The Mayor of Casterbridge

I'm trying to keep some semblance of normalcy in my life, and blogging about books is one of those things that has been part of my life for over ten years now, so onward.

I finally got around to reading The Mayor of Casterbridge, by Thomas Hardy. It was on my Back to the Classics list for last year and the one book I didn't read in the challenge. Thankfully, the Goodread group The Victorians read it in March, which was incentive enough for me to dive in.

Interestingly, I really liked the book, and didn't find it as heartrending as I expected. The main character, Michael Henchard, was not sympathetic enough for me to feel much real angst at his spiral into tragedy. When it comes to tragic flaws, his is clearly being impulsive, acting before thinking and then regretting his actions almost immediately afterwards. And, you cannot simply blame his plight on drunkenness. Even when cold sober, he is foolishly rash.

Near the end of the book, it struck me that the story was really that of two mayors of Casterbridge, and as I read on it fell into place that this was basically an archetypal story, that of the new young king challenging and defeating the old king. A tale as old as time, as old as Oedipus.

Donald Farfrae is, of course, the young king, who is young, buoyant, handsome, clever, and at first Michael embraces him as a son. But then the prince outstrips the king, and the people clamor for him, and he steals the old king's woman. Michael is so threatened by Donald that he fights him, and then slinks away to the woods to die.

It is beautifully written--you can tell that Hardy saw that his true calling was to be a poet. I love his turn of phrase, the symmetry of his storytelling.

Here is one of my favorite little passages, when Michael seeks out a soothsayer to predict the weather:

“By the sun, moon, and stars, by the clouds, the winds, the trees, and grass, the candle-flame and swallows, the smell of the herbs; likewise by the cats' eyes, the ravens, the leeches, the spiders, and the dungmixen, the last fortnight in August will be—rain and tempest."

I'm not quite sure why I dreaded reading this so much. Despite the tragedy of the story, I enjoyed it immensely. It gave me much to think about, and the writing really is first rate.

For the Back to the Classics Challenge - 2020, this is for the category Classic with a Place in the Title.

And, drum roll please, this completes the 50-book Classics Challenge that I started back in 2013. I didn't complete the challenge in 5 years, but that's life! I'm not sure I want to sign up for another 50 new classics. Right now I feel the urge to reread classics I love or read so long ago they'll be like new.

Stay safe and healthy, all my book-loving friends.

Stay calm, and read on.

Classics Challenge Completed

I finished Romola by George Eliot this afternoon, which means I completed my Classics Challenge for 2012.

To recap, here are the books that constituted my challenge and my links to their reviews:

Silas Marner - George Eliot

This was my second time reading this book, and I loved it and appreciated it so much more the second time through.  A truly lovely tale of how love can redeem a lost soul.

Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
Overall disappointing, but it was an early work of Steinbeck's and prefigured my favorite, Cannery Row, in several significant ways.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes - Robert Louis Stevenson
An interesting travel memoir, and another early work by a classic writer.  Walking memoirs evolved into one of my reading themes this year, and so this book fit into both classics and walking.

Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
I did end up liking Barchester Towers more than The Warden, the first in the series, which I didn't dislike but I found the discussion of church politics in mid-19th century England to be a bit mind-numbing.  I thought the narrative voice to be calmer and less intrusive than in The Warden also.  Also, I became acquainted with two marvelously drawn characters, Mrs. Proudie and Mr. Slope.

Romola - George Eliot
Wow, this book has been a roller-coaster.  I thought I would loathe it based on the first few chapters, but then it got interesting and readable.  Halfway through, I was wondering why it was titled Romola as it really seemed more about Romola's husband, Tito, but then the focus shifted and I came to understand why it was titled as it was.  Romola is definitely cut from the same cloth as Dorothea Brooke, from Eliot's Middlemarch, one of my all-time favorite heroines, but in the end I found her a bit too saintly to be a really interesting character. Tito, on the other hand, was fascinating.  I'm now listening to a Great Courses lecture series on the Italian Renaissance to help me understand what was going on in the novel!

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
After a long hiatus from Dickens, an estrangement really, I decided to make up with the great egotist and read a book whose mini-series I have long wanted to watch. I enjoyed the book and mini-series very much, and was thrilled to discover the Little Dorrit and her family visited Venice, which happened to be another of my reading threads for 2012.

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
In my opinion, one of the greatest American novels ever written.  I came to it prejudiced against it, expecting it to be cloying, pedantic, and self-righteous. It was none of those, and really helped me understand the forces that led to the American Civil War, which happens to be another reading thread for 2012.  If you haven't read this wonderful book, I urge you to do so.  Should be on every high school reading list along with To Kill a Mockingbird.

My thanks to Katherine Cox for hosting this Classics Challenge and providing such wonderful monthly prompts.  I really enjoyed reading everyone else's classics reviews, and I look forward to another year of great classics reading and rereading.  Working on my 2013 list now!

Quotes from Uncle Tom's Cabin

This month's Classics Challenge is about picking a favorite quote from a classic and talking about it.

As mentioned in my previous post on Uncle Tom's Cabin, St. Clare Augustine is my favorite character.  The following quote is from the section of the book in which he tells his cousin, Miss Ophelia, how he came to be the cynic that he is.  Blessed with a sensitive soul, he lost the woman he loved, married one he didn't, and came to regret the life of inaction that he's been leading.  Tormented by the injustice he sees in his society,  he is unable to muster the energy to try to reform it.

Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in the story that is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us. There is a most busy and important round of eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, buying, selling, talking, reading, and all that makes up what is commonly called living...

After St. Clare's heart was broken, he went through the motions of living--eating, drinking, dressing, walking, visiting, etc.--but his spirit died and even though he was blessed with a wonderful angel of a daughter, Eva, who is the bright and shining example of how one can do good in the world and make a difference regardless of age or circumstances, St. Clare chose to live as an inactive cynic.  In a way, St. Clare's inaction is one of of the true crimes of the book--he neglected to act promptly and free Tom and his other slaves as Eva had requested as her dying wish and doomed him to his fate. 

If only he had listened to Miss Ophelia...

"But I want it done now," said Miss Ophelia.


"What's your hurry?"

"Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia. "Come, now, here's paper, pen, and ink; just write a paper."

Truly, "now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in." For Stowe, a lifelong activist who wrote a book that changed the world, this quote would work as her epitaph.

Classics Challenge: We Have Always Lived in the Castle

I've been meaning to write about Shirley Jackson's 20th century classic, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, for a couple of months now, and this month's topic around book covers from November's Autumn's Classic Challenge is all the incentive I needed.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a horror story, not a genre I read much, but it's gotten such rave reviews from fellow bloggers whose opinions I trust that I had to give it a try.

And it's cover? Awesome.

At least I think the cover of the Penguin Classics edition I have is awesome. It's sort of a cross between an Edward Gorey illustration for PBS Mystery and the woodcut illustrations of Fritz Eichenberg that grace my favorite editions of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. It is perfect for this modern gothic tale, and absolutely captures the essence and themes of the novel. The illustrator is Thomas Ott, and I don't think Penguin could have picked a better artist to do the cover of this oh so creepy book.

Front and center we have an image of the novel's extremely unreliable narrator, Merricat, a young teenaged girl, holding her cat and facing the world grimly. Her big staring eyes convey her innocence, vulnerability, and that underlying psychosis she dances around so deftly.

Behind her is her sister Constance, which is apt because throughout the story Merricat continually conveys the impression that she is shielding Constance from the world. However, it's not clear from the cover whether Constance is hiding behind Merricat or is supporting her. Her hands on Merricat's shoulders have a maternal feel that makes the cover reflect the ambiguities of the story Merricat tells and the reality that the reader eventually pieces together.

Behind Merricat and Constance, in the background, are the villagers who shun them after the "accident" that kills the rest of their family and who eventually storm their castle. True to the book, they display a range of emotions from shock and horror to mockery or what might even be interpreted as friendliness.

To be honest, I didn't love the book. I'm glad I read it, and I found it morbidly interesting and the unreliability of the narrator to be fascinating, but I felt a great sense of relief when I finished it and could put it safely back on the shelf. It wasn't a comfortable read, but I admire Jackson's writing tremendously. She really is the queen of modern gothic--her short story, The Lottery, is absolutely chilling and is a masterpiece of American fiction as is We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

Classics Challenge: Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens

I'm only on page 82 (just finished chapter 6) of Little Dorrit, and I've only just met the title character of the book, and so I cannot go with the obvious selection for character analysis in this month's Classics Challenge prompt. Katherine of November's Autumn, host of the Classics Challenge, challenged participants in February to write a blog post about a character we find interesting.

At this stage in the novel, having but 8% of the novel read (by my Goodreads calculator), I'm going to have to go with Affery Flintwinch. She is introduced first in chapter 3 as a "cracked voice" coming "out of the dimness" to greet Arthur Clennam when he has returned home and is meeting with his mother for the first time in years. Affery is an old woman and an old servant of the family--she is described as a "tall hard-favored sinewy old woman, who in her youth might have enlisted in the Foot Guards without much fear of discovery," but who retreats in fear from her husband, a "little keen-eyed crab-like old man."

She tells Arthur that her husband and Mrs. Clennam decided she should marry him because it wouldn't be appropriate for the two to remain as the only servants to a bedridden woman if they weren't married. So she did--no courting, not much of a wedding, and a marriage of convenience to a man she fears. Poor Affery.

The next chapter recounts a scene in which she is sleeping, hears a noise and gets up to investigate, and sees her husband talking with someone in a stealthy way. When Mr. Flintwinch sees that his wife has seen him, he goes after her, choking her and telling her that what she saw was a dream. She is so afraid of him that she doesn't question his assessment of the situation.

I chose Affery because I anticipate her being a literary Fool--that is, a character who speaks the truth and provides a moral compass for the reader and other characters if they are wise enough to see and hear the wisdom in her ramblings. Miss Bates in Austen's Emma is such a Fool, and I'm wondering if Affery is another such character. Dickens used her to show the reader that Mr. Flintwinch is involved in some shady dealings and he will willingly resort to violence to quiet anyone whom he sees as a threat--but he does this in an oblique way. The narrator doesn't spell this out, but describes Affery's experience as a "dream."

According to my Penguin Classics Notes, Affery is an "old Puritan name, common in Kent. Variants include Aphra, Aphora, Afra, and Afferie. Dickens may have been alerted to the name by a tombstone in a churchyard at Folkestone, where he wrote the main part of Little Dorrit: 'To the Memory of Affery Jeffrey (a female)'."

Here's a photo of Affery from the BBC adaptation that I am very eager to see, as soon as I finish the book. I'm not sure that this woman could have "enlisted in the Foot Guards without much fear of discovery," but she seems frightened enough, which is her main character trait at this point in the story.

Classics Challenge: George Eliot's Silas Marner

Katherine at November's Autumn is hosting the Classics Challenge and is posting prompts the 4th of every month. This month she is focusing on classic authors. Turns out she and I both are reading George Eliot. Here's a link to Katherine's post on Eliot, aka Maryann Evans.

Now it's my turn.

My first classic of the year is Silas Marner, by George Eliot. I first read this in tenth grade and didn't really warm up to it. What's to warm up to from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl? The hero of the story is unattractive in form and spirit--he has protruding eyes, is elderly (well, mid-30's, but that's elderly to a teenager, just ask Marianne Dashwood!), miserly, naive, and easily duped. We also read Ethan Frome the same semester and I saw Silas Marner and Ethan Frome as twin losers. Needless to say, Silas Marner was got through and quickly shelved and mostly forgotten.

A few years ago, I picked up the audio version from the library and thoroughly enjoyed it. Most of the details I hadn't remembered, and I found the story of the rebirth of Marner's soul and humanity to be moving, beautiful, and enobling. It didn't hurt that I had discovered Middlemarch in college and counted it among my favorite books when I reread Silas Marner. My admiration for George Eliot predisposed me to give Silas Marner a second chance, and I'm so glad I did.

Now, I'm rereading it again, as part of my George Eliot project (i.e., to read her books in order whilst reading a bio of her life), and it's interesting to see where it fits in the evolution of George Eliot as a novelist. I must say that with Silas Marner, she did set out to tell the story of a most challenging protagonist--even at my more mature vantage point, I have to say that he's still a pretty unattractive person at the outset. I have to believe that Eliot consciously picked an unattractive person for this story--I think the reader has to look on Marner with a certain amount of contempt in order for his redemption at the hand of a child to mean so much and to reflect so well the "man in the mirror," which I think Eliot strives to do.

I've only read the first two chapters, but the backstory has been fully told and Silas is a miserly misanthrope whose life is about to be transformed by grace. I'm really looking forward to reading lit crit about this book as well as what Eliot was trying to do with the story. It's much shorter than the two novels that preceded it (i.e., Adam Bede and The Mill on the Floss), and it's very tightly focused on one man, his soul and the child who saves him from himself rather than being about a family or a village or a way of life.

Signing up for...A Classics Challenge

Katherine Cox of November's Autumn has organized a reading challenge that is right up my alley, and I simply love the graphic she created for it and will be happy to have that gracing my blog for the next year.

The Challenge: Read seven works of Classic Literature in 2012, but only three of the seven may be re-reads.

How Does it Work? A little like a blog hop. Instead of writing a review as you finish each book (of course, you can do that too), visit November's Autumn on the 4th of each month from January 2012 - December 2012.

You will find a prompt, it will be general enough that no matter which Classic you're reading or how far into it, you will be able to answer. There will be a form for everyone to link to their post.

Join the Challenge: Anyone who loves to read classics and has a blog is invited and can join anytime before December 2012.

My Reading List for this Challenge:


Silas Marner - George Eliot
Reread, but I have to in order to read her major works in order!

Tortilla Flat - John Steinbeck
I reacquainted myself with Steinbeck this past summer and found out how much I like his writing.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes - Robert Louis Stevenson
I'm a long-time fan of RLS and I learned that Steinbeck's Travels with Charley was inspired by this RLS book.

Barchester Towers - Anthony Trollope
I enjoyed The Warden, which I read about a year ago, and am looking forward to more in the saga.

Romola - George Eliot
Know nothing about this book, other than I am reading all of Eliot and it comes after Silas Marner.

Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
I really want to watch the BBC mini-series and I can't until I've read the book first. I haven't read much Dickens in recent years, but looking forward to diving into a good London story since I've been reading up on London history a lot lately.

Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
I just have to read the book that helped launch the Civil War. Can't believe that I haven't yet. One of the most important books ever written and it will be a nice contrast to my recent rereading of Gone With the Wind.

Thanks, Katherine, for helping me organize the Classics part of my 2012 reading plans. This is equivalent to getting all my Christmas shopping done before Thanksgiving!