A Second Look (3)

To make a long story short, based on an earlier blog about book clubs, my book club decided to read Emily's Quest by L.M. Montgomery. Now, although I have always been a major fan of the Anne of Green Gables series, I have never read the Emily books. Since Emily's Quest is the third book in the series, I decided to take this opportunity to read the first two Emily books as well. Boy, was it ever an eye opener. Now I want to re-read all the Anne books to see if my impressions of those will be different as well.

I've read the first two Emily books so far, and I am finding them almost unbearably sad. As I'm reading them now, I keep wondering how much of herself L.M. Montgomery put into them. Emily's story is painful to me now. Her family seems so unloving and non-understanding. I find it so hard to empathize with Aunt Elizabeth. I get indignant just reading about her. How dare she read Emily's letters to her father? How dare she open the mail that is sent to Emily? How dare she decree that Emily can't go to high school unless she gives up writing? These things seem so unfair. I just want to reach through the pages and shake her. And don't even get me started on Emily's other aunts and uncles. They are horrible, horrible people.

I feel so sorry for Emily, because her life seems so unfair. I can see that she doesn't shrink from her own shortcomings, which I like; I'm not a fan of perfect characters because they irritate me. Emily doesn't irritate me because she admits her flaws. Characters like Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Ruth do irritate me because they are highly flawed but won't admit that they have any flaws. I'm not too sure why these fictional characters have struck me so deeply. On the one hand, it is definitely a sign of a great writer that the characters seem so real; on the other, I wonder just how real they are. How much of Lucy is in Emily? How many of the incidents related by Emily were experienced by Lucy?

I want to cry when I read about Emily's need to write and how her family mocks her efforts and her achievements. Her life seems unfairly difficult, and in some ways unnecessarily difficult. Yes, it's terrible that her beloved father dies when she is 11 and she becomes an orphan, but it is unnecessary that none of her family want to take her in. Her mother's relatives do nothing but tell her how difficult and unruly she is. Sly is the word most often used to describe her, and it's simply not true. She is an imaginative child who needs love and support. All she gets is disappointment and disapproval.

I have to wonder what I would have thought about Emily if I had read the books when I was 11. Would I have seen her life the same way I'm seeing it now? Would I be as upset by her circumstances as I am now? I'm also wondering how I'll feel if I re-read the Anne series. Anne was another orphan who had a fairly difficult life. Will I find the same things in the Anne books that I'm finding in the Emily books? Maybe L.M. Montgomery wrote herself into Emily the way things really were and wrote herself into Anne the way she wished things had been. Maybe Anne is the ideal and Emily is the reality. I don't know enough about L.M. Montgomery to be sure.

I am sure that I'll be reading Montgomery's journals in the not too distant future. I would like to see what her life really was like; I know it wasn't a bed of roses, but I don't know the details. I'm always interested in how real life affects fiction, and I think in L.M. Montgomery's case there will be a lot of overlap.

Has anyone else had an experience of re-reading a favourite from childhood and seeing it in a completely different way? I'm feeling very unsettled by reading the Emily books. It's not a comfortable feeling.

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here ... (2)

.... or not, depending on how you're feeling. For those of you who recognize the quotation, well done. It is, obviously, Dante Alighieri and this post will discuss Dante and a book that references Dante heavily, The Dante Club by Matthew Pearl. I have a sneaking suspicion that this post could be slightly disjointed since my mind is running in two directions at once, and I'm going to try to deal with both thoughts in one post. One one hand, reading The Dante Club made me think about Dante and his role in our literary canon; on the other, I have a number of thoughts about the novel itself.

First, Dante. I must confess that I have never read anything by Dante, including The Divine Comedy. I am certainly familiar with the concept behind the story, and know some famous quotations (such as the title of this post); I've even seen it performed by Theatre in the Mud. If you ever go to Theatre in the Mud, be sure to stay out of the splash zone. I wonder if that says something about me. Should I be more familiar with Dante? His is certainly one of the biggest names in world literature, and I feel somewhat less than fully cultured for not having read at least The Divine Comedy. Am I being too hard on myself? I'm familiar with Chaucer and Shakespeare, Hugo and Stendahl, but not Dante. I'm always looking for new works to share with my students, but Dante has never crossed my mind.

Is my lack of familiarity with Dante due to him writing in classical Italian? I'm not sure. I have never thought of myself as being a snob about only wanting to read English speaking authors, but that seems to be the case. My familiarity with translated works is definitely lacking. Reading The Dante Club, and the passion with which men like Longfellow and Wendell Holmes worked on translating Dante's work into English has made me want to read The Divine Comedy. Maybe that will be my summer reading.

Now, onto the novel that inspired this post. The Dante Club is a murder mystery set in 1865 Boston. It is the story of how "The Dante Club" solves the mystery of who is killing men using punishments from Dante's Inferno. The premise is really interesting. The main characters are well-known figures from literature and publishing. "The Dante Club" is made up of poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, author Oliver Wendell Holmes, historian George Washington Greene, poet James Lowell and publisher James Fields. This is historical fact. These men came together after the American Civil War to translate Dante's Divine Comedy into English. What happens as a result of this collaboration though, is purely a work of the author's imagination.

In the novel, a mysterious murderer stalks the streets of Cambridge, Mass. killing prominent men in horribly painful ways. The members of the Dante Club come to the horrific realization that the murders are being taken from Dante's travels through Hell in The Divine Comedy. As is so often the case in murder mysteries, the police are horribly incompetent, and it falls on these literary powerhouses to solve the murder. I found this to be a great idea for a novel, and I for the most part, I really enjoyed it.

As someone who is passionate about history, I loved the description of life in Boston and Cambridge in the post-Civil War era. It really struck me as realistic. Matthew Pearl really did his research when writing this novel. The differences in the university system really struck me. The idea that the Harvard Corporation would work to prevent Dante from being studied in English was just fascinating. The underlying racism and anti-Catholicism also rings very true. The fear of immigrants from Ireland and Italy was true to life. Another realistic feature was the treatment of the soldiers coming home from war, and the internal terrors they faced. All in all, it was a well done novel.

There was only one aspect of the book that I didn't particularly enjoy. The author kept hinting that there was actually an evil force at work, and that by translating Dante, the authors may have actually released evil into the world. I found this to be a stretch. Pearl had a great novel already; there is enough evil in the human characters; why hint that there was anything supernatural? I felt that it was an unnecessary complication in the book. That's only a mild criticism; overall, I enjoyed the novel and recommend it to others.

Nostalgia (1)

I wrote a blog about a fictional book club and the way these women decided to choose books to read. Reading the story and writing the blog got me thinking about the books of my childhood. I have always loved reading, and I have been surrounded by books my entire life. Actually (confession coming), when I was a child and I needed to be disciplined, by parents would forbid me from reading. Trying to think of my favourite books is going to be hard.

In terms of early childhood, I remember a couple of favourites. One was Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Voigt. I loved that story. I really felt like I could relate to Alexander. He never got anything he wanted, and he just wanted everything to go well. Wouldn't we all like to move to Australia on occasion? I was also a big fan of Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Again, who hasn't wanted to just escape from our daily life and become king (or queen) of the monsters. I still enjoy reading those books.

As I got older, and began reading to myself, there were a number of favourites. As I stated in an earlier post, Nancy Drew was always a favourite. Hmmmm, as a girl I loved mystery stories and I still do; I guess some things never change. Sorry, brief moment of introspection. Along with Nancy, I also read Trixie Belden, the Bobbsey Twins, and Enid Blyton's Famous Five. Children solving mysteries was obviously something I really enjoyed. I don't know what it was about those mysteries, but I could really lose myself in all those stories.

Another set of stories in which I could get lost were the Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery. Anne Shirley was such a great heroine. I just loved how spunky she was. No one ever took advantage of her. Her life wasn't easy, but she made the most of it. She may not have been the most popular, but she managed to achieve everything she wanted. As a result of my last entry about the book club, I want to re-read L.M. Montgomery's works; I also want to read her journals and the new biography that Jane Urquhart has written. There is so much more to see when looking at her work from an adult perspective. Actually, my book club has decided to read Emily's Quest as our book for next month. This means that me being me, I've bought all three of the Emily books to read - Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs and Emily's Quest. I'm sensing another blog entry for the near future.

On a slightly different note, a big part of my childhood was being read to. My mother would read to me and my brothers every night; it was a wonderful end to every day. I can't remember everything she read, but the memory of having her read to us is a wonderful one. I do remember reading The Wind in the Willows and Anne of Green Gables with my mother. I know that if and when I ever become a parent, reading together as a family will be a really important part of the day.

What are some of your favourite childhood books? These could be books you read yourself or books that were read to you.

Lamb

I'm already struggling with what I should say about Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal. The title alone is a hint as to why this may be a difficult entry. I wasn't sure I even wanted to read it, but I believe in learning how other people see the world and the place of religion in the world. First though, it's important to know how I see the world. I'm a member of the Baha'i Faith, and the teachings of Baha'u'llah strongly influence how I see the world. As a side note, if you are interested in knowing what some of those teachings are, I would suggest www.bahai.org as a good place to start. Being a Baha'i means that I don't follow an orthodox Christian view of Christ or the events of the Bible, even though I firmly believe that Jesus Christ did bring the word of God to humanity. Well, with that out of the way, onto the book.

Lamb tells the story of Christ through the eyes of his best friend Levi, known as Biff. Biff has been brought back to life in order to complete his gospel. He is the one who knows what happened to Jesus, known in the book as Joshua, when he was a child. That's right, Lamb is the story of Jesus before he begins preaching. Christopher Moore has taken the first 30 years of Christ's life and imagined what it could have been like. All I can say is - it was an eventful life. According to Biff, he had Jesus travelled from Galilee to Kabul to Nepal to Tamil and then back to what is now Isreal. The premise is that in order to learn how to become The Messiah, Jesus and Biff must find the three wise men who visited at the time of his birth.

Through these visits, Jesus learns the variations of the Golden Rule and how it can be used in the message of what will become Christianity. This is where I have my first problem. I didn't know how to take this idea when I first met it. My first thought was that by having Christ learn about compassion and justice from the Magi was taking away from Christ's revelation, but then, I started thinking that what this really did was show how the messages of the different religions all come from God. In the Baha'i Faith, this concept is known as Progressive Revelation. I don't agree with the idea that Christ's revelation actually came from Gaspar, Melchior and Balthazar, but the idea that the Christian message shares ideas with Taoism, Buddhism and Hinduism is a good one.

The novel does a good job of showing Christ's human side. It shows him struggling with trying to understand his role in the world, with the guilt of not being able to help everyone, and with being gone when Joseph dies. The character of Biff is there to show the weakness of humanity and all the temptations we feel. He is a big fan of sex, and wherever Jesus goes to learn his lessons, Biff learns more about sex. Biff seems to spend a lot of time in the company of various concubines and prostitutes, and he tries to tell Jesus what he's missing, since the one instruction Jesus has received is that he is not to know women.

When I read Lamb, I thought that the author was trying to be irreverent and anti-Christian, but in reading his notes after the story, the one thing that really struck me was that he says that his perspective was that Christ was who he said he was; he was not trying to take away from Christ's message in any way. I really appreciated that. I'm still not sure what I think about using a Manifestation of God as the main character in a fictional work like this; I guess I'll have to keep thinking about it. I think that the image and idea of Jesus Christ are oven used in inappropriate ways, and if I read a book like Lamb, am I contributing to the irreverent view of Christ? I just don't know.

Any thoughts?