Book #981

Reviewer: Kara

Written in the 1740s, Joseph Andrews is Henry Fielding’s response to Samuel Richardson’s gigantic tome Pamela, which Fielding found ridiculous. Joseph is a virtuous footman who is saving himself for the pure and perfect Fanny Goodwill. Abraham Adams, the local parson, likes Joseph because of his virtue and because he reads good books. The story follows Joseph and Parson Adams on their wacky adventures – first trying to return home, then trying to get Joseph and Fanny married.

The novel is replete with situational comedy. Parson Adams is attacked by dogs, falls into the mud in a pig sty, has his parson’s garb completely destroyed, and is doused in pig’s blood. While he endures these indignities, Joseph is trying to protect Fanny from being raped and working to maintain his own virtue, despite offers from the likes of the wonderfully-named Lady Booby and Madame Slipslop. The end of the novel features a comedic and absurd situation of confused identities but in the end, as in Pamela, virtue is rewarded.

Anyone who has read Don Quixote will notice a lot of similarities. Fielding was profoundly influenced by Cervantes and openly attests to this in his own preface to the novel. Fielding wrote that his novel was written in the style of the “comic epic poem in prose” as exemplified by Don Quixote. Fielding extended the writing style by introducing the omniscient narrator. Joseph Andrews represents the first appearance of a narrator in a novel who is not actually a character, but purely a voice, there to know what the characters do not and, in this case, for satirical effect.

I find the history of Joseph Andrews that I’ve just described fascinating, but that is not why the book is on my top ten list of the greatest books I’ve ever read (and I mean ever!). It’s because I LOVE this story. It’s ridiculous, fun, zany, and absolutely hysterical.

It’s also very well-thought-out. Parson Adams is a wonderful character and a very unique and full creation. Fielding does an excellent job of making the reader love him while also repeatedly laughing at him. I will admit that the plot is, very occasionally, a little too convenient, but Fielding’s message – that hypocrisy and vanity are ridiculous – comes across perfectly through the satire.

If one thing is missing from Joseph Andrews it’s a solid female character. While the male characters remain three-dimensional throughout the absurdity and satire, the females do suffer. Madame Slipslop is merely hideous and the butt of many jokes, Lady Booby is vain and selfish, and Fanny is too good to be true and extremely weak. However, I’ve chosen to forgive Fielding for his 1700s attitude towards women because I truly enjoy his sense of humor and his early shaping of the novel genre.

Book #685 

Reviewer: Kara

Please note: this is also known as Remembrance of Things Past and is in the list as such.

I’ve always said that I’d rather a book be short on plot and long on thought than fast-paced and full of clever plot devices but lacking realistic characters and something thought-provoking to sink my teeth into. The fact that I truly loved reading this 3000-page novel, from beginning to end, puts my money where my mouth is. After all, the first volume (Swann’s Way) opens with 30-ish pages describing that weird feeling of waking up and not knowing for a split second where, who, or when you are.

In Search of Lost Time is impossible to summarize, but here I go: The novel is about Marcel (the narrator, not the author) discovering, after a long life of distractions and failures, that he can reach the goal of writing a novel that he gave up long ago. The novel has two “I’s” – both young Marcel and old Marcel (writing the novel we’re reading) wax and wane throughout. This provides the reader with two different looks at characters and events that combine to give us a more rounded perspective. As Roger Shattuck, literary critic and Proust scholar says, this is just like the way that our two eyes with their slightly different locations on our face work together to give what we see depth.

There are dozens of central characters and plot points and hundreds of pages of philosophical musings and digressions, but the last 100 pages are a glorious culmination. Proust comes at his major themes from an endless variety of closely-associated angles, teasing out every nuance. Ultimately, I feel comfortable distilling In Search of Lost Time down to the following themes, in order of increasing importance, that will continue to haunt my thoughts for a long time:

Art and Literature – Proust is very clear that both literature and art are tools for human growth and reflection. This does not, however, mean that reading a good book or watching an acclaimed play will automatically change the reader/viewer and help her grow. Rather, literature and art are means to an end, starting points. As Marcel (our narrator) describes the readers of his novel: “For they were not, as I saw it, my readers, so much as readers of their own selves, my book being merely one those magnifying glasses… I would be providing them with the means of reading within themselves.” Merely having and experiencing the tool isn’t enough, the reader must then do his or her own internal work to gain from the experience.

Identity – We are, each of us, an endless number of people. As we change over time, we become new people. Additionally, we are a different person in the eyes of each person who knows us. As Marcel describes himself: “I was not one single man, but the march-past of a composite army manned, depending on the time of day, by passionate, indifferent or jealous men.”

Memory and Time – I’m discussing these two themes together because they are so interwoven. Proust very thoroughly show how our memories aren’t static, but are shaped and filtered by how our identity changes and what happens to us over time. Life weaves new connections and ideas around old memories, changing them. Proust also argues that the more we consciously focus on creating or thinking about a memory, the less real and visual it will be because we wring all the strength out of it. Involuntary memories – what readers of In Search of Lost Time would call “Proustian moments” – are the most potent. The most famous Proustian moment in the novel is when the narrator takes a bit of a madeleine cake he has dipped in tea and very suddenly recalls his childhood in an extremely sensual way.  This moments allows the narrator to occupy two time periods at once, the one he is in and the one he recalls – he “experience[s] in a flash a little bit of time in its pure state.” The novel closes with a rapid succession of five such moments, which ultimately lead the narrator to write his novel.

It took me six months to work my way through In Search of Lost Time and I would not be exaggerating to say that the experienced has changed me. My perspective has deepened, my self-visualization has been refined. And, to end on a lighter note, I’ve found another reason to read literature to add to my growing mental list:

“To read genuine literature is to accumulate within oneself a fund of possible experiences against which to achieve an occasionally intensified sense of what one is doing, to recognize that one is alive in a particular way.”

Through literature, the young look forward to life, and the old look back at it.

Book #472

Reviewer: Kara

Things Fall Apart is a simple little novel with a fable-like voice that packs a real punch. The main character is Okonwo, a leader in the fictional Nigerian village of Umuofia. He is extremely industrious and strong, but also brusque and ambitious to point of harboring a lot of anger to those who don’t fit into his vision. The first half of the novel is a fascinating background about Okonkwo, his family, his village, and their indigenous cultural and religious beliefs and practices. The second half shows just how “things fall apart” (Chinua Achebe took the title from Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”).

Achebe touches on many themes in just 180 pages. Umuofia’s culture is described in detail and it’s rituals and beliefs are connected throughout to the larger themes of gender, religion, history, and mythology. While all of this is fascinating and serves the novelistic purpose of building believable and interesting characters, for me Achebe’s crowning achievement comes in the second half of the book.

Achebe takes a situation that could easily be oversimplified in a novel (that of the destruction of African culture due to the influence of white men, specifically Christian missionaries) and allows it to have its inherent complexity and truth. For example, Okonkwo is no romanticized version of a native African man – he is overbearing, angry, and completely inflexible and all of these qualities contribute to his downfall as much as the influence of Christianity. In turn, the two white men who spend time in Umuofia are not stereotypical villains, but have distinct personalities: Mr. Brown is benevolent and aims to convert many people to Christianity by letting them dabble in its teachings; Mr. Smith is hard-edged and sends away anyone who does not bend completely to the will of God as he lays it out.

Things Fall Apart is a stern warning about the destruction that can happen when two cultures come into contact. It’s clear in the novel (and in Africa’s history over the past 100 years) that the influence of white culture has been forceful and destructive, but Achebe very interestingly points out that no one is perfect and Okonkwo himself could destroy the life he built for himself. In other words, the individuality that we as humans each have plays an important role in strengthening our societies – perhaps an even more important one than culture itself.
Things Fall Apart is a great gateway into African literature, and absolutely belongs on the list of books to read before you die.

Book #258

Reviewer: Kara

Case is a washed-up, drug-addicted computer hacker who is rescued from his downward spiral of dangerous scams and suicidal tendencies when Molly, a “Razorgirl,” recruits him for a mysterious mission that throws him right back into the world of cyberspace and computer hacking he left behind. The rest of the novel details their adventures sci-fi-style — complete with battles among cybernetically-modified humans, large-scale computer espionage, and cool tech-y inventions that like the ability to project holograhic images or to see through another person’s eyes – literally.

As a caveat to this review, I must mention that I am not a science fiction reader. Beyond a few short stories and some Ray Bradbury, I’ve read little to none and I’ve never felt particularly inspired to do so. I picked up Neuromancer because of its genre-breaking (or making?) status and the sheer volume of accolades and glowing reviews that have been showered upon it. In other words, I figured that if there was a sci-fi book I should read, this was it.

I didn’t really enjoy the novel, but I’m willing to entertain the idea that my lack of experience with and interest in the genre could be the problem. There were some pretty sentences and the major characters (Case and Molly) were decently well-developed, but the plot line was dense, confusing, uninteresting, and full of conveniencies and things that seemed to me to be invented by the author to further things along. I can tell you what happened, even using the book’s lingo, but I’d be hard-pressed to explain why any individual bit of plot matters or what the point of the whole mission was in the grand scheme of things. I didn’t get that sense of bits and pieces clicking together as things moved along that I expected and there was no indication that the final result has any impact or influence on the world Gibson has created or even means anything at all.

The most interesting thing to me (and this comes up in every review and essay anyone has written about the book) is Gibson’s invention of the term “cyberspace” and, more than that, his imagining/prediction of it: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation.”  This creative achievement is certainly worthy of note but, ultimately, I can’t really recommend this book to anyone except true-blue sci-fi readers. If you happen to be a sci-fi enthusiast though, Neuromancer is a must-read!

Book # 433

Reviewer: Kara

I am climbing to my freedom, freedom from fear, freedom from marrying the wrong person, like Buddy Willard, just because of sex, freedom from the Florence Crittenden Homes where all the poor girls go who should have been fitted out like me, because what they did, they would do anyway…

Esther Greenwood is a Smith College student in the early 1950s. She is an excellent student and loves to write, earning her a summer internship at a fashion magazine. However, Esther is slowly becoming disillusioned with the role she, as a woman, is asked to play in the world. She begins to question the behavior of the women around her, her feelings for her boyfriend, and the weight of her virginity hanging over her head. Esther suffers a mental breakdown that leads readers through the dizzying maze of mental health care in the 50s.

The Bell Jar landed on my to-read list back about 8 years ago, when I was a fresh-faced and idealistic college student. I briefly met Gloria Steinem and heard her speak and in follow-up discussions with other students, Sylvia Plath came up and has been in the back of my mind ever since. Now that I finally gotten around to reading The Bell Jar, I wish I had read it 8 years ago. My reaction at the time would have been strong and emotional – I was in the thick of a milder, turn-of-the-21st-century version of what Plath’s narrator, Esther Greenwood, faces. Now, at 28, I feel personally beyond what Esther faces, but I was still struck by the truth of how coming-of-age as a woman is portrayed.

As a look into the lives of young women of the 50s, this novel is fascinating. Esther’s confusion about sex and love and her path in life are heartbreaking and very nearly destroy her. There is a moment where she sees her possible futures as ripe and beautiful figs on a tree. All she needs to do is choose one, but she can’t. She doesn’t want to choose between love and career, and as she considers her choice the figs begin to blacken and rot.

This is a beautiful microcosm of early feminism, and the way that freedom could trap women just as much as patriarchy because once a decision was made there would be no turning back. A career woman wouldn’t marry or have children and a mother would have a lifelong role as housewife.

Esther’s hangup with sex also says a lot about coming of age as a woman in the 50s. She wants to lose her virginity so it will stop hanging over her head, but she has no access to birth control and is plagued by the not yet outdated notion that by losing her purity she will be cast aside by men, her community, and the world at large.

Esther’s confusion, fear and indecision plummet her into despair and the second half of the novel is a close look at the various mental health options in place in the 50s, from impersonal male psychiatrists and electric shock therapy, to low-quality state hospitals and high-quality private hospitals. It is at this point in the novel that the meaning of the “the bell jar” becomes clear. Esther, and by extension other young women of the time, feels confined under glass, breathing her own “sour air” and unable to free herself from her prison, though the ending does offer hope.

The bell jar hung, suspended, a few feet above my head. I was open to the circulating air.