A Cup of Classics

This book was my companion as the days got colder, as the shadows got longer, and the world retreated in on itself. In the eerie silence of the new lockdown norm, I had lost the job I'd been offered, and was spending my days sketching and walking down a wooded path to the to the local shops.

Woolf's words were my solace, in a way. I could not have picked up a better book.

Now, an attempt to put my thoughts on this work to paper:

-The prose punctured me; it found its way, light beaming, into the naked crevices of me and there it stayed, pushing and prying at the flimsy skin of studied existential ignorance I'd built for myself over the years.

- Never, since I read Wuthering Heights on a storm-wreaked weekend at the gloriously angst-ridden age of 15, has a book been more perfectly timed.

- Woolf understands. She wrote in spells of madness and madness - it is clear - illuminates. Perhaps it is only when we are teetering on the edge of things that they are thrown, like a lighthouse beam, into sharp relief.

- She writes of the rich, tumultuous existence and careening peaks and troughs of emotion that exist within all of us, rarely seen by others.

- She articulates the fragility and often arbitrary-seeming nature of human relationships. A husband and wife for instance, so close, and simultaneously so very distant from each other. In the course of an evening they go from enemies, to confidantes, to begging love from one another, yet all in subtlety, all played out in nuance.

- The writing on childhood was especially poignant. She writes of one of the youngest children, "He will never be happier than he is right now", as lamented by his mother. In the course of the narrative, this is shown to be resoundingly true. The truth of this temporal and fading childhood happiness smacked me in the jaw. It sounds bleak, and hopeless, that we all get increasingly miserable as we grow. Perhaps it is. But it is nevertheless true.

Woolf rages, and she mourns the fact that children must grow up. Why? She writes as Mrs.Ramsay, Why must they?

- On this note, I loved how she captured the awe and serene reverence that young girls have for their mothers. I wasn't a child in the early 19th century, but she could well have been describing my own memories of "helping" my mother with her jewellery before going out to a posh dinner. "That's my mother" Rose thinks.

Poignant again, because I too eventually lost this childhood awe.

- In fact, so many passages could have been my own thoughts, verbatim, though with marked improvement to their clarity and general wordsmithery.

The underlying anxiety that all of the characters have - from Lily Briscoe in the finale, painting, wondering at truth, to Mrs.Ramsay, finally alone in the light of the lighthouse, wondering if she does good for entirely selfish reasons, to Mr. Ramsay, wondering desperately how to get to Z, to the answer of it all, and instead distracting himself with comforting thoughts of his wife and his 8 children, reminding himself that he is lucky. This muddle, this inner argument and tying and untying of self is familiar.

I have had all of these thoughts, in some way or another. I have this same underlying awareness of some huge, unanswerable question.

The Meaning of Life,

Unanswerable, certainly.

Though To the Lighthouse made me feel a little less alone in the askin.

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I am delighted to write that I started this reading year off on a HUGE high. The Shadow of the Wind was my companion over the New Year break and I absolutely could not put it down.

The Shadow of The Wind

By: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
First Published: 2001
Translated by: Lucia Graves

I love books that bring cities to life in such lucid detail that the rythms of the city become integral to the plot itself. This book does that for Barcelona. Zafon weaves autumn winds around crumbling alleyways, he has us in roaring cafes and quiet bookshops. The city's turbulent past bleeds out through the cracks in its cobblestones- the city, arguably, is the book's main character.

Set in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Barcelona is grieving and themes of loss and ghostly loneliness tug at the protagonist's heels. Nevertheless, the protagonist, Daniel, is immediately likeable as a young bookish boy who gets swept up in the mystery of a lost author. His gradual unravelling of the mysteries of Julian Carax forms the backbone of the book. He is self-deprecating, charming, and flawed in a way that makes him very human.

Other characters include the beautiful but unattainable Clara, a blind girl several years older than Daniel who he reads to, as well as a mysterious man with a burnt face seen smoking under lamp-posts, a bona-fide femme fatale and the unforgettable Fermin Romero de Torres, a homeless man that Daniel befriends with a dark past and witty way with words.

And on top of this suite of intriguing characters we have a winding helter-skelter of a plot that moves at a breakneck speed, cleverly interspersed with suspensful silences. From its beginning in a Cemetery of Forgotten Books, this story etches a path of mystery and fantastical twists and turns that perform a wonderful ode to classic Victorian literature. Crucially, however, the characters' groundings in human motivation and emotion prevents the plot from becoming farcical.

There are love stories, there is mystery, and above all there is friendship, with a powerful message of turning your back on loneliness, on emptiness and ghostly misery, and choosing a future, and friends, and family.

If I hadn't already made it clear, I thoroughly recommend this.

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(aka, that time Hemingway literally published his diary and won a Nobel Prize)

I finally read The Sun Also Rises. I had never bothered with it before, because unfortunately for him, my first exposure to Hemingway was The Old Man and the Sea, forced upon me by an unenthusiastic English Lit teacher at fourteen years old. The language was dull and the subject matter even more so: an old man tries to catch a fish. Like, tries really really hard to catch a fish. He catches the fish, then the fish dies.

The end.

Suffice to say, I did not care for it. I stayed away from Hemingway from then on, and was further deterred by his reputation as a misogynistic, adulterous drunk. However, Literature As A Whole adores Hemingway, so I, assured that there would be no paint-drying, fish-catching old-man antics, gave Sun a try.

First of all, they lied about the lack of fish-catching. There is a big ol’ detour in the middle of the book where two manly male characters sit by a river for some manly male time catching fish. It’s a shame, because the bits before and after that are full of juicy juicy action.

The story actually reads a bit like a 1920s version of Geordie Shore. Friendships, rivalries, jealousies and unconsumated love form the book’s backbone. (I couldn’t help but feel like fourteen-year-old me would have been a lot warmer to Hemingway if this was the book she’d read first). I was pleasantly surprised by the main character – here was a kind-hearted and likeable hero – in love with a woman who is engaged to his friend and also cheating on him with his other friend. And is getting divorced. And also has a thing for bullfighters. Actually, she wants to sleep with pretty much anything that moves.

Anyway, in spite of my fish-informed prejudice I enjoyed the book, even with all its melodrama and certain elements that did not age well. (The anti-Semitic and sexist language, for instance) I put it down and thought, I get it. This is why Literary People like Hemingway. His simple style places you squarely in the scene; I felt like I was there in the Spanish fiesta; sipping coffee at the cafes and drinking wineskins in the taverns.

In fact, I liked it so much I decided to find out a little more about expat life in the 1920s.

And here, my hard-won respect for Hemingway disintegrated.

I discovered that, like Jake the protagonist, Hemingway also worked as a journalist in Paris. This, alone, made sense, given the richness of the scenery descriptions. Usual, even, to base a novel off one’s own experiences. But there’s inspired by, and then there’s straight-up reporting: it transpires that Sun is little more than an embellished diary entry.

Hemingway made himself the hero of his own story, then proceeded to decimate the characters of real people who thought him a friend.

For more of what really happened, here’s a Vanity Fair article that covers just about every detail.

Basically, there really was a Brett Ashley. (the protagonist's love interest) Her name was Lady Duff Twysden. She really was divorced, and sleeping with Hemingway's friend. There really was a Robert Cohn. His real name was Harold Loeb and he really had had an affair with Lady Duff. He was also a friend of Hemingway’s who, understandably, didn’t take the anti-Semitic vitriol heaped upon him in Sun all too well. The real Brett Ashley and Jake and Robert Cohn and everyone else went to the bullfighting fiesta in Spain in 1925.

All of them, based on real people. And then there was one addition to the party not mentioned in the book: Hemingway’s wife.

He had a WIFE.

I learnt that Hemingway was infatuated with Duff. Here I saw sharply his reasons for writing the book: just as the old man couldn’t catch his fish, Hemingway couldn’t sleep with the woman he wanted. Tragically, he already had a wife.

When I think back to Jake and Brett’s intimate conversations, it reads like wishful thinking. As if he wanted to give them some credence, Hemingway's own feelings are given life in Jake and clearly reciprocated by Brett. She prefers him over all the others. If it were not for his impotence, she would be his.

My heart bleeds for him.

I’d like to point out that having a wife and impotence are not the same thing, but to Hemingway they are. He uses his writing to disguise – poorly I may add – a narcissistic desire to have his feelings returned. He uses his writing to lament over his lust for a woman that, at the real fiesta, likely had no interest in him. Now that I’m aware of his context, I find Hemingway and the novel he tore from the pages of his diary even less exciting than when I sat through hours of fishing.

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A Cup of Classics

The Shadow of The Wind

By: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
First Published: 2001
Translated by: Lucia Graves

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A Cup of Classics

The Shadow of The Wind

By: Carlos Ruiz ZafonFirst Published: 2001Translated by: Lucia Graves

NANOWRIMO WRAP UP 2018

About me

2019 Reading Challenge

Follow Us

Search This Blog

Categories

Popular Posts

Blog Archive

By: Carlos Ruiz Zafon
First Published: 2001
Translated by: Lucia Graves