Finished Mann ...
... finally finished Buddenbrooks. Dreadful. Long and dreadful. Okay, there were some beautiful passages here and there, if it had been the first Mann book i had ever read i would probably hold out hope that another book of his might be great. The problem is, i read his short works first (including, of course, Death in Venice) and then The Magic Mountain. Loved them. ... and i can see his writing in the 3 or 4 books of his i have read since, but only in sections, in paragraphs, and the reading, as a whole, has been an ordeal. (Looking at my shelf ... the others would be: The Holy Sinner, Transposed Heads, Felix Krull, Doctor Faustus and Buddenbrooks. Faustus was the best of these, and maybe The Holy Sinner was also average.)
If anyone has Mann suggestions that might get me back to that first high, please let me know.
Meanwhile i have made that labor up to myself with a new Mauriac novel ... Woman of the Pharisees. At his best, Mauriac is not as good as Mann (at his best). But i enjoy the average Mauriac novel far more. "Therese" is one of my all time favorites. The Viper's Triangle is the only one that has let me down. From a critical standpoint ... Mauriac talks to much, which is a shame because he does not have to. His characters take care of their own characterizations, and the themes and motifs are pretty straight forward. Still he feels the need to tell you what the characters are too ... and if this is a pet peeve of yours you will probably dislike Mauriac. But the habit meerly makes me wrinkle my forehead and then i move on.
My pet peeves ... bad psychology (eg. D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover), proving points via literature (eg. C.S. Lewis - Screwtape), the author writing about the intellectual standpoints with whom they do not agree in such a way as to suggest that the intellectuals who hold those viewpoints really do not believe what they say (eg. DeLilo - White Noise) and stopping the story to explain the intellectual points just made (Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath, all Ayn Rand, Tolstoi - War and Peace). And OF COURSE ... text that does not have anything to do with the novel, play or short-fiction (Melville, Shakespeare, Mann - Buddenbrooks, many many others).
Okay ... i have a lot of pet peeves. I admit that. But i will also input that even Melville at his worst is better that contemporary "plastic" writing.
If anyone has Mann suggestions that might get me back to that first high, please let me know.
Meanwhile i have made that labor up to myself with a new Mauriac novel ... Woman of the Pharisees. At his best, Mauriac is not as good as Mann (at his best). But i enjoy the average Mauriac novel far more. "Therese" is one of my all time favorites. The Viper's Triangle is the only one that has let me down. From a critical standpoint ... Mauriac talks to much, which is a shame because he does not have to. His characters take care of their own characterizations, and the themes and motifs are pretty straight forward. Still he feels the need to tell you what the characters are too ... and if this is a pet peeve of yours you will probably dislike Mauriac. But the habit meerly makes me wrinkle my forehead and then i move on.
My pet peeves ... bad psychology (eg. D.H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover), proving points via literature (eg. C.S. Lewis - Screwtape), the author writing about the intellectual standpoints with whom they do not agree in such a way as to suggest that the intellectuals who hold those viewpoints really do not believe what they say (eg. DeLilo - White Noise) and stopping the story to explain the intellectual points just made (Steinbeck - The Grapes of Wrath, all Ayn Rand, Tolstoi - War and Peace). And OF COURSE ... text that does not have anything to do with the novel, play or short-fiction (Melville, Shakespeare, Mann - Buddenbrooks, many many others).
Okay ... i have a lot of pet peeves. I admit that. But i will also input that even Melville at his worst is better that contemporary "plastic" writing.
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 8:38 PM
6 Comments:
It's been a while since I read Buddenbrooks, but I actually thought it was okay. Mann is, as you have experienced, a writer of highs and lows: I hated The Holy Sinner and Felix Krull, thought Lotte in Weimar and Buddenbrooks were lacking but worth reading overall, and loved Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain. I quite like his short stories.
I've read the whole Therese series by Mauriac and was unimpressed. The literary territory he covers is such cliche: we've heard it all before, and much better, from nineteenth-century writers like Flaubert and Maupassant.
I agree with most of the pet peeves you hold, although I might disagree with your interpretation of the examples you give. Lawrence is a much, much better thinker than people give him credit for, although Lady Chatterly is by no means his best novel (see Women in Love, the best Anglophone work ever). I hate C.S. Lewis, he's just a didactic Christian without a truly religious bone in his body. DeLillo is more problematic, too, than you say here... White Noise is a good novel, but I think where it falters stems more from the hyperbolic nature of Jack's family background than his intellectual posturing. Four wives? Give me a break. Saul Bellow does it much better in Herzog, although that novel is not quite so cutting edge as DeLillo's in its engagement with technology.
Can't say I really understand your last point though. What is "text that does not have anything to do with the novel, play or short-fiction"?
By other text i mean too much description, or explaining how something works or how something is done (eg. hunting whale) ... mostly an issue in fantasy and sci-fi type writings where the author is showing off their world creation ability, but overly descriptive English novels fit much the same bill to me. Maybe The Decamaron has some of the same feel to me, much talk of garden paths and dinners that have little to do with the running themes ... but i give Baccacio a break due to the earliness of his time ... and Melville a little of a break too, i guess, do to his reader's reality (long New England winters).
Mauriac - It is the characters i love. I identify with them in a way i have not found in other authors. Flaubert is a better writer, but i simply hate Madame Bovary. There is no mixed emotions. There are very few literature characters toward who i am not ambivalent, Mauriac's characters interest me and yet my sympathy or hatred of them is ambiguous, both and neither. The only other author with similar characters for me is Somerset Maugham (especially The Razor's Edge and On Human Bondage), but Maughan's characters are an aesthetic ambiguity to me, not a moral one.
I can certainly see how one might disregard Mauriac. I think he merely strikes a personal interest of mine.
Lawrence - His short stories i remember liking (Rocking Horse Winner is his, yes?). Sons and Lovers was the only other novel i tried and it was better, but merely commonplace.
I have heard Ted Hughes described as the "heir" of Lawrence and i love Hughe's poetry ... so i hold out hope i have just not stumbled across the right text. I shall try Women in Love sometime.
Melville is definitely a classic example of the overblown text, but there are some other texts that, when I was much younger, thought were boring because they contained too much detail (mostly eighteenth and nineteenth-century English...). But when I came back to read them with a more sophisticated eye, I started to realize that in some cases this apparent rambling was not only interesting but crucial, Dickens and Fielding being great examples of this. It's not always the case, of course (I still would circumcize Moby-Dick to half its current size), but it seems to happen more and more as I go back.
I understand your dislike of Madame Bovary, but I think that's what Flaubert was partly going for. You're meant to hate these characters and their culture on the surface, but the more I consider that novel, the more mixed my feelings become. I think that modern readers are, in many cases, intrinsically poor readers of nineteenth-century fiction, and that this determines our tastes. Flaubert was far too complex a writer simply to write a "hate" novel: there is something about Emma Bovary and the bourgeois culture she represents that not only horrifies but fascinates him, like the rotting corpse in Baudelaire's famous poem. If you only see Flaubert's horror without the fascination, then of course you will hate the novel.
A further problem is that people only read Flaubert's most famous works (Mme Bovary, "A Simple Heart") without realizing that they are not his best. Sentimental Education is much, much better, and ranks alongside the coming of age stories that characterize the very pinnacle of nineteenth-century literature. It's not quite Stendhal or Balzac, but it's in the ballpark. And then there's the wonderful Bouvard and Pecuchet, which despite its flaws (Flaubert died before it was completed)nonetheless shows a satiric skill that approaches Voltaire.
It's from that perspective that I can't really admire Mauriac. Therese, for example, seems like a rerun of Une Vie (A Woman's Life) by Maupassant - more engaging, but not very much less whiny.
I read Sons and Lovers when I was a teenager and was surprised to like it, although like you I found it commonplace. The thing about reading Lawrence is that he has a series of textual symbols that must be understood in order to make full sense of his work. He has very strong ideas about idealism and vitality, and he uses such symbols as the sun and the moon, for example, in quite specific ways to signify this. Reading Lawrence is rather like reading Nietzsche: you seem to grasp something when you read him without understanding his symbols, but one you do grasp his schema you realize the great error of that first reading. It wasn't until I started reading the short stories in The Prussian Officer collection that I began to understand what was going on. I went back and read his early fiction, and suddenly Sons and Lovers (which is his first very good (but not quite yet great) novel) gained a richness that I had completely failed to see the first time. The Rainbow is the same way, although I wouldn't recommend it so soon after Buddenbrooks, even though it is considered the prequel to Women in Love. You can read Women in Love without reading The Rainbow, however.
Ted Hughes is only a rather indirect heir of Lawrence - I am sure that claim was made in regard to his collection "Crow". Instead, I see the later works of Aldous Huxley as taking up this tradition in English thought. Huxley starts as a depressed and cynical humanist and ends his career on a note of triumphant vitalism. In particular, read The Genius and the Goddess - it's short (about 100 pages) and it intertwines science and philosophy and literature in a way that I'm sure would appeal to your tastes (or that you would detest, sometimes it's hard to tell).
Let me rephrase that. I love the book "Madame Bovary", i hate the character. I have also read Sentimental Education and B&P (heh heh ... i feel like them all the time). I read Balzac's Lost Illusions before Snetimental Education and i seem to conflate the two a lot. Most of the scenes i really like seem to be Balzac's though.
I love being aware of why certain books have the affect of me that they do ... Madame Bovary is a good case in point. It wasn't what she did, action wise ... it was that she could have destroyed the loose ends before offing herself and let her husband live in peace, but she did not, and eventually he came to know when he needed not to. I find it interesting that that twist made me hate her so.
This was fresh on my mind because the way Mauriac's character handled similar letters in "Woman of the Pharisees", and her thoughts and justifications about that.
Thanks for the directions. I will certainly hit some of those spots. The only Maupassant i have read is Bel Ami and i frankly don't remember too much about it ... a similar plot line to Sentimental Education and Lost Illusions.
Yeah, the nineteenth century is rife with great coming of age novels. The Red and the Black (Stendhal) and Lost Illusions (Balzac) both make it into my top ten novels of all time. The sequel to Lost Illusions, A Harlot High and Low, is almost as good.
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