Verdi, Dickens... go for the greats, I say. :)
Lots of cultural experiences over the past week, including some classic Doctor Who, (Fourth Doctor, with jelly-babies and scarf) and the first two Vorkosigan novels. But as well as those, a couple of the seriously greats:
Last Thursday I was at a performance of Verdi's Requiem.Ah! The trumpets! the soprano! The flutes! The choirs! But mostly, amazing Verdi. I am an absolute sucker for the 'Dies Irae', and I was knocked sideways by how he reprised it in the last part ('Libera me'), and then (it seemed to me) had the astonishing boldness to counter it with something which sounded like a children's play-tune, like 'Oranges and lemons' - dippity-dippy - so hugely open to interpretation. :) and then the enormously demanding call from the soprano again, and falling away to an exhausted end-of-the-road finish. I loved it. :)
And I'm reading, and marvelling over, the truly breathtaking Bleak House. It's crammed full of invention -- there's at least three normal Dickens-novels in there (which is to say ten ordinary-writer novels).I make it:
And the whole style of the writing is really intriguing. Esther Summerson - she is such a sly, reserved, misdirecting narrator! Did Dickens know how horribly unappealing all that poor little me stuff was? Is she a huge mistake in his part, or a really subtle portrait of seething resentment which doesn't dare to acknowledge itself?
All the omniscient narrator parts are in present tense - it makes reading it so much a breathless drama! (I've been trying it, to see if I can make it work. Results not yet in.) How usual is that, in Dickens or in other nineteenth-century novelists?
And the book ends in mid-sentence. The only other book I know that does that, off-hand, is Sterne's Sentimental Journey. But maybe it's not as wild as it seems? Maybe there's a whole school of such? I'd love to hear, if anyone knows of any, partly because the answer might shed some light on the Esther Summerson mystery - it's th last part of her narration - so typical of her to leave us to fill in the blanks. The novel as Rorschach test.
This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/29102.html. Please comment here or there.
Last Thursday I was at a performance of Verdi's Requiem.Ah! The trumpets! the soprano! The flutes! The choirs! But mostly, amazing Verdi. I am an absolute sucker for the 'Dies Irae', and I was knocked sideways by how he reprised it in the last part ('Libera me'), and then (it seemed to me) had the astonishing boldness to counter it with something which sounded like a children's play-tune, like 'Oranges and lemons' - dippity-dippy - so hugely open to interpretation. :) and then the enormously demanding call from the soprano again, and falling away to an exhausted end-of-the-road finish. I loved it. :)
And I'm reading, and marvelling over, the truly breathtaking Bleak House. It's crammed full of invention -- there's at least three normal Dickens-novels in there (which is to say ten ordinary-writer novels).I make it:
- one detective/police procedural (Inspector Bucket!! Yes!!!)
- one weird damaged psyches novel
- one condition of England novel
- about half a warm family life/upper working-class novel? or more than half?
- a Trollopian novel of young just-barely-middle-class men about town
- and a handful of grotesqueries - starring the Smallweeds, Krooks and Mlle. Hortense
And the whole style of the writing is really intriguing. Esther Summerson - she is such a sly, reserved, misdirecting narrator! Did Dickens know how horribly unappealing all that poor little me stuff was? Is she a huge mistake in his part, or a really subtle portrait of seething resentment which doesn't dare to acknowledge itself?
All the omniscient narrator parts are in present tense - it makes reading it so much a breathless drama! (I've been trying it, to see if I can make it work. Results not yet in.) How usual is that, in Dickens or in other nineteenth-century novelists?
And the book ends in mid-sentence. The only other book I know that does that, off-hand, is Sterne's Sentimental Journey. But maybe it's not as wild as it seems? Maybe there's a whole school of such? I'd love to hear, if anyone knows of any, partly because the answer might shed some light on the Esther Summerson mystery - it's th last part of her narration - so typical of her to leave us to fill in the blanks. The novel as Rorschach test.
This entry was originally posted at http://heliopausa.dreamwidth.org/29102.html. Please comment here or there.