -year-old girl would act so stupidly (nor would the soldier). Lastly, delete the entire final Part Three, all twenty-some pages. It wraps things up in a highly unsatisfying way (and does so by using the gratuitous death of one of the characters). What is left after all these deletions? There’s the kitchen where Frankie and Bernice and John Henry sit and talk and interact. This is wonderful. Bernice (the Black cook) serves to blunt Frankie’s extreme words and actions. Bernice is by far the strongest character in the novel, and McCullers should be given credit for creating her. There’s not much to John Henry, except a sweet, unformed little boy (he’s the one who gets sacrificed in Part Three). The atmosphere of a small Southern town is nicely evoked. So there are pluses. The book didn’t get much of an audience, but the play and the film (which I saw, and liked very much) and the TV version made the story famous. I won’t delete this novel, due to its strengths. 2

A Member of the Wedding: A Play – Carson McCullers

This play version happened to be available at my local library. Reading it was quite a surprise. McCullers pretty much fixed all the problems I noted in my review of the novel. Did she see the light? Did someone give her guidance? (The primary candidate is Tennessee Williams, who encouraged her to do a play version and who helped her in writing the beginning.) Did the restrictions of staging benefit in not allowing all that indulgence in Frankie’s musings? The set keeps us in a single location: the kitchen, where the novel was at its strongest, and where we only get to hear what Frankie says and see what she does. Bernice is given the major role she deserves; John Henry is more developed; the soldier is eliminated entirely. The premise – wanting to be a member of the wedding – is presented in a more reasonable way. In other words, there’s an overall toning down of the extravagances. A few characters that were only referred to in the novel make brief appearances – mainly Frankie’s brother and the bride-to-be. This was a stabilizing element, because in the novel they came across as mythical figures. Three good actors could do something with this material, and Ethel Waters, Julie Harris and Brandon de Wilde (at age seven!) surely carried it off admirably. The play ran for 501 performances and won the New York Drama Critics Award. My only gripe (one I had with the novel) was the death of John Henry. When a character in a movie or play mentions in passing that they have a headache, you know that they’re doomed in the last act. But, probably, when Bernice talks of his death, there must have been a ripple of shock throughout the audience. What?! John Henry died? That lovable kid?

The Wager – Machado de Assis (Portuguese)
The novel takes the form of a journal kept by Aires, a sixty-three-year-old widower living in Rio de Janeiro. The wager is whether a young widow will marry again. (She does.) I’m giving away the outcome because it doesn’t matter. With the exception of Aires, no character is developed and the plot has no tension. This is a mood piece by a sixty-eight-year-old author who died months after the book was published. Though thoughts of death are pervasive, the mood isn’t dark. Aires/Assis accepts with calm resignation how life works, and he’s only mildly moved by anything, including his own demise. He still retains an interest in human nature and he can still find people to be a source of humor. But the absence of passion gives the novel a muted quality. To Aires the two young people who marry “have the right to live and to love, and to leave the dead and the aged behind with no regrets.” Fidelia must leave the memories of her dead husband behind, and both she and Tristao must leave their aged foster parents behind. There is no tragedy in this.

A Place in Time – Wendell Berry
These are crafted stories, in the sense that a master carpenter can make joints fit flush. I’m not referring just to the prose. Crafting in fiction is about how characters and situations are developed, and how the ending is handled. In “The Requirement” a man is dying; we go over Big’s life, as seen from the memories of a friend. We get to know Big. At the end he asks, from his bed, for the narrator to get his revolver from the closet. It’s what happens after that request that shows Berry’s gift; the ending is unexpected, perfectly right, and moving. In this story, as in many others, Berry imparts a philosophy about life and values. Mostly it blends in with the fabric of the narrative, but at times the philosophical and contemplative aspects are too overt (and belong, properly, in essays). What does consistently work is Berry’s waggish sense of humor. A woman recalls how she and her husband-to-be woke up a preacher to perform the marriage ceremony: “When he asked Grover to promise all those things ‘to death,’ Grover said, ‘Would you go over that a little slower?’ ” The pace throughout this collection is leisurely, which is appropriate for stories that dwell in the past, before mechanical efficiency sped everything up. I found it pleasurable to go back to a simpler time, when work was physically difficult but the fruits of one’s labor were clear to see. Also, people had an intimate connection with nature and animals and tools. Despite all the virtues to be found in this book – rare ones – I felt I was missing a lot. The setting is a small farming community on the banks of the Kentucky River. Kinship is important, but I couldn’t keep the relationships straight. Characters appear in one story, then reappear in another, and I couldn’t remember them as they had been. These are interconnected stories, but I often didn’t get the connections. What I intend to do is go back to the first novel in the series. Because I want to spend more time with the people of Port William.

The Enchanted April – Elizabeth von Arnim
A woman lunching in her London club reads an ad in The Times addressed “To Those who Appreciate Wisteria and Sunshine.” An Italian castle is to be let for the month of April. Mrs. Wilkins (Lottie) notices another woman staring at the same page. Eventually the two – strangers, both unhappily married and dissatisfied with their lives – decide to take the plunge. To defray expenses, they recruit an elderly widow, cranky and stuck in the past, and a young woman who is so gorgeous that men are mesmerized by her. (Caroline yearns to get away from all the “grabbers” in the world.) In Italy the four women are immersed in the stunning natural beauty. For Lottie it’s transforming: she sees life in an altogether different light (a rose-colored one), and the force of her feelings affects the others. Well into this novel I was caught up by an invigorating sense of escapism. But when men (the two husbands and the owner of the castle) enter the picture, reality set in. At least it did for me; the author tries to keep up the Lottie  fantasy that Love can induce a radical change in everybody. I couldn’t accept that Mr. Wilkins will cease to be a tyrant, nor that Caroline would warm up to a grabber like Mr. Briggs. Unlikely complications proliferate, and the gentle humor is replaced by slapstick. What had been quietly uplifting becomes doggedly instructive; to assert the primacy of Love makes it seem simplistic and sappy. When you like a book, then it falls apart, one feels betrayed. So I was in a bad mood when I read the introduction by Cathleen Schine. She raises the possibility that some characters are based on real people from the author’s life: “The Enchanted April’s sweetly ardent Mr. Biggs, owner of the castello, is, in his search for a mothering sort of love, based on Frere.” For one thing, the man’s name is Briggs, and he’s so smitten with young Caroline that he’s hardly able to function; he’s certainly not after any mothering.

The Flame Trees of Thika - Elspeth Huxley
These “Memories of an African Childhood” are narrated by a young girl, but it’s the adult the child will become who gives an unflinching account of a place and its people (on page two the mother, Tilly, dismounts from her horse and proceeds to “pop” the ticks that had settled on her clothing). Ticks are a minor annoyance compared to other hardships that confront the family in the African wilds in the early 1900s. The natives – mainly Kikuyu and Masai – are treated with understanding, but the book doesn’t shirk from describing practices and attitudes alien to our sensibilities (such as female circumcision and a complete lack of compassion for any animal). Not that the British and Dutch come across as pillars of virtue, though their vices are all too familiar. We’re presented with radically different outlooks on life. The Africans adapt to their surroundings while the Europeans try to alter it, mostly with the objective of making a profit. The persistence and resourcefulness of the settlers is amazing. Robin and Tilly (the child’s parents) are totally unprepared to farm the tract of land that Robin purchases, sight unseen. That they’re able to get by in the harshest conditions sometimes made me feel that I was viewing them through the baffled eyes of the Africans. The book’s diverse plot lines are made up of interactions the girl has with both whites and blacks (though her closest attachments are with animals); mostly she’s an observer, and some of what she sees is incomprehensible to her (but not to us; most significant is an ill-fated love affair). In this very odd childhood the oddest aspect is her relationship with her parents. They’re always referred to as Tilly and Robin; they’re not, in emotional terms, a Mother and Father to her. She isn’t mistreated, but merely taken care of in a matter-of-fact way. Though she displays no resentment, I was aware of the absence of warmth and affection. Despite all that she’s exposed to, some of it ugly and brutal, this unflaggingly resilient young girl develops a love for Thika. In a sense, this is a love story, with the object of love being childhood itself. *

Night Rider - Robert Penn Warren

In Warren’s first novel, written when he was in his early thirties, the talent and ambition that would culminate in All the King’s Men is evident. But ambition is a demanding virtue. The character of Mr. Munn (which is how he’s referred to in the third person narration) is key to the book; through him Warren explores the issues of power and violence. Mr. Munn is indeed a “Mr.” He has solidity, but it’s that of a figure carved from wood; for a while I thought he was real, until the inexplicability of his moods and actions accumulated; even the prose, which is generally straightforward, got dense and obscure when dealing with his emotional states. A shame, because Warren succeeds so fully in other ways: the secondary characters are strong and the rural setting has a deep-grained authenticity. The plot is based on a little-known episode in our history. In Kentucky and Tennessee in the early 1900s an Association of Growers of Dark Fired Tobacco was formed to force the conglomerates to pay a fair price for their product. But when the first step toward violence is taken, matters begin to spiral out of control; eventually night riders are terrorizing – and sometimes murdering – those who oppose them. Interesting material, but Warren passes the point where the story is completed and goes on for another hundred pages. Perhaps, being ambitious, he thought that a major first novel should be weighty in every sense of the word. What we get is Mr. Munn’s moral dilemma, which I had lost interest in, and a series of events that border on melodrama. As if to exacerbate my growing annoyance, Warren launches into a monologue (concerning the destruction of the west by the white man) from a saintly backwoods character named Willie Proudfit; we get twenty-two pages of this: “We got our’n and didn’t reckon on no end, hit looks lak. But a man’s that a-way. He sees sumthen, and don’t reckon on no end, no way, and don’t see it a-come-en. They’s a hoggishness in man, and a hog blindness.” Amen, brother.

Helena - Machado de Assis (Portuguese)

In his foreword to this early novel the author includes a disclaimer: “Do not blame me for anything romantic in it.” He also states that he holds a fondness for Helena, for in it he finds “an echo of youth and ingenuous faith.” (Youth? – he was thirty-six when he wrote it.) The book is radically different from anything else I’ve read by him; besides the romanticism, it has a conventional narrative and there’s a lavish amount of description. In the first chapter a wealthy man dies; in his will he reveals that he has a daughter, to whom he bequeaths a portion of his estate; he also asks his son and his sister to admit her to the family home and to treat her with “gentle care and affection.” Enter seventeen-year-old Helena – beautiful, vibrant, intelligent, and so agreeable that she even wins the heart of the doubting aunt. I was won over too – Helena is an enchanting feminine presence. And Estacio – what is to be expected of this young man? Though he refuses to acknowledge his true feelings, he comes to love her in a sexual way, and it’s clear that she reciprocates. Added to this dilemma – for they are brother and sister – something is oppressing Helena; since we’re in the mind of Estacio we’re barred from knowing what it is (though not for long; this mystery can be solved by using simple logic). In the last third of the book, when the various conflicts reach a crisis point, the tone of the writing changes. The intensity level is ratcheted up way too high as overwrought characters anguish over moral choices. What is the right thing to do according to the dictates of religion and the demands of a rigid code of honor? The only path open to Helena and Estacio is a narrow one. Too narrow – it constricts both them and the novel. I believe that the older Machado de Assis would have moved onto another path, into the brambles, and in doing so would have been truer to human nature, which is compelled not by considerations of propriety but by the cravings of the heart.

The Housebreaker of Shady Hill - John Cheever

How good was Cheever? Very good as a prose stylist. The problem is that too many stories are infused with yearning. Yearning for beauty, sexual love, youth. The yearning is elusive; it cannot be satisfied. This theme, when repeated, becomes tiresome. In the worst story of the lot, “O Youth and Beauty,” a wife shoots her drunken husband as he sets out to run the hurdles in their living room (he had once been a star athlete). Unfortunately, I wanted a lot of the people in this collection to be put out of their misery. The best story is the shortest and simplest. In “The Worm in the Apple” the residents of Shady Hill closely observe a happy family; they’re waiting (and hoping) to find the worm at the center of their life. It never appears.

Exile and the Kingdom - Albert Camus (French)

Camus was a philosopher who wrote fiction – and did it very well in The Plague and The Fall. But in most of these stories the philosophical aspect takes precedence. The characters and plot (which is what I value in a work of fiction) are of secondary importance to an overriding Idea – one which often remained obscure to me. I was left feeling detached and unsatisfied.

The Psychiatrist and Other Stories - Machado de Assis (Portugese)

Many of these unique stories dwell exclusively in the mind and emotions; some are about people with obsessions. The long title story is an exploration of sanity. Who is sane, who is insane? By framing those questions from an intriguing perspective Machado succeeds in undermining our standard assumptions. The prose (which was translated by different people) is lovely; I felt as if I were being carried along on a strong river current in the night. But because Machado attempted to capture something so elusive, the experience provided by these stories is limited and fragmentary. I can’t categorize this collection – but Machado always defied categorization.

The River - Rumer Godden

Initially I found this book pleasant enough, but I started to get annoyed. Irritated with little Harriet’s contemplating the Big Issues of Life (she’s a budding writer of great talent). Captain John, with his tragic war injuries and his melancholy presence, struck me as right out of a movie (a young Ronald Colman would be good in the role). Then there was the business about Harriet’s brother and the cobra. How could a reader possibly not know, many chapters before it happened, that the boy would be killed by the snake? Not only were Godden’s situations staged in too obvious a way, but her characters were stagy too.

Jane and Prudence - Barbara Pym

Good Pym. She has the ability to involve the reader with her ordinary characters (actually, all people are odd, if one looks at them closely, which this author does). Of the two women, Pym didn’t quite get Prudence; I never believed in her affairs (which weren’t fully explored – how far did she go?). Jane was much more solidly grounded. All the men were vain, selfish and fatuous, and this was unfortunate (come on, Barbara, you can be more fair-minded than that!). Still, no meanness was intended. One of Pym’s strengths was that she knew the sadness and loneliness of life, and how we must cope; she coped by absorbing herself in the harmless occupation of writing quiet, humorous, perceptive novels.

The House in Paris - Elizabeth Bowen

Bowen works in the tradition of Henry James. Simplicity in any form is not allowed – not in the prose, the descriptions, the emotions. Particularly the latter. An emotion is not allowed to just exist; it’s explored extensively, often going into areas beyond me, as if my perceptions of the human heart are limited. To read this type of writing is tiring. Spontaneous, ragged life is killed off by too many perfect words. The pity of it is that there was the core of a good story. The children (Bowen is good with children) interested me, as did the old lady. But then we shifted to Karen and her impending love affair. I stopped reading at this point; I couldn’t face the complexities, especially since Karen struck me as a phony creation. Or, to put the blame where it belongs, Bowen was burdening that character with her stultifying care.

The Sweets of Pimlico - A. N. Wilson

This first novel by an author whose work I’ve enjoyed is so inconclusive in every way that reading it amounts to an exercise in futility. The characters, even when on center stage, are inexplicable. Why do they do things, how do they feel? What the hell are they? Nothing can be pinned down, not even their sexuality. Is Mr. Gormann an ex-Nazi who had been active in homosexual orgies? That’s never resolved. Does the main character, Evelyn, love the old man, and he her? Can’t really say. Who will get Mr. Gormann’s money? That’s a stumper. Why is Evelyn thinking of marrying a homosexual drunk with a mean streak? Don’t ask me. Is her brother having sex with Angela or Angelo? Since the last letter of a name in a letter is unreadable, that’s a mystery too. The ending resolves nothing – adamantly so. And about Evelyn, whose head we’re “in.” She has sex with her brother (a pretty big deal) but it’s presented in an offhand way, free of any conflict. Is this woman capable of real feelings? Despite Wilson’s narrative gift, I was aggravated by this book.

Esau and Jacob - Machado de Assis (Spanish)

Too clever by half. Machado was fully capable of creating characters and plots (in his idiosyncratic way), but in this novel he indulges in intellectual games. The narrative is tediously convoluted and constantly interrupted by the author’s sly comments or his deep (and cryptic) thoughts about Life. The worst of it is, I love Machado’s work. This was one of his last books, written when he was much-honored in Argentina. Maybe fame went to his head.