The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (novel #130)

Who knows, he may grow up to be President someday, unless they hang him first! ~ Aunt Polly regarding Tom

I read this as part of the Back to the Classics Challenge 2019: A Classic from the Americas. 

Well, you don’t get much more classic, nor more American than Tom Sawyer.

As I did in my review of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, I will refer to the novels as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and the characters themselves as Tom and Huck.

Tom Sawyer comes before (not properly called a prequel) Huckleberry Finn. I think Huckleberry Finn is considered Twain’s greater work, but not for me. I enjoy both, but if forced to choose, I like Tom Sawyer better.

It’s more fun. Huckleberry Finn is fun – but it’s also important. Tom Sawyer is just fun. And once in a while, “just fun” is better than fun and important.

If that doesn’t make sense – I sort of feel sorry for you.

Another reason I like it so much: I identify with Tom much more than Huck. I lived a pretty carefree, barefoot in summer, fishing, swimming, and playing cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, or soldier, much like Tom. Like Tom, and unlike Huck, I was also loved and nurtured.

Tom is a wild, mischievous, but good at heart boy growing up along the banks of the Mississippi River in the 1840s. I don’t believe Twain ever gives his age, or grade. My guess is about 12.

And, did I mention this? It’s just loads of fun. Tom has adventures with his friends Joe Harper and Huck Finn, he falls in love with Becky Thatcher, blows it by being a jerk, then redeems himself by taking blame, and a whipping, for Becky. He runs away and becomes a pirate, witnesses a murder, saves a convicted criminal, finds stolen treasure, and attends his own funeral.

What fun.

I know; there are some who think this book is inappropriate today. I understand and I disagree.

This at least the third time I’ve read Tom Sawyer. It doesn’t get old. Well, I mean it is old, but I don’t get tired of it.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

Excerpt:

“What's your name?"

"Becky Thatcher. What's yours? Oh, I know. It's Thomas Sawyer."

"That's the name they lick me by. I'm Tom when I'm good. You call me Tom, will you?"

"Yes” 

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Middlemarch by George Eliot (novel #110)

…those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. ~ narrative regarding the heroine of Middlemarch

Middlemarch: a Study of Provincial Life, is as the subtitle states, a study in provincial life – in the fictitious town of Middlemarch, somewhere outside but not very distant from London, early 1830s. You may read it described as several interconnected stories regarding the principals of Middlemarch – which I suppose is accurate; However, for me the main character is Miss Brooke and it is her coming-of-age tale, with several related subplots. Dorothea Brooke is a young woman, orphaned, living with her uncle, and younger sister Celia. The uncle is a wealthy and established person of Middlemarch. He is kindly, but somewhat simple. Dorothea and Celia will receive a comfortable income, but no great fortune on coming of age. And as you might expect – there are suitors. 

Dorothea is kind and compassionate and hopes for little more in life than to be useful to her fellow humans, and perhaps to marry a worthy man and assist in his life’s noble cause. She is an idealist and admirable, but also painfully naïve. But as I stated, it is a coming-of-age tale; life gives Dorothea some hard lessons, but she learns them well and they have significant import to those other subplots in the doings of Middlemarch. 

The novel starts very slowly. The first 500 pages or so developing the characters with nothing very compelling happening. It is only the last several hundred pages where things get interesting. I was a little disappointed in the ending, not because I wasn’t relieved at the outcome, but because I thought the resolution to the conflicts was too easy, not very clever. It didn’t stun me. I didn’t want to stand and cheer. It just felt like – “Oh good; that’s nice.”

But in the end, the very end, I have to concede that I think the un-momentousness, was very likely Eliot’s intention. She writes (yes She, more on that in a moment) – she writes of Dorothea in the book’s final paragraph:

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive:  for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts; and the things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

And for that, I bow to Mary Anne Evans, author of Middlemarch who wrote under the pen name George Eliot.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

This novel satisfies – Back to the Classics Challenge 2018 – Category: a classic with a single word title.

Epilogue to my thoughts on Middlemarch. Author Henry James described Ladislaw [a lead male character] as the hero of the novel. Really!? Not Dorothea, but Ladislaw? Really? I understand the historical context of mid-19^th century attitudes towards women, but Really!?

Other excerpts:

Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of scientific prediction about them.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us.

SPOILER ALERT: The following quotation contains a spoiler. It is a poignant epitaph of Dorothea, and her reputation in Middlemarch:

…she was spoke of to a younger generation as a fine girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry his cousin – young enough to have been his son, with no property, and not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually observed that she could not have been “a nice woman,” else she would not have married either the one or the other.

Native Son by Richard Wright (95 down, 5 to go)

Of all things, men do not like to feel that they are guilty of wrong, and if you make them fell guilt, they will try desperately to justify it on any grounds; but, failing that, and seeing no immediate solution that will set things right without too much cost to their lives and property, they will kill that which evoked in them the condemning sense of guilt. ~ Boris Max, Lawyer for the defense

Native Son is the story of Bigger Thomas, an African-American man living in the South side of Chicago, 1930s. I knew this was another story about the racial divide in America and was expecting something like Invisible Man or Go Tell it on the Mountain.

But no, this was quite different, and much more troubling.

Bigger lives in poverty with his mother, younger brother, and younger sister – no father in the picture.

He hated his family because he knew that they were suffering and that he was powerless to help them.

Bigger is a petty criminal and a bit of an idler. However, social services arrange a job as chauffer for a wealthy white family, and maybe Bigger has a chance, until the naiveté and recklessness of the privileged do-gooder daughter leads Bigger into a catastrophically compromising situation. Bigger knows he won’t stand a chance in the courts, so he reacts in desperation.

In reality, Bigger never had a chance even before the present tragedy. Society had already determined, “his type” were trouble makers; denied any real chance to make good, the expectations usually come true. I believe there is an unfortunate truth in the message. There are rare exceptions who overcome, but if society expects the worst of someone, it is often a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Native Son is a disturbing and enlightening portrayal of this dark truth.

In a bit of foreshadowing, shortly before the catastrophic events of the story, Bigger tells a friend:

Sometimes I feel like something awful’s going to happen to me

From the moment of his “crime” Bigger begins an existential journey – somehow, he feels empowered. It is as if for the first time he is in control of his own life. He feels

…like a man who had been somehow cheated, but had now evened the score.

He hopes to escape punishment, for his innocent mistake, but he is all the time realistic that he probably will not. He almost wants to let the hated white masses know what he has done. This is only scratching the surface of Bigger’s thoughts and emotions. He is calculating and reckless, cowardly and defiant, frightened and peaceful, confused and deliberate.

I’ve read no commentary to suggest this, but I suspect the main character’s name was meant to convey that the story was “bigger” than its character.

Native Son is an important book, I couldn’t put it down, but it wasn’t a lot of fun. I’m sure it wasn’t intended to be. Have you read Native Son or Richard Wright? Your thoughts?

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

 

This novel satisfies the following category from the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018: A classic by an author that’s new to you.

Disclaimer – I grew up in middle-class white suburbia not far from Chicago. I usually feel a little trepidation at commenting on a book like this. Reading a novel, about racial inequality does not give me an understanding of minority suffering. My moral outrage at Bigger’s plight does not atone. My words even now are probably patronizing and self-serving.

When does it end? How can it end?

History seems to be saying it ends – painfully slowly. I believe books like Native Son help – albeit painfully and slowly.

Excerpts:

For the first time in his life a white man became a human being to him…

He had to make a decision: in order to walk to that chair he had to weave his feelings into a hard shield of either hope or hate. To fall between them would mean living and dying in a fog of fear.

He felt he wanted to live now – not escape paying for his crime – but live in order to find out, to see if it were true, and to feel it more deeply; and, if he had to die, to die within it.

Yet he felt that he could not fight the battle for his life without first winning the one raging within him.

But he is product of a dislocated society; he is a dispossessed and disinherited man; he is all of this, and he lives amid the greatest possible plenty on earth and he is looking and feeling for a way out.

He was not allowed to live as an American

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The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal (92 down, 8 to go)

(translation by Richard Howard) 

…it seems that nature has not granted me a heart with which to love and be melancholy; I cannot raise myself higher than vulgar pleasures, and so on. ~ Fabrizio del Dongo

The Charterhouse of Parma is a tale of romance, confounded by political intrigue, treachery, and adventure, wherein Stendhal pries into the psyche and soul of the young hero.

The hero, Fabrizio del Dongo, an Italian nobleman who, upon coming of age, runs off to join the cause of Liberté as he almost manages to enter Napoleon’s army. It’s all over before Fabrizio can truly enter the fray, but this adventure begins a lifelong sequence of right-place, wrong-time scenarios, and vice versa.

Fabrizio is intelligent though initially uneducated, honest, charming, and good looking, but in spite of this, I didn’t quite find him worthy of my sympathy, and this is the one weakness in the story for me. Fabrizio is also fickle, occasionally ungrateful, and impetuous bordering on reckless – no, he is outright reckless at times with his own life and with others’.

Nonetheless, it is an exciting tale reminiscent of The Count of Monte Cristo. The prose is affective and accessible, partial credit to the translator. Stendhal was an early practitioner of realism, when most of his contemporaries wrote in the Romantic style. I haven’t seen it labeled thus, but I would also call it a coming of age tale. There are also elements of Fabrizio that seem to be modeled after Stendhal himself, who like Fabrizio served in Napoleon’s army.

My rating: 3 ½ of 5 stars

This rating, just above the median on my scale, means I liked it, but didn’t love it. I intend to read more by this author, probably The Red and the Black. Have you read Stendhal or The Charterhouse of Parma? What did you think?

Excerpts

 

We must confess that, following the example of many serious authors, we have begun our hero’s story a year before his birth. ~ Narrative reference to Tristram Shandy

As after a great storm the air is purer, so Fabrizio’s soul was tranquil, happy and, so to speak, refreshed.

“I was in love with love”, he wrote to the Duchess; “I did everything possible to gain knowledge of it, but it seems that nature has not granted me a heart with which to love and be melancholy; I cannot raise myself higher than vulgar pleasures, and so on.” ~ Fabrizio del Dongo

A lover thinks more often how to reach his mistress than a husband how to protect his wife; a prisoner thinks more often how to escape than a jailer how to lock his cell; thus, whatever the obstacles, lover and prisoner will triumph. 

 

I am inclined to think that the immoral delight Italians experience in taking revenge is a consequence of their power of imagination; people of other countries do not, strictly speaking, forgive; they forget.

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The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford (88 down, 12 to go)

This is the saddest story I have ever heard. ~ opening line

And that about sums it up.

To be blunt I didn’t like this story. Ford Maddox Ford can certainly write, and sometimes good writing can compensate for a less than compelling story – but for me – in this case – it didn’t.

It is the story of American expatriates John and Florence Dowell and their nine-year friendship with the English couple Edward and Leonora Ashburnham.

John is a fool; Edward is a letch, Florence is a manipulative adulteress, and Leonora is almost likeable, or nearly pitiable, but not quite either. They’re all a mess and I didn’t care for any of them. I think maybe I was supposed to feel sorry for the narrator – John – but I didn’t. John at least felt sorry for everybody including himself.

Ya know what? Yuck! I’m done. Some excerpts below will give you a few more insights. The last one, the one about the cow, is not critical to the story, but it might have been the best part of this story.

This novel is very short. That was good. The title refers to Edward Ashburnham who was a British officer and by all accounts a credit to the Army.

My rating: 2 of 5 stars

 

This is the first time I’ve read Ford Madox Ford or The Good Soldier.

Excerpts – all the words or thoughts of the unreliable narrator, John Dowell:

But just think of that poor wretch….I, who have surely the right, beg you to think of that poor wretch. Is it possible that such a luckless devil should be so tormented by blind and inscrutable destiny? For there is no other way to think of it. None. I have the right to say it, since for years he was my wife’s lover, since he killed her, since he broke up all the pleasantnesses that there were in my life. There is no priest that has the right to tell me that I must not ask pity for him, from you, silent listener beyond the hearthstone, from the world, or from the God who created in him those desires, those madnesses…

Perhaps one day when I am unconscious or walking in my sleep I may go and spit upon poor Edward’s grave.

…you may consider me even to have been an imbecile.

And yet I am so near to all of these people that I cannot think any of them wicked. It is impossible for me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and honourable.

I have come to be very much of a cynic in these matters…

Leonora loved Edward with a passion that was yet like an agony of hatred.

You see, he was really a very simple soul – very simple.

So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago. I am the attendant, not the husband of a beautiful girl, who pays no attention to me. I am estranged from Leonora, who married Rodney Bayham in my absence and went to live at Bayham. Leonora rather dislikes me, because she has got it into her head that I disapprove of her marriage with Rodney Bayham. Well, I disapprove of her marriage. Possibly I am jealous. Yes, no doubt I am jealous.

Not one of us has got what he really wanted. Leonora wanted Edward, and she has got Rodney Bayham, a pleasant enough sort of sheep. Florence wanted Branshaw, and it is I who have bought it from Leonora. I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse attendant. Edward wanted Nancy Rufford, and I have got her. Only she is mad. It is a queer fantastic world.

Is there any terrestrial paradise where, amidst the whispering of the olive-leaves, people can be with whom they like and have what they like and take their ease in shadows and in coolness? Or are all men’s lives like the lives of us good people – like the lives of the Ashburnhams, of the Dowells, of the Ruffords – broken, tumultuous, agonized, and unromantic, lives, periods punctuated by screams, by imbecilities, by deaths, by agonies? Who the devil knows?

Let me come to the 4^th of August, 1913, the last day of my absolute ignorance – and, I assure you, of my perfect happiness.

I chuckled over it from time to time for the whole rest of the day. Because it does look very funny, you know, to see a black and white cow land on its back in the middle of a stream. It is so just exactly what one doesn’t expect of a cow.

Film Rendition: 1981 British rendition is very true to the book...consequently just as awful.
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