"The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling" by Henry Fielding

Written in 1749 and one of the earliest English novels, this classic was rated as 22nd/100 in a BBC poll of best novels of all time. The Guardian reckoned it 5th best ever. 

Squire Allworthy is surprised when a baby boy appears in his bed. Having made enquiries which point to the mother as one Jenny Jones, a servant girl, the good squire decides to bring Tom up in his own household. Tom grows up, with the Squire's nephew, Blifil, a nasty boy, and falls in love with Sophy, daughter of the neighbouring Squire Western (although Tom, being a young man, has amours with other ladies too). But Sophy is engaged to marry Blifil so that the two neighbouring estates can be joined and Tom is sent away. Sophy, who very much hates the idea of marrying Blifil, runs away to London and Tom, after various adventures, particularly in Upton, follows her. But even in London the course of true love never runs smoothly. Will our tomcat of a hero gain his true love? Will the mystery of his parentage be solved? Will Sophy be forced by her father to marry for money? Will she forgive Tom's infidelities? All this and more will be resolved over the course of eighteen books (800 pages of quite small print in my edition).

It's a classic, rated as number 5 in the Guardian's top 100 novels of all time. Why?

It's quite funny, there was even one moment when I laughed aloud, and Squire Western, obsessed with hunting ("Mr Western grew every day fonder and fonder of Sophia, insomuch that his beloved dogs themselves almost gave place to her in his affections"; 4.13) and with a sometimes variable Zummerzet accent, is a brilliant comic character. But Fielding writes as such length! Each of the eighteen books is introduced by a chapter which comments on what is to come without in any way being part of the plot; these chapters are eminently skippable. And Fielding is so prolix that even when there is action the relentless flow of words was putting me to sleep. The plot itself twists and turns and I sometimes lost track of the characters but at least there is a plot which is more than you can say of Tristram Shandy (although Jones doesn't have that wonderful surreality of Shandy).

It is interesting as a social document. It reinforces the notion that Englsnd was class-ridden with a wastrel aristocracy who either hunted their landed estates or fought duels if they were young men about town; the purpose of the lower classes is to serve them. It mentions "the toasts of the Kit-Cat" club and Hogarth (describing people as being like a certain character) and "Dr. Donne" and Pope and Garrick playing Hamlet and "the famous author of Hurlothrumbo"). It was written only four years after the 1745 Jacobite rebellion in which Bonnie Prince Charlie and his troops invaded England from Scotland, reaching as far south as Derby before turning back, and there are references to this, as when Tom volunteers to join soldiers going to fight the rebels, and when Sophy is mistaken for Bonnie Prince Cahrlie's mistress. Politically, it must have been very daring, since Squire Western is a Jacobite, drinking toasts to "the King over the Water" (7.4) and regularly excoriating Hanoverians.

One of the lovely things about this book is that it explores all the weaknesses of human character in such a tolerant and, indeed, compassionate way. Georgian society may have been class-ridden and hugely sexist, riddled with extremes of poverty and wealth, and plagued by criminality, but (perhaps like today) if a young fellow is good-looking he can charm the pants of others and get away with all sorts of roguishness.

There are lots of great moments but it was hard work.

TV adaptation

I've now watched the 2023 ITV adaptation. Of course there are alterations to the plot. It's a very long novel; how can it be adapted into four hours (minus at least forty minutes for titles and adverts) of television? There are aspects of the novel (for example, the fact that it is set at the time of the Jacobite rising and that the Hanoverians are neither a secure nor a generally popular dynasty) that one couldn't expect modern audiences to understand. 

But more problematically, Tom Jones doesn't accord with modern sensibilities. Although Sophia casts off the subjugation expected of women, nevertheless its toleration of Tom's misdeeds is fundamentally misogynistic. As though to compensate, Sophia was changed from being the daughter of Squire Western to being his grand-daughter, begotten by his son upon a slave woman in their West Indian plantations. I suspect that this was done solely to enable the casting of a person of colour in a high status role but I would have preferred colour-blind casting to avoid an unnecessary change of plot; they didn't actually make any political capital out of the idea that the wealth of the society was based upon the exploitation of black slaves (which wouldn't be the case in the novel since there is no suggestion that either Squire Allworthy or Squire Western make their money from anything other than their farming of their Somerset estates). 

Other aspects if the plot were changed, most importantly the fact that Squire Western's sister didn't die early but survived until the end. This meant that Blifil couldn't be as villainous as he is in the novel and it also begged the question as to why Mrs Blifil didn't intervene when Squire Western exiled Tom. This plot alteration baffled me.

Selected quotes:

• "One of the maxims which the devil, in a late visit upon earth, left to his disciples, is, when once you are got up, to kick the stool from under you. In plain English, when you have made your fortune by the good offices of a friend, you are advised to discard him as soon as you can." (1.13)
• "a news-paper, which consists of just the same number of words, whether there be any news in it or not." (2.1)
• "he looked on a woman as on an animal of domestic use, of somewhat higher consideration than a cat" (2.7)
• "Here [among the servants] are prudes and coquettes. Here are dressing and ogling, falsehood, envy, malice, scandal; in short, everything which is common to the most splendid assembly, or politest circle." (4.7)
• "He was a good-natured worthy man; but chiefly remarkable for his great taciturnity at table, though his mouth was never shut at it. In short, he had one of the best appetites in the world." (4.10)
• "Wisdom ... teaches us to extend a simple maxim universally known and followed even in the lowest life ... And this is, not to buy at too dear a price." (6.3)
• "He then bespattered the youth with abundance of that language which passes between country gentlemen who embrace opposite sides of the question; with frequent applications to him to salute that part which is generally introduced into all controversies that arise among the lower orders of the English gentry at horse-races, cock-matches, and other public places. Allusions to this part are likewise often made for the sake of the jest. And here, I believe, the wit is generally misunderstood. In reality, it lies in desiring another to kiss your a— for having just before threatened to kick his; for I have observed very accurately, that no one ever desires you to kick that which belongs to himself, nor offers to kiss this part in another." (6.9) This was when I laughed aloud. It seems so modern: kiss my arse (or ass as Americans say)!
• "'To be sure,' said the squire, 'I am always in the wrong.' 'Brother,' answered the lady, 'you are not in the wrong, unless when you meddle with matters beyond your knowledge'." (6.14)
• "When the centinel first saw our heroe approach, his hair began gently to lift up his grenadier cap; and in the same instant his knees fell to blows with each other." (7.14)
• "Our modern authors of comedy have fallen almost universally into the error here hinted at; their heroes generally are notorious rogues, and their heroines abandoned jades, during the first four acts; but in the fifth, the former become very worthy gentlemen, and the latter women of virtue and discretion: nor is the writer often so kind as to give himself the least trouble to reconcile or account for this monstrous change and incongruity. There is, indeed, no other reason to be assigned for it, than because the play is drawing to a conclusion" (8.1)
• “First, from two lovely blue eyes, whose bright orbs flashed lightning at their discharge, flew forth two pointed ogles; but, happily for our heroe, hit only a vast piece of beef which he was then conveying into his plate, and harmless spent their force." (9.5) Don't bother making eyes at a man while he's eating.
• "now on some hollow tree the owl, shrill chorister of the night, hoots forth notes which might charm the ears of some modern connoisseurs in music" (10.2)
• "he was one of those compositions which nature makes up in too great a hurry, and forgets to put any brains into their head." (10.6)
• "the slander of a book is, in truth, the slander of the author: for, as no one can call another bastard, without calling the mother a whore, so neither can any one give the names of sad stuff, horrid nonsense, &c., to a book, without calling the author a blockhead; which, though in a moral sense it is a preferable appellation to that of villain, is perhaps rather more injurious to his worldly interest." (11.1)
• "If she be not a woman of very great quality, sell me for a fool; and, I believe, those who buy me will have a bad bargain." (11.2)
• "Jones now declared that they must certainly have lost their way; but this the guide insisted upon was impossible; a word which, in common conversation, is often used to signify not only improbable, but often what is really very likely, and, sometimes, what hath certainly happened; an hyperbolical violence like that which is so frequently offered to the words infinite and eternal; by the former of which it is usual to express a distance of half a yard, and by the latter, a duration of five minutes." (12.11)

May 2023; 798 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Demian" by Hermann Hesse

This slim volume (110 pages in my paperback version) was originally published pseudonymously and purported to be the autobiography of a young lad; it was an instant success. At first sight it has similarities with Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther, it is very much in the Bildungsroman tradition, but this is not the self-obsessed self-tortures of a man in love; Demian is a novel of ideas about those who are outsiders in society.

There is a short prologue in which the narrator tries to explain what is this autobiography will be all about. It has a sort of dedicatory preface: “All I really wanted was to try and live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?” (Prologue). He warns about the limitations of autobiography: “When authors write novels, they usually act as if they were God and could completely survey and comprehend some person’s history and present it as if God were telling it to Himself, totally unveiled, in its essence at all points. I can't, any more than those authors can.” (Prologue) Finally, he warns: “My story isn't pleasant, it's not sweet and harmonious like the invented stories; it tastes of folly and bewilderment, of madness and dream, like the life of all people who no longer want to lie to themselves.” (Prologue) Then we can start. 

As a boy, the narrator Emil Sinclair recognises that there are two worlds: "the world of a warm glow, clarity and cleanliness; gentle, friendly speech, washed hands, clean clothes, and proper behaviour ... This was the world to adhere to if one's life was to be bright and pure, lovely and well-ordered ... The other world ... was altogether different, smelled different, spoke differently, made different promises and demands. In this second world ... there was a motley flow of uncanny, tempting, frightening, puzzling things, things like slaughterhouse and jail, drunks and bickering women, cows giving birth, horses collapsing, stories of burglaries, killings, suicides.” (Ch 1) Following a juvenile misdemeanour (in fact a pretended one) Sinclair falls victim to blackmail from another schoolboy; Demian rescues him from this. Demian becomes the Guide to Sinclair's Hero on a Journey, but Demian is a guide who starts by challenging conventional ideas of religion and morality. He explains that the Christian God represents "goodness, nobility, the Father, beauty and also loftiness, sentimentality - all fine! But the world is made up of other things, too. And all that is simply ascribed to the Devil, and this whole part of the world, an entire half, is swept under the table and buried in silence"; his solution is to "create some new god, who would also include the Devil within himself, one in whose presence we wouldn't have to shut our eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.” (Ch 3) This is what Sinclair has been waiting to hear and it enables him to go to boarding school where he becomes a drunkard on the point of expulsion; a classic Refusal of the Call. Later he reconnects with Demian and with other characters, such as Pistorius the organist who seeks salvation in ancient mysticism. Finally Sinclair begins his journey to the light. Demian's last visit to him is in the nature, perhaps, of a ghost.

Demian, with Siddartha and Steppenwolf, is the first of a three novels which Colin Wilson in The Outsider considers to be Hesse's exploration of the theme of the outsider. Demian has recognised Sinclair as a fellow who is marked with the ‘mark of Cain’. He explains that the story about Cain is the wrong way round, made up to explain the mark: “They said that fellows with that mark were weird, and so they were. People with courage and character always seem weird to other people.” (Ch 3)

Wilson wasn't too keen on the ending of Demian which he describes as 'airy-fairy' and I can see what he means: it lacks the raw punch of the first few chapters. But the first few chapters are bloody good.

There are some super description in which Hesse uses a comparison entirely unlike any I have heard before and yet spot on:

• “It was as if the wall clock and the table, the Bible and the mirror, the bookshelf and the pictures on the wall were saying goodbye to me.” (Ch 1)
• “He bore and behaved himself like a prince in disguise in the midst farmboys, making every effort to resemble them.” (Ch 2)
• “He didn't look at all like a schoolboy doing an assignment, but like a scholar pursuing his own research.” (Ch 2)
• “The world around me was like a clearance sale of shopworn merchandise, insipid and unappealing.” (Ch 4)
• “A new pot to cook his ideas in.” (Ch 6)
• “Scholarship ... a weary search amid the ruins of worlds gone by.” (Ch 6)
• “I stood at a street corner listening; from two taverns the ritual performed jollity of youth emerged into the night. Everywhere a sense of community, everywhere a squatting together, everywhere is shuffling off of destiny and an escape into the warm togetherness of the herd!” (Ch 7)

Great moments of truth:

• “The part of the story that took place among the wicked and the lost was by far the more appealing, and if one were free to state and admit it, it was sometimes actually a downright shame that the prodigal repented and was found again.” (Ch 1)
• “There were secrets I could much sooner share with the coarsest street boys than with my sisters.” (Ch 1)
• “It was my own business to cope with myself and find my own path, and I conducted my business badly, just as most children do who have been well brought up.” (Ch 3)
• “Very many ... for the rest of their life cling painfully to the irretrievable past, to the dream of the lost paradise [childhood], which is the worst and most murderous of all dreams.” (Ch 3)
• “Whoever wishes to be born destroy a world.” (Ch 5)
• “I like music very much, I think, because it's so unconcerned with morality.” (Ch 5)
• “I've always derived nothing but suffering from morality.” (Ch 5)
• “You certainly don't consider all the bipeds running around the street to be human beings merely because they walk upright and carry their young for nine months?” (Ch 5)
• “You shouldn't compare yourself with others; and if nature has made you a bat, you shouldn't try to turn yourself into an ostrich.” (Ch 6)
• “I didn't exist to write poetry, to preach sermons, to paint pictures; neither I know anyone else existed for that purpose. All of that merely happened to a person along the way. Everyone had only one true vocation: to find himself.” (Ch 6)

Fantastic writing from a Nobel laureate. August 2020; 110 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here:

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Trial" by Franz Kafka

“Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” (C 1) Thus starts K's trial and Kafka's The Trial. It is written in colourless prose, as if taken from a legal manual, and in long paragraphs (disregarding the convention that in a conversation each individual speech is accorded a separate paragraph). It frequently deals in generalities as if it is discussing academic theories of justice, it is mostly abstract, although the setting is concrete and everyday. There are elements of unreality: it feels like an absurdly detailed dream. We are never told what K has been accused of (he himself does not know) and so all discussion of the case has to be in generalities. Nothing really happens (until the shocking ending). The whole feeling is one of alienation like a modernist work of art or a Brecht drama.  It must be exceptionally hard to write this sort of stuff for page after page and to keep going without repeating yourself or running out of ideas.

I found it surprisingly easy to read. 

So what is it about? My naive feeling, before reviewing any of the critical literature, is that it is an extended allegory about religion. The judge is God who presides at the last judgement and before whom K must stand, not for a crime that can be articulated, but for all the things that he has done wrong in his life. This is why the courts are held in attic rooms. This is also why one needs an Advocate (a priest) although it is known that a priest cannot argue before a Judge but only plead, by virtue of knowing one of the lesser judges. This is why there is never any acquittal in this court system: no one is ever completely innocent; the best that can be hoped for is ostensible acquittal or postponement.

Alternatively, it is an allegory about disease. Kafka died from TB. One could see such a disease as arresting one arbitrarily one morning, although not imprisoning one but allowing one to go about their business, but identifiably as one who is diseased. That is why there is not acquittal, only remission. The Advocates in this case are doctors who cannot cure diseases but only try to ease the symptoms; this is why it is clear that there are advocates and there are quacks and why K. decides that in the end the Advocate he has is getting nowhere.

It is, of course, a classic work of literature. But is it any good? Well, Le Monde's readers voted it the third most memorable book of the twentieth century.

Selected quotes:

• “You may object that it is not a trial at all; you are quite right, for it is only a trial if I recognize it as such.” (C 2)
• “It may happen that one sees no point in an interview, and that is the case here.” (C 4)
• “K. wished to exaggerate nothing, he knew that Fraülein Bürstner was an ordinary little typist who could not resist him for long.” (C 4)
• “His uncle was always in a hurry, for he was harassed by the disastrous idea that whenever he came to town for the day he must get through all the programme he had drawn up for himself, besides missing not a single chance of a conversation or a piece of business or an entertainment.” (C 6)
• “She was so close to him she gave out a bitter exciting odour as of pepper” (C 6)
• “One could draw up genuinely effective and convincing pleas only later on, when the separate charges and the evidence on which they were based emerged more definitely or could be guessed at from the interrogations.” (C 7)
• “It seemed to K. as though two giants of enormous size were bargaining above his head for himself.” (C 7)
• “If you have the right eye for these things, you can see that accused men are often attractive.” (C 8) This might refer to the belief that people with TB, because they were pale (?), were physically beautiful.
• “People under suspicion are better moving than at rest, since at rest they may be sitting in the balance without knowing it, being weighed together with their sins.” (C 8)
• “The Advocate’s methods ... amounted to this: that the client finally forgot the whole world and lived only in hope of toiling along this false path until the end of his case should come in sight. The client ceased to be a client and became the Advocate’s dog.” (C 8)
• “You know quite well that in these matters opinions differ so much that the confusion is impenetrable. This judge, for instance, assumes that the proceedings begin at one point, and I assume that they begin at another point.” (C 8) This sounds like the start of a debate on abortion: when does life itself begin? or, indeed, death? Would such arguments have been current in Kafka's time?
• “The scriptures are unalterable and the comments often enough merely express the commentator’s bewilderment.” (C 9)
• “‘Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.” (C 10)

In an 'In Our Time' programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 27th November 2014 Steve Connor, Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, stated that Kafka's world is one of "extraordinary strangeness that can burst into everyday life but rendered with an oddly insistent levelness and muted lucidity” and that although The Trial focuses on “The Law ... as a system of deferral, a system of indirectness, it stands for all systems that don’t seem to have a centre or a purpose or a point.” He points out that nearly all of the chapters start "One day ..." and that “we really don’t know how all of these episodes join up”; the final chapter, which was written very early in the writing process, “feels very staged and forced" and is "too conclusive” although the final words suggest there is no end.

In an 'In Our Time' programme broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 27th November 2014, Elizabeth Boa, Professor Emerita of German at the University of Nottingham, stated that “The characters in the Trial are not psychological studies, they have no depth”; she suggests that the characters “come to life ... through the places they are associated with." These places are on “the margins of life ... the places you forget about”, says Ritchie Robertson, Taylor Professor of the German Language and Literature at the University of Oxford on the same programme. He goes on to suggest that The Trial is about “how the victim of authority is complicit with authority ... colludes with his own oppression” and points out that Josef K never actually asks what he is charged with.

I've just (14th Oct 2024) watched the Steven Berkoff theatrical adaptation (on Digital Theatre). It's a manneredly artificial production which is designed to alienate in the best Theatre of the Absurd traditions and yet the plight of K still held me spellbound for nearly two and a half hours. Plus there were some remarkable physical performances. 

My full review: https://daja57.blogspot.com/2024/10/kafkas-trial-berkoff-theatrical.html

July 2019; 250 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"The Way by Swann's" by Marcel Proust

This is the first volume of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) of which the other volumes are:

• In the Shadow of Young Girls In Flower
• The Guermantes Way
• Sodom and Gomorrah
• The Prisoner and the Fugitive
• Finding Time Again

This book contains three, more or less stand alone, stories.

Part I: Combray
In the first part the narrator is a young boy who finds it difficult to sleep at night. He obsesses over his need for a good night kiss from his mother. She is downstairs at a dinner with the family and M. Swann, a neighbour. He pens a note to her (!) to ask her to come to him and the faithful maid takes it but she won't come up. This is described in great detail, with long, convoluted sentences, full of sub-phrases, until I, if not the young boy, was nearly asleep. It is obsessively detailed. After nearly fifty pages of insomnia (on the author's part, not necessarily on the part of the reader) comes the famous part in which, presumably as an adult (Proust can be somewhat jumbled and confusing about chronology), the narrator tastes the Madeleine cake crumbled in tea which awakens memories of his childhood and then returns to his memories of childhood in Combray where he went walking either the Way by Swann's or the way by the Guermantes and of the various people in the village. And he hears a lot of social snobbery from his parents and grand-parents.

Some of my favourite lines:

• “If, in my own bed, my sleep was deep and allowed my mind to relax entirely; then it would let go of the map of the place where I had fallen asleep and, when I woke in the middle of the night, since I did not know where I was, I did not even understand in the first moment who I was.”
• “summer bedrooms where you love becoming one with the soft night, where the moonlight leaning against the half-open shutters casts its enchanted ladder to the foot of the bed, where you sleep almost in the open air, like a titmouse rocked by the breeze on the tip of a ray of light.”
• “Even the very simple act that we call ‘seeing a person we know’ is in part an intellectual act.”
• “What I fault the newspapers for is that day after day they draw our attention to insignificant things whereas only three or four times in our lives do we read a book in which there is something really essential.”
• “Once in my room, I had to stop up all the exits, close the shutters, put on the shroud of my nightshirt.”
• “Unfortunately, having acquired the habit of thinking out loud, she did not always take care to see that there was no one in the next room.”
• Two panels of the bookshop door are “more sown with ideas than the door of a cathedral.”
• “What should we care for if we don't care for our lives, the only gift the dear Lord never gives us twice over?”
• “Even women who claim to judge a man by his appearance alone see that appearance as the emanation of a special life. This is why they love soldiers, fireman; the uniform makes them less particular about the face.”

Part II: A love of Swann's
The second part relates the story of Swann, a young man about Paris, and his introduction, in a salon, to Odette de Crecy, a member of the demi-monde, that is to say a kept woman, with whom Swann falls in love, whom he starts to give presents, and the subsequent events when the Verdurins, in whose exclusive Salon Swann meets Odette, exclude him from their circle so that he is parted from Odette, who nevertheless continues to see other men; it is the story of Swann's growing jealousy; again it is chronicles in minute, obsessive detail and described in sentences such as this one, which go on and on and on:

• “Then, suddenly, he wondered if this was not precisely what was meant by ‘keeping’ her (as if, in fact, this notion of keeping could be derived from elements not at all mysterious or perverse but belonging to the intimate substance of his daily life, like that thousand-franc bill, domestic and familiar, torn and reglued, which his valet, after having paid the month’s accounts and the quarter’s rent for him, had locked in the drawer of the old desk from which Swann had taken it out again to send it with four others to Odette) and if one could not apply to Odette, starting from when he had come to know her (because he did not for a moment suspect that she could ever have received money from anyone before him), those words which he had believed so irreconcilable with her - ‘ kept woman’.” Wow! A single sentence containing two pairs of brackets!
• “Once or twice on such evenings he experienced the sort of happiness which, if it had not been so violently affected by the recoil from the abrupt cessation of anxiety, when would be tempted to call the tranquil happiness, because it consisted of a return to a peaceful state of mind: he had dropped in on a party at the painter’s home and was preparing to go off again; behind him he was leaving Odette transformed into a brilliant stranger, surrounded by men to whom her glances and her gaiety, which were not for him, seemed to speak of some sensual pleasure that would be enjoyed there or elsewhere (maybe at the ‘Bal des Incoherents’ where he trembled at the idea that she would go afterwards) and that cost Swann more jealousy than the carnal act itself because he had more difficulty imagining it; he was already on the point of passing through the studio door, when he heard himself being called back with these words (which, by cutting off from the party that end which had terrified him so, made the party seem in retrospect innocent, made Odette's return a thing no longer inconceivable and terrible, but sweet and familiar and abiding next to him, like a bit of his everyday life, in his carriage, and divested Odette herself of her too brilliant and too gay appearance,shows that it was only a disguise which she had put on for a moment, for its own sake, not with a view to mysterious pleasures, and that she was already tired of it), with these words that Odette tossed at him, as he was already on the threshold: ‘Wouldn't you wait five minutes for me? I'm leaving, we’ll go back together, you can take me home’.” An even longer single sentence containing, again, two pairs of brackets, and innumerable commas.

He seems to be endeavouring to do with these sentences that which he discerns in Chopin: “When she was young she had learned to caress the phrases of Chopin with their sinuous and excessively long necks, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking out and exploring a place for themselves far outside and away from the direction in which they started, far beyond the point which one might have expected to reach, and which frolic in this fantasy distance only to come back more deliberately - with a more premeditated return, with more precision, as though upon a crystal glass that resonates until you cry out - to strike you in the heart.”

But he can be brief and concise and to the point. Well, nearly:

“curiosity, that excessive interest in life which, when combined with a degree of scepticism concerning the object of their studies, gives certain intelligence men in any profession ... a reputation of having minds that are broad, brilliant, and even superior.”

One of his many strengths is his updated descriptions. He might be writing about French social snobbery in the 1890s but some of his metaphors are incredibly up-to-date and everyday:

•  “He would get into his carriage, but he would feel that this thought had leaped into it at the same time and settled on his knees like a beloved pet which one takes everywhere and which he would keep with him at the table, unbeknownst to the other guests.”
• “You're only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope it finds, a fish without a memory, without a thought in its head, living in its aquarium, mistaking the glass for water and bumping against it a hundred times a day.”
• “You don't choose to go holiday-making in latrines in order to be closer to the smell of excrement.”

Great lines:

• “‘You wouldn't want her to live the way you do, with your broken furniture and your threadbare carpets,’ she said to him, her bourgeois difference to public opinion prevailing, again, over her cocotte dilettantism.”
• “Swann immediately recognized this statement as one of those fragments of true fact which liars, when caught unprepared, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood they are inventing, believing they can accommodate it there and steal away its resemblance to the Truth.”

Part III: Place-names: the name

And the final part is back to the narrator who meets Gilberte, the daughter of Swann and Odette (whom he had already met, by chance, in part one), and falls in love as a child, playing childhood games with her, and then becomes obsessed about seeing her, and when he can no longer see her he becomes obssessed about seeing her mother in the parade at the Bois de Boulogne, where he hears other men talking about her reputation and admitting that they too have slept with Odette.
Great lines:

• “That day which I had so dreaded was, in fact, one of the only ones on which I was not too unhappy.”
• “The places we have known do not belong solely to the world of space in which we situate them for our greater convenience. They were only a thin slice among contiguous impressions that formed our life at that time; the memory of a certain image is only regret for a certain moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fleeting, alas, as the years.” (Last line)

But is it any good?
Three stories about obsession then, described in obsessive detail, and in long intricate sentences. A lot of the obsession involves the place of a person in society (Proust's obsession with the finer details of social life is perhaps why Virginia Woolf loved him rather than James Joyce, whom she thought common; Woolf was a massive snob; Proust says that Swann married "a woman of the worst social station, practically a cocotte"; it might be argued that Proust attacks and satirises the pretensions of social snobs and that he is therefore not a snob but he certainly feels that educated and intelligent people are superior to ill-educated and ignoratn people and he is therefore clearly an intellectual snob), as if he or she were an organism whose place in the grand ecosystem that is life cannot be understood without a microscopic examination of each facet of their ecological niche. And on that level, it is a masterpiece.

But it is exhausting to read.

Is Proust a genius?

• "The trouble with Proust is that sometimes you go through an absolutely wonderful passage, but then you have to go about 200 pages of intense French snobbery, high-society maneuverings and pure self-indulgence. It goes on and on and on and on." Kazuo Ishiguro
• "If you have read all of A la Recherche du Temps Perdu, you should be very worried about yourself. As Proust very well knew, reading his work for as long as it takes is temps perdu, time wasted" Germiane Greer
• "I find the endless sentences distancing, the people without interest." Susan Hill

Arthur Quiller-Couch, in Shakespeare's Workmanship, states that “The half of artistry consists in learning to make one stroke better than two. The more simply, economically, you produce the impression aimed at, the better workman you make all yourself.” If he is right then Proust, who routinely used ten words when one might have done, apparently under the impression that brevity was simply laziness, was not an artist, let alone a genius.

Other French books which are reviewed in this blog may be found here

This review was written by

the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling 

and The Kids of God

"Moby-Dick" by Herman Melville

This is the great American novel. What makes it great?

My sister was impressed. She called it "magnificently insane", "ridiculously wordy" and described Ishmael, the narrator, as "a Don Quixote figure". By these comments she meant that it was one of the best books she had read.

It is not a modern novel. It makes no sense to criticise in terms of what we expect a novel to be. In a modern novel, in English literature since about the time of Henry James, the characters have driven the novel. It was different in earlier times. Melville published Moby-Dick (the hyphen is only ever found in the title and one presumes was a typo by the printer of the first edition) in 1851; in this year Uncle Tom's Cabin began serialization and Mrs Gaskell published Cranford; Charles Dickens was in between David Copperfield and Bleak House; Balzac had just died. This was a time of big books and epic stories; it was a time of romantic ideas.

So I couldn't expect anything in the way of a character arc. The characters aren't even rounded in the E M Forster sense (see his Aspects of the Novel) While some of the characters debate (Starbuck, Ahab etc) soliloquise from time to time (To do or not to do) they remain flat and fail to progress anywhere. Thus we have the wonderful caricatures of Ahab (monomaniacal throughout: “The path to my fixed purpose is laid with iron rails, whereon my soul is grooved to run.”; C 37)  , Starbuck, Stubb, Flask and Queequeeg as well as minor characters such as Peleg but no characters in the modern sense. As Jane Smiley says in 13 Ways of Looking at a Novel, "Ishmael's own personality and fate are very little explored ... the novel is not about character transformation. ... It is Ahab ... who becomes the main focus of the narrative, but his character is no more transformed than Ishmael's."  In this way Moby-Dick is more of an epic than a novel. Only the narrator, Ishmael, seems to be a character and he disappears almost as soon as he boards ship.

The narration starts from the point of view of Ishmael as he explores New Bedford and Nantucket in his attempt to be hired on board a whaling ship. But the moment the ship sets sail, the narration switches to that of the omniscient narrator. He overhears things people say when they are on their own. He is privileged to record thoughts. He discourses with academic precision on the character of whales, their anatomy, their history. Parts of the narrative are rendered in the style of playscripts. Although he sometimes refers to himself during this narration, he isn't really part of it. He properly returns only for the epilogue.

I agree with my sister Jane that it is wordy. This is partly because Melville packs in his research: there are chapters on the types of whales, and on the anatomy of whales, and on the uses of whale-oil, and many chapters devoted to the business of capturing whales and then extracting their oil. These add verisimilitude and I correctly assumed that Melville had sailed on whalers. But these insertions distract from and slow down the narrative. This novel does not conform to modern notions of form.

But it is also wordy in another sense. Melville excites with his use of language. We are told in chapter seven that “There is death in this business of whaling - a speechlessly quick chaotic bungling of a man into Eternity.”; the word 'speechlessly' reminds us of the silence of death while at the same time acting as an intensifier for the 'quick', being used as a synonym for 'indescribably'; the word 'chaotic' harks back to the chaos of the void before creation; the word 'bungling' both describes the pushing and shoving that will force the living body through the doorway into death and at the same time refers to the errors that might cause the accident that brings about the death. This is beautiful writing.

Of course the novel doesn't really have a plot. Ship commanded by bonkers captain seeks revenge on white whale isn't really a plot. Jane Smiley (13 Ways of Looking at a Novel) again suggests what might be happening. She points out that Melville's problem was to get from the start of the sea voyage to its inevitable end. "The Pequod looks for the white whale for hundreds of pages; the encounter itself takes ... less than 5% of the novel. There is never any doubt about whether the whale will be found or pursued. At no juncture in the novel is there even the illusion of choice by Ahab, nor are there intervening circumstances.” So Melville has to find some way of exciting our interest. She suggests that whaling is inherently interesting. But she also suggests that Melville is seeking to "exhaust the spiritual meanings of obsession" by his use of multiple styles and that the novel should be viewed as analogous to Bach's Goldberg variations in which "much of the pleasure for the reader has to be witnessing the endless but systematic variety of the authors technique.” On this reading the length of the novel was necessary because it takes time to accustom the reader to the idea that the novel is trying to perpetrate.

There are some attempts at foreshadowing (“The picture represents a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane; the half-foundered ship weltering there with its three dismantled masts alone visible; and an exasperated whale, purposing to spring clean over the craft, is in the enormous act of impaling himself upon the three mast-heads.”; C 3) and the prophecies related by the Parsee in Chapter 117 but these are clumsy and obvious, spoilers rather than bread crumbs. The fact that these prophecies occur so late in the book gives the impression that Melville was making it up as he went along rather than having a structured plot. This impression is reinforced by the virtual disappearance from the narrative of Ishmael once the voyage has got under way. Furthermore there is Bulkington. Ishmael comes across this character in chapter 3. Bulkington has a reputation at the tavern where Ishmael is to stay; he is a favourite of the sailors. He then disappears to reappear as the Peqoud sets sail as its helmsman. He has a whole chapter, albeit only of a page and a half, to himself; but this is to be his last appearance.

The story starts being told from the point of view of Ishmael. But once the ship gets underway the narrator becomes omniscient. Ishmael virtually vanishes. The central character is Ishmael, with Queequeeg also centre stage, but as the voyage gets under way the hitherto invisible Captain Ahab becomes the focus of attention. Moby-Dick is two books.

The language of the book starts robustly but as we move further into the drama, and into Ahab's monomania, it becomes more and more old-fashioned. The last few chapters are melodramatic and full of exclamation marks.

So there is a lot wrong with this book, of which some can be excused by being in the style of its time and others not. But surely it is redeemed by the many moments of magic:

• There are pieces of perfect description:
• “Such unaccountable masses of shades and shadows, that at first you almost thought some ambitious young artist ... had endeavored to delineate chaos bewitched.” (C 3)
• “He looked like a man cut away from the stake, when the fire has overrunningly wasted all the limbs without consuming them.” (C 28)
• “In thought, a fine human brow is like the East when troubled with the morning.” (C 79)
• “If you have attentively regard almost any quadruped’s spine, you will be struck with the resemblance of its vertebrae to a strung necklace of dwarfed skulls.” (C 80)
• “Next morning the not-yet-subsided sea rolled in long slow billows of mighty bulk, and striving in the Pequod's gurgling track, pushed her on like giants’ palms outspread. The strong, unstaggering breeze abounded so, that sky and air seemed vast outbellying sails; the whole world boomed before the wind. Muffled in the full morning light, the invisible sun was only known by the spread intensity of his place, where his bayonet rays moved on in stacks. Emblazonings, as of crowned Babylonian kings and queens, reigned over everything. The sea was as a crucible of molten gold, that bubblingly leaps with light and heat.” (C 124)
• There is a first line to die for:
• “Call me Ishmael. Some years ago - never mind how long precisely - having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” (C 1)
• Can there be a better encapsulation of character than those three words: 'Call me Ishmael'. Of course you have to know a bit of Bible. Ishmael was Abraham's elder son, born of his slave-girl Hagar; when Abraham's wife Sarah belatedly gave birth to Isaac she persuaded Abraham to cast Hagar and baby Ishmael into the wilderness. Thus Ishmael refers to an outcast, to one who has been disinherited.
• The character of Ishmael continues to be explored in the early chapters:
• “I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.” (C 1)
• “I love to sail forbidden seas.” (C 1)
• The novel teems with wonderfully astute reflections on the world:
• “Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?” (C 1)
• “A purse is but a rag unless you have something in it.” (C 1)
• “Who ain’t a slave? Tell me that.” (C 1)
• “The act of paying is perhaps the most uncomfortable infliction that the two orchard thieves entailed upon us. But being paid - what will compare with it?” (C 1)
• “The Commodore on the quarter-deck gets his atmosphere at second hand from the sailors on the forecastle. He thinks he breathes it first; but not so. In much the same way do the commonalty lead their leaders in many other things, at the same time that the leaders little suspect it.” (C 1)
• “Wherever in your wisdom you may conclude to lodge for the night, my dear Ishmael, be sure to enquire the price, and don't be too particular.” (C 2)
• “It's only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin.” (C 3)
• “Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian.” (C 3)
• “But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.” (C 7)
• “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appal! Woe to him whose good name is more to him than goodness!” (C 9)
• “Higher the top of that delight, than the bottom of the woe is deep.” (C 9)
• “What is worship? thought I. Do you suppose now, Ishmael, that the magnanimous god of heaven and earth - pagans and all included - can possibly be jealous of an insignificant bit of black wood? Impossible!” (C 10)
• “But what is worship? - to do the will of God - that is worship. And what is the will of God? - to do to my fellow man what I would have my fellow man do to me - that is the will of God.” (C 10)
• “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” (C 12)
• “Though seven hundred and seventy-seven is a pretty large number, yet, when you come to make a teenth of it, you will then see, I say, that the seven hundred and seventy-seventh part of a farthing is a good deal less than seven hundred and seventy-seven gold doubloons.” (C 16)
• “But when a man suspects any wrong, it sometimes happens that if he be already involved in the matter, he insensibly strives to cover up his suspicions even from himself.” (C 20)
• “But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God - so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that was safety! For worm-like, then, oh! Who would craven crawl to land!” (C 23)
• “An utterly fearless man is a far more dangerous comrade than a coward.” (C 26)
• “Think not, is my eleventh commandment; and sleep when you can, is my twelfth.” (C 29)
• “God keep me from ever completing anything.” (C 32)
• “Who has but once dined his friends, has tasted what it is to be Caesar.” (C 34)
• "What he ate did not so much relieve his hunger, as keep it immortal in him.” (C 34)
• “The chick that's in him pecks the shell.” (C 36)
• “For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.” (C 45)
• “Of all tools used in the shadow of the moon, men are most apt to get out of order.” (C 46)
• “There are certain times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” (C 49)
• “Go to the meat-market of a Saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds.” (C 65)
• “If your banker breaks, you snap; if your apothecary by mistake sends you poison in your pills, you die.” (C 72)
• “Is heaven a murderer when its lightning strikes a would-be murderer in his bed, tindering sheets and skin together?” (C 123)
• “Some men die at ebb tide; some at low water; some at the full of the flood.” (C 135)
• There are even moments of humour:
• “There, Betty, go to Snarles the Painter, and tell him to paint me a sign, with - ‘no suicides committed here’, and ‘no smoking in the parlor’; - might as well kill both birds at once.” (C 17)
• “Certain I am, however, that a king’s head is solemnly oiled at his coronation, even as a head of salad. Can it be, though, that they anoint it with a view of making its interior run well, as they anoint machinery?” (C 25)
• “A mature man who uses hair oil, unless medicinally ... has probably got a quoggy spot in him somewhere. As a general rule, he can't amount to much in his totality.” (C 25)

The introduction suggests that Melville intended Moby-Dick to be an allegory of America.

But does this novel stand the test of time?

Influences:

• The obvious maritime influence would have been The Antient Mariner, a poem by Coleridge. The story of the Essex, a whaling ship attacked and sunk by a whale, the survivors then enduring a long journey in small boats during which time they resorted to drawing lots and killing and eating the loser, was another inspiration; Melville is known to have read the account of this incident by Essex Mate Owen Chase.
• The Essex incident (told in Nathaniel Philbrick's In the Heart of the Sea) has inspired other novels including:
• Dark Water by Elizabeth Lowry
• Jamrach's Menagerie by Carol Birch

But there are other influences too. Andrew Delbanco, in his Introduction to my (Penguin) edition, suggests that the book was written during the congressional debates over slavery which led to the Civil War; he calls Moby-Dick "a sustained meditation on the sectional crisis". It is noticeable that the highly skilled harponeers on board the ship are all non-whites but the officers of the ship are all white.

On 7th December 2017 BBC Radio 4 broadcast an 'In Our Time' programme about Moby-Dick. Host Melvyn Bragg was joined by Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds; Katie McGettigan, Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London; and Graham Thompson, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. Among the points they made was that:

• Melville had been reading Shakespeare obsessively in the period just before writing M-D and this can be seen in the chapters with stage directions and in the way some characters are given quasi-Shakespearean soliloquies. Other influences include Milton (Ahab partly based on Satan in Paradise Lost) and the King James Bible including Jonah, the start (“Call me Ishmael”) and the ending, referencing Job. The language clearly draws on the KJ Bible. (GT)
• Themes of the novel include: 
• "asking, well which of us isn’t in one way or another a cannibal, who might not be a savage" seen in the relationship between Ishmael and Queequeg. (BB) The close male-male relationships; inter-racial male relationships are a feature of US literature including Hawkeye and the Mohicans, and Huckleberry Finn and escaping slave Jim (GT)
• What should a leader do with his legitimate authority (GT) “Also how far authority can actually reach” (KM)
• Political allegories eg Ahab a dictator whose power has been conferred by the crew as in Hobbes Leviathan (BB)
• It is a Voyage and Return narrative (GT)
• M-D “is a novel full of symbols” with multiple meanings (GT) such as whiteness whose meanings Ishmael lists but “whiteness becomes a surface on which you can project” (KM)
• The Quarterdeck chapter where Ahab gets the men on side with his plan is the pivotal chapter in the novel. This is where it becomes epic. (GT)
• Melville’s working method was to write a basic story and then supplement it to add depth. (GT) 

Sales were initially disappointing, perhaps because a review from the Athenaeum called it “disfigured by mad English and absurd” (KM). Then in the 1920s Modernism arrived and Billy Budd published 1924, Benjamin Britten wrote novel (libretto by EM Forster). (BB).  DH Lawrence praised it “as a proto-Modernist text” (KM)

“We might even think of it as post-modernist in terms of the kind of pastiches, the collections of different texts and the kind of cut-and-paste method; so this all makes it quite illegible in some kinds of ways. But that’s precisely what the novel is about, it’s about the limits of meaning, it’s about what can be done with the novel, it’s about the extent of the novel” (BB)

May 2019; 625 pages

It was rated 17th in The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Guy Mannering" by Sir Walter Scott

This is an old-fashioned novel by the man who was the acclaimed and best-selling writer of historical novels. It is his second novel, following Waverley. The first edition of GM (published anonymously in 1815), 2000 copies, sold out on the day of publication.

As with novels of this age, there is little character development. Guy Mannering is as nuanced as they come. He is fundamentally nice and honorable, as befits a hero, and he is well-bred and rich and clever and brave. Glossin is a self-made man and therefore scheming and avarcicious and a cheat and a "wretch". Dominie Sampson is a poor ungainly ragged tongue-tied scholar whose fundamental role is to be laughed at (often by the author although he is at pains to point out the Dominie's essential goodness and allows Guy to reprove people who laugh at the poor Dominie). In general, the pedigreed are honorable and the low-born are bad. This is especially true of the character who is well-bred but, through misfortune, has a lowly status.

It is notable for the introduction of the gypsy queen and witch Meg Merrilies.

But for all its faults, Scott could certainly tell a story. The first ten chapters contain gypsies, smugglers, the mysterious death of an excise officer (complete with scene of crime evidence) and child abduction. Other thrills include a struggle for a gun which involves one goody shooting another, a very bad lawyer, a smuggler's raid on a house repulsed with gunfire, and a thrilling scene in which the hero has to hide from robbers in their lair.

It also amused me that all the many Scottish dialect words are footnoted but there is no explanation for the Latin.

Great phrases

• "An excellent old Highlander, without a fault, unless a preference for mountain-dew over less potent liquors be accounted one." (Introduction)
• "Like other philosophers, she remarked that the world grew worse daily; and, like other parents, that the bairns got out of her guiding." (Introduction)
• "Does the devil mingle in the dance, to avenge himself for our trifling with an art said to be magical in origin?" (C 4)
• "To those who lie out of the road of great afflictions, are assigned petty vexations, which answer all the purpose of disturbing their serenity." (C 5)
• The Lake District is "the resort of walking gentlemen of all descriptions, poets, players, painters, musicians, who come to rave, and recite, and madden, about this picturesque land of ours." (C 16)
• "A retired old soldier is always a graceful and respected character. He grumbles a little now and then,  but then his is licensed murmuring - were a lawyer, or a physician, or a clergyman, to breathe a complaint of hard luck or want of preferment, a hundred tongues would blame his own incapacity as the cause." (C 21)
• "In civilised society, law is the chimney through which all that smoke discharges itself that used to circulate through the whole house, and put everyone's eyes out - no wonder, therefore, that the vent should sometimes get a little sooty." (C 39)
• "The lawyer afterwards compared his mind to the magazine of a pawnbroker, stowed with goods of every description, but so cumbrously piled together, and in such total disorganisation, that the owner can never lay his hands on any one article at the moment he has occasion for it." (C 39)
• "Speaking as if his utmost efforts were unable to unseal his lips beyond the width of a quarter of an inch, so that his whole utterance was a kind of compressed muttering" (C 41)
• "Law's like laudanum; it's much more easy to use it as a quack does, than to learn to apply it like a physician." (C 56)

It's a great little read but you have to be tolerant of the old world style.

Other Walter Scott books I have read include The Talisman, Waverley, and Ivanhoe.

Other points:

• Scott mentions the Bold Admiral Benbow as a ballad (C 6)
• Scott in a footnote mentions that Adam Smith was, "for some hours", abducted by gipsies as a child (C 8)
• At the time he is writing of Edinburgh New Town "was just then commenced" (C 36)
• The game "High Jinks" involves making a member of the company, chosen by lot, pretend to be a fictitious character or say a funny poem. Another game mentioned (C 57) is "Hy Spy". Wikipedia states that this is nopt IO Spt as we know it today but a variant of Hide and Seek.
• "The post was much more tardy than since Mr Palmer's ingenious invention has taken place" (C 40) Palmer was a theatre owner in Bath and Bristol whose experience of stage coach travel led him to set up the first mail coach service in August 1784.
• He compares a gypsy with "Siddons herself" (C 53) Sarah Siddons (1755 – 1831)was a famed tragedienne.

May 2019; 408 pages

"Steppenwolf" by Hermann Hesse

Synopsis

Harry Haller (HH like the author) lives in a room in a boarding house with his books. He believes he is a warring mixture of two personalities: a man and a wolf from the steppes (Steppenwolf). “A wolf of the steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd, a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.” Seeing and despairing of the mundanity of everyday life, he is brought to the brink of suicide. Then he discovers a door in a wall. This reminded me strongly of the opening of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. In Steppenwolf, the door is labelled: “Magic Theatre. Entrance not for everybody. ... For madmen only!”. Searching for the entrance to this Magic Theatre he discovers a book about himself.

He meets a girl, Hermine, who reminds him of his childhood friend Herman. She teaches him to dance and enjoy jazz. He meets Pablo, a charming and handsome jazz musician, and he begins an affair with a dancer. Then Pablo offers him drugs and the chance to enter the magic theatre.

Is this a novel of magic realism? Certainly strange things occur which cannot be rationally explained. It has some elements that might be described as Kafkaesque. But it also reminded me of Brechtian drama with its insistence on signposting what was unreal.

Steppenwolf is an exploration of what it means to be an Outsider in the Colin Wilson sense. (Wilson uses Steppenwolf as a key text.) Thus: 

• He feels alienated from the everyday world:
• “Wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain.”
• “It had been just one of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days of a discontented middle-aged man”
• “There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for those bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure cry out, on which everything only whispers and tiptoes around.”
• “The majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs ... without really wanting to at all, pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain ... and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognising the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all.”
• Rather than being a lonely outsider he seeks some sort of mystical union with the universe:
• “I accepted all things and to all things I gave up my heart.”
• “All births betoken the parting from the All, the confinement within limitation, the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew.”
• “The intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality in the mass, the mystic union of joy ... My personality was dissolved in the intoxication of the festitivity like salt in water.”
• The problem seems to be the idea that one's Self is a single self:
• “It appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. ...in reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities.”
• “We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange those pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life.”
• “I knew that all the hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket.”
• There is an echo of this idea in The Biographer's Tale by A S Byatt

Some great observations:

• “He was brought up by devoted but severe and very pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine that makes the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and up-bringing.”
• “He who makes thought his business, he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water all the same, and one day he will drown.”
• “Let every reader do as his conscience bids him.”
• “Jazz was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all the academic music of the day. For me too, its raw and savage gaiety reached an underworld of Instinct and breathed a simple honest sensuality. ... It was the music of decline.”
• “What we call ‘bourgeois’ ... is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct.”
• “It is ...in the middle of the road, that's the Bourgeois seeks to walk. he will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. ... The absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving up the fleshpots.”
• “The heroes of the epics of India are not individuals, but whole reels of individualities in a series of incarnations.”
• “‘Supposing you were too obedient to learn to dance when you were young ... what have you been doing with yourself all these years?’
• ‘... ‘studied, played music, read books, written books, travelled -’
• ... ‘You have always done the difficult and complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learnt. ... But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit far’.”
• “Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.”
• “You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all sorts of superior things in your heads; but you’re human beings like the rest of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies.”
• “Life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and radio music.”
• “Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.”
• “There flared within me a last burst of desire which made me run all over her garden, and I bit once more into the sweet fruit of the tree in paradise.”
• “War is childishness on a grand scale.”
• “From her armpit to her breast I saw the play of a delicate shadow. It seemed that it wished to recall something, but what I could not remember.”

A profound and important book. March 2019; 252 pages

Books and plays written by Nobel Laureates that I have reviewed in this blog can be found here.

Other books by German authors reviewed in this blog.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God