A Certain Slant of Light

I have been reading Rousseau’s Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment, which sounds like it might be a philosophical tome about dry intellectual debates, but is in fact about Rousseau’s ridiculous personal feud with the Scottish philosopher David Hume. It’s very entertaining simply for the story, but it also gave me the odd experience of disliking Rousseau intensely and yet feeling terribly sorry for him.

I still don’t like Rousseau: it’s hard to warm to a man who abandoned all five of his children at the Paris Foundling Hospital, on the grounds that their existence would ruin his lover’s reputation, which he could easily have saved by, oh, I don’t know, marrying her. He had all these children by the same woman, La Vasseur, so it’s not clear to me why he so adamantly refused to do so.

Although frankly, I have the impression that Rousseau couldn’t bear keeping his children because it would mean he wasn’t the neediest person in the house anymore. He seems to have loved La Vasseur for much the same reason he loved his dog: she offered uncomprehending and unconditional support and love. Ugh, Rousseau.

However, as Rousseau descends into paranoid delusions about David Hume, I did feel terribly sorry for him, because he was so clearly tormented.

After Rousseau had to flee France, and then Switzerland, and then France again, the Scottish philosopher David Hume - who had never hitherto met Rousseau - offered to help him find asylum in Britain. While Hume was indeed extremely helpful, he apparently found Rousseau incredibly hard to deal with, though he tried to hide his irritation with his protege behind a polite mask.

Normally this mask worked well: Hume was so famously amicable that he was called le bon David. The super-sensitive Rousseau, however, saw the mask at once, although he could not discern what lay beneath. He could not imagine that it hid mere irritation: he began to fret that his supposed benefactor, who had done so much for him, was in fact part of a dark plot to discredit and destroy Rousseau.

The last evening before Rousseau left for his refuge in Staffordshire, he and Hume had an argument (their later accounts differ as to its cause). But then Rousseau flung himself Hume’s shoulder, sobbing his apologies, while Hume attempted to soothe him.

Hume, who had a reputation for being cool and detached, promptly wrote to half of his correspondents to recount the evening: “I kissed him and embraced him twenty times, with a plentiful effusion of tears,” he wrote. He was totally capable of being emotionally responsive, see see!

But Rousseau felt that all his worst fear were confirmed. Rather than entering into the depth and spirit of Rousseau’s agonies and embracing him as a friend, Hume had merely patted him awkwardly on the shoulder and tried to brush away Rousseau’s concerns with light and comforting words! Clearly the only explanation for Hume’s behavior was TRAITOROUS PERFIDY.

And not long after, Rousseau sent Hume a letter detailing all of Hume’s supposed treachery, which so infuriated Hume that he published a pamphlet detailing how deeply wrong Rousseau was about everything. All their friends were like, “I’m not sure whether to laugh at the ridiculousness of Rousseau’s suspicions or cry because he is so clearly unhinged and tormented by his own demons. Why don’t you leave the poor man alone, Hume?”

Hume: “NEVER. He has slandered my name and I will not rest until I have undone the damage!!!!!

Now, on the one hand, Hume is clearly the wronged party here. But at the same time, Rousseau was so tormented by the phantasms in his own mind, I do feel bad for him: it’s hard to imagine a worse punishment on earth than merely being Rousseau, and having to live with such suspicions all the time.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rumer Godden’s The Greengage Summer, which is about a group of children who spend a few weeks in a French hotel, alone because their mother has fallen ill and is in the hospital. Nothing much happens for most of the book: it’s a slow exploration of the hotel, and the routine of the hotel and the routine the children make for themselves while they’re there, and the complicated intersecting relationships of the people who run the hotel.

And then, having set up so many dominoes, Godden gently flicks them down. It’s rather fascinating to watch.

This is an adult book about children rather than a children’s book. This isn't so much about content as about, how shall I put it - underlying worldview. The first word that came to mind is bleak or possibly jaded, but that's not quite right. The book is not jaded, but many of the characters are, and their actions are driven by pettiness in a way that is uncommon in children's books.

I think perhaps in children's books, evil usually has a cause deeper than shallowness? I'll have to think about this more.

What I’m Reading Now

Maggie Stiefvater’s The Scorpio Races, which is amazingly awesome. I like the main characters a lot, particularly Puck (Sean took more time to grow on me, because he doesn’t like anyone except his stallion), but I love, love, love the island setting. I love the way its customs unfold as we, through Puck, learn more about the titular Scorpio Races. Every year, humans capture, train (not tame. Water horses are never tame), and race the deadly water horses which rise from the sea and occasionally eat people.

Because obviously if your island is beset by deadly flesh-eating horses of dooooom, the thing to do is to capture them and race them. Obviously.

And I love also that, although the deadly doom horses of the deeps are clearly the most important thing, Stiefvater remembers to flesh out other aspects of the islands as well. I would really, really like to eat a November cake.

Oh, oh! And I love the sibling relationships in this book, particularly Puck's friendship with her little brother Finn. Basically I like this book a lot.

What I Plan to Read Next

Sutcliff’s Mark of the Horse Lord is next, but after that I’m not sure. You guys, I have so many books that I’m planning to read over break, I don’t even know where to start.

But I've finished all my course work, so now I have time to read AS MUCH AS I WANT!

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Rosemary Sutcliff’s Dawn Wind. I really liked it! I worried vaguely beforehand that it might be just as depressing as The Lantern-Bearers, as both of them involve heroes enslaved by Saxons, but Owain hates the world considerably less than Aquila and is therefore less draggingly miserable to read about.

(Of course, it helps that Owain sells himself into slavery by choice, more or less, to save his friend Regina when she’s ill. It’s not a free choice, but it’s still more of a choice than having his home burned down, being tied to a tree, and then kidnapped, as Aquila was.)

Oh, and I liked Regina an awful lot! She’s a study in contrasts, hardened by her life but with flashes of kindness as well. I think what I find particularly appealing is that her hardness is genuine, not merely a defensive protection for a soft squashy heart: she tried to kill her old caretaker, who used to beat her. But her softness, as in her love for birds, is genuine too.

On a more macro level, one of the things I find fascinating about Sutcliff’s work is the sense of the sweep of history in it. Tribes and states and empires never just are in her work, they are always in a process of becoming. Either they are rising and replacing the empires that have come before, or decaying and being replaced in their turn.

What I’m Reading Now

Delia Sherman’s The Freedom Maze, about Sophie, a bookish white girl in 1960s Louisiana who, under the influence of too many Edward Eager novels, asks an uncanny creature to send her back in time. She winds up on her family’s plantation in the 1860s, where she gets mistaken for one of their relation Robert’s bastard slave children.

I suspect things are going to start going very badly for Sophie once her many-great ancestors realize that this is not so, but so far she’s coping with her situation by trying to convince herself that this is a perfectly acceptable adventure, if perhaps rockier than she anticipated. Oh, Sophie. :( This is going to end in brutal disillusionment and I feel bad for her in advance.

Before I started the book I felt trepidation about the potential anviliciousness of the message - I mean, just look at that premise - but so far the book has lived up to the laudatory review that convinced me to read it. Sophie’s characterization is a great triumph. She loves books and exploring and is a little awkward, is in short very easy to sympathize with - but at the same time, she’s imbued with the racism of her surroundings.

It’s not a virulent racism: it’s subtle and insidious enough that merely meeting black people on a level of equality is not enough to blow her tiny mind. Given how thoughtfully she’s been portrayed so far, I feel cautiously hopeful that the book will avoid anviliciousness.

Also I’m reading Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin. I’m reading this before bedtime, which means I’m getting through it rather slowly. But it’s also going well: it’s a book with a lot of book talk in it, which is always fun, and Dean has a gift for creating a sense of place and atmosphere at Blackstock College.

And it’s interesting just how different the college experience was, even just twenty years ago. I don’t mean only the lack of computers (although that does catch me up), but Janet’s comment on her anthropology professor: “Nor did it seem that he communed with the dead - the dates on all the books except one showed that the authors were either still alive or but recently dead.”

I think there is more of an assumption, now, that new books are better than old.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have a whole slew of Sutcliff books on hold from the university library, having just realized that this is my last chance to get at them. I’m particularly looking forward to reading The Mark of the Horse Lord.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Wind in the Willows, which is really more bunch of vaguely connected short stories, than a novel, because not only is there not much plot, but the Mole & Ratty sections have a completely different feel to them than the Mr. Toad sections. (I much prefer the Mole & Ratty sections; they're so nice to each other, while Mr. Toad is really a jerk to everyone.)

Many of the stories themselves don’t have much of a plot: they exist more to paint word pictures than to tell stories.

“And the talk, the wonderful talk flowed on - or was it speech entirely, or did it pass at times into song - chanty of the sailors weighing the dripping anchor, sonorous hum of the shrouds in a tearing North-Easter, ballad of the fisherman hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky, chords of guitar and mandoline from gondola or caique?”

Hauling his nets at sundown against an apricot sky. Isn’t that a beautiful image?

What I’m Reading Now

Madeleine L’Engle’s And Both Were Young, which I am enjoying a lot. L'Engle portrays Flip with great sympathy, but without ever letting that sympathy blind her to Flip's flaws.

And the mist-wreathed Swiss Alps and ruined chateaus and hot chocolate warming in copper pots by the side of grand fireplaces are all so atmospheric.

What I Plan to Read Next

Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin, I think. It’s been sitting on my shelf for more than a year, so I really ought to get around to it.

Oh, oh! And I have a couple of Rumer Godden's books on hold at the university library. They're hard to get a hold of, so I figured I should take advantage of the university's massive holdings while I still can. I should see if they have any Sutcliffs lying around, too...

A collection of short Sutcliff reviews for the mostly short Sutcliff books I have been reading.

1. The Minstrel and the Dragon Pup. Basically this is a vintage Sutcliff “boy with dog” story, except with a baby dragon instead of a dog. It’s a picture book, so the story part is pretty short, but the illustrations (by Emma Chichester Clark) are gorgeous and the dragon is all sorts of adorable, so if you run across it, it’s very cheering.

2. Chess-Dream in a Garden, which is totally trippy. So this chess set - actually, only one half of a chess set - lives in a garden, under the watchful eye of a stone bird, and the queen dreams she’s a unicorn and the knight dreams he’s a zebra (and he’s also totally in love with the queen) and the pawns dream that they’re armadillos, and then the knight confesses his love and causes discord in the garden which brings in the evil half of the chess set, but the queen...somehow summons up the force of the garden...and all the good chess pieces transform into their animal selves and defeat the evil chess pieces!

Yes. It’s kind of trippy.

3. Brother Dusty-Feet, which is about Hugh, who joins a troupe of traveling players in Elizabethan England. I would have bet money that Hugh was going to run into Shakespeare at some point, and I would have been wrong; he doesn’t so much as perform a cobbled-together form of any of Shakespeare’s plays, as Hugh’s troupe trades mostly in miracle plays.

This seems to be written for a slightly younger audience than most of her historical fiction: there are lots of asides to explain customs to readers, which the Roman Britain books don’t do. But it's still rather fun: I particularly liked the pilgrim-piper who might be one of the fairy folk.

I have read Sarah Rees Brennan's Unspoken! And now I must really set aside novels and actually finish my final projects. One of them is a lengthened rewrite of my American Girl paper, it should not be as hard to write as it is...

But first: a review of Untold.

1. Let me begin with my ridiculous crack theory: Angela and her brother Rusty are werecats. Think about it! They both spend all their time lounging, sleeping, eating, and occasionally practicing their self-defense skills. Angela hates everyone, and Rusty barely cares about anything: two common cat personalities. IT MAKES SO MUCH SENSE.

The rest of it is spoilery for the first book if not the second, so I'm putting it behind a ( cut )

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, which I thought was going to be all about horses and friendship and going to a school that is kind of like a year round summer camp - God, the book I thought it was going to be was so awesome, let me pause to mourn its nonexistence.

Okay. Pause over. Yonahlossee is in fact a train wreck. Our heroine Thea had disturbing love affairs in both the “adolescence in Florida” and “later adolescence at Yonahlossee” storylines.

In the flashbacks to her Floridian youth, she’s having a romance with her cousin. Cousin romances qua cousin romances don’t bother me - I love Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins books, where the basic plot is “Which of her cousins will Rose marry?”

But The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls has this dirty/bad/wrong Flowers in the Attic feeling to it, which I find unpleasant to the point of actually repulsive. No, really, Thea, it’s kind of gross that your cousin is feeling you up under the dining room table at Thanksgiving dinner. It would be gross even if he were a non-blood-related boyfriend, but the fact that he’s your cousin who was almost like your brother makes it even grosser.

And in the Yonahlossee portions, Thea boinks her married headmaster. I’m not sure if I find the “married” or the “headmaster” part more disturbing. Possibly they feed off each other for maximum disturbingness?

( But all this pales in comparison to the novel’s Theme )

Remind me never to read a mainstream novel with a blurb describing it as “sexy” ever again.

What I’m Reading Now

Psmith in the City! I decided that I needed something light to reward me for slogging through The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls. And indeed, Psmith is delightful! I find the cricket bits completely incomprehensible, but that’s all right, they’re rather short and most of the book revolves around Psmith being hilarious. Thanks for the recommendation, surexit!

What I Plan to Read Next

Between The Language of Flowers and The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, I’ve lost most of my enthusiasm for the whole “grown-up books for grown-ups” project, but nonetheless I’m going to give it one last try with Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child. The main couple lives a bazillion miles from anyone, so unless there’s a super sexy werefox stalking the wilderness there is no way they can have any affairs.

Finally limped to the end of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and the Damned, which chronicles Anthony Patch’s long, slow descent into alcoholism and penury (otherwise known as “a middle-class lifestyle”), and is super depressing. Even the parties are depressing. I’m actually not sure that anything un-depressing ever happens in this book, which is rather impressive in a way.

No, wait! There is the moment when Bloeckman the Jewish movie impresario punches Anthony in the face and knocks one of his teeth out! I really enjoyed that. It was the next best thing to being able to reach into the book and clobber Anthony myself.

I think I’m more interested in Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald as people than in Scott’s writing, because other than The Great Gatsby, which is comparatively hopeful, his work seems to be pretty soul-crushingly cynical.

And speaking of Fitzgeraldian fun! I recently saw Midnight in Paris, which is about a guy who goes to Paris with his fiancee - they’re stunningly ill-matched; I can only assume they were blinded by the vision of the adorable blonde children they would produce - only for him to wander back through time to Paris in the twenties when the clock strikes midnight.

It’s a rather slight movie, but it’s a ton of fun, not least because it features the Fitzgeralds being, well, themselves. (Although actually the Fitzgeralds are pretty minor, so probably you shouldn’t watch this just to get your Fitzgerald on.) Hemingway is rather flat; he’s just reciting his lines, he never sounds like he quite means them.

But Paris is beautiful and the twenties are beautiful and the brief bit where they slide back to the Belle Epoque is beautiful, and it’s a light and cheerful antidote to the misery that is true Fitzgerald.

Teach me to choose books for their titles. I finished Vanessa Diffenbaugh’s The Language of Flowers and ended up not liking it at all. Everyone in the narrative bends over backward to take care of Victoria, even as she pushes them all away. This is understandable up to a point, and God knows I can appreciate the wish fulfillment aspect of a narrative where everyone loves the main character so unconditionally they will put up with mountains of shit from her without ever getting mad -

- but at the same time, there is something to be said for conditional love, otherwise known as “having boundaries.” Victoria treats everyone in her life terribly, but no one ever gives up on her - except her social worker, who is a terrible person. Often, they don’t even seem to notice that Victoria has screwed them over.

For instance, early in the book, Victoria gets a job at Renata’s flower store. By the end of the book - using the contacts she made through Renata - Victoria has started her own flower store in the same neighborhood, which is so successful that she has a waiting list months long. She’s completely undercut Renata’s livelihood, providing flowers for weddings, but does Renata mind? Not at all! She’s totally willing to help when Victoria flakes out, which is all the time.

This is the other grating thing about Victoria’s successful flower business. It descends on her as if by magic, despite the fact that she puts little visible effort into it and abandons it repeatedly in the hands of a semi-competent assistant whenever she has an emotional crisis. Victoria is all, “No one cares about the way the arrangements look! They just want the meanings to be right!” Has she met the bridal industry? Of course they’re going to care about how their flowers look!

For all that Victoria starts the book homeless, The Language of Flowers seems weirdly disconnected from the realities of money. Renata pays Victoria hundreds of dollars for very little work, and routinely gives her extra just ‘cause, even though her flower business seems awfully marginal. When Victoria leaves her boyfriend Grant, she steals enough money to live on for months, but he doesn’t even bring it up when she shows up again.

And when Victoria (in flashback) wrecks her final foster placement by burning down her beloved foster mother’s vineyard, her only source of livelihood, the only thing her foster mother cares about is losing Victoria.

***

Now, if I lost a friend like Victoria, I might be glad she had finally gotten the hell out of my life, but no one in this book shares this view. They are all totally sad, but not sad enough to actually yell at her.

She walks out on her beloved boyfriend Grant without warning, hides from him for months, secretly has their child, abandons the child in his house with the stove on - in order to keep the place humidified, but still, what if the water in the pan ran out before he got back! What if he’s on vacation, Victoria?

And when, over a year after abandoning him, she shows up and is like, “You mad?” all he can say is “I should be.”

Yes, he bloody well should be! Why isn’t he? Because the book is carefully constructed so that no one ever yells at Victoria, that’s why.

For instance. Renata’s mother, a midwife, helps Victoria have the baby - at last minute notice and free of charge - and then checks up on her regularly after that, also free of charge. But once Victoria abandons the baby, Renata’s mother simply drops out of the book. If she ever interacted with Victoria again, she might say something mean like “If you were having so much trouble with the baby why didn’t you give me a telephone call? I was basically willing to adopt both of you to make this work!”

Victoria is surrounded by people who would drop everything to take care of her and her benighted young sprout. Don’t these people have any friends who actually treat them decently?

(Renata's mother would not, let us note, say something even meaner like “Did you abandon your baby to die by the highway?” Because everyone in Victoria’s life, despite Victoria’s reticence, always correctly divines her intentions. When she cuts all contact with her boyfriend, insists no one tell him she’s pregnant, and is so afraid of him finding her that she lives on the streets, no one even thinks Grant might be abusive; they just all know that this is because of Victoria’s issues.

Because Victoria knows he’s not abusive, and it clearly never occurred to Diffenbaugh that other people might make different assumptions based on incomplete information.)

Ironically, if the goal was to make Victoria seem sympathetic despite her selfishness, then this approach completely backfired. If the other characters had not been so eager to go out of their way to take care of Victoria - if they had sometimes gotten mad at her when she behaved in a ridiculous selfish manner - if the narrative hadn’t excused her every action - I would have liked her more.

Or perhaps liked is the wrong word? But I would have found her interesting, the way I find Eponine interesting, even lovable, despite the fact that some of her actions are pretty heinous.

As it is, there’s a strong sense in The Language of Flowers that Victoria is sinned against but never sinning - despite the manifold ways that her actions hurt other people, it’s all excused because the poor thing wasn’t loved enough as a child, and she never actually has to take responsibility for any of it.

Never mind that Grant and Victoria’s ex-foster mother Elizabeth weren’t loved enough as children either, and they somehow find it in their hearts to treat Victoria with the patience of saints.

I felt that if none of the other characters were going to get mad at her, then I had to do it for them.

I just read J. K. Rowling’s new mystery novel The Cuckoo’s Calling. I kept thinking, “I’ll read one more chapter. Well, maybe another chapter. They’re pretty short chapters, just one more…” and then somehow it would be a hundred pages later and midnight and I would still be reading.

The Cuckoo’s Calling is not quite as engrossing as Harry Potter: when I realized that it was midnight I could, in fact, put the book down. It’s both like and quite unlike the Harry Potter books. The mystery aspect - the disparate clues that rush together at the end, in a way unexpected but entirely satisfying - it is reminiscent of Harry Potter’s puzzle-box plots.

If you were into Harry Potter for the magic and the worldbuilding, though, The Cuckoo’s Calling will not scratch your itch. Although it occurs to me that The Cuckoo’s Calling does have a similar eye for detail - it’s just that this is detail about London, particularly high-society London, rather than the wizarding world.

I don’t know enough about London (or, for that matter, high society) to know if it’s accurate, but it’s certainly very vivid, and the mystery format gives Rowling the chance to show off her ability to capture a wide range of different voices as our detective, Strike (yes, he has a hardboiled detective name!) interviews everyone involved in the case.

I’ve always really admired Rowling’s ability to capture characters swiftly: I haven’t read Harry Potter for ages, but I can still remember even quite minor characters surprisingly well. It’s sort of like the ability of a gifted caricaturist: you see all of a character’s most important characteristics in the initial sketch, a little exaggerated to make them more memorable. And this ability holds her in good stead in writing a mystery.

So, yes, I’m hoping that Rowling writes more murder mysteries. The ending suggests that this book may spawn a series, so fingers crossed!