Recent reading, etc.
Nov. 11th, 2021 07:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
regshoeMuch of what I've read over the last couple of weeks has been for Yuletide, and is therefore top secret—so a smaller reading post today. However, the writing is going well! I've got what I need for the story, and it's currently in the process of growing a pleasing number of additional words between the first and second drafts.
Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala (2018). For book club, this is the story of a gay teenage boy, Niru, growing up in a Nigerian family in Washington DC. I thought it was a good book, but I didn't get on that well with it. It's written in a very immediate style, first person present tense, and with no inverted commas around the dialogue—not my preferred style, and the dialogue in particular I found confusing. The plot takes a sudden swerve about three-quarters of the way through; I appreciated what Iweala was trying to do here, and I thought some of the points the book made this way about life and narrative sense and senseless tragedy were very well done, but—insofar as it worked it was very upsetting, and then I don't think I got what it was doing well enough to go along with it, if that makes sense. Then the whole thing was too short and not as well-developed as it could have been—someone at the book club meeting said that apparently this is part of what was originally going to be a much longer and more detailed book, and perhaps it would have worked better if Iweala had written the whole of his original plan.
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (1742). I decided to sample some of Aunt Margaret's reading! I think this is one of the most famous novels of the eighteenth century. It follows Joseph, a servant, on a journey from his home in the southwest of England to London and back again, accompanied by his clergyman friend Mr Adams and a large cast of variously ridiculous secondary characters. Fielding sets out his ideas about fiction and humour in a preface, explaining how a sense of the ridiculous in comic fiction arises out of portraying true-to-life vanity and hypocrisy on the page, and I think he got what he was aiming for! It is very funny—I've read somewhere that Fielding was an important influence on Jane Austen, and while Austen is both more polite and more sophisticated as a storyteller, I can see the connection in her sense of humour. Apart from that, it is extremely eighteenth-century—without getting into the real excesses of the Gothic novels, there are all the usual side stories and digressions, views on Virtue and Providence and so on, romance and ribaldry (it's pretty explicit in places; there's a lot of use of threatened rape for drama, and the treatment of consensual sex and general relations between men and women are period-typically terrible), long-lost relations miraculously reunited and so on. Fielding also uses his book to make fun of Richardson's Pamela (a book which I want to read less the more I hear about it), through the device of Joseph supposedly being Pamela's brother—the sort of thing you can do in mainstream fiction without modern copyright laws...! A good piece of literary history, if not exactly the kind of thing I like for taking seriously.
I've also watched the film Winstanley (1975), about my new fave Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers at St George's Hill. The film, which is in black and white and told with a slightly confusingly minimal storytelling style, features a terribly earnest and loveable Winstanley making impassioned speeches about the rights of the people, the common land and so on to his fellow Diggers and the various powerful people who oppose them. It is very historically evocative. Amongst other things, there's also a Digger folk song sung to the tune of 'Ye Jacobites By Name', conflict between Diggers and Ranters, and some lovely scenery, although I did wish the film had been in colour so we could have appreciated the dramatic and significant heathland and woodland surroundings a bit more.
Speak No Evil by Uzodinma Iweala (2018). For book club, this is the story of a gay teenage boy, Niru, growing up in a Nigerian family in Washington DC. I thought it was a good book, but I didn't get on that well with it. It's written in a very immediate style, first person present tense, and with no inverted commas around the dialogue—not my preferred style, and the dialogue in particular I found confusing. The plot takes a sudden swerve about three-quarters of the way through; I appreciated what Iweala was trying to do here, and I thought some of the points the book made this way about life and narrative sense and senseless tragedy were very well done, but—insofar as it worked it was very upsetting, and then I don't think I got what it was doing well enough to go along with it, if that makes sense. Then the whole thing was too short and not as well-developed as it could have been—someone at the book club meeting said that apparently this is part of what was originally going to be a much longer and more detailed book, and perhaps it would have worked better if Iweala had written the whole of his original plan.
Joseph Andrews by Henry Fielding (1742). I decided to sample some of Aunt Margaret's reading! I think this is one of the most famous novels of the eighteenth century. It follows Joseph, a servant, on a journey from his home in the southwest of England to London and back again, accompanied by his clergyman friend Mr Adams and a large cast of variously ridiculous secondary characters. Fielding sets out his ideas about fiction and humour in a preface, explaining how a sense of the ridiculous in comic fiction arises out of portraying true-to-life vanity and hypocrisy on the page, and I think he got what he was aiming for! It is very funny—I've read somewhere that Fielding was an important influence on Jane Austen, and while Austen is both more polite and more sophisticated as a storyteller, I can see the connection in her sense of humour. Apart from that, it is extremely eighteenth-century—without getting into the real excesses of the Gothic novels, there are all the usual side stories and digressions, views on Virtue and Providence and so on, romance and ribaldry (it's pretty explicit in places; there's a lot of use of threatened rape for drama, and the treatment of consensual sex and general relations between men and women are period-typically terrible), long-lost relations miraculously reunited and so on. Fielding also uses his book to make fun of Richardson's Pamela (a book which I want to read less the more I hear about it), through the device of Joseph supposedly being Pamela's brother—the sort of thing you can do in mainstream fiction without modern copyright laws...! A good piece of literary history, if not exactly the kind of thing I like for taking seriously.
I've also watched the film Winstanley (1975), about my new fave Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers at St George's Hill. The film, which is in black and white and told with a slightly confusingly minimal storytelling style, features a terribly earnest and loveable Winstanley making impassioned speeches about the rights of the people, the common land and so on to his fellow Diggers and the various powerful people who oppose them. It is very historically evocative. Amongst other things, there's also a Digger folk song sung to the tune of 'Ye Jacobites By Name', conflict between Diggers and Ranters, and some lovely scenery, although I did wish the film had been in colour so we could have appreciated the dramatic and significant heathland and woodland surroundings a bit more.
no subject
Date: Nov. 11th, 2021 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Nov. 12th, 2021 05:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: Nov. 11th, 2021 10:37 pm (UTC)Joseph Andrews has been on my reading list for a while, for the same reason.
You made me smile when you said that the more you hear about Pamela, the less you want to read it. I know what you mean! It was also Henry Fielding who wrote Shamela, as I just confirmed via Googling. He clearly had it in for Richardson! :D
no subject
Date: Nov. 12th, 2021 05:57 pm (UTC)It was also Henry Fielding who wrote Shamela, as I just confirmed via Googling. He clearly had it in for Richardson! :D
Heh, that sounds like a fun literary feud...
no subject
Date: Nov. 19th, 2021 06:37 pm (UTC)Thanks for the report on Joseph Andrews! Interesting that Aunt Margaret would have read something as racy as that when she also read the Bible so much. But it's interesting with characters who contain contradictions!
the treatment of consensual sex and general relations between men and women are period-typically terrible
In what way? *curious*
no subject
Date: Nov. 20th, 2021 06:51 am (UTC)In what way? *curious*
Hmm, various things—everything is framed very much in terms of Passion vs. Virtue rather than, like, people liking and being attracted to each other and making good or bad decisions based on that. One thing I especially disliked was the treatment of the main couple's wedding night right at the end—there's a particular way of making a big deal of authorially-approved sex that I really don't like—it was sort of the same thing that bothered me about Almond, Wild Almond, actually. (Which I suppose means Broster was getting her period attitudes right, at least!).