Packing packing...
Jun. 26th, 2012 09:37 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerPacking up my apartment. Also cleaning it. My winter of dedicated tea-drinking has left an apparently indelible ring around the drain of the sink. >.<
Also listening to Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence. (I've just discovered the joy of listening to audio books while I drive. Why didn't I realize this earlier? Think of all the books I could have ingested during my commute!) Has anyone else read this? Did you feel a deep and compelling urge to throttle Newland Archer?
He gets engaged to May, who seems like a perfectly charming person, only to immediately fall in love with her beautiful and exotic cousin Madame Olenska - but despite realizing that his feelings for Madame Olenska will poison his marriage with May, he goes ahead with his engagement anyway even though May offers to release him. Because...because...it's never explained exactly why it would be too much effort to extract himself from a marriage that's preordained to be unhappy, but clearly it is.
This preordination, let me add, is entirely of Newland's making: he could be happy with Mary if he was willing to try, but no. Newland Archer would much rather wallow in his adoration of Madame Olenska (and assume that she's fated to be with him, no matter how clearly she says WE CAN NEVER BE TOGETHER), sneer at May for being shallow and insufficiently artistic (never mind Newland also lacks depth, compassion, and artistic talent himself), and luxuriate in his own exquisite misery than make an effort to be a good husband and a good man.
...I hope the books ends with May and Madame Olenska running away to Monte Carlo together. They both deserve someone so much better than Newland Archer.
Also listening to Edith Wharton The Age of Innocence. (I've just discovered the joy of listening to audio books while I drive. Why didn't I realize this earlier? Think of all the books I could have ingested during my commute!) Has anyone else read this? Did you feel a deep and compelling urge to throttle Newland Archer?
He gets engaged to May, who seems like a perfectly charming person, only to immediately fall in love with her beautiful and exotic cousin Madame Olenska - but despite realizing that his feelings for Madame Olenska will poison his marriage with May, he goes ahead with his engagement anyway even though May offers to release him. Because...because...it's never explained exactly why it would be too much effort to extract himself from a marriage that's preordained to be unhappy, but clearly it is.
This preordination, let me add, is entirely of Newland's making: he could be happy with Mary if he was willing to try, but no. Newland Archer would much rather wallow in his adoration of Madame Olenska (and assume that she's fated to be with him, no matter how clearly she says WE CAN NEVER BE TOGETHER), sneer at May for being shallow and insufficiently artistic (never mind Newland also lacks depth, compassion, and artistic talent himself), and luxuriate in his own exquisite misery than make an effort to be a good husband and a good man.
...I hope the books ends with May and Madame Olenska running away to Monte Carlo together. They both deserve someone so much better than Newland Archer.
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Date: 2012-06-27 03:40 pm (UTC)My little brother went to public high school and came home ranting and raving about how this Edith Wharton was the worst author ever, and he hated Ethan Frome. I didn't get it. So I read Ethan Frome. And then I did. Worst. Book. Ever.
And it really makes me sad that the school system inflicts that on American teenagers, unjustly making them hate Edith Wharton. I've read a little over half a dozen of her novels, and what I've found are the ones set in Old New York are charming and lovely, no matter what awful things happen, while the ones that go outside it are bleak and morbid, beginning to end.
It's like having people come to their opinions of George Eliot by reading The Mill on the Floss. Just no!
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Date: 2012-06-27 04:05 pm (UTC)But it's not like her other novels are the size of War and Peace, so you'd think the school system could find time to squeeze in one of the less soul-destroying ones.
I haven't read Mill on the Floss. We did read Adam Bede at school, though, and I quite liked that. We made a song about it to the tune of A Whole New World...sadly I can't remember any of the words now.