Reading: the Jane Austen Book Club
I read Karen Joy Fowler's The Jane Austen Book Club last night--or most of it. I will confess that I skimmed some of the latter portion, so I probably shouldn't discuss it, but what the hey.
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The events are set in Boston during the initial years of the Gilded Age(1865, and newly freed slaves and Civil War Vets are teaming into the city, great wealth and great poverty live side by side, publishing as we know it today is just beginning, and Longfellow is working on his translation of The Inferno with his cohorts, Lowell, Oliver Wendel Holmes, Sr. (although Jr. has a role as does Emerson) and several other historical personages.
Pearl uses the text as a primer for murder, and the book club become junior sleuths because they are potential suspects.
The book is wonderful.
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Dead Certainties, by Simon Schama, and
The Club Dumas, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte.
In general, taking well-known historical personages and turning them into sleuths is not a good idea. The real people are always so much better than the mystery into which they are shoehorned. (The books in which Jane Austen is made into a sleuth are particularly regrettable.)
My mileage on that one may have been particularly low because I am familiar with the places and people it used. Someone with more distance would certainly do less twitching.
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Reading communities (Brian Stock's term) are real, I think, and lj and the blogosphere generally support the concept. (What it sounds like: a bunch of people who've read the same material in more or less the same ways, hence share some modes of thought and textual interaction.) I've always wondered how the idea works with the fact that the more carefully and informedly one reads, the less likely one is to be part of a reading community broadly conceived.
This comment is coming out very clumsily--sorry. *flees*
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But I don't think your statement clumsy. I have been wondering if the claims on the jacket, etc, are true, that Jane Austen fans would especially like this book. I believe the opposite would be true, that is, the glimpses, out of context as they are, could spark a new reader's interest in Austen--maybe in revisiting Austen after twenty years, or to an adult reading after a college skim-through.
I guess I need more Austen lovers to speak up about their own engagement with the material to convince me either way.
Anyway, I agree about reader communities. But I think reader communities have been a staple of civilisation, including the so-called fanfiction aspect--other writers engaging with the material, as with Homer, and of course with the Matter of Britain, a thousand years ago.
But specific reader communities: I remember reading disparaging commentary in old essays, etc, about the "Baker Street Irregulars" and other Sherlockians, etc.
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Stock focused on a group of dissidents in eleventh-century France, if I remember correctly, and used the term relative to how they were bound together by their shared experience. I think that for him, things like the Matter of Britain would work differently; participation there isn't reliant upon a particular time. But all of us reading JABC shortly after its publication have some connective links, starting with other stories that subsets of the group have read--Austen ( ... )
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Whereas, in my view, a shared community is one in which one actively chooses to participate: the fanfic circles, frex.
Yes? No? It's already five a.m. but I still haven't had my tea yet.
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To being liked by everyone (the idea being that being likable doesn't actually get you anything in elementary school or high school).
read_o_rama had a response similar to yours, although coming from the opposite direction, someone who wasn't very familiar with Austen.
I liked it a lot, but maybe I'm in the desired middle ground--familiar but not too familiar with Austen.
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