Happily, the contradictions in Shandy's character can be explained by the fact that he's a subjective autobiographer who doesn't really know who he is. Despite Sterne presenting Shandy as somebody who 'neither [thinks] nor [acts] like any other man's child', the character is suitably real to sustain the novel so far, and I can imagine readers enjoying spending the course of the book in his garrulous company. However, my main issue with Sterne's work is that it's not aged well for a modern audience. Simply put, it's too wordy and too digressive. I'm aware that the constant digressions and overlong phrasing of simple things are key motifs within the novel, and is explained away as part of Shandy's desire not 'to disappoint any one soul living' - including those 'who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last', but as a modern reader, I'm just not sure I could put up with it for a whole book. For that reason, I won't be continuing with this book, although I can acknowledge how it contains all the hallmarks of a bildungsroman, but with an added comedic touch which distinguishes it from other works such as Jane Eyre.
On Tuesday, I tucked into the Poems and Fancies of the aristocrat Lady Margaret Cavendish. In the introduction to this book during the last week's menu, I noted that Cavendish intriguingly managed to be both a poet and a scientist, and the poems I read combine the two in a really unique way; it's definitely something that I haven't read before. Varying wildly in length from about 10 lines to about 140, the poems I read expound Cavendish's ideas about atoms - but first, the introduction explains how 'When Nature first the world's foundation laid,/She called a counsel how it might be made', this council being composed of Motion, Life, Form and Matter. A complication arises with the issue of 'Death, my great enemy', and Cavendish effectively conveys the 'strong mighty power' of this foe by her use of structure - having established the omnipotence of the concepts of Motion, Life, Form and Matter, she then juxtaposes this with their fear of Death, which Matter thinks ‘corrupts, and makes me stink’. The celestial council’s great triumphant act is to make the mind of man eternal, and Cavendish then gives Death’s futile reaction, all carried by the fairytale quality of the lilting ABAB rhyme scheme. It’s a beautiful poem, full of innovative phrasing and ideas – for example, ‘Sloth and Sleep’ are Death’s servants, employed ‘to get half of the time before they die’.
That Cavendish’s poetry binds together a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme and distinctive, innovative subject matter is exemplified by the succeeding run of rhymes, which revolve around Cavendish’s unconventional (to modern minds, at least) beliefs about atoms – they are square, round, long and sharp, and correspond to the atoms of earth, water, fire and air respectively. Cavendish gives her reasoning for all of this, before explaining which atoms make fire, what happens when atoms join, and a whole miscellany of other atomic facts. My issue with these poems, compared to the whimsical allegory of the opening diptych, is that they lack true interest – notice how I haven’t found anything distinctive to quote. Yes, Cavendish’s decision to base her poetry on her scientific beliefs is a brave and individual move, but by simply explaining these beliefs in a poetic structure, she risks losing the interest of readers who’d prefer to read something a bit more substantial than a lyrical textbook.
On Wednesday, I was reading a work of fiction whose characters exhibit some of the Seven Deadly Sins. The Sinclair family, protagonists of E. Lockhart’s We Were Liars, aren’t even aware of their greed, their privilege and excessive wealth, and that’s my first problem. This is a family who spend summers on their private island and ‘got rid of the couch and armchairs my parents had bought together’ when the parents split up. The daughter refers to her mother as ‘Mummy’, bemoans how ‘Red Gate is a much smaller house than Clairmont [both are houses on the island], but it still has four bedrooms up top’ and notes that ‘Ed followed Johnny, having stopped to help the staff unload the luggage’ – this is the only time ‘the staff’ are mentioned! I know that Lockhart probably wants me to hate these people from the off, but first, that isn’t the most failsafe way to construct a story, and secondly, I cannot comprehend how they can be this blind to their own wealth – surely when the narrator Cady introduces her family (as ‘athletic, tall and handsome. We are old-money Democrats. Our smiles are wide, our chins square, and our tennis serves aggressive’. Incidentally, nobody talks like this! Only in lousily-written film scripts) she would mention how privileged she feels to have such an easy life.
The above description that Cady gives of her family highlights one of my issues with Lockhart’s writing style; the author packs paragraphs with tricolons and little tripartite ideas, all lined up in incessant rows. When Cady describes her family (quoted above) she uses three tricolons in a single page (the first comes immediately before the above quote, Cady declaring ‘No one is a criminal. No one is an addict. No one is a failure’), and this continues throughout Cady’s opening chapter. I was initially prepared to tolerate it because I thought it was significant to the plot (similar to how Christopher in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time uses repetitive structures to reflect his need for routine), and whilst I concede that it could be the kind of repetitive device used by a teenage girl writing down her life story, it reads very unprofessionally and puts me off this book from the start. Elsewhere, purple prose characterises the text, with certain sections lurching unannounced into dizzying and incomprehensible patterns of enjambment – and I simply have to highlight the ridiculous scene where Cady’s father abandons her, and all hell breaks loose in the chimps-writing-Shakespeare typewriter factory which vomited out this story: ‘He started the engine. Then he pulled out a handgun and shot me in the chest… my heart rolled out of my rib cage and down into a flower bed. Blood gushed rhythmically from my open wound.’ And then, and then, here comes the killer line, the one the chimps earned an extra banana for – speaking about the blood… ‘it tasted like salt and failure’. BLEEEEUUURGH. NO, NO, NO, NO, NO.
It’s unfair to judge such a (clearly slow-burning) book on its first few chapters, but it’s difficult to say where the merit lies in it. I’m sure that Lockhart’s text does have its beautiful moments, with nice touches such as Cady relating how ‘divorce shreds the muscles of our hearts’ and how she is ‘nearly eighteen’ paling in contrast to a glorious description of love a few chapters in. So far, there has been no retribution for our sinful (in the Seven Deadly sense) characters, but their greed and materialism has been well-established. I’m tempted to say that I’ll give this book another go – its clumsy YA-pandering prose conceals moments of undoubtable beauty – but realistically, in a world where, sadly, reading time is limited, this one just doesn’t have enough to bring me back.
Full confession: I didn’t understand Loba. There’s very little I can say about this epic poem, in which Beat Generation writer and activist Diane di Prima identifies herself with the she-wolf, because I found it so taxing that it was difficult to derive much meaning from it. Echoing her contemporary Ginsberg’s Howl in her melding of different imagery and structures, di Prima writes mainly about femininity, but by god does she do it confusingly. The she-wolf is introduced as ‘the wind you never leave behind, black cat you killed in empty lot… she is harpy on your fire-escape, marble figurine carved in the mantelpiece… cornucopia that wails in the night, deathgrip you cannot cut away’ – the best I can make of this is that di Prima is emphasising the she-wolf’s permanence (or is it simply its multifariousness – how does a description of the she-wolf as ‘the fiery cloak of feathers carries you off hills when you run flaming down to the black sea’ link to permanence? It speaks more of the idea of the loba as a friend or an aid), but just as E Lockhart heaps on the tricolons, so does di Prima with the metaphors, to similar incomprehensible effect.
In the poems that I read, di Prima introduces the concept of the loba, clears up ‘Some Lies About The Loba’ (a poem which, brilliantly, ends by declaring the lie ‘that there is anything to say of her which is not truth’) and proceeds to introduce the ‘Lilith Of The Stars’. In this poem, the eponymous mystical protagonist is established in a concise and accessible way, relying on imagery that is not too disparate to confuse the reader, and is sufficiently evocative to intrigue them. Lilith appears to men ‘as vapour, a plague, a cacophony of unique bells, straining and stranger’ – instantly, and effortlessly, di Prima recruits multiple senses to convey her character. Ultimately, Loba is a mixed bag, confusingly written in places but brimming with wonderful, lyrical delights – lines that sing, such as di Prima’s dirty, tobacco-scented description of how ‘the streets were littered w/ half-eaten food’ and her question ‘Shall we remember the half-mad whores who walked on them?... Who will remember the bleakness of this time? Who will recall it, later?’ Diane di Prima says that Loba, an ongoing poem, is written when inspiration calls; it is “a series of poems that burst out of me”, and that could explain its unfiltered, unregulated nature, but the bitty style of Loba isn’t one that appeals to me, and whilst I accept that reading the full thing would give me a much clearer picture of di Prima’s artistic aims, as with E Lockhart’s work, it’s not something that I realistically have the time to explore further.
Being a musician as well as an avid reader, I decided that the fifth course of this week’s banquet would be a music-themed book. So far, Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad is only loosely themed around music (its characters all are connected to a record label tycoon), but I’ll let that slide because Egan’s introductory chapter, detailing the misadventures of pathological kleptomaniac Sasha, is beautifully done.
We are introduced to a character whose entire life is defined by her kleptomania. The things she steals are ‘embarrassments and close shaves and little triumphs and moments of pure exhilaration… years of her life compressed’. She lives experiencing emotions through her acts of theft. She knows she has ‘twenty eight-bars of soap, and eighty-five pens’ in her apartment, for example; it’s like she spends her days counting her prizes. Egan’s beautiful use of language allows the reader to construct an impression of Sasha in just a single chapter, without the need for much exposition – for example, Sasha lives a life where her ‘apartment had ended up solidifying around [her], gathering mass and weight, until she felt… mired in it’, a static and unfulfilled life, but stealing makes it all worthwhile. The act is presented in terms of childlike wonder – the handle of a screwdriver gleams ‘like a lollipop’ before it works its way into Sasha’s hands. To take a wallet is to ‘seize the moment, accept the challenge, take the leap, fly the coop, throw caution to the wind, live dangerously’; instantly, so many facets of Sasha’s character are unlocked – she is an opportunist, determined, brave, independent, intrepid. Something I hadn’t even thought about, which the novel made me aware of, was the idea that kleptomaniacs do not always want to steal. In the case of Sasha, Egan emphatically presents it as more of a need, motivated not by spite or pettiness, but because it provides security, and happiness, and it just livens up her life. On the night of stealing a wallet, Sasha divides her recollections into ‘Prewallet’ and ‘Postwallet’. Postwallet, ‘the scene tingled with mirthful possibility’ – Egan vividly conveys the sense of the night coming alive, as Sasha realises that ‘“I’m always happy… sometimes I just forget.”’ Stealing a screwdriver is like medicine to Sasha; it allows her to feel ‘instant relief from the pain of having [an old plumber] snuffling under the tub.
One of Egan’s innovations is to format the story in the third-person past, yet a few pages in, to make the reader aware that what they have just read fits within the framing device of Sasha’s conversations with a therapist, Coz, whose speech interrupts the narrative and reveals that Sasha is describing all her problems to him, and we as the readers are just reading it. This device intimates a close connection between Sasha and the audience, as if we are her therapist as well, privy to all of her thoughts, and this induces us to try to help her, to diagnose her. It’s a fascinating technique to engage the reader in what is already a very enticing tale.
So, the diagnosis: Sasha is portrayed as too resistant to outsiders, the unfamiliar. She ‘recoiled’ at the ‘frank need’ of a woman whom she had just robbed, since this quality is something ‘New Yorkers quickly learn how to hide’. Her date Alex’s ‘anger made him recognisable in a way that an hour of aimless chatter had not: he was new to New York’. Perhaps the reason she puts up with Coz is that he is ‘old school inscrutable’, a blank canvas onto whom she can splatter the paint of her experiences. Again, Egan tells, rather than shows, and as such the prose flows beautifully, rising up out of the ink and dancing on the page. Throughout, Egan subtly hints that Sasha isn’t ready to overcome her problem just yet, because she doesn’t understand it. Whilst Sasha has the fanciful idea that she is ‘writing a story whose end had already been determined: she would get well’, her clear commitment to change isn’t met by action, because her main problem with this lifestyle is that ‘“I’m bankrupting myself to pay for you”’ – again, Sasha lives based on her personal philosophies about value, rather than living a life based on morality. Whilst her desire to shirk ‘the burden of eye contact’ between therapist Coz and her hints that she feels ashamed of her actions, she asks Coz at the end of the chapter, ‘“Don’t ask me how I feel”’, and as the reader, we get the hint that this woman is a long way off the redemption she craves.
As I mentioned at the start of the review, A Visit from the Goon Squad is an ensemble piece, and if the other protagonists’ tales continue to the superb character work Egan does in Sasha’s introduction, then I’m sure this book will delight me ‘til the end.
If you’d have told me a month ago that Shakespeare would have come to the rescue and drastically improved my memories of this week’s reading challenge, I’d have been astounded. But The Comedy of Errors was a wonderful play to sample on Saturday, and ended the week on a high. The theme of the sixth course of the literary banquet was a text which obeys the Classical Unity of Time – that is, all of its action takes place on the same day. In its short opening act, Shakespeare’s early comedy both introduces this key conceit (by having Duke Solinus of Ephesus tasking the criminal Egeon to collect the sum of one thousand marks within the day) and finds a way around its limitations (Egeon provides a lot of expository backstory). Themed around two sets of identical twin brothers (kind of like Twelfth Night on acid), The Comedy of Errors is like a delicious mixing bowl filled with tasty Shakespearean ingredients – although it’s categorised as a comedy, any Shakespeare fan knows that the pioneer of the tragi-comedy genre never made things as simple as they seem on the surface, and so the play is brimming with coruscating turns of phrase, beautiful speeches, tense melodrama and genuine threat.
The premise is introduced in the opening scene, which depicts the merchant Egeon explaining to Duke Solinus of Ephesus why he, against Ephesian laws, has landed on the island. From the off, Solinus and Egeon are vividly-realised characters – Solinus in particular, far from being a simple stereotype embodying only one set of characteristics, switches from initial harshness (‘The enmity and discord which of late/Sprung from the rancorous outrage of your duke/…excludes all pity from our threatening looks’) to keen interest in Egeon’s story (‘Do me the favour to dilate at full/What hath befall’n’), which allows him to completely change his stance (he confesses ‘we may pity, though not pardon thee’). The brutal Ephesian justice, which decrees that Egeon will be put to death if he cannot accumulate a thousand mark fine, lends suspense to the opening scene, as the audience sympathises with the benevolent Egeon. Shakespeare seems to disparage this Draconian system; by presenting us with the pathos of Egeon’s story (he describes how ‘a heavier task could not have been imposed/Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable’, these ‘griefs’ recounting the story of how he became separated from his wife and one of his children when his ‘sinking-ripe’ ship struck a rock in a storm), and then juxtaposing it against Solinus’s mere dispassionate concession that he will ‘limit thee this day/To seek thy life by beneficial help’, since what Egeon has done by coming to Ephesus is ‘againt our laws,/Against my crown, my oath, my dignity’, the playwright criticises those in power for prizing their own reputation over their compassion. Egeon has been ‘sever’d from my bliss’, and the outlook is noticeably bleak for a purported comedy.
At this early stage (the play has five acts in all), comedy is just one component in a multifaceted play – and to think that this is regarded as one of Shakespeare’s more frivolous and lightweight works! The comedy really begins in the second scene, which introduces the comic tropes of mistaken identity and disorder which abound in other works such as Twelfth Night. In this scene, Antipholus of Syracuse and his servant Dromio arrive on Ephesus, where the former entrusts some money to the latter. Dromio leaves to store this money away, but in the interim arrives the identical Dromio of Ephesus, who, of course, has no idea about this money when quizzed by the increasingly grumpy Antipholus. The escalation of Antipholus’s confusion and anger is a comic masterclass which establishes the impatient and assertive facets of his character (he declares he is ‘not in a sportive humour now:/Tell me, and dally not, where is the money?’) and allows Shakespeare to run the whole gamut of comedic devices, as Antipholus hurls invectives at the ‘knave’ Dromio of Ephesus, despite the latter’s complete and utter bewilderment, and worries about the ‘liberties of sin’ that may be found in this town.
There are moments of real linguistic beauty nestled within the superficially comedic frame of The Comedy of Errors; for example, Egeon sombrely recounts that ‘in this unjust divorce of [his wife and him],/ Fortune had left to both of us alike/What to delight in, what to sorrow for’, where the anaphora of ‘what to’ allows Shakespeare to encapsulate the complexity of Egeon’s emotions after losing one of his children but retaining the other. This complex weaving of elements of pathos and drama around a comedic framework is testament to Shakespeare’s enduring success as a playwright, and I’ll definitely try to find a spare afternoon to devour the rest of this deeply impressive little firecracker of a play.
In conclusion, whilst Week 2 had impressed me with at least three books that I’d happily read to the end (you can find that post here), this week has been a much more difficult ride. All of its texts have had moments of blossoming wonder that I can appreciate as artful examples of good writing, but on the whole, the week’s reads haven’t surprised or delighted me in the same ways that I’ve experienced in the past. We’ll have to see if Week 4 picks up the pace again – I’ll be posting its menu over the next few days, and the week’s banquet will begin on Monday 13 August. Until then, you can keep up to date with all of my literary comings and goings by following me on Twitter (@Banquetofbooks), and I’ll see you back here over the weekend!
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