Thomas Hardy on Roxana-Mălina Chirilă

[29 mar] Cartea de azi: „Tess d’Urberville” de Thomas Hardy

Sat, 31 Mar 2018 11:10:29 +0000

Într-un sătuc din Anglia victoriană, unui țăran îi intră în cap o idee fixă: că se trage dintr-o mare familie nobilă, d’Urberville. Nu e o idee pe care a avut-o dintotdeauna, dar pastorul i-a spus că numele lui de familie, Durbeyfield, ar putea fi o variantă adaptată a numelui franțuzesc, așa că brusc își imaginează că locul lui în societate ar trebui să fie cu totul altul.

Așa că o trimite pe fiica lui cea mare, Tess, să lucreze la familia d’Urberville, ca să fie mai aproape de sus-pusele ei rude. Însă evident că nu e decât o țărăncuță, iar „vărul” ei Alec d’Urberville o seduce/violează într-o scenă foarte ambiguă – atât de ambiguă încât am impresia că faptul că rămâne însărcinată cu un copil care moare curând după naștere e acolo doar ca să clarifice faptul că nu mai e fecioară.

Și de aici, urmează o tragedie cauzată de standardele dure ale zilei și de naivitatea eroinei. Thomas Hardy, la fel ca alți scriitori ai perioadei victoriene, critică societatea din jurul lui, cu standardele ei duble și consecințele uneori teribile pentru cei care trăiesc în ea (mai ales dacă sunt din clasele inferioare). Însă unde Dickens, de exemplu, e binevoitor și le oferă personajelor și câte un final fericit, Hardy tinde să facă fix opusul – dar dacă începi să-i guști înclinația spre ceea ce profesoara mea de literatură din universitate numea „media-evil”, are povești fascinante prin duritatea lor.

Cartea e disponibilă în română pe eMag și Libris (și peste tot, bănuiesc), iar în engleză pe Book Depository în format fizic și gratuit în format digital, pe Project Gutenberg.

Vrei să afli mai multe despre „Cartea de azi”? Intră aici.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 08:01:20 +0000

Soooo… Read the book, decided to check the film out on youtube. Ran into this 10-minute preview, which I thought perfect for satisfying my curiosity. And I saw the English literature teacher, Mr. Anderson, whom I liked so much in the book. Check him out from about 5:30.

Ermmm… What the hell was that?!

1. Which author invented the paperback book?
Answer: None that I know of. ‘Paperback’ is basically a term describing a really simple idea: soft, inexpensive covers for books, bringing the price down and enabling higher sales. There wasn’t much invention to be done there, considering that they already had papers and magazines. The idea sort of sprouted up with several publishers. I don’t know who was first.
It definitely wasn’t Dickens.

2. „[Dickens] also invented the serial.”
Answer: No, he didn’t. He just made good use of it and popularized it, with his first novel, The Pickwick Papers.

3. „In fact, at the end of the third chapter of his first novel, he had a man hanging from a cliff by his fingernails, hence the term ‘cliffhanger’.”
Answer: Who, Charles Dickens?! No way. His first novel was, as I’ve mentioned above, The Pickwick Papers. Which is a series about a few gentlemen and their (mis)adventures. Quite charming. Quite gentlemanly. Nobody goes through anything truly physically threatening, as far as I recall, although there’s a bit of an issue with prison.
The ending of chapter 3:

The dismal man readily complied; a circle was again formed round the table, and harmony once more prevailed. Some lingering irritability appeared to find a resting-place in Mr. Winkle’s bosom, occasioned possibly by the temporary abstraction of his coat—though it is scarcely reasonable to suppose that so slight a circumstance can have excited even a passing feeling of anger in a Pickwickian’s breast. With this exception, their good-humour was completely restored; and the evening concluded with the conviviality with which it had begun.

The cliffhanger scene happens in somebody else’s novel: Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes. It wasn’t his first novel – it was his third. But, to the teacher’s credit, it was the first one that Hardy put his name on. The scene is at the end of chapter 21:

As he slowly slid inch by inch upon these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of vegetation—the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further descent. Knight was now literally suspended by his arms; but the incline of the brow being what engineers would call about a quarter in one, it was sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion of his weight, but was very far from offering an adequately flat face to support him.

There’s a bit of dialogue before the chapter ends. By the way, I haven’t read this particular book (although I knew of the scene), but Google was my friend. It should’ve been the scriptwriter’s as well.

Urgh. Movies about school shouldn’t, you know, misinform people.

A list of classy WTF books

Thu, 01 Aug 2013 08:01:23 +0000

Do you know those books which you can supposedly brag about reading? You know, like „Pride and Prejudice”, „The Satanic Verses” or „The Iliad”? Of course you do. You run into them a lot – and there’s others which are less known, but just as impressive to mention.

Except some of them are weird. Or very weird. Or, well, fucked up – despite being classics, critically acclaimed and other such. And despite their authors not thinking they were that twisted. Here’s a few:

The Tale of Genji.

This wonderful, beautiful novel was written sometime in the 11th century and it’s the world’s first novel. Or the first modern novel. Or the first psychological novel. All of those have been said at one point – it’s considered a masterpiece and the only real reason you’ve probably never heard of it is that it’s Japanese. Our Western world grew up without it.

It’s a splendid book, full of poetry and romance. Genji is a Japanese prince, so beautiful women fall in love with him at first sight, so handsome he makes men wish he were a woman so he could be their wife. And he has these wonderful affairs, yes?…

Well. For a few chapters. Then he falls in love with one of his father’s concubines, a woman who looks exactly like his dead mother. He can’t have her for his own because he can’t exactly snatch her away from the emperor, but he has an affair with her anyway. And, later on, he pretty much kidnaps a ten year-old from her family because she looks precisely like his father’s concubine (and his mother) – and raises the little girl to be the perfect wife.

If that doesn’t set your teeth on edge, then you should also know that pretty much everybody a character is likely to sleep with in this novel will be a blood relation. Because interbreeding yay!

House of Sleeping Beauties

Yasunari Kawabata won a Nobel Prize for literature. If that doesn’t make him a classy author, I don’t know what will.

Most of his novels have a haunting beauty, a delightful meditative atmosphere, a contemplative mood that will stick with you for quite some time. House of Sleeping Beauties is no exception.

…but then there’s the fact that the sleeping beauties are drugged prostitutes. The protagonist finds out about this brothel where old, impotent men go to spend the night with girls who’ve been fed sleeping pills so they wouldn’t wake up no matter what happened. And he spends quite some time thinking he’s still potent – what if he were to actually sleep with one of the girls?

The Japanese. They have way too many examples of creepy as hell fiction.

The Last Temptation (of Christ)

If you’ve only heard of one modern Greek author, Nikos Kazantzakis is probably it. He’s one of those VIPs of world literature whose novels got translated in all sorts of languages and then transformed into movies.

The Last Temptation of Christ is about a Jesus who is struggling with the destiny God threw on his shoulders. He spent his life as a carpenter making crosses for would-be Messiahs to be crucified on and he really, really doesn’t want to be the Chosen anything. Eventually, though, he ends up in charge of a bunch of misfits (the apostles), with Judas, who wants a real revolution and a liberation from Romans at his side.

It’s actually all weird, as if Kazantzakis was dreaming this in a drug-induced stupor, but the oddest part is where Jesus has this strong vivid dream/temptation where his „guardian angel” tells him he did well and he’s released from the cross. He goes away free, marries Mary Magdalen, and she dies. So then he goes off and marries both Martha and Mary, sisters of Lazarus and has lots of children with them.

The entire novel reads like an odd fever dream. I’m certain that’s not exactly the impression Kazantzakis would have liked to leave behind.

Women in Love

D.H. Lawrence. You’ve probably heard of him because of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. This is more of the same scandalous sex stuff. Except less explicit.

Ursula and Gudrun are sisters. Ursula is a teacher, Gudrun is some sort of artist. They become involved with Rupert Birkin and Gerald Crich and some very psychological stuff ensues, complete with philosophical discussions of politics and society. Which is probably what makes this book one of those ‘classics’ that you study in university (I know I did).

But aside from the crazy names which add their own special ‘huh?’ to the book, the title too is an oddity. It’s a misnomer, but I’m not sure it’s an intentional one. Considering D.H. Lawrence’s other books, I think the author doesn’t know what love is if it strips down to its underwear and paints the letters ‘L’,‘O’,‘V’ and ‘E’ on its naked body. If the book was called ‘Women in Relationships They’re Very Ambiguous About’, it would’ve been more to the point (but admittedly less catchy).

The book provides examples of what I’ve come to describe as ‘D.H. Lawrence sex’. It involves the couple being attracted, going to bed – and then suddenly one of them (usually the woman) has this revelation that she’s actually repulsed by the guy she’s sleeping with. It’s sort of the ‘oh my god, who and what did I do last night?!’, but experienced a lot faster than simply the morning after. Or the hour after. Or the minute after. Or just after – it’s during.

Between some instincts for violence and more dislike than love in the major couples, the only real relationship based on actual love and attraction in the book is between Gerald and Rupert. There’s a moment when the sexual attraction between them is palpable and much, much more real than what either of the two experience with the women. I’m not sure it’s what Lawrence intended, but the psychological ride you take in Women in Love is going to keep you going, ‘what the fuck?’ over and over.

Jude the Obscure

My literature professor called Thomas Hardy mid-evil (pun on medieval, of course), which was very witty and informative of her.

If you’ve read a single Thomas Hardy novel, it was probably Tess of the d’Urbervilles, which is pretty WTF itself. But Jude the Obscure beats it hands-down on the WTF scale. It’s sort of a small village boy-meets-girl novel, in which Jude is a young man aspiring to go to university and Sue is his beautiful, perfect cousin. It’s kind of a worrisome plot in the first place, but things go a lot worse when you get the hand of destiny practically making itself felt at every step of the book, and when you have a creepy as hell kid popping up in the novel for no other reason than to make you think Frankenstein was a perfectly decent and socially acceptable sort of fellow.

Combine the creepy magical-superstitious-fated part of the book with the supposed realism and by the end you’ll be wondering what the hell you’ve read.