2017 Challenge - The Bell Jar

Book 5 (March, Mad People)

The Bell Jar, by Silvia Plath (read by Maggie Gyllenhaal)

Reason for Reading: The Bell Jar was one of the first entries on the original list, recommended by Sara, and the month's overarching theme of Mad People was suggested by Abi to link it with Trainspotting. This was a book that I went into pretty much blind. I knew that it was a novel by the poet Sylvia Plath and that it was called The Bell Jar, and that was about it.

Esther Greenwood is an academically successful girl, whose life seems to have peaked. Having earned the chance to spend a month in New York as one of twelve guest editors on a magazine she finds herself at a loss in the big city, and then unable to find herself once she returns to her home in the suburbs of Boston. She suffers a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide, before slowly returning to health in a private asylum. The book's first person narrative follows Esther's skewed and unreliable perspective as she attributes sinister and selfish objectives to the people around her, as viewed through the distorting glass and suffocating air of the bell jar which separates her from normality.

The book depicts a world and a mental health system far removed from our own, despite the relatively short gap between Plath's time and ours. With her country tan fading Esther calls herself 'yellow as a chinaman,' and her first psychiatrist assigns her crude ECT after two sessions. While I am approaching this challenge as a means of exploring other viewpoints, however, I was surprised how much I recognised in Plath's semi-autobiographical narrative from the time of my own lowest ebb. I was never so bad that I could not read, but the sense of that distorting glass is one I once knew well.

The Audible release of The Bell Jar is read by Maggie Gyllenhaal, whose cool, almost detached delivery renders the mesmerising language of the novel all the more affecting. And it is the language that is perhaps the most remarkable thing in this novel. Like the superb translated text of 100 Years of Solitude, The Bell Jar contains not a sentence that is purely functional, not a word that is present simply to convey a single, dry piece of information. The prose itself is art, beyond its value as a medium for the story.

2017 Challenge - White is for Witching

Book 4 (February, Gothic)

White is for Witching, by Helen Oyeyemi

Reason for Reading: This was in many ways the impetus to break from 'classic' novels, based on a very strong recommendation from The Anxious Gamer. It replaced... something older and altogether more conventional to accompany We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and although I have a number of clear commonalities with Oyeyemi as an English-born Cambridge graduate - in the same field as Ore Lind, indeed - it seems unlikely that our experiences as a black woman and a white man would have been similar even there.

White is for Witching weaves the tale of the twins, Eliot and especially Miranda, in a disjointed and experimental fashion, beginning with four decontextualised responses to an unknown questioner before proceeding with four more or less conventional narrative voices: a third person narrative following Miranda, and the first person voices of Eliot, Miranda's university friend Ore, and that of the Silver House (which may actually also be the narrator of Miranda's sections, now I think of it,) a rambling manor which the twins' father runs as a guest house. His wife, a photographer, was killed in Haiti and Miranda wears her watch, set always to Haitian time. Eliot is perhaps a little eccentric, but grounded and part of the wider world. Miranda is lost and distracted, suffering from pica, an eating disorder which compels her to consume whatever will do her no good. Ore is an anchor to Miranda at university, but at the cost of her own self, which is physically whittled away by the relationship. And the house waits, knowing that like all Silvers, Miranda belongs only with, only to it.

I'm going to start off by saying that my reading habits - I mostly get a chance to read on the train to and from work - are not well suited to gothic. I struggled somewhat to get into White is for Witching, and it only really clicked for me about a third of the way through, when Miranda went to Cambridge(1). Perhaps the Silver House was too abstract a place for me to find mysterious, whereas Ore's view of the streets and colleges of my alma mater had the underlying familiarity which allowed it to convert what I know into something uncanny. what has a rambling guest house with too many rooms to do with me, after all, but student dorms cut incongruously into a wall hung heavy with a sepulchral air... that I can be chilled by. With my attention thus grabbed, I found the last third of the book, back in the Silver House near Dover, flowed more easily, and Ore's romantic investment in Miranda gave me more cause to fear for her inevitable doom.

I'm not convinced that the modern Gothic is my natural home (which may be the point, of course,) but while White is for Witching did not grip me as it has some, I certainly don't regret the experience. As an aside on medium, I found it more than usually frustrating to read on a Kindle, because there were many occasions when I wanted to flick back and check my recollection of some small thing, and that is hard to do on a Kindle. I am also sad that this one wasn't available as an audiobook, as I think that, well read and ideally by multiple readers, it could be something very special.

(1) Online reviews seem evenly divided on whether this juncture was when the book came alive or got bogged down.

Reading Roundup - February 2017

2017 Reading Challenge

This month I have hit my two book target, reading Nights at the Circus and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, although this still leaves me a book behind going into March, and I haven't done more than flip through The Rose that Grew from Concrete. It turns out that I suck at reading poetry in any systematic manner.

Rogues is not so much a book that I read/listened to this month as one that I finished. It's a collection of short stories curated by George R.R. Martin and Gardner Dozoir. The stories are written by a wide array of successful and highly-acclaimed authors working in a variety of genres, including contemporary thriller, western, horror, historical, SF and fantasy, united by the common theme of roguery. As is the way of anthologies, it's a mixed bag, with some excellent entries, some less successful, and a few that I can't honestly recall after a few months, although none of them were truly dire. Particular highlights include: Joe Abercrombie's 'Tough Times All Over', a fantasy tale following the path of a package which is repeatedly stolen from a succession of carriers; Scott Lynch's 'A Year and a Day in Old Theradane', in which a team of retired thieves are tasked with stealing a street; Neil Gaiman's 'How the Marquis Got His Coat Back'(1); and 'Now Showing' by Connie Willis, a caper of conspicuous consumption set in a near future where a corrupt cinema industry screens non-existent films in vast consumer centres. It's been a useful standby between full novels, and I may look at getting another of Martin and Dozoir's cross-genre collections some time, although for now I think I'll fill that hole with the short stories in the new Definitive Sherlock Holmes.

As the third book in the Last Dragonslayer series, Jasper Fforde's The Eye of Zoltar fails in only one respect; that of actually finishing the story. It turns out that the series is a tetralogy, not a trilogy, although Fforde's website does not have a due date for the book currently titled Jennifer and the Wizard (formerly The Great Troll War.) The book itself follows orphan heroine Jennifer Strange as she is dispatched to the precipitous terrain and treacherous politics of the Cambrian Empire to retrieve the titular jewel, with the aid of newly-minted sorcerer Perkins and pre-teen jeopardy tour guide Addy Powell, while at the same time unmasking a conspiracy and educating the impossibly spoiled Princess Shazeen in the fine art of not being a complete brat. As with the last book, there are a few niggles with continuity, not least that the trolls previously seen to be relatively sophisticated beings who consider humans as a cute but annoying invasive species have apparently reverted to being brutal, corpse-displaying savages. The stakes of the novel end up significantly greater than in the previous books, and it ends on an as yet unresolved cliffhanger, which is a bit of a bugger really.

Jane Collingwood once more provides a fine reading, with a wide array of voices and accents; some better than others. 

Finally for the month, I gave up on Viking epic West of the Moon on the grounds that if I'm going to tell my daughter she ought to change library books she isn't reading, I ought to do the same myself, and instead picked up Cressida Cowell's How to Train Your Dragon, on which the film is based. It is a completely different beast, far more interested in joke names about bodily functions than father-son bonding, and featuring a culture in which dragons are ubiquitous in the place of hawks and hounds, but less so as horses. It's not a bad book, and a quick read besides, although I'm in no hurry to plough through the next eighteen of the buggers. I confess, I am probably biased in that I saw the film first and loved it, and enjoyed the second one (although it has its problems, some of which I think I overlooked in considering the films as part of the wider world created in the accompanying TV series,) but in this case I definitely prefer the film.

(1) Although in all honestly I am baffled by the reader, Roy Dotrice's decision to give the Marquis a French accent. Name notwithstanding, I've always considered the Marquis to be a London boy.