A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I finished Zola’s Nana. I rather think Zola intended me to dislike everyone in this book, but in fact I just ended up feeling terribly sorry for them all: they all seem so human and stupid and tragic, wasting their lives and their treasures buying pleasures that give them no happiness. Not that they would be likely to get happiness from anything else, either. Does happiness even exist in Zola’s world? No one got to be happy in Germinal either.

In any case, I really liked the book. It gives such a clear and evocative picture of such an alien world, the nineteenth-century French theater and demimonde, and I think Nana in particular is a wonderfully complex character. (I also think you could probably make a strongly-supported textual argument that she has borderline personality disorder or possibly C-PTSD, which is impressive given that neither diagnosis was even a glimmer in anyone's eye at that point.) But it's definitely not for the faint of heart.

What I’m Reading Now

Nearly done with Eva Ibbotson’s The Star of Kazan. Annika has been rescued from the evil boarding school where her mother sent her! (Her mother’s portrayal is totally chilling, by the way, because she’s so good at acting like she has Annika’s best interests at heart: she presents the Evil Boarding School as a lovely surprise that will surely fill Annika with joy.) But will she be able to stay with her adoptive family in Vienna????

I mean, of course she will, because it’s an Ibbotson book, but I’m worried how they’re going to keep Annika’s mother from coming and taking her away again. Unless I’m right and it turns out that her mother is not actually her mother after all? WE SHALL SEE.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I meant to start it last week, but then I got sidetracked by Nana.

Watching Les Miserables has put me irresistibly in mind of the other French novel I’ve read about tragic revolutions: Zola’s Germinal, which reads as if Zola read Les Miserable and said, “You know what is wrong with this book? Way too happy. Two whole characters end up happy, gross.”

I found Germinal so distressing the first time I read it - for class; I can’t imagine I would have finished it otherwise - that I sold it back to the bookstore thereafter, because I couldn’t stand to have it sharing my living space. I have since regretted this, because if you don’t mind having your soul crushed into tiny little pieces by Zola’s determinism, it’s a fascinating read. The characters are so human that you - don’t quite like them, for the most part - but they seem real to you; you worry about them, you hope they’ll do better.

Of course they do not. Literally everyone in this book, workers and bourgeois, ends up worse off, except Souvarine the crazy revolutionary. After his girlfriend died in Moscow - they stared into each other’s eyes the whole time while she was being hung, how’s that for traumatizing? - Souvarine destroyed all vestiges of human feeling in his soul and therefore cannot suffer anything but death. And of course, being a bad person, he doesn’t die.

No, wait, even Souvarine suffers! He loses his pet rabbit - indeed, his landlady feeds him his beloved pet rabbit! Apparently he didn’t quite manage to kill all his softer feelings in the service of the glorious socialist future that will bathe the earth in blood.

In Les Miserables, people talk about how Enjolras’ girlfriend is France. Well, Souvarine scorns to have a girlfriend as warm and touchy-feely as a nation-state. Souvarine’s girlfriend is the frickin’ apocalypse. Building a more just world would be nice, but if it’s not possible Souvarine is perfectly happy to tear down what we have and leave nothing but smoking blood-soaked ruins in its place.

The plot of the book concerns the miners going on strike. When the miners give up, Souvarine is so incensed that he sabotages the mine. And then he sees his friend Etienne about to go into the sabotaged mine, and Souvarine has one last burst of fellow feeling and is all “NO DON'T GO DOWN...oh, wait, you are with your girlfriend Catherine. Human feelings mean you are a failure as a revolutionary, and I will leave you both to your terrible mine cave-in death.”

(I occurs to me that Souvarine and Javert have a lot in common. Oh, Souvarine is a servant of Chaos while Javert is a servant of Order, but they share a black-and-white view of the world and a tremendously unforgiving attitude toward anyone who by their lights sins. I could totally see Souvarine killing himself if he realized that a) the world was more complicated than he had hitherto realized, and b) he therefore lost his nerve and fell short of what he considered his duty.)

Souvarine is my faaaaaaaavorite. In a “NO SOUVARINE DON’T DO IT” kind of way, but still, I’m pretty sure this means there’s something wrong with me.