This little novel waited a few years for me without any complaint. I read Welty's The Golden Apples previously, I was spurred on by this ancestral relThis little novel waited a few years for me without any complaint. I read Welty's The Golden Apples previously, I was spurred on by this ancestral relation of sorts of the author's Miss Eckhart in June Recital to a more satisfied descendant in Alice Munro's Dance of the Happy Shades. And I adored those stories for their generosity and for Welty's delicate treatment of character, story, and myth.
The Optimist’s Daughter remembers that temperament and generosity, but autobiography replaces myth. There's less of a natural and dewy texture, something more of cut flowers and smooth timber. There's the same almost comic action and an inclusion somehow of everyone and everything. But there's also that refusal to give over human oddity to the grotesque.
Where The Golden Apples ranged over many characters and stories, Welty’s final novel favours the view of one woman. Laurel, the widowed daughter of Judge McKelva of Mount Salus, travels from Chicago to see her father in New Orleans, where he’s having eye surgery on a detached retina. There, she’s confronted by the judge and his young (younger than Laurel) second wife Fay. The two women are thrown together when circumstances force a return to Mount Salus. And Laurel, coming back to her family home and to the memory of both her parents, encounters friends, death and a different understanding of the relationship between her parents and herself.
I can imagine a reader beginning this one and not knowing what to make of it. The character of Fay, in particular, is easy to read melodramatically. And it’s even easier to read that melodrama into the novel itself. But Welty balances character and prose very carefully, and she refuses to abandon the carnival of people to irony and judgment. There are moments of insight, where the storied memory and meditation burst and you gain a recognition of something that’s not in the sentences themselves. A kind of overloading until clarity. Welty just continually (and thankfully) produces a realism that’s comedic rather than tragic, even where it’s poignant. And, in the kind of realisation of Chekhov, she secures that rare realism that never fully gives up its secrets. It’s an object that always hides some of itself away from perception. Or a concept that's never fully captured by words....more
Children of God is Mary Doria Russell's sequel to her rather abundant debut work The Sparrow that I read early this year. CoG was, again, passed to meChildren of God is Mary Doria Russell's sequel to her rather abundant debut work The Sparrow that I read early this year. CoG was, again, passed to me by a mate (thank you!). But with other books underway, I took my time getting to this one. The two books work together coherently almost as a single volume split in half; however, that volume is something like a thousand pages all up!
Picking up in the immediate aftermath of Father Emilio Sandoz's revelations of what he and his friends endured on the mission to Rakhat, the story sees Sandoz begin to piece together a fragile life for himself in the strange future-present to which he's returned. With everyone he knew dead, he leads a lonely existence until new people enter his life. But it happens that, amidst the religio-political fallout to the previous mission and a loss of contact with another group of travelers on the Rakhat, a new mission is assembled. And Sandoz, against his will, returns to Rakhat one last time to confront the remains of his past and a world now gripped by revolutionary change.
Children of God is a harder novel than its predecessor. Harsher in tone, event and spectacle. With many of the characters of the original gone, and its new cast not up to the task of replacing the gentle humour and warm humanity of that first outing, it's a different trip. The anthropological and historical engines driving it are intriguing and replace the mystery at the heart of the previous story. But, again, they don't quite measure up without those really interesting characters at their centre. The novel doesn't quite achieve balance the way the first one did. Dark humour is joined with dark drama. And because Russell's writing leans into technical prose and too conventional sci-fi dialogue, there's something lost when enjoining this to the religious novel that it is underneath.
Those points aside, it's a good novel. I went through it quicker than I did the first. There are sections that beat the ever-loving shit out of my heart. And more than a few moments that made me cackle. It's what you want in a page-turner....more
The Sparrow is an odd little debut novel. The ‘Catholics in space’ genre, I saw one reader say. I had it handed to me by a good mate and went in withoThe Sparrow is an odd little debut novel. The ‘Catholics in space’ genre, I saw one reader say. I had it handed to me by a good mate and went in without knowing much of anything but what the blurb told me. And I think it rewards that. There’s a sense in which, these few decades later, it hasn’t filtered down through popular culture to spoil any of its story particulars.
Father (Emilio) Sandoz and a group of his friends, of the SETI program at Arecibo Observatory, intercept radio signals in 2019. They suggest alien life in the vicinity of Alpha Centauri. A manned Jesuit mission follows. Contact. But the story doesn’t unfold along those straight lines. Discovery and space journey rather interrupt the Sandoz we find in 2060. He’s a battered and bruised man, mangled in body and religious spirit. The lone survivor returned to Earth. What happened comes out slowly under organisational questioning and against the backdrop of Sandoz’s dark night of the soul.
As mystery novels go, this one is well-handled. At 50 pages out from the ending, you might think it can't be resolved cleanly with so much left. But the author has some surprises. Russell has a both elastic and technical style: she can rattle off specifics like an instruction manual and yet turn to lived particulars and human relationships when she needs to. And although it’s a ‘religious’ story, the narrative lens feels scientific: it never lingers too long to consider beauty but rather moves into an anthropological or observational mood. Russell is never quite settled about appreciating something for its beauty or its reassurance. She subverts. And as the conclusion of the story comes, and we learn what happened to the other crew, that creates some pretty unique afterglows.
To bring it back to the beginning, it’s an impressive novel for a first. Recommend....more
This was my lockdown book. It's been at least 15 years since I first tried to read it, but not till now could I pick it up with enough intent and motiThis was my lockdown book. It's been at least 15 years since I first tried to read it, but not till now could I pick it up with enough intent and motivation to get through. But when I couldn't go out much farther than my own front gate most days, and the big adventures I had planned for 2020 weren't going to happen, I took this out under a tree and read it with the breeze at my back. And it did what not much else could: it made the ever-shrinking world large again.
It's a fantasy book, of course. It's also a certain kind of adventure book. There are wars in here and action, but the temperament and the focus isn't in the cinematics and centre of battles. The better part of the book, and where Tolkien seems to be most ready to speak, is taken up with journeying. Characters exist but are somewhat thin, with a few exceptions. Wars are fought but are almost swiftly over. But the journeying through places dark and wonderful lasts. There's food and light, there are trees and caves, strange creatures and haunted places. It's the sort of book you can live in, largely because Tolkien's philosophy seems to be precisely that the good of his hobbit characters is in how they're concerned with, and wanting to return to, the good life....more
Like the early Lives of Girls and Women, The Beggar Maid centres continuously on the the same characters and themes. In so far as it takes on the formLike the early Lives of Girls and Women, The Beggar Maid centres continuously on the the same characters and themes. In so far as it takes on the form of a Bildungsroman, it seems to do so almost by accident. There's connection across stories, but their voices are somewhat multiple and time and place are never quite stable enough to say that this is a tract of youth and that one of maturity. Death and mortality loom larger than I think they do in any of her other collections. There's abuse and trauma in early stories, and their moments seem to recur or shadow over later stories and experiences without any clear call back. It's more expansive than Lives of Girls and Women, it encompasses life outside of the rural and the small town. But it's also somehow a great deal more ambitious even than Munro's other collections. The attention that the author shows in her usual varied stories is everywhere as sharp here, but it stretches in long form over the course of a life....more
A good book. There's story in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. It's swirling in billows of water and religion and cold air. It's about Ruth and LuciA good book. There's story in Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping. It's swirling in billows of water and religion and cold air. It's about Ruth and Lucille, two children abandoned to their grandmother in the town of Fingerbone. And, when that great relative dies and others remove, it becomes about their guardianship as it falls to their mother's strange sister, Sylvie. If it's about something, I guess I'd say its subject is women or people cut off somehow from the precedent of place and community. But it's difficult to say just how about that the book is, so I won't try to do so. I'll just say that Robinson phrases what she says in dense and difficult prose, but stirring underneath and often atop is a musicality that's somehow choral but singular. It's like a tiny orchestra under the surface of a slow river....more
Alice Munro has a way in many of her stories of putting off their telling into the particulars of description and time. There’s a voice. But the storiAlice Munro has a way in many of her stories of putting off their telling into the particulars of description and time. There’s a voice. But the storied narrative isn’t carved out of or draped over it. It’s underneath. It’s an undertow. It registers with you after pages of steady consciousness. And yet, her voice is direct and commonplace and starkly unpretentious.
The stories in The Love of a Good Woman are often of this sort. They’re stories of women and girls losing themselves, or versions of themselves. They’re about girls growing into women. They’re about girls and women changing and becoming. But, as summary, none of this is quite what they’re about; her stories have too much of a multiplicity and her characters too much life.
There are some great stories here (there always are). But My Mother’s Dream stands out for me, more than individual stories usually stand out in Munro collections. It’s the final story. And it’s all of what I described above. A daughter tells the story of her mother, that mother’s losses and gains as a young woman and finally, in the frantic dream-like sequence of activity and unsteadiness around her, of the “queer bright moment” in which she became someone else. ...more
Sartre: Romantic Rationalist was Iris Murdoch’s first published book and the first book on Sartre’s work to appear in English. In it, Murdoch studies Sartre: Romantic Rationalist was Iris Murdoch’s first published book and the first book on Sartre’s work to appear in English. In it, Murdoch studies Sartre’s fiction, his philosophy, and his politics. And over the course of the book she offers insights and criticisms that both contextualise and historicise Sartre’s work and key concepts; and these offerings both clarify and hit their mark. Her writing is more substantial than structural and more literary than philosophical, the layout initially appears idiosyncratic and conversational; but as the details of Sartre’s work begin to appear (opening after the later produced introduction, as the monograph does truly, with an energetic discussion of La Nausée) the book finds its force of explication and exegesis.
Initially it might appear strange to assimilate Sartre to romanticism or rationalism or some combination thereof. Sartre, after all, is the go-to existentialist for many and existentialism for many more is a kind of considered and politicised subjectivism or the mature consequences of a fully realised and worked out atheism. And further, Murdoch came to have a complex relationship with existentialism, as can be seen in The Sovereignty of Good (and less so in the misguided recent attempts to assimilate Murdoch’s own work to existentialism). But Murdoch relates the point of the charge to Sartre’s uses of freedom and the will, and particularly with his use of self-aware reflectivity, isolation, and the energetic upshot of his employment of a certain existential paradox.
I’d praise this book for the author’s work on Sartre alone, but for a reader of Murdoch whose interest is primarily or latently in her philosophical and artistic writings, there are further points of interest here that only passingly have to do with Sartre himself. There are early and spectral glimpses of ideas from Murdoch about art, novels, and the poverty of the contemporary picture of the human personality, that we’d see fully embodied in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals and essays like On Dryness. There are also key terms and their usages that would develop into later points of interest in Murdoch scholarship and novel criticisms of Sartre from other writers, such as her uses of ‘flux’ to describe the acute experiences of contingency in La Nausée.
So, while I’d recommend the book to anyone looking to situate Sartre, my own selfish interest here is in how it situates Murdoch. I think it succeeds at both....more
Less a narrative apart and more a lovely retelling with its own voice, Byatt's Ragnarok is fiction, biography and myth in mixture. A thin child in warLess a narrative apart and more a lovely retelling with its own voice, Byatt's Ragnarok is fiction, biography and myth in mixture. A thin child in wartime reads a book of Norse legends and, in the thick experience of reading, interprets her inner and outer worlds against the vivid fore of mystery, cosmology and oblivion....more
For me, Simone Weil has been prefiguratively an outside voice of Christian mysticism, and of an alternative platonism that finds its natural tone in IFor me, Simone Weil has been prefiguratively an outside voice of Christian mysticism, and of an alternative platonism that finds its natural tone in Iris Murdoch. So, it was in a bewildered mode that I realised I'd completely overlooked her essay on Homer and the concept of force at work in The Iliad.
Weil reads the Homeric epic as exhibiting force not merely understood as a power of violence but as transformational. That is, force transforms living humans into matter. "The force that kills is summary and crude. How much more varied in operation, how much more stunning in effect is that other sort of force, that which does not kill, or rather does not kill just yet. It will kill for a certainty, or it will kill perhaps, or it may merely hang over the being it can kill in an instant; in all cases, it changes the human being into stone." Weil continues, translating Homeric lines herself and without the customary of context and place, with a strangely particular generalised reading of key and inessential scenes of the poem against her immanent treatment of force; first, in its immediate violence and then onward through enslavement and loss and into its physiological inherence in persons.
For Weil, force not only transforms its patient but also its agent. Its proponent is, to borrow one of Weil's concepts used and summarised elsewhere, an object of gravity. It's propelled by necessity of the relation of force. Against this, or perhaps within it, and redeeming of the poem is grace. Homer does not revel in the triumph of the victors. Rather, the mood throughout the poem is one of loss. The victors are in turn victims caught up in the machinery (or gravity) of force, certain to be victims in their turn. And it's in Homeric impartiality, not found in the Romans or the Hebrews that Weil finds, "All who escape the empire of force in their innermost being and in their relations with their fellow men are loved, but loved in grief at the threat of constantly impending destruction. Such is the spirit of the only true epic that the West possesses."...more
Munro, as near as I recall, has never ranged so far and so broadly before and situated this in one written place - in a box left open. There’s reverieMunro, as near as I recall, has never ranged so far and so broadly before and situated this in one written place - in a box left open. There’s reverie, interiority and recovery of the particular in these stories, but also a concreteness of place even as it shifts by time and view. Places, not to be confused with locations, stick and house and are revisited. What’s nice is that the space of interiority is not compromised or fractured or made inauthentic by the openness of range....more
”It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his h”It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. Voracious and misguided as Uncle Craig out at Jenkin’s Bend, writing his history, I would want to write things down.”
I put this down perhaps a year ago or more. Having read it to the end and put my thoughts about it to the forefront of my mind, I readied myself to write them out. But I found that my reviewer’s ink had dried up and caught my pen in its well. I didn’t write. I wish I had wanted then, as strongly as I do now, to write things down.
Lives of Girls and Women is a collection of inter-connected short stories centred on the experience of Del Jordan as she grows up in rural Ontario during the 1940s. Experiential centrality, however, should be read broadly. The stories are as often about the people who enter into Del’s experience as they are about those experiences that involve her as direct protagonist. In departing from the form of individually contained stories that her first collection and most of her subsequent ones took, I remember worrying all through the book that something had gone with it. Those revelatory features of Munro’s stories, those events that can be so gradual and shifting as to barely warrant being called “events” must suffer for this novel-length extension. I suspect that that worry is what stopped me writing this out previously - that it might lessen what the book is and could do. It had me questioning Munro’s choice of form. What I missed was that this very loss of Munro-ness occasioned a foray into storytelling that honoured others and otherness by rehearsing them.
Lives of Girls and Women is often called a novel and it bears similarities to Welty’s The Golden Apples, but I don’t know that I’ve fully appreciated until now (nor even now) what reflection on these side issues might have told me last year. The concern about this book’s status as a novel can be looked at too sternly. And in seeking too forwardly after an answer it’s rather easy to shrink your vision and miss a question sitting nearby and shining with pertinence. But in bringing Welty’s work into the picture – a work which is so much more sturdily possessive of its form and yet speaks its possessiveness softly – you can broaden your vision again. Welty’s is not a novel. Insofar as Munro collection is indebted to Welty’s, is Munro’s a novel? Or is it more in the tradition of Welty’s a collection apart from a novel, and yet honouring length to bring out the shifts in a short story collection without the dedication to centre as found in a novel?
Would that I could be thinking this out in these terms a year ago. ...more
I remember first reading Alice Munro a number of years ago and, quite apart from the long searching task of merits being enlarged and made single and I remember first reading Alice Munro a number of years ago and, quite apart from the long searching task of merits being enlarged and made single and countable, being just overwhelmed by the nearness of the reading experience in a way I hadn’t been before. Different collections, though, can do different things. Friend of My Youth, because of its careful lengths and its doubled permission to allow the mundane its earned enlargement, reproduces, or rather produces, that first-second nearness and assembles the familiar voice out of its strange ones.
This is all from memory that isn’t any longer near....more
"Iris Murdoch’s novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts doubts on all philosophy including her own. She is an author whose proje
"Iris Murdoch’s novels are philosophy: but they are philosophy which casts doubts on all philosophy including her own. She is an author whose project involves an ironic distance not only from her characters but also from herself."
Until quite recently, I think, philosophers have not written very well on Iris Murdoch. MacIntyre, in the above, is more generous than some, but there is that lingering sense with him here as elsewhere that the generosity is tempered by the very inward-directed attention he gives to his own view and its abstract and intellectual enemies. What he's noticing, we might say, is Murdoch's attempt to strive here for what she has elsewhere distinguished as imagination from the lesser cousin of fantasy - imagination being the sort of creativity that sees others. But when situating The Time of the Angels in Murdoch's own story, it looks like more of an experimental effort than it does the delivery of her early promise. It appears to be just one form among others that imagination might take.
I'll explain by way of vagueness. In so far as Murdoch has allegiance to any philosopher, it is foremost to Plato; but the centre of this book is unabashedly Nietzschean. Where the imagination fails, then, is that in so far as Nietzsche is put at the centre, Plato is brought too close to him. In life they never met....more
The sort of novel that her deprecating critics came to expect from Iris Murdoch usually breaks in an entrance on a convoluted love muddle between someThe sort of novel that her deprecating critics came to expect from Iris Murdoch usually breaks in an entrance on a convoluted love muddle between sometimes seven and more characters. Murdoch is, she seemed put upon to press into the minds of her readers, a character-situational writer who finds her beginnings and endings there. Sometimes these muddles are found to be centred on a physical or philosophical enchanter or enchantress (The Time of the Angels) or something stranger (The Bell) and then others seemingly on nothing but the muddle itself (The Italian Girl). But the muddle is where they begin. We are put there, so to speak, mid-action. An Unofficial Rose opens on a funeral. The Nice and the Good begins with a gunshot.
The Sea, The Sea opens in its first-person voice a view of the sea and the past. Charles Arrowby has retired from the theatre to a quiet life alone on the coast, in a house overlooking the sea - a life of swimming and simple eating and seeing and remembering. His many and varied love affairs are behind him, he thinks. Murdoch gives something in this beginning that she rarely gives. She treats an isolated character and surrounds that character in isolation. The situation is not merely a device to treat the muddle in retrospect, but rather a drawn out space that breathes without the clutter of outside voices. The sea descriptions, the detailed scattered adventures, and the strange visions of the unexplained out on the water (the black) and in the narrator's house (the face) all come off beautifully. But even the muddle that has withdrawn for this space is not treated as usually when it intrudes. It rather flows with the themes set out in the open air. The vision of the narrator narrows as the story broadens. It's a unity; all the agents of time, place, voice, setting, and character seem set to the same end.
The narrative view for Murdoch is typically from without the action, even if the narrative itself is firmly within it. But here, and this is perhaps why it feels like the delivery on the thematic promises of her earlier career, the narrative view is within the action and resolves through a love pilgrimage to escape it. It's a long, long novel. It teaches its narrator something very little. And yet, the littleness of the lesson, even as it's shaded and covered over by the narrator's deflection from himself and most aptly backgrounded in Murdoch's concerns about a loving gaze and the return of love to our family of philosophical concepts, seems to be pure. It seems that the narrator against his own refusal to face up to himself has been given a glimpse of the real....more
In the late 90s, the novelist J. M. Coetzee was invited to Princeton to give the Tanner Lectures. He chose to speak on the topic that is sometimes refIn the late 90s, the novelist J. M. Coetzee was invited to Princeton to give the Tanner Lectures. He chose to speak on the topic that is sometimes referred to in philosophy as “the moral status of animals” and the result is The Lives of Animals. Given the simple and elegant form of a meta-fictional novella, the two parts, The Philosophers and the Animals and The Poets and the Animals, combine to an extended narrative about fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello, who has been invited to the (also) fictional Appleton College to speak on a topic of her choosing. Her topic of choice is our treatment of animals. What follows is a sometimes moving, sometimes funny, consistently thoughtful and eloquent reflection on the animal and animals in philosophy and literature, the connections we have with them and the kind of animal we are. Rather than an avowal of his own, Coetzee distances the main character from his authorial voice and repeatedly undermines any attempts to identify him finally with his protagonist or his position with hers. And with her personal and compassionate perspective against the entrenched rationalism of Costello’s interlocutors and contemporaries, he shapes a descriptive chasm in place of an argumentative resolution. It's in this state of remove, I think, that the piece gets its novel quality of freedom.
Following on from Coetzee’s centrepiece are several commentaries from his own contemporaries. Marjorie Garber turns to the literary and psychological aspects of the piece and appropriates Coetzee’s narrative to a psychoanalytic piece. Peter Singer creates his own rather didactic fictional account to take Costello’s argumentative points to task. Wendy Doniger attempts to document anthropological points of interest that enlarge and complement the more understated sections of Coetzee’s narrative. And Barbara Smuts turns to her personal experience working with and studying animals in the wild to reflect on what compassion in ethics and science might teach us.
While Coetzee is consistently good, the commentaries vary in quality and attention. Garber’s piece, following as it does so soon on the turns of horror and compassion of the main action, reads almost as a hostile case of deflection from the other into the familiar. Singer, similarly, seems somehow threatened by Costello’s critique of philosophy (or of Singer’s way of doing philosophy) and Coetzee’s refusal to be these positions. As these two depart and Doniger begins her more modest and search piece, the colour seems to return the book. And it’s with Smuts and her delicate and suggestive firsthand account of real animal lives that the open spirit of Coetzee’s piece returns and speaks with a new and evocative optimism. ...more
Philosophy and Animal Life is a volume of essays which, along with Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal, continues the rich critical reflection on J. Philosophy and Animal Life is a volume of essays which, along with Stephen Mulhall's The Wounded Animal, continues the rich critical reflection on J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and on the peculiar depths and surface of its protagonist, Elizabeth Costello.
The core of this volume is Cora Diamond's studied and abundant The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy. Diamond begins with a descriptive account of a poem by Ted Hughes, "Six Young Men", wherein the speaker describes a photo of six smiling young men seated in a familiar spot.
"He [the speaker] knows the bank covered with bilberries, the tree and the old wall in the photo: the six men in the picture would have heard the valley below them sounding with rushing water, just as it still does. [...] The men are profoundly, fully alive, one bashfully lowering his eyes, one chewing a piece of grass, one 'is ridiculous with cocky pride'."
A photograph from 1914, of six young men, smiling, who, six months from when the picture was taken, were all dead.
"In the photograph, then, there can also be thought the death of these men: the worst 'flash and rending' of war falling onto these smiles now forty years rotted and gone."
Diamond says, after quoting the final stanza, "What interests me there is the experience of the mind's not being able to encompass something which it encounters." This coming apart of our everyday thinking, which Diamond illuminates in great detail, is what she finds in Coetzee's lectures and in the experience of Elizabeth Costello. This is the difficulty of reality with which Diamond is concerned. Then, drawing on the theme of deflection in the work of Stanley Cavell, Diamond questions what philosophy can say of these experiences. Unfortunately, what philosophy can and does do too often, as perhaps is best seen in Singer's response to Coetzee, is to deflect from these difficulties into an abstract philosophical problem in the vicinity. That is, as in Cavell's original use in his discussion of scepticism, philosophers will re-say the problem in terms of an abstract philosophical game of tokens and thus deflect from the real. But can philosophy practice itself without deflection?
Stanley Cavell's own contribution, Companionable Thinking, of which I'll say little only so as not to reduce it, is both a commendation and a criticism of Diamond's essay, but it is also a continuation of his engagement with Emerson, Wittgenstein, scepticism, and perfectionism.
John McDowell responds to Cavell's criticisms of Diamond's essay with a commentary of his own, characteristically singular and sharp, that engages with his own writings on Wittgenstein and "seeing aspects". He (McDowell) rehearses his own peculiar methods of resolution, which come through in performance not by way of unfolding new and grand systems in place of the old, but by attention to the delicate and the situation of obstacles that still, and have stilled, our flow of thought. According to McDowell, Cavell, in his own obtrusive way, "does not do justice to the wonderful way Diamond has found to throw light on Cavellian themes".
Cary Wolfe's Exposures, which introduces the volume, reads for closeness and situates the live work of Cavell and Diamond in the context of treatments of the human and the animal in a broader picture, while taking from the more conspicuously philosophical elements under consideration to draw comparisons between Diamond and Derrida - comparisons that work, rather than to disown or disparage one or the other, more to bring out their strange affinities .
Finally, Ian Hacking's Deflections is a roaming piece of commentary, decidedly more literary than philosophical and yet argumentative at its own pace, on all that came before it. "Roaming" is the word I use, because Hacking moves so swiftly and unsteadily from here to there. And yet, his vision is never hazy after a jump. He focuses, illuminates something the foregoing authors had missed in each other, and re-says in order to be faithful to them. He seems to capture, in his somewhat deliberate performance, the ordinary that had gone out of the world....more
She did not know herself. It was not possible, it was not necessary, it was perhaps not even proper. Real compassion is agnosticism; and we must be
She did not know herself. It was not possible, it was not necessary, it was perhaps not even proper. Real compassion is agnosticism; and we must be compassionate to ourselves too. Tasks lay ahead, one after one after one, and the gradual return to an old simplicity. She would never know, and that would be her way of surviving.
The character of An Unofficial Rose has transition as its key trait, but it's difficult to know if it's a virtue or a vice. Among Iris Murdoch's published works, it sits between her earlier The Bell and later The Italian Girl. In reviewing those, I characterised them as "stirred and uncaged" and "stolidly and rigidified" works, respectively. But there are three books in between those two, and An Unofficial Rose is only the second and central of these. That gives me to wonder if it ought to be thought of as an increase and whether the change for Murdoch has been sudden or gradual. There is a new sympathy: what previously called for comic treatment is more softly delineated and the happy picked out from the sad. Themes are that familiar couple, Love and Goodness. For Murdoch, these have to be married by a third, Vision (or Attention). So, this is a number of linked ceremonies - all interrupted. The ideas and play do achieve their vibrancy and volume, but the voice of these within the festivities is mute in all but the concluding toast. Still, the toast is memorable....more
In Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro found herself on several occasions visitor to a richly dilemmatic territory of storytelling that her mature In Dance of the Happy Shades, Alice Munro found herself on several occasions visitor to a richly dilemmatic territory of storytelling that her mature work has since lived in. But, about as she was with those narratives that moved organically and to unbound endings, she stayed as often in places that were visibly finite and grounded by their styles in the time they were written. Something I've Been Meaning to Tell You looks like a conversation between these two different approaches, or between two different peoples. Siding first with the organic and then broadening the logical room of the finite, Munro dives into the Wawanash River midway through. By the time she resurfaces in 'The Ottawa Valley' she has chosen to break with the grounded and narrow form. Though the finite may visit, may reoccur and diminish, Munro has chosen the open-ended and to exemplify its local virtues that are cosmopolitan....more
She pressed through a haw thicket and through the cherry trees. With a tree-high seesawing of boughs a squirrel chase ran ahead of her through the
She pressed through a haw thicket and through the cherry trees. With a tree-high seesawing of boughs a squirrel chase ran ahead of her through the woods - Morgan's Woods, as it used to be called. Fat birds were rocking on their perches. A little quail ran on the woods floor. Down an arch, some old cedar lane up here, Mattie Will could look away into the big West. She could see the drift of it all, the stretched land below the little hills, and the Big Black, clear to MacLain's Courthouse, almost, the Stark place plain and the fields, and their farm, everybody's house above trees, the MacLains' - the white floating peak - and even Blackstone's granny's cabin, where there had been a murder one time. And Morgana all in rays, like a giant sunflower in the dust of Saturday."
The character of these stories is immensely generous: the prose overflows with mythic music, time passes into place, people are formed and reformed as folklore and events enlarge to the Homeric. And somehow this is all boundlessly human and sad.
You encounter no small difficulty in describing a book like this, because its choice ground lies somewhere between the novel and the short story collection. That is, between broad lakes and small rivers. Some of these are short stories. One or two look happily the length of novellas. And others are barely tales at all. These last look like collecting pools that only take substantial shape when waters rise; the pools gain body from rivers and the rivers gain new shape in flooding the pools. Bathe in it. Drink it in handfuls. ...more
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