The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Back in the mid-1980s when I was in high school and just getting to know the gay world no article or book about gay literature, or gays in literature failed to mention The Well of Loneliness. The only thing I remember about any of that exegesis is that TWoL is a bedrock classic of gay lit, but that it is also a depresso-tragic tale that reinforces the tragic gay stereotype. In college when the book came up in a conversation some Lesbian friends admitted they thought it was boring. Although today I have a predilection for this kind of Virago publishing-niche book, I can understand why some would find it less than compelling–or at least those who don’t have a thing for early 20th century women’s fiction. And god knows Hall could have used a better editor to fix some of her needlessly bad sentence construction. But I digress.

In terms of LGBT issues, things have changed enormously since TWoL was published in 1928, and have even changed enormously since I first heard of the book 25 years ago. Those changes definitely had an impact on how I perceived this text. For sure the Lesbian main character in the book faced great challenges and could not live an open life but she was of an economic class that allowed her much more freedom and opportunity to at least be a Lesbian. A working class woman in the same period would likely not have been so lucky.

I think one of the analyses of this book and others of its ilk is that it seems only able to present gays and Lesbians as leading tragic, depressing, or debauched lives. In my vague recollections it seems like some blame the book for setting or reinforcing that notion, and suggesting that that tragic story line was required in order to get mainstream publishers to consider printing such things. The gays had to pay for their sins somehow or the reading public would burn the place down. Indeed this may have been the case. E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice which ultimately puts a positive spin on a gay character was written 1913-1914 but didn’t get published until the 1970s after Forster was dead. I know that Forster wanted it that way, but I wonder if he would have been able to get it published back in the day without killing off Maurice and Scudder? Perhaps there are other books from that period that had happy endings for gays?

One of the ways that today’s political and social climate has changed my view of the story is that I could see the ultimate final tragedy of the book (which I won’t disclose here) as being one that didn’t necessarily have to be about being gay. I could easily see how the final pages could have played out for a straight couple in a similar way if, perhaps not, for similar reasons.

Then there is James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. Written in 1956, it has similarities with TWoL in the need for a tragic end, but in many ways Baldwin’s characters are truly self loathing individuals in a way that Hall’s characters were not. Long story short, David is an American in Paris whose girlfriend/fiancee is traipsing around Spain while he falls in love with the beautiful Giovanni. Even from the relative freedom of Paris in the 1950s (I failed to mention that Hall’s book also largely takes place in Paris) society and family weigh heavy on David and cause no end of denial. So much so that even after a prolonged emotional and sexual relationship with Giovanni he seems perfectly able to pretend to himself that he is straight and sets in motion one tragedy after another. No one wins in this book.

Unlike Hall’s book I don’t think one can see this tragedy unfolding without the gay dimension. In fact their is no amount of cowardice in TWoL that comes close the David’s in GR. Happily, Baldwin, and I think to some extent Hall, led lives that were more open and fulfilling than the characters in their books.

One of the odd things about both TWoL and GR was how closely the experiences and feelings tracked with my own in the 1980s. Although things were way better in 1985 than they were in 1928, the emotional roller-coaster felt very similar. I wonder if it still feels that way for kids today.

I first read The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht in 2004 which was a few years before I started blogging, so I’ve never been able to really plug it. I’ve mentioned it a few times in passing and written a word or two about Lebrecht’s other fantastic novel The Game of Opposites, but I haven’t really laid out why more people should read this book.

To be sure the book did not go unnoticed when it was published and it won the Whitbread Prize in 2003. But I’ve never run into anyone in real life or in blogging life who has read it. Well that all may change soon. I was getting ready to write about my re-read of the book and I came across an image of a poster for a movie adaptation. And not just any movie but one starring Ben Kingsley and John Malkovich. A little more digging didn’t produce a release date but it did produce listings showing Anthony Hopkins and Dustin Hoffman in the lead roles. As someone who thinks a lot about having my favorite books turned into films, all this made my head spin. With these actors lined up-whichever pair ends up being right–this doesn’t look to be some small release that will be consigned to DVD. If I had my choice I think I would mix the two up and have Kingsley and Hopkins. I worry a bit about the two American actors. Not because they aren’t good actors, but because I don’t want any of the characters turning into Americans. Maybe Malkovich and Hoffman are the ones lined up to play Dovidl, the Polish Jew in the novel.

But I am getting ahead of myself. My intention in writing this post was to talk about the book, not a movie. As I mentioned earlier, I first read this book in 2004 and it has been one that I have recommended every chance I got. But with the passage of time I began to wonder if I should keep doing so. Was it as good as I remembered? I just finished listening to the audio version of the book last week and I can confirm that I still love the book, but more importantly, I can confirm that it is a really good book. I love it because Lebrecht, a classical music critic, writes extremely well about the classical music world, something most novelists cannot do. But more than that, The Song of Names can stand on its own and one doesn’t have to be entranced with classical music to enjoy it.

For those who need a little plot to stay interested…young Polish Jew violin prodigy is left in London to live with a concert promoter and his family during World War II. The promoter’s son becomes his bosom buddy and they live like brothers until the day of Dovidl’s Royal Albert Hall debut when he and his violin disappear for almost 50 years.

Besides being a good book and interesting story, for those who do like classical music gossip with a slightly bitchy and bitter edge, this book is for you. Whether its publishing, recording, concerts, conductors, players, or the music itself, Lebrecht comes up with the goods and isn’t afraid to poke the giants of the classical music world. I loved these gossipy bits. There is also one scene early in the book where he laments not just the dumbing down of the classical music world but British civilization itself. And Lebrecht seems to be one of those lefty snobs of which I count myself. Populist in politics but personally and culturally elitist. And he is so good at being snarky. (Never too much in this novel, but his Twitter feed and blog can sometimes be a bit much. Do critics ever tone it down?)

Listening to the audio book not only reacquainted me with a book I already new that I loved, but I think it may be one of my most enjoyable audio book experiences I’ve had so far. At first I found Simon Prebble a little too driven in his reading. It seemed like someone was poking him in the back. But it actually kind of worked, and his accents were very believable and made one forget he wasn’t actually different people. The only complaint I have is his mispronunciation of a single instance of the name Gianni. Italian is so easy to pronounce but so many people have real trouble with the “gia” combo. Don’t even get me started on the terrible reader who butchered Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room on audiobook. Overall there were many times as I listened when I took note of how well Prebble read the book.

Don’t wait for the film to come out. Go find the book or audio book and give it a go. If for no other reason, you will have the inside scoop when the blockbuster film comes out.

 
I’ve read the Barsetshire series and loved them–although the final volume could have used a better editor. And I’ve read 4 or 4 stand alones like Dr. Wortle’s School and Three Clerks and loved those as well. I’ve even read four of the six Palliser novels, and that is where things started to go wrong. I liked Can You Forgive Her?  But then Phineas Finn bored the sox off of me. I enjoyed The Eustace Diamonds for sure, but thought it a little one note. And then Phineas Redux, hmm, now I’m not even sure I have read that one yet. So I guess I have only read the first three.

So why do I bring this up now? When I started listening to audiobooks on my new commute I loved listening to Timothy West read Trollope and decided to listen to the Pallisers again in hopes of juicing me up to read the rest of them. Well, I enjoyed listening to Can You Forgive Her?, but Phineas Finn in audiobook is boring me as much as it did in print. It’s making me think I want to give up on the Pallisers entirely. A little sad perhaps, but it frees me up to listen to the Barsetshire series which I know I will enjoy and it will give me a chance to pick up one of the many non-Palliser Trollope novels I have on my shelves that I have been neglecting because of my intent to finish off the Palliser novels first.

Also exciting is that I don’t have to listen to 21 more hours of Phineas.

Jeremy Northam. See number 6.

I keep bringing up audiobooks on The Readers, but I don’t think Simon really wants to talk about them. I can understand. Before I became a convert I didn’t want to talk (or hear) about them either.

1. I’m counting them on my books read list for the year. I used to think this was totally cheating. But now that I am listening to books on my driving commute since I can no longer read on a mass transit commute, it feels like a much more equivalent activity than I ever would have thought. Plus one still spends a lot of time with an audiobook. 40 hours for a Trollope. One still goes through the ups and downs of the story and feels the emotions of it. And in some ways I think I am even more aware of the prose than I am when I read.

2. I’m still only choosing books that I have already read. In general they are books I read and liked years ago and would like to revisit them without taking away from reading other books for the first time. This has proven quite ineresting.

3. I need plot and/or material details much more in audiobooks than in regular books. Abstract concepts or thoughts are a little too hard to follow when driving. I’m dying to listen to all the Brookner novels I have downloaded, but the car isn’t the right place for them.

4. So far, children’s dialog in audio books is dreadful. The readers voicing the children make me want to reach in the book and slap the kids silly. They all sound so whiny and annoying. Then again I felt that when I read Pied Piper and What Happened to the Corbetts as well, so maybe it has more to do with the way Nevil Shute writes kids.

5. IF YOU ARE GOING TO RECORD GIOVANNI’S ROOM BY JAMES BALDWIN YOU BETTER BE ABLE TO PRONOUNCE ‘GIOVANNI’ AND BASIC FRENCH. AND, IF YOU INSIST ON RECORDING IT EVEN WITH YOUR TERRIBLE PRONUNCIATION, COULD YOU AT LEAST BE CONSISTENT IN YOUR MISTAKES. I HAVEN’T HEARD ‘MONSIEUR’ PRONOUNCED THAT WAY SINCE I WAS IN MY 11TH GRADE BEGINNING FRENCH CLASS.

6. Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene wrote some unbelievably good books. And OMIH is not a bad book, but you have to be ready for a few scenes that are of the “Who’s on First” type of farce. I laughed like crazy at the famous Abbott and Costello routine when I was a kid, but as an adult that kind of farce makes my teeth itch. I first read this book back in 1997 and quite enjoyed listening to it recently on audio book. But the heavy farce scenes were even more annoying on audio than on the page. I largely liked Jeremy Northam’s narration, not sure all his accents were very solid, but Northam can whisper in my ear any day. The worst part about this audio book was the use of bad faux-salsa music between chapters.

The only thing more handsome than Jeremy Northam is Jeremy Northam with a beard. Here he is in The Golden Bowl.

[I was so good about posting regularly in January, but then I got busy and ran out of ideas. Haven’t quite snapped out of the rut, but working on it.]

Regular readers know that I am a sucker for a matched Penguin set. In the past I have gone to great lengths and expense to collect them. I bought the English Journeys series, the Great Love series, and most infamously all 100 volumes of the Great Ideas series. And then when push came to shove I got rid of all of them selling them for pennies on the dollar. Still, I can be sorely tempted when I see a nice matching set, which is why I am grateful that Penguin’s latest release isn’t much of a temptation for me. Even though the design of them hearkens back to the early, uniform, glory days of Penguin, I find them uncompelling–almost ugly.

The main reason I dislike them is the use of the serif font for the titles. I’m not universally opposed to a serif font, and I actually kind of like this one, I just think it looks a bit anemic against all that black. It also doesn’t help that the somewhat dainty titles sit below the the bolder sans serif font used for the authors. makes it feel a little top heavy. If the titles had been placed on top I think the serif font would have worked better. Also, without measuring them, it looks as if the white band is centered top to bottom and then both the author’s name and the title are centered in their respective parts of the black space. It’s oddly discomfiting visually. Again, without measuring them, on the original orange and white covers, it appears that the top orange panel is slightly shorter than the white panel and the lower orange panel. This just feels better I think. The centered-ness of this new set makes it feel oddly out of balance.

If you are like me and can pour over graphic design, good and bad, for hours despite being no expert or having any graphics art training, you should check out this website that compares logo redesigns. If you do a search on “penguin” on their site, you will find more than a few that relate to Penguin logos.

 
This is not a take down of Sarah Palin, and it isn’t a defense of Sarah Palin. It’s more of an observation about the speech she gave recently in Iowa. It was pretty much panned from all points of the political spectrum and one of the biggest criticisms has been her (not new) trouble with the English language. There are plenty of reasons why people are piling on at the moment, but there is something about recent criticism that I find slightly disingenuous. This is the part of the speech that seems to be getting the most buzz:

It’s too big to succeed, so we can afford no retreads. Or nothing will change, with the same people and the same policies that got us into this status quo. Another Latin word, status quo. And it stands for, man, the middle class, every day Americans are really gettin’ taken for a ride. That’s status quo. And GOP leaders, by the way, uh, you know, the man can only ride ya’ when your back is bent, so strengthen it. Then the man can’t ride ya’, America won’t be taken for a ride because so much is at stake.

Folks on the left and right have been pointing to this as completely incomprehensible. It really isn’t. If we can understand Faulkner and Joyce and William Burroughs why do we act like we can’t understand Palin? And for anyone who has even the faintest understanding of Palin’s political views understanding Palin’s speech is a whole lot easier than understanding the lions of the English speaking literary world.

So let’s take that “paragraph” phrase by phrase (keeping in mind I make no claims about the veracity of any of it or whether or not I agree):

It’s too big to succeed
Our government is too big to be effective.

so we can afford no retreads
We can’t keep doing the same thing.

Or nothing will change, with the same people and the same policies that got us into this status quo. 
Again, we can’t keep doing the same thing.

Another Latin word, status quo. And it stands for, man, the middle class, every day Americans are really gettin’ taken for a ride. That’s status quo.
The system is rigged against the middle class.

And GOP leaders, by the way, uh, you know, the man can only ride ya’ when your back is bent
Telling GOP leaders that if they had resolve, the man (aka big government/Democrats) couldn’t take advantage of them.

so strengthen it. Then the man can’t ride ya’,
An exhortation to strengthen their resolve.

America won’t be taken for a ride because so much is at stake.
We won’t let this happen because too much is at stake.

This might be the most political thing I will say: Sarah Palin isn’t the only American whose grammar and syntax sound like this. And I’m not talking ideology or even intelligence. We hear it in wedding toasts, we hear it in sales pitches, we hear it in man-on-the street TV interviews. I’m not suggesting the world should be a grammatical free for all. Let’s just quit pretending that we don’t understand it.

I was going to write about Herman Koch in a Bits and Bobs post but as I started to write I realized I had more to say about his work than would fit either in a bit or in a bob. Koch is a Dutch writer and actor and so far only two his six novels have been translated into English. Hopefully his recent success and a possible Cate Blanchette adaptation of The Dinner will bring his back catalog into the English speaking world.

When Simon Savidge visited Washington back in August he put The Dinner in my hands while we were browsing a bookstore. I was slightly dubious about this since he had also given me a copy of Gone Girl which I was somewhat loathe to read and the cover blurb on The Dinner was by Gillian Flynn. But I did buy it and read it and it turns out I kind of loved it. So much so that soon after I read it I was in a bookshop and bought his latest Summer House with Swimming Pool in hardcover without hesitation. I ended up liking that one even more than The Dinner. Based on those two novels he has been added to my must buy list. Not many authors end up on that list.

The Dinner
One of the things that intrigued me about The Dinner is that the entirety of the novel takes place over a single meal. Turns out there are many flashbacks that take the reader away from the dinner table but the book does feel like it takes place over one long meal. There is something very interesting about the arc of the plot and the arc of emotion all happening over dinner.

In the book, Paul Lohman and his soon-to-be Prime Minister brother and their wives have dinner in a high-end restaurant in Amsterdam. It is almost impossible to say much about this book without giving too much away. In fact the only thing I can really say is that by the end of the book you will have had moments of hating almost every character that passes through the pages.

In my mind, the restaurant De Kas was the setting for The Dinner. Having eaten here for a special occasion a few years ago, it popped into my head and never popped out. According to at least one source, this was the basis for the setting of the novel.

Summer House with Swimming Pool
Since I am a Johnny-come-lately to Herman Koch I had a peek at some reviews of his work in the esteemed mainstream press. Among other things, this exercise reminded me why I don’t read professional book reviews. Even when they are positive they always seem to me like they are written by authors bitter that they have to write reviews to help eke out a living writing. The benefit of reading these reviews was that they shook loose in my brain how I feel about Koch’s writing. His books have commercial appeal (i.e., they are readable) but I think they provide deeper psychological insight and observations than most commercial fiction. I think Koch is clever without ever seeming like he is trying to be clever. His books don’t feel like they have been workshopped to death in some MFA program. 

The other day when I was snuggled up in bed reading while the rain pattered on the roof, I came across a line that made me laugh with delight. So much so, I Tweeted the line and posted it on Facebook.

Far-off on the hill a sheep coughed.

After I posted it on Facebook and said that it was the best line ever, my friend Barry–in fact the same friend who I mentioned in my last post–wrote: “Are you being sarcastic? It sounds to me like a line written by a 10-year old who has hopes of becoming a novelist.”

When I saw this response I was a bit taken aback. Barry was right, but the author who wrote the line is one I revere and the book I was reading was one that I really liked. Although the line struck me as funny when I first read it, it didn’t strike me as bad writing. But out of context I can’t blame my friend.

In context I think the line works, and while still funny, doesn’t seem like bad writing. In fact, it reminds me of when John and stayed in a farmhouse in the Cotswolds and we enjoyed listening to the sheep bleating on the distant hillsides each evening. I don’t remember any of them coughing, but that’s not to say they didn’t. Here is the full context, the scene is a large, remote country house in Ireland in the early 1950s.

Sally came up from the dark kitchen stairs into the house, empty, still, and flooded with sunlight. Charles and Violet had gone out of course; Violet would be in the walled garden examining the ruins of the roses with Cammaert [the gardener]. With something like relief, with a tremor of fear, Sally thought, I’m all alone here. She stood on the threshold of the library as if waiting for some decision which would take her inside, to her grandfather’s desk. Far-off on the hill a sheep coughed.

What do you think? Bad writing? Okay, but not great? Middle brow? 1950s chick lit? Does it matter? The writer is my beloved May Sarton and the novel is A Shower of Summer Days. Her work pleases me so much and this novel ranks in the upper middle range of all the novels of hers that I have read.

But what about the book?

Violet and Charles, a 50-something couple returns to the wife’s ancestral home in Ireland after Charles is pushed out of his industrialist position in Burma. Soon after they return Violet’s estranged sister who lives in America sends Sally, her college-age daughter, over to stay with them in the hopes she forgets about her actor boyfriend.

I can’t say too much more without giving too much away. I will say that I think that there is a gay subtext that comes really close to pushing through in a few places that would make the novel make more sense than the more abstract issues Sarton focuses on. The subtext is independent of the quasi-Lesbianic idol worship that Sally has for Violet. Or is it? I don’t really know. But I do think if Sarton had felt more comfortable being open about the subtext the story might have made more sense. Without doing so meant that much of the book’s climax and resolution was based on some fairly opaque conclusions that I am not sure someone as literal-minded as I am can be happy with. This would seem like a fairly big flaw, but I still enjoyed the book quite a bit.