Long Walks Through the World Wednesday
What I've Just Finished Reading
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen! It's so good. It's a lot less intense than Persuasion -- Catherine's younger than Anne Elliot, and her anxieties and frustrations and hopes are much more youthful and less heartwrenching -- but it has the same mix of clear-eyed detachment and close emotional engagement that made Persuasion so compelling. It's not as funny as Persuasion at its funniest, but it's more light-hearted and self-referential, with a narrator who is constantly making sardonic apologies for Catherine Morland's inadequacies as a heroine, pausing to defend the novel against its detractors, and refusing to explain things she is not interested in dwelling on. Catherine is a realistic and likable teenager, and the supporting characters are wonderful, especially affectionate, selfish Bella and her spectacularly inappropriate brother John Thorpe, and the kind but ineffectual Mrs. Allen. Catherine's earnest brother and thoroughly un-tragic parents are also great, and Henry Tinley's first conversation with Catherine is a masterpiece.
Austen is really only at about the middle of her game here, but that still puts her miles ahead of everyone else in sight. She makes a huge quantity of comic hay out of the distance between Catherine's favorite novels and the ordinary fabric of her life, then makes the matter of whether the Tinleys will forgive Catherine for accidentally snubbing them two days in a row as suspensful as the Gothic intrigues in Udolpho -- then wraps the whole thing up one page from the end with a careless deus ex machina for which she pointedly declines to apologize. Even her sloppiness is magnificent.
What I'm Reading Now
The Power and the Glory is ok. Like a lot of the 99 Novels, I would probably have given it up after a few pages if left to my own devices, but I'm glad I haven't yet. The main character is sympathetically unlikeable in a way that is a little similar to the voices in The Naked and the Dead, but I haven't yet made it to the point where the wall of my irritation is breached and pity comes pouring through like sunlight. That point will probably come -- it's not a bad book; it's just not my book, not yet. He's a priest pursued by an anti-clerical governement and his own sense of worthlessness, and he's pitiable, but only in the abstract: the idea that he can't give himself up in order to save the villagers who are being taken hostage in this state-wide search for him because 1) he can't willingly break his oath to the church, and 2) he would make an embarrassing martyr anyway, is hard to sympathize with.
But his non-heroism is the point, I guess. What he thinks are his finest ideals make him small and unhappy; what he thinks of as his tempatations and failings also make him small and unhappy. It's not supposed to be pleasant; it's supposed to be Human, All Too Human. I don't know yet if I'm going to love this book or become more indifferent to it, or admire it without loving it. There are a little less than a hundred pages left, and anything could happen.
What I Plan to Read Next
All those books I started last week and haven't read any more of since -- no starting new books until I make some progress! Unless it's really important, I guess.
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen! It's so good. It's a lot less intense than Persuasion -- Catherine's younger than Anne Elliot, and her anxieties and frustrations and hopes are much more youthful and less heartwrenching -- but it has the same mix of clear-eyed detachment and close emotional engagement that made Persuasion so compelling. It's not as funny as Persuasion at its funniest, but it's more light-hearted and self-referential, with a narrator who is constantly making sardonic apologies for Catherine Morland's inadequacies as a heroine, pausing to defend the novel against its detractors, and refusing to explain things she is not interested in dwelling on. Catherine is a realistic and likable teenager, and the supporting characters are wonderful, especially affectionate, selfish Bella and her spectacularly inappropriate brother John Thorpe, and the kind but ineffectual Mrs. Allen. Catherine's earnest brother and thoroughly un-tragic parents are also great, and Henry Tinley's first conversation with Catherine is a masterpiece.
Austen is really only at about the middle of her game here, but that still puts her miles ahead of everyone else in sight. She makes a huge quantity of comic hay out of the distance between Catherine's favorite novels and the ordinary fabric of her life, then makes the matter of whether the Tinleys will forgive Catherine for accidentally snubbing them two days in a row as suspensful as the Gothic intrigues in Udolpho -- then wraps the whole thing up one page from the end with a careless deus ex machina for which she pointedly declines to apologize. Even her sloppiness is magnificent.
What I'm Reading Now
The Power and the Glory is ok. Like a lot of the 99 Novels, I would probably have given it up after a few pages if left to my own devices, but I'm glad I haven't yet. The main character is sympathetically unlikeable in a way that is a little similar to the voices in The Naked and the Dead, but I haven't yet made it to the point where the wall of my irritation is breached and pity comes pouring through like sunlight. That point will probably come -- it's not a bad book; it's just not my book, not yet. He's a priest pursued by an anti-clerical governement and his own sense of worthlessness, and he's pitiable, but only in the abstract: the idea that he can't give himself up in order to save the villagers who are being taken hostage in this state-wide search for him because 1) he can't willingly break his oath to the church, and 2) he would make an embarrassing martyr anyway, is hard to sympathize with.
But his non-heroism is the point, I guess. What he thinks are his finest ideals make him small and unhappy; what he thinks of as his tempatations and failings also make him small and unhappy. It's not supposed to be pleasant; it's supposed to be Human, All Too Human. I don't know yet if I'm going to love this book or become more indifferent to it, or admire it without loving it. There are a little less than a hundred pages left, and anything could happen.
What I Plan to Read Next
All those books I started last week and haven't read any more of since -- no starting new books until I make some progress! Unless it's really important, I guess.