Three Years After

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

TWO YEARS AND TEN MONTHS LATER:

No time at all. No Time.

THREE YEARS AFTER:

And by now I’ve stopped making these notes.

– Denise Riley, Time Lived, Without Its Flow

Content warning: depression and suicide.

Owen died three years ago today. I wrote about his death a lot in the first year: I felt a strong urge to write about it. I needed to gather up my pain and shock and confusion and shape them into something that made some kind of sense—to bring the chaotic, unbearable feelings under some kind of control. (“In words, like weeds, I’ll wrap me o’er,” Tennyson says on In Memoriam, a poem I have returned to over and over since that first day.) I also wanted to reach out to my community of friends and readers, who showed me so much kindness, and still do. I also see now that this writing was a way of holding on to Owen by showing what I could of who he was and what he meant to me, what his loss meant. There’s a lot I don’t remember very clearly about the first few months after his death, but I do remember the way sentences would rise up in my mind and nudge at me until I used them—and the way lines of poetry would surface (as they still do), haunting me until I figured out where to put them, whether in my journal or in a sampler or in a post.

I also remember how angry it made me, in what I now know to call the “acute” phase of grief, to be told “it takes time.” Time for what? What could possibly change, with any amount of time? “My son is in a box!” I raged at the nice woman on the other end of the help line I called, before I had the right kind of person to talk to. “What difference is time going to make to that?” Seeking my own way to understand that, however I felt, time was going to keep passing, I thought about Woolf’s idea of To the Lighthouse as two blocks joined by a corridor:

One way I suppose I could think about where I am right now is precisely in a corridor between two blocks, one of them my previous life, which included Owen, and the other my future life, which will go on without him.

I have thought about that model a lot, as time has passed—time in which I have learned that both things are true, that it does take time, and that the passage of time doesn’t change how much it hurts that Owen’s life ended the way it did (or that Owen’s life itself was, to him, so painful that he ended it the way he did).  When people said, kindly, helpfully, “it takes time,” I resented the implication that I would one day stop grieving, even though the prospect of feeling the way I did indefinitely was also terrible. What I think they actually meant, or should have meant, is rather that over time you learn to live with those feelings: that they do not destroy you. The grief does not end—how could it? It does not get any less—why would it? A. S. Byatt said of the death of her young son that she was haunted by the thought “He is dead . . . that will go on and on till the end of time.” People say, she said in an interview, that “after a time, you get to want to celebrate somebody’s life. All I can say is no, you don’t. It’s just terrible. It stays like that.”

The model of grief that makes sense to me now is that, as time passes, you build new layers around it: it is a lasting part of you, a big part, but it is not all of you any more. So I’m not sure that a corridor was the right metaphor. I like these lines from Julia Copus’s poem “The Grievers” a lot:

What we can’t absorb we carry in us,
a lumpish residue. It’s truly a wonder
we manage to move at all; let alone
as freely as this, with the ease at times
of our old and lighter selves.

Her emphasis on the heaviness of grief matches my own experience of it as weighty, hard to carry. I still carry it with me, but I do also sometimes move now with ease, with lightness. I am doing much better. I am stronger. I have worked hard at this: therapy is hard. The work is not done, but I am better at it too.

Like Riley, whose meditations on grief have been interwoven with my own since almost the beginning, after three years I have nearly stopped writing about it, at least publicly. As I realized long ago, there is a terrible sameness to grief: it is repetitive, including for me. I don’t talk about it much any more either, and sometimes that’s tough, because it means I’m not always honest. How are you? Oh, fine. I’m fine. For other people, time has passed; they have moved on, and probably it seems as if I have too. I have, of course, in a way, because time does pass – for me, just not for Owen. “The dead slip away,” Riley says, “as we realize we have unwillingly left them behind in their timelessness.” 

It’s a grey, foggy day here today; the lines that are pressing on my mind on this sad anniversary are Tennyson’s again, the starkest lines in In Memoriam:

He is not here; but far away
    The noise of life begins again,
    And ghastly thro’ the drizzling rain,
On the bald street breaks the blank day.

He is not here: after three years, what else is there really to say? But it has helped me, as always, to put some of what I’ve been feeling and thinking into words.

Meal Plan: Sarah Moss, My Good Bright Wolf

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

She was surprised to find it more or less possible, most of the time, to follow her meal plan: it seemed that perhaps the battle was over, the endgame complete. She had followed the rules all the way to the end, until it was possible to go no further. She had met the experts’ standards until her heart and liver and kidneys failed in quantifiable and quantified ways, until other experts told her that it was time to stop and now, surely, there must be a period of grade, a little mercy.

If food issues or eating disorders are a problem for you, you may not want to read either this post or Moss’s book.

My Good Bright Wolf is a harrowing, disturbing, honest, vulnerable account of Sarah Moss’s anorexia, though that neat diagnostic term seems inadequate to the complexity of the story she tells about the childhood, the parenting, the schooling, the culture of femininity and beauty, and the “experts” that all played a part in making it impossible for her to accept food as nourishment her mind and body needed – never mind to embrace eating as pleasure.

How do you tell a story like this about your life, and especially about your family, that does justice to your own suffering, and your own rage, while still also, as far as is possible, doing justice to good intentions, to sound principles, to the tensions and struggles of the people who did you so much harm? How do you convey the extraordinary power of feelings – compulsions – that to other, “healthy,” people do not, cannot, make sense? How do you bring both yourself and your readers to an understanding that is not (because it can’t be) the same as an explanation? How do you orchestrate the voices in your own head, both the ones expressing your unreasoning, impossible, self-destructive conviction that you should not eat, and the ones – trained, educated, hyper-rational – that know better? While Moss’s experience would, I think, have been gripping and heart-rending if told in a more conventional expository way, the most remarkable thing about the memoir she has written is the form she created for it, which is constantly interrogatory, and which adopts elements of allegory or fairy tale to shift our thinking away from the strictly literal towards something at once more surreal and more affecting.

Her mother, for instance, is always “Jumbly Girl,” her father “the Owl.” They are characters as much as people; Moss is aware of that, self-conscious about herself as in some sense their creator, certainly their narrator. The artifice does not signal untruth, but truth, in memoir, is a function of memory, and she knows memory can never be wholly reliable:

They’re gods and monsters, your mum and dad, mythological. Larkin was right, they were fucked up in their turn, by fools in old-style hats and coats. Fools who taught them, one way and another, that love takes the forms of surveillance and judgement, that children will stay dependent and needy forever if not forced to grow up. Fools who taught them that care and attention are scarce resources, not to be wasted on the undeserving. And maybe they’re not really your parents, the Owl and Jumbly Girl, not really human at all, just voices in your head.

But their real voices – the ones she remembers – say things like “We know she’s fat” when she is taken for a mandatory weigh-in with the school nurse, who replies “She’s not overweight, nothing to worry about there,” much to her shock – “Next she’d be saying you could do maths. Nonsense.” They say things like “no need for any lunch, there’s plenty of meat on those bones.” They permit only “natural” foods, only organic produce, no fast food or processed food, no sweets – healthy, in theory, but punitive in practice. They preach (though the Jumbly Girl does not always practice) a doctrine of self-control, and eventually, in early puberty, Moss learns she can win at that game, “dieting” so much she stops menstruating:

You had only another two or three periods, not enough to learn how to manage or accept them. Bones emerged comfortingly, hips, clavicle, shoulders and then ribs. Even the popular girls . . . envied your bones, as they had never envied and would never envy anything else about you. You began to get tired on the two-mile walk across the city to school, to get a bit dizzy sometimes on the stairs, and you greeted it all with relief. Here was safety. Here was something you could do.

A severe case of frostbite from a sailing trip leads her to a doctor who is “concerned about how thin you are”; he diagnoses anorexia and refers her to a psychiatrist, but her mother says “we’re about to spend a month hiking,” so “she’ll have to manage.”

Sailing, hiking, trips to the Continent, ballet lessons, organic food: Moss is very aware – sometimes uncomfortably so, I thought – of her “privilege,” though her self-conscious admissions of it are unhappy echoes of her parents’ rebuttals (real? imagined?) of her “complaints.” “You must be sick in the head, complaining about this stuff, ballet and sailing and private school”;

Do you have any idea, even now, what a lucky girl you were? Have you forgotten the food collections for the families of striking miners another two junctions up the motorway, have you forgotten how skinny some of the kids at your first school were?

Answer me this: would it be better to know that your parents wanted to feed you and couldn’t, or to know that they could and didn’t want to?

Seriously?

Moss is astute about the social contexts and structures that meant her father, a professor, was away all day and resentful, at home, about incursions on his time and attention, and also about the frustration of her mother – indeed, her mother’s whole generation, able to get an education (her mother had a Ph.D. too) but then too often expected to conform, “clever girls . . . before marriage and maternity enclosed and enraged them.” Her mother cooked and sewed, and young Sarah admired and emulated those skills even while absorbing guilt, even hatred, of them fueled by feminist rejection of them. Her sympathy for her mother’s thwarted aspirations complicates her resentment at her own miserable treatment and fills her with ambivalence about her own ambitions: “Bad scholar, bad writer, bad clever girl.”

Through all of this, Sarah reads, and My Good Bright Wolf has long, fascinating sections about Little Women, about Little House on the Prairie, about Swallows and Amazons, about The Bell Jar, drawing out what they have to say about food, about nourishment, about ideal girls. Moss goes on, of course, to become both a literary critic and scholar and a novelist. This is not, by any means, however, a “literature saved my life” kind of book. The “life of the mind” she idealizes often seems, to her, to be at odds with her own physicality; the one argument that works, when any argument does, to get her to eat is that if she doesn’t, she will not be able to think and thus to write. Her success, as a student then an academic then a writer, only changes the terms and the stakes of the battle she fights with her body. Once – quite recently – in Italy, on a fellowship, in just the kind of circumstances that seem ideal for writing (“What a privilege, to have a room of one’s own with all meals found, all housework done, for six weeks!”), she finds herself in a particularly devastating spiral, unable to eat, dissociating, disintegrating. “I’ll get over it,” she insists to her therapist, who responds “You’re not safe” and insists that she come home.

My Good Bright Wolf is not, as I said, a book about writing (or reading) as salvation, and it is also not a recovery narrative, though by the end there are glimpses of reconciliation between Moss and her hungry body: “No making of art – or love, or war, or peace, or dinner – without a body, no body without food.” What would it feel like for her to be at ease, at home, in her body (“my house / my horse my hound,” as it’s called in her epigraph, May Sarton’s poem “Question”)? It would feel like the time she and a friend stop at a café in Lombardy, “with a view of the mountains and the sound of wind in the leaves”:

There’s a small bowl of the estate’s honey and one of preserved wild berries, and for now, for this sunny moment, you’re not scared, it’s just good food in a good place . . .

Sunlight, earth and water become grass becomes milk becomes cheese becomes you walking and thinking and writing.

The moment is the opposite of anorexia.

It feels fragile, precious, whole.

“Eternally Incomplete”: Han Kang, Greek Lessons

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

Greek Lessons: A Novel eBook : Kang, Han, Smith, Deborah, yaewon, e.: Amazon.ca: BooksThat instant, the memory of a long-lost word rises up in her, cut in half, and she tries to grab hold of it. She had learned that, in times past, there had been a word, a Hanja word . . . by which people had referred to the half-light just after the sun sets and just before it rises. A word that means having to call out in a loud voice, as the person approaching from a distance is too far away to be recognized, to ask who they are . . . This eternally incomplete, eternally unwhole word stirs deep within her, never reaching her throat.

I had looked at Greek Lessons more than once in the bookstore before Han Kang won the Nobel Prize, partly because she’s a writer I’d read about as far back as J. C. Sutcliffe’s excellent review of The Vegetarian in Open Letters Monthly, and partly because the title kept catching my eye: what could a novel called Greek Lessons be about? Language, certainly, and lessons, both of which already hint at themes of (mis)communication, translation, and (mis)understanding. It was the Nobel Prize that finally tipped the balance for me to try one of her books, and my curiosity about its (to me) promising title that made me choose Greek Lessons.

I’m not sure how I feel about Greek Lessons now that I’ve read it, and I’m not sure if I will read any of Han Kang’s other novels. I suspected going in that it was not exactly the kind of novel I typically like, but I often try to test these expectations, to challenge myself a bit. It’s funny, maybe, that a novel as quiet as Greek Lessons could be a challenge, but I often struggle to engage with novels that are more mood or experience than plot and character, that are evasive or elliptical—and Greek Lessons is all of these things.

It could hardly be more explicit or expository, of course, and still preserve its “aboutness” (a librarian’s term I find so useful!). An incredibly simple story, on the surface, about a relationship slowly and haltingly developing between a man who is losing his sight—the Greek teacher—and a woman who has lost her voice—one of his students—it is also a delicately profound, wistful exploration of gaps and silences and the struggle for expression, the ways language clarifies but also obscures our feelings and our meaning. One of the clearest accounts of this comes fairly late in the novel, when she is reflecting on why she stopped speaking:Greek Lessons – The Book Lounge

She knows that no single experience led to her loss of language.

Language worn ragged over thousands of years, from wear and tear by countless tongues and pens. Language worn ragged over the course of her life, by her own tongue and pen. Each time she tried to begin a sentence, she could feel her aged heart. Her patched and repatched, dried-up, expressionless heart. The more keenly she felt it, the more fiercely she clasped the words. Until all at once, her grip slackened. The dulled fragments dropped to her feet. The saw-toothed cogs stopped turning. A part of her, the place within her that had been worn down from hard endurance, fell away like flesh, like soft tofu dented by a spoon.

The paradox here, of course, is that Han Kang’s own language is expressive and evocative: surely that passage, ostensibly about the failure or abandonment of language, is its own rebuttal?

But other parts of the novel are more fragmented, especially (and again this felt paradoxical) as these two wounded, lost, and lonely people move closer to each other:

At one moment, moving your index finger over the flesh of my shoulder, you wrote.

Woods, you wrote, woods.

I waited for the next word.

Realizing that no next word was coming, I opened my eyes and peered at the darkness.

I saw the pale blur of your body in the darkness.

We were very close then.

We were lying very close and embracing each other.

It is perhaps a failing in me—in my reading habits, or my reading sensibility, or the way I have trained as a reader—that I find this kind of writing portentous rather than captivating or moving. It provokes a kind of impatience in me; it distracts me with attention to the writing, rather than immersion in the written.

희랍어 시간 | Greek Lessons - Han KangAnd yet overall I was captivated by Greek Lessons, not so much by its particulars as by the melancholy space it created. Ordinarily I prefer some forward momentum in a novel (both cause and effect of my specializing in the 19th-century novel for so long!). What Greek Lessons offers instead, or this is how it felt to me, is a kind of time out, from that fictional drive and also from the busy world that these days overwhelms us with “content” and noise. In the intimacy of the portrayal of these two people, both of whom are retreating from the world partly by choice but mostly from the cruelty of their circumstances, there is some recognition of how hard it is to be ourselves, to be authentic, to see each other. The quiet sparseness of Han Kang’s writing could be seen as an antidote to the pressure to perform who we are and to insist on making space for ourselves out there. (Pressured by her therapist to break her silence, the woman thinks, “she still did not wish to take up more space.”)

The novel isn’t consoling, though: it’s deeply sad, almost tragic. Even the connection the two people achieve feels less like a triumph or a happy ending and more like a concession: this is the best we can do. “It felt like I was being kissed by time,” he thinks;

Each time our lips met, the desolate darkness gathered.

Silence piled up like snow, snow the eternal eraser.

Mutely reaching our knees, our waists, our faces.

Novels in November!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

VeraNovember wasn’t a bad reading month, considering how busy things were at work—and considering that “work” also means reading a fair amount, this time around including most of both Lady Audley’s Secret and Tess of the d’Urbervilles for 19thC Fiction and an array of short fiction and poetry for my intro class. (I have not managed to get back into a routine of posting about my teaching, but I would like to, so we’ll see what happens next term.)

My book club has been trending French for a while: in November we wrapped up a thread that began with Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce back in April, then took us to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami in July and Colette’s Gigi in August until we arrived at Dumas’s The Lady of the Camellias. I’ve known the story of Dumas’s novel for most of my life because La Traviata has been my favorite opera literally since I was 5, so what was most surprising to me about actually reading The Lady of the Camellias (in English translation, sorry) was how exactly Verdi’s opera maps its every scene. I kept half expecting the characters to burst into song! It was pretty funny to be reading a scandalous French novel at the same time as I was reading about Robert Audley’s scandalous habit of lazing about reading French novels—and I have to say that Dumas’s novel really lived up to the bad reputation French novels have in English novels of the period. Within just the first few chapters there’s an abortion and an exhumed corpse, and the novel as a whole is much more sexually explicit than any mainstream Victorian novel I’ve ever read. (I mean, by contemporary standards it’s more implicit or suggestive than graphic, but compared to the nearly imperceptible details of Hetty’s pregnancy in Adam Bede that so outraged some 19th-century critics, Dumas is really out there!). The Lady of the Camellias: Dumas fils, Alexandre, Kavanagh, Julie, Schillinger, Liesl: 9780143107026: Books - Amazon.ca

Somehow we didn’t find The Lady of the Camellias that conducive to discussion, and we decided we would head off in a fresh direction with our next book. At the suggestion of one of our members, we chose Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera, which I also read in November, and it is superb. It is a lot like Rebecca but more domestic realism and less Gothic melodrama, which actually makes it more chilling. I don’t think I’ve read a better account of the kind of coercive control he exercises over her, and her attempts—so loving at first, so gutting as it goes along—to figure out how she can possibly anticipate his ‘rules’ and demands and so avoid his unpredictable rages. As I got nearer and nearer to the end, I got more and more puzzled about how this naïve young second wife was going to get out from under the shadow of her predecessor and/or out of the clutches of her increasingly terrifying husband in the few pages that remained. I don’t want to spoil the ending for anyone who hasn’t read the novel yet but I will say that I found it pretty devastating.

To Say Nothing of the Dog: A novel of the Oxford Time Travel series eBook : Willis, Connie: Amazon.ca: Kindle StoreI felt the need for something cheering in the wake of The Election and landed on Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing of the Dog: it was a great choice, genuinely comic and warm-hearted but also endlessly clever. I had a lot of LOL moments over its characterizations of the Victorian period, and it is chock full of literary allusions, many of which I’m sure I didn’t catch. A lot of them are to Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers: who know that Gaudy Night would be one of its main running references. I liked it enough that I’ve put The Doomsday Book on my  Christmas wish list, even though I don’t ordinarily gravitate towards this genre.

I also really enjoyed Clare Chambers’s Shy Creatures, which I picked up on the strength of her earlier novel Small Pleasures. I remarked on Bluesky that it reminded me of Anne Tyler, in that it is a very unassuming book but everything it does, it does well—this kind of fiction can be too easily underestimated, IMHO, especially if, as with both Chambers and Tyler, the seeming simplicity of the writing is accompanied by quietly persistent insight into what makes people tick and what makes things matter. My first review assignment for 2025 is Tyler’s forthcoming Three Days in July and I am really looking forward to both reading and writing about it. I haven’t loved all of her novels equally, but I’m never sorry I’ve read one of them.

I managed to finish Claudia Pineiro’s Time of the Flies and wrote up my thoughts about it already; I also wrote about my rather vexing experience with Mary and the Rabbit Dream. In lighter options, I read my first novel by crime writer Jane Casey, Let the Dead Speak, and thought it was good enough that I will look for more by her the next time I’m at the library; and I read Katherine Center’s The Rom-Commers, which I enjoyed.

Almost French: Love and a New Life in Paris: Turnbull, Sarah: 9781592400829: Books - Amazon.caAll in all, then, there was a lot of variety in both style and quality across the month. December is off to a good start: I’ve just finished Sarah Turnbull’s very engaging memoir Almost French (thank you, Helen!), and at the top of my TBR pile is Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, though I may actually turn next to Mark Bostridge’s The Pursuit of Love, which looks fascinating and which I also have a very small peripheral connection to because I had a nice dinner with Mark when he was in Halifax a few years ago doing research for it. (We have a mutual interest in Vera Brittain, which is how we first got in touch.) December is often one of my best reading months, with the constant busywork of the term calmed down and “just” (ha!) papers and exams to deal with. So thanks to all of you who have already put out your “best of 2024” lists, as I browse them happily looking for treasures to wrap up my own reading year.

“Her Own True Voice”?: Noémi Kiss-Deáki, Mary and the Rabbit Dream

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

Mary and the Rabbit DreamI knew I would read Noémi Kiss-Deáki’s Mary and the Rabbit Dream the first time I heard about it. It sounded like exactly my kind of thing: a fresh style of historical fiction, with a strange and subversive story to tell. It was published in the UK by Galley Beggar Press—and maybe that should have been a red flag for me, as they are the publishers and champions of Lucy Ellmann, whose Ducks, Newburyport I have begun three times, never making it more than 30 pages, but more significantly (because I still believe Ducks, Newburyport may be worth yet another try) whose Things Are Against Us I absolutely hated. On the other hand, I didn’t hate After Sappho, which they also published, and I do try, on principle, to push my own reading boundaries. So when Coach House Press here in Canada put out their edition of Mary and the Rabbit Dream, I promptly picked it up and happily began it.

Happily began it . . . and much less happily finished it. I did finish it, because it really does tell a weird and fascinating story, and I genuinely wanted to find out how it ended. It is about Mary Toft, an impoverished laboring woman who in 1724 claimed to have given birth to rabbits, although as Kiss-Deáki tells it, the tall tale was never really Mary’s but was a scheme cooked up by her overbearing mother-in-law to get attention and hopefully money from their wealthier neighbors, who value rabbits much more highly than they do poor people.

The fraud is carried on for some time even as interested and increasingly expert men (always men) investigate, and in case you’re wondering what counts as “evidence” of the rabbit births, well, bits of rabbit (and sometimes of other animal parts) are shoved up into Mary’s body so that she can be seen to “birth” them. It’s exploitive and horrific, and Kiss-Deáki emphasizes Mary’s great suffering along with the appalling indifference to it of those around her, all of whom are using her—and more specifically her wracked and wretched body—for their own purposes. This includes her mother-in-law and her accomplices, but also many esteemed men of science and medicine, who stake their reputations on disproving what is advanced as an extreme example of the fairly widely held theory that what a mother feels, sees, dreams, or otherwise experiences during pregnancy impresses itself on her unborn child. “I just dreamt of a rabbit,” Mary says at one point,

I really did, all my dreams are full of rabbits now, rabbits and hands, they are vile, they are nightmares, but I had one dream that was not vile, not a nightmare, it was a little rabbit, a little rabbit in my womb, ears pink and its little nose shivering pink

and although she is rambling feverishly and we know that she is confusing the nightmare she is currently enduring with a miscarriage she previous suffered, her interlocutor does not.

Mary Toft - WikipediaThere is a lot that is good and interesting about this novel, especially the way that, while it centers sympathetically on Mary and her experience, it also uses her story as a device to expose the cruelty of misogyny and the punishing self-satisfaction of a certain species of scientific certitude. There is a particularly harrowing scene in which a powerful man, determined to break her and expose her as the fraud he is sure she is, threatens Mary with live vivisection, explaining to her with truly menacing “objectivity” that

a vivisection is an operation undertaken on a live body through a series of incisions for the purpose of the betterment of science.

Never mind what might be for the “betterment” of poor Mary Toft, whose eventual confession (in Kiss-Deáki’s version, at any rate) is a damning indictment of everyone’s readiness to make her suffer. (Nobody cares, and off she goes to jail.)

What wasn’t so good about Mary and the Rabbit Dream—and here I have to insert the obligatory disclaimer, as other people may feel very differently, and indeed other people do, unless they were lying in the blurbs they provided! so, what didn’t work about Mary and the Rabbit Dream for me—was Kiss-Deáki’s writing. In parts, it is (as my quotations may show) intense and effective, if you like a spare style. But those short snippets do not capture the oddly stilted and highly repetitive quality of the writing, which at times I found almost comical. A sample, and I promise it was not cherry-picked:

Ann Toft is opposed to it. All the women are opposed to it.

Even Joshua Toft is opposed to it.

But Mr. Howard insists.

And Mary Toft has no opinion.

Mary Toft has suffered too much to have an opinion.

Mary Toft has been listened to too little her whole life to have the courage to form any opinions of her own.

And now she has no opinions. Not even if she tries.

She has suffered too much.

She is stunned with pain and fear.

She is fearful of the women around her. She is fearful of her surroundings.

Everything, right now, inspires fear.

She is the ideal person to use for people who wish to use other people for their own ends.

I suppose you could call it rhythmic or incantatory or something, but I’ll stick with stilted and repetitive, especially because the tic of repeating phrases from line to line is so consistent across the book and serves (to my ear anyway) no purpose. What or who is that supposed to sound like? Is it meant to create an impression of archaism? 

File:Cunicularii, or the Wise Men of Godlimon in Consultation MET DP824926.jpg - Wikimedia CommonsI might have tolerated the long stretches of this kind of stuff better if they hadn’t so often devolved into heavy-handed comments on what is perfectly obvious from the story itself, about how vile and prejudiced and uncaring the men are; or about how unfair the whole system is, especially to Mary (as happens in the example above); or about the symbolic meaning of what is going on. The worst such moment was this one, right after Mary, in excruciating pain and exhausted from relentless examinations, breaks down and begins screaming (“she slips down on the floor, she starts screaming, she screams and screams and screams”):

Sir Manningham asks,

“Are you done?”

And what Sir Manningham doesn’t realize with that question, is that on this night, at his feet, on the floor, Mary has given birth to something, not a rabbit, but her voice, her own true voice, voicing all the pain, all the anguish, all the misery, all the humiliation.

Honestly, if by this point in the novel, we aren’t able to read her screams exactly that way ourselves, the previous 138 pages were wasted efforts, and besides, it’s just clunky: a moment of high drama, of real emotional consequence, deflates completely with the words “her own true voice.”

Your mileage may vary, as we like to say, which is a reasonable acknowledgment that taste varies and that style is idiosyncratic. That’s what keeps things interesting, when we talk about books! That’s why, as I have occasionally argued at length and try always to demonstrate in my writing here, criticism is, at its best, both conversational and provisional. Also, any book worth saying this much about surely is not a bad book. Books, like people, are rarely all one thing. Still, I really disliked Mary and the Rabbit Dream. I thought that it was badly written. The note on Kiss-Deáki explains that English is her third language, and maybe that accounts for some of the awkwardness I felt in her style—but it also says that English is the language in which “she has found her author’s voice,” so I have to respect that the prose I am reacting to is not accidental, that it is her “own true voice.” 

Pest Control: Claudia Piñeiro, Time of the Flies

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Time of the FliesClaudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies is, like the other novels of hers that I’ve read, a crime novel. Sort of. It is about a convicted murderer, Inés: she killed her husband’s lover, but at the time of the novel is out of prison and making her living running an environmentally friendly pest control business. Then she is approached by one of her clients to provide a deadly pesticide—so that she too can kill “a woman who wants to take my husband the same way yours was taken from you,” or so she tells Inés. Inés, who is not in general a murderous person and who also would very much like not to go back to prison, is tempted only because her friend Manca urgently needs treatment for breast cancer but can’t afford to pay to get it right away. The situation gets more complicated when a connection emerges between the client and the daughter Inés has not seen since her imprisonment.

Already, then, we are in what seems like a familiar mix for Piñeiro: women whose troubles and also whose transgressions are partly the result of individual characters and circumstances and partly symptoms of a world in which women are constrained, ideologically as well as socially and economically. What are the limits of justification for striking back against patriarchy, or against the men who embody, however unthinkingly, its privileges and advantages? What counts as a crime in a context that is itself systemically unjust? What do women owe each other, in the name of friendship, or motherhood, or solidarity?

This is promising stuff! But. By the end of the novel, its various strands, though cleverly plotted, did not cohere in a very satisfying way, I thought—but that isn’t what made Time of the Flies a struggle to read. Piñeiro is a good enough storyteller that the parts of the novel taking us through Inés’s decision and its consequences would have kept me engaged, and in fact those parts of the novel did. The challenge is that interspersed with Inés’s story there are long discursive sections made up of this kind of debate, or commentary, or polemic, or analysis: Time of the Flies by Claudia Piñeiro | Goodreads

Let’s set the insects and fumigations aside for a moment and get to the bigger issue: one woman killing another woman. Are you talking about Bonar or Inés? Bonar wants to do it, Inés already did it. And is the woman being killed just because she’s a woman? No. Yes. Is she the husband’s lover ‘just because she’s a woman’? In a way. Really? Don’t be silly. What are you saying? That it’s not femicide. I don’t agree. Yes, the killer has to be a man. Can’t a woman kill another woman just because she’s a woman? It’s not that I want to pick on men. I just think that if we noticed that women are, on the whole, radically less violent, we might be able to theorise where violence comes from and what we can do about it a lot more productively.* There are violent women. That’s the exception, she said, ‘on the whole‘, didn’t you hear? Inés isn’t violent. But she committed a violent crime: she killed Charo. That’s different. Charo’s death wasn’t femicide. Yes it was. Let’s not get bogged down in a theoretical legal debate when we’re not even the jury. What are we? We’re the chorus. We’re an assembly.

*Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things To Me, Haymarket Boks, 2014, p. 24.

Another sample, from near the end of the novel, after the revelation that a key instigation for the client’s murderous intentions is actually her daughter’s transitioning to become a son:

Should we have a go at the issue or just stick to Inés and her poison? What issue? The issue of Timo-Tamara, Tamara-Timo. We address every issue. Not necessarily. But why wouldn’t we address this issue? Because it’s one of the most polarising issues in twenty-first century feminism. We should proceed with caution. We are not cowards. Let’s be careful. I’ll sit this one out. If it’s controversial, all the more reason to debate it. Is it controversial in Latin America, though? Less so, we understand marginality. It has nothing to do with where you are in the world. It would seem that it does at least somewhat. Feminism has to be committed to gender freedom, to radical equality, and to alliances with other minoritarian positions, sexual dissidents. Transphobic feminism is no feminism, that cannot happen.* Are there really people who want to leave trans people out of feminism? Incredible. I can’t believe it. Yes, that’s what they want to do. I think we should take some time to think about it a bit more.

*Judith Butler, from the ‘Pandemia, democracia y feminismo’, Lecture Series, Universidad de Chile.

EL TIEMPO DE LAS MOSCAS / THE TIME OF THE FLIES. CLAUDIA PIÑEIRO. Libro en papel. 9786073825030Clearly Piñeiro is doing something experimental here, creating a genre hybrid in a way that is actually reminiscent of Woolf’s The Pargiters, which I’ve been thinking about for some time because I’m fascinated by Woolf’s attempt to combine fiction and non-fiction, story and commentary. Woolf considered it an unsuccessful attempt and gave it up, turning her “novel-essay” into a novel (The Years) and an essay (Three Guineas). Maybe, I found myself thinking as I made my way to the end of Time of the Flies, Piñeiro should have done the same: if she didn’t trust her story to raise these questions for us, to stimulate those debates, she could have written a companion essay, or a different work altogether, leaving us the crime novel we expected when we picked the book up. It’s awkward, distracting, sometimes (to be honest) boring to have the plot, the suspense that Piñeiro is so good at building, constantly interrupted with these more abstract political sections, especially when they take such an uncertain form, voices themselves interrupting each other, offering competing arguments, incorporating references.

Until I copied out these samples, I hadn’t really thought about these as choric. I do find that a useful way to understand their role, and it also helps me appreciate that (I think) Piñeiro is trying to avoid didacticism by presenting topics precisely as debatable, though (as in the section on trans-inclusive feminism above) it is pretty clear that not every issue has, in her view, more than one legitimate side. Clarifying as the idea of a chorus is for the form of these sections, though, it doesn’t help me like them any better as part of my reading experience, which may e my own fault for resisting them as part of the book I thought I was reading. Hey, who spilled their feminist theory all over my mystery novel? But of course a lot of crime fiction has specifically feminist underpinnings, even before they got really explicit with the ‘feminist turn’ in the genre in the 1970s and 1980s. Piñeiro is just going much further, using her crime story as a provocation for feminist analysis.

The Body Lies: A novel eBook : Baker, Jo: Amazon.ca: Kindle StoreThat might be a good explanation for the hybrid nature of Time of the Flies, but it doesn’t necessarily make the book a success. I’d probably have to read it again (and again) to make up my mind about that, which I might do, given that I offer a course called “Women and Detective Fiction.” Last time around I almost assigned Elena Knows for it. Another title I’ve considered for the book list is Jo Baker’s The Body Lies, which is quite unlike Time of the Flies except that it too is a crime novel that turns out to be about crime novels, and especially about the roles and depiction of women in them, the voyeurism of violence against women, the prurient fixation on their wounded or dead bodies, the genre variations that both do and don’t reconfigure women’s relationship to the stories we tell about crime and violence. I thought Baker’s novel was excellent. I certainly didn’t have any trouble finishing it, in contrast to the concerted effort I made to get to the end of Time of the Flies. I really did want to know what happened! But I felt like I had to wade through a lot of other stuff to get there. If I do reread it, maybe that stuff will turn out to be the real substance of the book.

October Overview

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

October was a fitful reading month. I blame . . . everything? including my own bad habits, which currently include far too much election doom-scrolling on social media. I began the month by finishing up The Bee Sting, which I already mentioned in my September reading round-up. I really enjoyed it until, perhaps paradoxically, nearly the end. The reason this might seem odd is that the novel is a really slow burn, building up to the cataclysm of the conclusion, so it seemed as if I should have been more and more engrossed as the suspense built. But honestly, there was just so much going on that I got a bit worn out, especially as it eventually started to seem as if Murray was just deliberately and heavy-handedly deferring revelations about what exactly was going to happen. Suspense easily becomes cheap if it’s just about exploiting our dread while ramping up the stakes. I was relieved when the book was over, although it is a pretty shocking ending.

The only other book that really stood out to me of the seven I read in October (not counting Adam Bede for class) was Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, and I gave that its own post, which seems at the moment to be how this works: I can only muster the energy and enthusiasm for a one book post if the book really lights me up!

Treasure Island!!! - Sara LevineThat said, I did quite enjoy Sara Levine’s Treasure Island!!!, which I picked up quite randomly at the library, mostly because it’s a Europa Edition but also because I vaguely recalled hearing good things about it online. It turned out to be a sharp and very funny send-up of the “great literature transformed my life” genre. Its narrator, whose life is in something of a shambles, reads Treasure Island and decides it offers her a template for turning things around. She adopts the novel’s “Core Values”—BOLDNESS, RESOLUTION, INDEPENDENCE, HORN-BLOWING—and applies them to her job (which, improbably and hilariously, is at a “pet hotel,” where clients sign out cats, dogs, rabbits, even goldfish), her boyfriend, and her family, with hilarious if also sometimes weirdly poignant results. I have such a love-hate relationship with books that purport to turn literature into self-help manuals that I relished the premise, but Levine uses it as a launching point for something much zanier than I could possibly have expected or can possibly summarize.

I read another Abby Jimenez novel, Part of My World, and have already forgotten what it was specifically about. I read another Katherine Center novel, The Bodyguard, and did not like it nearly as much as Hello Stranger. I’m still on the waiting list for her latest, The Rom-Commers: it looks promising but clearly for me she’s a hit-or-miss author.

The Dry by Jane HarperI finally read Jane Harper’s The Dry—I say ‘finally’ because I regularly shop around for new mystery writers, partly for my own interest but also because I like to refresh the reading list for my mystery & detective fiction course, and Harper is someone that keeps coming up as a likely suspect. I thought The Dry was a good crime novel, but I can’t see assigning it. I thought the drought might be more of a theme, rather than primarily an aspect of setting, and a crime novel that turns in some way on the climate crisis would be a welcome addition to the syllabus, but The Dry did not seem to me to be built around that kind of political message. (If you know of a crime novel with a plot that intersects with ideas about ‘climate justice’ in an effective way, please let me know!)

Finally, I began but so far have not finished Claudia Piñeiro’s Time of the Flies. This is the first of Piñeiro’s novels that I have found a slog. I’m not sure why it isn’t working for me: it has a good and very political murder plot brewing—its protagonist, recently released after serving time for murdering her husband’s mistress, is hired by another woman to provide poison that will, presumably, be used to kill someone else. As this storyline is unfolding we got long sections of overt commentary, including citations to many famous feminist writers. This interferes with the momentum, but that’s clearly deliberate, and the combination could and should still be interesting, and yet somehow I’m just not getting through it. I am determined to persist: the root problem is pretty clearly a mismatch between my expectations, both for crime fiction and for Piñeiro, and what she has chosen to do in this case, and she’s smart enough that I believe it’s probably done well. At the very least I would like to know how the plot develops and concludes, but it seems like cheating to skip the talky bits, so I won’t. Probably.

The Lady of the Camellias (Penguin Classics) eBook : fils, Alexandre Dumas, Kavanagh, Julie, Liesl Schillinger: Amazon.ca: BooksNovember is off to an OK start: I just finished The Lady of the Camellias, by Dumas fils, which I read for my book club. It is our follow-up to Colette’s Gigi, which was our follow-up to Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, which was our follow-up to Diane Johnson’s Le Divorce. In other words, we have been on a French-themed kick! I think we are probably ready to go in another direction: I wonder what thread we will follow from Dumas’s tragic tale of passion and self-sacrifice. I have always known that La Dame aux Camelias was the original for Verdi’s La Traviata but I was surprised how closely the opera follows the plot, so closely that at every key scene in the novel I could match it exactly to the music. (It is the opera I know best, as it has been my favorite quite literally since I was 5 years old and got an LP of the highlights for my birthday.) What I enjoyed most about The Lady of the Camellias is that it entirely lived up to all the snarky comments about French novels in English novels of the period; in fact, I am reading Lady Audley’s Secret with my class at the moment and in his moments of idle self-indulgence Robert Audley himself is reading Dumas fils.

The Bridge: Dorothy Baker, Cassandra at the Wedding

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

To be like us isn’t easy, it requires constant attention to detail. I’ve thought it out; we’ve thought it out together. I’ve tried to explain to my doctor that it’s a question of working ceaselessly at being as different as possible because there must be a gap before it can be bridged. And the bridge is the real project.

Early in Cassandra at the Wedding Cassandra Edwards tells us how “attractive” the Golden Gate Bridge looks to her. That sounds innocuous enough until she clarifies that its irresistible pull is the “appeal of a bright exit sign,” a way out of a life in which she feels rootless, dissatisfied, unhappy, angry. All that “cancels it out” is her therapist—so maybe it isn’t surprising that when she travels away from her home in Berkeley and her doctor’s support she becomes increasingly unstable. It doesn’t help that she’s traveling to attend the wedding of her identical twin sister, Judith, an event that Cassandra finds intolerable to contemplate, an unacceptable tear in the fabric of their relationship and her own identity.

What makes Cassandra at the Wedding so gripping and ultimately heartrending? Cassandra’s a pretty privileged person—a running thread in the novel is the fate of the Bösendorfer piano she and Judith co-own, and the family home where she and Judith converge for this fateful event is an elegant house with a pool and all modern conveniences—and her clear intention to derail Judith’s wedding seems petty and selfish, even mean. Her passive-aggressive refusal to get Judith’s fiancé’s name right is just one symptom of how this plays out; getting so drunk and upset that even Judith is reluctant to firmly and clearly tell her that she will not in fact call off the wedding shows us Cassandra knows only too well how to deploy her own vulnerability to get exactly what she wants.

Cassandra, in other words, is an almost entirely unsympathetic protagonist and her manipulative mission is one we can hardly sympathize with, especially when the novel breaks from her first-person narration to Judith’s for an interval, a tactic which (among other things) makes quite sure we know that Judith’s love for John Finch is sincere, as is his for hers, and that Cassandra’s point of view is definitely not to be trusted. Unlikable characters are often the most interesting ones (I’m reading Adam Bede with my 19th-century fiction class at the moment, so the potential of virtuous ones to be wooden or static is much on my mind!), but the risk I felt Baker was taking is that Cassandra’s nastiness in combination with the basic set-up of “privileged people struggling with personal issues” could make the novel itself seem trivial.

And it was sometimes tempting to say to Cassandra “oh, just get over yourself!” What kept me going was Cassandra’s voice, which conveys so well the emotional mess she is in, as an aspiring writer inhibited from pursuing a writing career out of fear of comparisons to her mother, “author of two novels, and three plays, and quite a few screen plays, all quite well known,” dead from cancer but still a powerful presence in Cassandra’s life. Cassandra is, instead, pursuing a PhD “about writers, very current ones, women mostly and young,” work she only intermittently finds engrossing: it is, she thinks, a “gap-stopping degree.”

Her depression (if that’s what it is—I always advice against armchair diagnoses of fictional characters, but it read like Borderline Personality Disorder to me) is also very much related to what we could consider a form of separation anxiety about the coming breach in her bond with her twin. Cassandra and Judith are already living apart, and now Judith is taking the even more decisive step of establishing not just a separate life but a new identity, one no longer defined primarily by being Cassandra’s twin sister but by being Dr. John Finch’s wife. Cassandra cannot bear the thought of being herself without Judith; she doesn’t even know who that person—that half a person, as she insists—would be or what she would be worth. Not much, seems to be Cassandra’s conclusion: underneath her desperation about Judith’s marriage is a poignant current of both self-doubt and self-hatred, and that is where the power of the novel lies, in the pain Cassandra is constantly expressing but not explicitly admitting. A sample, as Judith sets Cassandra straight about the “plan” to intercept John at the airport and tell him the wedding is off:

‘I know I never said I’d let you go get him,’ she said now. ‘You thought it up; and after all the trouble about the dress, I didn’t think it was a very good time to get you all stirred up again. It was almost morning.’

‘Stirred up,’ I said, ‘girl you do talk like granny.’

‘What do you want me to say—disturbed?’ she said.

I felt a knife go in and twist around. For a moment everything stopped. Then I turned over again and lay flat and heard the pounding behind my ears, and felt the whirling in my head and the bitterness welling up out of m own personal well of bitterness, and I let it well. I think I may even have felt a certain relief, because nothing worse could happen now. I’d had the mortal blow, I’d received the Judas kiss with that word disturbed. . . . I lay there and listened to the roar, and once in a while the sounds would come down to me from up there where the assassins were hobnobbing with the traitors and hatching their plots, up there in the seersucker shirt. Who cares, it’s over. But I kept hearing my name in all its forms: ‘Cass, listen to me,’ and ‘Look, Cassie,’ and ‘Hey, Cassandra Edwards, don’t make a big thing of this. Let’s just not get into any more of these, shall we? Let’s not. Can’t we work up a little togetherness around here, and just accept the fact that I’m going to marry a man named Jack Finch, and his name isn’t Walter Thorson, and I’m sure you’ll like him very much, and that he’ll adore you. That’s how it ought to be, and that’s why we came out here to get married—so that he’d know my family and they’d know him. Don’t you see?’

But how can you see if you’re dead, and I was good and dead.

The hyperbole, the melodrama, the outrage, all juxtaposed against Judith’s perfectly reasonable attempts to talk her sister around: it’s hard, actually, to know who to feel more sorry for, because while Judith has every right to live her own life, Cassandra’s suffering, however unreasonable, is so palpable. And suffering is rarely reasonable anyway: if it were, people could be talked out of it. The question in this case is how far Cassandra should be allowed to set the terms for Judith, or what Judith should be willing to sacrifice to save her sister, if indeed that’s what Cassandra needs from her.

Cassandra does eventually take a drastic step to set her sister free. “We should have been one person all along,” she thinks, “not two, and this way the other one could live it out, possibly with some part of my spirit alive in her to the end of her days to make up for the part of her I might take with me today.” This is not a real or good solution, though: even Cassandra wonders what her decision might do to Judith. If the novel had allowed her to end her attempts at sabotage in this way, it would also have preempted the quest she is on from the first moment she tells us she is drawn to the bridge, the journey to confront and then accept herself, alone, one person. I didn’t think the flying visit from her therapist was a very plausible or convincing part of her extrication, but that she does ultimately attend Judith’s wedding seemed necessary to that process, and the novel’s ending successfully, I thought, walked the fine line between pat and thus unsatisfying optimism and a more provisional commitment to a way of being that is still uncertain but, at least in the moment, bearable:

I was wearing loafers and socks and on the way back I was walking faster and one of my socks kept crawling down behind my heel. I stopped and pulled it up two or three times and finally I slipped the shoe off and dropped the sock over the side and stood where I was and watched it go. Or tried to. It took immense concentration to stay with it. When I thought I’d lost it for good, the wind caught it far down and I saw it flash in the sunlight, once, and again, and maybe even a third time. But after that I don’t know. It was out of sight a long time before it could have hit the water.

You just have to keep going, Cassandra concludes, contemplating again her vocation as a writer: “Don’t lean. Stand up. Find a way.” If we are meant to read Cassandra at the Wedding as the result, it is more than a record of destructive self-absorption: it is a confession, an apology, perhaps even a redemption.

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September Reading: Mostly Light

Rohan Maitzen13 Comments

I read a lot less in September than I did in August—which makes sense, of course, given the return to the many immediate demands of the teaching term. That said, it seems fair to say that in addition to the books I’ll mention here, I also read all of Bleak House for class and most of Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting (though I didn’t actually finish it until October).

Because I was busy and distracted, most of my personal reading was on the lighter side. I read another of Katherine Center’s novels, Hello Stranger: I liked this one quite a bit, even if the Big Surprise was painfully obvious all along (if you’ve read it, you know what I mean). I don’t think that’s a flaw in the novel, really; it creates a cute bit of suspense and dramatic irony as we wait for the penny to drop for our heroine.

I also read two novels by Abby Jimenez: The Friend Zone and The Happy Ever After Playlist. I enjoyed both of these as well, maybe The Friend Zone a bit more, though (and this is definitely just a matter of personal preference) I wish Jimenez would keep her hero and heroine apart longer. The trend in contemporary romances seems be to heat things up really quickly and then draw us along to the HEA not through sexual tension and the push-pull of figuring out if this is the right person but through some kind of crisis that breaks the central pair up (often in a very emotionally fraught way) and eventually gets resolved. I am generalizing from a pretty small sample, as I don’t read tons of romance (contemporary or other) these days. But the pacing of a lot of the ones I do read just feels a bit off to me, because the hot sex happens too soon and then there has to be some other kind of tension to provide the momentum. Imagine Heyer’s Devil’s Cub if Mary and Vidal actually got together a single moment sooner than they actually do in the novel! The delight is knowing they will get there eventually but not until everything else has been properly sorted. Does anyone else feel this way with current romances, or is my reaction idiosyncratic, or (another reasonable possibility) am I just reading the wrong ones (not in general, just for me)? Finally, another lighter read, also basically a romance but packaged a bit more as comic fiction, was Eleanor Lipmann’s Ms Demeanor. This looked fun but in the end I didn’t really find it so: it was OK, but did not particularly interest or entertain me.

The other three novels I finished in September were more “literary” or serious, and none of them really excited me either. Jane Smiley’s A Dangerous Business looked like exactly my kind of thing, and I have quite enjoyed some of her other novels (especially Private Life), but I have already forgotten almost everything about it except its premise. It’s a Western, with a protagonist who works in a brothel and begins trying to detect some mysterious disappearances inspired by her reading of Poe—you can see why I expected to enjoy it more than I did! In contrast, I picked up Anne Michaels’s Held in spite of suspecting it was not for me, because a lot of smart readers have raved about it (including Sam Sacks, one of my most-trusted critics!) and I thought it was worth a try. I suppose it was, but it has that “unfinished” approach to fiction that usually leaves me wishing the writer would actually do their job and write the book, not scatter fragments artfully around gaps. Kent Haruf’s Where You Once Belonged held my attention raptly until the very last page—and then I felt let down by its just ending and not really concluding. It’s not nearly as tender a novel as the ones of his I have liked the best (Plainsong and especially Our Souls At Night); I think if it had been the first of his I read, I would probably not have sought out more.

The Bee Sting was by far my favorite September reading (besides Bleak House of course), but by the time I finally finished it a few days ago, I was honestly a bit tired of it and just really wanted to get to whatever catastrophe was clearly going to happen at the end. (It’s clear from the outset and also from the jacket blurb that it will end in catastrophe, so the suspense is from wondering exactly what that will look like and how bad it will actually be—which is, it turns out, pretty bad.)

While I was reading The Bee Sting and mostly enjoying it, I was also thinking about Murray’s earlier hit novel Skippy Dies, which sticks in my memory less because of the novel itself and more because I so distinctly remember ordering it online late one night in 2010 because I was hearing so much about it and feeling so eager to be part of the wider book conversations I was just starting to participate in. At that time I didn’t buy a lot of books, as (given our overall financial situation and immediate priorities) they still seemed like relatively expensive luxuries, especially with good libraries close at hand. Of course I did always buy books, for myself and as gifts, but I was careful about it, not casual, and clicking a few buttons on my computer and having a book turn up in my mailbox a few days later was both a rarity and a novelty—and a sign that the balance of my world was shifting a bit in some new direction. As I recall, I ordered Skippy Dies from the Book Depository, which was still independent in those days, but I’m so old I can also remember when Amazon was a brand new and thrilling phenomenon—a giant online bookstore that seemed to have everything!—rather than an evil empire.

I realize this is not a particularly momentous memory, and I’m surprised how vivid it is. Clearly that small action felt significant at the time, though, and recalling it now adds to my current rather vertiginous sense of time passing and of the pieces of my life shifting around yet again.

This Week in My Classes: October Already?!

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

3032-Start-Here-cropI had such good intentions to post regularly again this term about my classes . . . and somehow the first month has gone by and I’m only just getting around to it. The thing is (and I know I’ve said this a few times recently) there was a lot going on in my life besides classes in September, much of it difficult and distracting in one way or another—which is not meant as an excuse but as an explanation. Eventually, someday, maybe, my life won’t have quite so many, or at least quite such large, or quite such fraught, moving pieces. Honestly, I am exhausted by the ongoing instability—about which (as I have also said before) more details later, perhaps—and the constant effort it requires to keep my mental balance.

Anyway! Yes, I’m back in class, and that has actually been a stabilizing influence overall: it turns out I do better when I am busier. I have two courses this term. One is a section of “Literature: How It Works,” one of our suite of first-year offerings that do double-duty as introductions to the study of literature and writing requirement classes. In the nearly 30 years I’ve been teaching at Dalhousie, I’ve offered an intro class pretty much every year, though multiple revisions of our curriculum over that same long period have changed their names, descriptions, formats, and especially sizes. I don’t think it’s just nostalgia that makes me look back wistfully on the version that was standard in my first years here: called “Introduction to Literature,” running all year, capped at 55 with one teaching assistant per section to keep us in line with the 30:1 ratio required by the writing requirement regulations. So many things about that arrangement were preferable to the current half-year version with 90 students . . . but even as demand has stayed robust for these classes, our available resources have shrunk, and so here we are. (Oh, but how much more I could do when I didn’t lose so much time to starting and stopping anew every term—and actually the change to half-year courses was brought about because the university acquired registration software that could not accommodate full-year courses and so we were forced to change our pedagogy to fit it. That still makes me angry!)

broadview short fictionThere are still things I like about teaching first-year classes, though, chief among them the element of surprise, for them as well as for me: because students mostly sign up for them to fulfill a requirement, and choose a section based on their timetable, not the reading list, they often have low expectations (or none at all) for my class in particular, meaning if something lights them up, it’s kind of a bonus for them; and for me, it’s a rare opportunity to have a room full of students from across a wide range of the university’s programs who bring a lot of different perspectives and voices to the class. I do my best to keep a positive and personal atmosphere—and some interactive aspects—even in a tiered lecture hall that makes it essential for me to use PowerPoint and wear a microphone; we have weekly smaller tutorials that also give us a chance to know each other better.

I continue to think a lot in my first-year teaching about the issues of products and processes that I have written about here before. This year I am also using specifications grading again, with its emphasis on practice and feedback rather than polish and judgment. I feel good about the basic structure of the course I have worked out over its recent iterations—but it seems possible I will get a break from teaching intro next year, and that would buy me time to give it a refresh, perhaps (who knows) the last one before I retire. This week is the last one of our initial unit on poetry (we will return to some more complex poems at the end of term). We’ve approached it in steps, focusing first on diction, then on point of view and voice, then on figurative language, then subject and theme—all, as I’ve tried to emphasize, artificially separated so that we can be clear about what they are and how to talk about them, but actually happening and mattering all at once. So this week’s lecture is “Poetry: The Whole Package” and the reading is “Dover Beach”—last year it was “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” but that seemed to be too much for most of them, and no wonder.  (Still, it was fun to teach “Prufrock,” which I’m not sure I’d done before.)

bleak-housseMy other class is 19thC Fiction, this time around the Dickens to Hardy version. (Speaking of full-year classes, once upon a time I got to teach a full year honours seminar in the 19th-century British novel and let me tell you we did some real reading in that class! Ah, those were the days.) (Is talking like this a sign that I should be thinking more seriously about retirement?) I went with “troublesome women” as my unifying theme this time: Bleak House, Adam Bede, Lady Audley’s Secret, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles. We have been making our way through Bleak House all month; Wednesday is our final session on it, and I am really looking forward to it. I hope the students are too! But I’m also already getting excited about moving on to Adam Bede, which I have not taught since 2017. It was wonderful to hear a number of students say that they were keen to read Bleak House because, often against their own expectations, they had really loved studying David Copperfield with me last year in the Austen to Dickens course. (You see, this is why we need breadth requirements in our programs: how can you be sure what you are interested in, or might even love, if you aren’t pushed to try a lot of different things? And of course even if you don’t love something you try, at least now you know more about it than whatever you assumed about it before.)

The_YearsIn many ways the first month of term is deceptively simple: things are heating up now, for us and for our students, as assignments begin to come due. After a fairly dreary summer, though, when the days often seemed to drag on and on, I appreciate how much faster the time passes when there’s a lot to do and I’m making myself useful (or so I hope) to other people. I also decided to put my name on the list for our departmental speaker series, to make sure the work I did over the summer didn’t go to waste, so I will wrap up this week by presenting my paper “‘Feeble Twaddle’: Failure, Form, and Purpose in Virginia Woolf’s The Years.” Wish me luck! It has been a long time since I did this exact thing; in fact, I believe the last presentation I made to my colleagues was about academic blogging, more than a decade ago. I have given conference papers and other public presentations since then: I haven’t just been talking to myself—and you—here, I promise! But I haven’t felt that I was doing work that fit very well into this series, which for related reasons I haven’t attended regularly for many years. I made a vow to engage more with my department and my colleagues this year, though, and so I’m going to the talks as well as giving my own. This is one result of my recent reflections on what I want this last stage of my professional life to be like: difficult as it still sometimes is for me to do this, I want to be present for it, if that makes any sense.

And that’s where things are at the moment, after the first month back in my classes. I probably shouldn’t make any promises about returning to the kind of regular updates I used to make to this series, but as always, I have found the exercise of writing this stuff up both fun and helpful—that hasn’t changed since I reflected on my first year of blogging my teaching. It’s a bit like exercise, I guess: if you can just get past the inertia, you feel better for doing it! We’ll see if that’s motivation enough.