Dawn's Reading Blog

This is my second Faulkner and the second time I’ve felt like a child in the face of adult genius – not quite getting it but so wanting to and admiring it all the same. As I Lay Dying is somewhat more accessible than The Sound and the Fury because at least you aren’t trying to follow the voice of a retarded man skipping through place and time and characters (some of whom have the same name) willy nilly. On the other hand, there are more narrators and they switch more frequently. Also, these are uneducated southern farmers from a hundred years ago. Their language and mine only overlap each other.

And yet, just as with The Sound and the Fury, you do get it, slowly and dimly but you get it. Somehow, without introduction or explanation, you pick up on what these people are actually thinking and feeling right then, right there, not filtered through the eyes of the novelist and presented in a tightly wrapped package. That’s the genius of Faulkner and the feeling that yes, it does all makes sense if only you can fit the pieces together and maybe read it again and read it again is what keeps me at it.

The notes at the end of my edition said that he wrote this very quickly. I can only imagine that it was all in his head first – exactly what each character’s relationship was to the others and to the past and the events that happened there. It hangs together too well to believe he was making it up as he went along but perhaps this sort of life and these sorts of people were second nature to him.

Each character is so fully dimensioned. There’s no need for Faulkner to tell you that someone is arrogant or charming or hard hearted because he’s showing it to you every moment – in the way they think and what they say and do. You get to know these characters the same way you know the people around you, through first-hand experience, not like people you’ve heard about who live somewhere else and who’ve had some pretty interesting things happen to them but that are no concern of yours.

The situation surrounding Dewey Dell was one of the most confusing and mysterious but also the most interesting and realistically drawn. Dewey Dell, like any woman in her situtation, wasn’t harking back on how and why she got pregnant for the convenience of the reader. She was dealing with it as best she could. And if that left me scratching my head with curiosity now and then, well so be it. It didn’t diminish how well I could relate to what she was feeling.

This and The Sound and the Fury are the only two Faulkners on the 100 Best list, but you can bet I’ll be reading more Faulkner anyway. Not all at once because they’re hard reads and take some digesting, but I’ll get to all of them.

Forster is a chameleon of a writer. I remember loving Maurice and finding Howard’s End entertaining but odd. Now A Passage to India provokes different feelings entirely.

The book is slow to get started and ends with a whimper. The overall interest is the depiction of a time and culture totally different from my own. And I don’t mean India here so much as British Imperialism. In today’s world, raciscm couldn’t be expressed so openly, either in conversation as the characters do or even in a book showcasing such characters. So it’s important that some books of this sort remain and I hope they don’t all get banned because they have the “n word”. To read that it happened is not to endorse it and to ban a book won’t change the truth.

Forster seems to make the point that the British couldn’t help it, that even those who intended to treat the natives fairly and equally were forced to toe the company line and learn raciscm. This is believable, as I think raciscm is almost entirely a behavior learned from one’s peers. As such, Forster sets up Mrs. Moore as a kind of fantasy figure who doesn’t cave into this pressure, even at its worst, and Mr. Fielding as a good-natured hero who has never caved and stays faithful to the end.

There’s a lot of good material here but it’s not hard to imagine this being a stronger book. Mrs. Moore is simply disappeared, as though Forster couldn’t figure out where she ought to go next. The book as a whole drifts off without coming to a conclusion, except perhaps that even the heroes aren’t, in the end, able to avoid being tainted by raciscm.

The more subtle raciscm that pervades the book is Forster’s attempts to get inside the Indian mind. He has various Indian characters admitting to all kinds of failings as a race. Very Uncle Tom to imagine that they really felt that way themselves or that, if they did, it wasn’t because pervasive English power and influence forced them into it.

So if you read this book, you might come away with the thought that oh yes, Indians know they are hopelessly romantic, unpunctual, unable to govern themselves, fractured as a country, etc. This is their own opinion of themselves. It’s not, of course. It’s Forster’s idea of their opinion of themselves. So even in his attempt to expose how pervasive and harmful raciscm is, he’s perpetuated various stereotypes. As I said, it’s not a book that would fly today.

I’m glad I read this book but can’t say that I really enjoyed it. I feel more could have been made of it with an ending that actually set the various characters/viewpoints against one another rather than allowing each to drift off into a separate compartment. The only character who seems to have been changed by the events of the novel are Aziz and, of course, Mrs. Moore because she’s dead. For the others, it’s more like an isolated episode and then they continue on. This book could have been better.

I have seven pages left and I’m writing the review now. The review is: if I never read the last seven pages of this book, I wouldn’t feel like I’d missed anything.

The writing has a certain flow. The author can describe a highway or a jazz club like nobody else. There was even a time when I got a little interested in Dean and started to see him as a kind of tragic hero: a hero for his effort towards a greater life, tragic for the inevitable failure of his everyday life. But that theme was never developed, as indeed no theme was ever developed. The book is one long description of a party I wasn’t at.

I wonder how a book like this gets into the top one hundred. I know it has meant a lot of things to a lot of people. Is it that its time has passed? What might once have seemed novel – young people wasting their days with drugs and philosophy, trying to solve the world’s problems by ducking their own – is a commonplace stage in every generation’s development these days. I had my own time like that and although we didn’t take road trips across the country, I think that whatever we did do was at least as interesting as this book. But then, it happened to me. As fresh, as frantic, as Kerouac manages to make his descriptions feel, they can’t compare with having been there. And having been there, I don’t particularly need to go back.

Or is it not so much the age as my age? I’m pushing forty. The self-aggrandizing musings of so-called young adults are so many wasted words to me now. I suppose it’s normal to believe that your generation has got it figured out – how to change the world by not participating: to have fun, be high, think great thoughts, wallow in your own soap opera where who loves who and said so is more important than who’s going to feed you that night. But once you’ve escaped that pit, brought on as much by drugs as youth, can you ever relish it again?

I believe a book could have been written that would have made the experience real and also put it in perspective. I don’t think this is that book.

I don’t say it was torture to read it. As I said, the book flows. But it wasn’t interesting to read it and I never picked it up willingly. I almost gave up on it entirely but it is on the 100 Best list and has the benefit of being fairly short. If I were choosing the 100 Best, I think there would be a requirement that they illustrate human nature, either by putting a well defined character in a moral dilemma or by using an unusual situation or allegory to better highlight a situation we gloss over in every day life.

Things I’d pick: Animal Farm, Les Miserables, Tale of Two Cities, 1984. I’m trying to think of situations that will stay in my mind forever, the books I’ll never forget because they taught me something about who I am. Those are the 100 Best. This ain’t.

The best thing about this book is that I learned to pronounce Kerouac. Care-o-ack. (Todd looked it up on the internet for me.) The worst thing about this book is that I have to read the last seven pages.

Rating: 3 out of 10

Death Comes for the Archbishop is on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels list which I’ve set a goal of reading my way through. It’s about a priest setting off for what has recently become American territory in the New Mexico/Arizona area. The book follows him and his assistant through their careers in the desert working with Native Americans and former Mexicans.

It’s a very pretty book with a lot of word pictures – short but colorful descriptions of the landscape and the people. I’m not normally a very visual reader so some of it was lost on me but even I had to stop and imagine the settings she painted.

While the book covers some of the day to day details of running a church – they hold mass and say prayers and such – there’s really no religious philosophizing and the priests are surprisingly tolerant of any Native American sprituality they come across. It’s more a story of what the priests saw and who they met and what the territory was like in those days for a relatively civilized newcomer.

I can’t say I agree with putting this on the 100 Best list. It was a pleasant read but didn’t seem to have much point. The characters were agreeable but not particularly well defined and there wasn’t any conflict in the book. Here are two priests from France who seem to be completely at home in the desert: comfortable with privation and able to get along with any person or beast of any race or religion and speaking any language they might happen to meet. You’d think it would’ve been harder than that to be a priest in New Mexico in that time.

It’s even mentioned that prior priests have been massacred or run out from time to time. I might have chosen to write about them, as the ones she chose to write about seem to have lived relatively uneventful lives. But I guess she’s a poet at heart and it does have a kind of poetry to it – not just the evocative descriptions but an overall feel of sunshine and open air.

Overall rating: 6 out of 10, not a top 100er

These are the books from the 100 Best I read before I started my blog:
Great Gatsby
Lolita
Brave New World
The Sound and the Fury
Catch-22
Darkness at Noon
Grapes of Wrath
1984
I, Claudius
To the Lighthouse
American Tragedy
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
Slaughterhouse Five
Henderson the Rain King
Animal Farm
Golden Bowl
Sister Carrie
All the King’s Men
Lord of the Flies
Deliverance
Portnoy’s Complaint
Age of Innocence
Catcher in the Rye
Heart of Darkness
House of Mirth
Main Street
Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Ragtime
Call of the Wild
Sophie’s Choice
Magnificent Ambersons
Howard’s End