A thematic, dual review...
First up is book club selection Candide, which was fun to revisit for the first time since high school. Voltaire is funny and also complicated. I felt like I wasn't deep enough when I was reading it, if that makes sense. But it's an impressively modern-feeling satire, skewering our beliefs in progress, our obsession with money and being right, and of course our hypocrisy about most everything. The translation I chose was a recent one, from 2005, by Burton Raffel. Comparing mine with other club readers' editions today, I'm pretty fond of Raffel's, with one exception. He notes in an introduction that "il faut cultiver notre jardin" has been mistranslated for ages now. Since garden/jardin meant something closer to "fields," he ends the book with "we need to work our fields." Are you kidding me? Sometimes you've just got to go with the famous line. Which isn't to say that it's not useful to know that Candide isn't just talking about pruning roses but actually tending to crops and plants intended for use. But dude, "we need to work our fields"? Yuck.
(PS - To make it clear for readers who have forgotten or never experienced the novella, it fits into my theme because Candide's rather ridiculous travels and travails all stem from his love for Cunegonde and desire to be with her.)
Next up is yet another of my Eastern European ex-pat books, this one a memoir by journalist Jennifer Beth Cohen. The title, Lying Together, provides a delicious double-meaning that frames her Cohen's affair with the one who got away, a fellow college student and Russophile that at the start of the action is working in St. Petersberg and has leads Cohen needs for a story. Within weeks they are engaged and she is on a plane. And that's where the fun begins. I can't believe how much happens in what I believe is apparently just 11 months. Maybe there was an extra year there that I missed. Dunno. Anyway, Cohen does a fantastic job of recreating the seduction of a good scoop, and the heady first days of love, and the heady crazy capitalism of 1990s Russia. But when Jennifer & Kevin start to fall apart, things get hazy and the book loses focus. Which is fine, b/c by then it's almost over and for a book that you can read in just about one sitting (despite the heat! oh the heat in Los Angeles this weekend!) you can forgiven a weak ending when it's got a strong beginning. Plus it mimics their deterioration.
(PS for this one - do you ever mark pages and notes on bookmarks when you are reading and then come back to them and wonder why exactly you felt this passage was worth noting?)
Sunday, June 22, 2008
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Bewitched by Beginner's Greek
It really is the best word I can think of - bewitched. I wasn't even sure I liked James Collins' novel while I was reading it, but I just could not put it down. He manipulated my emotions perfectly, so that I was utterly invested in the outcome of the novel.
Peter and Holly fall in love as seatmates on a cross-country flight, but Peter loses her number, killing the romance before it has a chance to flower. Until fate brings them back together, except now she's with his best friend. Cheesy, I know. Except it works. One thing that particularly pleased me as Collins laid out the scenario was that he skipped the re-encounter. We jump from a heart-stricken Peter looking desperately for the lost number, to him three years after Holly has returned to his life. The meeting happens in flashbacks. A lot of important moments in the novel happen in flashbacks. And we spend a lot of time in various characters' heads, seeing how they see themselves and the starcrossed couple. Holly though? We don't really meet her until page 280, by which point I'm ravenous for her to become more than a cipher onto which others attach their own aspirations.
The rarefied air in which the characters move can be a little annoying - um, why am I not that rich and clever? - but forgivable in the same while Jane Austen & Edith Wharton's settings are forgivable. And like Austen, Collins loves skewering self-interest and hypocrisy. But also like her, he is gentle about it. No one tends to fall very hard or very far.
In fact, therein lies a central theme of the story: "[...] here she was setting off to grab all the love and happiness she could get. He hoped she would succeed. Whenever good people who were weak and timid showed strength and got things that bad, arrogant people always had handed to them, Peter was moved." Indeed.
Peter and Holly fall in love as seatmates on a cross-country flight, but Peter loses her number, killing the romance before it has a chance to flower. Until fate brings them back together, except now she's with his best friend. Cheesy, I know. Except it works. One thing that particularly pleased me as Collins laid out the scenario was that he skipped the re-encounter. We jump from a heart-stricken Peter looking desperately for the lost number, to him three years after Holly has returned to his life. The meeting happens in flashbacks. A lot of important moments in the novel happen in flashbacks. And we spend a lot of time in various characters' heads, seeing how they see themselves and the starcrossed couple. Holly though? We don't really meet her until page 280, by which point I'm ravenous for her to become more than a cipher onto which others attach their own aspirations.
The rarefied air in which the characters move can be a little annoying - um, why am I not that rich and clever? - but forgivable in the same while Jane Austen & Edith Wharton's settings are forgivable. And like Austen, Collins loves skewering self-interest and hypocrisy. But also like her, he is gentle about it. No one tends to fall very hard or very far.
In fact, therein lies a central theme of the story: "[...] here she was setting off to grab all the love and happiness she could get. He hoped she would succeed. Whenever good people who were weak and timid showed strength and got things that bad, arrogant people always had handed to them, Peter was moved." Indeed.
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