Exhausted as I am from writing that absurdly alliterative title, I wanted to update with a brief note about what I've been reading in the last few weeks:
- Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot - If you've read either of Eugenides's other novels (The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex), you'll know he's a writer of phenomenal imaginative power, very learned and very funny. These qualities are again exhibited in The Marriage Plot, though perhaps not to the same degree, or as consistently. The novel follows three undergraduates at Brown as they fall in love, graduate and attempt to begin their lives, confused about how to live in a post-modern where Derrida and Barthes dominate. I loved the satire of 1980s intellectual fashion -- it appealed particularly to my memories of stumbling through literary theory at university -- but in other places the writing feels a little lazy. The balance of narrative between the three characters also felt wrong, with one perhaps neglected compared to the other two; but overall it's an engaging and humane novel, if not quite as magnificent as his previous two.
- Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone - This was another gap in my literary knowledge, and did not disappoint: I raced through it in less than a week because it is both gripping and highly readable, and the last part, in which the characters try to recreate the disappearance of the prized diamond in order to try to work out what happened to it, is particularly interesting. A recognisable prototype for a kind of forensic detective fiction which really took off with Sherlock Holmes. At times with Collins, as with his more famous friend Dickens, you wonder how much his misogynistic protagonist is simply ventriloquising his own views, but this wasn't so annoying as to destroy my enjoyment of the whole.
- Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre - I reread this rapidly on a whim. There isn't much to say about its brilliance that hasn't been treated better and in more detail by others; but I had forgotten how comically dry Bronte can be at times.
- Ali Smith, Artful - This is a series of four lectures that Smith gave at St Anne's College, Oxford, dealing with 'time', 'form', 'edge' and 'offer and reflection'. As suggested by the title, the lectures are partially entangled with Oliver Twist -- Smith says she reread the novel whilst writing them -- but draw on a breathtakingly wide array of literature, film and music. She weaves thoughtful, but only lightly analytical, commentary on her topics into a narrative about a bereaved person finding her dead lover's scholarly notes (i.e. the lectures). The imitation of early novels where the authors had to invent an excuse for the narrative existing (e.g. in Moll Flanders, Pamela and Les Liaisons Dangereuses) is presumably deliberate, and it adds a lightness of touch and a humour which is quintessentially Smithian. As inspirational pieces for students at Oxford, I imagine these went down a storm.
- Fiona MacCarthy, The Last Pre-Raphaelite: Edward Burne-Jones and the Victorian Imagination - After months of eyeing this up, first in hardback and then in paperback, I persuaded my partner to buy it for me for Christmas. I'm only a quarter of the way through, and am enjoying it immensely: it's readable and vivid, and made me cross when I realised I'd just missed the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at the Tate, which has now gone on tour to the USA and taken all the normally resident masterpieces with it. My only problem with the book is that it does treat some events and topics more briefly than I would have liked. It has the air of a work that was cut intensively before publication, and although paring down is a highly-encouraged habit amongst writers, in this case I think it has diminished the quality of the whole. My indignant letter to Faber and Faber will be in the post today ...
The final thing is that after March my commission for Mslexia will be finished and I'll be back blogging here more regularly. Thanks to everyone who said nice things about those posts!
