A Bunch of Books
At some point over the summer I picked up a second hand copy of Bleak House. Whenever I read Dickens, my brain continually reminds me that these were serialised, and he got paid by the word. This one sure made him a few pennies. There’s two narratives in parallel: Esther, done in first person, and everyone else, done in third. Esther is an orphan (Dickens loves orphans) whose secret parentage (likewise) emerges later on, entwined with the other plot. At the same time there is a lawsuit (Jarndyce and Jarndyce) that has been going on for years, and has got so convoluted that nobody understands what the actual state of it is. There are wills being contested, which is about as specific as it gets really. One of the litigants who no longer wants anything to do with it is John Jarndyce, and living with him - in Bleak House - are cousins (who later get married [it’s 1837]) Ada and Richard. They are also potentially in line for some payout from the suit. Richard gets obsessed with it and goes a bit mad. Esther also lives with them.
Being 900 pages long, there are obviously a lot of other things going on. Sir Leicester Dedlock and his wife Lady Gillian Anderson are on the fancy end, and there’s Jo the street sweeper who is perpetually told to “move on” before breaking down that he has run out of places to move on to. There’s a gun shop owner (also secret parentage), a lawyer who gets murdered for having too much blackmail material, a landlord who spontaneously combusts (Dickens was convinced it could really happen) and various others. You don’t read this for the bare plot, which is good because the Jellybys, Turveydrops and Smallweeds, though fun, don’t contribute a whole lot to it.
Speaking of plot though, there are some wild swings in here. That guy who spontaneously combusted took some crucial documentation with him. John Jarndyce “proposes” to Esther in a very vague way, by asking her to be the mistress of Bleak House. She agrees, time passes, and it turns out he’s made another house for her to live in when she marries a different (age appropriate) guy, and to avoid technically lying I guess, he has also called that one Bleak House. A new will just turns up that solves the whole case, but then nobody gets any money because the entire estate has gone on legal fees and this basically kills Richard. That bit is pretty funny. There’s a detective story buried in there, before Poe and long before Holmes.
This wasn’t as good as David Copperfield, Esther is too gracious and flawless to be an interesting protagonist, where Copperfield was occasionally an idiot and fuckup. Esther gets smallpox (presumably, it’s not entirely specified) and it ruins her face but everyone still loves her. Her secret parentage and subsequent suicide of her mother doesn’t really affect much about her future, she’s still pretty fine at the end. There’s a lot of fun stuff, Detective Bucket, Guppy being a loser, the threads of the lawsuit to the secret guy who wrote the documentation for it to the various secret parentages.
That took bloody months to read so I went on some easier, though less satisfying detours after that.
Revenge by Yoko Ogawa was a book of short stories that all took place in the same universe, and each one had a little thread leading to the other. There’s a lot of “oh you’re person A from story Y”, but it didn’t do a lot for me.
Weather by Jenny Offill was very lightweight, just a breeze of short paragraphs of abstract worries and daily life from its librarian protagonist. I feel like I forgot each page as I finished reading it, but I enjoyed them while they were in my mind RAM.
The Vegetarian by Kang Han, who recently won the Nobel Prize, was all psychology but with no inner glimpse at the protagonist. The title character decides not to eat meat any more after having a strange blood-filled dream. Her husband does not accept this, but also she completely shuts down in general, stops moving, talking, wastes away. According to herself, she is becoming a plant. Part two is her brother-in-law using her in some kind of sex art movie (feat. himself) until he gets busted by his wife/her sister. Then we get the sister’s perspective with the protagonist gone to a mental home. Very well regarded, everyone’s favourite, but left me a little bit “yeah, so?”
And then Flesh by David Szalay. If you thought that the protagonist of The Vegetarian was impenetrable well boy do I have a novel for you. This won prizes out the wazoo. It is very good at what it is clearly trying to do, which is strip the novel of any kind of interiority and strip the main character István of any kind of agency in his life. He drifts from situation to situation, women throw themselves at him, every single conversation is “are you ok?” “yeah” “yeah?” “yeah”. He rises in the world, falls back to working in a Hungarian supermarket and we learn absolutely nothing about him. He just does stuff. This is the great exposé of men, we just do stuff, and if women throw themselves at us then we just roll with it. Every relationship he has is an affair of some kind, he doesn’t care about any of them, even the one that eventually turns to marriage. As I said above, Flesh does a great job of taking everything that a novel does well, and deliberately not doing it, like making a meal with no food. Congratulations on your anti-novel and non-characters, you really showed us.
Anyway then I picked up Hyperion by Dan Simmons. I’m not quite finished it yet but it absolutely fucking rules. Maybe I’m not complex and really just a huge dork. I do have more George Eliot on the dock soon though, <3.