On finally appreciating Wuthering Heights

I thought it was going to take ages and I would dislike it as much as ever, but I think I've just confirmed that I've been unfairly prejudiced. With a caveat that I think maybe this is a book you have to grow into. As a side note I do think I've matured as a reader and as someone who writes about books for a hobby.

WH is a strong candidate for the debate about whether you need to like the characters in order to appreciate a book. Heathcliffe and Cathy are both loathsome examples of humanity. You can appreciate their devotion to one another to some extent, but their love is eternally polluted by their own characters and backgrounds. I still can't understand why Stephanie Mayer thinks it's an example to emulate, but then she did write Twilight. 

I think I appreciated it more this time because I realised how ground-breaking it is and surprising that it appeared and was successful at the time. I'm not sure I've really read anything like it in its savagery, and this was certainly the first time I've realised that Heathcliffe poisoned his own son to gain inheritance and probably poisoned himself (he somehow doesn't seem the sort to pine away, even if he did realise that his revenge was empty and Cathy 2 and Hareton were going to marry). I think it's also interesting how it's narrated by Nelly, I'm not sure if she can be classed as an unreliable narrator or not. She certainly doesn't shy away from describing her feelings towards the various characters. Lockwood also works well as the bumbling outsider who doesn't understand the wild Yorkshire ways and has a creepy encounter with the ghost of Cathy. 

I'm glad I've read it and it does make me wonder what other books I've previously disliked might be more to my taste, particularly the two Austen novels on the list and Ivanhoe. I last read that at university and can't remember why I disliked it so much, but I want to put a bit of Walter Scott on the next reading list if I ever finish this one. I'm not quite sure where I'm going with it at the moment but I would like to get a bit further with the ones I'm currently reading, mainly W&P and The Moonstone.

 

Bittersweet by Miranda-Beverly Whittmore

Warning: This review is going to spoiler the hell out of the book. This is quite an odd book and it is difficult to interpret both the author's intentions and the motives of Mabel, the first person narrator. The whole book is from the point of view of the ugly duckling Mabel who becomes friends with the glamorous Ev and her family. As I grew more and more frustrated with the utterly self-obsessed Mabel I began to wonder if the author was portraying her as an unreliable narrator and if we are supposed to dislike her? She certainly turns out just as unlikable as any of the family she exposes. Everything she discovers is pointed out in VERY BIG LETTERS, like the readers are unable to draw their own conclusions. Birch is flagged up as a bad guy from half-way through the novel by his cruelty to the dog, from there he is only a tiptoe away from becoming a Nazi Art looting father of incestuous children.

Anyway, the first half increasingly reads like a YA novel about the relationships between the young people, and I got increasingly impatient for the mystery element, as all Mabel seemed to be doing was mooning over Ev and her brother Galway (was it me or did he just seemed to be sort of tagged randomly with Mabel? All of a sudden he showed up and fell in love with her even though they had nothing in common other than her creepy obsession with his family?). The second half veers into overblown Gothic with the discovery of the incest, art looting and the murder, up until the horrible end where Mabel marries rescues Lu, marries Galway and the bad guy drowns. It just seems a bit, well, preposterous that everything get tied up so neatly and Mable 'wins' becoming part of the Winslow family.
I think I judged this harshly because with all the Paradise Lost references and some of the techniques she used such as deliberately obscuring the time setting, I was expecting this to be a bit more literary. As it was, I found it quite frustrating to read. 

I know I am no writer, just a woman who has read a lot of books, but in my humble opinion here is what I would do with it:

• Make Birch a more rounded character, not just an evil villain with a mask of geniality. All he needed really was a waxed moustache to twirl.
• Cut down the number of incestuous children to one, two makes it seem a bit overblown. There could also be a bit more doubt about the incest so that it looks more like Mabel is being manipulated.
• Make Mabel and Galway have something in common other than the creepy family, even if it's a liking for flippin' Paradise Lost. 
• Yes, I know it has the potential for being a bit dull and boring, but all that financial stuff Mabel was going into also had the potential for being quite interesting, I'm sure the Winslow's could have profiteered more from Great Depressions and wars, it's just I had the feeling the author was nervous about writing about it. 
• Focus more on Tilde, who is a much more interesting character than Indo, the colourful mad aunt. Indo isn't really needed to prompt Mabel's investigations, Mabel doesn't need a motivation, she is obsessed with the family anyway and an incurably nosy voyeur who seems to be there whenever anybody has sex.
• Change the pacing a little so that the mystery is drawn out more over the first half and it's less about meeting the 50,000 members of the family and Ev's relationship with John. We get it, it's a large clan.
• Change the ending, I suppose I would have found it more satisfying if Mabel had walked away and encountered Galway/Ev/Tilde in the future, subsequently finding that they had changed the family around, rather than Mabel being the catalyst and choosing to ignore everything that had gone on if the family returned the art.  As it is, nobody in this book seems to develop as a character, especially Mabel.
• Don't spell everything out in minute detail, readers can usually draw their own conclusions.This was particularly bad after Mabel discovered that Ev and John were brother and sister. We knew as soon as Mabel remembered that John's mother's name was Pauline, we didn't need Mabel explaining, we only needed her reaction. The subtle elements of the story get overlooked if there are aspects of the narrative that are applied with a paint roller rather than a delicate brush. For instance, the use of Paradise Lost as a metaphor, good, but not so good if it's used too much. I liked the Turtle bit too, but Lu didn't need to become a Marine Biologist.  

Anyway, I hope I haven't been too nasty and given constructive criticism. As a non-writer I don't like slating books, it's just that I thought this book had unrealised potential.

Clarissa - first 20 Letters...

...Or 5%. Although no-one on the Goodreads forum has commented yet, and I am kind of too shy to make the first move! I admit, this is not the easiest book to get into and you can't really read it quickly, but once you get into it, it seems to become easier and the archaic language makes a bit more sense.

Anyway, Clarissa is currently under a massive amount of pressure from her money-grabbing family to marry the odious Mr. Solmes, her only comfort being her clandestine letters to Miss Howe describing her treatment and the appalling way her siblings are behaving. Our heroine is trying to be as reasonable as possible, but to no avail. Mr. Solmes has cunningly promised either an exchange of estates with James (Clarissa's brother) or that he will buying the northern estate, increasing the family's land. Her mother has been roped into persuading her, and Clarissa hoped to bring her mother over to her way of thinking, but alas, as Clarissa tells her, she has the will of her father's relations rather than her mother. Her mother married for love, but she has very little will of her own, as she says herself, although her husband is a good man 'he will not be controuled [sic]; nor yet persuaded.' She lives in a state where she has to accede to his every whim. Surely, this is no recommendation to Clarissa to wed? She evidently wants to avoid her mother's example, as she puts it, 'those who will bear much, shall have much to bear', that through her passivity her mother is allowing her father's tyranny, and in extension, the unchecked, strong wills of her other children as well. Clarissa believes that as she is in the right to refuse Solmes, she is not being stubborn. She offers to either not marry at all (lamenting that as the family are not Catholic, she had no recourse to entering a nunnery), or only marry with her parent's consent. However, her pleas fall on deaf ears and there seems to be little she can do to improve her situation or avoid marrying Solmes. 

The reader really feels for her here in the way that her family seem to treat her as a bargaining chip rather than a person with feelings. She is completely disgusted with Solmes and finds his physical appearance and character repugnant. I guess some of the original people reading it would probably side with her parents though, and find it surprising that someone who is portrayed as being so obedient should be so against doing what her parents want. Her parents seem to believe that she is rejecting Solmes out of some sort of crush on Lovelace and that by forcing her into marriage quickly she will be out of the way of the man that James hates.

 

Night Film by Marsha Pessl

I was not sure how to review this. I think if you ignore its literary pretensions, the over-use of italics, the rambling, cheesy ending, and the poor editing and proofreading, what you are left with is quite an entertaining (if bonkers) novel. Prepare yourself for a rollercoaster ride where you will question your grip on reality as you encounter documentary evidence relating to the mysterious film director Cordova and his family. It can be eerie at times and I thought the way that Pessl blended fiction with reality was quite clever at times. I also liked the use of the mocked-up webpages and other documentary evidence. It definitely could have done with more work on the writing, however.
I admit, I enjoyed reading some of the awful reviews it got (people mostly seemed to love it or loathe it) and I agreed that the protagonist didn't really need his own Scooby gang to join in the investigation, as much as they might have added colour and assisted a man who seemed to be mostly obsessed with the clothes the people he encountered were wearing. It doesn't really work as an investigation type novel though, as Scott is a poor investigative journalist whose main tactic seems to be bribe as many people as you can, and if the author can't think of how he might get some information, one of the Scoobies can always supply it for him.

What fresh lunacy is this?!

So, having put the dreaded Proust on hold for the moment due to the weight of book and lack of time, and being bogged down by the penultimate Barchester chronicle as well as numerous other rather large volumes, I have gone and joined a reading challenge group on Goodreads and committed myself to a six month reading of the dreaded Clarissa. It's a bit naughty, but I was hoping that I would be able to not only get through this behemoth, but also discuss it with some other readers. I'm not sure anybody has actually started it yet, but so far it's not going too badly. I'm a aiming for about five per cent per week so that I can hopefully read it in about five months and I'm reading it on the Kindle fire, which somehow makes it less intimidating. Only thing is, I have a free edition so I miss the footnotes of the paperback edition I have previously tried to read. Still, I can always refer to the other edition, and there is no danger of the spine breaking as it is prone to do on the paperback.
I think Clarissa is  quite a difficult book to judge by modern standards, as the age makes some of it seem very distant to the way people think and behave and read novels. From studying Defoe and Richardson's other novel, Pamela I know that the novel as a form was just taking off and was generally frowned upon for being frivolous and untrue. Writers tried to make it seem as true to life as possible and containing a strong moral message. The messages of Clarissa are that a rake cannot be reformed by marriage and that parents should not treat their children too harshly, I imagine this  would have been quite a controversial proposition for parents of the period. 
It's an understandably difficult book to read, not just in terms of the length but also the way it's written in the epistolary form. So far, I've found that this does give the narrative a sense of urgency, as the letters are written immediately after the events, often the in the evening after the day's events have unfolded. Clarissa is a bit of a contradictory character in that although she is a dutiful, obedient daughter she is dead set against the suitor that her parents have chosen. In fact, there is a sense that Mr. Solmes is not really the person that her parents would have chosen, the family is seemingly controlled by her bachelor uncles, who are concerned with the financial prosperity that a match would bring, and, surprisingly by the older children who act out of jealousy of Clarissa's inheritance from her grandfather, and a hatred for Mr. Lovelace, Arabella's former suitor who briefly tries to switch courting Clarissa (at least this is how Clarissa herself reads the motives of her siblings). She writes about Lovelace, but not as if she considers him a suitor, as he has a bit of a reputation. Mr. Solmes on the other hand, she immediately abhors. 
Mr. Lovelace is another rather contradictory character, although he is considered a rake from the start, Clarissa describes how he gives money to a family in need. He may be putting on a face for the family, but it does serve to slightly warm him towards Clarissa, and she sees him a few times when she is visiting her friend Miss Howe. Miss Howe is a great character, the kind of naughty best friend who contrasts nicely with Clarissa's virtuousness.
Anyway, 3% in and although I know where the plot is going (I saw the TV series years ago and did modules in uni that at least alluded to it, although no-one was brave enough or daft enough to use it as a set book, Pamela was bad enough!), I still think I will be glad to read it.

Brighton Rock by Graham Greene (spoilers)

This was the first Greene novel I’ve read and certainly won’t be the last. I loved the lyricism of the writing, the plot was gripping and the characters were really well written.  The story is about Pinkie, a young gang leader who tires to seduce and marry a young girl whom he fears will give away his alibi, pursued by Ida, who investigates him and tries to prevent him from marrying Rose.  It’s one of those books I would like to re-read or even study in a bit more depth, but at the same time I found it quite hard writing this review, even though I felt so enthusiastic about it. 

Love this image (link)

 Pinkie is a disturbing anti-hero, yet it is still possible for the reader to feel some sort of sympathy for him given his background and experiences and the fact that everything he tries to do fails. He can be completely cold and feels only repulsion for Rose because of witnessing his parent’s sexual intercourse. He has some twisted ideas about Roman Catholicism, believing that it doesn’t matter how evil he behaves in life, he can still be saved if he repents at the point of death ‘betwixt the stirrup and the ground’. He sees his marriage as a mortal sin, and although he is completely horrified by the idea of sex, he refuses to get married in church as he feels that it will not be a proper wedding if they get married in a registry office. 

Rose could be described as a passive, innocent character in the way that she falls under Pinkie’s attempt to seduce her, but in other ways she seems to realise that she has some power over him and wilfully ignores the signs that he is disgusted by her. There is a sense that she is trying to get away from her parents and takes the only way out that she can find, by marrying the first man who asks her. There is quite a disturbing passage in the book where Pinkie, who needs her parent’s consent because they are both underage, buys her off her parents who don’t seem to care very much about her. He believes that he is taking her in, but she seems to know very well what is happening and why he suddenly pays her attention. She forces him to make a recording for her of his voice so that she can keep it for later, one of the tragic elements of the novel is that she doesn’t realise that although he tells her that he has recorded a loving message, he has really recorded a horrible message for her which she will presumably listen to after his death. 

Ida, is an appealing investigator and almost the complete opposite of Pinkie. Whereas Rose and Pinkie are Roam Catholic, Ida has no real faith, just a belief in the power of ‘Right’ and ‘Wrong’ and a belief in life after death in that she perform séances. She is a sensual woman who enjoys sex, likes a drink and enjoys her food, whereas Pinkie has few pleasures.  

Brighton is vividly described, acting as an appropriately sleazy backdrop to the story, representing heaven and hell.

Pinkie falls over the cliff in the course of trying to escape the police, having failed to convince Rose to commit suicide. It is a bleak ending; Rose seeks absolution from a priest and convinces herself that she has salvaged something from her love for Pinkie through her pregnancy and the love she believes he has confessed on the recording, the reader knows that she has deluded herself. It is left to the reader to fill in the blanks –Is Rose really pregnant? What will happen to her when she listens to the recording?

Swann’s Way Part 6 – The novel’s close

Ivan Kramskoy painting, Bois de Boulangne

The final part seemed quite short compared to some of the parts I’ve written about. It’s at this point that I began to truly appreciate Proust’s mastery in the way that he completes the novel bringing everything together. I can see some of the themes and the motifs that he has used more clearly here, particularly how each of the characters play different roles throughout the novel, and how Swann’s experience is reflected by that of the narrator. 

The point of view is returned to the narrator who is a young man, on the cusp of adulthood. He has returned to Paris where he lives with his parents and Francois. Although he is not exactly a perfect specimen of manhood, he seems a little more confident and dreams of travelling away from Combrey. Combrey is an important location in the novel which represents different things, for example, it represents a place of security to Swann, a place where he can go to where he can recover from his relationship with Odette, and to the narrator I think it represents his childhood which he is slowly leaving behind him. 

Part of this is the proposed travel plans. The theme of duality is present here in the way that the narrator separates the way he imagines places from the places themselves, pointing out that they are completely different. He opens the chapter describing a room that he has visited in Balbec sometime in the past, but it is not at the moment he is describing, as he is prevented from travelling by an illness and is forced to confine himself to wandering around the Champs-Elysees with Francoise.

Balbec is associated in his mind with storms. Nature is another reoccurring motif in this chapter, and is associated with sex and with the transition into adulthood. The narrator longs to witness the storms as an example of something real and genuine as opposed to created by man. Legradin further improves if by describing its historical attraction, which the narrator asks Swann about. The imagery of fisherman living as they had always lived and of the Gothic church that Swann describes further sparks his imagination, and he day-dreams about taking the train to see Balbec. 

His desire is replaced when his parent offer to take him to Italy. Whereas Balbec is associated with storms, Italy is associated with sunshine and flowers (particularly lilies), and with architecture. The names take on a significance which is not related to how the places that he later visit really are. However, he is too ill to be able to travel, or to be able to do anything that excites him such as going to the theatre. He can only walk around the Champs-Elysee, a place which he cannot imagine anything about. 

On one of his visits he encounters Gilberte, Swann’s daughter. He immediately begins to obsess over her, and tries to meet her at every opportunity. She is not that attached to him at first, it is like she is an Odette in training in the way that his obsession and her indifference mirrors Swan and Odette’s romance. The narrator is already the type of person to obsess over people (hence his obsession with his mother kissing him in the night), now he transfers it to Gilberte. She meets a mysterious older woman who asks about her mother and sits reading the newspaper watching her grandchildren. The woman re-occurs several times in the narrative.

Gilberte doesn’t tell the narrator that she loves him, much to his despair. In fact, she compares him with other boys and can be cold towards him. He finds that the picture he has in his head of her is different to the way she really is. She buys him a marble the colour of her eyes to remind him of her, as well as an out-of-print pamphlet. He experiences a kind of doubling; there is a sense of multiple Gilbertes representing different things.

The narrator encounters her father, who is no longer friendly with “Marcel’s” parents. Whilst Swann is welcome at Combrey, I think his parents fear that inviting him will lead to his wife joining him, and besides, he has a bad reputation in Paris. He is fascinated by M. Swann, who doesn’t really recognise him (however, the narrator is quite embarrassed by his former behaviour in trying to force his mother to come up to see him).

He convinces himself that Gilberte is going to write a letter to him confessing her love and why she can’t tell him, she has to keep it a secret. Like Swann, he dreams of a woman who can be beside him, helping him with his work. He tries to get his parents to talk about Swann and particularly Gilberte’s friend, the mysterious lady. He has assumed that she is upper class (‘…she must at least me an Ambassador’s widow, if not actually a Highness’ p390) but his mother tells him that’s Mme. Blatin, a widow of a bailiff, and his mother had encountered her at his gymnastic lessons, where she kept bothering his mother. “She is, really, a horrible woman, frightfully vulgar, and besides, she is always creating awkward situations.” (ibid). His parents are unimpressed with his attempts to emulate Swann and lack of interest in anything but Swann, and he also becomes obsessed with Mme. Swann.

He witnesses the effects that her notoriety has on her in the way that she avoids speaking to anyone in the street although many men recognise her. She dresses too expensively, and behaves like she thinks she’s the queen, which draws attention to her. She has different faces for different men. She seems to want to be noticed, but doesn’t want to recognise it. People talk about her. 

His burgeoning sexuality is associated with his spying on Odette in the Bois de Boulogne, which in turn is associated with the jungle and other types of wild foliage such as trees and large red flowers. The trees represent women, hence the narrator’s association with the trees and the dryad. There is also something mysterious and sensual about the trees. He later remembers the park and the splendour of the carriages and the way that people dressed, comparing it unfavourable with the modern dress and motor cars. Like Swann, he longs to share a cup of tea with a sympathetic woman, but the houses that he remembers longing to visit have gone. 

The way that the novel concludes is perfect in its symmetry as the older narrator remembers how his younger self obsessed over Odette/Gilberte (I think that these two characters are doubled, as is the young narrator and Swann).

Swann’s Way Part 5 – Another unfortunate party

So, I left off with Swann still obsessing over Odette despite the Verdurins best efforts to separate them. She’s busy not only completely taking him for granted but also having affairs with other men. Swann stops meeting her at the Verdurin’s, now that the first flush of love is over he remembers that he hates them to the point of comparing their parties to the Dante’s last circle of hell. In return, Mme Verdurin thinks he’s ‘”too deadly for words, a stupid, ill-bred boor”’.  

He gets angry with her for having no taste and for lying to him. She puts on weight and grows less attractive but he loves her even more. She begins to go off on some little trips with the Verdurins where they try to persuade her to stay overnight and she refuses to send any messages to Swann, evidently attempting to stop him stalking her. Swann can only just resist from following her, fearing that she will be angry about it, whereas she doesn’t think of him at all. He has a kind of a crisis about it and worries that everything she says is a lie. He hires a private investigator to look into someone he considers a rival, but he only discovers her dead uncle.

Proust returns to the motif of the senses provoking emotion, Odette is making orangeade which causes him to lose his suspicions of her (p289), it’s as if he can only trust her when he is in her presence, shortly after they are separated he begins to torture himself imagining her being with Forcheville. He loves her, but hates her at the same time. She is like a morphine addiction or consumption, just as Swann thinks he is breaking the habit or being cured he succumbs again (p298). 

Swann asks his friend Adolphe to intercede on his behalf, and it is here we see how cleverly Proust has tied the novel together, as Adolphe is the narrator’s great uncle Adolphe and the narrator has already encountered Odette as his mistress. Adolphe is not that helpful and Odette tells Swann later on that he tried to rape her. Adolphe certainly has come off quite badly so far in the novel, I am not sure here whether Odette is telling the truth or not, she does have motivation to manipulate, lie and generally prevent Swann from finding out what’s going on. He finds out that she has led a ‘gay’ life in Nice (prostitution) and worries that she might have done it out of a ‘capricious instinct’ which will led her into it again. He is not worried about her reputation. She is extremely mysterious about what she does when she is away from him. She is quite dismissive towards him, with little respect and it’s quite tragic how obsessed he is still with her.

He is persuaded by the Baron de Charlus to attend a horrible society party given by the Marquise de Saint-Euverte. He does not intend to go to the musical evening, but Charlus convinces him that it will not be as boring as he expects and he wants Charlus to intercede with Odette on his behalf. 

Although the narrator can be quite snobbish at times, Swann is not affected by mixing with people of different classes. Proust has an unerring eye for the foibles of society and wonderfully describes how the contemptuous sneering footmen treat his hat like it is some sort of holy relic whilst treating him as if he’s nothing. Some of the guests are portrayed as being ugly and deformed, and not many of them are all that upper-class. The Marquise de Gallardon claims kinship with the Guermantes family and basks in underserved reflected glory, name-dropping at every occasion. But the Princesse de Laumes, her young cousin, doesn’t recognise her or invite her anywhere so she deceives herself that she doesn’t want to be invited in case she meets the Princesse Mathilde there. However, in this case the cousin turns up. The Princesse de Laumes behaves in a really snobbish but also awkward way. She arrives ‘with her arms pressed close to her sides, even where there was no crowd to be squeezed through, no one attempting to get past her; staying purposely at the back with the air of being in her proper place, like a kind who stands in the waiting procession at the doors of a theatre where the management have been warned of his coming;’ (p318). She is so far back she can’t see properly, and refuses to pretend that she likes the music in a really obvious way like the woman next to her, and then starts to feel really unsure of herself like she should pretend. The music is a little old-fashioned anyway, and some of the audience feel bad for enjoying it (including de Laumes). 

Gallardon rushes towards de Laumes, simultaneously attempting to remain unfriendly and distant towards her whilst inviting her over. De Laumes doesn’t ‘do’ society or going out, however, so turns her down. Gallardon is rude and anti-Semitic towards Swann, but de Laumes is friends with Swann so shuts up Gallardon by pointing out that Swann has never turned up to her house despite the social climber inviting him numerous times.

I think this is a reminder to the reader that Swann is still considered to be an outsider by certain members of society, and has always been considered an outsider. He hasn’t really cared about the opinions of society, hence his affairs with women. This doesn’t matter that much to the highest echelons of society that he moves in, de Laumes still considers herself a friend of his, but it does matter to the social climbers who are secretly unsure of their own position in society. So far, the narrator has confined himself mainly to the social climbers, the awfulness of society parties is perfectly captured, along with the humour inherent in the characters that attend. 

There is a sense that the narrator is being rather snobbish towards them, but this is tempered by the way that De Laumes is not spared either, along with her awkward way in society she has a rather unfortunate marriage to her cousin, who has been continually unfaithful to her since she married him. 

Mme de Cambremer is admired, despite almost interrupting the piano recital. I have a feeling that she might be an important character later on by the way that the narrator ensures that she is continually mentioned, even though she doesn’t have that big a role in the party itself. Des Laumes doesn’t seem to have anything that good to say about her, however, nor about the Iénas, her husband’s friends, who have some old-fashioned furniture. She seems to be lashing out a little because her husband is probably having an affair with the Princesse d’Iéna, but the guests dismiss what she says as ‘the wit of the Guermantes’ (p325).

Swann is very fond of de Laumes, partly because she reminds him of Guermantes, which is close to Combrey. He is a little flirtatious to her, but I think it’s more in a friendly, gallant way than anything else. She finds him witty and finds his compliments amusing. She asks him about Mme de Cambremer, Swann tells her that she was a Legradin who originally came from Combrey. Although they don’t talk of Odette, he feels comforted by her anyway. 

The music also reminds him of Odette and provokes memories of happier times; sights, smells and sensations. The overwhelming feelings cause him to realise that he has no hope with her: ‘…Swann could distinguish, standing, motionless, before that scene of happiness in which it lived again, a wretched figure which filled him with such pity, because he did not at first recognise who it was, that he must lower his head, lest anyone should observe that his eyes were filled with tears. It was himself.’ (p338). Vinteuil’s sonata marks the beginning of his romance and the end. 

Whenever she is kind to him, instead of seeing it as a sign of a renewed affection he compares it to the kind of sensation a person feels who is nursing a friend suffering from a terminal illness and the friend has a kind of temporary relapse, although the person still realises that the friend is still going to die. He does not have the courage to end it himself. 

He dreams of going away on a train, leaving behind a young man on the platform whom he is trying to convince to go away with him. The young man reoccurs later in the narrative, where it is revealed that he is an aspect of Swann himself. Here, he represents the part of Swann who is happily in love with Odette, a part which Swann is trying to hold on to but has to reluctantly leave behind.  His relationship with her is a kind of gender reversal in that although he started off being the one who had all the power, his obsession with her somewhat emasculates him. She ends up with all the power, he submits to her and tries to get his friends to ‘put in a good word’ with her (which doesn’t work anyway). 

She plans to leave for Egypt with Forcheville, he is afraid to question her about whether she is his mistress in case she becomes angry. He also receives a letter anonymously saying that she had been the mistress of a number of men, including Forcheville, a number of women, and that she frequents ‘houses of ill-fame’. He is not that upset by the contents of the letter, just upset that someone who evidently knows him quite well would write an anonymous letter to him. It causes him to suspect all his close friends, including servants and the narrator’s grandfather, but doesn’t believe the letter.

He does, however, start to question Odette’s relationship with Mme. Verdurin, and he suspects that they had a lesbian affair. He questions her, but she denies it, eventually admitting that she is lying and she did have a relationship with a woman, something which he considers ‘evil’ (p345) and compares to some sort of disease he needs to prevent. He still loves her: ‘this Odette, from whom all this evil sprang, was no less dear to him, was, on the contrary, more precious, as if, in proportion as his sufferings increased at the same time the price of the sedative, of the antidote which this woman alone possessed.’ She tries to dismiss it, but he realises that she could’ve been lying all along. He goes to brothels to try to find out something about her.

She goes off on a cruise with the Verdurins which takes far longer than expected; meanwhile, Swann starts to extricate himself from her. However, he meets Mme Cottard who tells him that Odette was always talking about him on the cruise. Mme Cottard seems to try to re-awake his feelings of love for her, but he has decided not to see her again. 

A few weeks later he dreams of walking along the coast at twilight with Mme Verdurin, Dr. Cottard, a young man in a Fez, the painter, Odette, Napoleon III and the narrator’s grandfather (p360). He can feel the spray from the waves on his face and Odette tells him to wipe it off, but he feels ‘confused and helpless’ by her presence and is wearing his nightshirt. Mme Verdurin grows a bigger nose and a moustache; Odette loves him so much she is on the verge of tears but looks at her watch and decides she must go. He is unable to follow and feels that he hates her. They part and the painter tells him that Napoleon III has gone after Odette, which makes the young man cry. Dream Swann comforts him and he realises that the man in the fez is himself. Napoleon III is Forcheville. He has a vision of destruction, hearing the thunder of waves and the beating of his own heart, feeling sick and in pain, then encounters a ‘dreadfully burned peasant’ (p362) who tells him to ask Charlus about Odette and her friend who started the fire, then he wakes up.

Eric C. Hicks (‘Swann’s Dream and the World of Sleep’, Yale French Studies No. 34, Proust (1965), pp. 106-116) analyses Swann’s dream, linking the word éclaboussure meaning to ‘splatter’ (which Proust has used to describe the freezing spray) but also related to someone’s name being smeared and ‘to flaunt one’s magnificence (or wealth) in another’s face’. This is linked to Swann’s disgrace, along with Mme. Verdurin’s transformation linked to her reaction to something Forcheville has said about Swann and her general hostility to Swann (I also interpreted this as Swann’s subconscious reaction to discovering that Odette and Mme. Verdurin had had an affair, he feels emasculated). Mme Verdurin also prevents Swann from challenging Odette and her leaving followed by Napoleon III is reminiscent of her leaving in Forcheville’s carriage (Napoleon III was a notorious womanizer). As the man in the fez is a representation of a previous incarnation of Swann (Swann who loves Odette and is probably going to go with her to Egypt), the Odette who is about to cry and whom dream Swann feels he wants to carry off with him, is the previous incarnation of Odette who was trying to get Swann to love her (Swann notes that she looks sad when she tries to attract other lovers). Duality is a reoccurring motif throughout the dream, with the duality of Swann, Odette and Napoleon and Swann’s sensation that he can reproduce himself, as is binary opposition - light/dark, low/high, love/hate, up/down, and disorientating sensations such as the feeling of holding a strange hand and of being able to hear his own heart beating. I think the horribly burned peasant represents the destructiveness of Odette and Forcheville’s affair, Hicks’s theory is that the peasant is yet another part of past Swann.

Swann decides to go to Combrey to see Mme de Cambremer. He realises that he has misrepresented her to himself and wasted time and agony on her. His love for her is over.

Run by Ann Patchett (spoilers)

I am finding this novel quite hard to review. I generally enjoyed it, it was a quite gentle read with some good characters and plot twists, and I love Patchett’s writing style, but at the same time I found myself feeling quite dissatisfied with a few aspects, maybe this was because I enjoyed State of Wonder so much and found this paler in comparison.

The novel explores family relationships between Bernard Doyle and his three sons (Sullivan, who is his biological son and his two adopted sons Tip and Teddy) and Tennessee and her daughter Kenya, and what happens when Tennessee and Tip are involved in an accident. Although Tip, Teddy, Tennessee and Kenya are black, I would argue that the novel doesn’t go into race issues in any depth. The fact that Tennessee and Kenya live in a housing project and she is too poor to afford medical insurance is glossed over, as are Bernard’s previous political aspirations and life as a mayor. This would have been interesting to explore in more depth. 

 I can’t say that I felt particularly engaged with the characters, perhaps this was due to the number which meant that their stories were spread quite thin.   I agree with Leah Hagen Cohen’s  remark in her review in the New York Times suggesting that the characters ‘ultimately feel less real than symbolic, as wooden as the Virgin’s statue’ (September 30^th 2007). The problem seems to be that there is a sense that they are defined by few characteristics, particularly ‘sweet’ Teddy and ‘clever’ Tip. Father Sullivan and his namesake, Sullivan are more interesting characters in comparison, but again, Father Sullivan’s apparent healing of two women is not really explored, it’s sometimes as if she’s thrown everything in but not really found time to explore it or tie it together. 

The final issue was the clunky anaesthesia-induced reunion of Tennessee and her friend Tennessee Alice Moser. I understand why she did it (to reveal a secret to the reader that the rest of the characters weren’t supposed to ever learn), but I found it a bit of a cheesy plot device.

 In comparison, I thought the motif of the statue of the Virgin Mary was handled nicely and the ending was quite satisfying; it gave the novel a nice kind of symmetry and a sense of progression. Overall, I liked the plot as well.  I feel as if I’ve mostly written about the negative aspects, even though I didn’t feel that negatively towards it when I was reading it. Overall, it’s an uplifting, entertaining book, and I am probably judging it too harshly for what it isn’t rather than what it is. 

References

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/books/review/Cohen-t.html