Recent reading
Aug. 22nd, 2023 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeFalse Goddesses by Rachel Ferguson (1923). This is Rachel Ferguson's first novel, and is about two things: firstly, the Edwardian-era theatrical world and the experiences of young middle-class women who go on the stage; secondly, lesbian crushes. If this sounds like a promising combination, the historical stuff is really pretty interesting—it's full of precise and thoroughly-observed detail, something which Ferguson is very good at, and she was writing directly from experience here—but the emotional side of the book did not really work for me. I think this was partly because I never really warmed up to Leah, the protagonist, and so couldn't really get into her relationships emotionally; and partly because Ferguson's writing style—which skips breathlessly between details and incidents, turns a sharply-elegant phrase and passes loosely and somewhat confusingly through time—while it works very well indeed in a novel like Alas, Poor Lady, is not so well suited to describing passionate emotions like those here. Altogether worth reading, but not what I might have hoped.
The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1885). This was another slightly strange partial disappointment! It's a sequel to New Arabian Nights, loosely defined, and is more of a coherent whole than that book, with the stories all interlinked and revealing a single overarching plot by the end. It is about Fenian terrorism—hence the dynamite of the title—and the strange characters who get involved in it, and I think I never really got into the book's mood. Either it can't quite make a definite statement in the detail the subject matter deserves, or decide how far it is a serious statement and how far a light-hearted satirical comedy, or I was missing too much of the social and political context to understand what the authors were saying. (Also I am slightly surprised, given his attitudes towards the Highlands in Kidnapped, to learn that RLS was apparently vehemently against Irish independence.) However, there are good things in it, especially its female characters: the book is in three parts, each of which could be summarised as, 'male protagonist meets a weird woman; she tells him her life story; drama and intrigue follow', and it is entertaining. Perhaps that's thanks to Fanny! At one point there's what looks like a parody of the 'sudden backstory Mormons' trope from e.g. A Study in Scarlet. Via the book's Wikipedia article I found this website, about an academic project using stylometry to analyse Louis's and Fanny's distinct writing styles and investigate the authorship of this book, which is fascinating. (sanguinity, have the Holmestice people ever tried doing this to identify anonymous exchange authors???) For myself I couldn't distinguish any obviously different writing styles, either while reading the book or after learning which bits of it each of them apparently wrote—probably partly because RLS's style is so versatile that it's difficult to tell what's different because it's a different author!
And re-read The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster (1907) for RMSE! I read this book several times years ago and have loved it very dearly ever since I first did, but hadn't revisited it for a while, so that was a very good and also interesting opportunity. I think I'm much less mystified by Forster's writing than I was when I first read his books—I remember reading this and feeling amazed at its resonant significance but only getting a little way towards articulating what it was doing, and now I read it and I can see Forster making choices and achieving effects in the way a writer does, very skilfully but no longer mysteriously. Perhaps that's being a little older, perhaps it's having more experience writing myself? I do still think it's terribly significant! It's a weird, gloomy book with a tragic ending—a tragic ending that seems a little less inevitable than it used to, albeit on the straightforward 'how things could happen' level rather than the narrative level—and some of its ideas are very strange, and it never seems quite certain of how to deal with the significant questions it asks, but my goodness, who ever wrote about weird gloomy tragedy and uncertainty and failure more beautifully? I love this book, and I love Rickie. It's still meaningful in a way the triumphantly happy ending of a Maurice never could be. And, although the sadness and unresolution of the story are so important to me in some ways, I do think Rickie and Stewart could have been happy together if things had gone a bit differently...
The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson (1885). This was another slightly strange partial disappointment! It's a sequel to New Arabian Nights, loosely defined, and is more of a coherent whole than that book, with the stories all interlinked and revealing a single overarching plot by the end. It is about Fenian terrorism—hence the dynamite of the title—and the strange characters who get involved in it, and I think I never really got into the book's mood. Either it can't quite make a definite statement in the detail the subject matter deserves, or decide how far it is a serious statement and how far a light-hearted satirical comedy, or I was missing too much of the social and political context to understand what the authors were saying. (Also I am slightly surprised, given his attitudes towards the Highlands in Kidnapped, to learn that RLS was apparently vehemently against Irish independence.) However, there are good things in it, especially its female characters: the book is in three parts, each of which could be summarised as, 'male protagonist meets a weird woman; she tells him her life story; drama and intrigue follow', and it is entertaining. Perhaps that's thanks to Fanny! At one point there's what looks like a parody of the 'sudden backstory Mormons' trope from e.g. A Study in Scarlet. Via the book's Wikipedia article I found this website, about an academic project using stylometry to analyse Louis's and Fanny's distinct writing styles and investigate the authorship of this book, which is fascinating. (
sanguinity, have the Holmestice people ever tried doing this to identify anonymous exchange authors???) For myself I couldn't distinguish any obviously different writing styles, either while reading the book or after learning which bits of it each of them apparently wrote—probably partly because RLS's style is so versatile that it's difficult to tell what's different because it's a different author!And re-read The Longest Journey by E. M. Forster (1907) for RMSE! I read this book several times years ago and have loved it very dearly ever since I first did, but hadn't revisited it for a while, so that was a very good and also interesting opportunity. I think I'm much less mystified by Forster's writing than I was when I first read his books—I remember reading this and feeling amazed at its resonant significance but only getting a little way towards articulating what it was doing, and now I read it and I can see Forster making choices and achieving effects in the way a writer does, very skilfully but no longer mysteriously. Perhaps that's being a little older, perhaps it's having more experience writing myself? I do still think it's terribly significant! It's a weird, gloomy book with a tragic ending—a tragic ending that seems a little less inevitable than it used to, albeit on the straightforward 'how things could happen' level rather than the narrative level—and some of its ideas are very strange, and it never seems quite certain of how to deal with the significant questions it asks, but my goodness, who ever wrote about weird gloomy tragedy and uncertainty and failure more beautifully? I love this book, and I love Rickie. It's still meaningful in a way the triumphantly happy ending of a Maurice never could be. And, although the sadness and unresolution of the story are so important to me in some ways, I do think Rickie and Stewart could have been happy together if things had gone a bit differently...
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Date: Aug. 22nd, 2023 07:00 pm (UTC)Is this common enough to be a trope?? And is it always Mormons?
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Date: Aug. 22nd, 2023 08:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 23rd, 2023 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 22nd, 2023 08:11 pm (UTC)However! There have been people who have attempted to use stylometry to attribute some of the Sherlock Holmes stories to Conan Doyle's wives! c.f. this post and my critique of the technique in the comments. I have no idea of those critiques are applicable to the Dynamiter analysis; I've only given the website the quickest of scans.
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Date: Aug. 23rd, 2023 04:08 pm (UTC)And that is interesting—I've never heard of that theory before, although it does sound as though the technique is rather flawed.
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Date: Aug. 22nd, 2023 09:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 23rd, 2023 05:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Aug. 22nd, 2023 10:34 pm (UTC)Re: the tragic ending, I stand by my impression that it was tidy. Intentionally so, the book was already long enough, and it caps off the mood well! But yes, there’s a story in which Rickie gets to live and must reckon with (re)building relationship old and new. How he might have related to his Aunt, for example! And I think some of that might have gone a little ways towards dealing with at least one of the significant questions that I picked up from the novel—I don’t quite know what Forster envisioned as the practice of living a ‘real’ life. I do know what he thought was fake! That’s quite detailed. What significant questions did you get from the story? I’m very curious about what things felt especially unsettled or unfinished to you.
Also I very much want to know more about what you mean by: “It's still meaningful in a way the triumphantly happy ending of a Maurice never could be.” While I certainly enjoyed many elements of Maurice, by biggest takeaway from that was “Clive Durham was done dirty (I love him),” and that was not the intended message of that book! Whereas TLJ was much more sticky, and I agree, I just adored Rickie (whereas I didn’t care for Maurice as the protagonist).
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Date: Aug. 23rd, 2023 06:33 pm (UTC)As for the other thing, it gets a bit more personal than I want to go into here, but basically, when I'm in a bad mood I find happy endings depressing and stories that speak to that sort of bleak sadness comforting, especially when it involves 'representation' and the question of characters being examples of 'people like me' in fiction.