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On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan, is the best book I’ve read in a while. It was beautiful and breathtaking and melancholy and almost perfect. (I include the “almost” because it didn’t do my laundry.)
The novella takes place in 1962 on Edward and Florence’s wedding night. While the foregoing sentence is technically true, it actually covers a great deal more than that because of the flash backs. Still, the pivotal moments occur because the virgins have some unspoken issues that they will be forced to deal with on this momentous night. Here is the first line:
They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.
The plot and character development were done so deftly that I was always in the moment and yet always looking forward to the next point. Perhaps what I liked most was that Edward and Florence were normal people. They had no excessive horrors in their lives or personalities. They were everyman and everywoman with their own set of issues and fears and strengths and weaknesses. This book was ultimately human.
The writing was simple and yet complex in its beauty. I particularly liked this passage:
She watched him coming along the strand, his form at first no more than an indigo stain against the darkening shingle, sometimes appearing motionless, flickering and dissolving at its outlines, and at others suddenly closer, as though moved like a chess piece a few squares toward her.
Ian McEwan was impressively adept at writing both the male and female perspectives realistically. There is no easy answer to the questions before the newlyweds, and McEwan shows how differently they both perceive the same situation. McEwan also portrays their young love very realistically. He describes the two lovers retelling their first meeting, which was “by now enriched by a private mythology.”
Okay, I could go on and on. Just read this book! One note of caution, this book does deal with sex. While I personally thought the subject was treated respectfully and realistically, not voyeuristically, this book may not be for everyone.
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan (35) * * * * *
Knocking another one down for the novella challenge, I finished Death in Venice this evening. I’m not sure what exactly I was expecting when I choose this story, but it certainly wasn’t the tale of a respected older writer gentleman who falls in love with a fourteen year-old demigod boy and eventually dies of cholera because of it. Nope. That’s not what I expected at all.
Gustav von Aschenbach sees a strange red-headed man in Munich and suddenly decides to go on vacation. Before retiring to his summer house, he stops in Venice, a city he has visited often. The red-headed man makes numberous appearances throughout the story as a man on the ship, a gondolier, and a street musician. Aschenbach arrives at the hotel and sees Tadzio, a young polish boy, “[p]ale and elegantly reserved, with ringlets of honey-colored hair, a straight sloping nose, a lovely mouth and an expression of divinely belseed solemnity, his face called to mind Greek sculputres of the best period.” Aschenback falls in love with the boy and begins to follow him around Venice. Meanwhile, Venice is suffering from the plague. Aschenback knows this but keeps the secret along with the government officials of Venice. Becoming further and further debased, Aschenback falls ill with the cholera and dies.
I did enjoy the progression of the story, though there, at times, seemed to be a number of digressions that slowed down the plot. However, the story is packed with metaphors and literary allusions to Greek mythology and other arresting techniques. For example, the health of the city of Venice declines at the same rate as does the mental health of our hero. Also, our hero’s greatest written achievement is a short story entitled “A True Wretch.” I think you can guess by this point who turns out to be that True Wretch. The best part about the story is that a second reading would reveal a number of insights that I missed the first time.
Here are a few of my favorite passages:
“But he discovered in the end that his thoughts and inspirations were like the intimations of a dream, which always seem inspired at the time but prove utterly shallow and useless to the waking mind.”
“His nerves lapped up the tooting and jangling, the vulgar pining melodies, for passion criples taste, solemnly following the lure of pleasures that sobriety would either laugh at or reject altogether.”
“Ultimately, we are only as old as we feel in our hearts and minds.”
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann (35) * * * *
I’m not quite sure how to go about reviewing this fable of a book. Let’s start with the basics:
Title: The Alchemist
Author: Paulo Coelho (translated by Alan R. Clarke)
Date Published: 1993
Pages: 167
Genre: Fiction?? (Borders has all of Coelho’s books shelved under “Metaphysical Studies”)
My Favorite Quotes
“Now I’m beginning what I could have started ten years ago. But I’m happy at least that I didn’t wait twenty years.”
“I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.”
Character List (in order of appearance)
- The alchemist
- The boy
- The merchant’s daughter
- The Gypsy woman
- Melchizedek, the King of Salem
- Owner of the bar
- The young thief
- The candy seller
- The crystal merchant
- The Englishman
- The leader of the caravan
- The camel driver
- The Bedouins
- Fatima
- The guard
- The chieftains
- Three armed Arabs
- Band of rival tribesmen
- The monk
- The refugees from the tribal wars
Settings (in order of appearance)
- Andalusia (Spain)
- Tarifa (Spain)
- Tangier (Africa)
- Oasis (Africa)
- Desert camps of waring tribes (Africa)
- Coptic monastery (Africa)
- Pyramids (Africa)
- Andalusia (Spain)
Summaries
Prologue - The alchemist reads a story about the lake who weeps when Narcissus is killed.
Part I – Shepard boy has a dream about the pyramids for the second time. He goes to a Gypsy woman who interprets the dream in exchange for a tenth of his treasure if he gets it. At the Tarifa village, the boy meets Melchizedek, the King of Salem who helps him start on the path of his Personal Legend. In Tangier, Africa, the boy is robbed. He meets the crystal merchant. The boy decides to give up on his Personal Legend.
Part II – The boy works for the crystal merchant for a year, making the business very profitable. He leaves the crystal merchant, once against following his Personal Legend. He joins a desert caravan and meets an Englishman who teaches him about alchemy. When the caravan reaches an oasis, he meets his true love Fatima. He listens to the Soul of the World and is told about a coming attack on the oasis. He warns the chieftains and is made counselor of the oasis. He meets the alchemist and leaves the oasis with the alchemist to head for the pyramids. Along the way, the boy learns to listen to his heart. The boy performs a miracle and turns himself into the wind after conversing with the desert, wind, sun, and “the hand that wrote all.” The pair reach a Coptic monastery where the alchemist turns lead into gold. The boy is left alone and goes to the pyramids. He is robbed and beaten by some refugees, one of whom tells the boy of his dream about a treasure in Andalusia.
Epilogue - The boy goes to Andalusia (to the church where he started) and finds a great chest of treasure there. He then heads back to get Fatima.
The Bottom Line: This story is presented in parable/fable form. While there are many benefits to telling the story in the parable format, plot and especially character development are somewhat lacking. However, it is hard to ignore the simple prose and the powerful message contained in this little book. The story is very readable. It made me think about my own “Personal Legend” in the context of my own life and beliefs. I think the universality of this book is what has made it such a success. It is definitely worth the read.
The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho (75) * * *
As part of the novella challenge, I read Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote this weekend. The novella is quite short, only 85 pages in the version I read. Still, unraveling the intricacies of Holly Golightly would take up many more pages. For a critical analysis go here.
Holly is twenty years old. She has a somewhat questionable past in that, at fourteen, she married a much older Texan with a slew of children. She had a brief stint in Hollywood, and we find her living in New York, living off of tips she gets from men in bars. She makes a weekly pilgrimage to Sing Sing to deliver a “weather report” to a mafia boss named Sally Tomato. In the brief glimpse that we get of Holly Golightly’s life via the narrator, Holly has a cat. The cat, though, has no name.
“We just sort of took up by the river one day, we don’t belong to each other: he’s an independent, and so am I. I don’t want to own anything until I know I’ve found the place where me and things belong together. I’m not quite sure where that is just yet. But I know what it’s like.”
At the end of the story, Holly dumps the cat in a rainy alley and tells the driver to drive away. Before they get to the end of the block, she jumps out of the car and goes in search of the cat, to no avail.
“I’m very scared, Buster. Yes, at last. Because it could go on
forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away. The
mean reds, they’re nothing. The fat woman, she nothing. This,
though: my mouth’s so dry, if my life depended on it I couldn’t spit.”
The narrator promises to go in search of the cat, and Holly continues on her way to the airport, out of the story. The narrator spends days looking for the cat and when he does, the cat has found a home. Perhaps Holly did too.
I loved this story. I love Holly Golightly. I love the way she describes her particular form of depression as the “mean reds.” I love that the only cure for a particularly bad case of the mean reds is a trip to Tiffany’s. I love how all of the characters in the book fall in love with Holly for different reasons and in different ways. (I also love the movie.) Mostly, I love the themes of the futility of taming a wild animal and of our life’s search for home.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote: (55) * * * *
“Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses.”
Cannery Row is even more than that—it’s people. It’s Lee Chong and Dora and Mack and the boys and Frankie and Tom and Mary Talbot and Henri the painter and the old Chinaman and Mr. and Mrs. Sam Malloy (and Darling) and Doc. Doc is as much the main character as anyone in the story. “And everyone who thought of him thought next, ‘I really must do something nice for Doc.’” Doc and his collecting really inform the whole story and provide a tie among all of the characters. Doc collects sea things as Steinbeck collects the denizens of Cannery Row—with understanding and absolution.
The vignette narration style allows Steinbeck to include dark elements while keeping the overall tone a notch above neutral. The undercurrent of darkness is, though, rather dark. In the first chapter, Horace Abbeville shoots himself on a heap of fishmeal. In the third chapter, William kills himself by shoving an ice pick through his heart. In chapter twelve, a famous writer’s entrails are thrown into a ditch and carried off by a little boy and his dog. In chapter eighteen, Doc is shocked when he finds a woman’s body in the reef. (“The eyes were open and clear and the face was firm and the hair washed gently about her head.”) In the twenty-eighth chapter, Frankie, a young boy with mental problems, is institutionalized for stealing a present for Doc, the only person who was ever kind to him. And, finally, in the penultimate chapter, a gopher builds the perfect home for a posterity of gophers, but cannot find a female to mate with, loses two toes on his front paw, and eventually has to move away “to a dahlia garden where they put out traps every night.”
The quote that perhaps sums up the book for me is: “There is no explaining a series of misfortunes like that. Every man blames himself.” As with most Steinbeck novels that I’ve read, I think the underlying message is that life is hard and heartbreaking, but people are resilient and will not only survive but proliferate.
Cannery Row, by John Steinbeck: (55) * * * * *
The challenge is to read six novellas by September. For the purposes of the challenge, a novella is defined as a work of fiction between 100-250 pages.
The challenge starts tomorrow, so I thought I would list my selections:
Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
The Fall, by Albert Camus
The Unknown Masterpiece, Honore de Balzac
Breakfast at Tiffany’s, by Truman Capote
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Stardust, by Neil Gaiman
I finished The Uncommon Reader and Cannery Row before the official start date, so I’m not counting those. Wish me luck.
Immediately after finishing The Uncommon Reader I was disappointed. The last few pages were a little strange.
However, letting the experience age over the weekend made me realize that the novella was definitely worth the read. As I mentioned in Part I, there are many good reviews out there about this book. Let me just add the following:
I thought the ideas conveyed about reading were innovative. All book lovers love books about loving books (and they are plentiful). However, this book made me think about book-loving in the context of public opinion. Illustrative of this is an exchange between the Queen and her personal secretary:
“I feel, ma’am, that while not exactly elitist it sends the wrong message. It tends to exclude.”
“Exclude? Surely most people can read.”
“They can read, ma’am, but I’m not sure that they do.”
“Then, Sir Kevin, I am setting them a good example.”
I have always been of the opinion that people who don’t read on a regular basis are somewhat questionable—not to be completely trusted, not up for a position as a bosom friend. It has never occurred to me, though, that the non-book lover might view the book lover with a similar suspicion.
Alan Bennett is an artful writer. The writing and dialogue flowed throughout. I even, upon reflection, enjoyed the turn towards the end to writing. I do disagree, somewhat, though, with the statement that reading is not doing.
*Also, as an aside, I thought the few (and far between) crude comments were out-of-place and disappointing. It also made it so I couldn’t recommend the book to my somewhat sheltered book club.
In all, I highly recommend this little book about reading and the Queen.
The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett: (55) * * * *
