A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Naomi Mitchison’s first novel, The Conquered, in which Meromic the son of a Gaulish chieftain is captured and sold into slavery during Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. When Meromic is about to be killed for insubordination, the Roman centurion Titus Barrus saves his life, and after that, well, even when they go back to Gaul to help Caesar finish his mopping up operations:

“There’s half of me aching to get off, to be fighting on my own side, the side I ought to be on; and there’s the other half - oh God, Lerrys, I’ld give my life for him, I would truly; he’s all I’ve got, he’s wife and child and home and everything. I don’t care what he does to me - not really. There’s nothing I can be sure of except friendship, but that’s true, that’s a god; how can I throw it away?”

Strongly suspect that Rosemary Sutcliff read this book at some point. There are even dog metaphors! After Meromic runs away (to revenge himself upon a man who betrayed his family) and then comes back to Titus, his fellow slave Dith tells him scornfully, “when you [came back] you went jumping about and kissing his knees like a dog - oh, Meromic, don’t!”

For Meromic has started battening on Dith, as one does when someone says something that is perhaps not literally true, but figuratively too true for comfort.

But Meromic is much more conflicted about his loyalty than your average Sutcliff character, and in any case this is only one aspect of the novel. Like the other Mitchison novels I’ve read, this one is bursting at the seams, an everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach where Mitchison throws in all the things that she happens to be thinking about. This often means that her novels are messy, but it’s often a glorious mess, and in this case it all comes together into a coherent whole.

Here Mitchison is writing about conquest (the title may have given this away), the difficulty of forming a critique of imperialism when your position is really “Mad about being conquered because my people ought to be the ones going a-conquering,” the difficult lot of women in the ancient world, the way that personal and political loyalty intertwine and undermine each other (the various groups of Gauls can’t come together to effectively oppose Caesar because they can’t set aside old personal animosities), the power and limitations of friendship and human kindness, and also glimmers of magic here and there because why the hell not?

What I’m Reading Now

REALLY enjoying the Christmas Carol readalong. Dickens is having so much fun as he writes (“There’s more of gravy than of grave about you!” Scrooge storms at Marley’s ghost) and it’s just a nice pick-me-up to have a couple of pages of Christmas Carol to read in the morning. Scrooge has just met the Ghost of Christmas Past! Glad that the Muppet Christmas Carol didn't go along with the thing where the Ghost of Christmas Past fluctuated, so that it was "now a thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs, now a pair of legs without a head..."

My interest in The Lightning Conductor, on the other hand, is flagging. The book has devolved into LONG sight-seeing sections, and it’s the rare author who can make unalloyed sight-seeing interesting to me.

What I Plan to Read Next

A few months ago I was CRUELLY STYMIED in my quest to read John McPhee’s The Ransom of Russian Art, which the library owns… but it's in the art museum library, which is closed except by appointment. And it’s impossible to make an appointment because no one answers emails, the phone number on the website is wrong, and the phone number on the art museum library door automatically hangs up after two rings.

WELL, it turns out that The Ransom of Russian Art is collected in The Second John McPhee Reader, which I CAN get my hot little hands on. So TAKE THAT, art museum library!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Diary of a Goose Girl by Kate Douglas Wiggin, a hilarious little wisp of a book. A society maiden retires to bucolic Thornycroft Farm, where she becomes deeply involved in the lives of the resident poultry. She also spares some attention for the resident humans, particularly Phoebe, a girl of eighteen, whose musings on a rejected suitor lead our Goose Girl to muse, “I can understand that, for I once met the man I nearly promised years before to marry, and we both experienced such a sense of relief at being free instead of bound that we came near falling in love for sheer joy.”

There is a little wisp of a romantic plot - our heroine has repaired Thornycroft as part of a complicated courtship scheme - but it appears to exist mainly so Wiggin can bring the book to a tidy end. Otherwise how could she ever decide it was time to stop her fascinating and funny observations of the social lives of geese, ducks, and hens?

I also finished John McPhee’s Oranges, also a delight, as full of interesting facts as an orange is of juice. Have you ever wondered why those oranges with the easily-removed skin are variously called mandarins or tangerines or clementines? It turns out that mandarin is the name for all oranges with this “zipper skin,” while tangerines, clementines, satsumas, etc. are simply the names of specific varieties.

What I’m Reading Now

I have succumbed to peer pressure and signed up for Dracula Daily, which sends you the diary entries/letters/newspaper clippings/etc that make up Dracula on the day that they are dated. I have read this book, but AGES ago in high school (my teacher made us chicken paprikash so we could get a taste of Jonathan Harker’s travels), so it will be interesting to revisit. So far Jonathan Harker has arrived in a gloomy castle in the middle of nowhere, where he has realized he is a PRISONER!

What I Plan to Read Next

Trying to decide whether to read Yone Noguchi’s The American Diary of a Japanese Girl. It’s been on my list for so long! and the idea of a novel written by a Japanese man in English for an American audience in 1904 is so interesting! and also Noguchi apparently had an affair with Charles Warren Stoddard. (You may remember Stoddard as William Dean Howells’ flirty penpal, as well as the man who broke Francis Davis Millet’s HEART. He was 65 when he met the 22-year-old Noguchi. Clearly a man who got around.) But then I actually started to read the book and…

Without beauty woman is nothing. Face is the whole soul. I prefer death if I am not given a pair of dark velvety eyes.

What a shame even woman must grow old!

One stupid wrinkle on my face would be enough to stun me.

My pride is in my slim fingers of satin skin.

I’ll carefully clean my roseate finger-nails before I’ll land in America.

It’s ALL like this. Most of the paragraphs are single sentences, the sentences are all in this highly ornate style, and the opinions expressed are all Like That. Maybe the book I truly want to read is Amy Sueyoshi’s Queer Compulsions: Race, Nation, and Sexuality in the Affairs of Yone Noguchi.