When I'm Between Books
Book Group Homework
By Marc Berlin
It's been awhile since I've been between books. Membership in two book groups has kept my eyes busy this past month.
For the group sponsored by the Maine Council for the Humanities, I read The Master by Colm Toibin and Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The Master is a fictionalized portrait of James which, though admiring, also portrays him as a repressed homosexual whose inability to either admit to or act upon his sexual impulses blights his emotional life and destroys those who seek to get close to him. David Lodge, in Author, Author takes a somewhat different view. He portrays James as writer whose devotion to his art is all-consuming, leaving no room or desire for intimate human relations. Lodge ultimately applauds James' single-minded, all-consuming devotion to his craft. I prefer Lodge's cooler assessment but both books are fascinating portraits of a unique individual. Reading, actually re-reading, Turn of the Screw reminded me of why James is a writer I wish I could like but find impossible to read. His word choice is an odd mixture of the mundane and obscure. The attempt to exactly describe an emotional state results in creating so many ambiguities that it's impossible to know a character's motivations. A strong plot would help, but James seems to feel that using “this happened then this happened” would be too easy. His books have ideas about plots, but I'm not sure they actually have plots. It's ironic that Henry's brother, William, created a philosophy based on the notion that action expresses thought, while Henry believed that it is our inner life that is all important.
My other book group assigned the book English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. This was a big book in word count (400 plus pages) and theme (the destruction by the English of the aboriginal population of Tasmania). Written from multiple viewpoints, the first two thirds of the book is often tedious but the last third is so rich in black humor and irony that, in recollection, the book gets better and better. Unlike a James novel where you wonder if anything actually happened, in Kneale's book so much seems to occur that you have to keep stepping back to put things in perspective. It's not a book I would have chosen to read, but now I'm glad I did, which reminds me of what book groups are all about: the broadening of one's reading habits, the recognition of perceptions very different from one's own and, of course, some very good meals.
By Marc Berlin
It's been awhile since I've been between books. Membership in two book groups has kept my eyes busy this past month.
For the group sponsored by the Maine Council for the Humanities, I read The Master by Colm Toibin and Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The Master is a fictionalized portrait of James which, though admiring, also portrays him as a repressed homosexual whose inability to either admit to or act upon his sexual impulses blights his emotional life and destroys those who seek to get close to him. David Lodge, in Author, Author takes a somewhat different view. He portrays James as writer whose devotion to his art is all-consuming, leaving no room or desire for intimate human relations. Lodge ultimately applauds James' single-minded, all-consuming devotion to his craft. I prefer Lodge's cooler assessment but both books are fascinating portraits of a unique individual. Reading, actually re-reading, Turn of the Screw reminded me of why James is a writer I wish I could like but find impossible to read. His word choice is an odd mixture of the mundane and obscure. The attempt to exactly describe an emotional state results in creating so many ambiguities that it's impossible to know a character's motivations. A strong plot would help, but James seems to feel that using “this happened then this happened” would be too easy. His books have ideas about plots, but I'm not sure they actually have plots. It's ironic that Henry's brother, William, created a philosophy based on the notion that action expresses thought, while Henry believed that it is our inner life that is all important.
My other book group assigned the book English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. This was a big book in word count (400 plus pages) and theme (the destruction by the English of the aboriginal population of Tasmania). Written from multiple viewpoints, the first two thirds of the book is often tedious but the last third is so rich in black humor and irony that, in recollection, the book gets better and better. Unlike a James novel where you wonder if anything actually happened, in Kneale's book so much seems to occur that you have to keep stepping back to put things in perspective. It's not a book I would have chosen to read, but now I'm glad I did, which reminds me of what book groups are all about: the broadening of one's reading habits, the recognition of perceptions very different from one's own and, of course, some very good meals.
posted by BookMarc's at 1:38 PM
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