BITS & PIECES OF A MISPLACED LIFE: THE JOYS OF READING #10

“I think it is all a matter of love: the more you love 
a memory, the stronger and stronger it is.
                                    -Vladimir Nabokov


Epigraph to Daring My Passages by Gail Sheehy (New York:
Harper Collins Publishers, 2014)

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“Like Thackeray’s daughters, I read Jane Eyre in childhood, carried away ‘as by a whirlwind.’ Returning to Charlotte Bronte’s  most famous novel, as I did over and over in adolescence, in my twenties, thirties, now in my forties, I have never lost the sense that it contains, through and beyond the force of its creator’s imagination, some nourishment I needed then and still need today. Other novels often ranked greater, such as Persuasion, Middlemarch, Jude the Obscure, Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, The Portrait of a Lady – all offered their contradictory and compelling versions of what it meant to be born a woman. But Jane Eyre has for us now a special force and survival value.”

Adrienne Rich. “Jane Eyre: The Temptations of a Motherless Woman” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose,1966-1978 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979) 

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JOHN BUCHAN

John Buchan
Wrote less about fuckin’
& more about spies.
I wonder: was that wise?
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LJP

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JOSEPH CONRAD AND RIVERS

“ Conrad loved the sea as few authors love their subjects, loved our actual planet, which few people now know intimately. But he did need to come ashore, alas, and rivers were
Another matter for this seaborne enthusiast. They narrowed and twisted claustrophobically, closing into confines where the stage was set for treachery and tragedy. With ‘the patient forest ‘ all around, issues of conduct and craftsmanship were not straightforward but bewildering, and death came not in the midst of a violent storm but by dreadful draining, silent fevers – ‘the playful paw-strikes of the wilderness.’  ‘Men who come out here should have no entrails,’ says Kurtz’s boss, the manager of trade on the river, in ‘Heart of Darkness…’”

Edward Hoagland. Balancing Acts (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992)

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A FEW WORDS ABOUT RABELAIS’S PERHAPS

“ The legend is that Rabelais last words were ‘The farce is finished, I go to seek a vast perhaps.’ This is one of the most apposite of the tales about Rabelais, but only if we realize what a different meaning the words have for us. There is no bitterness like ours in the choice of the word ‘farce,’ no hint of Hamlet’s instruction to the players. There is no hint of Hamlet’s soliloquy in the choice of the word ‘perhaps.’
Rabelais meant a farce like those he had seen a thousand times on a stage of planks in a town square full of sound and fury, uproarious with laughter about copulation and defecation – or as Aristotle would say, coming to be and passing away. The skepticism of the perhaps is an untroubled skepticism, as far from Pascal’s agonized wager or Kierkegaard’s leap into the dark as could be imagined.”

Kenneth Rexroth. Classics Revisited (New York: Avon Books, 1968)
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NO MORE PRETENDING

“Some years back I made a New Year’s resolution to stop pretending I had read books I hadn’t. This necessitated 
a crash course in those books I had already, for years, pretended to have read just because everyone else had 
read them. And hey! No one ever told me ‘Moby Dick’ was
funny.”

Karen Joy Fowler. “By the Book” in The New York Times
Book Review (March 13, 2022)
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"A persistent autograph-seeker once asked him to
inscribe a copy of his novel Elmer Gantry, about
the hard-drinking con man turned amoral preacher.
   Lewis complied and wrote: "To you, are more 
like Elmer Gantry that anyone else I know --
except that unlike Gantry, women won't fall for
you."

Jeffrey Lyons.Stories My Father Told Me: Notes 
From the "The Lyons Den" (New York: Abbeville,
2011)




Dear Editors:

   Violet reviewing NoViolet tells us that the novel 
Glory is about characters who "are all animals." I
 wonder how many novels for adults have no adults, 
teen-agers or children in them?  There must be very 
few. Even the classic Animal Farm (originally titled 
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story) has four humans in it. 
Perhaps some other fairy tales and Science Fiction 
novels qualify.

Sincerely,


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