Mrs. O'Dell Reads

I love, love, love Jen Lancaster!  Such a Pretty Fat is the first book I ever laughed out loud at in my whole life. She’s just one of those writers whom I will always read whether or not I’m interested in the book at face value.  But I was nervous when I heard she was writing her first novel and making the jump to fiction. (Perhaps it’s just book snobbery — if it’s a memoir, it’s okay if I read it. If it’s a novel, then I really am reading chick lit.)

I was pleasantly surprised with If You Were Here,  though. Semi-autobiographical, there is a lot of the real Jen and Fletch in this book.  In the novel, the first of three, the fictional Mia and Mac buy a serious fixer-upper primarily because it was featured in John Hughes’ Pretty in Pink. The renovation (rebuild?) that ensues challenges their finances, friendships, and their marriage.

Nothing about this book was particularly stunning, and I might not have liked it so much had it not been written by Lancaster. The things fans love about her are not lost — her signature snark, her love of animals, the dynamics of her friendships and marriage. It feels very much like what we’re used to, and that will make me pick up the next in the series … even if it’s chick lit fiction and not a memoir.

I am alive and still reading … sort of.

I know I am committing reading blasphemy by saying this, but I’m having serious trouble finishing Abraham Verghese’sCutting for Stone.

And this is the second time I’ve picked it up without finishing it.

And I will finish it. It’s a great story. Two twins in Ethiopia, born against all odds, are adopted and raised by two doctors. The twins, in turn, grow up to be doctors.  It’s well-written. While I’m in the midst of reading it, I’m interested.  It’s not a difficult read in any way.

But I can’ seem to WANT to read it. At all.

And perhaps it’s not the fault of this book in particular. Maybe I’m just in a more general reading funk. Either way, I have 100 pages to go. 100 pages standing between me, a review, and you.

I’m still here. I’m still sort of reading.  Feel free to comment and yell at me for not being as completely wrapped up in this book as everyone else in the world. 

I often wish that I could go back in time to sixth grade and read Pride and Prejudice or Jane Eyre for the very first time.   Though I often re-read my desert-island favorites, and while they certainly continue to bloom on the tenth or twentieth perusal, what was it like to read them the first time without preconception? Without favorite heroes and loathed villains and oft-quoted treasured sentences?

In spite of my myopic English studies in college, almost always focused on 19th century British literature when I could possibly help it, I had never read Charlotte Bronte’s Villette, a novel written after her initial though anonymous success with Jane Eyre and largely considered to be autobiographical. Famously, Virginia Woolf claimed that this was Bronte’s “finest novel.”

To read a Bronte for the very first time — the perfect way to wrap up a year of reading.

In Villette, a family tragedy leaves young Lucy Snowe impoverished and without hope or family, excepting her godmother Mrs. Bretton and her son Graham.  Living with them until her own young adulthood, Lucy then sets out on adventure, rather accidentally travelling to a foreign city, Villette (modeled on Brussels). There,  Lucy stumbles upon a job in a boarding school, first as a governess, then promoted into the position of an English teacher.

Lucy becomes acquaintances with a handsome young doctor who tends to the young girls at the school.  As fate would have it, it is the self-same young man in whose home Lucy was raised — Graham Bretton, now ”Dr. John.” Friendship blossoms anew between Dr. John, Lucy, and his mother; and, naturally, infatuation isn’t far behind. All the while, Lucy battles with an ornery literature professor, M. Paul Emmanuel, who challenge’s Lucy’s intellect and fortitude.

Can you figure out where this goes?  Dr. John falls in love with another (prompting one of my new favorite lines in all of literature: “Goodnight, Dr. John; you are good, you are beautiful, but you are not mine.”), and Lucy falls in love with the brooding and complicated M. Paul.

But, wait: I don’t want you to think this is just a romance. Bronte is never “chick lit”. That is not true of Jane Eyre, and it is even less true of Villette.  Yes, in broad strokes, there is a young lady coming of age who meets her match and falls in love. But that is not solely what these 559 pages are made of.  Much to my students’ frequent chagrin, Bronte doesn’t really care about plot — keeping the story moving along or enticing the reader to stay interested. No, while Jane Austen (the apple of my bookish eye and more frequent proprietor of  ye olde chick lit) writes the plot of “four or five families in a country village”, Bronte writes about the emotional landscape of one individual’s life. This frequently requires the detailing of little moments, insignificant conversations, and microscopic little nuances and opinions that an author enslaved to plot would never reveal.  Austen gives the reader the best parts; Bronte gives the reader everything.

(This is all tangentially to say that to love Austen is not to necessarily love Bronte, and to equate one with the other is like Nicholas Sparks equating himself with Hemingway. Well, maybe it’s not that heinous a literary crime … but you get the idea.)

So, Reader, is Villette superior to Jane Eyre, for, after all, that was the question I sought to answer in my year-end reading escapade. Well, not for me.  Perhaps because there is nothing like the blind devotion of first love. I thoroughly enjoyedVillette, but it didn’t have the wildness, the passion, the lack of self-possession that is often demonstrated in Jane Eyre. And I would posit that this is probably the exact reason that Virginia Woolf felt the opposite.

Villette is measured, reasoned, and much more grown up than Jane Eyre.  It was great to read something real.  Something substantial. Something to be sipped and savored rather than gulped and judged. Something transcendent. Something worthy of being my 79th book in 2010 — a perfect bookend to a delightful reading year.

In an anonymous country on New Year’s Day, no one dies. No one dies the next day either. Or the next. Seemingly, death has been (accidentally) vanquished, and celebrations and patriotism abound throughout the countryside. That is until the people realize what a life without death really means.

You see,  those who are aging, ill, or lingering on the line between life and death are not miraculously cured. They just won’t die.  Families are left to watch their loved ones suffer and left to care for them indefinitely. Major industries, too, are left in turmoil. What will become of the funerary industry or life insurance in a world in which death has no place?  What will become of religion, whose dominant source of power is that of life after death?

Soon, the country and government falls into turmoil. Maphiosos (spelled with a “ph” to distinguish them from the other mafia) control large human smuggling rings that transport the dying to neighboring countries so that they can finally pass over into death. The neighboring nations, in turn, threaten war. What seemed utopian quickly turns catastrophic for the nation who thought they could overcome death.

Death With Interruptions is a fascinating, challenging, read. Admittedly, this is my first encounter with reading Saramago, but I was surprised by the heaviness of the text — very few paragraphs and lost of words on a page. There is little capitalization (a point the narrator makes himself) and virtually no characters.  Death, a woman, and the cellist with whom she becomes infatuated in the second half of the book are the only characters Saramago’s narrative follows — and even that is merely two-dimensional.

Rather, the narrator himself/herself/theirselves becomes the primary protagonist, with an incredibly strong, tongue-in-cheek tone that had me laughing out loud more than once. Self-referential and sly, the narrator is at once thoroughly modern and also ancient — like a Greek chorus commenting on the folly of the human players below.

While Saramago’s prose is beautiful, taking surprising turns throughout the novel, I found myself marvelling at the skill of a good translator — a translator like Maragaret Jull Costa here.  With Saramago’s unusual vocabulary and interesting syntax, I was so impressed by someone with such a command of not only English but also Saramago’s native Portugese.

This is a book that I would love to teach — it’s fresh and strange. It’s difficult.  It’s philosophical yet sarcastic. I had not finished the first chapter before knowing that this is the kind of book that bears hundreds  of re-reads.  Next time,  I am pulling out the “reading kit” my students made for me last year, full of colored pens and highlighters and post-it notes.  Death With Interruptions is the kind of book that makes me excited to be a reader, always uncovering new personal treasures to spend hours pouring over.

Admittedly, I am generally a book snob. Usually I am fairly selective about what I read, and I do classify people as “non-readers”, “readers”, “real readers.” It’s not necessarily nice, but it is the truh. (And after all, there are worse things to be than a book snob. Like a book lemming, for example. That’s far worse.)

Still, every so often after a deluge of heavy, serious reading, I do enjoy some chick lit. It’s not something I’m proud of either, but, in the interest of full disclosure, here it is. For me, an Emily Giffin novel is the right kind of chick lit — usually better written and more creative than your average I-am-a-20-something-wanting-to-find-Prince-Charming-but-oh!-the-scandals-and-foibles-along-the-way-to-my-happy-(usually New York)-ending fare. Plus, she’s a UVa alumna. So what — I’m biased.

All of that being said, I really enjoyed Giffin’s first two novels Something Borrowed and Something Blue. They were easy, fun reads with interesting plots and endearing characters. Not so with Baby Proof. Disappointingly, for me Giffin’s third novel was just another chick lit book.

Claudia Parr, a high-powered New York City book editor, has the seemingly perfect life and marriage to Ben Davenport. Everything collapses, though, when Ben reneges on their pre-marriage pact to never have children.  Suddenly single and missing her “soulmate”, Claudia is forced to decide what she really wants in life and what she is willing to sacrifice in order to have it.

Other than the fact that this novel was an easy read, there was nothing that made me want to read. I felt like I had already read this book a few times over.  No matter how weighty my reading list, it will probably be awhile before I turn to Emily Giffin for relief.