Book Meme, Day 4
3. Least favorite book by favorite author
I don't have one singular favorite author, but Lion Feuchtwanger certainly counts as one of my favorites, as I mentioned a couple of times, and I most definitely have a least favorite book of his:
"Tis Folly To Be Wise" is the English title, "Tod und Verklärung des Narren Jean-Jacques Rousseau" the original German one. Feuchtwanger himself wasn't really happy with it - in a letter, he described it as a novella which got out of hand, and which got stuck somewhere between novella and novel -, but the reason why I dislike it so much isn't that it's among his weaker works, plot wise.
What it is about, roughly summed up: not Jean-Jacquess Rousseau the person but his heritage of ideas and how they should be realised. Rousseau himself dies early on in the novel, living just long enough to shock one of the novel's heroes, Fernand, the son of Rouseau's last patron and a fervent admirer, by how unlike the sage Fernand imagined he is in person, how everyday human. There's something of a murder mystery plot - did Rousseau die of natural causes or was he killed by his wife's lover who wanted Therese to sell the unpublished manuscripts and make money out of them? - but that doesn't really go anywhere. What becomes the main plot is what happens to Rousseau's ideas. To wit, the French Revolution. (That most famous of Rousseau admirers at the time, Maximilien Robespierre, also shows up repeatedly in the novel.) Fernand starts out as the equivalent of a liberal who becomes disgusted at his fellow liberals when he discovers that liberté, egalité, fraternité ends for them where the money earned by slavery in the French colonies starts and no, by no means should the slaves of Santo Domingo be freed. While the liberal revolutionaries thus show themselves cowardly at best and corrupt at worst, the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, turn out to be the only ones ready to carry the revolution through by not flinching from bloody consequences. The deaths of Louis and Marie Antoinette are a political necessity. So, and here comes my main reason for disliking the novel, is the Terreur. When Fernand himself, as a born aristocrat, gets arrested despite being subjectively innocent of any wrong doing, his old friend Martin Catrou, who as opposed to Fernand actually is of the people, visits him in his cell and has this confrontation with him:
Sure enough, the first thing Martin said, 'I suppose you think you have been treated unjustly?' Fernand replied, 'I can see that I must have seemed suspect to certain people.' He could not resist adding, 'In any case what I think is a matter of no importance.'
'It is of importance,' Martin aanswered belligerently. 'If you think you've been treated unjustly you are guilty.' 'I have not been treated unjustly,' Fernand replied, and this he felt.
Martin persisted.( ...) ' Anyone who works for the revolution with half-measures is digging his own grave and that of the Republic as well. Oh, you gentlemen of learning!" (Martin) broke out. "You fainthearts! You desired the revolution, but you only half desired it. When the cards were down, when severity and terror were necessary, you turned cowards and took refuge behind your stupid 'humaity'! If it had been up to you the Republic would have been defeated and done for by now. (...) You don't understand us. Yourbirth prevents you from understanding the people. You are incapable of understanding them. And because your kind couldn't understand, you did everything by halves. Everything you did turned out to be wrong."
Then, remembering a former conversation of theirs, he planted himself in front of Fernand and without preliminaries (...) announced, 'I've drafted a new law for the abolition of slavery in the colonies. The Convention has voted for it. Slavery has been abolished and without any ifs and buts."
Fernand should have been pleased. He was not pleased. He was conscious of nothing but anger. Martin was standing there and rubbing it in. 'I took action where you and your educated friends failed.' And it was true. Martin had acted where they had merely talked, and slavery was abolished.
Now you might wonder why that passage disturbes me so. After all, it's plausible enough, and Fernand's ensueing rueful realisation that he just felt as the Marquis' son, taunted by the shopkeeper's son (Martin), and that his sense of privilege was far more engrained than he'd assumed also works. But the thing is: Lion Feuchtwanger, who was very insightful indeed when it came to Hitler and the Nazis and wrote a novel in which Hitler was satirized three years before Hitler came to power (Feuchtwanger was a citizen of Munich and thus had a front row seat in the 1923 failed coup attempt by Hitler & Co., which forms one part of the plot of said satirical novel), was not only wilfully blind when it came to Stalin's monstrosity, he'd even written a book (non-fiction) justifying the Stalinist show trials from the 1930s. And 'Tis Folly To Be Wise was published in 1952, a year before Stalin's death. It's impossible not to read this as a further attempt of justification by the argument of "historical necessity", with the France of the Terreur era standing in for Stalinist Russia.
Fernand, for what it's worth, doesn't die, Martin saves him, but Fernand, as mentioned in the excerpt not only is made by the author to agree that he hasn't been wronged by being accused in the first place, but also to admit that true progress can only be achieved in such a fashion. It's this agreement that I find most offensive, because it's a direct counterpart to both what the accused in the Stalinist trials and in, say, China during the Cultural Revolution (oh, and these days again) were made to say. What happens to them is just. They are guilty. "If you think you've been treated unjusty you are guilty" - that's Orwellian to the max.
Incidentally: I'm not fond of the entire subgenre of British and American novels which you could sum up as "The Scarlet Pimpernel school of thought", wherein the French aristocray are the poor victims to be saved by their equally aristotratic British saviors, and the entire French Revolution is solely about decapitation. (As Orwell pointed out, one Napoleonic battle caused more deaths than the entire Terreur era.) But just as Zhang Yimou's film Hero is disturbing and repellent to me because it feels like a director using his considerable craft to justify executions and totalitarian oppression in the name of historical necessity, so is this infinitely less known novel by an author whose books otherwise have given me a lot.
1. Favorite book from childhood
2. Best Bargain
3. One with a blue cover.
4. Least favorite book by favorite author.
5. Doesn't belong to me.
6. The one I always give as a gift.
7. Forgot I owned it.
8. Have more than one copy.
9. Film or TV tie-in.
10. Reminds me of someone I love.
11. Secondhand bookshop gem.
12. I pretend to have read it.
13. Makes me laugh.
14. An old favorite.
15. Favorite fictional father.
16. Can't believe more people haven't read.
17. Future classic.
18. Bought on a recommendation.
19. Still can't stop talking about it.
20. Favorite cover.
21. Summer read.
22. Out of print.
23. Made to read at school.
24. Hooked me into reading.
25. Never finished it.
26. Should have sold more copies.
27. Want to be one of the characters.
28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.
29. The one I have reread most often.
30. Would save if my house burned down.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1287763.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
I don't have one singular favorite author, but Lion Feuchtwanger certainly counts as one of my favorites, as I mentioned a couple of times, and I most definitely have a least favorite book of his:
"Tis Folly To Be Wise" is the English title, "Tod und Verklärung des Narren Jean-Jacques Rousseau" the original German one. Feuchtwanger himself wasn't really happy with it - in a letter, he described it as a novella which got out of hand, and which got stuck somewhere between novella and novel -, but the reason why I dislike it so much isn't that it's among his weaker works, plot wise.
What it is about, roughly summed up: not Jean-Jacquess Rousseau the person but his heritage of ideas and how they should be realised. Rousseau himself dies early on in the novel, living just long enough to shock one of the novel's heroes, Fernand, the son of Rouseau's last patron and a fervent admirer, by how unlike the sage Fernand imagined he is in person, how everyday human. There's something of a murder mystery plot - did Rousseau die of natural causes or was he killed by his wife's lover who wanted Therese to sell the unpublished manuscripts and make money out of them? - but that doesn't really go anywhere. What becomes the main plot is what happens to Rousseau's ideas. To wit, the French Revolution. (That most famous of Rousseau admirers at the time, Maximilien Robespierre, also shows up repeatedly in the novel.) Fernand starts out as the equivalent of a liberal who becomes disgusted at his fellow liberals when he discovers that liberté, egalité, fraternité ends for them where the money earned by slavery in the French colonies starts and no, by no means should the slaves of Santo Domingo be freed. While the liberal revolutionaries thus show themselves cowardly at best and corrupt at worst, the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, turn out to be the only ones ready to carry the revolution through by not flinching from bloody consequences. The deaths of Louis and Marie Antoinette are a political necessity. So, and here comes my main reason for disliking the novel, is the Terreur. When Fernand himself, as a born aristocrat, gets arrested despite being subjectively innocent of any wrong doing, his old friend Martin Catrou, who as opposed to Fernand actually is of the people, visits him in his cell and has this confrontation with him:
Sure enough, the first thing Martin said, 'I suppose you think you have been treated unjustly?' Fernand replied, 'I can see that I must have seemed suspect to certain people.' He could not resist adding, 'In any case what I think is a matter of no importance.'
'It is of importance,' Martin aanswered belligerently. 'If you think you've been treated unjustly you are guilty.' 'I have not been treated unjustly,' Fernand replied, and this he felt.
Martin persisted.( ...) ' Anyone who works for the revolution with half-measures is digging his own grave and that of the Republic as well. Oh, you gentlemen of learning!" (Martin) broke out. "You fainthearts! You desired the revolution, but you only half desired it. When the cards were down, when severity and terror were necessary, you turned cowards and took refuge behind your stupid 'humaity'! If it had been up to you the Republic would have been defeated and done for by now. (...) You don't understand us. Yourbirth prevents you from understanding the people. You are incapable of understanding them. And because your kind couldn't understand, you did everything by halves. Everything you did turned out to be wrong."
Then, remembering a former conversation of theirs, he planted himself in front of Fernand and without preliminaries (...) announced, 'I've drafted a new law for the abolition of slavery in the colonies. The Convention has voted for it. Slavery has been abolished and without any ifs and buts."
Fernand should have been pleased. He was not pleased. He was conscious of nothing but anger. Martin was standing there and rubbing it in. 'I took action where you and your educated friends failed.' And it was true. Martin had acted where they had merely talked, and slavery was abolished.
Now you might wonder why that passage disturbes me so. After all, it's plausible enough, and Fernand's ensueing rueful realisation that he just felt as the Marquis' son, taunted by the shopkeeper's son (Martin), and that his sense of privilege was far more engrained than he'd assumed also works. But the thing is: Lion Feuchtwanger, who was very insightful indeed when it came to Hitler and the Nazis and wrote a novel in which Hitler was satirized three years before Hitler came to power (Feuchtwanger was a citizen of Munich and thus had a front row seat in the 1923 failed coup attempt by Hitler & Co., which forms one part of the plot of said satirical novel), was not only wilfully blind when it came to Stalin's monstrosity, he'd even written a book (non-fiction) justifying the Stalinist show trials from the 1930s. And 'Tis Folly To Be Wise was published in 1952, a year before Stalin's death. It's impossible not to read this as a further attempt of justification by the argument of "historical necessity", with the France of the Terreur era standing in for Stalinist Russia.
Fernand, for what it's worth, doesn't die, Martin saves him, but Fernand, as mentioned in the excerpt not only is made by the author to agree that he hasn't been wronged by being accused in the first place, but also to admit that true progress can only be achieved in such a fashion. It's this agreement that I find most offensive, because it's a direct counterpart to both what the accused in the Stalinist trials and in, say, China during the Cultural Revolution (oh, and these days again) were made to say. What happens to them is just. They are guilty. "If you think you've been treated unjusty you are guilty" - that's Orwellian to the max.
Incidentally: I'm not fond of the entire subgenre of British and American novels which you could sum up as "The Scarlet Pimpernel school of thought", wherein the French aristocray are the poor victims to be saved by their equally aristotratic British saviors, and the entire French Revolution is solely about decapitation. (As Orwell pointed out, one Napoleonic battle caused more deaths than the entire Terreur era.) But just as Zhang Yimou's film Hero is disturbing and repellent to me because it feels like a director using his considerable craft to justify executions and totalitarian oppression in the name of historical necessity, so is this infinitely less known novel by an author whose books otherwise have given me a lot.
1. Favorite book from childhood
2. Best Bargain
3. One with a blue cover.
4. Least favorite book by favorite author.
5. Doesn't belong to me.
6. The one I always give as a gift.
7. Forgot I owned it.
8. Have more than one copy.
9. Film or TV tie-in.
10. Reminds me of someone I love.
11. Secondhand bookshop gem.
12. I pretend to have read it.
13. Makes me laugh.
14. An old favorite.
15. Favorite fictional father.
16. Can't believe more people haven't read.
17. Future classic.
18. Bought on a recommendation.
19. Still can't stop talking about it.
20. Favorite cover.
21. Summer read.
22. Out of print.
23. Made to read at school.
24. Hooked me into reading.
25. Never finished it.
26. Should have sold more copies.
27. Want to be one of the characters.
28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.
29. The one I have reread most often.
30. Would save if my house burned down.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1287763.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.