Monday Morning Book Blog – Page 51

Tell the Wolves I’m Home, by Carol Rifka Brunt

December 19, 2016 by barbara

This 2013 debut novel came highly recommended. I approached it cautiously, prepared to be disappointed, only to be thoroughly charmed by the voice of the narrator, fifteen-year-old June. One of the blurbs compared her to Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, but I thought immediately of Cassandra in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle. Both young women are imaginative and well-read. Both have beloved older sisters who seem to be moving away from them. Both are set apart from their peers, Cassandra by her peculiar family and living situation, June by a special friendship.

The voice alone would have carried me through the novel, but the story is gripping as well. As it opens, June remembers when and her sister Greta were being driven by their mother to Uncle Finn‘s apartment to continue sitting for the portrait he was painting of them, Uncle Finn who was dying of AIDS. It is the late 1980s, when AIDS was still new enough that, unsure of how it was transmitted, people feared and shunned the infected.

For June, who hardly saw her accountant parents during tax season and was ignored or tortured by her older sister, Finn was the one person with whom she could be herself. He took her to the Cloisters and Renaissance festivals and museums. He shared her fascination with the Middle Ages. She would often walk into the woods to pretend she lives in another time altogether. His death has left her bereft.

The story moves easily between memories of times with Finn and the present of the story: tax season, with the girls left alone to care for themselves. Popular Greta, who is two years older, is in her last year of high school, having been moved up a grade. She is starring in play at school and struggling with her own demons.

June is stunned by the loss of her confidante, struggling with the idea of death and, later, with the impossible task Finn has left for her.

There is so much I love about this story: June’s imaginative life that reminds me so much of my own at that age, the relationship between the sisters, the absent Finn and his care for his niece, the mounting suspense as events close in around June. I especially love the use of symbols.

I’ve always appreciated the use of symbols, particularly when they mean something a little different each time they reappear. The best at using symbols is Paul Scott, author of The Jewel in the Crown and other novels. In an essay, “Imagination in the Novel”, he describes how he came up with the central symbol of one of my favorite novels, his Birds of Paradise. His idea for the novel began with an image of a woman appearing in a doorway. The idea of her wearing “fine feathers” leads him to his symbol.

Sometimes this thing that glitters appears, sometimes it doesn’t. The thing that glitters is often a symbol. If the symbol can be justified, it is best to use it for all it is worth, to be honest about it, to say: “This is my symbol and this is what it means.” . . .

It was the idea of birds of paradise that glittered, and they became my symbol because, upon investigation, they not only stirred me with the idea of their beauty, but yielded information pertinent to the idea of the woman in the doorway and to the general climate of something having come to an end. Research brought knowledge.

Later he adds a third factor: “an experience of the oddity of life. The imagination, the knowing, and the experience finally cohere into a pattern.”

In Brunt’s novel we have various symbols: the woods where anything can happen, June’s medieval boots given her by Finn. The main symbol, though, is the wolves. June hears a pack of them in the woods—they are part of her secret world, and it’s significant when and with whom she’s willing to share them. And then wolves begin to emerge in unlikely places. At one point she says they are “hungry and selfish.”

This is more than a coming-of-age story, more than a dealing-with-the-first-death story. It is an engrossing story of deeply human emotions, ones we deny or fear, ones that lead us into actions we regret and the connections we crave.

What are you reading that has moved you deeply?

Calyx, Volume 24, No. 1

December 12, 2016December 12, 2016 by barbara

Cleaning out a box, I came across this copy of Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. I’m not sure where it came from, but I could tell right away that I had never read it. The opening story was so gripping, I knew I would not have forgotten it.

In “Goulash”, by Anna Balint, the fourteen-year-old narrator is in Budapest, Hungary with her parents and younger brothers visiting Uncle Zoltan and his family: Auntie Eszter and their daughter Gizi. They are all on their way out into the countryside, a trip Zoltan didn’t want to take and Eszter is still angry about. But Mum fought for it, Mum who refuses to speak Hungarian, who claims she is “English, English, English.” There is much here about language and heritage and what we choose to remember, about denial and loss, all wrapped in a story full of enticing scents and sounds, the taste of apricots and hot peppers, singing in the night, and outstretched hands.

The poetry in this volume, too, is stunning. Each poem resounded deep within me. Such innocent images at first, drawing the reader in, ever further in, through forests of joy or comfort or peace. Take “Doorpost”, by Laurie Patton:

There is a lightness
when we cross a threshold—
. . .
No matter the sorrow,
every door holds a hope

And then the memories summoned by the room’s objects begin to multiply, memories of joys and losses, of days past, days that can seem like a future—all conveyed in just a few lines. And then the final lines subtly tie these memories to the image of the door, the threshold, the liminal space between past and future.

There is art here as well, black and white photographs of paintings and sculptures, starting with four pieces by Leah Kosh that seem to unearth hidden memories in me, truths I once knew but have let slip away. Kosh says, “My paintings most often explore the belief that there are a multiplicity of realities co-existing and that these realities are our shadows and our mirrors—always with us, rarely acknowledged.”

Four substantial reviews of books by women close the volume.

Each piece in this issue is a gem. I am stunned by the quality of the works and their diversity. There are stories of a girl who sees her absent mother as a star floating in a pond, of a young woman whose boyfriend’s age seems to be going backwards, of an older woman who has suffered one too many accidents. There are astonishing poems about crows and dancing and walking in the dark.

There are hundreds of literary magazines out there. I used to subscribe each year to a different one, until I hit a rough patch timewise and decided to get through the backlog before continuing. However, there has always been one so consistently good that I’ve continued to subscribe to it and read year after year.

I think I’ve just found a second one.

What literary magazines have you enjoyed reading?

The Mistress of Nothing, by Kate Pullinger

December 5, 2016 by barbara

Another novel based on the lives of real people, The Mistress of Nothing is the story of Sally Naldrett, lady’s maid to Lucie, Lady Duff Gordon.

In August of 1862, thirty-year-old Sally sets sail for Egypt with her mistress, where it is hoped that the warm dry climate will ease Lady Duff Gordon’s tuberculosis. While Sally is thrilled at the prospect, having thoroughly enjoyed their previous stay in South Africa, she knows that behind Lady Duff Gordon’s brave front, her mistress is miserable.

Author of several books, translator of others, Lady Duff Gordon enjoys the scintillating company of friends such as George Meredith and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. As Sally can see, the only thing worse than leaving behind her intellectual life is the separation from her husband and children, the youngest of whom is only three. In addition to the physical suffering she endures from her advanced tuberculosis, Lady Duff Gordon resents and tries hard to hide her physical decline.

As lady’s maid, Sally tends to her mistress’s illness as well as to her clothing. When Sally declines a last-minute proposal, she declares that she is devoting her life to caring for Lady Duff Gordon.

Sally’s descriptions of Egypt are entrancing, from the crowded streets of Cairo to the time spent traveling on the Nile in their dahabieh to setting up housekeeping in Luxor. They are accompanied by a dragoman hired in Cairo, Omar Abu Halaweh. The three fall into an easy rhythm of life in Luxor, enhanced by various townspeople.

Battered by the heat, the two women shed their English clothes for loose-flowing Egyptian costumes. Both study Arabic and Islam with Omar, and the three begin to have their meals together, sitting on cushions on the floor per local custom. But differences remain. Lady Duff Gordon adopts the clothing of Egyptian men while Sally hesitates and finally choses women’s robes. Sally practices her Arabic in the marketplace while her mistress uses hers in entertaining local notables.

The English class structure is not abandoned as easily as the stiff stays that the women toss away. Sally soon finds that their free and easy their life in Luxor is an illusion. The structures of Egyptian society and politics also close in on the small household.

I raced through this novel, fascinated by the characters, entranced by the descriptions of floating on the Nile and viewing Luxor by moonlight. Most of all, I was caught up in Sally’s story, afraid of how it might turn out, shocked by some of the privileges claimed by English aristocracy that even I, with all my reading, was not aware of. If you want a good read that will also make you think about class and race and religion in new ways, this is a book for you.

In this book, the actual people involved are from the past, which makes me wonder if that is better or worse. We may be able to discover more about them now that they are gone. At the same time, they are not around to defend themselves. Pullinger has done a lot of research and I am pretty confident that the events are accurate. However, she has had to imagine the emotions and motivations of Sally, Omar and their mistress.

It is clear from her comments in the interview at the end that Pullinger has tried to follow the same advice I give in my memoir-writing classes: treat the people in your story with respect. Genuinely try to understand why they thought they were doing the right thing. Remember that each of them thinks he or she is the hero of the story.

The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway

November 28, 2016 by barbara

It seems a good moment to be reminded of those who retain their integrity even in the worst of times. Like Geraldine Brooks’s People of the Book, this novel is based on a true story of courage and honor during the siege of Sarajevo.

Galloway’s novel is based on the actions of Vedran Smailović, a former cellist in the Sarajevo String Quartet, who during the siege played among the ruins, especially the Albinoni piece, and at funerals, even though funerals were often targeted by snipers. Unsurprisingly, Smailović was furious that his life and story had been co-opted by someone else without his permission, calling it an invasion of his privacy. He also said,

“I didn’t play for 22 days, I played all my life in Sarajevo and for the two years of the siege each and every day.

“They keep saying I played at four in the afternoon, but the explosion was at 10 in the morning and I am not stupid, I wasn’t looking to get shot by snipers so I varied my routine.

“I never stopped playing music throughout the siege. My weapon was my cello.”

Galloway, on his part, defends his actions by saying in the same article that Smailović’s actions had been “an extremely public act” and that a writer need not get permission from his sources of inspiration. Apparently they have since begun to move towards reconciliation, but I still am concerned about defining the grey area between a private person and a public figure.

In Galloway’s story, on 27 May 1992 an unnamed cellist sees a mortar bomb explode in the square outside his room, killing 22 people who had been standing in line for bread. He decides to put on his formal clothes, go out to the spot where the bomb exploded at 4:00 pm and play Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, a piece composed around a fragment found after the bombing of the Dresden Music Library in 1942. He will do this every day for 22 days, if he survives that long.

The rest of the story revolves around three fictional characters, ordinary citizens whose lives have been derailed and distorted by the war. Arrow is a young woman who reluctantly became a sniper for the city’s defenders because of her previous experience on her university target-shooting team. To separate herself from that person who would never have used a rifle to kill, she has taken a different name. Yet she still struggles to align her actions with the remnants of her belief system. “The Sarajevo she fought for was one where you didn’t have to hate a person because of what there were . . . You could hate a person for what they did.” What could be more timely?

Dragan was able to send his wife and son out of the city before the siege and now lives with his sister and her family. He is trying to get to the bakery where he works, even though it is his day off, to eat in the employee cafeteria—one less burden for his sister. Dragan imagines Sarajevo as it was before the war, the parks, the Academy of Fine Arts, the Olympic venues from 1984. He is delayed by the people he encounters and the terrifying hesitation at street corners. Crossing a street means exposing yourself, and Dragan falls into magical thinking about what might save him. This is a choice I see people resisting today: to hide in memory or indulge in magical thinking. Only by facing reality can we address it.

Another person out on the streets is Keenan who must travel across the city to get water for his family and for his elderly neighbor, Mrs. Ristovski, even though he is almost paralysed by the thought of venturing out into the sights of the snipers in the hills. As he makes agonising decisions about which bridges to cross and whether to abandon Mrs. Ristovski’s cumbersome bottles, he becomes aware of tankers of water servicing the rich, those who are making money off the beleaguered residents. Keenan must find a way to live with his fear of death and decide whether it is worth going on.

Nothing is more relevant to today’s fears than this chilling reminder from late in the book. Although Galloway is referring to Sarajevo, he could be talking about any of several nations in the throes of change today.

. . . civilization isn’t a thing that you build and then there it is, you have it forever. It needs to be built constantly, re-created daily. It vanishes far more quickly than he ever would have thought possible.

What novel have you read recently that has given you new insight about current events?

The Lord of the Rushie River, by Cicely Mary Barker

November 21, 2016 by barbara

When in need of comfort, I often turn to beloved books. In a recent article on the great writer’s website Writer Unboxed, author Juliet Marillier described some of her favorite and most treasured books, her keeper books. This picture book was the very first one she named. It is by the author of the Flower Fairy books, which I have long adored.

This story opens with Susan’s father, the Sailor, bidding her goodbye as he heads to sea again. In her sadness, she is comforted by a family of swans swimming nearby, one of whom, as a cygnet, had been rescued by her father when some boys had broken its leg.

Dame Dinnage, hired by her father to care for Susan in his absence, immediately drops her pretense of loving Susan, feeding her scraps and watered milk, refusing to mend or replace her clothes. All Dame Dinnage cares about is her stocking of money that grows heavier and heavier. Then she moves them to the city.

In her despair at never seeing her father again, Susan runs away, trying to make her way back to Rushiebanks. She is rescued by a swan, the one her father saved, now grown large and strong, and lives with the swans until he returns.

I’ve given away the ending, but you knew it would end happily. The delight is in the details and in the drawings by the author, some in color. Barker perfectly captures the timeless voice of a young girl. Here is a short passage from Susan’s flight from the city:

It was still the dark night; but in one house a dim light burned in an upstairs window. It gave her a feeling of company; it might be the night-light of a little girl like herself. She crept into a corner of the creeper-covered porch, and rested there.

I was lucky to find a used copy of this lovely book and will treasure it and share it with the young people in my life. I’m grateful to Juliet Marillier for introducing me to it.

One of the benefits of the Writer Unboxed site is that people leave comments on every post. I culled more ideas from other people’s comments on Juliet’s post. Here are the keeper books that I posted in my comment:

The Diamond in the Window, by Jane Langton. As a child I didn’t realise that this tale of magic and danger was based on aspects of Transcendentalist philosophy. I simply loved it, and the images in it are still touchstones for me.

The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett inspired a lifelong love of gardening and Yorkshire. I walked the Dales Way this summer.

The Scent of Water, by Elizabeth Goudge. I first read this as a teen and, on re-encountering it later, realised how much it had influenced my personal philosophy, my beliefs, and my view of the world and relationships.

Parzival, by Wolfram von Eschenbach. Innocence, quests, and honor: this book took my childhood love of King Arthur stories into adulthood.

The Hobbit & Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkein. One rarely mentioned aspect of these books is their maps and songs and barely remembered histories, which gave me a love of scholarship that has carried me through formal schooling and beyond.

Birds of Paradise, by Paul Scott. This early novel by the author of the Raj Quartet resonated so deeply with me that I come back to it again and again. A coming of age story, it makes me consider the unreliability of childhood memory and the place of Arthurian honor and glory in today’s world.

What are some of your keeper books?

The Door, by Magda Szabó

November 14, 2016 by barbara

I have been thinking a lot about doors this week, what doors are closing, what doors are opening. It is a time of great change for me personally, for my country, for the world.

Szabó’s brilliant novel opens with a recurring nightmare of desperately trying to force a door open; there is someone inside who needs saving. Yet she cannot even call for help; she has no voice.

The narrator of this first-person story is a Hungarian writer, also named Magda. She and her husband, also a writer, have no children, indeed no family, for Magda’s mother has recently died. After 10 years, the government has finally lifted its restrictions on Magda’s writing and, overwhelmed with opportunities, Magda decides to hire a housekeeper. Thus, Emerence enters their lives.

A sturdy older woman, Emerence takes control of the interview, announcing that she will decide whether to work for them, rather than the other way around. With great physical strength and an unrivalled understanding of how the world works, she performs herculean tasks to maintain the apartment building where she lives, clearing the snow for 11 buildings, providing meals for the sick, finding homes for stray animals, and the many other duties she has assumed.

Emerence is proud of her role as the bulwark of the neighborhood. She is the one they turn to with their problems, holding court on her front porch with strong tea or coffee. However, no one is allowed inside her apartment, which Magda calls the Forbidden City. This is only one of many mysteries about this remarkable woman. Did she steal the valuables Jewish neighbors had to leave behind when they were rounded up during the war? Did she kill a man and bury him in the back yard? Who is the young woman whose arrival she anxiously awaits?

Magda and Emerence frequently clash, more and more violently as they grow closer. Emerence has a laborer’s contempt for the idea that tapping on a typewriter could be considered work. She disapproves of Magda’s faith and criticises her when she attends church services. In her turn, Magda dismisses many of Emerence’s gifts as not being up to her standards and resents the way Emerence has appropriated the love and obedience of Magda’s dog.

Miscommunications and misunderstandings plague the relationship. In one hilarious scene, Magda takes Emerence to where a film is being shot, thinking to give her a treat. Upon learning that there are machines making the tree branches dance during a passionate love scene, Magda is disgusted and accuses Magda and the other filmmakers of being liars and cheats. Magda asks her, “‘Don’t you think it’s a function of art to create the illusion of reality?’” Emerence’s response changes how Magda understands her own art.

“Art . . . If that’s what you were—artists—then everything would be real, even the dance, because you would know how to make the leaves move to your words, not to a wind machine or whatever it was.”

Neither woman is spared in this brutal, yet subtle work. Every page reveals Szabó’s profound understanding of human behavior and motivations. I am grateful for the work of translators like Len Rix and publishers like New York Review Books for enabling me to read novels from other countries such as this one.

The book works on many levels. Some have seen it as old Hungary versus new Hungary or peasant versus educated elite. Perhaps it traces the difference between art and physical labor. In the end, though, it is a story about how difficult it is to love someone, and how necessary.

Have you read a book translated from another language? What did you think of it?

A Cup of Tea, by Amy Ephron

November 7, 2016 by barbara

I once read a novel where a man enters a room and the woman there, who has never seen him before, just says, “Yes.” And she goes with him, even though she is married and has two children. I was at a susceptible age, young and a bit cynical, and wondered how that could even be possible, to recognise someone in that first moment.

I found out later that it was indeed possible, though I couldn’t explain how. Perhaps it was the circumstances; perhaps the way he looked or the sound of his voice, the peculiar scent of his skin. I don’t know.

Such a moment occurs in this slim novel, based on a short story by the same name by Katherine Mansfield. On a shopping expedition in New York City, wealthy Rosemary Fell sees a young woman standing under a streetlight in the cold rain. Moved by a surprising impulse of generosity, she invites the destitute woman home with her for a cup of tea.

Navigating the concerns of her driver, her housekeeper and her best friend, Jane, Rosemary presents the girl with a dry change of clothes. Before she has decided how far to go in befriending the girl, Rosemary’s fiancé arrives. Philip immediately notices the strange girl who is studying him. After being introduced, he takes Rosemary to another room to find out what is going on. Although unconvinced by his lecture on the unwisdom of bringing home strange girls, Rosemary does return and sends the girl—Eleanor Smith—away.

It’s 1917 and many of society’s mores are changing. The U.S. will soon enter the Great War, sending men overseas and disrupting lives even as comfortable as Rosemary’s. The story follows these four characters, Eleanor, Rosemary, Philip and their friend Jane.

While it seems like a simple story, the complexity of the characters and the intensity of the times give it depth. Rosemary is no empty-headed debutante, and Jane’s motives only gradually take shape. Although of a good family, Philip has had to build his shipyard business from scratch. And Eleanor is a bit of a mystery. A woman who has reinvented herself, perhaps more than once, she moves through the months, taking shape herself along with the story.

People sometimes argue the difference between character-driven novels and those that are plot-driven. To me, the best novels are like this one, where plot and character are fully integrated. Things happen; people change; larger themes of class and materialism lurk around the edges: I couldn’t ask for anything more. And the setup, a moment of just saying yes, was entirely believable to me.

What story have you read that resonated with your own experience?

I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith

October 31, 2016 by barbara

I must have been ten or eleven when I first read this novel of an eccentric English family living in a house attached to and using a corner of a partially ruined castle. I didn’t remember anything except that I’d loved it despite my initial disappointment that it wasn’t about King Arthur or magical doings—I’d come to it from The Once and Future King and somehow thought it was going to be similar.

Yet I only had to read the first sentence for the whole story to come flooding back to me, plus a precise memory of where I was when reading it. The voice of Cassandra, who tells the story, is that strong.

Seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain and her family love their dilapidated home. It would be better, though, if they had some money for little things like, oh, having more candles so they can read at night, fixing the leaks in the roof, actually getting enough to eat, and paying the rent.

Her father, a writer, had a very successful book many years ago but hasn’t written since. Her stepmother, Topaz, is a model for whom there aren’t many work opportunities in the depths of the country and London is too expensive. Although a bit drifty, Topaz is even-tempered and has turned out to be adept at fashioning meals out of almost nothing. There’s a brother, Thomas, two years younger, and Stephen, a year older than Cassandra, the son of their maid who stayed on with the Mortmains after her death even though they can’t pay him.

Of her older sister, Cassandra says: “Although I am rather used to her I know she is a beauty. She is nearly twenty-one and very bitter with life.”

See what I mean about the voice? Wanting to be a writer, Cassandra has decided to keep a journal, the book we are reading. She intersperses her record of the oddities of their daily life with her own quite original thoughts and interpretations. I say original, but I remember reading them and thinking Oh yes, that’s EXACTLY the way I feel. And she’s hilarious, sometimes without meaning to be.

I was too young then to recognise the inciting incident, the happening that upends their odd but stable lives. On a rainy night, while Cassandra is taking a bath in front of the kitchen fire, a young man knocks at the door and enters. He and his brother are moving into nearby Scoatney Hall, empty since the death of their uncle who is also the landlord for the Mortmains’ home. The sisters actually joke about Austen’s novel.

In trying to decide what most delights me in this story, I have to give credit to the setting: the peculiar house/castle with its moat and nearby ancient tower. I love the room over the gate where Father retires to “write” every day, but actually reads mystery novels. And Cassandra’s descriptions of their life at home, their jaunts in the English countryside, etc. are quite distinctive. Here’s a bit from her first visit to Scoatney Hall:

We left our wraps in the hall—Topaz had lent us things to save us the shame of wearing our winter coats. There was a wonderful atmosphere of gentle age, a smell of flowers and beeswax, sweet yet faintly sour and musty; a smell that makes you feel very tender towards the past.

I love their hijinks. Not just the imaginative way they live—calling the room between the girls’ room and the adults’ bedroom the “buffer state”, using a dressmaker’s dummy as a confidante and mentor—but the accidental mischief they fall into, like Rose being mistaken for a bear.

Most of all, though, it’s Cassandra’s storytelling, her humor, her peculiar turns of phrase, her odd outlook. Every page holds delightful surprises. If you’ve never read this book, you have a treat in store for you. If you have, try reading it again.

Have you reread a book that you loved when young? Was it as good as you remembered?

Professor Harriman’s Steam Air-Ship, by Terese Svoboda

October 24, 2016 by barbara

The poems in this new collection by Terese Svoboda get to the heart of what it means to be human. I wrote a woman at first, but I think their truths transcend gender. Allusive, often playful, they are deeply moving.

Take the first poem, “Whose Little Airplane Are You?” With light but deft touches, she conjures a mother speaking of apricots and clouds and planes, as though in answer to the question What was it like when I was a baby? She apologises for all she had not apprehended then. Yet the immense love comes through, together with the hint of threat that the image of planes coming out of clouds now holds for us.

In “The Talking Tea-Kettle” an enchanting and amusing discussion of spiritualists and their debunkers is sprinkled with calls from a daughter trying to connect with her mother.

Other poems take us into different territory, such as “Orlando is Us” which imagines what it must have been like to be in that nightclub on the night of the attack. “Airport News” uses Dante’s Purgatorio to describe a flight, and will have any frequent flyer nodding and chuckling. Another intensely imagined piece has a father trying to find his son in a parking garage in “Boy on Crutches”. Others, such as “Baghdad Calls” and “Hope Wanted Alive”, speak to our fractured world.

The long poem that makes up Part III and provides the book’s title, looks at our race pell-mell into the future. With allusions, puns and other word-play, Svoboda takes us on a balloon ride of a marriage. She invites us to look at the space between concepts such as “Transportation as transport:/Court-ship.” With references to Spock, DNA, and the Jetsons, she circles around the idea of invention, the future, and the stories we imagine about them.

It is the last section that keeps bringing me back. She begins with the lines “No one imagines/night at noon.” With compelling imagery and concrete details, like gingko trees and the triangle on the Play button, these poems of a loss conjure in us, not just the memory, but the experience of our own losses and help to heal them.

I’ve written before about Svoboda’s earlier collection, When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley, and Anything That Burns You, her incredible biography of the influential but now mostly forgotten Modernist poet Lola Ridge. This new collection builds on the strengths of those earlier works. If you enjoy word-play and are ready to be moved, I encourage you to explore these poems.

What poem have you read recently that moved you?

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a digital copy of this book free from the author. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

The Idiot, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

October 17, 2016 by barbara

I remember this book from my childhood. It was on a top shelf in the study, a small room lined with bookcases. Aside from the many-volumed encyclopedia and my grandfather’s law books, most of the shelves were filled with my father’s medical books. We children would pull them down when we wanted to scare ourselves and each other with the photos of rare diseases. So when I saw this book with the title in large letters on the spine, above my reach, I assumed it was another medical book, describing some form of mental disability.

I must have been curious, though, because it is the only title I remember from those walls.

Although I read a lot, I’ve only recently begun to catch up with the classic Russian authors. The Idiot begins with young Prince Muishkin, 26 or 27 years old, traveling by train to St. Petersburg from Switzerland where he’d spent several years being treated for severe epilepsy. He meets two men: Parfen Rogojin, a pale man of about the same age with fiery eyes, and Lebedeff, a social-climbing clerk of about 40.

The two are amused by the prince, who is inappropriately dressed for the cold and who answers their questions with a naive honesty and openness that makes them think him simple-minded. The prince reveals that he has no other plan but to look up a distant relative, Mrs. General Epanchin (Elizabetha Prokofievna). The two take him in hand.

I won’t try to summarise the complicated plot and large cast, but the heart of the book is the prince, whose artless innocence wins over everyone he meets. Dostoevsky said that he wanted to write a novel about a completely good and moral man. Of course, like others the prince has been compared to since, such as Don Quixote and Jesus himself, he brings trouble on himself and those around him. Most people, including the prince himself, call him an idiot, thinking his innocence and epilepsy symptoms of a feeble brain. Gradually, though, they come to appreciate his wisdom and deep insight into those around him.

The prince falls in love with two women who—to their own surprise—both love him back: Nastasia Philipovna, a woman who has been used as a concubine by a man who adopted her as his ward and whom Rogojin also loves, and Aglaya, the youngest and most beloved Epanchin daughter. As A.S. Byatt astutely observes in her review of a recent translation:

The women think they are in a story about seduction, rape, proposals, money and marriage, like most novels in the realm of the passions and economic forces. The prince is in some absolute moral world in which he can instinctively gauge who is being cruel to whom, who is in need and who is tormenting or tormented, without having in him any genuine sexual response of his own to help him to judge his own effect on people.

I found this novel compelling, though I certainly understand the complaints of critics who find the plot contrived and the characters flat. What most impressed and unsettled me was Dostoevsky’s technique of presenting some incident or fact as though we already know all about it, whereas in fact he only explains it some pages or chapters later. At first I was annoyed, but then I realised this was how the prince must feel, adrift in a world where everyone seems to know the rules except him. At the same time, he is utterly sure of his own understanding.

As writers, we are taught that to make characters seem real they must be neither entirely good nor entirely bad, but some mixture. Dostoevsky’s challenge here is to make the purely good prince seem real. He makes the other characters complex enough, like Mrs. General Epanchin berating those whom she most cares for and worries about, or Rogojin who is alternately selfless and grasping.

I think Dostoevsky succeeds in making the prince real. Perhaps that is because I have known a few such people, not perfect certainly, but so innocently good that your heart aches for them, knowing the hurts they will encounter. I’m glad I waited to read this novel. I don’t think I would have enjoyed it so much if as a child I had pulled it down from that top shelf.

What Russian classic have you read that impressed you?