Saving Francesca and Feeling Sorry for Celia

Continuing my binge on Australian YA lit, I read Melina Marchetta's Saving Francesca, which is - very good but not quite to my taste. The first half of the book is so difficult to get through; it's not boring, but it feels like a gray miasma is roiling off the page, lingering in the air, bleaching color and deadening emotion even after the book is closed.

This gives the second half of the book, when Francesca reengages with the world, a feeling of fragile luminosity, but I'm not sure the joy of the second half is worth the misery of the first.

However! All is not drear in my reading world. I read Jaclyn Moriarty's Feeling Sorry for Celia. (I should have a Jaclyn Moriarty tag.) WHY ARE YOU NOT READING JACLYN MORIARTY. Seriously. Why are you wasting time on this post? IT IS TIME YOU COULD SPEND READING JACLYN MORIARTY.

What I particularly love about Moriarty's work is the richness of her characters - there's a certain density to their lives, a feeling that they are enmeshed in a web of people: friends, classmates, family, boyfriend (sometimes), schoolwork, work work... and even the characters who we barely see seem individual. We may not know their story, but you can tell they have one.

And being surrounded by so many three-dimensional characters makes the main characters stronger and more interesting. The individuality of the secondary characters brings out unexpected facets of the main characters, perfectly in character but also surprising.

Moreover, it gives the reader perspective on Moriarty's characters which is hard to achieve with Marchetta's, whose book is more tightly focused. (It helps, too, that Moriarty writes epistolary novels, while Marchetta writes in first person). This makes it easier to love and sympathize with her characters: the reader doesn't have to feel every iota of their pain.

Also, I love Moriarty's sense of humor. She can be serious, and she doesn't shy away from painful topics, but she writes with a firm grip on her sense of the ridiculous and an exquisite grasp of amusing turns of phrase. She makes me love her characters and laugh out loud, and I can't think what more I would ask from an author.

More Book Reviews: The Short Reign of Pippin IV and Middlemarch

My dad and I went fishing this weekend, by which I mean that he fished and I sat beneath the covered bridge, dabbling my feet in the water and reading John Steinbeck’s The Short Reign of Pippin IV.

It’s quite funny - Steinbeck makes mincemeat of the French Communists, who abstain from voting on the restoration of the monarchy so they can complain about the king later. But it’s light-weight. Steinbeck explored similar political ideas in much greater depth in Grapes of Wrath (much as I disliked it), and with greater power and higher stakes in The Moon is Down; this books feels like a rehash.

Also, it treats rather extensively with Steinbeck’s interesting ideas about men and women. He’s much more enjoyable when he leaves all that aside, because then I don’t have to froth with rage.

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My other foray into classic literature this summer was George Eliot’s Middlemarch, which I took to Italy with me on the grounds that if I had it I wouldn’t need to carry along any other books. And indeed, this turned out to be true, because Middlemarch is so long, so plodding and obsessed with minutiae, that it takes about a month to slog one’s way through.

Which is not to say I’m sorry that I read it. Eliot is in many ways an exasperating writer, but she does have a knack for creating memorable characters - in particular Mr. Casaubon, a cramped and petty man with a mildewed soul, too small to commit any actual evil, but possessed of a personality so arid that it sucks the vitality out of everyone around him.

Including the reader. I don't believe I've ever been so relieved by a character's death.

It also includes an interesting exploration of the ways that romantic love can diminish or bolster the character. Loving an unworthy object makes the worthier partner half of a whole that is smaller than they were alone. Both Dorothea and Lydgate eventually realize that their respective spouses are too weak or too venal to bear any weight in their relationship, and that they will therefore have to take the entire emotional burden of the marriage on their shoulders if it’s going to work. They do it, because it must be done, but it crushes them.

But romantic love can also enlarge the character - mutual love between good people creates a whole that is bigger than merely the sum of their two characters, because it includes not only their own good qualities but the strength that they draw from each other.

So I’m glad I’ve read Middlemarch. But I’m so, so happy that I’m no longer in the process of reading it.