Keith Chatterly's Lover

Read from Thursday, February 10th to Tuesday, February 15th.

Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence.  I've always been intrigued by this book, since it was banned in England for a long time because of its supposedly racy content, that was too hot for some.  I picked up this used book once again in Asheville, NC and decided to give it a try.

The plot is pretty much a basic love triangle.  Connie marries Clifford Chatterley in a haste before he ships off for WWI.  However, he comes back handicapped and forever wheelchair-bound.  Clifford has inherited a large estate in the Midlands of England, a place called Wragby Hall, and also a piece of the nobility.  Connie and Clifford are essentially alone at Wragby, and Connie grows depressed.  She has to dote on Clifford's needs, and he becomes a moderately successful writer.  He has intellectual friends over to entertain every so often as well, and their conversations become increasingly boring and pedantic to Connie.  She craves action and excitement, and not all that talk, talk, talk.  Also, due to Clifford's injury, she is sexually frustrated.  Connie has a brief affair with Michaelis, a writer come to visit one weekend, but she eventually loses interest. 

Connie is in a funk, and Clifford thinks it is because she cannot have a child, an heir to Wragby Hall.  He gives her permission to have an affair and become pregnant, so long as she returns to him in the end.  He does not want to know who it is, just as long as he is an upstanding citizen.  Connie eventually breaks down, and they hire a woman, Mrs. Bolton, to look after Clifford and take care of him.  This gives Connie more freedom, and she takes long walks in the woods on the estate.  There she meets Oliver Mellors, the gamekeeper hired by Clifford.  He had spent time in the army in India, and he had a wife he was separated from.  He is a smart, educated man from the local town, but he chooses to speak the local dialect (often confusing to read).  He is quiet and strong, and very tender with Connie when they finally get together in his cabin in the woods. 

Connie falls for Mellors, and he does as well.  Connie becomes pregnant, and she plans to go away with her family to Italy for a month in the summer.  There she can pretend to have an affair and come back pregnant to Clifford.  Then her and Mellors can plan to run away together.  However, plans often go awry.  While Connie is away, Mellors' wife returns and wants him back.  When he refuses, she goes crazy and spreads slander all over the town accusing Connie of sleeping with him.  He is forced to resign from Wragby.  When Connie returns, she tries to tell Clifford she had an affair with an artist in Venice, but her lie falls apart and she confesses that it was Mellors.  Clifford is furious and refuses to divorce her, but Connie leaves anyway.  The story ends with Mellors working on a farm while Connie is living with family, waiting until the time they can reunite and run off together after their divorces are finalized. 

At times, it is a difficult book to get through.  The affair with Mellors doesn't begin until almost halfway through.  There are some long passages where the action is almost non-existent.  However, the book isn't only a romance story; Lawrence talks at length about the class differences between the poor citizens and the aristocracy.  Clifford believes that nobility is important, they need to lead the poor and uneducated.  But Mellors does not fit that stereotype.  He is his own, independent man, and he has been to school.  Lawrence also discusses the importance of action, and a physical respect for the body, not just the mind.  Clifford believes that the intellectual connection is all that's necessary in a marriage, and the sex stuff is something antiquated and we will eventually evolve out of.  Connie knows that it is important to love the body as well. 

The sex scenes are intense, but pretty mild compared to many contemporary subjects.  Lawrence is not graphic, but he is realistic, and he portrays the act as it is felt by the two subjects; something intense and emotional and spiritual.  I can see how in a post-Victorian England, that can be seen as something radical, but it is still a good piece of literature.  Three out of five stars.

The Partly Cloudy Keith

Read from Monday, February 7th, to Wednesday, February 9th.

The Partly Cloudy Patriot, by Sarah Vowell, the second of my Sarah Vowell books I got as Christmas presents.  This book is not about a single topic, but more of a collections of essays she wrote during the late 1990's and the early 2000's.  The essay topics are varied, but all are insights into her own personal history, as well as the history of this country and some of the more prominent people and events.  Sarah is experiencing the history herself through her personal reflections.  Once again, her funny, dry, and self-deprecating humor is on display, and the essays are all pretty upbeat, easy to read, and fun.

Vowell discusses her views on the Gettysburg Address, Teddy Roosevelt and North Dakota, Thanksgiving with her family and Ellis Island, basketball, antique maps, Rosa Parks, Tom Cruise, the underground cafeteria in Carlsbad Caverns, Canadian Mounties, and presidential libraries and legacies.  She spends a lot of time talking about Al Gore, his nerdiness and personality, and how he managed to mess up his message in the 2000 election.  The 2000 election is seen as the prominent event in the book, and she discusses her patriotism, and her right to question her government.  It is always right to be asking questions, and not take things at face value. 

Her liberal values are on full display, and she makes it clear.  It is good that I agree with her, or else this book could be difficult to read.  It is also interesting to see what people were writing about a decade ago, back when the Clinton sex scandal was breaking, Gore vs. Bush, and then September 11th and the wars that followed.  Sarah Vowell is funny, extremely smart, and persuasive.  This was a very lighthearted, easy, but intellectual read nonetheless.  Three and a half out of five stars.

EveryKeith is Illuminated

Read from Friday, February 4th to Sunday, February 6th.

Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer.  Again, I return to Eastern Europe, and again I return (happily I may add) to JSF.  This book has been on my shelf for awhile, and though I saw the movie a couple of years ago, I flew through this work of art.  Many critics do not like his writing style, saying it is too modern, using too many devices like time shifts, writing to look like artwork, photos, dialects and unreal elements.  This is exactly why I love this writing, and this is what I would aspire to write like.

This semi-autobiographical novel follows two story arcs, told by two narrators.  In the present day, JSF travels to Ukraine and hopes to find a woman named Augustine who supposedly saved his grandfather from the Nazis.  Armed with only a photograph and the name of the town, Trachimbrod, he hires a tour company that consists of Alex (the narrator of this story), whose English makes him a translator, and Alex's grandfather, who says he is blind but is the driver, and also his seeing eye bitch, Sammy Davis Junior, Junior.  This motley crew set off into the countryside to find this lost town where his grandfather was from.  This is the most humorous part of the story.  Alex seems like he learned his English from a dictionary and thesaurus without learning how the words are used properly.  The dog is hilarious,  as is JSF's vegetarianism.  Alex is writing his version of their search for Jonathan's novel, and he explains things in letters that accompany each chapter (very meta).

At the same this story is being told, Jonathan is also writing the history of his family and the town, specifically his (very) great grandmother, Brod, who survived a river accident in 1791, and who the town is named after.  Unable to love anyone, and unable to comprehend what love is, Brod sets a precedent for her family to follow for many generations.  She marries a man who rescued her from a rapist at age 13, and was then injured in a saw mill accident.  He survived for many years after, and after his death he was turned into a statue that the town used for luck.  There are many elements of magical realism that exist in these sections of the story, and I think they work very well.   

Meanwhile, the present-day search is getting closer to the truth as they find an old woman who says she is all that remains of Trachimbrod.  She has many collections of papers, artifacts and mementos from the town, and she shows them where it used to exist, but it is now just an empty field.  She is the last one left alive there, but she is not the lucky one.  The lucky ones are the dead ones that are not forced to remember.  But she is not Augustine, she is Lista, who knew his grandfather.  She then tells a harrowing tale of how the Nazis lined every Jew up, and forced them to spit on the Torah.  Her father refused to spit, so the Nazis shot her in her pregnant stomach, and the baby absorbed the blow so she could survive.

Both stories converge on Safran, JSF's grandfather, in the years before the war.  His story is told in the magical back-story by JSF.  He was a womanizer, sleeping with many widows and lonely women until he was forced to marry the rich girl in town, nine months before the Nazi invasion.  She becomes pregnant of course, and when the Nazis bomb the town, most of the town drowns in the river, but Safran is able to float away to safety. 

Back in the present, Alex's grandfather becomes uneasy when the woman gives them a photo of him as a young man.  His grandfather reveals another terrible story about how in a neighboring town, the Nazis forced everyone to reveal a Jew.  He was a Gentile, but his best friend Herschel was Jewish, and he had to point him out or else risk his family's life.  This experience haunted him for the rest of his days, and the grandfather ends up killing himself a few months after Jonathan returns to the U.S.  However he is more at peace after revealing his secret, and giving his grandson the strength and courage necessary to care for the family on his own, after he kicks out his deadbeat alcoholic dad. 

One fault of the story is that it can be confusing to follow all the characters and what their interrelationships are.  There are many switches in time, and new connections are revealed often.  Lista's character is confusing to the reader, and I had to reread some passages, although she was probably meant to be confusing since the characters didn't know what was happening either.  The dialogue requires careful reading.  It is quick, and put all in one paragraph with no speaker identity, and some of it is supposed to be Ukrainian and some in English.  Some of the connections between JSF and the Ukrainian characters seemed like too much of a coincidence as well, but I guess it is supposed to be a fictional story. 

Most of all, this is a work of art.  At times, there are scenes of plays, lists of recurring dreams, and an encyclopedia of every minute fact of the town of Trachimbrod, very similar to his other book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.  At times very sexual, and at times extremely hilarious, these light-hearted moments disappear toward the end, as the graphic examples of human nature are revealed.  Memory is a sixth sense that all the characters have to live with in the book.  There is also the theme of who is good and who is bad, and what makes it that way, and can a good person do bad things?

It is sad, like all the characters in the novel.  I am eager to rewatch the movie to see any differences, and I am also still eagerly awaiting Tree of Codes, which still has yet to ship.  Four and a half out of five stars.

The Unbearable Keithness of Being

Read from Sunday, January 30th to Thursday, February 3rd.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera.  What I love about books is the ability to be anyone at any time, and to experience the world as it was for those people.  I have recently been to the modern literary scene in France, the Communist regime in Romania, the northern woods of Norway, and Schultz's beautiful Poland.  Again I return to Eastern Europe, this time to Czechoslovakia, during the Prague Spring in 1968, when Moscow invaded to put down the uprising.  This book is the story of four people and their intimate relationships, set in the backdrop of an all-knowing society.  But it is a philosophical exploration of relationships, communication, self-assessment, a person's place in society, what they are willing to compromise, and why we act the way we do and why we stay with the people we are with.

Primarily, it is the story of Tomas and Tereza.  Tomas is a womanizing surgeon in Prague.  He meets Tereza, beds her as usual, but she sticks around.  She is attached to him, and they more or less fall in love and get married.  Tomas is not able to give up his extra-marital affairs, and that racks Tereza, although she is still not able to leave him.  After the 1968 uprising, Tomas and Tereza emigrate to Switzerland, but Tereza cannot handle being abroad, so she returns to Prague, and Tomas follows.  He loses his job as a surgeon because of an article he wrote, and Tereza is harassed at her job as a bartender by the secret police.  They both move to the country and live on a collective, and finally achieve happiness together, before they are tragically killed in a car accident.

It is also the story of Sabina and Franz.  Sabina was first one of Tomas' mistresses in Prague and Switzerland, but fell apart from one another when he moved back to be with Tereza.  Sabina was a painter, very independent, and hated Soviet realism.  She got involved with Franz, a married professor, who was very devoted to her.  However, he also needed to 'live in truth,' and he came clean to his wife about the affair.  This upset Sabina and she ran off to France and then the U.S.  Franz still tried to live up to Sabina's expectations, even though she was not there, by doing noble, liberal things.  He joined a group of doctors and intellectuals protesting in Cambodia, where he was killed by thugs. 

The overall question of the book is whether it is better to be light or heavy.  The conventional wisdom is that lightness is desirable, and heaviness is negative.  However it is not always the case.  If our lives are only lived once, argues Kundera, then our being, our place in the history of Earth, is incredibly light and insignificant.  Our decisions are rendered meaningless.  Heaviness is not always a burden.  'Es muss sein,' is a recurring line by Tomas, quoting Beethoven.  It means 'It must be.'  It is his duty and responsibility to be with Tereza and take care of her.  There is also the contradictions of love and sex.  Tomas consistently argues that sex is meaningless, it is just a way for him to explore the uniqueness of every woman.  He loves Tereza, although she constantly fears she will become just another body for him to boss around. 

In the end, after moving to the country, they are united by their love for their dog Karenin.  He is so full of joy because his life is cyclical, everyday he can enjoy the same routine as if it were new, while humans crave new things.  Karenin is sick with cancer, and it soon becomes clear he will die.  I will admit, these last few days for the dog may have jerked free a few tears from my eyes.

This is a complicated philosophical book, and my brief summary cannot do it complete justice.  I definitely recommend reading it, and I'm looking forward to renting the movie.  Four and a half out of five stars.