The Odd Women- George Gissing

Are they so odd?

Released in 1893 and telling a story about a time when Britain’s views on marriage and ‘a woman’s place’ was changing, The Odd Women by George Gissing places the reader in a world where a woman was expected to marry and centre her world around her man. Capturing the differing opinions of this socially awkward time, the novel centres on women, marriage, society and morals.

Yet there is a group of ‘odd women’ who refuse to be part of this, and are led by the head strong Rhoda Nunn. When she is first introduced to the reader, she is seen as feisty and independent, with strong values about the complexity of marriage, and the unhappiness it brings to young women. Yet by asserting herself this way to others, she is traps herself by her ideology and finds herself in a difficult position where she must choose between her beliefs and love.

Odd?

EXTRACT

They looked fixedly at each other, like people about to stake everything on their courage. “Is such a life worthy of the name?” asked Virginia in tones of awe.

“We shan’t be driven to that. Oh, we certainly shall not. But it helps one to know that, strictly speaking, we are independent for another six months.”

That word gave Virginia an obvious thrill. “Independent! Oh, Alice, what a blessed thing is independence! –  Do you know, my dear, I am afraid I have not exerted myself as I might have done to find a new place. These comfortable lodgings, and the pleasure of seeing Monica once a week, have tempted me into idleness. It isn’t really my wish to be idle; I know the harm it does me; but oh! if one could work in a home of one’s own!”

Alice had a startled, apprehensive look, as if her sister were touching on a subject hardly proper for discussion, or at least dangerous. “I’m afraid it’s no use dear,” she answered awkwardly. “No use; no use whatever. I am wrong to indulge in such thoughts.”

“Whatever happens,my dear,’ said Alice presently, with all the impressiveness of tone she could command, ‘we must never entrench upon our capital – never– never– never!”

With humorous conversations that will make many females chuckle in remembrance of the ‘good old days’ when we were oppressed by marriage,politics and social convention, the novel puts forward an important message about the power of ideology. While Rhoda Nunn is in an economic posotion to rebel against convention, Monica Madden- who isn’t that well off, is forced to live the life that relies on a man and is deemed acceptable. I enjoyed this novel, as it asks you to think about the argument of head and heart, and it mentions Clevedon! (My home town)

So I ask you:

Did you enjoy this novel? Do matters of the heart take priority over your head?

SMH

Jude the Obscure- Thomas Hardy

Really Obscure?

What strikes me about Thomas Hardy is his ruthless portrayal of Victorian life. At a time when the world was changing and modernity was striking, his characters are portrayed as mere ants within a large colony. Yet the reader feels compelled to follow them and care, much like Tess of the D’Urbervilles, as their lives usually take a tragic turn. Many dislike the melancholia of Hardy’s novels, but if you can find pleasure in identifying with human traits in all their forms- the beautiful and the ugly, you may just enjoy Jude the Obscure.

Set in the rolling English countryside in Victorian England, the novel invites you to Jude’s life where he is longing to further educate himself at the prestigious Christminster. (That is the yee oldy version of Oxford/Cambridge you know) Being a whizz with Latin and having a hunger for the traditional, Jude falls victim to the unconventional as his life takes a dramatic turn. Forced to accept his circumstances, Jude experiences love, loss and unfulfilled expectations, which leave him questioning the world around him, just as it questions him. It is Hardy’s symbolic descriptions with satirical irony that I want you to note, as the story unfolds with many twists and turns.

Is he Obscure?

EXTRACT

“That’s the church,” said Jude.”Where I am going to be married?”"Yes.”Indeed!” she exclaimed with curiosity. “How I should like to go in and see what the spot is like where I am so soon to kneel and do it.”

Again he said to himself, “She does not realize what marriage means!”He passively acquiesced in her wish to go in, and they entered by the western door. The only person inside the gloomy building was a charwoman cleaning. Sue still held Jude’s arm, almost as if she loved him. Cruelly sweet, indeed, she had been to him that morning; but his thoughts of a penance in store for her were tempered by an ache:

… I can find no way

How a blow should fall, such as falls on men,

Nor prove too much for your womanhood!

They strolled undemonstratively up the nave towards the altar railing, which they stood against in silence, turning then and walking down the nave again, her hand still on his arm, precisely like a couple just married. The too suggestive incident, entirely of her making, nearly broke down Jude.

“I like to do things like this,” she said in the delicate voice of an epicure in emotions, which left no doubt that she spoke the truth.

“I know you do!” said Jude.

“They are interesting, because they have probably never been done before. I shall walk down the church like this with my husband in about two hours, shan’t I!”

“No doubt you will!”

The stark reality for the characters is dressed in the symbolic beauty, that dramatises every day life, but at the same time normalises it. It is this contradiction that you will find in Jude the Obscure , as you attach yourself to the protagonist who may or may not be ‘obscure’ to you. This novel will break your heart and mend it again, with the sense that: you must not care what others think of you, live your life, and do not waste it yearning after something you expected to happen. Go with the flow guys

What do you think of Jude?

SMH

A beautiful short film

Check this out this magical world where books can fly!

This is beautiful short film that we need to circulate! It sums up the magic of reading and books, so enjoy.

SMH

Child of God- Cormac McCarthy

Child of God- Are you?

Child of God written by one of America’s greatest writers (yes I think he is the bee’s knee’s) Cormac McCarthy, invites the reader to follow the actions of the notorious degenerate Lester Ballard. Published in 1973, the third of his novels, is rooted in the raw landscape of East Tennessee where the stereotype of the ‘white trash’ southerner comes into the forefront. Displaying problematic issues such as rape, incest and necrophilia, this isn’t a read for the faint hearted.

Plagued with a damaging past, protagonist Lester Ballard (such a powerful and memorable name!) is portrayed in an animalistic way as he roams the land that is as conflicted as he is. Convicted falsely of rape in a community where incest is just another every day norm, Lester is set free to do what he likes. What he does like to do though brings more terror into a place that already has loose morals. Another attraction/repulsion novel you say? Yes. It is Cormac McCarthy’s prose that I would like you to focus on though, as the language displays dark poetry that reveals and raw and wild beauty.

EXTRACT

‘They came like a caravan of carnival folk up through the swales of broomstraw and across the hill in the morning sun, the truck rocking and pitching in the ruts and the musicians on chairs in the truckbed teetering and tuning their instruments, the fat man with guitar grinning and gestering to others in a car behind and bending to give a note to the fiddler who turned a fiddlepeg and listened with a wrinkled face. They passed under flowering appletrees and passed a log crib chinked with orange mud and forded a branch and came in sight of an aged clapboard house that stood in the blue shade under the wall of the mountain. Beyond it stood a barn. One of the men in the truck bonged on the cab roof with his fist and the truck came to a halt. Cars and trucks came on through the weeds in the yard, people afoot.

To watch these things issuing from the otherwise mute pastoral morning is a man at the barn door. He is small, unclean, unshaven. He moves in the dry chaff among the dust and slats of sunlight with a constrained truculence. Saxon and Celtic bloods. A child of God much like yourself perhaps. Wasps pass through the laddered light from the barnslats in a succession of strobic moments, gold and trembling between black and black, like fireflies in the serried upper gloom. The man stands straddlelegged, has made in he dark humus a  darker pool wherin swirls a pale foam with bits of straw. Buttoning his jeans he moves along the barn wall, himself fiddlebacked with light, a petty annoyance flickering across the wallward eye.

Humour is mixed with the grotesque in this novel, as McCarthy submerges the reader in medias res, into a community where you may feel alien and uncomfortable. The juxtaposition of the humour about the southern families who are far from ‘normal’, with the unnerving realisation of their sad degeneracy, reveals a story that captures the essence of human behaviour in its extremes. Forced to accept some of McCarthy’s languange and words which are specific to the identity of the community, Child of God demands the reader’s attention that it deserves. Let it take you into the unpleasant environment, it is good to push your boundaries! Lester Ballard is described like a ‘child of God, much like yourself, perhaps’ connecting the reader to his humanity. Is he a child of God?

What do you think about this brilliant but disturbing novel?

SMH

American Psycho- Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho- Can you handle it?

Known as one of the most controversial books ever published, American Psycho by author Bret Easton Ellis places the reader into the depths of horror and the uncomfortable. Why read it? I hear you ask. Well, in my opinion, anything you may read after this- be it horror, sickening or just plain wrong- will not affect you as much. Still not convinced?

Published in 1991, the novel is set in New York in the 1980′s where protagonist Patrick Bateman, a high flying wealthy business man working in Wall Street, takes the reader into his world. It is a world where the American Dream dissatisfies him so much that he needs to find an escape. Unfortunately that escape is that of brutality murdering women, homeless people and his even his peers. Still not convinced? Well, the beauty of this novel (if there is any you may argue) is that it throws light on the world’s obsession with labels, products, objects and routine- all of which are under the ‘evil force of captalism’ that is being portrayed. Dominated by this ‘yuppie culture‘, the language is substantially made up of naming details such as what brand of suit he is wearing to what brand his juicer is. While this may feel a little tedious at times, I think Ellis is just driving home the banality of this type of culture. His possessions and commodities around him are valued the same way as the people he murders. Or does he murder them? Deep isn’t it?

It comes in many forms...

EXTRACT

‘…I decide to even up the score a little bit by showing everyone new business card. I pull it out of my gazelleskin wallet (Barney’s, $850) and slap it on the table, waiting for reactions.

“What’s that, a gram?” Price says, not apathetically.

“New card.” I try to act casual about it but I’m smiling proudly. “What do you think?”

“Whoa,” McDermott says, lifting it up, fingering the card, genuinely impressed. “Very nice. Take a look.” He hands it to Van Patten.

“Picked them up from the printer’s yesterday,” I mention.

“Cool coloring,” Van Patten says, studying the card closely.

“That’s bone,” I point out. “And the lettering is something called Silian Rail.”

“Silian Rail?” McDermott asks.

“Yeah. Not bad, huh?”

“It is very cool, Bateman,” Van Patten says guardedly, the jealous bastard, “but that’s nothing….” He pulls out his wallet and slaps a card next to an ashtray. “Look at this.”

We all lean over and inspect David’s card and Price quietly says, “That’s really nice.” A brief spasm of jealousy courses through me when I notice the elegance of the color and the classy type. I clench my fist as Van Patten says, smugly, “Eggshell with Romalian type…” He turns to me. “What do you think?”’ (American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis)

From Bateman’s witty, and at times darkly humorous comments, to the violent outbursts he expresses (I warn you that it is very violent) , American Psycho plunges you into a world where brands and labels dictate your actions and thoughts. Expect paragraphs at times to be disjointed and at times to be repulsive, but stick with it- just to say that you have braved it!

The novel was one that I studied in university, when looking at ‘the three C’s'- Capitalism, Consumerism and Commercialism. So bear this in mind and try to see that even though Bret Easton Ellis may take it too far at times, the reader is very much being subjected to and desensitised to the power of ‘the three C’s’ , very much like the violence and outrage you may become desensitised to. This is a read that will both attract and repulse you. The sort of read that will have your eyes glued to the page but also retracting in horror. The type of read that you don’t want to be reading on a bus. Which I did, and was reading one of the most graphic scenes, fearing the thoughts of the person behind me seeing what I was reading!

What are your views on one of the most highly debated novels?

SMH

The Beginning

As I study English Literature at university, I thought it would be a great idea to start a book review blog where I can review all that I come across! You can expect a range of genre’s being covered on this blog, so hopefully there will be something that you fancy to read, have read, or even disliked. I will inform, intrigue and spread the passion for books! So get following people!

SMH