Understand now?

Too true

An Equal Music

I just finished reading this novel by Vikram Seth. I can't even remember what prompted me to buy it. The novel's central character is a musician, Michael Holme, who plays second violin in a classical quartet. He has loved and lost and attempts to retrieve the lost love of another musician, Julia McNicholl.

First, I must admit that the main character was totally unlikable to me. Selfish, obsessed, inconsiderate and absurd, he makes a mountain of his love affair and fails to understand or even remotely understand the person who is Julia. He's like a stalker, forever obsessed with the way she affects him, rather than the person she is. I found him contemptible. I found her weak and barely forgivable.

And yet, there is an understanding of musicians and their obsession with their instrument that makes this novel worth reading. The real love story is between Michael and the violin he plays, a gift from a patroness who has known him since childhood.

Also, this book deals with class. Michael is the son of a butcher, a man unlikely to become a world-class musician. It is only through the patronage of a local aristocrat, that Michael is able to access this world of musicianship.

And this is where the book goes wrong. You cannot transform a working class child into a self-absorded bourgeois twit without some explanation. There is none. What is it that gives this manchild his massive ego? What makes him so completely insensitive to Julia's reality. How is he able to elevate his lover for her to a mythic Utopia without the least consideration or her reality or his?

I can see writing a novel like this that makes clear the extreme selfishness of Michael and his blindness to reality. But this is not the book Seth has written.

How unfair this book is to the reality of love and living with another human being. How dismissive of Julia's husband and child.

So True!


Cartoon by Caldwell Tanner
Source: http://loldwell.com/?p=104

Cleaning Up

The girls and the grandchildren came by today to help us clean up the household. Found lots of fun items we'd lost in the process. Pretty pictures of daughters on Halloween. This is good.

Spent two hours today at the Casket Arts book sale, picking up classics of the leftist variety.

What a weird sensation to be staring down rows of Sydney Sheldon and Dominic Dunne and finding, amidst the dross, the occasional Chomsky or Lenin.

I plowed on through for two solid hours. Picking the gems from the frauds.

The Lace Reader

Just finished reading this book by Brunonia Barry. It starts with a great premise, the unreliable narrator. The narrator begins by saying she lies all the time and that she's a crazy woman.

Okay. Let's see how a crazy woman thinks.

Except we then go into a fairly logical narrative of which we are expected to believe most of what we read, but be prepared to toss out some of the more outlandish claims. That's cheating.

For an amazing example of reading the words of a crazy woman while being able to discern reality from fiction, I recommend and highly prefer Charlotte Gillman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." It's free on the web at Gutenberg.

However, to review the book on its merits, I should say I was pulled along by the plot and kept coming back to it when I had time to read. The sense of place is awesome, I assume, although I've never been to Salem. I was fascinated by the family, Towner, her twin sister Lindley, her mother May and her guardian Eva. All were strong, fascinating women with quirky habits and powerful beliefs. Even the secondary female characters get fleshed out: Angela, Roberta, Anya and Ann.

But I was really bothered by the shift from first person narrative by Towner to first person narrative by Rafferty, the detective who falls for Towner, midway through the book. In comparison to the women of the book, Rafferty is poorly developed. We know little of his beliefs or his desires. He is curiously incapable of action.

I'm not sorry I read this book, but I'm not recommending it to others.

Updated 10/17 flyers

Don't mess with French farmers!

Another flyer for Mayday