Penelope Fitzgeraldish musings

And to end the suspense about which book I chose to read... it was The Bookshop. Though The Dud Avocado was close on its heels, The Bookshop being a very short 123 pages.

I find I'm of two minds about Penelope Fitzgerald. I like her and always pick up her books expecting to love them, but somehow I find myself ultimately unsatisfied. I like her writing style, and I always very much like her premises or her settings--a bookshop in a tiny seaside town, a tiny college of Oxford, both show lots of promise for my enjoying them. I often like her characters, too. I think it's just what she does with the characters and the settings that I find unsatisfying. These books are rather too short to have exactly what I'd call a plot, it's more an extended premise or even a series of (relatively mundane) events. It's not the lack of plot I mind, I suppose, just the outcomes. I think the settings of her books give me an expectation of what the book is going to be like, and that's never what it is, so I am unsatisfied because what I expect is exactly what I want. In a way, I guess, Penelope Fitzgerald's eluding of my expectations is a point for her skills as a writer. Her books are never what it says on the tin. They're very good, and I will probably keep reading them, even though on some level I find them disappointing.

Short books fascinate me, in a way. They're longer than a short story, quite long enough to get to know the characters, but too short to have a really involved plot. In a way, this makes them sort of like a slice of the life of a person you know really well, except that it's not someone you know so you've got a fresh view. And of course, there's always the joy of being able to finish them quickly so you can get on to something new.

Now I am on to The Dud Avocado. I started it ages ago and got distracted, but now I'm back to it and more into it that I was before, so hopefully I will finish it this time.

Bookish indecision

I finished reading The Mitford Girls yesterday as expected, and now I'm experiencing my usual inability to chose a new book after finishing such a good one. We've rented a car for 4th of July weekend and drove around to various shops today, so I wound up with I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, which I've already read, and The Bookshop, by Penelope Fitzgerald, which I haven't. I did read another book by Penelope Fitzgerald, The Gate of Angels, which I talked about here.

So now I'm torn between reading The Bookshop, The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy, or Lyddie, by Katherine Paterson. Or maybe even a reread of I Capture the Castle, which I loved a great deal when I read it a few years ago. Decisions, decisions, I think I just need to pick one and sit down with it.

Happy 4th of July, to those in the right country for it!

Jane Austen, Russia, and everything else

I've been rather absent lately, but school has definitely taken precedence. I've spent the last week lurking in the lighting booth (which is really just a booth, it was never finished properly) at school cleaning heavy, incredibly dusty stage lights, which is very very fun but also time consuming. I admit I have not done a lot of reading. I'm still plodding through Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen, which is very good but not, I admit, that gripping. At least, in the way that nonfiction rarely grips me. So that's slow going, and I'm determined to finish it before I read anything else.

I gave up on The Beginning of Spring. I've discovered that books about Russia just don't work for me. Penelope Fitzgerald is great, I just can't get myself to enjoy the setting. I think it's possible that this is not exclusive to Russia, but rather any terribly cold climate. The cold just gives the book a mood that I can't really enjoy, though sometimes I appreciate it. There are still some Russian classics I'd like to read, but that may have to wait until I take a class, or something.

Even if the Miss Austen biography is slow going, I have been thinking about Jane Austen in general, and the research paper I'm working on about sibling vs. romantic love in her novels. It's a question that's rather invaded the rest of my life, too, actually. What do you think? In literature, or in life, what is the real difference between romantic love and love between siblings/very close friends?

A bit of an update.

I haven't posted in quite some time, I see, although that doesn't mean I've not been reading. Mostly, life is getting in the way of keeping up with all the internet things I follow. School and friends are the main culprits, though I must say I rather like both of them.

One thing that's been keeping me busy is the writing of my senior research paper. I have to write a paper for my Jane Austen class anyway, which has to be 5-7 pages, so it's not that much more work just to make it 12-15 pages instead and call it my senior research paper. It's on sibling relationships in Jane Austen's novels, but also on the various romantic relationships that spring from sibling-like relationships, and how I think the sibling-like aspects of these relationships were more important to Jane Austen than the romance. I'm really enjoying writing it.

In the course of my research for the paper, I've been reading Claire Tomalin's biography of Jane Austen, which I like a good deal. I love reading biographies, but don't do it very often, and this is a very good one. Clear and well put together, and also well able to keep my interest.

Other books on the table--my second Penelope Fitzgerald, The Beginning of Spring, and the newest Tamora Pierce book, Melting Stones. I've loved Tamora Pierce for years; it's young adult fiction which has not the best writing, but which always manages to involve fascinating characters, concepts, and plots. This is exactly what I needed in terms of a comforting fantasy novel that is also new.

Praise the wonders of time for non-school books!

So, the other night I found myself in between books, having just finished the last Senior Lit book and not yet acquired the new one. Accordingly, I picked up The Gate of Angels, by Penelope Fitzgerald. And now I've just finished it. It's a very strange little book, and probably the only reason I managed to finish it is that it is so little--only 167 pages. It tells the story of Fred Fairly, who is a Junior Fellow of the smallest college at Cambridge in 1912, St. Angelicus. His college doesn't allow women to set foot on the premises, was founded by a pope who was later removed from his pope-hood (there must be a better way to put that), and has no sort of modern amenities at all and no rooms for the students. He is also not allowed to marry. And then he gets into a crash with a horsecart and a woman on a bicycle, whom he later wakes up to find himself in bed with. And it all goes on from there.

There is nothing the least bit complicated about the plot, though things do not always come in quite the right order. There are a series of rather strange characters, but unusually they are strange in a very normal way--not at all over the top, not even especially vivid, just strange. It's written in an unusual style, though I don't mean the writing, I mean that it doesn't quite flow. It is definitely put together deliberately, but not in the usual method of a novel. It has no concrete beginning, and the end is extremely abrupt, although not without managing to wrap things up well. It is simply a cutout of these characters' lives, just episodes put together, sometimes with no apparent relevance to the plot (assuming there is one).

Anyway, I enjoyed it very much, since it appealed to my love of reading about Oxford and Cambridge and their whole culture. I'd quite like to read more of Penelope Fitzgerald's books.

Next up on the reading list is The Things They Carried by Tim Obrien, and also the Iliad.