— Bleak House on the whole is astonishing. Is it conventionally Victorian? Oh yes, but there are pages and pRead this 25 years ago. Notes as I reread.
— Bleak House on the whole is astonishing. Is it conventionally Victorian? Oh yes, but there are pages and pages here of drop-dead writing.
— It reminds me, in its deft use of characters high and low, of the novels of Martin Amis — particularly Money, London Fields and The Information. Both writers also possess a keen grasp of the slang of their respective periods. Whereas Amis can be sparing in dialogue, Dickens is voluble almost to a fault.
— Surprising how readable the novel is after 171 years.
— Mr Skimpole is a sponge; Mr Jarndyce knows it but allows this drain on his resources since he finds Skimpole amusing. Later, we understand Skimpole’s con and how well it pays him. That he’s a child, doesn’t understand money— well, the fellow “doth protest too much, methinks.” These endless self-justifications become tiresome.
— Dickens use of patterning is often a pleasure. If it ever seems careworn though, I think it’s because he was writing this novel in serial to be published over a period of more than two years. So he’s creating mnemonic devices for his readers.
— Henry de Montherlant's famous saying "happiness writes white" seems undermined by Dickens's capacity to make happiness — and kindness — fairly sing on the page. Consider Mr Jarndyce, who is a doer of good works, and Miss Esther Summerson, whose very name radiates delight. But when Dickens pushes this pedal too hard — as he does in the scene between Mrs. Rouncewell and her son George — the result can be cloying.
— Preacher Chadband is vile with his halting oratory of pious hooey. Poor Jo, the little orphan, is blamed for being a victim, hounded for witnessing a key piece of the book’s core scandal.
"All this time, Jo . . . feels that it is in his nature to be an unimprovable reprobate . . . Though it may be, Jo, that . . . if the Chadbands, removing their own persons from the light, would but show it thee in simple reverence, would but leave it unimproved, would but regard it as being eloquent enough without their modest aid — it might hold thee awake, and thou might learn from it yet!" (p. 414)
Thus we move toward redemption. But not for Jo! His death from neglect is hideous.
Later, Jo, in a fever, is rescued by Miss Summerson, who puts him up at Bleak House, only to find he has mysteriously disappeared come morning.
——Young Richard Carstone is such a pigheaded twit. He can't be told anything. He must make his own mistakes— by taking Jarndyce & Jarndyce seriously — and he must suffer. Sad to watch, like an addict toward the end, pushed on his course by the despicable Vholes. The speaker here is Richard:
“‘Mr Vholes! If any man had told me, when I first went to John Jarndyce's house, that he was anything but the disinterested friend he seemed — that he was what he has gradually turned out to be — I could have found no words strong enough to repel the slander; I could not have defended him too ardently. So little did I know of the world! Whereas, now, I do declare to you that he becomes to me the embodiment of the suit; that, in place of its being an abstraction, it is John Jarndyce; that the more I suffer, the more indignant I am with him; that every new delay, and every new disappointment, is only a new injury from John Jarndyce's hand.'” (p. 626)
Truly, no good deed goes unpunished!
—Interesting, for all its concern about the dysfunction of Chancery, there’s almost no mention of how the great 19th century families (Dedlock et al.) made their fortunes. There is Mrs Jellyby’s colonialist monomania for Borrioboola-Gha, Africa. Then on page 699 a passing reference is made to a “large Indiaman” trading vessel. See Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a kind of fictional corrective.
— Mr Bucket is a detective and the soul of discretion. The last third of the novel is effected through him. He’s the narrative glue tying virtually all the characters together. Indeed, he seems almost oracular toward the close, which is suspenseful....more
Despite caveats, I am awarding full recognition. There are such long stretches of gorgeous writing here. What an astonishing writer Dickens can be wheDespite caveats, I am awarding full recognition. There are such long stretches of gorgeous writing here. What an astonishing writer Dickens can be when he keeps away from cloying sentiment, his hobbyhorse.
I kept girding for the saccharine heroine (à la Little Dorrit). She never appeared but the novelist hews closest to his chief indulgence in Chapter 17: "One Night."
Here young Lucie, who has rescued her father from Louis XVI's Bastille, speaks with him — years after their safe return to England — about her upcoming marriage to Charles Darnay, a Frenchman also involved in the father's rescue.
Lucie in her immoderate selflessness is guilty about sidelining her father, who until now has received all her personal attentions after his great suffering. So here father and daughter expatiate at wearying length on their love for one another. This goes on for many pages until Lucy is convinced her father won't hold her marriage against her. In fact, he welcomes it.
Quite a slog when you consider how the preceding and succeeding chapters fly by. But it is a small inconvenience compared to what remains....more
1. A beautiful book. Highly readable and gratifying. Too much description, but that was a convention of Flaubert’s day. The book is full of histNotes:
1. A beautiful book. Highly readable and gratifying. Too much description, but that was a convention of Flaubert’s day. The book is full of history, the abortive Revolution of 1848, the rise and fall of the French Second Republic and so on. The story of Frederic Moreau himself is the faux-biographical thread that ties it all together.
2. The Alhambra sequence here is reminiscent in the phantasmagoric “Nighttown” chapter in Ulysses. James Joyce knew Sentimental Education well. A later costume ball echoes the Alhambra scene, and it’s just as wild, just as frenetic. In other ways, in how it deals with the tribulations of Frederic’s desire, the book reminds me of Knut Hamsun’s Pan. At one point he’s running between three women — not unlike the protagonist of Isaac Bashevis Singer‘s Enemies: A Love Story. Love is mad.
3. Frederic Moreau has been pining away for years for Madame Arnoux, the wife of a wealthy gallerist. He earns his law license but after five years gives up. He admits that Madame Arnoux is unattainable. Much disappointment arises from his low income. He cannot remain on the same playing field as the Arnouxs if he is poor. He moves back to his mother’s house in the provinces. He takes walks with a four-year-old girl. His hygiene starts to go. He loses touch with his Paris friends, especially Deslauriers, with whom he had shared boyhood dreams. But then, when all hope is lost, he receives an enormous inheritance from his sourpuss uncle. Everything changes, so he feels.
Yet Madame Arnoux is out of his reach. She’s a good woman. He’ll never have her. He presses on making strange plans to further ingratiate himself and make him look even more pathetic. M. Arnoux starts borrowing money from Frederic. Strangely, our hero traipses about with the husband, the man he’s trying to cuckold, and is a witness to some of his extramarital affairs. Meanwhile Frederic remains a virgin. They’re being nothing to indicate he’s ever had a woman. Interestingly other characters can claim relationships with available women.
4. This novel uses Paris in the same way Woody Allen uses New York in his films. Here’s one colorful passage. It occurs when Frederic, flush with his legacy, is returning to Paris impatient to see Madame Arnoux.
“They stopped a good while at the city gate, for it was blocked by poultry-farmers, carriers, and a flock of sheep. The sentry, his hood thrown back, walked up and down in front of his box to keep warm. The toll-clerk clambered on to the top of the coach, and a fanfare on a coronet rang out. They went down the boulevard at a brisk trot with swingle-bars rattling and traces flying. The thong of the long whip crackled in the damp air. The guard gave his ringing shout: ‘Look sharp there! Hullo!’ And crossing-sweepers stood aside, passersby jumped out of the way, and mud splashed against the windows. They passed wagons, carriages, and omnibuses, and finally reached the iron gate of the Jardin des Plantes.” (p. 115)
When Frederic returns to Paris he finds the Arnouxs in reduced circumstances. All the luxury and grandeur have gone. The husband‘s gallery has failed and he now lives with his family above his pottery shop; this as opposed to his former gallery “just beyond the rue Monmartre,” the family home in rue de Choiseul, and the country place in Saint-Cloud. Madame Arnoux is dressed with a simplicity Frederic has never seen before.
5. At times Flaubert’s description becomes cloying in its excess; a writer today could suffice with ten percent of it, if that. These descriptive flights are the only bits where one feels oneself slogging through.
6. This novel was published in 1869 and one thing is clear, capitalism has not changed, except perhaps in the variety of its cons. Frederic’s position in uneasy; he is at heart not social, and yet he is condemned to negotiate so-called high society. He’s such a timid little man. Everyone’s robbing him blind. When failed bomber Sénécal is released from Sainte-Pélagie for lack of evidence, Dusardiers gives a party in his flat to celebrate; it’s here that Flaubert eviscerates the socialist, ostensibly pro-Republic, mindset. The monarchists don’t come out much better; everyone gets it in the neck.
So eventually, at a restaurant, Madame Armoux’s honor is besmirched; Frederick throws a plate at Viscount Cisy, the besmircher, and a particularly hilarious duel ensues in the Bois de Boulogne. The duel is called with off when Cisy faints under pressure and accidentally cuts himself with the knife with which he was to have fought Frederic. Too funny. When Madame Arnoux learns about the duel she realizes she loves Frederic. They then enter upon a difficult platonic friendship; difficult because of their physical lust for each other. And who hasn’t at some time in life been in such a fix, forswearing sex for friendship? It’s utter torture.
7. It’s impressive how adroitly Flaubert incorporates the 1848 Revolution — also known as the February Revolution it ended the July Monarchy and led to the brief French Second Republic — into the narrative. It corroborates for the most part what I had recently read in Pages from the Goncourt Journals. The revolution begins, however, on the very day Frederic was to have taken Madame Arnoux to a love nest he had designed presumptuously without her consent. She never shows. Frederic is humiliated and angry. In something like retaliation he picks up the Marshall, a prostitute, and takes her to the love nest prepared for Madam Arnoux. This is Frederic’s first sexual experience; he is 28 or 29.
8. We watch Frederic enter the Imperial palace as it’s vandalized by the “common people.” Frederic is encouraged to stand for office by M. Dambreuse, an arch monarchist who hopes to control him in that role. Frederic prepares a speech and goes to deliver it at a ribald meeting. He steps up to speak and is called an aristocrat by his erstwhile friend, Sénécal, a sociopathic “revolutionary” who has him booed into the street. It’s hard to know what the gathering’s true purpose is since it’s such a zoo. For example, before Frederic is sent away, “A man in a cassock, with crinkly hair and a peevish expression, had already put up his hand. He mumbled that his name was Ducretot, and that he was a priest and an agronomist, the author of a work entitled Manure. He was advised to join a horticultural society.” (p. 329)
9. The street names and place names and palace names of Flaubert‘s day have for the most part not changed and can be easily looked up, but then many nineteeth century books are “illustrated” for us in this way.
The essential Goncourt Brothers were like the twin Truman Capotes of their day. However, unlike Capote they never had a big novel, though they tried. The essential Goncourt Brothers were like the twin Truman Capotes of their day. However, unlike Capote they never had a big novel, though they tried. Oh, and they were straight.
“Suspicion of the entire female sex has entered into our minds for the rest of our lives; a horror of the duplicity of woman’s soul, of her prodigious gift, her consummate genius for mendacity.” (p. 76)
This is a worthwhile read. But the misogyny will set your hair on fire. The Goncourts—debauchees and gossips—saw women as whores, and blamed them for their troubles. Given that Jules, the younger brother, was eventually to die of neurosyphilis, maybe that was prescient.
Gustave Flaubert on Marquis de Sade: “‘He is the last word in Catholicism,’ he said. ‘Let me explain: he is the spirit of the Inquisition, the spirit of torture, the spirit of the medieval Church, the horror of nature. There isn’t a single tree in Sade, or a single animal.’” (p. 48)
The Goncourts’ critiques of their contemporaries may be justified; frankly many are of artists or journalists I’m not familiar with. But the rants against some, especially those in the lucrative theater, are clearly spiteful envy. As Martin Amis said, I paraphrase, envy never comes to the ball as envy, it always comes as some superficially objective criticism. There’s plenty of that here.
The journals give a good sense of the politicization of the theater, with paid claques, audience members hissing, declarations of pique from the audience—just madness. Imagine people going out to first nights solely to hiss and ruin the show for others, no matter its merits.
Much energy is spent ridiculing critics of the Goncourts’ novels, which though seen as unimportant today, other contemporaries we’re known to imitate; Zola being one.
“It is wonderful what a center of debauchery the theater is . . . It would be impossible to gather together in a smaller space a greater number of sexual stimulants, of invitations to copulation. It is like a Stock Exchange dealing in women’s nights.” (p. 68)
“If there is a God, atheism must strike Him as less of an insult than religion.” (p. 135)
Early in 1870 Jules dies of neurosyphilis; his brother Edmond describes his death throes in excruciating detail. Absolutely heartbreaking pages…
Later that year the Prussians ignominiously defeat France. This part of French history I know about mostly from Emile Zola’s superb The Debacle, which is about the Battle of Sedan. Here Goncourt, a monarchist to the marrow, describes street scenes during the fall of the monarchy, the establishment of the Paris Commune, which is ultimately massacred (15-20,000 souls) by the French Army. Goncourt witnesses some of the round ups.
“The semaine sanglante ("bloody week"), from 21 to 28 May 1871, was a short and bloody military campaign by the French Army . . . that recaptured Paris from the Paris Commune. Many Commune prisoners . . . were summarily shot by the army. In the final days, the Commune executed about one hundred hostages . . . and burned many Paris landmarks . . . .” — from Wikipedia
On Flaubert’s Temptation of Saint Anthony: “The Bible, the Christian past, brought up to date in the Horace Vernet manner, with the addition of Bedouin and Turkish bric-a-brac.” (p. 195)
“Looking at the Jews I know growing old around me, I am sometimes astonished at the peculiar ugliness which the years bring them. It is not our decrepitude but a moral ugliness. What is the explanation? I believe it is to be found in the purely material appetites and desires, in a life with no other object than money.” (p. 284)
There is so much that is objectional here: the anti-Semitism, the discussions about how real men fuck women correctly, etc. So you’ve got to measure each part separately and not let the bad cancel out the considerable amount of good.
“My cousin Fédora, talking to me today about a branch of her family which is almost poor, said: ‘Just imagine: they are people who for five generations have married for love!’” (p. 337)
Herein lies the “revelation” that Guy de Maupassant was in fact Gustav Flaubert’s biological son. The biographer of both men, Francis Steegmuller, questioned the claim in a Oct. 5 1974 New York Times article. It’s true Flaubert and Maupssant’s mother knew each other as youths. But the timing for him to have impregnated her just before his trip to the “orient” is iffy. Then again Flaubert was the younger man’s mentor. Maupassant studied under Flaubert, planned and managed his funeral and brought sculptor and donors together for the Flaubert memorial bas-relief
“‘A child! The eyes of a child . . . No, it’s too much!’ exclaimed [Alphonse] Daudet in connection with the graveside speeches and newspaper articles about Verlaine’s funeral. ‘A man who used to stab his lovers, who, in a fit of bestial lust, once tore off his clothes and ran stark naked after an Ardennes shepherd! . . . And that article by Barrès, who has never written a line of verse and who acted as one of the pallbearers, Barrè who is fundamentally a champion of stylish dressing and decent living . . . . The joker wrote that article just to proclaim that he is the intellectual prince of the younger generation!’ (p. 407)...more
Self aggrandizing and egotistical, but very well written.
Wonderful is the book's ability to completely immerse you in a vanished world. A world in whSelf aggrandizing and egotistical, but very well written.
Wonderful is the book's ability to completely immerse you in a vanished world. A world in which all the idiocies of the present day do not pertain. So in that sense like all worthwhile books it's an escape. Its description of landscape in particular reminds me of the works of Patrick Leigh Fermor, especially A Time of Gifts and the other volumes of his Danube trilogy.
It's not for everyone, however. The prose is highly allusive, often citing myth, literature, world history, etc. All of this is dutifully footnoted, but that hardly makes it a light beach read. But perfect for someone like me who reads slowly, not missing a thing.
He's extraordinarily Catholic and a longstanding virgin. (Check that: Peter Gay has written about his incredibly rakish ways. That's something of a relief, for no one can be that chaste. But it makes paragraph number 7 below rather hypocritical, does it not?)
He prides himself on his Christian humility, but also loves to speak of his extraordinary intelligence. His boyish escapades are delightful, as when he fights a monk at school who was intent on punishing him for climbing a tree, which had been expressly forbidden. His fits of vomiting when an Italian sought to cure him of tertian fever, for his father was a fool for quacks.
I'm particularly pleased when he quotes Montaigne, whose essays I admire. Chateaubriand writes "suffering is prayer," which reminds me of a sentiment expressed in Bellow: "The forgiveness of sin is perpetual and righteousness first is not required." (Martin Luther)
"If it were true that I had prostituted myself to the courtesans of Paris, I would not consider myself obliged to enlighten posterity; but I was too timid on the one hand, and too idealistic on the other, to let myself be seduced by the filles de joie. When I shouldered my way through packs of these unhappy women, who grabbed at the arms of passersby to pull them up to their quarters like Saint-Cloud cabmen trying to make travelers climb into their carriages, I was overcome by disgust and horror." (p. 155)
N.B.: Well, he did, and so he does not consider himself obliged.
The surprise of Chateaubrand is that despite his nobility he despised social climbing. His brother tried to introduce him at court, but he was unable to withstand it. In his young adulthood, he was a solitary and incredibly shy. After a single hunt with the King, he rushed back to Brittany. Though impressed by the opulence of Versailles, he hated Paris and all cosmopolitan doings, only his brother and beloved sister's presence there made it briefly tolerable.
About 35,000 people were killed during the French revolution for political reasons. That number is considered conservative. Yet Châteaubriand writes of the normality in Paris during the Revolution's early days. In short, people didn't anticipate the slaughter.
"In every corner of Paris, there were literary gatherings, political meetings, and theater shows; future celebrities wandered in the crowd unknown . . . I saw Marshal Gouvion-Saint-Cyr play a part in Beaumarchais's La Mère Coupable at the Théâtre du Marais. People went from the Club des Feuillants to the Club des Jacobins, from balls and gambling houses to the crowds at the Palais-Royal, from the gallery of the National Assembly to the gallery of the open air. Popular delegations, cavalry pickets, and infantry patrols marched every which way in the streets. Beside a man in French dress, with powdered hair, a sword at his side, a hat under his arm, leather shoes, and silk stockings, walked a man with unpowdered hair cropped close to his skull, dressed in an English frock coat and an American cravat. In the theaters, actors announced the latest news, and the pit burst into patriotic song. Topical plays drew the crowds: a priest would appear on stage, and the people would shout, Calotin! Calotin! and the priest would reply: Messieurs, Vive la Nation! Everybody hastened to hear Mandini and his wife, Viganoni, sing with Rovedino at the Opéra-Buffa, only minutes after hearing "Ça ira" howled in the street. . . ." (p. 226)
N.B. Chateaubriand is a better writer than the clap-ridden Giacomo Casanova, whose twelve-volume memoir I have yet to finish. It's not that Casanova is such a poor memoirist really, just that Chateaubriand is such a very good one.
His writings about contact with the "savages," his unfortunate word, gives insight to Indian culture in the early 1790's. He sees, already then, how it's been warped by exposure to the colonizers, and this is something he laments. Factually he is often incorrect, but his impressions of the newly expropriated nation can be riveting.
The chapter "Dangers for the United States" reminds me of de Touqueville. I wonder to what extent it was influenced by that famous book, the first volume of which appeared in 1835? The US chapter is the weakest part of the book because, as the author emphasizes, there's nothing in the US at this particular time. No art, no literature. . . Just commerce, brothels and Indian genocide. When he returns to France and the Revolution things rapidly become more interesting.
The author's claims at the volume's close that Lord Byron imitated him ferociously bears some looking into. ...more
A major theme of The Professor is that of finding one’s true vocation. Anyone who has ever had a false start can find wisdom in it. Young William CrimA major theme of The Professor is that of finding one’s true vocation. Anyone who has ever had a false start can find wisdom in it. Young William Crimsworth, just out of Oxford, has cast off his objectionable relations who wanted him to enter the church. Having reverence for men of the cloth, William must now break with them because he knows he doesn’t have the aptitude for a spiritual post, and his relations are rather too insistent, having paid his college costs.
At first he works for his elder brother, Edward, who turns how to be this unbearable tyrant. Despite telling his now cast off relations that he would, like his father, enter the business world, he quickly realizes this field, too, is not for him. Happenstance then leads him to Brussels where he takes on, with no previous experience, the teaching English and Latin in a boy’s school. In this he succeeds but falls for the directoress of the neighboring girls school, the Rubinesque Mademoiselle Reuter.
This novel what the first Charlotte Brontë wrote; it was published posthumously. I am reading it because it is a kind of proto draft for sections of her last novel, the exceptional Villette. As a young woman Charlotte and her sister Emily went to Brussels ostensibly to brush up on their French. Opportunities for women were rare in those days, the mid-1800s, and there was thought of starting a school back in England where her father was a pastor. In Brussels Charlotte had what might be considered a crush on the school’s director, M. Hegel, which was not requited. From this experience poured both The Professor and her final novel, Villette....more
1. This story is beautifully modulated, unrushed and a pleasure to read. It's a love story that becomes a disappointed-in-love story. It reminds me of1. This story is beautifully modulated, unrushed and a pleasure to read. It's a love story that becomes a disappointed-in-love story. It reminds me of Flaubert's Sentimental Education and two Knut Hamsun books: Mysteries and Pan.
This iteration involves an aristocratic woman widowed from a tyrannical husband who since his fortunate demise has started a salon. She casts it with her failed lovers. She has never permitted them in her bed, we are told, but she can't do without their adoration. She is brash, overconfident. Then she meets André Marrioll. He is 37 and something of a dilettante. He's dabbled in the arts but has never found his niche. Madame de Burne is rapt, and he with her.
He desires from her an ideal reciprocal love she is incapable of. Alien Hearts does something more than the other novels cited above. This something is implicit in the title; the author's characters argue that male and female ways of loving are so dissimilar as to be virtually alien. Stated baldly, this sounds absurd, which is precisely why the novel must be read. Summary won't do.
"'A woman cannot always love,' she answered quickly, 'she can only be faithful. And do you imagine that the exalted delirium of the senses can last for years on end? No, no. As for the majority of women given to passions, to violent liaisons lasting . . . however long they last, such women merely live their lives as a novel: the heroes differ, the circumstances and the crises change, the outcomes vary. For such women it must be diverting, even entertaining, for the feelings at the start, in the middle, and at the end are different each time. But for the man, when it's over, it's over. Do you understand?'
"'Yes, I suppose I do. But I don't see what you're driving at.'
"'At this: there are no passions which last very long, I mean burning, tormenting passions of the sort you're still suffering. It's a phase which I've made painful, very painful for you, I know that now, by the ... aridity of my kind of tenderness, by my incapacity for... expansion. But this phase passes, it can't go on indefinitely—' She broke off." (p. 172)
2. There is the gross over description of that time; the book was published in 1890. The Russians Formalists saw such over description as a device to get the reader to see things in a new way. The term is ostranenie, or defamiliarization.
Here's a brief example.
"Mariolle observed Madame de Burne, now seated under a bronze column that supported an enormous lamp. Her delicate nose with its turned-up tip, the dimples in her cheeks, and the slight fold of flesh that divided her chin made her look like a mischievous child, though she was nearing thirty and the faded-fower expression of her eyes gave her face a sort of disturbing mystery. Her skin, under the bright light, had the texture of pale velvet, while her hair glowed with russet highlights whenever she moved her head." (p. 17)
The question is, of course, and there is surely a scholar somewhere who knows, how intentionally is Maupassant applying the device? "Her skin . . . had the texture of pale velvet." How estranging, almost alarming.
3. There is a scene in the film "Network, written by Patty Chayefsky, in which two lovers are having sex. While the man (William Holden) is overcome with fascination to have this paragon of womanhood in his arms, the woman (Faye Dunaway) humps away while blabbing about office politics. That's sort of what happens here, only the gossip about network TV is replaced by Faubourg Saint-Germain society prattle. Now imagine that scenario raised to near literary perfection and you have something like the present novel. Superb.
"It seemed to him she was escaping into an elegant, gaudy crowd, dancing away, far from that strong secret happiness he had so hoped for, and he was jealous of it all — men, women, things even. He detested the kind of life she was leading, the people she was seeing now, the parties she was invited to, the music, the theaters, parceling out her hours, absorbing her days and her nights: only a few hours remained for the intimacy they once had. His resentment was so fierce that his health began to suffer. . . ." (p. 107)
4. Guy de Maupassant was half-insane and close to death from syphilis when he wrote this novel. Not just this novel, but as Richard Howard explains in the introduction here, quite a few stories as well. After several attempts at suicide he died horribly (blindness, paralysis) at a clinic in Passy, age 43.
5. The novel's attack on women dates to its time and to understand it we must read accordingly. Only the rare woman was permitted an intellectual life then. When they are criticized for their limitations, it rings false to us. Naturally today we see it as blaming the victim. The materialist context explains Madame de Burne. Given her background how can Marrioll honestly expect an extraordinary love from her.
6. Robert Walther, I just reread his first two novels, can do with striking narrative clarity and such apparent ease, what Maupassant does here. That is to follow his protagonist around while he is thinking things over, considering a view, talking to a pretty waitress etc. He can do all of this with such compelling ease that it astonishes. Yasunari Kawabata can do it too. Many masters can, but only these....more
A stranger comes to town. His name is Johan Nilsen Nagel (aka Simonsen). This is Norway and it’s 1890 or so. Nagel says he is an agronomist taking hisA stranger comes to town. His name is Johan Nilsen Nagel (aka Simonsen). This is Norway and it’s 1890 or so. Nagel says he is an agronomist taking his summer vacation in the country. He alternately charms and appalls the townspeople. He meets the innkeeper; the doctor; the town invalid; the beautiful Dagny, who’s engaged to an absent naval man; a minion called the deputy, whom he proceeds to fight in defense of the invalid. He is constantly teetering between despair and something like ecstasy, or possibly mania.
He carries a vial of Prussic acid about and obsesses about a recent local suicide. He dislikes the British PM Gladstone, presumably because of his rectitude. And he takes great pains to undermine any good reputation he himself may have earned by way of compassionate acts. In short, he slanders himself. This despite anonymously buying a new coat for the invalid, and paying a destitute old woman an immense sum for a chair that he insists is an antique. What brilliant pages these are as he tries to convince the poor girl that she owns an estimable antique! The book is alternately harrowing and funny, bizarre and beguiling.
Naturally Nagel falls for the alluring Dagny. Hamsun like few writers I know has a knack for writing about love’s longing, pining depths. He addresses the topic here fulsomely and perfects it in his next novel, Pan.
“‘You must be crazy!’ she said, shaking her head. And distressed and pale, with an icy glint in her blue eyes, she added, ‘You know I am engaged, you remember and assume that, and yet—‘
“‘Of course, I know! Could I forget the face and that uniform? After all, he’s a handsome man, and it isn’t that I find any fault with him; and yet I could wish him dead and gone. What’s the use of saying to myself, as I’ve done a hundred times: there you won’t get anywhere. Instead I try to avoid thinking about this impossibility, telling myself, Oh yes, I’ll get somewhere all right, lots of things can happen, there’s still hope . . . . And there is hope, isn’t there?’” (p. 140)
Well, this bit comes across as basely melodramatic, but his gift for the subject matter of pointless love is genuine. Now do some of Nagel’s monologues go on too long? For that reason alone I subtract one star....more
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