This Week In My Classes: Orientation

Rohan Maitzen1 Comment

You-Are-HereThe new term is underway, as you might guess from the sudden dearth of new blog posts. After all this time I am much better at the start-up logistics; what gets harder is adjusting to the sudden dramatic increase in demands on my energy. I was exhausted after every class meeting this week! But as we get deeper into our course material, more energy flows back towards me, and then the process feels less draining — on a good day, it’s even exhilarating!

One thing I found myself thinking a lot about as my classes got underway is the importance but also the difficulty of bringing us all together intellectually as well as physically. I always feel that before we can delve into the details of our particular readings, we need to establish some common ground. Because both the canon and our curriculum have diversified so much in the last few decades, there’s very little that I can expect everyone to know or to have read. Even with our most “advanced” seminar classes, I can’t expect students to have studied any of the material before, or even any material from the same genre or period. (This is increasingly true of students in graduate seminars as well.) While the range of knowledge and perspectives everyone brings can have some great results for our discussions, it can also mean things get a bit random and scattered, or that it’s hard to make connections meaningful enough to draw everybody in. So one thing I try to do at the beginning is sketch out some of the general territory in which our particular class is situated. This usually means providing historical and/or literary historical contexts, but it can also mean setting up some conceptual frameworks.

crimedaleyFor Mystery & Detective Fiction, for instance, I start with some comments about the (vexed, contested, elusive, perhaps nonexistent) difference between “literary fiction” and “genre fiction,” and some thoughts about how our ideas and expectations about these kinds of fiction affect our reading strategies. I also give an overview of the development of mystery fiction as a genre, from Newgate and gothic fiction through sensation fiction and Sherlock Holmes and on to the present day, with attention to the emergence of a wide range of subgenres; and I talk a bit about the history of policing, from thief-takers to Scotland Yard. For courses on Victorian fiction, I often lead off with some discussion about the contemporary connotations of “Victorian,” then talk about the historical and literary-historical reasons for those stereotypes; then I go over some generalizations about the “rise of the novel,” with some attention to social contexts and some to formal or thematic trends.

I’m always very aware when I put these introductory lessons together that they are, inevitably, in some ways artificial and inadequate. I usually say so eventually, too, noting that every generalization I offer, every master-narrative I string together, could itself be the starting point for a complex and nuanced exploration of details. But I still believe that we need some sense of a (not the) big picture, just to get oriented. I also think good reading does rely to some extent on having the relevant knowledge: to give another example from my own recent teaching, I don’t think it’s possible to read A Room of One’s Own really well if you don’t know anything about the history of women’s education and where to place A Room of One’s Own in that story. It’s not that you wouldn’t get anything out of your reading without knowing these things, but aspects of your understanding would necessarily be superficial. So that’s a context I make sure we address in class.woolf

I doubt there was ever a time when every student arrived in any given class with all the “right” equipment: setting things up, or filling them in, has always been one of a teacher’s jobs, along with drawing semi-arbitrary lines around what’s relevant and what’s not. It’s a good thing that we’ve gotten more self-conscious about how and why we do this and why it is also a way of making things up, but I expect most of us still do some version of it, laying the groundwork we want everyone to have for our purposes. In my department, we used to do more of this structurally, through course requirements and prerequisites. This has become less and less possible, however, both because of the way our mandate has grown (despite what some conservative bobble-heads might think, the expansion of literary studies has been additive — it’s not that we teach comic books instead of Shakespeare or vampire movies instead of Beowulf but that, resources permitting, we do it all!) and because students seem to like requirements less and less. (I think the two developments are related, actually: the more it’s clear they could reasonably study, the less reasonable it seems for us to require them to study anything in particular.)

nortonIf our curriculum currently has an organizing principle or direction, it’s more skills-oriented rather than content-oriented: first-year classes emphasize reading strategies and writing skills, then for majors and Honors students we have kinds of required classes (literature surveys and theory / methods) that they choose among. There are some breadth requirements, for historical range, but because they can take classes in pretty much any order they want, none of this provides any predictability or consistency. And so I try to build it in myself.

I’m curious what other people’s experiences have been with this sort of problem — or whether it even seems to you like a problem! Maybe other teachers just show up and jump right in, or maybe students would rather learn as they go, or make do with what they already know, and never mind the Grand Unifying Theory of Everything, even as a provisional framework. If you’re a professor, how does your department deal with the question of “coverage,” or of sequencing, or have you done more or less what we’ve done, that is, let the diversity of material become a smorgasbord of options for students? Viewed that way, I think our offerings are pretty tempting — they are both nutritious and delicious! And mostly I am glad about that, about their variety and inclusiveness and even idiosyncrasy, because that’s the reality of our field. We contain multitudes! For the first week or so of every term, though, I struggle with the pedagogical implications of what we have become.

“Not Simple Enough”: Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady

Rohan Maitzen3 Comments

nortonportrait

“You seem to have so many scruples, so many reasons, so many ties. When I discovered, ten years ago, that my husband’s dearest wish was to make me miserable — of late he has simply let me alone — ah, it was a wonderful simplification! My poor Isabel, you’re not simple enough.”

I had barely finished reading The Portrait of a Lady when I learned that I had read the wrong book — the wrong version of this book, that is. Immediately following the novel’s last page in my Norton Critical Edition is a “Textual Appendix” itemizing all of James’s revisions between the first edition (1880-81) and the 1908 edition used as the main text for the Norton edition. “Even though more recent critics have acknowledged the revisions to be an improvement,” says my editor, “and numerous editors have tacitly concurred by reprinting the later version, dissenting voices have been raised.” The extensive catalog of textual variants is, in turn, followed by three critical commentaries on the issue of James’s revisions. Here are some excerpts from Nina Baym’s “Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady,” which is the essay that made me wish I’d read the original 1881 version of Portrait instead of the “improved” New York edition:

The revised version is stylistically and thematically closer to his later interests than the early one had been. Its writing is more complex, mannered, and metaphorical. It is thematically less timely and realistic, for its main concern is the private consciousness. In the 19o8 version, Isabel Archer’s inner life is the center of the character and of the novel’s reality. In the early version the inner life is only one aspect of character, which is defined by behavior in a social context. . . .

The 1881 novel was one of an increasing number of works about “the woman question.” The heroine, an appealing young American, wants to live an independent and meaningful life; but she is thwarted. Unlike many works of the period on this theme, The Portrait did not depict Isabel’s desire as unnatural and misguidedly unfeminine, nor did it employ the standard formula of saving her from this delusion by love and marriage. On the contrary, the novel sympathized with her aim to the point of calling both love and marriage into question. . . . The changes of 1908, transforming the story into a drama of consciousness, overlaid and in places obliterated the coherence of the 1881 versions.

Now, I admit I did not patiently follow all of Baym’s specific arguments about particular revisions, or work through the 80 (yes, 80) pages of them for myself — I’m trusting Baym’s overall claim, which suggests (though she doesn’t quite put it this way) that James’s revisions transformed The Portrait of a Lady from a Victorian novel to a modern(ist) one. It’s not that I actively disliked the novel I read, but the 1881 novel she describes is one that I would be eager to put in conversation with other novels I know about “the woman question,” most of which are not quite as formulaic as she suggests — Gissing’s The Odd Women, for instance (1893) certainly calls both love and marriage into question, and even much earlier novels from Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall through Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda offer little hope that marriage is a simple solution to women’s thwarted desires for meaningful lives.

oxfordportraitReading the 1908 Portrait, though, I had found myself wondering where we were supposed to be looking for the causes of Isabel’s catastrophe — besides, of course, to Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle. I think we are implicitly directed to Isabel’s social context by her overpowering sense of what is expected, of what convention demands. But given the greater freedom experienced — socially and emotionally — by so many of those around her, I think we have to conclude that it’s her own sense of duty, her own insistence on what she believes to be honor, that ultimately condemns her. There is something Eliot-like in this, to be sure: what is Dorothea’s obligation to Casaubon, after all, if not an expression of her strong sense of duty and her individual principles, which make betrayal of trust an abomination to her? But James’s attention to the external conditions of Isabel’s life is much less detailed and explicit, and he tells us next to nothing about its historical antecedents: Isabel’s moral dilemma seems much more abstract than any moral crisis Eliot confronts us with. Further, it is difficult  (or was for me, anyway) to discern any principle which James thinks ought to guide Isabel: that inhibition about moving from is to ought (as I think Martha Nussbaum would agree) is characteristic of James, and for some that is part of his appeal, but for me it feels like a loss — or, more accurately, like an artful reticence, as all the emotional weight of the novel’s final chapters surely presses us to feel Isabel’s return to Osmond as a fatal error. Her horror at openly breaking a vow she has made is not supported by anything else in the novel — another way in which the novel’s moral operations differ from Eliot’s, as the true crises in her work usually turn on competing goods, not unmoored error.

In any case, this version of Portrait seemed to me very much a psychological rather than a social novel, a “drama of consciousness,” as Baym says, and while I was often impressed, even overwhelmed, at the subtlety of James’s analysis of motive and perspective, I also found it frequently oppressive: I missed the balance Eliot gives us between the individual and the community, the particular and the general, the instance and the abstraction. Though I hesitate to align myself with the Countess, when I came to her wry comment to Isabel that she wasn’t “simple enough,” I thought: that’s it! that’s the problem with the whole book! It is so subtle — and is life (life as lived, that is, rather than life imagined) anything like that? If we thought that scrupulously about every little thing — if we strove to be, as James  urges in “The Art of Fiction,” “one of the people on whom nothing is lost” — not a nuance, not even a shade of a nuance — we’d never be able to get out of bed in the morning. As I argued in much more painstaking detail in my essay on “Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Life of Middlemarch,” “the reason James’s psychological realism should not satisfy us in our efforts to decide how we should live is that ultimately morality lies in action.” To which, of course, a reasonable response is not only that we are under no obligation to read in the service of morality but that James has no obligation to help us be moral…but the more general point remains: that at many points while reading Portrait I wished for a “wonderful simplification.”

And yet perhaps the earlier version would have given me hardly more satisfaction. Here’s Horace Scudder writing in The Atlantic Monthly in 1882 (and thus, obviously, about the 1881 text):

penguinportraitWhat renders [James’s method] distinct from, say, Thackeray’s method, with which it has been compared, or from George Eliot’s, is the limitation of the favorite generalizations and analyses. If the reader will attend, he will see that these take place quite exclusively within the boundaries of the story and characters. That is to say, when the people in the book stop acting or speaking, it is to give the novelist an opportunity, not to indulge in general reflections, having applications to all sorts and conditions of men, of whom his dramatis personae are but a part, — he has no desire to share humanity with them, — but to make acute reflections upon these particular people, and to explain more thoroughly than their words and acts can the motives which lie behind. . . .

[His work] is consistent, but the consistency is with itself. . . . This self-consistency is a separate thing from any consistency with the world of reality. . . . In Andersen’s quaint story of the Emperor’s New Clothes, a little child discovers the unreality of the gossamer dress, and his voice breaks in upon the illusion from the outer world. Something of the same separation from the story, of the same unconscious naturalness of feeling, prompts the criticism that, though these people walk, and sit, and talk, and behave, they are yet in an illusionary world of their own.

I’m sure nice Mr. Scudder doesn’t mean that when you break the illusion, James’s work is exposed as naked pretension rather than art! Indeed, he’s quite admiring about what it’s like to be inside James’s world. I admire it too: the scene in which the Countess tells Isabel the truth is thrilling, for instance, both because of its psychological acuity and because we’ve waited so long for the dramatic irony to reach its climax, for the gap between our knowledge (and suspicions) and Isabel’s to close. The farewell with Ralph, too, has all the emotional intensity of Dorothea’s climactic visit to Rosamond at the end of Middlemarch, though its revelations and effects could hardly be more different. It may be that we feel moments like this — which are the closest the novel comes to dramatic action — particularly deeply because we have spent so long dissecting and analyzing: at last, there is blood.

In the end (though as always it’s a conclusion that reveals as much about me as about either James or his novel) I sympathize most with Margaret Oliphant’s verdict on The Portrait of a Lady:

It is far too long, infinitely ponderous, and pulled out of all proportion by the elaboration of every detail; but there is scarcely a page in it that is not worked out with the utmost skill and refinement, or which the reader will pass over without leaving something to regret — that is, if he has leisure for the kind of reading which is delightful for its own sake in complete independence of its subject. . . . But nothing so elaborate ever could be real, and the dazzle sometimes fatigues, though the effect is one which cannot be contemplated without admiration.

As she too was contemplating the 1881 version, that probably sets me straight about whether I did in fact read the wrong version: it would not have made a difference, or at any rate not much difference, if I hadn’t read the “more complex, mannered, and metaphorical” 1908 version. The difference is a matter of degree, not of kind. Where does that leave me? Stumped, as usual, I think, by James’s own point (again, in “The Art of Fiction”) that “there are all sorts of tastes,” and mine aren’t altogether Jamesian.

Happy New Year! and New Books! and New OLM!

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

Books2016

2016 is getting off to a good start in my corner of the world. For one thing, I have a lovely array of new books, thanks to the kind people who basically ran my entire Chapters wish list. Isn’t that an enticing stack? My problem now is that I can’t decide where to start: rereading Mr. Impossible, because I know how fun that will be? rereading Little Women, because I finally have my own elegant edition? embarking on Jane Smiley’s ‘100 Years’ trilogy? plunging into Fates and Furies? wandering New York with Vivian Gornick? I suppose I could postpone the decision by settling down to finish The Portrait of a Lady — not least because I don’t want to read The House of Mirth until I’ve done that.

It’s not just the beginning of a new year, of course: it’s also the beginning of the month, and that means, as always, that a new issue of Open Letters Monthly has just gone live. I’m in it a couple of times: in brief in our feature of most-anticipated books of 2016,and at greater length in an essay about different editions of Middlemarch that is also a review of the elegant new Penguin Classics Deluxe edition. I’m always wary of writing autobiographically, but I couldn’t think how else to approach this review, and I enjoyed reflecting on the versions of the novel I’ve accumulated over the years as well as on how the editions we read of a book affect the relationship we develop with it.

oxfordlawrenceAs usual, the issue includes a wide range of other interesting pieces. One of my favorites this time is Dorian’s essay on D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love. My own experience with Lawrence so far is limited and ambivalent — but it has certainly made me curious, and Dorian writes so eloquently about both the language and the ideas of Women in Love that I’m feeling emboldened to read more Lawrence before too long. My co-editor Robert Minto offers a fascinating essay on Nietzsche’s Anti-Education, recently reissued by NYRB Classics, finding in it strains that might serve as cautionary to today’s “anxious citizens of academia”; Steve Donoghue reviews (as only he can) a new book on Sigismondo Malatesta, the only man ever to be reverse-canonized; Barrett Hathcock explores the hall-of-mirrors sensation of finding himself fictionalized by a student in his own creative writing class; and that’s just the top half of the Table of Contents. I hope you’ll check it out, and if you like anything about what we produce every month at Open Letters, I also hope you’ll consider supporting our efforts — we are entirely sincere when we say that a comment or a link is as welcome as a donation.

Very soon, I will also be launched on the new term. My classes this time are familiar ones in my teaching rotation: Mystery and Detective Fiction and 19th-Century British Fiction (Austen to Dickens edition). As usual, I’m feeling equal parts anticipation and dread at the prospect of starting it all up again. (I have already had one very typical anxiety dream in which I was unable to print notes or handouts because my files had disappeared, and the computer kept auto-updating as I desperately tried to find them, and the start time for class came and went … you’d think after all these years I would not need my subconscious warning me to prepare for class, but this did prompt me to go to campus early and print all my notes and handouts for Monday, so that’s good, I guess!) I’m also feeling very aware that this time last year my sabbatical term was just beginning: inevitably, I guess, that is provoking some reflection on how I used that time and what has become of the projects I worked on since it ended — more about that eventually, along with more of my regular posts on how things go in my classes.

But I still have one more full day, and since I did print my materials early (and have also built my Blackboard sites and labelled my folders and made my Powerpoint slides for opening day), I will spend it reading — if I can just settle on which book. Happy New Year!

Novel Readings 2015

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

It’s time again to look back over my year in books and blogging. It was a good reading year overall, I think, with a number of real stand-outs and hardly any duds. Interestingly, it doesn’t look as if my sabbatical led to a great deal more reading than usual — for which I blame our mind-numbing, soul-destroying winter and our kitchen renovation, which (in their different ways) ate up a lot of whatever energy I had left after putting in my time on my research and writing projects. But reading “about as much as usual” isn’t too shabby, especially when so much of it is so good.

hildBook of the Year

I already identified Nicola Griffith’s Hild as my best reading experience of 2015 in our “Year in Reading” feature at Open Letters Monthly; I wrote about it at more length here. What lingers with me the most about this extraordinary novel is not its historical world-building (though given that I compared Griffith’s achievement in this respect to Dorothy Dunnett’s, you know how impressed I was!) but Hild herself: her characterization struck me as profoundly feminist, though nothing about her or her novel could ever be pointed to as didactic or even overtly political.

Other recent fiction I’m especially glad to have read

I read two other excellent novels featuring memorably complex, questing female protagonists — novels that were otherwise very different in both voice and context: Rabih Alameddine’s An Unnecessary Woman, and Miral al-Tahawy’s Brooklyn Heights. Much as I liked An Unnecessary Woman, it’s the quieter, but also more quietly moving, Brooklyn Heights that I find I still think about: it is particularly evocative about the wintry bleakness of loneliness, and about the ways exploring physical space can also be a way of exploring and maybe even expressing who we are.

doerrLike many other readers (though certainly not all), I loved Anthony Doerr’s elegant, fairy-tale-like World War II novel All the Light We Cannot See. And, a bit to my own surprise, I really liked Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, another critical favorite. I found the melodramatic conclusion somewhat over-plotted, but among all the new books I read this year it’s the one I keep thinking about teaching: I think it might go over very well in an intro class, perhaps juxtaposed with The Road. Students would find it engaging, and it would give us plenty to think and talk about.

“Enjoy” isn’t quite the right word for the experience of reading Adam Johnson’s Fortune Smiles, but I thought The Orphan Master’s Son was so extraordinary that I was eager to try it, and I’m glad I did: the stories in the collection are strange and bleak and funny and full of surprises — all without being flashy or overtly experimental.

Not strictly speaking “recent” but out recently in new editions are the two novels I read by Barbara Comyns: The Vet’s Daughter, and Our Spoons Came From Woolworths. There’s something a bit off about both of them, but in a good way: I always enjoy puzzling over fiction that doesn’t fit any of my own preconceived notions, and I’m looking forward to reading her equally odd-looking Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead.

Critical darlings that disappointed

lostchildDonna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is definitely in this category: it left me thoroughly underwhelmed. I was moderately more whelmed with the final volume in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels — but I never caught “Ferrante Fever,” and frankly, by the time I’d finished with The Story of the Lost Child, I had had quite enough of the whole phenomenon, which I have long suspected is as much about what (a certain population of) readers and critics are looking for from women writers as it does with the books themselves. (All reading, of course, is a complex interplay of text and context, including the reader’s personal complexes and desires, but sometimes things seem to tip particularly sharply in one direction or the other.) I was unmoved by Andre Alexis’s Giller Prize winner Fifteen Dogs, and I abhorred The Girl on the Train, which I wrote about for OLM’s always- entertaining “bestsellers” feature.

Classics and old favorites I happily revisited

The Victorian novel I had the most fun rereading this year was Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, which has more artful restraint but also more breadth than North and South (which is the novel of hers I know and like the best). I also really enjoyed rereading George Eliot’s “Janet’s Repentance,” which contributed a lot to my thinking about her treatment of religion and religious characters.

Some of the most fun I had blogging all year was with my two posts on Busman’s Honeymoon, one laying out the reasons I have always loved it, the other laying out all the reasons to be wary of it. It’s so important, I think, to acknowledge that these two kinds of responses can co-exist, that we can learn to critique without having to discard. Head and heart, as Sayers might say, must work together. Sometimes, of course, our perception of a book’s flaws may become so acute that our love cannot survive (I think that has happened to me with Gone with the Wind) — but I think it would be worse if we allowed our love to blind us to a work’s problems, or to drive us to deny them.

Another old favorite I greatly enjoyed both rereading and writing about was Margaret Campbell Barnes’s My Lady of Cleves – this is not historical fiction the way Hilary Mantel achieves it (or Nicola Griffith or Dorothy Dunnett either) but personal drama lovingly furnished with tapestries and eel pies.

Novel kinds of reading

understanding-comicsI made my first self-conscious foray into graphic fiction this year, reading both Maus and Persepolis, and also Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics — which taught me a lot about how to read this kind of book better. I don’t feel I quite “got” it, but it felt like progress to see what “it” might be like if I did. And I started listening to more books, which I enjoyed when I could find the right match between book, narrator, and opportunity.

Mysteries

This year I tried (again) and failed (again) to fall in love with Louise Penny’s Inspector Gamache series. It makes me feel like such a bad Canadian that I can’t get past her stilted writing! But I’m going to stop trying, because I read enough series as it is, and I started at least three this year that I’d like to continue with: Maurizio de Giovanni’s Commissario Ricciardi series, Arnaldur Indridason’s outstanding Inspector Erlendur novels, and Steve Burrows’s birding mysteries.

Romances

juliejamesAlthough I didn’t usually blog about them, I read — or at least started — quite a lot of romance novels this year. (As I have mentioned before, I tend to feel less committed to finishing these if I don’t like them right away, partly because I get most of them from the library, but also because I don’t have high expectations that persistence will pay off, as romances tend to be more consistent than transformative — which is a good thing if you like what you’re getting, of course). Among them, only new one really stood out, and that was Julie James’s Suddenly One Summer. I have quite enjoyed most of James’s other novels, particularly Practice Makes Perfect (which would make an excellent Hollywood rom-com, if anyone’s interested in doing the screenplay): her characters are smart, her dialogue is snappy, and things get pretty sexy with her heroes and heroines (who are always, annoyingly, extraordinarily good-looking). I’ve heard her books described as “brittle,” though, and I can see why; also, some of them tend towards “romantic suspense,” and I don’t particularly love “woman in jeopardy” plots. I liked Suddenly One Summer a lot, though. It’s quieter than her other ones, and rather than turning on fast plotting and sparks flying, it is about two people patiently building trust and finding love. The heroine is a divorce lawyer who suffers from debilitating anxiety attacks; she is always at work splitting families up, but bringing a family together for once helps her find new courage herself. For me, this one’s a keeper!

Memorable non-fiction

mwordTwo works of non-fiction that I read this year resonated powerfully with me for personal reasons: Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal (which is the present we should all probably have given someone we love this Christmas, but also probably shouldn’t, because it’s not very comfortable reading) and Emily White’s Lonely. Somewhat less anxiety-inducing, often sad, sometimes funny, and always thought-provoking was Kerry Clare’s wonderful collection The ‘M’ Word, which explores many facets of motherhood, most of them quite unlike the more sentimental cliches our culture surrounds us with.

Unfinished business

I’m still working my way through The Portrait of a Lady, which is not a book I can concentrate on easily with the hum of family activity in the background. The two posts I’ve written on it so far do show that I’m making progress, though, not just on moving through the pages but on coming to terms with James’s style, which initially irritated me but now (mostly) just interests me.

The inevitable meta-blogging

My interest in blogging about blogging has gone down over time, but I did pause to reflect on how things were looking for “intelligent bloggy bookchat by scholars,” as John Holbo once optimistically championed, and then to add some afterthoughts based on my own further reflections and the responses I got.

Blogging my teaching

I kept up my series ‘This Week In My Classes,” which now (after so many years in which I often teach the same classes, albeit in different variations) has become less a chronicle of what we read or talked about and more an occasion to reflect on broader issues about pedagogy, such as what it’s like to be a beginner or how, as teachers, we can learn to let go. I still find this exercise useful, and I’m always gratified when other people tell me that they appreciate it too. I’m reasonably certain that there is no one right way to do any of the things that professors do in or out of the classroom: this is at once the best and the worst thing about this part of our job! It’s impossible to be complacent: we can only get more confident about trying things and seeing how they go, knowing that we can always tweak them next time.

Appearing elsewhere

godinruinsMost of my published writing appeared, as usual, here and at Open Letters Monthly — where, in addition to the pieces already mentioned, I reviewed Kate Atkinson’s very good but also very annoying A God in Ruins, Diana Souhami’s 100% annoying Gwendolen, and Elizabeth Gilbert’s initially empowering but ultimately (you guessed it) profoundly annoying Big Magic. But an essay I wrote on faith and fellowship in Middlemarch appeared in Berfrois, and my review of Samantha Walton’s Guilty But Insane appeared in the TLS: these are both publications I was very happy about.

Books I’m especially looking forward to reading in 2016

So many! But near the top of the pile is Emma (not just because everyone’s reading it for its 200th birthday, but partly because all the interesting things they are saying about it are inspiring), along with Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. My Christmas books include Gillian Rose’s Love’s Work, Jane Smiley’s Some Luck, and Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, all very tempting. I’ve got Alaa Al Aswany’s The Automobile Club of Egypt waiting as well, and somehow I’m certain more titles will accumulate as the year goes on.

Thank you to everyone who read and commented at Novel Readings this year!

“Life is Never Absent”: May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

mrs-stevens-hears-the-mermaids-singingIn her 1974 introduction to Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, Carolyn Heilbrun comments on how little “organized acclamation” or “academic attention” May Sarton has received. I was curious to see if that had changed in the intervening decades, so I did a quick subject search on the MLA Bibliography and turned up 108 results since 1974 — which is within hailing distance of George Eliot’s (surprisingly modest) 117 results for the same time frame, much better than Winifred Holtby’s 36, but far from Virginia Woolf’s startling 5147. Sarton’s star has risen, then, at least a little.

I’m almost as interested in Heilbrun’s interest in Sarton as I am in Sarton herself. Heilbrun clearly found something in Sarton that mattered to her, and thus she became her reader, her critic, and her advocate. She works hard to understand and go beyond strains of conventionality in Sarton’s novels, and particularly in Sarton’s ideas about women and women’s work, and to articulate what it is, despite Sarton’s formal limitations, that gives her work such speaking force. In this introduction, for instance, Heilbrun praises Sarton’s compassion:

Louise Bogan, in a letter to Rush Limmer, calls some poems of Sarton’s “sentimental,” an easy charge, a palpable danger to any writer not barricaded against revelation. But what appears sentimental to the society Mrs. Stevens envisioned as composed of male critics is an inevitable aspect of the compassion which, in Sarton, has never cowered behind the usual defenses. As a result, life is never absent from her work as it is from, to name a master, the work of Flaubert. And even Bogan must have understood something of this. Writing of Elizabeth Bowen’s crystalline and pristine prose, never for a moment lax or sentimental, Bogan observed, “The Death of the Heart is too packed, too brilliant, for its own good. What Miss Bowen lacks is a kind of humility.”

I was struck by how these comments actually bring us back to what I was puzzling over in my last post: the relationship between a certain kind of artistic excellence and a quality of what, in Heilbrun’s terms, might be called lifelessness. Another way to think about it, building on Bogan’s word “humility,” might be that Sarton comes across as a writer trying to figure things out, whereas Flaubert or James seem so sure of themselves — an effect that of course is the result of effort, not ease. There is intellectual excitement as well as beauty in their achieved confidence, but there’s something appealing in a different way in Sarton’s awkwardness — a quality that (in my limited experience, at least) is more apparent in her fiction, as if when writing memoir some obstacle (psychological, formal, whatever) melts away and she finds her own kind of writerly certainty.

Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing is actually a lot like a memoir: it’s hard not to read the story of novelist and poet Hilary Stevens reflecting — through the device of an interview — on her life’s work as a version of Sarton’s own story, as an attempt to dramatize questions she had thought a lot about regarding creativity and love. I think I might have found it more engaging if I were a creative writer myself: as it is, I have little idea what the relationship between a poet and her “muse” might be, and I care a lot more about the results! Still, I was quite interested in Hilary’s comments on poetic form:

Inspiration? It felt more like being harnessed to wild horses whom she must learn to control or be herself flung down and broken. The sonnet form with its implacable demand to clarify, to condense, to bring to fulfillment, became the means to control. Now for the first time she understood about form, what it was for, how it could teach one to discover what was really happening, and now to come to terms with the impossible, how it was not a discipline imposed from outside by the intellect, but grappled with from inner necessity as a means of probing and dealing with powerful emotions.

But what I liked best here, as in Plant Dreaming Deep or Journal of a Solitude, is Sarton’s ability (or, perhaps, her willingness) to convey the vitality of a single person: a person alone in her own space, observing it closely but also filling it with her thoughts and memories; a person deeply, persistently, without self-satisfaction, simply being herself. “You’ve given me courage,” says Jenny Hale, one of the interviewers and herself an aspiring writer, near the end of the visit: “courage to be myself, to do what I want to do!” “How did I do that, I wonder?” asks Hilary. “Maybe –” replies Jenny, “maybe because you have dared so greatly to be your self.” It doesn’t sound like much, to be your self, but it is a lot, isn’t it? And it’s hard to do, especially among other people who inevitably, often quite legitimately, make their own explicit or implicit demands on who you can be. Sarton’s fascination with being alone is tied to this sense that solitude brings (albeit at a cost) a certain freedom otherwise inaccessible — perhaps especially for women.

Henry James and “le mot juste”

Rohan Maitzen7 Comments

nortonportraitI feel I owe Henry James a bit of an apology. In my previous post on The Portrait of a Lady I complained that his sentences were irritating. Yet, as several people commented at the time, they really aren’t, or, not much, not in Portrait. (Of course, it’s also possible that, as Dorian predicted, I have become accustomed to their cadence, but Portrait is early enough in his oeuvre that I think it is partly that the worst was yet to come — a theory which my memory of reading The Golden Bowl confirms.) Now that I’m back to the novel again, what I find myself making note of are not places where I tripped over stuttering syntax but moments where I let out a small sigh of satisfaction: that, yes, that word (or phrase or, especially, metaphor) exactly. A few samples:

A young gentlewoman without visible relations had always struck her as a flower without foliage.

To live in such a place was, for Isabel, to hold to her ear all day a shell of the sea of the past.

Every now and then Isabel heard the Countess, at something said by her companion, plunge into the latter’s lucidity as a poodle splashes after a thrown stick.

She mightn’t be inhaled as a rose, but she might be grasped as a nettle.

The flower of her youth had not faded, it only hung more quietly on its stem.

It’s Flaubert, of course, who’s most associated (as far as I know, anyway) with the relentless search for “let mot juste,” and Flaubert is the last writer I can remember reading who provoked this kind of appreciation for his thrillingly precise yet somehow unexpected details. James was a fan of Flaubert, whom he called “a novelist’s novelist,” and both are known as key figures in the aestheticization of fiction, so this similarity isn’t surprising.

Thinking of James and Flaubert together, both writers I can admire but don’t really like, makes me wonder if these marvelous details are symptoms of the problem — my problem, that is. In his essay “How Flaubert Changed Literature Forever,” James Wood discusses Flaubert’s comments on “the monstrous difficulty of writing a sentence. “Style had always been a battle for novelists,” Wood says, “but Flaubert, in his letters at least, turned it into a perpetual defeat.” His writing becomes a site of struggle for a particular kind of perfection, a struggle which is part of how the novel becomes self-consciously artistic and thus great. And yet, Wood proposes, “under Flaubert … the novel’s great expansion was perhaps an expansion into limit”:

When the nineteenth-century novel became madly ambitious to be everything, it began to chastise itself for failing to do everything. Taking everything as its only measure, it became afflicted with a sense of its failure, and began to throw off those ambitions, like a plane dumping fuel, until only one was left: its very essence, style itself. Until Flaubert, the novel had been mithridated in its own unself-consciousness, as an alcoholic thoughtlessly medicates himself; but Flaubert took away its sweet, ignorant poisons.

As so often with Wood, and with any generalization about “the” nineteenth-century novel, I am not entirely comfortable with this account of literary history. Certainly not every novelist threw off every ambition but style — only the novelists in whom Wood takes a particular interest. And Wood’s own metaphors are so hopelessly biased against the novelists who aren’t Flaubert-like in their repudiation of the “ignorant poisons” of everything besides style! I do like Wood’s phrase “an expansion into limit”: it’s just that for me, what he interprets as a sign of progress feels to me, as the reader I am, like a loss, a decline. There’s something claustrophobic about this highly-crafted prose that never rushes, that’s never excitable, that sculpts and places and polishes its pieces so perfectly. I don’t concede that other 19th-century novel(ist)s are formless, but their forms are not (or, not just) verbal, not just stylistic but also spatial, not singular but plural.

It’s absurd, of course, to call James’s prose a “decline,” and in any case I don’t actually want to fall into Wood’s habit of identifying a favorite kind of novel as the best kind: as James himself said (in his Preface to The Portrait of a Lady) “the house of fiction has not one window, but a million.”  I just find myself wishing James would open his window up a bit wider and let some air in! But if you’re that self-conscious, I suppose you can’t take a risk that an errant breeze will shuffle your papers or, worse, carry in some sweet but destructive — that is, distracting — poison. Is oxygen really too high a price to pay for le mot juste?

Loyalty and Cutting Your Losses

Rohan Maitzen2 Comments

banquetAlex at Thinking in Fragments has an interesting post up about how to decide whether to carry on with a series if you aren’t that impressed with its first installment — and asking for examples of writers whose books got better as they went on. She cites the Peter Wimsey novels, for instance: if Whose Body? had been her first experience with them, she wonders if she would have read any further. (As someone who is not a fan of the early ones in Sayers’ series either, I wonder the same — I first met Wimsey in Strong Poison, fell for Harriet, and read on for her sake as much as his.) She also mentions Ian Rankin: while I like Knots and Crosses quite a bit, I agree that it’s not Rankin’s best.

I’m slow to pick up new series: life is short and books are so, so  many! So I need a strong testimonial to carry one if I’m not immediately convinced it will be worth it. One relatively recent example of a case where I’m glad I persisted would be the Martin Beck books: I didn’t like Roseanna all that much, but I could tell something interesting was going on and Dorian in particular was persuasive about the merits of the series overall. With Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, on the other hand, or the Brother Cadfael mysteries, one book was enough to convince me to read them all — though I’m doling out Brother Cadfael because it’s comforting to know there are more when I need them. My first Commissario Ricciardi mystery has given me yet another series I expect I’ll be faithful to.

Where I have the most trouble, though, is knowing when to give up on a series that I’ve enjoyed for a long time but that seems to have lost its lustre. I’m instinctively loyal: I like to stick with things I’ve started. This means I do keep picking up Sue Grafton’s novels, for instance, even though I haven’t really enjoyed any of them for a long time. Keeping up with Kinsey is one motive, and now that she’s up to X, my completist instincts might kick in — having come this far, how can I not read all the way to Z? But what about Elizabeth George, whose A Banquet of Consequences I have been slogging through? I am about 3/4 through at this point, and that’s only because I’ve taken to skimming a lot of the details about the case and focusing closely only when Lynley and Havers are actively involved. Her books seem to get longer and longer, and it’s hit or miss whether I’ll be interested enough in them to make it worth while. For me, 600 pages just seems excessive for a mystery novel — or any novel, really — that is all plot and character, with no thematic complexity or depth of insight. I do want to know how things are going for her main characters though, because her early novels were so good at making me care about them. I’ve felt this way about George for some time (2009, 2012) — but then I really liked 2013’s Just One Evil Act, which I suppose makes it reasonable to at least keep trying.

Maybe it’s time I broke up with some of these series. Is loyalty really a virtue for a reader, after all? I have sometimes wondered if the guaranteed sales an author like Grafton or George has now becomes a factor in what strikes me as pretty poor editing of their books; I remember Josephine Tey’s Inspector Grant, too, scoffing at people who buy “the new Lavinia Fitch” or “the new Silas Weekley” exactly as they would “a new hairbrush”: “they never said ‘a new book by’ whoever it might be. Their interest was not in the book but in its newness. They knew quite well what the book would be like.”

Sameness is comfort, of course: we don’t always want to (and never really have to) keep ourselves constantly alert by reading only what is unfamiliar. But, as I said, life is short and there are so many books to read! Are there series you have grown disappointed enough in, or tired enough of, to cut your losses? What keeps you going back to a series even if it doesn’t always live up to its best examples?

This Week In My Classes: End of Term Reflections

Rohan Maitzen5 Comments

Vanessa BellI’m always relieved at the end of the term, because the last phase is always quite stressful. But I’m also always aware that it’s really only the end of a term — another one immediately looms, and another, and another! Every limit is, indeed, a beginning as well as an ending, and so this in-between time inevitably prompts reflections. What went well — and what could I do better next time? What fell flat — and what might, nonetheless, be worth trying again? From class policies to book lists, from the layout of the syllabus to the assessment of final exams, teaching is always a work in progress, isn’t it?

I don’t think there’s really any way to judge if a course as a whole has been a success: what would that mean, especially for my first-year class, which was populated largely by people taking it, not out of interest, but as a requirement? Their success (in learning to write better, for example, or learning more about literature) is only partly in my hands, too: this term I was particularly struck by the difference it makes when a student really shows up for class — meaning, not just attending (though that is very important), but being truly present and engaged, following up on feedback, and so on. Another article complaining about a consumerist mindset among students recently made the rounds on Twitter, and again the gym membership analogy seemed apt to me: you literally cannot buy an education, but if you energetically use what you are paying for (expertise, guidance, support), you can get what you came for. Another measure of success, this one perhaps more dependent on my efforts, would be seeing students who arrived with low expectations  discover how interested they get in our readings and discussions. That was me, once upon a time — an avid reader but one who didn’t really understand why or how to “study” books, who lit up at what I found in my own first-year class. So I try to keep in mind, as I work with my first-year students, that both they and I can’t predict what this required class will end up meaning to them.

woolfI was more or less happy with the reading list this year for intro, which wasn’t much changed from the course’s last iteration. Because, with a larger class size, we had regularly scheduled tutorial meetings, I did cut back the reading: our only two long texts were A Room of One’s Own and Unless. (Last time, we also did Night and The Road.) I didn’t make this choice because of the recent Dentistry scandal, but that context gave these readings new urgency, and (perhaps because of it?) this group seemed more receptive than usual to the discussions these books invite.

During our discussions of Woolf and Shields, I also felt very aware of ways that my years of reading and writing with an eye to the book world outside the academy enhanced our discussions. I brought in things like the VIDA counts and the recent kerfuffle over David Gilmour‘s narrow-minded braggadocio; I also provided a link to one of many stories about the way YA writers get segregated by gender. My point was to show that the literary history both Woolf and Shields talk about and intervene in is an ongoing one; that these are not just academic issues; that the problems that frustrated them as women writers aren’t solved, though they may have some new forms; and that the feminist critique Woolf made so eloquently is still necessary. One of my most important goals as a teacher is to help my students think about how and what they’ll read when they aren’t under orders: I hope that some of this discussion will stick with them and they will look out for these things, not just in their own reading but in their parenting, in their work as librarians or teachers or editors or journalists or programmers, or in any other context where books and reading and gender matter. Now that would be a success!

mylifeinmiddlemarchI enjoyed a lot about my graduate seminar on George Eliot, but it was a source of some pedagogical frustration for me. I felt all term that I was talking too much, for instance. But also I felt somewhat confused about the aims of the seminar now that we’ve all openly admitted that graduate school isn’t now (if it ever was) wholly populated by people aiming at academic careers. I couldn’t decide how much that could or should change the conversations we had in class, the research I asked the students to do, or the kind of writing I asked for. I don’t think it’s possible to turn a specialized seminar in a particular discipline into an all-purpose smorgasbord of skills and knowledge, so in the end I didn’t change much of what I’ve routinely done in graduate seminars.  But I did (for the second time) include a blogging component aimed both at encouraging preparation for our once-a-week face-to-face sessions and at increasing the students’ comfort with the idea of writing more publicly. I also included as options seminar topics on George Eliot ‘outside’ the academic context, which led to three presentations on recent ‘popular’ versions of George Eliot: Diana Souhami’s Gwendolen, Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch, and the BBC adaptation of Daniel Deronda. These examples all gave them real-life proof that people talk about, write about, and care about Victorian literature in non-academic contexts, and the presentations all raised good questions about how and why they do, especially in comparison to the kinds of reading and writing that are more typically academic.

For me, it didn’t feel like a great term, but I think overall it went smoothly — as surely it should, after all these years. I think one reason it felt rough at times is that I was mentally (and sometimes emotionally) preoccupied with my promotion case, which has been moving slowly along through its various stages. For obvious reasons, this is not something I can address in detail here, at least before it’s all over. I will say, though, that in general it has already been a learning experience, in some ways a very good one (thought-provoking, constructive, illuminating) and in other ways an unwelcome one —  it’s one thing to anticipate what executive types call “pushback,” after all, and  another to see what form it actually takes. Eventually (once I know the ending!) I may have a longer tale to tell.

Next term I hope to have a bit more straight-up fun in the classroom — even though it is winter. I’m teaching the mystery class again, which I still find really stimulating even after teaching it almost every year for a dozen years. One reason I think the atmosphere is generally so positive and the students so engaged in this class is that it’s an elective for everyone: this can have its down sides (sometimes it’s not a top priority for students, for example), but mostly it means hardly anyone is there who doesn’t want to be. Plus, of course, I do try to make it as lively, interesting, and thought-provoking as I can!

vanityfairMy other course is yet another incarnation of “The 19th-Century Novel from Austen to Dickens,” for which as usual I have mixed up the reading list: instead of Persuasion, I’ve switched in Pride and Prejudice (which I haven’t done in 5 years); instead of Waverley, I’m bringing back Vanity Fair; instead of Jane Eyre, we’ll read The Tenant of Wildfell Hall*; and then I’m pairing Mary Barton and Hard Times at the end. Mary Barton is not as accomplished a novel as North and South, but its raw power always surprises me, and its importance as a social novel is perhaps greater. Hard Times is not everyone’s favorite Dickens novel, but I think it too is very powerful in its strange, excessive, fabular way. It’s a line-up I chose more for variety than continuity: the last time around, the novels were all variations on the Bildungsroman. I am most curious about how Vanity Fair will go over; I think the last time I assigned it was 2008. Will I need to stage an intervention, as I did last time with Waverley? Or will the inimitable Becky carry them all along with her, in her unscrupulous clamber up the social ladder?

*Update: So much for working from memory: I chose Jane Eyre again for this round, as I was reminded today when I went to check the stock in the bookstore! I was a bit disappointed to realize that at first, but actually it’s good, as 2016 is the 200th anniversary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth, so we really ought to be reading her most famous book. And I do love Jane Eyre.

Dogs and Cats

Rohan Maitzen9 Comments

alexisI’m back! It has been quite a week, and I still have work to do to finish up the term, but I can see my way through it now — and really, it hasn’t been that bad compared to terms when I’ve had more or bigger classes and no teaching assistants. Still, it feels good to have everything under control, and thus to be able to contemplate the stacks of books around my desk with anticipation rather than anxiety or guilt. Hang in there, Isabel: you’re next! (Egad, was it really a whole month ago that I started The Portrait of a Lady?)

The one book I have managed to get to the end of recently is Andre Alexis’s Fifteen Dogs, which was my book club’s latest selection. Usually we try to follow some kind of link from one book to the next, but we settled on Fifteen Dogs a bit randomly because a few people had heard about and thought it sounded interesting. A few days after we chose it, it won the Giller Prize, so that seemed like validation! (Coincidentally, it did turn out to resemble Ending Up in one respect: all of its main characters end up the same way Amis’s do.)

I didn’t like Fifteen Dogs. The premise was initially interesting, and I have nothing in principle against adapting old forms (in this case, the apologue) for contemporary use. But Alexis’s choice to write the book in stiltedly formal diction as if to recreate the form’s antiquity really didn’t work for me: to my ear, it just sounded artificial, and it kept me from ever feeling anything about the dogs. Perhaps that was the intent: to keep it intellectual, to give it the (supposed) objectivity of a philosophical exercise. Or perhaps (and equally likely) I just wasn’t the right reader for the book, as at least one other member of my book club said it made her cry.

Was I unmoved by Fifteen Dogs because I’m a cat person and have never been particularly comfortable around dogs, which usually strike me as loud, messy, and intrusive? I wondered about that a lot while I was reading Alexis’s book. I wan’t convinced by his dogs as either dogs or dogs-with-human-consciousness, but I thought that might be because I don’t have an intimate knowledge of what he repeatedly calls “the canine.” I think Alexis does manage not to simply anthropomorphize his dogs once they can think and talk — he works hard to keep them still dog-like (as he understands that) and then to animate the strange hybrid his thought experiment has created. (There’s a pretty funny bit about a dog watching a movie who, despite being otherwise pretty interested in it, gets frustrated that he can’t smell anything in it.)

alexis2But it turned out that although I am the only person in my book club who doesn’t own (and love) dogs, most of the others also didn’t like the book much. One was offended by it because she loves dogs and thought the book showed Alexis doesn’t actually like them: his version of them is negatively selective, uncharitable, she proposed. The nobility of the dog who waits years for his owner to come back struck a chord with some of the others (though why this dog, in spite of his grasp of human language and motives, never figures out that she has died did bother us). We all agreed with the one who cried that the last dog’s death was very pathetic — but she recently lost her own dog, so she thought she might have also been emotionally vulnerable. I was the only one who had gotten both distracted and annoyed by the weirdly specific allusions to Victorian novels (if you were going to train your preternaturally talented dog to recite just one 19th-century novel, would you choose Vanity Fair? and what is it exactly that makes Mansfield Park the pooch’s preferred Austen?). In general, the complaint was simply that it wasn’t very engaging, though as is often the case, as we talked we found it getting more interesting, at least theoretically: why does the acquisition of language so immediately cause such a deep rift? what is it about poets that makes them both outcasts and – or so Alexis proposes – the only ones likely to find happiness? We had a little fun going through the poems, too, looking for the hidden dog names that we’d missed the first time.

Their tepid response to Fifteen Dogs notwithstanding, there’s no doubt that I was surrounded by dog lovers, and the book prompted some impassioned discussion of their dogs, which naturally made me feel both left out and a bit defensive. I have met some individual dogs over the years that I’m fine with, and every once in a while I think it might be nice to be met with panting enthusiasm when I come home from work, but really, if getting a pet were an option for me, I’d absolutely get a cat, not a dog. As a child, I longed for a cat above all things, but my father and both siblings are allergic, so it always seemed like an impossible dream. Then on Christmas Day in 1977, a mysterious basket was delivered that seemed to be making a sad mewling noise — and inside was an absolutely beautiful seal point Siamese kitten. This very old and sadly discolored photo shows us on our very first day together:

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I was at once completely in love and completely petrified! And I was deep into my Mary, Queen of Scots phase, so I named him “Bothwell,” an aristocratic title he quickly grew into:

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Bothwell was a truly splendid cat: smart, elegant, expressive, loyal. In retrospect, I wasn’t the greatest owner: I didn’t clean out the litter box as often as I should have, and sometimes I just dumped new food in without cleaning out his bowl. But he was definitely mine — or, since cats do tend to resist being possessed, he was definitely my friend more than anyone else’s. I spent many hours reading in my comfy chair with him curled on my lap, and when I wasn’t in the chair, he kept it warm for me:

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When I moved into my first apartment, the hardest part was not being able to bring him with me; I was at Cornell when he died, and though it had been a few years at that point since I’d lived with him, I felt completely bereft.

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My husband is allergic to cats; I wouldn’t be surprised if my children were too. So it seems unlikely I’ll ever get another one: I’m back where I was long ago, dreaming of the perfect feline companion!

After reading Fifteen Dogs, I thought my book club might want to try a different dog book, so I looked around for possibilities and there are lots of them. In the end, we went a different way (in fact, we went back to Kingsley Amis to find our thread, and chose Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Beautiful Visit). But my search got me wondering what the great cat novels are. I got a number of good suggestions on Twitter including May Sarton’s The Fur Person, Takashi Haraide’s The Guest Cat, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters, and Natsume Soseki’s I Am a Cat. Maybe I can talk all those dog lovers into reading one of these soon: fair’s fair! In the meantime, it’s probably time I read “The Cat That Walked By Himself.”

Update: I realized right after I published this that I have posted about cats once before: see here for my daughter’s memorable poem CATS.

“The Sorrow of the Dead”: Maurizio de Giovanni, I Will Have Vengeance

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ricciardi

I see it. I feel it, the sorrow of the dead who remain attached to a life they no longer have. I know it; I hear the sound of the blood draining away. The mind that deserts them, the brain clinging by the fingernails to the last shred of life as it runs out. Love, you say? If you only knew how much death there is in your love …

It turns out I do have a little time for reading and writing in among the essays and exams (it’s better for everyone if you don’t get too single-minded about marking, after all). So tonight I was able to finish up Maurizio de Giovanni’s I Will Have Vengeance, which Steve Donoghue kindly sent my way after he learned I had never read any of the Commissario Ricciardi mysteries. (Steve has written about the series a few times at his blog and in Open Letters Weekly.)

I enjoyed  I Will Have Vengeance very much. It is an atmospheric whodunit set in Mussolini’s Italy in 1931. The case itself is a murder mystery wrapped in opera – specifically, the famous duo of Cavelleria Rusticana and I Pagliacci: de Giovanni elegantly combines his own plot with the themes and stories of the operas, and especially with the powerful emotions evoked by and in the music.

Commissario Ricciardi is an opera skeptic: “he didn’t like the theatrical representation of emotions,” we’re told. Listening to one of the novel’s many opera enthusiasts, he wonders “how opera, mere make-believe, could produce such emotion.” It’s understandable that he would resist such artificial stimulation, as he has abundant experience of real, if vicarious, suffering: the strange and somewhat risky gimmick of the series is that he sees dead people — or, rather, dying people:

He saw the dead. Not all of them, and not for long: only those who had died violently, and only for a period of time that revealed extreme emotion, the sudden energy of their final thoughts. He saw them as though in a photograph that captured the moment their lives ended, one whose contours slowly faded until they disappeared. Better yet, he saw them as in a film, like those he sometimes saw at the movies, only the same scene kept playing over and over again.

Risky, as I said, because this could easily be a trick that feels as artificial as Ricciardi believes operatic melodrama to be. But I thought de Giovanni pulled it off, partly because he makes Ricciardi’s visions interesting and often moving, and also because he emphasizes not their inexplicability but the psychic toll they take on Ricciardi, who cannot go for a walk or enjoy an espresso without some horrid violence flashing on his inward eye. De Giovanni integrates these chilling moments into his narrative with so little specific notice that I wasn’t always sure if we were seeing a death that is present — in our present, that is — or absent. Here’s an example will give you the idea, both of this device and of the bleak overall tone and imagery of the novel:ricciardi2

The cold wind gradually grew stronger as the tram clambered up the hill, trudging along; Ricciardi could tell from the swaying of the vegetation that was now more dense. Trees, shrubs, cultivated fields, dirt paths leading into the countryside; here and there a villa surrounded by palm trees. On either side of the road — the tramway running down the middle of it — were occasional shacks with women washing clothes and children playing outdoors. A boy with a dog and two goats tied to a rope was selling ricotta cheese and bread to a small group of bricklayers at a construction site. One of them, standing a little apart, had his head bent in an unnatural way. The Commissario looked away: one of the thousands of workplace accidents, which no one ever heard about.

Actually, I’m still not sure what he’s seeing here: is this broken man dead or living? The reality is clearer, and creepier, when Ricciardi sees a little girl outside his cafe, carrying “a bundle of rags, perhaps a doll”:

Her left arm was missing: a fragment of white bone protruded from the torn flesh, splintered like a piece of fresh wood. Her hip was staved in, her chest cavity crushed. A tram, Ricciardi thought. The girl stared at him then, all of a sudden, held out the rag doll to him: ‘This is my daughter. I feed her and bather her.’ Ricciardi set down the cup, paid, and went out. Now he would feel cold for the rest of the day.

Against the chill of all this reiterated suffering we get Ricciardi’s own effortful humanity, which in this case becomes dedicated (as it does for so many fictional detectives) to reconciling the competing demands of law and justice. There’s a glimmer of warmth, too, in his relationship (if that’s the right word) with the young woman he watches every night from his window (to her satisfaction, we discover, which saves the situation from being uncomfortably voyeuristic).

I Will Have Vengeance is the first of the Commissario Ricciardi mysteries. Though (as the translator’s note at the end spells out) de Giovanni is meticulous in his recreation of the period, the historical context is mostly just background here — the murder victim, an opera singer, is admired by Il Duce and so the higher-ups put extra pressure on the Commissario to solve the case. There are some comments about the relentless emphasis of the regime on order and conformity, which is contrasted with the city’s unruliness as well as people’s emotional turbulence. I’ll be interested to see if the later books draw us and the Commissario more deeply into the era’s troubled politics. Happily, Steve also sent me the newest one, The Bottom of Your Heart — though I wonder if I should jump straight to the seventh book or work my way up to it.

The books are published in English translations by Europa Editions, in case you think they look interesting.