Fall 1996 Reads

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Anne Tyler, Searching for Caleb

On HAO's recommendation. My first Anne Tyler was Breathing Lessons when I was but a chit of a girl, in 1988, I think, spring break sophomore year of school in Boston chez my sister CLH, who likes her a lot. At 19 I was quite the unsophisticated reader and Tyler's psychological, episodic style--am I completely talking out of my butt? It could happen--didn't appeal to me. Searching for Caleb is quite good, good characters well drawn (and now I can appreciate it). But still pathe. The usual wise thing to say is that the journey counts more than the destination, right? Well these people never get anywhere and they don't enjoy the ride either. Giving away the ending now: did he have to die without hearing from his brother? December 1996

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace

Historiographic, psychological fiction. More Atwood metaphors. I do like her.
December 1996

Richard Adams, Tales from Watership Down

Some lovely stuff, some less lovely stuff. The mythological tales are, I think, mostly as good as those in Watership Down. The first, "The Sense of Smell," is a good Just-So story (except that rabbits had their sense of smell well before the other animals were extincted), but it doesn't mesh perfectly with an established point in Watership Down: the rabbits' knowledge of other species. In the "Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog," Rowsby detects the scent of camel. Bigwig asks, "What on earth's 'camel'?" and Dandelion replies, "I don't know; it was in the story when I heard it so it must be some creature or other." [Watership, 402] But in "The Sense of Smell," the rabbits listen without murmur as exotic animals are named. This is their mythology, and therefore mysterious; and Adams make a point about human care and conservation quite separate from the lives of the Down rabbits; so while it doesn't mesh, it does have a valid moral and at least doesn't counter any fundamental Watership Down idea.

On another point of mythology, the dea ex machina Lucy is now called by name in a story. I like the idea that the rabbits know her name through some sort of mass consciousness, the cell consciousness that perhaps all beings share. On a simpler level perhaps the Nuthanger rabbits knew her name. So neither did that point counter any known Watership Down fact.

These two observations lead to the one particular of Tales that did contradict a clearly spelled-out and emphasized element in Watership Down. During the tale of Flyairth, a doe, Flesca, approaches Hazel and said that whatever Flyairth did or said was so funny, "I couldn't help laughing." [Tales, 194] Mr. Adams, why? Did he forget that the "phenomenon of laughter is unknown to animals; though it is possible that dogs and elephants have some inkling of it"? [Watership, 87] When Hazel and Blackberry saw Cowslip laugh, they thought he was possessed, ill, threatening. Have our beloved Down rabbits picked up another habit of the snared warren besides the Honeycombe? Did no copyeditor spot this?

(1) Richard Adams. Watership Down. New York: Avon, 1972 [which can't be right, because the paperback date has to be later?], p. 402.
(2) Richard Adams. Tales from Watership Down. New York: Knopf, 1996, p 196.

James M. Cain, Three of a Kind

For DAO's sake I shall not go into what I really think except to say that the title is absolutely appropriate. Well, a little. Albert Camus was inspired by this man? The Stranger and The Fall owe something, anything to this? October 1996

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice

I remembered, sketchily, a cinematization of this starring Jack Nicholson. Naturally the novella is superior, but now I wonder how much that version bothered to follow the novel. This aches and wretches. I began Cain's introduction to Three of a Kind, in which he says he writes as his characters speak. Yep. Frank Chambers wrote this novel. I get the feeling he came from behind, whapped Cain on the head, and announced "I need to write my story." Then he did. I want someone to explain the title though. I mean I get the twice bit, but why a postman?
October 1996

Jeannette Winterson, The Passion

She's hard to describe. Vivid metaphors, entirely different from Atwood's or Hurston's (which is why they're vivid, lisa?) Napoleon from his troops' point of view. Venetian folklore. Wrenching and wonderful.
October 1996

Sandra Dallas, The Persian Pickle Club

The title made me choke when I came across it in the Arapahoe Country Library newsletter as the subject of the library's book club. I asked the Reader's Adviser at Koelbel what it was about, and she told me it was quite good, about a quilting club in Dustbowl Kansas in the Depression. I'm glad Dallas explained Persian Pickle to this non-sewer within the first several pages: it's another word for paisley. Now as I'm typing this I realize if I name the play the author has got to have read, I'll ruin the denouement for anyone reading my page. With that warning, here goes: "Trifles," whose playwright currently slips my mind. Also Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café. In "Trifles," women realize what men do not because the women perceive and understand what the men overlook or dismiss. The dichotomy in Persian Pickle is not demarcated between men and women but primarily between insiders and outsiders of a close-knit farming community and secondarily between women and men. Quilting, of course, also connects the two works.

Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry

Susie gave me her review copy of Written on the Body something like two years ago and I never read it but now I know I will. Rich has Sexing the Cherry for his Modern and Postmodern class and told me I'd like it. It was one of those books you read a paragraph of and know you won't rest until you read the entire thing. A little magical realism, a lot of earthy humor, a lot of fruit. A novel of stories and journeys, like Temple of My Familiar, though otherwise it has little in common with it.
(19 October 1996)

Peter Høeg, Borderliners

I think I read about Smilla's Sense of Snow in The Nation. I don't remember, but anyway I went questing and found this and A History of Danish Dreams in the library. For over a month while my parents were here (a week to prepare, a week for my father, a week to breathe, a week for my mother, a week to recover) I feel like I didn't read a drop. (I'm looking at the gap between completion dates of books on this list.) I guess I was weary and stressed during that whole period, because I got through Borderliners a few paragraphs at a time, falling asleep page by page which I think is insulting to Høeg and I'm sorry. (The only other time that happened to me was when I read Dr. Zhivago for Modern European in tenth grade. Inexplicable phenomenon, because I liked it, too. Apologies to Pasternak too, I guess.)

"In China, before Christ, a clock consisted of concentric circles of incense through which a glowing ember burned its way, thus keeping pace with the day by way of constantly changing scents" (page 66). What a marvelous idea. I wonder if anyone still makes such a clock, just for kicks.

All the questions about time that Høeg poses put my mind in gear for Sexing the Cherry.
(17 October 1996)

*Madeleine L'Engle, A Swiftly Tilting Planet

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