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Florentine books
Jul. 12th, 2011 10:59 pmI am so sorry that I didn't bring A Room with a View with me. It was the first grown-up classic I ever read, a gift from my seventh-grade English teacher (he was totally amazing), and for these reasons as well as its intrinsic merit I am devoted to the book. Lucy Honeychurch is a wonderful heroine, ordinary in a way that is heroic, and Forster has such wonderful insight into people; Lucy's long-suffering cousin Charlotte is a masterpiece.
I think George Emerson is rather flat, though. He's a bit too perfect a romantic hero, angsty as Rochester but without the rough edges that make him interesting.
Instead I'm stuck with George Eliot's Middlemarch, which is not an acceptable substitute. She keeps pausing to explain to us why we should feel sympathy for odious people, which slows her pacing to a glacial speed and, more crucially, backfires. I might have sympathized for Casaubon for being so pathetically insecure, but five pages telling me why I ought to feel bad for him...? I refuse to have my sympathies dictated! Revolt! Vive la France!
Eliot displays this bizarre mixture of grimness and sentimentality that I find particularly hard to take. It's most obvious in Silas Marner (I've read three of Eliot's books. Whyyyyyyyy do I keep doing this to myself?), where miserly Silas is Saved by the Love of a Golden-Haired Child, who is the product of a grim subplot about either bigamy or illegitimacy and dying in quarries.
And! And! As I'm ranting about Eliot already! The way she handles female characters bugs me. She seems dedicated to a peculiarly conservative model of gender relations - more so than Austen or the sisters Bronte, so you can't just blame it on the times.
But she's still not as irritating as Edith Wharton, so I suppose it could be worse.
ETA: And by Edith Wharton I definitely mean Willa Cather, because I haven't read any Wharton except Ethan Frome.
ETA, a year after the fact: And now that I have read some Edith Wharton, I apologize to her unreservedly. Her female characters are delightful. It's the male characters I sometimes want to strangle.
ETA, after reading House of Mirth: Actually, I don't want to apologize to Edith Wharton, because Lily Bart is so irritating in every conceivable way.
I think George Emerson is rather flat, though. He's a bit too perfect a romantic hero, angsty as Rochester but without the rough edges that make him interesting.
Instead I'm stuck with George Eliot's Middlemarch, which is not an acceptable substitute. She keeps pausing to explain to us why we should feel sympathy for odious people, which slows her pacing to a glacial speed and, more crucially, backfires. I might have sympathized for Casaubon for being so pathetically insecure, but five pages telling me why I ought to feel bad for him...? I refuse to have my sympathies dictated! Revolt! Vive la France!
Eliot displays this bizarre mixture of grimness and sentimentality that I find particularly hard to take. It's most obvious in Silas Marner (I've read three of Eliot's books. Whyyyyyyyy do I keep doing this to myself?), where miserly Silas is Saved by the Love of a Golden-Haired Child, who is the product of a grim subplot about either bigamy or illegitimacy and dying in quarries.
And! And! As I'm ranting about Eliot already! The way she handles female characters bugs me. She seems dedicated to a peculiarly conservative model of gender relations - more so than Austen or the sisters Bronte, so you can't just blame it on the times.
But she's still not as irritating as Edith Wharton, so I suppose it could be worse.
ETA: And by Edith Wharton I definitely mean Willa Cather, because I haven't read any Wharton except Ethan Frome.
ETA, a year after the fact: And now that I have read some Edith Wharton, I apologize to her unreservedly. Her female characters are delightful. It's the male characters I sometimes want to strangle.
ETA, after reading House of Mirth: Actually, I don't want to apologize to Edith Wharton, because Lily Bart is so irritating in every conceivable way.
