The Woman In White

The Woman in White (Oxford World's Classics, 2008)
by Wilkie Collins
UK, 1859-60

Although British literature as a whole has to rank as one of the most overrated examples of a national literature anywhere (admit it, bloggers--how many tales about governesses and class bias do you really need?), I enjoyed The Woman in White enough that I could see adding it to old favorites like The Canterbury Tales and "Clash City Rockers" on a list of things from across the pond that don't suck. Whether or not that makes this a true classic or not is another story, but this goofball first "Sensation Novel" makes up for its lack of depth in terms of what it has to say by how it says what it does: unraveling the mystery behind "the woman in white," a story that touches on false imprisonments, poisonings, secret societies, and star-crossed lovers, via a series of courtroom-style witnesses to the prosecution.  Although Collins tries too hard to draw attention to the gender differences among his narrators (a typical howler from a female character: "I dare say it was very wrong and very discreditable to listen--but where is the woman, in the whole range of our sex, who can regulate her actions by the abstract principles of honour, when those principles point one way, and when her affections, and the interests which grow out of them, point the other?" [228]), the novel's ensemble effect is marvelous at masking how increasingly uninteresting the main character, Walter Hartright, is in comparison to the mannish Marian Halcombe and the devilish Count Fosco--a fantastic villain whose evil ways reach a comic zenith when he feeds an organ-grinder's monkey some "lunch" but "contemptuously" fails to provide any sort of a handout at all for the organ-grinder himself!  Elsewhere, Collins also gets a thumbs-up for presenting a love affair between Hartright and Laura Fairlie that rings true emotionally.  Unfortunately, I had to dock him a couple of points for throwing his hero into jail temporarily for merely jostling another man--the novel's low point--and for making us wait so long before Count Fosco's bombastic turn in the spotlight ("Youths!  I invoke your sympathy.  Maidens!  I claim your tears." [628]).  Fortunately, Fosco's maniacally unhinged written declaration near the end redeems any creaky plot elements in the 600 pages that preceded it--and might just have opened up the door for me to a possible follow-up reading of Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, Dickens' Great Expectations, Wood's East Lynne, or some other guilty pleasure.  Any suggestions?  (www.oup.com/worldsclassics)

Wilkie Collins, the ladies' man

Thanks to Trish of Trish's Reading Nook, whose review of The Woman in White here made me want to read Wilkie Collins again after I'd forgotten about him for years and years somehow!

Season of Migration to the North

Season of Migration to the North [Mahsim al-Hijra ila ash-Shamal] (NYRB Classics, 2009)
by Tayeb Salih (translated from the Arabic by Denys Johnson-Davies)
Sudan, 1966

"It was, gentlemen, after a long absence--seven years to be exact, during which time I was studying in Europe--that I returned to my people. I learnt much and much passed me by--but that's another story." (Season of Migration to the North, 3)

Some postcolonial punk recalled this book from me less than a week after I'd checked it out from the library, but he/she might have actually done me a favor by forcing me to read it sooner than I'd intended. Sort of a reverse Heart of Darkness, Season of Migration to the North is a superb short novel that wowed me with its bravura storytelling and its odd, somewhat feverish air. The journey begins when the unnamed narrator returns to his quiet village on the banks of the Nile after spending seven years studying English poetry abroad. One night during a drinking bout, the narrator is astonished when he hears an enigmatic newcomer from Khartoum himself reciting World War I verses in a perfect English accent. How did two British-educated Sudanese intellectuals wind up in the same desolate wadi? And what does the mysterious newcomer have to hide hanging out here in the sticks? The two questions that obsess the narrator begin to take on a haunting quality when Mustafa Sa'eed, the man from Khartoum, confesses to having killed a white woman in Britain and having caused others to commit suicide over him after leaving them abandoned in his romantic wake. Bizarre? Yes. But Salih (1929-2009) is such a master of narrative that both the trajectory of the plot, essentially composed of two equally compelling and intersecting storylines set decades apart in time, and the behavior of the characters practically demand your attention. As befits a work that at least one major critics' group has anointed as the best Arabic novel of the 20th century, Season of Migration to the North of course offers much more than just a gripping plot and an iconic character, Mustafa Sa'eed, who vanishes one day only to linger on as a sort of phantom of memory that torments the narrator with his very presence. The novel is studded with surprising images--the octogenarian grandfather whose unique smell "is a combination of the smell of the large mausoleum in the cemetery and the smell of an infant child" (61), the drought that prompts the narrator to complain that "such land brings forth nothing but prophets" (90). It's also insistently and at times defiantly oral in nature, as when Mustafa Sa'eed repeatedly mumbles "my store of hackneyed phrases is inexhaustible" (30, 34) and "the train carried me to Victoria Station and to the world of Jean Morris" (26, 27, 29) when explaining his techniques for sexual conquest and the mad love affair that would bring him face to face with the British justice system. Salih's poetic qualities notwithstanding, the work is probably most famous for offering its readers a look at the Empire from the point of view of the other side of the table--an "Arab-African" POV (33) in which colonialism is characterized as both a sexual battlefield and an infectious germ that poisons both the oppressor and the oppressed. While I'll leave those rather complicated topics for somebody with more time on their hands to try and suss out, suffice it to say that Season of Migration to the North was as much of a revelation to me as Walser's grand Jakob von Gunten was back in July. Outstanding. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Tayeb Salih

"Season of Migration to the North isn't the first book in which a writer of color has decided to 'write back' to the empire, of course. Ngugi wa Thiong'o's The River Between (1965), Camara Laye's The Radiance of the King (1954), and Aimé Césaire's A Tempest (1969), for instance, can all be seen as attempts to subvert European colonial discourse. But Season of Migration to the North is unique among these books in that it is written in the author's native language, rather than the colonial one. Indeed, Salih stands out among African writers of his generation for his insistence on continuing to use Arabic in spite of having lived the majority of his life outside the Sudan. ('It's a matter of principle,' he once told an interviewer.)" (Laila Lalami, "Introduction" to Season of Migration to the North, xiv-xv)

Camilleri vs. Gadda, Damn It!

The Shape of Water [La forma dell'acqua] (Viking Penguin, 2002)
by Andrea Camilleri (translated from the Italian by Stephen Sartarelli)
Italy, 1994

That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana [Quer pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana] (NYRB Classics, 2007)
by Carlo Emilio Gadda (translated from the Italian by William Weaver)
Italy, 1946 & 1957

Whilst the Jane Austen-and-Brontë sisters wing of the US blog mafia might lead you to believe that no new literature of note has been published outside of the United Kingdom since about the middle of the 19th-century, I'd like to spend a few moments on a pair of 20th-century Italian novels anyway. Please bear with me. After a long wait to sample one of his highly-touted Inspector Montalbano mysteries, I finally read Andrea Camilleri's surprisingly gritty The Shape of Water (the first in the Montalbano series) in a couple of sittings recently. It was a good taut weekend read, well-written, with appropriate nods to fellow Sicilian scribes Giuseppe di Lampedusa and Leonardo Sciascia, but it seemed like more of a high-octane genre workout to me than anything special. I mean, I'd read another work of his in a minute if I needed something to while away the time while traveling, but for right now the most impressive thing about Mr. Camilleri as an author is his undeniable resemblance to cable TV icon Junior Soprano! I finished Carlo Emilio Gadda's That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana a day later, a bit of misleading symmetry on the book-finishing front since I'd started the novel a month or so prior to The Shape of Water and I can't think of any actors that Gadda even remotely resembles. Although the Milanese Gadda's halting, deliberately digressionary style made it a lot more slow-going a reading experience than Camilleri's bullet train of a crime caper, the narrative difficulties were way more than worth the extra effort required as this brooding, metaphysical tale of a burglary and a subsequent murder in an upscale 1927 Roman apartment building gradually revealed itself to be the literary equivalent of a stunning panorama of the Eternal City at the moment when the fascists were coming into power. While Gadda didn't finish the novel in a way that any fans of old-fashioned literature would ever appreciate, his arresting way with words ("History, past-mistress of life" [299]), his mischievous interior dialogues, and the infamously abrupt ending evoke a sense of modern malaise that feels real enough for me. An underrated classic: that is, if any work can be considered as such when praised by both Italo Calvino and Pier Paolo Pasolini. (http://www.nyrb.com/)

Camilleri

Gadda

"He didn't think, he didn't believe it opportune to think of asking anything, either about the new niece or the new maid. He tried to repress the admiration that Assunta aroused in him: a little like the strange fascination of the dazzling niece of the previous visit: a fascination, an authority wholly Latin and Sabellian, which made her well-suited to the ancient names, of ancient Latin warrior virgins or of not-reluctant wives once stolen by force at the Lupercal, with the suggestion of hills and vineyards and harsh palaces, and with rites and the Pope in his coach, with the fine torches of Sant'Agnese in Agone and Santa Maria Portae Paradisi on Candlemas Day, and the blessing of the candles: a sense of the air of serene and distant days in Frascati or the valley of the Tiber, taken from the girls drawn by Pinelli among Piranesi's ruins, when the ephemerides were heeded and the Church's calendars, and, in their vivid purple, all its high Princes. Like stupendous lobsters. The Princes of Holy Roman Apostolic Church. And in the center those eyes of Assunta's, that pride: as if she were denigrated by serving them at table. In the center...of the whole...Ptolemaic system; yes, Ptolemaic. In the center, meaning no offense, that terrific behind." (That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, 10-11)

Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop (Vintage Classics, 1990)
by Willa Cather
USA, 1927

I haven't had to say this for a while, but I didn't actually care for this book all that much. While far from the worst thing I've read all year, Cather's overrated "classic" about the colonization of New Mexico after its annexation to the United States in 1848 never really clicked with me in any major way. Although I wound up being at least somewhat moved by the portrayal of the lasting friendship between the two French clerics at the heart of the novel, I wouldn't recommend Death Comes for the Archbishop on its storytelling merits alone (Kit Carson, Fray Junípero Serra, and Pope Gregory XVI cameos be damned). The plot is passable but told in a pedestrian manner, the characterization is fairly weak throughout (even the Archbishop himself, famously modeled on Santa Fe's real-life Archbishop Lamy, is more type than character up until the final chapter), and that whole panorama-of-an-era-in-upheaval thing isn't all that convincing compared to a real classic of historical fiction like Di Lampedusa's The Leopard. That being said, this still might be an OK read for anybody curious about the difficulties of missionary work in the 19th-century West, for people interested in learning about the conflicted perceptions of white settlers toward the Mexicans and Native Americans of the region when New Mexico began to be "civilized," and--last but not least--for critics with low standards. Pretty cover, though. (http://www.randomhouse.com/)

Willa Cather

For another blogger's take on this novel, please check out Emily's review from Evening All Afternoon.

Operación Masacre

Operación Masacre (Ediciones de la Flor, 2008)
por Rodolfo Walsh
Argentina, 1957 y 1972

"Espero que no se me critique el creer en un libro --aunque sea escrito por mí-- cuando son tantos más los que creen en las metralletas". Operación Masacre, p. 195

En esta obra clásica del periodismo de investigación, Rodolfo Walsh cuenta la historia trágica de un grupo de argentinos que, erróneamente acusado de tomar parte en la sublevación del 9 de junio de 1956, enfrentó la muerte por pelotón de ejecución la mañana siguiente. Contra todas las leyes del país, estos hombres no recibieron un juicio por jurado. Para colmo de desgracias, la única culpa de la mayoría de los hombres fue de estar en el lugar equivocado a la hora equivocada. No tenían nada que ver con la rebelión. Milagrosamente, había siete sobrevivientes de la carnicería, cado uno con su propia historia. Casi inventando el género de la llamada "novela de no ficción" (notáse que A sangre fría de Truman Capote no sería publicado hasta nueve años más tarde), Walsh juega con la estructura de una novela policial al mismo tiempo que escribe con la energía de una novela de intrigas. El resultado es que su narración de los acontecimientos conlleva una inmediatez absorbente. Más que todo, Walsh arde con la cólera e indignación de uno que se siente traicionado por la injusticia y las mentiras de su propio gobierno, de uno que se siente movilizado para atestar la verdad sobre un crimen estatal contra el pueblo argentino. Aunque no es una obra con un final feliz, Operación Masacre ya refleja la valentía y la dignidad de un ser humano solitario frente a la cobardía y la barbarie de un gobierno entero. Por cierto, es un libro que merece su fama. (http://www.edicionesdelaflor.com.ar/)
*
Operación Masacre [Operation: Massacre] (Ediciones de la Flor, 2008)
by Rodolfo Walsh
Argentina, 1957 & 1972

"I hope I'm not criticized for believing in a book--even one written by me--when there are so many more people out there who put their faith in machine guns." Operación Masacre, p. 195

In this classic work of investigative journalism, Rodolfo Walsh relates the tragic story of a group of Argentineans who, erroneously accused of taking part in an uprising against the government on the night of June 10, 1956, faced a death by firing squad early the following morning. Against all the laws of the land, the men failed to receive a trial by jury. To make matters worse, the only misdeed of the majority of the men involved was that of being found in the wrong place at the wrong time. They didn't have anything at all to do with the rebellion. Miraculously, there were seven survivors of the carnage, each one with his own story. Practically inventing the genre of the so-called "nonfiction novel" (note that Truman Capote's In Cold Blood wouldn't be published till nine years later), Walsh plays with the form of the detective novel at the same time as he captures all the energy of a conventional thriller. The result is a narrative that's completely gripping. Above all else, Walsh burns with the anger and indignation of someone who feels betrayed by the injustice and lies of his own government, of someone who finds himself driven to tell the truth about a crime of state perpetrated against the Argentinean people. Although it's not a work with a happy ending, Operación Masacre still reflects the bravery and dignity of a lone human being standing face to face against the cowardice and savagery of an entire government. By all means, it's a work that's certainly deserving of its reputation. (http://www.edicionesdelaflor.com.ar/)

Rodolfo Walsh

Rodolfo Walsh "desapareció" en 1977, la víctima de otra pandilla de tiranos argentinos. Un día antes de su muerte, había enviado una "Carta Abierta de un escritor a la Junta Militar" a varios periódicos domésticos e internacionales, hablando en contra de la ilegitimidad de los militares./Rodolfo Walsh "disappeared" in 1977, the victim of another gang of Argentinean tyrants. The day before his death, he had sent a missive entitled "Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta" to various domestic and international newspapers, denouncing the illegitimacy of the military leaders' rule.

Epílogo: Victoria Ginzberg, "Jaque mate a los asesinos de Walsh"

The Twelve Caesars

De vita Caesarum (Penguin Classics, 2007)

by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (translated from the Latin by Robert Graves and James B. Rives)

c. 125

"Gaius made parents attend their sons' executions, and when one father excused himself on the ground of ill health he provided a litter for him. Having invited another father to dinner just after the son's execution, he overflowed with good fellowship in an attempt to make him laugh and joke. He watched the manager of his gladiatorial and wild-beast shows being flogged with chains for several days running, and had him killed only when the smell of suppurating brains became insupportable. A writer of Atellan farces was burned alive in the amphitheatre, because of a single line which had an amusing double entendre. One eques, on the point of being thrown to the wild beasts, shouted that he was innocent; Gaius brought him back, removed his tongue, and then ordered the sentence to be carried out." (The Twelve Caesars, p. 160)

Although I don't have much to say about Suetonius (c. 70 AD-c. 130 AD) that hasn't already been said before, I've got to give the guy at least a qualified thumbs-up for his "classic" status after finally getting around to reading The Twelve Caesars in its juicy entirety. While lacking Plutarch's psychological insights and Tacitus' biting way with words, these lurid imperial biographies of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar on down to Domitian aren't without a certain scandalmongering charm. But what can you, the typical 21st-century book blogger with an inexplicable fondness for cheesy vampire novels, expect to derive from such a work? For one thing, this is as good a place as any to savor the anecdotal flavor of ancient biography in its raw and unrefined form (from a letter that Mark Antony sent to Augustus: "What has come over you? Do you object to my screwing Cleopatra? She's my wife, and it's not even as though this were anything new--the affair started nine years ago. And what about you? Is Livia Drusilla the only woman you screw? My congratulations if, when this letter arrives, you haven't screwed Tertulla or Terentilla or Rufilla or Salvia Titisenia or all of them. Does it really matter so much where or with whom you get off?" [83]). For that matter, the personal and political dirt dug up on all these masters of depravity provides plenty of lively reading moments in and of itself (i.e. the Caligula excerpt above, while extreme, is entirely typical). If Suetonius' attempts to balance the good and evil of his subjects' resumes sometimes seem a little formulaic, his persistent cataloging of an unforgettable series of "follies and crimes" (216) still casts a powerful spotlight on the Roman genius for the abuse of power at the highest levels. Too bad that other works of his such as On Abusive Words or Insults and Their Derivations and one titled On Notable Prostitutes no longer exist! (http://www.penguinclassics.com/)

The Classics Challenge

Dear Lurkers:

While you enjoy--or don't enjoy--this post in your usual silence, please be aware that I've signed up for the 2009 edition of the Classics Challenge hosted by Trish of Trish's Reading Nook. Full details on the challenge, which will run from April 1st through October 31st this year, can be found here; however, the more curious among you should know that I'll be planning on reading a book a month or so for the challenge under the "feast + 1 bonus" option. The following is a list of some of the entrées under consideration (all subject to change, of course):

• Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars (Rome) (review)
• François Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel (France)
• Alessandro Manzoni, The Betrothed (Italy)
• (alternate choice) Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (UK) (review)
• (alternate choice) Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (USA) (review)
• Teresa de la Parra, Mama Blanca's Memoirs (Venezuela)
• (alternate choice) Carlo Emilio Gadda, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana (Italy) (review)
• (alternate choice) Rodolfo Walsh, Operación Masacre (Argentina) (review)
• Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Nigeria)
• (alternate choice) Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (Sudan) (review)
• Elena Poniatowska, La noche de Tlatelolco (Mexico)

P.S. I had a harder time than expected selecting some of these initial choices because I could have easily gone all-Argentina, all-France, all-Italy, all-Mexico, all-Greece and Rome, etc., under the classics rubric. Do you have a favorite country or era for "classics" yourself?