Charles Bovary, Country Doctor

Finished May 22

Charles Bovary, Country Doctor: Portrait of a Simple Man by Jean Améry, translated by Adrian Nathan West

This book is a combination of novel and literary criticism, unlike any other book I've read. The book starts in the voice of Charles Bovary after the death of Emma, as he grieves and reflects. In this first section he interacts with other characters like Berthe, Homais and Lheureux, and for some of these he shows both sides of the conversation. He also addresses his late wife, and revisits past conversations. 

In the second section he revisits the past, scenes from the novel, where he relates his inner response to these and we see how it differs from the novel. He shows how Charles is made to be stupid and ridiculous, not a real person. 

The third section switches to essay format and is literary criticism of a sort, but focused on the author and how his experience relates to what he wrote, both in terms of inspiring and in terms of limiting. 

This essay form continues in the fourth section where the author focuses on Flaubert's view of the bourgeois and how that led him to make his characters fit that mold.

The fifth section takes us back to Charles Bovary and how a man of his time and experience would have acted and felt, as opposed to the way he is portrayed in Madame Bovary. 

The last section takes us back to the novelistic format, speaking as Charles as he accuses Flaubert of betraying his reality and as he experiences the loss of his wife, both over time as she pulled away from him and in the end with her final choice. 

This book was ahead of its time in how it looked at a classic novel and responded to it. While written in 1978, it has only recently been translated into English and allows the reader of the classic a new way of looking at Madame Bovary. It definitely addresses some of the issues that I had when I read it, and shows me good arguments for my reactions to the classic. 

A great addition to the field of literature. It also had me with a dictionary by my side to look up some of the less common terminology used. 

The Saddest Words

Finished November 9

The Saddest Words: William Faulkner's Civil War by Michael Gorra

I first read Faulkner in my university American Literature class, and have several of his novels on my shelves. This book looks at his books treatment of the civil war and its aftermath, and of his own personal statements on the same. Beyond that it looks deeply at the social history of the American South, and how the civil war is reflected in that history. 

It looks closely at several characters in his novels, and at how he portrays black characters, quite differently from other southern white authors, and we see how his books differed from the customary attitude about black people in the south. Some of these things in his novels were observations that he wasn't as comfortable saying publicly outside of fiction, and he still struggles with some of the prejudices of his peers. 

There is in-depth analysis of his writings, social commentary, historical comparisons between his fiction and the real events, and literary criticism. The book includes a chronology of his life, a list of his major works, and a brief history of his fictional Yoknapatawpha County. 

The title refers to references from the book, referring to the words "was" and "again", both references in this way by the author. 

I found this a fascinating insight into his books, and his environment. It seems especially apt during the social changes that we are going through now.

Machiavelli

Finished April 20
Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What to Fear by Patrick Boucheron, translated by Willard Wood

This is a close look at Machiavelli's life and writings. It's split into six sections covering different periods of his life, with each section having five chapters.
The introduction starts with a quote from Trump, one that could have been written by Machiavelli. It was a statement made in March 2016 "Real power is -- I don't even want to use the word -- fear." It definitely relates to both men. It speaks to the fact that we really don't know how to feel and think about Machiavelli. This book stays in that uncomfortable zone of thought. It is a deep analysis of the man and his writing, some drawn from a series of talks on French public radio about using Machiavelli to sharpen our understanding of our own times. It shows how people can be so worried about a pending threat that they don't realize that it has already happened.
Youth - this section begins by setting the context for Machiavelli's life, a time period of great upheaval. Those times we are drawn to reading him are also times like these, which should alert us to that in our time. It also talks about how his name became associated with the practice of violence and tyranny, one that he didn't actually profess, but that his worst opponents assigned to him. One of the works he drew on here was a diary kept by Machiavelli's father, showing that the house owned thirty books (an extravagance at that time) and valued education. One of the books was Lucretius, and Machiavelli read it and transcribed it, a very humanist book
A Time for Action - This section talks about the influence of Savonarola's rise and fall, Machiavelli's first government role, first secretary to the second chancery. He created a team of young men that would stay with him for nearly fifteen years. It also marked the beginning of his travels away from Florence to observe what happened elsewhere, and allow him to compare. It also had him writing: dispatches, reports, and diplomatic letters, forming a base for his later work. It is said that this time and place in history invented diplomacy, so it was a valuable experience. It also brings us to the beginning of his exile when the Medicis were reinstalled as rulers and he was implicated in a conspiracy.
After Disaster - His first writings from exile are covered here, where he spent time conversing with the men of his community and his evenings reading. The Prince is looked at, with his intentions to "write something useful for discerning minds," and his determination to look at the truth of the way government worked. He wasn't describing good government, but more the government that he had observed and these are principalities, not republics, an important distinction. He talks here about self-preservation, what a ruler needs to know how to do to stay in control. He ends this famous work by calling on patriotism to deliver Italy from barbarians, the French, but also this is a cry to be noticed, to be brought out of exile.
Politics of Writing - The Prince gained some attention, but the Pope warned the Medicis against him, so he turned to theatre successfully. In the plays, he used the same themes as his previous work, but added humour and variability to them. This section also talks more about his personal life, his marriage and family and draws from personal letters written to his wife and his friends. His work also ventured beyond the diplomatic language of the time to include idiom and street language.
Republic of Disagreements - This section ventures into his orations, beginning with those on the Roman republic. They can be seen as a counterbalance to the Prince in that he acknowledges the role of the voice of the people. He notes that although the general populace is ignorant, it is capable of truth, and they don't want to be dominated. One of the points he makes is that which damages the public spirit "to make a law and not observe it, particularly when it is not observed by the person who devised it." This section also looks at his work Art of War, and the role of military force and his arguments against the dependence on mercenaries. It also reveals his idea of peace as violence in abeyance, useful for its vagueness of threat. Here, this book also tackles the common line "the end justifies the means" as being associated with Machiavelli. He never wrote such a line, and it doesn't fit with his philosophy. For him "The end will always occur too late to justify the means of an action. To govern is to act blindly within the indeterminacy of the times."
Never Too Late - The final section of the book begins with the death of Lorenzo de' Medici at the age of twenty-seven, and the ascendency of his cousin Giulio, who provided more opportunity for Machiavelli, beginning with  a commission to write a history of Florence. When Giulio became Pope Clement VII, Machiavelli had more opportunities, including diplomatic missions and travel. This takes us to the capture of Rome in May 1527 and the topple of the Medici reign, but now that the republic was restored, Machiavelli's services were not wanted, and he died soon after. But the body of work he created survived and was interpreted in various ways by various parties. Boucheron points out the Machiavelli often comes up when a storm is threatening. His quarrel "is rekindled every time a Caesar subjects Europe anew to servitude and war." We may not have reached that point, but the truth of Machiavelli's words are worth considering.

Pieces of My Mind

Finished December 9
Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism 1958-2002 by Frank Kermode

This collection of essays and criticism turned out to be a lot more academic than I expected, causing me to keep a dictionary nearby to look up various words, and to read it slowly over many months.
Included here are a number of essays, most around books, authors, and artists. Some of them are from presentations given at conferences and other academic events.
There are nineteen long essays on subjects such as Diaghilev; Time and Eternity; Solitary Confinement; The English Novel; Hawthorne; Wuthering Heights; The Man in the Macintosh; Wallace Stevens; Secrets and Narrative Sequence; Botticelli; Cornelius and Voltemand; The Plain Sense of Things; Mixed Feelings; Eros; Memory; Forgetting; Cambridge; Literary Criticism; and Shakespeare and Boito.
There is a section of shorter essays about various people: Raymond Carver; James Lees-Milne; Auden on Shakespeare; Don DeLillo; Martin Amis; Ian McEwan; and Tom Paulin.
All in all it was a very interesting read, but definitely a stretch for me.

Strange Things

Finished November 29
Strange Things: Clarendon Lectures in English Literature 1991 by Margaret Atwood

This book contains four lectures Atwood did at Oxford in 1991. They explore how aspects of the Canadian North are used in literature. Each lecture focuses on a specific aspect to do with the North. The first lecture looks at the folklore derived from the disastrous Franklin expedition and the mystery surrounding what happened to the men on it. The second lecture focuses on white writers going native, using Grey Owl, a white man who took on the persona of a native and was only revealed as white after his death. The third lecture looks at the myth of the Wendigo as shown in literature. The fourth looks at women in the Canadian north.
Throughout the lectures she looks at the retelling of stories, the themes and how they come up in different ways, and how the idea of the wilderness as a character in its own right is portrayed. Sometimes the north is shown gendered, often female and predatory. Sometimes it is shown neutral. Sometimes it is shown positively, as a force that brings good in characters lives.
The series offers interesting insights into uniquely Canadian literature themes. I quite enjoyed it.

A Jury of Her Peers

Finished April 13
A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx by Elaine Showalter

This overview of American women writers covers the entire history of the topic from the beginnings of the country to the end of the twentieth century. Showalter includes more than 250 women writers in her commentary from poets to dramatists to short story writers and novelists. She touches on not only the obvious issues of gender, but also race, class, and politics.
The book is arranged chronologically with authors reappearing in different chapters as their writing carries over multiple time frames. As the book gets closer to the present, the time frames shorten to decades. Showalter looks at the writing in its context, examining the personal lives of the writers, how their experiences shaped their writing and their lives, and how outside forces reacted to their writing. Some drew support from male writers of their time, while others did not. Some flourished economically but not critically. Some did well at the time of writing and grew less significant in following years, others didn't do well during their lives, but became more valued later. Some had to sacrifice their preferences in the type of writing they wanted to do due to the pressures of economics, family situations, or prejudice.
There were a lot of writers I had never heard of, but also many that I've heard of but never read (some of them I've even got the books on my shelves!) And of course ones I've read and loved, or read and not loved. This book will help to guide some of my future reading.
Showalter gives us a history but also includes some criticism here, occasionally making clear her own views on the writers' works, and the reasoning behind those views.
The title is taken from a short story that was adapted from a play. The author, Susan Glaspell was a journalist who covered a murder case where a woman was accused of murdering her husband, and then was so fascinated by the case that she developed it into both a play and a short story. When the county attorney and sheriff go to the house to gather information, their wives accompany them and looking through a woman's eyes make their own discoveries and decisions about her actions. Of course, real juries at the time of the case, 1917, didn't include women and the link is made in this book from legal juries to literary juries. Glaspell won a Pulitzer Prize in 1931 and yet didn't rate inclusion in literary overviews even at her death nearly 20 years later. Questions are raised by the question of "peer" and what that means both legally and in a literary sense.What judgments have been made about the subject matter women chose to address in their writing at various times is discussed as is the change over time to the situation today where a woman writer can, without judgment choose any subject she wishes to write about.
A work leading to reflection, more reading, and thoughtful response.

Invisible Listeners

Finished June 14
Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery by Helen Vendler
I'm not really sure how this book got on my TBR list (maybe my love for poetry?) but it was one started but not finished, until yesterday.
Not a long book, it focuses on the addressed invisible listener in these three poets works.
For Herbert, his listener was God, and the author shows how it changed from a vertical relationship to a still vertical but more intimate, parental type relationship, to a horizontal one, where Herbert addressed his listener as "friend".
For Whitman, she shows the change in the treatment of listener as well. Here it changes from a hopeful near future friend he can have a full relationship with, to a future generation where such a relationship can exist, to the ultimate invisible listener of Death. His address to death is a very intimate and friendly one, unusual even among poets.
For Ashbery, he is struck by a painting viewed in 1959 by Francesco Parmigianino, "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". He is moved to research the painter and painting and finally writes a poem addressing him in 1972. He finds in him a fellow artist who shows art distorting what it portrays, and addresses him as a friend.
This is an interesting look at the role of invisible listener in poetry, and while more academic than my usual reading, gave me insight into the poems I love.