A couple of nights ago I finished The Hours. I was a little perplexed by its interwoven structure at first, but as I caught on and Michael Cunningham pulled the pieces together, I got it. The author's technical mastery in lifting themes in the subtext in the beginning of the book up to the surface as a meditation on death and life is something to behold. Another technical feature that I had heard Cunningham talk about in interviews when the book first came out was how he echoed Virginia Woolf's language. I haven’t read enough Woolf to know how well he succeeded. I find that Woolf says things that are so original and startlingly unique that an author would be hard put to say something Woolf-like. Confession time: I have not read Mrs. Dalloway. One of the curses of being an English major is you have to read the armloads of books you get assigned, leaving no time at all to read anything else--plus I fulfilled my 20th century requirements with Americans. One of my roommates in college told me he thought Virginia Woolf was the best novelist of the twentieth century and that Mrs. Dalloway was her best book. I do, at least, own a copy of it, and it has been on my list to get to for quite a while. As an aside, I read A Room of One's Own three times in 2005 and I bought my studio apartment in The Bronx shortly afterward. My personal life is still unsettled, but at least I've got the room-of-my-own part settled.
I am now reading an anthology of mystery stories, mostly by women authors who live with their husbands and dogs in Nebraska and have been finalists in mystery awards I have never heard of. I'm not a snob, but it isn't literature. I have nothing against plot-driven genre fiction; the fascinating thing for me is trying to figure out why this doesn't sound like literature. "Literature" does not require the use of highfalutin language, of course. Steinbeck used plain American English effectively. Literature requires telling details, original expression. In one typical story a man plots to kill his wife. Reasons are given, but no one in the story has an interior life--the focus is on the plot the man hatches and the twist of his wife turning the table on him. The one story in the group I've read so far that approaches has one other criterion that I apply to literature: The author takes a risk in his language. It isn't highfalutin language; what this author does is ratchet up the intensity of the descriptive language as a character tries to cope with a loss--not that we get a lot of insight into his interior life, but we sure get more than in than in the other stories.
As for my subway reading, I have temporarily put aside all prospect of pleasure and have been editing a chapter for one of the accounting books I edit at my day job. Specifically I am editing a 120-page manuscript concerning two official interpretations (FIN-45 and FIN-46R) that the Financial Accounting Standards Board has issued by the on its standards. These two interpretations and the standards they interpret have important implications for accounting by construction contractors and property developers. At the risk of understating, this is a truly mind-numbing topic. Fortunately, my author has done a decent job and my editing is not heavy.
I did finish Alfred Corn's The Poem's Heartbeat, which I enjoyed immensely. Corn's book neatly summarizes the development of prosody in English from Anglo-Saxon forms through the present day and the prevalence of unmetered poetry in our time. He draws parallels with Greek and Roman models and contrasts our system with systems that have developed in Romance languages.
The purpose of Heartbeat, or at least what I got out of it, is more or less summed up by something Corn says in his lead-in to his last chapter: "no one can write syllable-count verse well who is not also able to compose good unmetered poems. It's also possible to argue that no one in the contemporary period can write good metered poetry (poetry that, despite its regular meter, has the requisite fluidity and variety of conversational speech) who does not also understand the tradition of unmetered poetry that has been practiced now for just over a hundred years."
I haven't finished Michael Connolly's City of Bones, by the way. It got to an extremely climactic scene in the middle of the book, but it's a long book and by that time I felt I'd read enough detective fiction for a while and had to take a rest. I'll get back to it when I'm ready--after I read the mystery anthology for sure.
I keep a book about French with me at all times--sometimes you have to set FIN-45 and FIN-46R aside and apply a little linguistic CPR to your soul. I'm leaving The Berlitz Self-Teacher: French an home these days; and I'm not working on my accent because I'm still getting over my cold and my voice is still trashed. The Berlitz book is good because it focuses on fundamental features of French grammar and drills on basic useful vocabulary; however, that means there are a lot of examples along the lines of "Le chapeau noir est sur le sofa" (The black hat is on the sofa)--I mean a lot of sentences like that.
So, these days I carry New French Self Taught with me, which is only slightly more advanced than the Berlitz book except it's filled with examples such as "Je ne sais pas très bien m'expliquer en français." If understanding the grammar in that utterance eludes me, at least I could memorize that and actually use it.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment