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!

Silas Marner and A Simple Twist of Fate

I read George Eliot's Silas Marner as my first classic of 2012 and as part of my mission to read all of Eliot in order. Silas Marner is quite a short book, with fairytale qualities--a lonely miser finds his way back to humanity and community when a little child adopts him--not very subtle symbolism (the gold of the child's hair is mistaken for the miser's gold on numerous occasions) and breathtakingly beautiful prose. Every time I read it, I enjoy it more. Eliot really mastered her craft with this work, and transcended to the artistic level.

That said, I've been eager to watch the highly acclaimed 1985 BBC version starring Ben Kingsley as Silas. It was utterly faithful to the novel, in plot, in tone, in dialogue (much of it I recognized from the novel), and in feeling. I absolutely loved it and was thrilled with Kingsley's performance. I also thought the Cass brothers (Godfrey the heir and Dunstan the ne'er do well) were perfectly cast, as was Nancy Lammeter, played by Jenny Agutter. It was a thoroughly enjoyable adaptation and one that I look forward to watching again.

When I posted about Silas Marner, Lisa from Lit And Life recommended A Simple Twist of Fate, a modern adaptation starring Steven Martin from 1994. So after I finished the BBC faithful adaptation, I watched A Simple Twist of Fate and am now a fan of it as well.

The modern movie is remarkably faithful to the original story, and Martin makes an understandable and sympathetic misanthropist who is redeemed by the love of the child. I absolutely loved the Dolly Winthrop character, this time named April and played superbly by Catherine O'Hara. Gabriel Byrne as the Godfrey Cass character, this time named John Newland, was excellent, and Laura Linney was Nancy, his gentle, practical wife.

The major difference in the modern version is that the discovery of the child's parentage is made much earlier in her life than in the original. In the original story, Eppie doesn't learn who her real father is until she is 18, at which point she is given the choice of whose daughter she wants to be and there the story ends. In the modern film version, the child (this time named Matilda) learns who her real father is when she is 12, and a custody battle ensues.

My only issue with the movie is some ambiguity about why the judge changes his mind about who to award custody to at the very end. I think that part could have been made clearer, and I had to read up on the film on Wikipedia to get it. Apart from that little hiccup, it's a wonderful modern retelling of a fabulous story created by one of literature's greatest artists, and whom I believed truly entered the canon with this work.

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.