All the World's a Page

This collection is a sort of strange farrago of Ibsen's plays, from the metrical mock-epic of Peer Gynt, to the family dramas of A Doll's House, Ghosts and The Wild Duck, and lastly Hedda Gabler and The Master Builder which are powerfully individual dramas. Ibsen was a very versatile play write, maybe the best since Shakespeare. Unlike Shakespeare, Ibsen has much more the novelist's sentiment, he doesn't write comedies or tragedies, or what-have-you, but rather he writes life as it is, comments on it and criticizes it. Where the bard is the master of language, Ibsen is a master of morality, particularly household morality, family morality. And most of all, Ibsen is the champion of the individual: man, woman, child, invalid, married, abandoned or alone, anyone and everyone and individual unto themselves.

Certainly A Doll's House is Ibsen's most-read, and understandably, it is a pillar of drama. It is comedy, tragedy, satire, it is humanist and feminist, it is economic and economical. Following Nora, a faithful wife to her husband Torvald, who indebted herself to a man who lusts for her in order to care for her dying father, only to feel the alarming suffocation of that debt when it comes due: the pressure of finances, the social stigma of her forgery, the family pressures and judgments; but most of all the truth of her position. Nora realizes that she is not an equal in her marriage, she is beneath even her children in the esteem of their father, she is a simple doll. Torvald treats her, and addresses her, strictly in the diminutive, barely even capable of believing his "squirrel" of such a transgression. Nora's struggle against her husband, a man who she thought she loved and who loved her, but who supresses and dismisses her, who treats her as sub-human, sub-individual, is heartbreaking, and feels very real. While there is a beauty in the versed plays of Racine, Shakespeare, the greeks, there is a lovely poignancy in Ibsens's realistic and colloquial portrayal of Nora's (and Hedda's and Hedvig's) plight. Joyce was notably a devoted fan of Ibsens, and it is most obvious in his Dubliners: their critical eye to society, their offhand colloquialism, and perhaps most Ibsen-esque: their moral epiphanies.

NORA
Our house has been nothing but a play-room. Here I have been your doll-wife, just as at home I used to be papa's doll-child. And the children, in their turn, have been my dolls. I thought it fun when you played with me, just as the children did when I played with them. That has been our marriage, Torvald.

Unlike in Joyce, Nora's (Hedda's, Hedvig's, Solness's, Mrs. Alving's) epiphanies are powerful enough to disrupt, the cause change: their effects are irrevocable and unavoidable. It becomes impossible for Nora to stay> Though leaving her children pains her, to stay for their sake would destroy her.

Ghosts, alongside Hedda Gabler and Peer Gynt was a most felicitous discovery for me. The drama whirls around the Alving family: the family-head recently deceased, an orphanage has been built and is to be named in his memory, the son suffers from dangerous seizures and so is come home where he falls in love with his nurse, Regina; his mother has deluded herself into believing the heroic mythology about her late husband, though she knows him to have been a cruel and unfaithful scoundrel and drunk. The play deals with two parallel issues: individual rights, parental rights, over life/death of a son, and the creeping of the past into the present. Ultimately Ghosts is haunted by the mortality and impotence of the good (Oswald) and the immortality of evil (Mr. Alving's reputation, legacy). The discovery of Regina's consanguinity with the Alving's, the most wretched of Mr. Alving's legacies, brings on Oswald's most severe seizure as yet. While Oswald is weak, loving, and honest, his presence in the play is always diminished beneath the shadow of his terrible father, who grows more and more terrible. It is the ghost of Mr. Alving which is unescapable, which is to say that moral transgressions outlive us, our sins become our legacies.

MRS. ALVING
I almost think we are all of us ghosts, Pastor Manders. It is not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that "walks
with us. It is all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we cannot shake them off. Whenever I take up a newspaper, I seem to see ghosts gliding between the lines. There must be ghosts all the country over, as thick as the sands of the sea. And then we are, on and all, so pitifully afraid of the light.

I have read somewhere that Hedda Gabler is considered by some to be the "female Hamlet" - a sort of strange claim, which doesn't seem to quite follow the texts. While both Hamlet and Hedda are tremendous imaginative capacity, and both powerful individual thinkers (and hero-villains of their respective plays), Hedda's case is one of neuroticism, not of genius. Hedda's hero-villainy is not simple revenge or Machiavellian ambition, nor even true madness. She doggedly pursues what it is that she wants, but what she wants is an aberration of normal morality, her means for achieving those odd ends are even more transgressive and highly manipulative: but they adhere clearly to her own subconscious logic. She is not mad, she is without reason, her reason is simply perverted. She is married to an Tesman, a man who bores her and offends her in his simplicity. She is the masculine figure to an unmanned husband, she is an expert horse rider, and a champion of her father's, rather than her husband's, name. When her old flame, Lovborg, returns, having achieved fame for his work in the same academic field as Tesman, she fears that he will threaten their financial security. Though he assures her that he is not interested in pursuing the professorship that Tesman has worked hard for, Hedda still manipulates him to go out drinking (he is a recovering alcoholic) with her husband and his friends. He does so, loses his manuscript for his "great sequel" to his previous work. Tesman discovers it, and Hedda, instead of returning it, convinces Lovborg to commit suicide (giving him her own gun), and then burns the manuscript. When her complicity in his suicide is discovered, she kills herself.

Hedda has a tremendous capacity for imagination, and is perhaps one of the great solipsists of drama, alongside her princely Danish friend. Like Hamlet, she is an aesthete; he view of the world is a drama in itself, and that drama is one which is proleptic to the play which we read as Hedda Gabler, until the two converge at her suicide. Her love for Lovborg is one which is artistic, beautiful, and his death in the brothel shatters her warmly amorous conception of him, shatters the illusion of him in her eyes, and reveals to her the very real world around her: the broken pieces left behind of her beautiful design. Like Hamlet, Hedda's design is perfect, but only as it adheres to her own internal (and flawed) logic, and therefore it is incompatible to the real world. Though ultimately her goals are achieved, the effects escape her, they are not as she planned, and her design has failed her.

The metonymic treatment of the Lisbon girls for some larger tapestry of childhood innocence or idealism seemed a bit too much for me, and Eugenides' reach for something like a dimmed-down Nabokovian effect in the vein of dark comedy and buoyant prose felt a little bit like a failure. Eugenides is a great prose writer, but I felt that at times his prose felt like it was trying to wear some other guy's clothes. As much as The Virgin Suicides is a eugolgy for childhood innocence, it too is a paean to nostalgia. Told from the third-person-plural in a tone which flirts with journalistic distance and lockerroom gossip, the original approach to narration is perhaps the best quality of Eugenides' novel.

My main problem with The Virgin Suicides is that it felt like it wasn't a success either as a plot-story, but also wasn't a deep character study. In fact, I felt that with the exception of a few cursory traits, the Lisbon girls were largely fungible for each other. They basically boiled down to Spice Girl categorization: Sporty sister, Smart sister, Slutty sister, Religious sister, etc. While many a novel has gotten away with this sort of characterization, they at least make up for it with a compelling plot. The Virgin Suicides's plot really needed that in depth characterization, though. With suicide there needs to be some psychological depth, and frankly I felt that Eugenides failed in that regard. It is hard to support a novel completely on prose styling. It can be done, and to be sure Eugenides tries to handle some large ideas in The Virgin Suicides: but his failure to successfully manage his own devices rather sullied the effect.

In the end we had the pieces of the puzzle, but no matter how we put them together, gaps remained, oddly shaped emptinesses mapped by what surrounded them, like countries we couldn't name.

As a novel, The Virgin Suicides is a fun read, it is a relatively quick read, but it does not have endurance. Eugenides novel has failed to stay with me, and besides perhaps its uniquely dark humor, even some of its larger messages seem lost to me now, or better handled by others. I will grant him the difficulty of crafting a high-school novel aimed at adults, which certainly this novel is a successful example of, however as a novel which stands out for its own merits, I think The Virgin Suicides falls somewhere in the middle. I liked it, I didn't love it. There were a great number of small successes, little victories and beautifully poignant passages, but there too were a great number of attempts at greatness which only just missed the bar, and I think that it is perhaps because Eugenides was aiming for the bars of someone else, rather than his own.

Calvino's Invisible Cities is more a chronicle of linked prose poetry than it is a novel. Marco Polo, the Scheherazadean narrator, tells Kublai Khan about the fifty-five (is it really only that many?) of impossibly imaginative cities which he has encountered along his travels. Whether cities of the dead, or continuous cities, or what-have-you, every city has some element of the paradoxical, or the impossible and irrational. This Borgesian labyrinth of falsity mixed with truth is gripping. And though each city is a lie, each city, too, holds a kernel of some deeper truth about life - and isn't that what literature is all about? Truth through falsity?

And our lives are expanded through falsities and half-truths and unknowables. Every person we meet, every thing we see, everything we hear, expands our consciousness and adds value to our lives. It's how we compile these sensory experiences that defines our lives, that makes a "heaven out of hell, or a hell out of heaven," so to speak. Perspective is the flavor of life and no two people have the same tastes. But can we have more tastes than one? I suspect a good novelist can taste life through a number of different perspectives than their own, which makes fiction so appealing to us, every book a new flavor, a new perspective: getting closer to that singular truth.

For Marco Polo, the singular truth at the heart of Invisible Cities is the one city which he really knows, which he really loves, which to him is everything: Venice. At one and the same time, he seems to know everything about Venice, yet seems also to be doggedly search for the heart of it; has it firmly in his grasp, yet is ceaselessly losing it:

“Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it, or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

Perhaps he is losing it piece by piece because city by imaginary city he is uncovering it. The mystery which remained for him in Venice, which he hoped to preserve, he loses little by little in getting at the truth of the illusory metropolises of his mind. When you escape into a good book, the world falls away from you, you are transported, but when you return the world is not quite the way it was before: there is a different color to the sunlight, a different touch to your bedsheets, a different feel of the wind at your back on a hot summer day. Something is added to your appreciation of the world you live in: but maybe not - maybe it is that something is taken away, some barrier torn down, some dust wiped away, which makes your vision clearer.

Mysteries are so hard to review - I mean, what's the by what metric do you gauge them? Surprise? Overall dramatic tension? Writing Style? I'm not even sure myself, but I really liked Wilkie Collins' The Moonstone, it had a very different mode than the classical detective tale à la Agatha Christie et. al. In fact, it's not much of a detective tale at all. There's a detective, rather briefly, but he retires and gives the case up to pamper his rose garden.

There's a tangible appreciation for art and craft in this novel, which I want to touch on briefly. Betteredge has a profound adoration of the novel Robinson Crusoe and uses it as an ersatz Bible: a literal apotheosis of Literature. This is, afterall, a very literary mystery novel, one which has post-modern tricks and unreliable narrators and artifact-as-narrative component, etc. Betteredge's reverance for Defoe operates to subordinate the role of religion but not to destroy it - religious destruction brings one's own demise, as in the case of the stolen gemstone from the Hindu temple. Another instance is Sergeant Cuff, and his curious affection for roses: an affection which I took as a sort of surrogate for the novelist's love of literature:

I began my life among them in my father's nursery garden, and I shall end my life among them, if I can. Yes. One of these days (please God) I shall retire from catching thieves, and try my hand at growing roses.

Like Cuff's relationships with roses, a novelist, or any artist, begins life among his art, begins life as an admirer of art, of books, of paintings, of music, and in his age that appreciation boils inside him or her as an artist impulse. Cuff is torn between the art of mystery and the art of beauty, and that is the same tension which pervades the novel overall. While the story is clearly a mystery, its form defies the tradition of genre fiction (in the sense that one considers "genre fiction" to be a simplistic narrative, mortgaging style to buttress plot). The story is broken down into a series of first-hand accounts, all unreliable, all contradicting each other, but ultimately leading to the thief by a thin strand of truth.

I'm a sucker for unreliable narrators. They unlock the imagination, and make you question "is that what really happened?" and really we are all unreliable narrators. Who doesn't embellish their anecdotes for dramatic or humorous effect? It is likely universally done, but we hardly hold it against anyone. Unreliable narrators in fiction are so interesting because we get to be the detectives ourselves. While The Moonstone is a crime story, a detective story, the real mystery is the particular motives of our many narrators: why do they tell us what they do? what do they conceal, and why? What is their motive, what do they hope to gain (or not lose)? In my youth I was very much attracted to mystery novels, and couldn't remember half the titles or authors if I wracked my brain for weeks. My mother is a voracious reader of the mass-market mystery paperback: Cromwell, Patterson, Higgins Clark, etc. We have about seven packed bookshelves of these mysteries, which she reads and re-reads (the benefits of aging and fading memory, I suppose: re-reading mysteries!) - we also have a few bookshelves of my dad's German chemistry books, some business theory books, a handfull of classic paperbacks (1944 edition of Wuthering Heights, two copies of The Odyssey (Fitzgerald, Fagles), a collection of D.H. Lawrence's Short Stories, two copies of Moby-Dick (why?), etc.), and my abandoned bookshelf in my abandoned childhood room with paperbacks of Ayn Rand, some school books on writing and on finance, and some beloved comic books. Reading is a passion, and those with the passion must have some love for mystery, I think.

What makes us read on? I suspect it is some mystery, though I would not say it is suspense, which is a sort of specialized mystery. Sure, the mysteries in Christie or in my mother's beloved collection are very much in the foreground, they are murders or thefts, kidnappings or conspiracies: mysteries in the very classical sense. But I believe every book worth reading is a mystery at heart, if the reader is a curious and engaged participant in literature. From "Who is John Galt?" to "Who is Leopold Bloom?" - we are constantly confronted with the mystery of character, of motivation, of desire. And deeper than that, there are larger questions confronted by literature, questions which diminish characters to puppets on the stage: Death - life - love - hate, what do these concepts mean to us? what do we believe about them? You cannot touch love, you cannot look at it under a microscope, and to examine it in our own lives is to make us the unreliable yarn-spinners of our own narratives. Books, literature, are the best microscopes we have for life's manifold mysteries. Like in The Moonstone, every book is the unreliable narration of life's eternal enigmas, full of smokescreens and lies, mistakes in memory, but ultimately the compounding of perspectives begins to reveal to the reader something with a shimmer of truth beneath the earth of evasion.

The accumulation of consecutive rooms in his memory now resembled those displays of grouped elbow chairs on show, and beds, and lamps, and inglebooks which, ignoring all space-time distinctions, commingle in the soft light of a furniture store beyond which it snows, and the dusk deepens, and nobody really loves anybody.

Poor Professor Timofey Pnin! He just can't catch a break! I really enjoyed reading Pnin, as I enjoy reading just about everything by V. Nabokov, but I feel an inadequacy in reviewing his work, because it feels so reluctant to be reviewed. On the surface, the story is a simple sort of Russian, Saul-Bellovian mid-life crisis; on a character level, Pnin is a sort of lost flotilla at sea, and no one wants him, not his colleagues nor his expatriot friends nor his ex-wife. But in typical Nabokovian fashion all that sympathy is flipped upon it's head when we discover that the narrator is someone from Pnin's past, someone with a bitterness or disdain for the pathetic Pnin, with his bald head, stocky build, and suffocating misfortune. How much of Pnin can we believe?

I feel strange sometimes reading mid-life crises novels. I feel a sort of detachment because I am only half way to mid-life myself, and I think when I turn the last page "I need to read this again with another 20 years of perspective." But Pnin is a different animal entirely, sure I will read it again when I'm 40, but I'll likely read it again in a year or two anyway, because it is bliss. Pnin, though middle aged, is almost childlike: physically he strikes no imposing figure, emotionally he is quite immature and inexperienced in the areas of love, friendship, etc., and his clumsiness is irresistibly sympathetic and redolent of playground follies. I don't see myself in 20 years as a Pnin, but rather I see my Pnin-ness 10-15 years back! But Pnin's childlike-ness is not accompanied by a childish-ness, we see in Pnin a cohabitation of youthful esprit and gaucherie, but a solemnity and remorse of agedness:

Pnin had taught himself...never to remember Mira Belochkin - not because...the evocation of a youthful love affair, banal and brief, threatened his peace of mind...but because, if one were quite sincere with oneself, no conscience, and hence no consciousness, could be expected to subsist in a world where such things as Mira's death were possible. One had to forget - because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one's lips in the dusk of the past.

I apologize for the extensive quotation, but it is observed here in this remembrance of Mira both his childlike solipsism and also his age-wrought sensitivity. He has taught himself to ignore reality, to ignore what has happened to him, to live outside the gates of truth in the chaos of fleeting bliss, evading reality's magnetism. This solipsism, this evasion of all which contradicts one's sangfroid and contentment, is something so puerile, so immature, that the reader feels a sympathy and also a condemnation on Pnin. At once it seems that he blocks out Mira's death because his love for her is so strong, but then he reminds us that it was only a brief affair. It is not Mira's death which perturbs Pnin, but death in general. It's not necessarily a fear of his own death creeping towards him, but an aversion to the existence of death. But these concerns over death, Mira's death, are parleyed with such a knowing solemnity, one which speaks from a life lived, and a life not quite buried in the past, but which reaches into the present, which elucidates the present even if involuntarily.

Memory, life-lived and life-past, are very central to this novel of Nabokov's, as with many of his other novels; though the past is cosseted with a softer, if not more serious, touch than, say, Pale Fire, where past-life is mixed with a question of delusion, or Lolita where childhood experience is held up as a funhouse mirror excuse for perversion. In Pnin the past is a solemn, though still humorous, thing. And the beautiful writing radiates with both festivity and ceremony at alternating turns: humor and tragedy commingled.

But that ceremony is reversed, nothing can be taken seriously because the man telling us about Pnin, is perhaps the least qualified to do so. He is the man who replaces him at school, he is the man who replaces him in his wife's affections, he is the man who displaces him, who drives him away. He is the sinister schemer behind Pnin's story, trapping him in at every labyrinthine turn, chasing him off in the direction he pleases. He is a shadowy figure, whispering his modus operandi: "Some people-and I am one of them-hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam," as he ensures that our (and his own) schadenfreudig appetites are appeased.

Playful Pnin, pathetic Pnin, persnickety Pnin, paunchy Pnin, Pallid Pnin and the Summer Sunburn, philosophic Pnin, philological Pnin, Pnin the picayune, and plenary Pnin and all the panoply of Pnins in the masquerade of tragicomedic Pnin. Yes, Pnin is both sentimental ceremony and Bacchic festival of post-modernist games, and it's one I recommend to anyone who has a few hours to devote to logophilic frolicking, tragi-parodic gameplay, and the alliterative altercations between life and logos.

Like the previous four volumes, both the Captive and the Fugitive are a delight. The Fugitive much more so than the Captive, in my opinion.

The Captive opens with Albertine moving into Marcel's Parisian home. His parents are conveniently absent. There's a lot to love about this volume, and I especially loved the scene when M. and Albertine are passing through the streets with all the sounds of vendors in the air - the way Proust brings to life that atmosphere really impressed me, and I felt very much in that moment to be in that street as well. Much of the fifth volume is M.'s obsessive jealousy for Albertine. Like, he pretty much is convinced she's a lesbian, and he just constantly backs himself into an "is she? isn't she?" corner over and over, which became cloying after a while.

Finally in the Fugitive, Albertine is put permanently to rest for the real world, and we see the slow but eventual stages of grief and oblivion in M. - which was very, very well done. We also hear back from poor M. de Charlus who is pretty heartbroken about how Morel called him a dirty old man for ruining his sweet sixteen (or something like that).

I think this volume may be the most laugh-out-loud funny installment of Proust's masterpiece yet.

If I had to summarize this volume, it would be that you find out that EVERYONE IS GAY. Well, pretty much everyone. The first half is about M. de Charlus, who is hilarious, and his affairs with Jupien and other men, but more interestingly how he postures himself to try to hide his "secret" which more-or-less everyone suspects. For the second half, M. returns to Balbec with Albertine, and he becomes obsessively jealous of her, and suspects her of both hetero- and homosexual infidelities. The Verdurins come back, having last seen them in 'Swann in Love' - and also Mme. de Cambremer (nee Legrandin) returns and respectively represent the "nouveau riche" salons and the low-importance old families. Both of them are very petty, and the cattiness of this volume is hysterical.

Some highlights:

M. de Charlus calling Mme. Saint-Euverte's garden party a cesspool in front of her. When M. ask him if he is going, he basically responds "Are you asking if I have diarrhea? I can only imagine that people with diarrhea would go there - it smells that way."

Mme. Verdurin, upon finding out that M. is going to visit the Cambremers at Feterne: "Oh, do you like rats? Then you should go there immediately, the place is infested"

I'm finding it's really hard to rank the volumes of Proust - they all build on each other and have a sort of theme of their own. I think Swann's Way and Guermantes' Way are a bit stronger than this volume, but all are so inter-related and codependent, you would miss out on so much by reading only a few volumes! I'm really excited to move on the The Capitve and the Fugitive, but I'm afraid my first immersion in Proust's dreamworld is coming to a close! Who would have thought 4,000 pages would fly by so fast?!

Illusions! Lost ones! Where are they? Joking about it now, 'lost illusions' is a really sad thought, you can never get them back! The notion of illusion in fiction is something really interesting to me, and I think I dwell on it quite a bit in my reviews either consciously or unconsciously. I mean, is there anyone really without illusions? I hope not, it seems like an awfully sad life to live without illusions. Whenever I think of illusionment or disillusionment, my mind always floats away to Wallace Steven's poem "Disillusionment at Ten o'Clock." The poem mourns the loss of illusion, or imagination, of the modern world, as a result of the rise of routine and superficiality. He mourns:

The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
...People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.

The world, to Stevens, has become unimaginative, "haunted" by ghosts without imagination of creativity. People don't have imagination to dream of silly things, they are burdened by the dullness of reality, the focus on the real value of things, appearances. Childhood dreams of baboons and periwinkles, gaudy playfulness and uniqueness of dress are forgone for the seriousness of the world, a deliberate but deadening disillusionment.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches tigers
In red weather.Catching tigers in red weather - what a dream, what an illusion and imagination, though the only one enjoying it is a drunk sailor.

Lucien Chardon is the drunk sailor of Balzac's Lost Illusions and offers the counterargument to Steven's cry for the imagination. Like Macbeth, Lucien's imagination is proleptic, always anticipatory of his greatness and his fame, and so he does not see the precarious path he walks on in the pursuit of those dreams. Within the dream of his success, he mortgages reality, he mortgages all he has and all he imagines he will have in order to reach his goal: Not listening this time to the voice, he put his twelve hundred francs on the black and lost. He then felt within him that delicious sensation which succeeds the dreadful agitations of gamblers when, having nothing more to lose, they leave the flaming palace of their spasmodic dream.Lucien moves constantly from one oneiric palace-in-the-sky to the next, burning each to the ground, but shuffling quickly cloud-to-cloud to always keep himself afloat. But the real tragedy, and this book really approaches tragedy, is that Lucien's imagination sacrifices everyone whom he loves (David, his sister, his mother, Coralie), but never himself. Lucien seems impervious to his fall. And he does fall, and his name is the appropriate echo of the fallen angel Lucifer, for whom he is emblematic.

Lucien is charismatic, he is naive, he knows himself to be a good poet but his illusions which shroud the reality of Paris life make his publishing success an impossibility. Throughout Balzac's Paris are heavy social commentaries on the print business for literature and poetry, a field with which he clearly had some familiarity. If Lucien is the fallen Lucifer, Literature and Art are God, but Journalists are the devils of Hell, which destroy art for sport. Lucien, more like Milton's Satan than the Bible's, is morally vague, he is a shadow of his Biblical predecessor, a parody of him even. In trying to good, Lucien invariable does bad. Like Macbeth, his crimes beget crimes, he makes matters worse, he is caught in the maelstrom of malefactions:"It is written," cried Madame Chardon, "that my poor son is fated to do evil, as he said he was, even in doing good."While it seems easy to say 'Lucien's heart is in the right place' it would be to over value his morality. Lucien is a misguided Machiavellian. He is a Machiavellian in spirit, but only in his imagination is he capable of doing the means which would justify his ends; for Lucian is really very timid, clever and maybe talented but too timid to stick to one dogma or path to success.

Lucien's illusions are literally invested in an identity: Lucien de Rubempré, an illustrious name which he adopts without having truly the right to bear it (though is related to the Rubempré line through his mother). It is this identity, this illusion, which is bold, which is brilliant, which is famous and beloved, and like a caterpillar turning to a painted butterfly, he hopes to shed his Chardon skin and leave his mother and sister and David behind him in Angoulême ('It is better to serve in Paris than rule in Angoulême!' I can almost hear him say). But in his attempt to transform himself he loses himself, he tries to jump over the gestation-chrysalidic phase, and in doing so cuts himself from all supports, headed for a free-fall which financially destroys David Sechard and his wife, Lucien's sister.

The first section of Lost Illusions is entitled "The Two Poets" - which are Lucien and David. While Lucien represents a "true" poet in the definitive sense, David is a poet of science, in that he labors in his art to discover the truth. While the story of Lucien's fall is morbidly fascinating, and evokes pity and condemnation, the tragedy of David is heartbreaking and sympathetic. Ruined by his friend and brother-in-law, David starves as he works to revolutionize the printing process, and create a new, cheap stock of paper. David is a good man, a truly good man and loving husband, a virtuous man and a generous man. Son to a penny-pinching mogul who stole his wife's inheritance from his own son, David's story is an tenuously uplifting story of the virtuous struggle, which parallels Lucien's struggle to fame and downward race to the ethical bottom.

Lucien is never fully removed of his illusions, even in the end, despite his regret for the fate which befalls David, a new dream quickly replaces the one that has died and fallen away. What can can be said of Lucien's imagination is that it is phoenix-like in its endurance. So why is it called Lost Illusions? I think to Steven's poem again, disillusionment in routine, in the middling repetition of the bourgeois. Despite his success in invention, David never financially enjoys his success, but rather sells his enterprise to feed his family. His struggle has unchained him from the illusion. We feel his inventions are done, he is "happy" - his ending is a happy one, but a reservedly happy one. We want David to succeed, to achieve the greatness which he deserves and which Lucien seeks. But he doesn't get that, he gets a complaisance, he gets by, and he and Eve are OK with that. He doesn't foster the illusion of success or of fame, nor of wealth nor ambition of any kind. His house is haunted by white night-gowns, none of them are "strange with socks of lace and beaded scintures." He will live happily, we believe that, but he will live only a half-life, and that wounds us.

It always amazes me how prudish our world used to be. And Europe no less! Walk into any convenience store or newsstand in Berlin and the place is plastered with celebrities' tits on the front covers of every daily rag-mag: "Duchess of Cambridge Royal Knockers!" -- "Mme Bloom in her Bloomers!" -- "Ms. Fizziwits's tits!" etc. etc. Flashback fifty years and they're all shrieking over a D.H. Lawrence book saying their Hail Marys in the libraries. It's amazing the world we live in, how very quickly it changes and how quickly it has changed. It's hard for me to even imagine Lady Chatterley's Lover as a smutty novel, and anyway the sex is quite bad; to imagine this being shuffled under tables at Tupperware parties and read sub rosa seems to me ridiculous, I can't even imagine how Faulk's Birdsong would be receive: now that had some thinly veiled sexual metaphors! (I cringe whenever I read "his member" or "her flesh" - really folks? not any better, just say penis/vagina for chrissakes!) But for all the barechested beachers tanning their tits in the sun, I suppose this book has it's merits, maybe not as smut, but as a beautiful mix of New World ugliness and Old World romanticism.

Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles. We’ve got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen.

Lawrence is so pained by industrialism, by change, and his disgust with his changed world is very clear in the novel. It seems that more than anything, Lady Chatterley's Lover is an attempt to live, to write, in a sky-fallen world: to reconcile the Old World aestetics with the New World horror, ugliness, and smog. Connie is naive, she has romantic notions of how life and love should be, but she is married to a man who is coldly academic, and completely impotent in fulfilling her sexual needs. Clifford, paralyzed from the waist down is a sort of representation of the Old World, he is pure in his academic endeavors, he is a bit of a snob, hosting little philosophical parties with his friends where they discuss Proust and society, metaphysics and human liberties, but the War has made the world literally a challenge for him. The New World is not one he can appreciate, not one he can walk around in or take in. Connie on the other hand is somewhat outside of time, she is younger than Clifford and so is adapted to the ugliness and lost-innocence of the world around her, but her illusions are of the previous era. She is torn between the old-time conventions which hold her responsible to her husband and her new-born sexual freedom which she finds kindled in Mellors, the groundskeeper.

Though the story can be a bit dull, and there is a noticable tension between the idyllic prose and the intermittent polemics about industrialization, the characterization of Connie and the beauty of Lawrence's writing are reason enough to read Lady Chatterley's Lover. Connie, while maybe in imperfect portrayal of a proto-feminist woman, is a complex portrayal of a person: someone with a real history, real insecurities and worries and conflicted ideas and premises, experiences which clash with her learnings, real problems and a real confusion of her future. She is not some one you are likely to like, nor some one you may be likely to sympathize with, but you will be able to understand her. In the trifecta of famous infidels (the present novel, Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, and Flaubert's Madame Bovary), Lawrence's novel is the weakest portrayal of the burdens, the jealousies, the conflictions and worries of marital transgressions: but these are not the primary concerns for Lawrence, nor the primary themes of the novel. Lady Chatterley's Lover is not primarily a romance novel, but a society novel. It is a championing clarion of the old days, the days of country estates and castle grounds, of kings and queens, and fields of tussocked grass and wildflowers, of dukedoms and princedoms, and love-at-first-sight, and innocence and purity. It is the elegy of time gone by, and the wary first step into a new era. And anyway, Fifty Shades of Grey has nothing on this tralatitious sexual imagery:

Then as he began to move, in the sudden helpless orgasm, there awoke in her new strange thrills rippling inside her. Rippling, rippling, rippling, like a flapping overlapping of soft flames, soft as feathers, running to points of brilliance, exquisite and melting her all molten inside. It was like bells rippling up and up to a culmination. She lay unconscious of the wild little cries she uttered at the last.

Saucy.

In prose-poesy, Nabokov is sui generis, part of the movement to reinvent the language of the novel along with other modernist stylists: Joyce, Woolf, Proust. He is remembered as one of the greatest novelists of the twentieth century, and rightfully so for his creative re-conceptualizing of the novel's form and intent in his books Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada et. al. But for all his poetic prose, he is not remembered for his poetry. This isn't especially surprising, though maybe a bit undeserved. Poetry is a realm wherein meaning is sovereign; Nabokov is resistant to meaning.

In Nabokov's Selected Poems, we find not the brimming emotion of Plath, nor the surfeit meaning of Eliot or Stevens, nor the lofty Romanticism of Keats, Byron, Shelly; Nabokov is a painter of images, sequences, in words, and that is what is striking in this collection. Indubitably, the novel is Nabokov's most amenable medium, and it is one which he mastered, and in mastering it he largely gave up poetry, but in his poetry, especially in the English poems, there are the sprouts of genius which lubricated the authors mind when composing his novels.

Perhaps Nabokov is as famous for his exile as he is for his work, and throughout this collection, which is composed of both his Russian and his English poems, there is a tension between the world that he gave up and the world he has adopted. I think especially of the poem "Lines Written in Oregon, which begins: Esmeralda! Now we rest
Here, in the bewitched and blest
Mountain forests of the Westand goes on to claim (Europe, nonetheless, is over.) in a Nabokovian aside. There is a longing for the world which has been lost, but a reassurance that his new home, America, has a similar hidden beauty, and that his muse, Esmeralda, has come with him, making art possible though he is far from the beloved home which he recalls in Speak, Memory. Nabokov's poetry is a call for the imagination, a plea to view the world for, not necessarily its actual natural beauty, but the beauty which is made possible through your perception of it, though a childlike infinitude of the imagination. "Huddle roadsigns softly speak / Of Lake Merlin, Castle Creek" - the world is open to play, filled with an unreal beauty which Nabokov captures both in his poetry and in his novels. His novels, like his poetry, do not have the steely coldness of reality, but have a strangely warm veneer of almost fairy-tale quality, and that effervescence is the heart of his poetry in particular, the distillation of that whimsy into the meaty metrical skeleton of verse.

Nabokov's poems, unlike his novels, paint small ephemeral images rather than complete portraits of the psyche. He is a master of language, and this mastery is the seal of genius which is kissed upon his poems, though they lack the emotional fervor of other poets. They are lyrical, and metered, rhyming and ordered: like his novels, form and structure are supreme, and he greatly distances himself from the modernist free-verse poets, like Eliot. Also like his novels, the poems are peppered with puns and humor:

The room a dying poet took
at nightfall in a dead hotel
had both directories - the Book
of Heaven and the Book of Bell.

Though professionally he was an author, his passion for lepidoptery is a common thread throughout all of his fiction, this poetry collection included. And despite the fame which he garnered for Lolita his poetry shows a skepticism in the endurance of art:

Dark pictures, thrones, the stones that pilgrims kiss,
poems that take a thousand years to die
but ape the immortality of this
red label on a little butterfly.

Though there are things in life which we find so important: literary fame, power, art, it is the small advancements in our understanding of the world which become immortalized: only knowledge is a power which endures time, which "transcends its dust."

There's a sort of invisible thread from Madame Bovary to A Streetcar Named Desire, which in its route gets tied up in a hot whorehouse and wraps vainly around the cosmetics section of a pharmacy in the Southern United States before knotting at its terminus in New Orleans. I find it almost criminal how often people mistake Blanche duBois' whimsy for female frailty, for I think she is an almost unnaturally strong character; far, far moreso than her timid sister Stella. Perhaps it is because her foil, and diametric opposite, Stanley is so much so the iron casting of masculine strength and violence, that make Blanche seem to the reader/viewer so relatively weak. But the play is dominated by the very different strengths of these enormous characters: Stanley's violent force and Blanche's imaginative power.

Blanche, like her French-bourgeois predecessor, Emma Bovary, has an old fashioned ideal of romance which she cannot reconcile with her amorous experiences. Unlike Emma, Blanche has a much more sordid history, and as a result has become the battleground between her vain illusions and her knowing disillusionment. Having fallen in love with a gay boy in her youth, who subsequently died, she sought love in the many men of the local army camp, living a prostitute's kind of life, and even had an affair with a young male student, until she lost her family estate, Belle Reve (presumably from "belle rêve," french for "beautiful dream" - and appropriately a common name for sanitariums, along with belle vue) which she lost to debtors. Blanche's world: her home, her job, her love (or search therefor), everything, she loses, and flees her soiled reputation to live with her sister Stella and her husband Stanley Kowalski. She has a passionate imagination, which is her last remaining crutch of her fragile sanity:

“I don't want realism. I want magic! Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to people. I misrepresent things to them. I don't tell the truth, I tell what ought to be the truth. And it that's sinful, then let me be damned for it!”

Her desperation for romance, for magic, in her life is the only avenue remaining for her escape. That's what Streetcar Names Desire is about: escape. Escape from the shameful past, drinking to escape from the dully painful present, and escape from the violent future. Blanche eventually retreats fully into her own self-delusions of romantic escape when her past creeps unexpectedly into the present.

The story of Stella and Stanley is a time-creep of the opposite orientation: Stella is made aware of the dangers and disturbances of a future with Stanley by the mistreatment of her sister. Stella sheds her luxurious tears at the the curtain close as a rueful acknowledgement of the tension between reality and illusion. While she cannot fully believe Blanche's story, she cannot bring herself to fully deny it either. Her vision of Stanley, of her sister, and of her life spread out ahead of her are forever changed by what has transpired. Though she stays with Stanley, her relationship with him is tainted with something of mistrust and fear.

Illusion in the play, the main funhouse mirror, is the illusion of appearance. Everything has a surface and an interior, and there is a struggle, a contradiction, between the veneer of appearance and the truth of substance. Blanche becomes obsessed with her appearance, rather than reconciling herself with the maelstrom of emotion and fear which boils beneath the surface, she suffocates her own Self by the feint play of her made-up appearance. She has an imagination which approaches prolepsis in its improvisational fervor. She always has a lie, a fraud, a gloss-over for the truth which is black inside of her. She is fearful of the light, which not only shows her aging appearance, signs of aging she she cannot cover-up, but is also symbolic for the truths which are rising like slag to the surface, revealing the cold worn metal beneath. What she cannot escape is that the world does not have the magic which she seeks, the most powerful force around her is truth, and it is truth which she feels she needs to escape. The tension between truth and "magic" eventually destroys her psyche.

For Stanley, escape, illusion, is obtained through vice: drinking, gambling, domestic abuse and violence. His fears of incompetence and undeserving are evaded through his violent actions, which both evade questioning yet also show his hand. He is mirrored man to Blanche, and she the revealing pier-glass to him. Because they are so opposed, they reveal the truths in each other's characters. Stanley's violence is incompatible with Blanche's romantic visions of the world, particularly her vision of men. In Stanley she seems a savage character, almost like the stock ruffian of a Spanish romance, but one which is violent even to her, which is violent in its uncovering of her secrets: one which is deliberately cruel. This deliberate cruelty on the part of Stanley is something which Blanche finds "the only thing not forgivable" and the only thing which has the true power to shatter her war-worn illusions. For Stanley, Blanche represents the world which shares his wife, but which he fears has a stronger, atavistic claim on her. He can never offer Stella money or blissful security, he can never offer her culture. Blanche is the very manifestation of these ideals, and her romantic vision of the world is alluring to all around her, her imaginative power is a danger to Stanley's marriage, because it is a reminded to him and to Stella of the kind of life which they can never have with each other.

"They told me to take a street-car named Desire, and transfer to one called Cemeteries, and ride six blocks and get off at—Elysian Fields!"

Desire and death: the only ways to reach paradise!

Following his longest novelistic work, Ada, Nabokov gave us his smallest, Transparent Things: a miniature Fabergé egg of a novel, highly ornamental, highly sophisticated in design, but with an elegant simplicity. Within this ovoid coruscation of Nabokovian bravura and prosodic flourish, is a jeweled miniature of the master's oeuvre - a sort of encored farewell to literature, although he would go on to write Look at the Harlequins! and begin, but not finish, Laura. This novelette is a sort of pell-mell mélange of Nabokov's themes: time, love, madness, murder, style, and memory. The story is a deceptively simple one: a man, Hugh Person, recalls his three visits to Switzerland while he returns for his fourth and final visit: once as a young man with his father, then as a man on a job for a publisher, then with his wife. There is an enigmatic beauty to the way Nabokov discusses time: Perhaps if the future existed, concretely and individually, as something that could be discerned by a better brain, the past would not be so seductive: its demands would be balanced by those of the future.This is how we are introduced to the novel's main theme which is memory, or rather the seductive past. Why does the past so enchant us? Hugh's past is one mired by murder, death, a failed career and a marriage abbreviated by spousal murder. But it has an allure to Hugh, one that makes us shudder.

We love the past because it is transparent to us, which by this book's definition is to say that it has a known history. To Hugh, Switzerland has a personal history for him, it marks the coincidental milestones of his declination into madness, and ultimately cleanly quarters his life into Machiavel son, disillusioned salaryman, husband to the Swiss nymphet Armande, and ostensibly-remorseful widower-murderer. His troubled past is part of him, though, and it gives him comfort. The future "does not exist" for him, dually referring to his fatal funeral pyre and also because generally it is yet unwritten. some 'future' events may be linked to others, O.K., but all are chimeric, and every cause-and-effect sequence is always a hit-and-miss affair, even if the lunette has actually closed around your neck, and the cretinous crowd holds its breath.The past has a particular seductiveness to Nabokov: in the shadow puppet world of his fiction all is predetermined, all is set, all is past. The future, being unknown, being a realm where things can 'get away from him' are excluded. Nabokov's works are patterned, intricately interwoven and consistent throughout and show a master at work always revising and meticulously planning. Every story of his is in the past, predetermined, and that is what enables it the level of Art he achieves. Nabokov is a treasure to re-read, maybe even moreso than he is to read, because his novels have a playfully ominous omniscience. Observe in Lolita the many hints at the fates of our protagonists, most startlingly the playbook entry which is anything but randomly selected. The past in a land that is concurrent with the present, it lives upright in the now while the present is still in its nascence.

This is a novel to be read in one sitting. At a slim 105 pages, it is a concise pleasure, but I think it would make a poor introduction to Nabokov. Nabokov must be loved and appreciated before he can be really explored, and so I wholly recommend Lolita as an introduction, and then a re-read of Lolita for the love of it. From the nymphet disparu the world of Nabokov opens up itself, lending to cerebral pleasure unmatched by most authors. From the Boswellian jaunt of Pale Fire to the tragicomedy of pauvre Pnin, and the reality-chagrinned chess champion Luzhin, to this slim volume: a better end-point than embarkation.

While I was collecting my thoughts on The Age of Innocence, I decided to tip it up to a four-star, from the previous three-star rating I had given it. My original rating was more a feeling of the novel's not living up to The House of Mirth, which I still feel is the stronger novel, however the distance I have put between reading it and writing this review has given me a change of heart and let me look at it with a greater appreciation for what it is, rather than what it is not. Almost a year removed from reading Wharton's novel I am left still lingering on the epilogue, which may be the only epilogue which I have ever truly felt lived up to the rest of the novel, and was worthy of it's attachment thereto. That said, spoilers are likely to ensue, though the novel's appreciation is not derived from surprise but rather from the accumulation of emotional power throughout the novel, culminating in an emotional release in the epilogue - continue at your own risk.

As humans, as readers, we have a morbid fascination with impossible romance, with illicit romance. We love to read Anna Karenina because we love Anna not despite her infidelity, but because of it, we are fascinated by her struggle. Conversely, the love, in the same novel, between Kitty and Levin, endears us, but does not fascinate us in the same way. We feel a bit awkward peering in on Levin and Kitty, their love is too sacred to spy on, too private, but we see in Anna's and Vronsky's transgression a scandal which, though of private concern between the two lovers and Anna's husband, we feel entitles us to observe. While Levin is as much in love with Kitty as Anna is with Vronsky, it is the latter which dazzles our imagination because it is forbidden. In The Age of Innocence, we are presented with a doubly forbidden fruit in the dazzling vision of the Countess Olenska. She is beautiful, she is intelligent and sophisticated, but she is bruised in the eyes of society - she is divorced and suspected of an affair with her secretary. Newland Archer is in love with Ellen Olenska, despite her reputation, and she excites in him what he perceives as his truest potential for happiness. But this match is doubly damned, first by society's condemnation of Ms. Olenska, second because Archer is engaged to be married to May Welland, Ellen's cousin. This love is stifled on two levels: society's condemnation on divorce and Ellen's perceived transgressions, but also Archer's own complicity with that line of morality. He is not a man against society, but rather a man within it.

Archer is quick to defend Ellen's rights as a woman, and claim them insufficient, inequitable, and unfair: "Women ought to be free - as free as we are," and I always imagine these lines are chanted in feminist cycles around a shrine to Wharton and a burning effigy emblematic of male hegemony, but that is to misread the text as a whole. Edith Wharton had few female friends, and lived in such a privilege that she was largely distanced from the genuine struggle of her women contemporaries. Though she was hardly unaware of the plight and double-standard of women, she seems distanced from it emotionally, and her writing is critical of society at large rather than intended to be read as having any proto-feminist agenda. In many cases, the women of Wharton's novels are the far more malicious figures standing in the way of women's freedoms than are the men. However, back to the quotation, which in the novel is a poignantly ironic one, while Archer wishes Ellen was as "free as we are" he shows how little freedom he actually has. While certainly Ellen is restricted by society, she confronts it with poise, she is a strong woman. While she loves Archer, it is he who is powerless in his own eyes to marry her, not she. His love is made as impotent as her freedoms by the society in which he lives and of which he is a part. He alone has the power to cast off his engagement to May and to instead take up with Ellen, but he cannot bring himself to do so.His whole future seemed suddenly to be unrolled before him; and passing down its endless emptiness he saw the dwindling figure of a man to whom nothing was ever to happen. Compare this sentiment of Archer with the following sentiment of the comically tragic Mme. Emma Bovary: But, in her life, nothing was going to happen. Such was the will of God! The future was a dark corridor, and at the far end the door was bolted. Almost a plagiary of emotion! However, I feel we are stronger inclined to feel for Archer than we are to sympathize with Emma, and certainly Wharton is much more generous to Archer whose life is certainly happier, which isn't to mention longer, than Emma's. Which brings us the end of the hall, the epilogue. In the throes of romance and passion, Archer envisioned his defeated desire as a vacuous vista, an eternal emptiness; but what he actually gets is something which he never expected: fulfillment. His marriage to May, though he felt he did not want it at the time, turns out well - he is happily married and has children to whom he is a loving father. Many years have passed and he visits Paris with his son, where he discovers that Ellen Olenska is living. He refuses to go up to see her, but sits below her balcony past nightfall, watching the procession of shadows cross the lighted window:

Then he tried to see the persons already in the room—for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one—and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it.... He thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.
"It's more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

In this emotional release, Archer realizes what so many tragic characters cannot: the past is the past. Missed opportunities are never offered twice in the same fashion, they are always changed. Ellen is certainly changed, and he knows this. Unlike Jay Gatsby who refuses to see that his Daisy has changed since her youth, Newland Archer knows that the Ellen he loved, and still loves, is only alive in his mind, that just the reminder of her, the chance to relive their fireside chats, even only in the flicker of his memory, is more real, more really the Ellen he loves, than if he lived by her side the rest of their lives.

It is important to remember that Henry James's later works (his "major phase") are very much the roots of "modern literature" (whatever that means), and should be read in the same way as Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves and Mrs. Dalloway: which is to say: slowly savored. James himself was cognizant of this and admonished his readers to read only five pages a day (a challenge which I found impossible, but rather read in small-ish bits over each day). In Barthes's The Pleasure of the Text he advises (in reading "modern" texts as opposed to classical ones):

"Read slowly, read all of a novel of Zola, and the book will drop from your hands; read fast, in snatches, some modern text, and it becomes opaque, inaccessible to your pleasure: you want something to happen and nothing does... the interstice of bliss, occurs in the volume of languages, in the uttering, no tin the sequence of utterances: not to devour, to gobble, but to graze, to browse scrupulously, to rediscover--"

This is sound advise, suited perfectly to find pleasure in James's The Ambassadors - the master's, and my own, favorite of his works. There is a painstaking and almost painful subtlety to James's "major phase" (which is canonized in the present work, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl), a subtlety which was growing in power in his Portrait of a Lady but is in full force in Ambassadors. The sentences alone, little labyrinths, make the work difficult to read quickly, and foils any attempts to do so pleasurably.

The "Ambassador" is Lewis Lambert Strether, an American man from Woollett, a conventional but fictional Massachusetts town, where he is engaged to be married to the cold and absent figure, Mrs. Newsome. He is sent by Mrs. Newsome to Paris to retrieve her son, Chad, and recruit him to take charge of the family's mysterious manufacturing concern (the product is never mentioned outright, though it is alluded to as something insignificant but over which the Newsome's hold a monopoly). When Strether arrives in Paris he sees that Chad is happily engaged in a romantic relationship with an older woman, Mme. Vionnet.

The character of Strether is really the height of James's art. (An art which usually centers on the innocence/corruption of the female psyche, most famously Isabel Archer, Milly Theale, Kate Croy, Daisy Miller, Turn of the Screw's governess, etc.). In this work, James presents us, rather than a central heroine, a central man who is affected on all sides by a covey of women (this approach is foreshadowed in James's treatment of Merton Densher in Wings of the Dove) The three powerful women which both charm and control him are: Maria Gostrey, Marie de Vionnet, and Mrs. Newsome; Strether's nuanced relationships with these women constitute the web and drama of James's masterpiece.

Maria and Marie, two names very similar (derived from the Virgin Mary), play diametrically opposite roles for Strether, though he is enchanted by both women. To call Marie (Mme. de Vionnet) the story's "villain" is to misread the novel, and would be much too explicit for a work by James (she is the more nuanced, more subtle Mme. Merle, a la ). The "tension" of the novel, is the tension between those who "know" and those who do not "know" (namely Strether). Mme. de Vionnet is in the knowing camp, she deceives Strether and keeps him in the dark about the unvirtuous nature of her relationship with the young Chad. She is certainly in love with Chad, or with her situation, and is passionately at odds with his returning to America. But to paint her as a villain is too black a lacquer for her; she opposes Strether, but she does so with something like love for Chad.

Maria is Strether's confidant, and Strether's growing affection for her makes his ultimate return to Mrs. Newsome that much more poignant to the reader. She represents the life that Strether could still have, as opposed to the one which he has now with Mrs. Newsome, and even opposed to that which he had with his son and wife before the died. She represents a freer life, one which has elements of European freedom of spirit, and also American values (honesty, etc.). When reading The Ambassadors I can't help but sympathize accutely with Ms. Gostrey. She is the book's closest thing to a Jamesian heroine, and Strether represents as much a salvation to her as she does to him.

The cold and absent shadow of Mrs. Newsome is cast far over ever nook and crevice of the book. Though she is 3,000 miles away in Woollett, her presence is felt in every motion and futile rebellion of Strether abroad. While Mme. de Vionnet deceives Strether, it is Mrs. Newsome who controls him. She is haunting figure, and one cannot help but see her as Strether's gaoler, imprisoning what is naturally a vibrant optimism and fullness of life, to the state of servant. The whole of his life is given a thin veneer of meaning by his association with Mrs. Newsome, but to that point, his life has no meaning for himself:

His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world— the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from Woollett—ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether.

He values himself insofar as he is known for editting a small publication in Woollett - a post which he has not earned through merit, but by his amorous association with Mrs. Newsome. Furthermore, his errand for Mrs. Newsome to Europe has the salty taste of a business transaction, even moreso when she sends her daughter to check on his progress and efforts. Their relationship is so coldly economic, it is almost horrifying to imagine a man as potent and vibrant as Strether (as seen in his speech to Little Bilham) married to such a domineering woman, who treats Strether like an account to be settled rather than a fiance. Though the story is relayed exclusively from Strethers point of view, Mrs. Newsome is never referred to by her first name. The petit mort of Portrait of a Lady, wherein Isabel returns to Osmond, is often rallied against, but the Strether's return to Mrs. Newsome, to me, seems as horrible. We may hate Osmond and Mme. Merle for betraying Isabel's innocence, but she remains a strong figure; we must hate with equal, or increased, vigor Mrs. Newsome, who stifles the chance of happiness for Strether, which he is so expressly aware of, which he knows full well are within his grasp, which he urges upon Little Bilham, upon Chad.

Who would suspect that a book which can be basically boiled down to "good versus evil" or "modern take on the Biblical 'Genesis'" would be such a pleasure to read? Steinbeck's East of Eden is a family epic in the long tradition of family epics, with a Biblical seasoning. Like most family epics I have read, this one reads a bit unevenly. The first generation, which follows Adam Trask and his brother Charles, with a parallel story of Cathy Ames, reads a bit too much like allegory, albeit a captivating one. You catch on within the first few chapters, and have it drilled into you by the end, that all characters bearing a "C" given-name are slanted to evil, while the characters bearing "A" are slanted good. This duality is especially singular in the character of Cathy, who is a socio-pathic young woman, hellbent on revenge, and with a Machiavellian view of money which she feels is justified by her own miscarriage of justice in her youth.

To say that Cathy's portrayal is a malignant reading on Milton's Eve is to understate her evil disposition, and also to do a disservice to Milton's Eve. Cathy (a common irony in literature, to name wicked characters "Catherine" which etymologically means "pure") is a creation wholly unique in literature, having no clear ancestors or true successors, and she is the morbid interest which carries the reader through both generations, and survives the reader's attention past fire-side Bible study episodes. Though Adam's odyssey through war and family struggle, from New England to California's Salinas Valley, is gripping and interesting, Cathy steals the show in both generations: first from her husband and then from her sons. And the question which the reader must grapple with is "what is the root of all evil?" and we see various doses of evil throughout most of the characters, which drives at one central cause: need for love. Though in the case of Cathy, it seems that Steinbeck offers a second cause, which is innate perversion to love. But though Cathy is the prime actor, she is a character that must be read, and not explained in a review such as this.

The search for someone to love is the parallel search of the desire to be loved. Unrequited love cannot fulfill us, it wounds us, it wounds our vanity and our morality, it heaves wrath and envy upon us, invokes our prideful demons. Unloved we become our own worst enemies, we smash up what we have as a meaningless tribute to what we can never have. Observe in King Lear, who exiles his only devoted daughter, Cordelia, because she cannot love him to the extent which he demands to be loved, to an extent which is impossible. What evils befall Lear after her exile? They are many, and they are terrible to him and they undo him; for his very evil is to hold the duplicitous Goneril and Reagan above the pure Cordelia, to pass the worthy over for the unworthy. We hate to be passed over, as Satan was passed over for Messiah, as Iago was passed over for Cassio: as Charles is passed over for Adam, and Caleb is passed over for Aron. Cordelia's unwarranted devotion to her father vouchsafes her from the evil which grips the others I have mentioned, but Cordelia is a force which is almost infinitely good and understanding, just as Lear is infinitely demanding.

As the eldest of three children, I know the feeling of seeming on the short end of parental favoritism. It is incredibly painful to work hard for something, for the soul purpose of praise, and for your accomplishments to be met with a pale ghost of what your impossible expectations held as your entitlement, or worse to be met with disapproval, as is Caleb's gift to his father of hard-earned (though questionably-got) money: I would have been so happy if you could have given me – well, what your brother has – pride in the thing he's doing, gladness in his progress. Money, even clean money, doesn't stack up with that. Adam and Aron are like and like, perfect kin of each other: blindly good, but naive to their own detriment; Caleb, being a true genetic mix of the polar inclinations towards pure good and evil, is the far more sympathetic, the far more human. While Adam represents the pure light of generosity, though he is often misguided in practical matters, and Cathy is the complete shadow, the powerful counter-balance to Adam's goodness and piety, Caleb is the interceding penumbra: misguided and imperfect.

There is much talk of timshel, which means "thou mayest" and is the word in the Bible which is the focus of many of Lee's and Adam's discussions, and essentially distills to free-will and human responsibility. Without free-will, man can neither be good nor evil, only destined so. And our free-will is what makes us human, what evokes our sympathy and our disdain. The people we are and the people we meet: we are the culmination of our choices, balanced upon the platform of our birth-station. Morally, though, we are all equal at birth (I believe), and no one is innately dispossessed of their freedom of choice, the responsibility of their own ethics and morality. While I am not a religious man, I think that the ten commandments had a pretty good point on some of the basics: thou shalt not murder, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not listen to Nickelback, etc. - not everything was there, but the essentials or the foreshadowing of essentials were basically outlined. I believe that any true code of moral conduct has to come from within, though, one can't blindly follow a dogma they don't understand or believe in, it's unsustainable and tenuous. It is our paths in life which define our moral codes, our experiences and our reactions and inward analyses of those experiences which station us differently in the catechisms of life.

In Henry James, we rarely if ever have a villain - a real, horrible blackguard character for whom we feel morally adequate enough to pass severe judgment. There are characters with evil intentions, who do evil thing: who lie and undermine the hero or heroine, Mme. Merle and Gilbert Osmond, of The Portrait of a Lady, may be among the most "evil" duos in the James canon, if only for the tenderness we feel toward the passionate Isabel, who they snare. What is perplexing in James, which frustrates us, is that we are nearly always on the precipice of love and hate for non-protagonist characters, there is an ambiguous moral haze which pervades James's works, and steals away our ability to classify, to count the troops of good and evil. Moral ambiguity may be at its consummate peak in The Wings of the Dove, a book populated by characters which elicit, in turnstile fashion, our censure and sympathy, which are condemned only to be redeemed, and condemned again. With the exception of the fatally ill, angelic, Milly Theale, (and perhaps her duena Susan Shepherd), whom we may only hold her naivete against, no character remains unmarred by human foible - and that is the transcendent beauty of The Wings of the Dove.

Set in the mannered and deeply class-divided Victorian England, the story follows Kate Croy and her lover, Merton Densher: separated by class but passionately in love and still heatedly in lust. Despite Densher's willingness to break with convention and marry the higher-class, though essentially orphaned, Kate, if he did so she would be disinherited by her wealthy aunt-dowager, Maud. When an enigmatic young American woman, Milly, arrives on the scene, connected to Maud through her travel companion Susan, it is discovered that she is the "wealthiest orphan in America" - and also that she is fatally sick. These dual revelations begin the moral descent of many of the money-lusty characters including Lord Mark, a fading noble, and our own Kate Croy. Kate's quick-witted devices which she places upon Milly's money are startling, and reveal her perniciously creative mind. Her gift of morbid certitude is almost reminiscent of Lady Macbeth (and at times, Macbeth himself) in its terrible improvisational tact, and malignant boldness which surpasses conventional expectations of her 'weaker sex'. She devises a plan which sets her secret fiancé to fool the invalid into loving him, and then leaving him her money when she soon passes. Kate's Janus-faced friendship with Milly is chilling, and veiled. While she seems to hold some genuine affection for Milly at the onset of their friendship, it cools to a remote admiration for her unnatural goodness, and is corrupted by Milly's money to a hauntingly composed opportunism - as Kate waits for Milly to die.

Perhap's the book's greatest strength is the transition of perspectives between the three main characters: Kate, Milly, and Merton. In addition to a masterful play of dramatic ironies, in which there is ever the floating question-mark of "who knows what? who knows what who else knows?" - an infinitely recursive self-questioning and hyper-sensitivity to the awareness of others, it also deepens our understandings of all the characters, and confronts our prejudices against them. Merton Densher remains for me one of the most intriguing and frustrating characters in the Jamesian universe. Like his counterpart, Kate, he too hearkens us to Shakespeare's Macbeth in his initial moral reticence, rash complicity, and ultimately trapped feeling of remorse for his transgressions against the innocent and doting Milly. Unlike Macbeth (though undeserving of a comparison to Hamlet), his great flaw is not haste but hesitation: He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few of them--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not, as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition in other words of freedom--hitherto known.What Densher lacks is Macbeth's horrible boldness to follow through, he only half commits and so is at one time less of a villain than Macbeth, but as morally outrageous and self-emasculating. In a book which is overwhelmingly about the illusion of gender, Merton is the only significant male figure, while significantly lacking in conventional masculinity - a trait which is made up for in his stronger half, Kate. The almost epicene quality of Densher is perhaps partially a result of his consort, which is described as a "circle of petticoats." His seeming preference for female company, even platonically, appears to parallel his creator, and may perhaps indicate the ambiguity of a repressed sexual preference. Merton's over-reliance on consideration, and his moral hesitations bring in to question his love for Kate. Does he love her, or does he simply envy her stirring temerity? Left alone with Milly, he is drawn to her subtle bravery and unnatural kindness and generosity - something which he lacks in his life with Kate, but perhaps he is also drawn to her fragility. Milly is the only character who despite her moving strength in character, is reliant on the physical aid of others. Merton's perverted views of love leave the reader unsure of him. He seems to us hopelessly lost. Milly's death brings upon Merton a Jamesian epiphany: an epiphany which shakes his self-understanding and causes him to question his choices, but ultimately is insufficient to change his weak convictions. He is aware of the spoiled happiness he may look forward to married to Kate, he is left aware, not of what he has to gain through Kate, but what he has lost in losing Milly. The moral descent of Kate coincides with the moral ascension of Merton: though he passes up the full potential of his rise. The ending is perhaps one of the most moving I have read, with such a poignancy and fullness of emotion it is shocking: "Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."
"Oh--her memory!"
"Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn't be. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. Her memory's your love. You want no other."
He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."
"As we were?"
"As we were."
But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!"We are left with the specter of uncertainty - do they get married? We hope not, but we are not left with the knowing petit mort which we feel at the close of The Portrait of a Lady, the conclusion is not forgone, there is time to redeem what one has left of life. The novel what actually written after The Ambassadors, though publishing circumstances delayed the later book's publication, and the ending is reflective of the solemnity of "the life unlived" of Lambert Strether. It is the openness of the ending which sets it apart from some of James's other works. We are saddened to see the dissolution of love, but we question whether what Densher and Kate felt for each other was truly love at all. Kate's love for her father, which seems to transcend situation, is starkly juxtaposed to her love for Merton which seems so dependent on his situation. While Kate descends in our moral estimation of her, it seems that by the end of the novel she reaches her own epiphany, it seems she has learned love from Milly, a thing which before had eluded her. So we are left reservedly heartbroken at the end, for Kate, but also reservedly happy. The friendship of Milly ameliorates both Kate and Densher: she changes them irrevocably for the better. But she changes them completely: they are no longer the compatible couple they once were, the passions are realigned and their love for each other is a mnemenic shadow of their adoration of Milly's goodness - a goodness which they can never reach.