Nonsuch Book

excellent women by barbara pym

Excellent women. Unseen by many, especially men. Useful to many unencumbered as they are by families or love lives of their own. The rock of the church and less practical friends and acquaintances. The last of a dying breed of gentlewomen whose former societal value is quickly vanishing in a 1950s postwar culture where women occupy a different place in society. This could so easily have been a sad little book where the women of the title recede ever further into the background, but what I found was just the opposite. Mildred Lathbury, clergyman's daughter and spinster albeit only in her thirties, emerges quietly from unseen and pitiable to a far more perceptive analyst of those around her than those presumed to have mastered the paths to social success.

There are many rich examples of this gradual reveal of both understanding of a world to which Mildred does not belong and a reluctance to attempt to attach herself to anything beyond the limited life she has chosen to accept. But my favorite illustrations of these points occurs through the descriptions of Mildred's clothing especially in relation to the clothing of her more socially successful peers. When she meets her glamourous new neighbor, Mrs. Napier, Mildred judges a potential friendship improbable based upon appearance alone.

"We were, superficially at any rate, a very unlikely pair to become friendly. She was fair-haired and pretty, gaily dressed in corduroy trousers and a bright jersey, while I, mousy and rather plain anyway, drew attention to these qualities with my shapeless overall and old fawn skirt."

Mildred lives among women who attire themselves as she does, like her old school mate, Dora, and her friend, Winifred, the sister of the local clergyman who keeps house for her brother.

"She was dressed, as usual, in an odd assortment of clothes, most of which had belonged to other people. It was well known that Winifred got most of her wardrobe from the garments sent to the parish jumble sales, for such money as she had was never spent on herself but on Good - one could almost say Lost - Causes, in which she was an unselfish and tireless worker."

But there is always an awareness in Mildred that whomever she is, she is unique and not merely one of the many excellent women.

"I had to agree that it was lovely material, but the dress was so completely Lady Farmer that I should have hated to wear it myself and swamp whatever individuality I possess."

Contentment at being a mere observer of life lessens though as her infatuation with the handsome Rocky Napier grows.

"Then I went back to my flat and collected a great deal of washing to do. It was depressing the way the same old things turned up every week. Just the kind of underclothes a person like me might wear, I thought dejectedly, so there is no need to describe them."

When her old friend Dora comes for a visit, she notices that Mildred looks different.

"I suppose I had taken to using a little more make-up, my hair was more carefully arranged, my clothes a little less drab. I was hardly honest enough to admit even to myself that meeting the Napiers had made this difference and I certainly did not admit it to Dora."

This is immediately followed up by a shopping excursion during which Dora and Mildred become annoyed with one another when Dora insists on buying an ill-fitting dress in an unbecoming color simply because brown is a color that she has always worn. Mildred's suggestion of an everyday dress in green instead is met with a reaction of disbelief and an inquiry into whether or not Mildred has started reading popular fashion magazines. This visit concludes with Mildred's observations that her friend's undergarments are even drearier than hers, and then Mildred dreads her own reflection in the mirror as she heads to the rest room with her friend before she departs.

By novel's end, Mildred has found a comfortable place between the excellent women and her own conception of self. While acknowledging her own limitations, there are choices in her future over which she has control.

"My normal appearance is very ordinary and my clothes rather uninteresting, but the new dress I had bought showed an attempt, perhaps misguided, to make myself look different."

So she wears this black dress to meet a possible future, to meld what appears a sentence of excellent womanhood in post World War II culture with a reinterpretation of a limited life. This is an amusing and insightful novel charged with the keen observations of the quiet.

This novel was read for Pym Reading Week, in celebration of the author's 100th birthday.

jane and prudence by barbara pym

Jane Cleveland and Prudence Bates are unlikely friends. Jane is firmly ensconced in the responsibilities of middle age as mother to a daughter preparing for university and muddling through her duties as a vicar's wife. The considerably younger Prudence, who was once taught by Jane at Oxford, fumbles through unfortunate romantic attachments to the extent that Jane feels compelled to play matchmaker.

At first glance, this seems to be pretty tame stuff, a novel that neatly constructs contrasts between the principal characters,

"Fabian liked Jane really – but it was an insult, an outrage almost, how unconscious she was of his charm, how little effort she made with her clothes – galoshes, old mackintosh, shapeless hat, the strap of her sandal pinned with a safety pin."

"Prudence looks lovely this evening, thought Jane, like somebody in a woman's magazine, carefully 'groomed,' and wearing a red dress that sets off her pale skin and dark hair."

the traditional duties of women and a rapidly changing postwar culture in which women reimagined the relationship between the sexes,

“Oh, but it was splendid the things women were doing for men all the time, thought Jane. Making them feel, perhaps sometimes by no more than a casual glance, that they were loved and admired and desired when they were worthy of none of these things - enabling them to preen themselves and puff out their plumage like birds and bask in the sunshine of love, real or imagined, it didn't matter which.”

city and country stereotypes,

“Prudence's flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.”

'Well, I expect it will be better than the suburbs,' said Jane. 'People will be less narrow and complacent.'

the lovely and less than lovely,

“But of course, she remembered, that was why women were so wonderful; it was their love and imagination that transformed these unremarkable beings. For most men, when one came to think of it, were undistinguished to look at, if not positively ugly. Fabian was an exception, and perhaps love affairs with handsome men tended to be less stable because so much less sympathy and imagination were needed on the woman's part?”

 “Jane felt that he would write from the depths of a wretchedness that would not necessarily be insincere because its outward signs were so theatrical. Presumably attractive men and probably woman too must always be suffering in this way; they must so often have to reject and cast aside love, and perhaps even practice did not always make them ruthless and cold-blooded enough to do it without feeling any qualms.”

and the married and the unmarried.

“Prue hadn't really been in love with Fabian. Indeed, it was obvious that at times she found him both boring and irritating. But wasn't that what so many marriages were - finding a person boring and irritating and yet loving him? Who could imagine a man who was never boring, or irritating?”

But the real impact of the novel comes from its humor, the deft but unflinching touch with which Pym illustrates that the greatest contrast that occupies all of these quirky characters is the divide between what one imagined for oneself in life and what life actually yielded. Neither beauty nor intelligence can subvert the ways in which we protect ourselves from a complete self-knowledge. This is not tragic. In the pages of Pym, it simply is. Wonderfully funny and insightful.

Wondering about other Pym works? Join the conversation during Pym Reading Week.

barbara pym reading week

Ideas about easing my way back into regular posting present themselves from time to time but never seem to take hold the way I intended. But hope springs eternal and the Pym love of above event sponsor, Thomas, and his Twitter partner in sly humor, JoAnn, have inspired me to take part. JoAnn sent me my first Pym title, Jane and Prudence, last year, and I recently read and loved it. Then at a book sale last month, Thomas encouraged me to purchase a copy of Crampton Hodnet. And now a copy of Excellent Women has found its way into my hands. So it shall be those three titles for me for the week of June 1-8.

In order to avoid the now customary dissolution of my posting plans, I have already pre-scheduled the Jane and Prudence thoughts. Now to make a plan for the others.... If you would like to make a reading plan of your own for the week, if you are a closet Anglophile for whom the words "vicar," "wry," and "repressed" drip from your tongue like honey, then check out the details here and here. The discussion, led by #PymPimps or #Pymps promises to be lively.

the estrogen collection

Last weekend, Teresa and Thomas and I went to a used book sale at a local girl's school. Annual event. Very large. Jam packed with tables of books that Thomas contended made him start menstruating. But at the end of the sale, the books are all so cheap that one could not help but pick things up just for the fun of it. There is nothing in the stack above that sets my heart aflutter. But for $15.90 I was more than happy to take them home. The haul and the justifications:

• Innocence by Penelope Fitzgerald - Only one of her books that I have not read. Makes me believe that one is never too old to pitch it all in to just write.
• Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - It's Stella Gibbons. I actually own a copy of this one. But not this edition.
• Making Things Better by Anita Brookner - Thomas is a Brookner enthusiast extraordinaire. I liked the one novel I read by her even though I suspect that "scary" might be the word to describe this author in real life. Oops. I meant "chain-smoking scary." 
• Tigers Are Better-Looking and Sleep It Off Lady by Jean Rhys - I have only read The Wide Sargasso Sea by Rhys. Appreciated the writing more than the plot. But they were a dollar each.
• The Leopard by Guiseppe Di Lampedusa - Have actually meant to read this for a long time. And Teresa reminded me that this is the next read for Slaves of Golconda.
• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke - Love, love this book. Psyched for the upcoming BBC series. Own the black covered edition but a friend made off with my red cover. A replacement was required.
• Still Life by A.S. Byatt - Same story as the Fitzgerald one above.
• The Night Watch by Sarah Waters - Teresa practically pushed it in my bag.
• Crampton Hodnet by Barbara Pym - Just recently read my first Pym novel and was mightily entertained by it. I would read another Pym in hopes of more clothing and food descriptions alone.
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers - Don't know. Peer pressure from the bookish all around. And I think that I saw someone else eyeing it which made it more attractive.
• Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor - Huge fans of her short stories. We have the same birthday. I appreciate her weirdness.
• A Frolic of His Own by William Gaddis - I wanted to shake up the hormonal composition of the bag.

 

Ironically enough, given his earlier remarks, my most estrogen-infused acquisitions of the day came from Thomas over drinks after the sale. The titles you see above. He is a truly generous soul.

Recommendations from the haul?

on cinderella

The recent Maria Tatar translations of the classic tales of the Brothers Grimm in The Grimm Reader and Phillip Pullman's artful retellings of the same in Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm have occupied me on and off since the start of the year. It all started as a simple idea - I would read each story first in Tatar's translation and then in Pullman's version. Just for the enjoyment of comparison. Which in theory would have been easy fun, but Pullman complicated the whole thing for me with his commentary for each story that tracks the historical evolution of the story, pointing the way to many other versions and other texts about fairy tales.

The temptation of this commentary proved too great for me, and my reading went off in many directions, nowhere more discursive than when it came to Cinderella. One of my favorite innovations Pullman made to the Cinderella tale was the dresses of different colors, an idea he pulled from what he cites as to his mind as "the best Cinderella of all" - "Mossycoat." Then, of course, I had to reread the Charles Perrault version that brings us the pumpkin and the glass slippers and a real fairy godmother in lieu of a hazel tree and a sweetness and charm that only arrived at sappy many years later in the hands of a famed animator. And there were many more: "Grattula-Beddattula" as retold by Italo Calvino in Italian Folktales; "Ashpitel" edited by Katharine M. Briggs in A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language; and finally the many offerings in Cinderella Tales From Around the World by Marian Roalfe Cox. And I am still planning on acquiring a copy of The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim for many reasons but in this context to read about his ideas about the troubles of sibling rivalry coming to a head with sexual maturity.

All of this reading was beautifully informed by reading Tatar's translation and Pullman's retelling first though. The reminders that the voice of Grimm was often a brutal one where a father does not die but stands by as his daughter is mistreated, eyes are pecked out by birds in punishment for misdeeds, outward appearance is not always reflective of inner qualities, and the desperate gruesomely self-mutilate upon instructions from their mother. Not a rags to riches story but a tale of the role of mothers as girlhood disappears into womanhood. This is really the best type of reading. A path, a hunt. What Aschenputtel's story becomes as her name and location and era changes.

(The illustration above was found at artMag. This is one of the unfinished drawings made by renowned illustrator Arthur Rackham for Cinderella.)

the happy life. the search for contentment in the modern world ;-) by david malouf

The seeming cultural imperative of happiness. The draw to it or a creation of it as strong in westernized culture as the draw to extroversion. The discussion of happiness, one would assume a preoccupation as old as man, feels even more present in recent years. It has become a popular "project." It has become frequently linked to our corporeal existence and all our accoutrement - green living and feeding your body well will bring you happiness as will cleaning your closet. The removal of physical clutter will apparently reveal much of what is required for spiritual or psychic equilibrium.

I poke fun at the self-help sector of the happiness trade, and yet I find myself peeking in these books and magazines and whatnot at the library and bookstore. Hoping for something more than I think I will find there. Because we all want to be happy, don't we? And wouldn't it all be so much easier if happiness were somehow quantifiable and not something with which to wrestle indefinitely? So when a copy of David Malouf's collected essays on the subject came through my mail slot from the publisher a little while back, I was pleased. They may have put an emoticon on the smart man's book cover, but I expected more from this than the material available to me in the Target book section breeze-through during a Sunday afternoon quest for cleaning products. And I was justified in my expectations.

These five linked essays, easily read in an afternoon, ask "what exactly are we looking for when we chase happiness?" Widespread poverty, illness, and famine do not threaten us as they have in the past. Yet so few are fulfilled. A desire for immediate gratification prompts frenetic quests for what we term happiness. Is happiness the same thing as contentment? Why do we have such outrageous stress levels? Malouf outlines our relationship with happiness through history from creation myths through Jefferson's assertion that the "pursuit of happiness" as a right and finally landing at an examination of how the increasingly impersonal nature of contemporary life leaves many a bit unhinged.

The premise of these pieces is deceptively simple, and some could say lacking the depth that the framing ideas promise. But I found this collection extremely pleasing. The beginning of thoughts, of a conversation, and lovely in its erudite simplicity. 

From The Happy Life:

“Fiction, with its preference for what is small and might elsewhere seem irrelevant; its facility for smuggling us into another skin and allowing us to live a new life there; its painstaking devotion to what without it might go unnoticed and unseen; its respect for contingency, and the unlikely and odd; its willingness to expose itself to moments of low, almost animal being and make them nobly illuminating, can deliver truths we might not otherwise stumble on.”

"Jeremy Bentham's proposition in An Introduction to the Principles of Moral Legislation (1789) - "the greatest happiness for the greatest number" - has become essential to any serious political platform."

"What the classical schools offered their adherents was the removal from their lives of the uncontrolled, their vulnerability to what was "external" - external, that is, to the Self: dependency on others, fear of Fate or the Gods, fear of death. Happiness lay in self-containment, self-sufficiency. The one thing that none of the schools doubted was the importance of the Self as the purest agency of being and its need to be protected from the distractions, the temptations and the dispersive busyness of things."

"So long as we are driven by the need to make up for our needs; by the restless sense that we are not yet fully assured of our place in the world and our hold on its swarming phenomenal so long as there is more to be discovered and made, more to grap for and make real, we musy go on inventing ourselves."

One of the most striking features of twenty-first century living, in what we think of as our part of the world, is the return of the body as our most immediate, and in some cases our only, assurance of presence, of the rich and crowded and actively happening world-we-are-in."

"Happiness is singular; each case speaks only for itself. It is also subjective. It belongs to the world of what is felt, what cannot be presented or numbered on a scale because it cannot be seen."

leaving everything most loved by jacqueline winspear

The latest installment of the Maisie Dobbs series, Leaving Everything Most Loved, will be released tomorrow, and it represents a turning point in the series. One that might make longtime fans a little apprehensive about where the series is headed. One that also is sure to entertain those same enthusiasts with the dramatic course of action that the protagonist chooses. Many read Maisie for the slow, thoughtful and deliberate way she navigates the disturbing memories she carries from the first world war, and for the way she respects the fabric of societal norms while still walking an unorthodox occupational path. She is comfortable inhabiting and interacting with a sense of "otherness." Will she choose the more conventional life or push that exploration of the "other" to another level?

While I enjoyed the last few novels in the series, I felt like the character of Maisie was caught in stasis, unable or unwilling to make difficult personal decisions for her own health and happiness and distracting herself with the demands of her job. The mystery portions were satisfying enough but the personal aspects began to repeat themselves. Can she resolve her personal difficulties? Winspear makes it very clear from the title and the quotes that introduce the newest book that a big shift is coming :

You shall leave everything loved most dearly, and this is the shaft of which the bow of exile shoots first. You shall prove how salt is the taste of another man's bread and how hard is the way up and down another man's stairs. - Dante, Paradiso

All the people like us are We, and everyone else is They. - Rudyard Kipling, "We and They"

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. - Beryl Markham, West With the Night

The year is now 1933 and the body of an Indian woman is retrieved from the water of a South London canal. Her brother arrives from India some weeks later, and is disturbed to find that Scotland Yard has done so little to solve the mystery of his sister's death. Chagrined, the inspector recommends Maisie to assist the brother in finding his sister's killer. When a friend of Usha's, the deceased, also shows up dead, before Maisie has had a chance to question her, the links to another case begin to draw an elaborate web that forces Maisie's hand in looking at her love life and her career path as she seeks justice for a woman who was invisible to some in society.

You may come away from this book wondering what the conclusion means for the series. It would be unfair to discuss this in detail, but a lot of the structure of the series is dismantled both literally and figuratively by the end. This installment is the movement, the beginning of resolution that I have been looking for in the slower pacing of the last few books. Highly readable for fans and a book that might draw back some to the series who gave up on it a while back.

Visit links at TLC Book Tours this week to read about this and other books in the series.

book lust: other people's books

Readers tend to judge others by the books on their shelves. And this is a socially acceptable practice. Don't go through their drawers or their medicine cabinet or their mail, but an even more pronounced form of voyeurism, mentally inventorying every last title in their homes or offices, is just fine. And don't tell me you don't make judgements based upon what you see. That you haven't identified a potential friend or lover by seeing what they read.

A email from the Strand bookstore arrived in my inbox this week, offering a link to an author's bookshelf. Karen Russell. I greatly enjoy her quirkiness and wanted to see what she reads. So I clicked through immediately and found many books I already own and enjoyed plus a few new things to lust after.

 And clicked away from the page feeling more excitement about reading her newest book over my upcoming break. Because I have seen her shelves. 

wordy diversions

At school, we are frequently looking for ways to enhance student vocabularies, and occasionally looking for diverting activities that pose as rewards but still serve the objectives of the learning day. And very often, the adults get caught up in the fun of learning as well. As it should be.

There are more than a few adults at our school who will willingly play Scrabble with kids. And more than a few that will log on side by side with students to Free Rice where correctly identifying the meaning of words will help to end world hunger. For each correct response, 10 grains of rice will be donated to United Nations humanitarian efforts to feed the needy globally. And the best part? It is adaptive meaning that when you answer a question correctly, the game moves you up a level. Or vice versa. You see your level at the bottom of your screen. Also, if you answer incorrectly, the correct response is supplied to you, and the same question will reappear a few turns later.

Another engaging but deceptively simple word game is Knoword. You play against the clock for points, and you can keep track of your progress should you choose to register and login. The first letter of a word appears in a box with a dictionary definition beneath. You type the word in and it progresses you along to the next question if you are correct. While not adaptive like Free Rice, you will have moments when you slap yourself in the head for not connecting to so simple an answer. An amusing reminder that intuitive approaches to language are all around. One senses what a word means, can decipher it contextually, but if called upon to explicitly state a definition... Well, that may be harder than foreseen.

Fun distractions. Or fun learning. Either way.

mr. penumbra's 24-hour bookstore by robin sloan

LOST IN THE SHADOWS of the shelves, I almost fall off the ladder. I am exactly halfway up. The floor of the bookstore is far below me, the surface of a planet I’ve left behind. The tops of the shelves loom high above, and it’s dark up there—the books are packed in close, and they don’t let any light through. The air might be thinner, too. I think I see a bat.

I am holding on for dear life, one hand on the ladder, the other on the lip of a shelf, fingers pressed white. My eyes trace a line above my knuckles, searching the spines—and there, I spot it. The book I’m looking for.

But let me back up.

A fun and enticing way to begin a book. Like Isabella, I received this one for a Christmas gift, and it proved the playful, goofy, geek-indulgent treat I needed for holiday reading. Where the Force is occasionally channelled, the role playing games of awkward adolescence inform our adult choices, and intelligent forces from both sides of the so-called digital divide alternately spar and join forces over the value of knowledge versus the joy of the quest to acquire it. And the book glows in the dark. But let me back up.

Clay is a young, unemployed web designer who takes a job at a 24-hour bookstore as a matter of financial necessity. The bookstore described above where no one seems to shop but a few select eccentrics arrive periodically to check out books stored at the top of the store, books that Clay has been instructed not to read. But Clay works the night shift at a store where no one shops so of course curiosity gets the better of him and he discovers that the texts in question are all written in code. His roommate who works at Industrial Light and Magic, his childhood best friend who has grown from chubby geek to buff and wealthy geek thanks to the boob-simulation software he has developed, and his genius potential girlfriend from Google all work to decipher the books. When the store owner, Mr. Penumbra, disappears, the team tracks him to New York and the headquarters of a secret society known as the Unbroken Spine. So who will crack this code first? The Luddites (who are not so technologically deficient after all) or the young and tech savvy?

It would be so easy to pick this apart if it were not for the fact that Sloan mocks his own material in a funny and infectious way, and his obvious regard for both tech and print mirrors the feelings of many of us closet geeks. Geeks who he celebrates unabashedly. Do yourself a favor and overlook the flaws. Irresistible quick read.