Elena Ferrante – My Brilliant Friend, Nov 19, 2021

 

My Brilliant Friend – first edition of the English translation, 2012, by Europa Editions

“Elena Ferrante may be the best contemporary novelist you have never heard of,” said The Economist in a review one year after Europa Editions brought out the English translation of L‘amica geniale as My Brilliant Friend.  In the years following 2012 three other novels were published that follow the two friends as they grow up – The Story of a New Name (2013), Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (2014), and The Story of the Lost Child (2015). The four novels constitute the Neapolitan Novels quartet by Elena Ferrante. The first two books in the series have been adapted into an HBO television series entitled My Brilliant Friend.

The HBO Series starring Gaia Girace as Lila and Margarita Mazzuco as Lenù

Elena Ferrante, the author, has maintained a studied anonymity, although she is willing to answer questions by e-mail, via her publisher. Her translator into English, Ann Goldstein, an editor at The New Yorker, did not have access to her directly; the film directors who transferred her novels to the screen had only the most fleeting help from her. Her attitude is summed up in a comment she made: “I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.”

A collection of essays, letters and interviews by Elena Ferrante

In a collection of essays, letters and interviews called Frantumaglia (meaning ‘fragments’) the author answers questions her readers have asked her. She speaks of the joys, the hardships, and the anxieties of those who tell a story. We learn about the cities in which she has lived. Childhood, she says, is a warehouse for a thousand suggestions and fantasies. She also deals with motherhood and feminism. 

Elisa Del Genio (Lenù) and Ludovica Nasti (Lila) in the HBO series Season 1

It was James Wood in a review in The New Yorker in 2013 who brought to the attention of the English-speaking world the writing of Elena Ferrante. He reviewed the four novels available in English at the time, Troubling Love, Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and My Brilliant Friend. Wood noted that the “the material that the early novels visit and revisit is intimate and often shockingly candid: child abuse, divorce, motherhood, wanting and not wanting children, the tedium of sex, the repulsions of the body, the narrator’s desperate struggle to retain a cohesive identity within a traditional marriage and amid the burdens of child rearing.” 

For Ferrante’s heroines, life is a conundrum of attachment and detachment. Illustration by Annette Marnat in The New Yorker

Poetry Session – Oct 29, 2021

Shelley claimed poets were “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Their moral influence on politics is exemplified by the spoken words which struck the world’s conscience when a young Sudanese-American poet was invited to tell the gathered attendees of COP26 in Glasgow what was happening as a result of climate change to the voiceless people of the world.

Emtithal Mahmoud shooting her poem about the devastating impact of climate change – ‘Earth began to purge us too’

We are treated at every poetry session to a similar experience as our readers declaim their selections. The written and the spoken words inspire us and we return energised to our lives, grateful for a hour or two of the human spirit bursting forth in word and song (yes, we listened to Leonard Cohen, that twin of Bob Dylan).

Two of our readers are leaving the group for personal reasons. We shall keep in touch directly; and indirectly through this blog. On occasion we have had past members join us for particular sessions.

The next meeting will be to read Elena Ferrante’s novel, My Brilliant Friend, on Nov 19 via Zoom. For those who have purchased the 4-novel Kindle edition, MBF, the first novel, ends at Chapter 62 with the sentence: “It was the pair she had made with Rino, making and unmaking them for months, ruining her hands.”

Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca, Sep 21, 2021

Daphne du Maurier – Rebecca, first edition 1938

Many remembered reading this novel in their teens or early twenties while at college. Daphne du Maurier was a best-selling novelist and her novels, often dark and brooding, with  hints of romance, attracted a wide readership.  Today Rebecca would be classified as a Gothic novel or a psychological thriller.

Three women figure prominently in the novel. The narrator herself who remains unnamed, Maxim de Winter’s deceased first wife Rebecca who dominates the novel, and the housekeeper, Mrs Danvers, who arranges the affairs of the estate of Maxim de Winter, Manderley. The novel can be seen as the journey of the second Mrs. de Winter from a hesitant and insecure naïf, kept in thrall by the domineering presence of Mrs. Danvers, to the confident mistress who rescues Maxim de Winter from his pathetic guilt-ridden state. 

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again,” is the famous opening line. The word ‘dreamt’ makes the reader throb with expectation, just as ‘Manderley’ with its hint of Mandalay makes one think of a mysterious locale. The reader is drawn into the story from the very beginning although it is not very exciting to read about the narrator’s life at first as a young handmaid and companion to an older woman on her travels.

The rescue from that life is almost a non-starter; Maxim de Winter says: “Instead of being companion to Mrs Van Hopper you become mine, and your duties will be almost exactly the same.” It does not exhilarate to be requisitioned as a wife into a role analogous to that of a travelling companion. Mrs Van Hopper's prediction of calamity is about to come true, although the narrator believes she is ‘dreadfully’ in love.

We learn how important it was to keep up appearances in the world in which Maxim de Winter moved. Maxim de Winter contributes nothing to making his new wife gain her rightful stature at Manderley, weighed down as he is with his own guilt. But it is the narrator’s ability to surmount that guilt and enable Maxim de Winter to survive, that gains her the freedom that she should have had from the beginning. The destruction of Manderley at the end is her final ascendancy. Women can rejoice now that Daphne du Maurier was a feminist, despite her reputation as a romance novelist. 

Romantic Poets Session – Aug 27, 2021

Ten Famous Poets of the Romantic Movement

The great age of Romantic Poetry was from the middle of  the eighteenth until the early nineteenth century. The big six who exemplified the age were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, and Blake. 

This was the period when the lofty poetic diction of the Augustan Age was largely replaced by straightforward language. A major influence was the program set forward in the Lyrical Ballads authored jointly by WilliamWordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We could summarise the great Romantic qualities as an enduring sense of wonder, a great love of beauty, marked melancholia, and a keen sensibility, with the rich splendour of Imagination enfolding poetic expression. The theme of themes was Nature.

Nature offered not only beauty, but solace in its contemplation and an invitation to the poet to find significance even it its trifling manifestations. Many poets discovered a religious meaning too in Nature.

Love of liberty and hatred of tyranny flows in the poetry of the Romantic poets. They cherished individual freedom as a condition of romanticism. Their voices  championed the cause of liberty domestically and in other lands.

Running through their themes is a philosophical notion that the poet should live plainly, associate with people, and constantly keep in mind the high moral purpose of their writings.

The expressions of human love are varied. In Keats, love is a sensuous, earthly passion and his expressions invoke an ardour missing in such poets as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Coleridge and Wordsworth are more for spiritual bliss.

Intense subjectivity and melancholy, are characteristics of romanticism, and no poet in the Romantic era escapes it. Though Wordsworth’s definition of poetry is often quoted (“emotion recollected in tranquility“), it hardly qualifies the poetry you find in much of Keats‘ love sonnets, for example, To Fanny:

O! let me have thee whole,—all—all—be mine! 

That shape, that fairness, that sweet minor zest 

Of love, your kiss,—those hands, those eyes divine, 

That warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breast,

Love and death are closely associated in the minds of the Romantic poets.

Perhaps after Nature the chief source of inspiration for the Romantic poets was their belief in the creative powers of the Imagination. Some like Blake founded whole imaginative universes, peopled by personages of mythical names. Others like Coleridge could enter dream-like states of bliss and describe their fancies in such alluring language that readers would be mesmerised and suspend their own reality so as to partake in what the poet had on offer, which was far more brilliant. Keats‘ imagination was no less sumptuous and inspiring, as may be seen in such a lovely poem as Ode on a Grecian Urn. But even in a lesser poem, On Leaving Some Friends At An Early Hour you can hear the note:

Pink robes, and wavy hair, and diamond jar,

And half-discover’d wings, and glances keen.

The while let music wander round my ears,

And as it reaches each delicious ending,

Let me write down a line of glorious tone,

Some poets of the same era writing in other countries are also gathered under the same umbrella, e.g. Edgar Allan Poe and Pushkin.  There are also a number of other poets in England and Scotland considered to be in this category, including women poets. For this wider collection one may read the Wiki entry on Romantic poetry. The British Library has an essay by Stephanie Forward on the key ideas and influences of The Romantics. There is a more varied collection of essays on Romanticism from the British Library.

Joyce Cary – The Horse's Mouth, July 30, 2021

 First Edition, 1944

We have a tradition of reading books filled with rollicking fun every so often. Joyce Cary, who started out to make a career in art before he switched to writing, has left this portrait of an artist as a blithe spirit making his way through London untroubled by the norms of art or society.

He is committed to his vision of art and pursues it relentlessly, often ending in absurd situations, dogged by ill-luck and the police. Reduced from the renown of a moderately well-known artist who was collected by the famous, he is now in penury, having to cadge a few shillings to buy paints. A fresh canvas is now a luxury and he has to resort to a palimpsest, effacing an old painting to cover it anew with his latest vision.

Yet his response to neglect is wit: 

Walls have been my salvation.... Walls and losing my teeth young, which prevented me from biting bus conductors and other idealists.

Joyce Cary once wrote about the character he created: “Jimson, as an original artist, is always going over the top ... and knows that he will probably get nothing for his pains and enterprise but a bee-swarm of bullets, death in frustration, and an unmarked grave. He makes a joke of life because he dare not take it seriously.”

For all his waywardness Gulley Jimson has his epiphanies. Quotes and comments on a dozen poems from William Blake, who was the visionary print-maker and poet of the Romantic Poets era, dot the text. Blake is a companion wanderer of Jimson through the novel.  There are lines from an early lyric, Infant Joy, and quotes from the late Prophetic Books, Milton and Jerusalem. Some are short like the phrase the “starry wheels”(from Jerusalem); there are more than thirty taken from Visions of the Daughters of Albion and forty-eight dispersed lines from Milton, and twenty-six stanzas of The Mental Traveller. (See https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780427 Joyce Cary's Blake: The intertextuality of The Horse's Mouth by Annette Shandler Levitt). Levitt maintains that  “One could describe  The Horse's Mouth as a mosaic of richly varied tesserae representing the interlocking worlds of Gulley Jimson and William Blake.”

It is never resolved whether Gulley Jimson was a great artist unappreciated in his time like a van Gogh, or a footnote in the history fo English art. It does not matter, for when we collide with the sheer force of will and creative frenzy of Jimson we are wholly swept up by the mad urgency of his impulses and imagine we are in the presence of the creative act. That is Joyce Cary's art. 

Jimson‘s mind is a restless cauldron of painterly images:

An evening by Randipole Billy. Green lily sky, orange flames over the West. Long flat clouds like copper angels with brass hair floating on the curls of the fire. River mint green and blood orange. Old man lying along the water with a green beard, one arm under head, face twisted up—vision of Thames among the pot-houses. I could use that, I thought—that blunt round shape like a copper St. Paul’s with a squeeze in the middle—like a teat with a long end.

... 

I had a good view … of the sky, through the top of the window, and the sky was like a cinema film gone mad. Great whirling heads and arms and noses, naked legs and trousered bottoms, guns, swords and top hats, rushing past all night. Sometimes you saw a lovely lady in a pose plastique, but before you could wink she had swelled out like a balloon, lost her leg or her head, and turned into an ammunition wagon galloping over the corpses. 

As Jack Stewart in his study of five authors, Colour, Space and Creativity, notes: “For Gulley Jimson, the creative process is a life-affirming ritual and if he does not have paints and brushes handy, he pursues it in words. Through the artist's reflections of the Thames Embankment, Joyce Cary dramatises painterly ways of seeing the world.”

Jimson has a unique response to the scrapes he gets into. A street vendor thumps him while Jimson is trying to sell a few cards. “Then he kicked me up and kicked me down; kicked me in the guts and kicked me on the jaw; kicked me into the road and danced on me three or four times. His feet moved so fast one couldn’t see them.” When Jimson totes up the damage it is extensive: “When they put me to bed they found I had a broken nose, a broken arm, a broken collar bone, four broken ribs, three broken fingers, three or  or four square yards of serious contusions and a double rupture.” But his reaction is summed up by this soliloquy:

I was so angry that I might have done myself a serious injury, if I hadn’t said to myself, Hold on, Gulley. Don’t lose your presence of imagination. Wash out that blackguard till you’re well again and get a new pair of boots. With nails in them. Forgive and forget. Till you have him set. Remember that he had a certain amount of excuse for his actions. Give him his due, but not till you are ready with a crowbar. Don’t get spiteful. Keep cool. It’s the only way to handle a snake like that.

Jimson is always beginning – “It's a new world with every heartbeat,” he remarks. It does not seem to matter that the city planners have decided to raze the building on whose walls he has thrown up a new masterpiece of a fresco (The Creation). His enthusiasm cannot be contained even as doom closes in, for he is sure something great will emerge on the next attempt. Even as the author is never defeated by a blank page, the artist who looks on a blank canvas will only see visions rising up.

Poetry Session – June 25, 2021

For this poetry session Joe initiated the Zoom session from Arlington, MA, proof that Zoom no distinction makes of geography, so long as the clients are connected to the Internet.

Devika remarked that KumKum looked very relaxed – it makes such a huge difference not having to run a household.

Joe & KumKum

J&K used to go to USA to visit the children and grandchildren every summer, but they were last there in 2019 – 2020 was entirely lost to Covid-19. Devika’s niece left Shanghai at that time and came to India because the disease was raging in China at the time.

Arun drinking tea from a rooster mug

The mug is from the Oxford Natural History Museum. Devika buys a mug from shops when she goes on foreign visits and showed a tea mug she got from Kenya:

Devika shows her mug from Kenya

 

She has one from a museum in Cape Town and one from thee museum of Antoni Gaudí in Barcelona. His work is very colourful, perhaps could be labeled gaudy …

Arundhaty's mug from Wales

We were expecting to hear from Thommo and Geetha who are singing two Dylan songs; Thommo sent in the songs recorded ahead of time so as as to avoid glitches on the Internet during the Zoom. Geetha is sporting a short haircut that Devika liked. Arundhaty said KumKum looks quite chilled out and younger. Lots of pampering goes on in Arlington at Rachel’s home – even washing clothes in the machine and folding is taken care of! The children who work from home require quiet. J&K who are accustomed to being noisy (Bongs are like that, said Arundhaty) have to compose themselves.

KumKum mentioned enjoying food from a Punjabi restaurant in Arlington and her mind wandered to the food from Fusion Bay restaurant in Fort Kochi. Regularly ordering from them helps to keep their workers employed  – it’s a good variety of Kerala food they serve. The young men are gradates from a food institute in Kerala and now they are all married but continue to make their tasty dishes which they sell at moderate prices.

The novel next month, Joyce Carey's The Horse's Mouth, will be read on July 30. Arundhaty has started reading it. She likes it quite a bit and Devika said Gulley Jimson, the artist, is a real bindaas character. The movie is there on YouTube – Alec Guinness stars in the role of Gulley Jimson. He is an actor who could take on any character, tragic or comic, and do the part as if he was made for it, said KumKum. The novel itself has a link from which you can download it free. Register for a free account on archive.org and go to

https://archive.org/details/horsesmouth00cary/page/n9/mode/2up

to read The Horse's Mouth online. . 

Hydrangeas in Rachel's garden

The hydrangeas in Rachel’s garden are in good condition – they do not seem to do as well in Kochi said Devika and Arundhaty agreed they need the cooler weather of our hill stations such as Kodaikanal and Coonoor. In Kochi the colours look a bit faded.

D.H. Lawrence – Women in Love, May 21, 2021

 

Women in Love (first edition cover)

Women in Love was the sequel to the novel The Rainbow about the Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, living in the Midlands (the central belt of England above London) in the 1910s. Ursula is a schoolteacher who meets school inspector Rupert Birkin. Gudrun, a painter recently moved from London, runs across Gerald Crich, rich heir to a coal-mine. The four of them become friends. Ursula and Birkin begin a friendship with romantic overtones, while Gudrun and Gerald eventually have a love affair.

Mechanisation of coal-mines by Gerald Crich

Apart from telling a story, the author is at pains to set forth the philosophy of each character at some length: how the colliery was mechanised to improve productivity, the nature of knowledge, the transcendence of love, what lies beyond death, and so on. It is as though the private diaries of D.H.Lawrence have spilled over into the novel. His vocabulary too is different from that of authors of the early nineteenth century. The nearest he comes to talking of nudity and love-making is ‘suave loins of darkness.’ Take this rapturous passage:

Oh, and the beauty of the subjection of his loins, white and dimly luminous as he climbed over the side of the boat, made her want to die, to die … his back rounded and soft—ah, this was too much for her, too final a vision. She knew it, and it was fatal. The terrible hopelessness of fate, and of beauty, such beauty!

The emotions of a character have large swings in a single conversation, starting with endearments and ending in expressions of hate and revulsion – the word hate is used 64 times. Electric charges often flow between people, and that technical idea is used 34 times to express the impassioned flow of feelings. Clearly DHL is magnifying ordinary feelings manyfold times in order to create drama, but the overuse of such words diminishes their effect.

Here are some word frequency statistics:

love (429), dark (371), death (169), hand (141), kiss (86), breast (38), electric (34), mystic (33), loins (21), hate, hatred (64)

The scenes are painted with a screenplay writer’s eye for detail, and a film director would have little trouble framing the important scenes cinematically. This is one reason the novel bulges; the second reason stems from all those mini-dissertations on subjects by people like Rupert Birkin, and later the Dresden sculptor, Loerke, whom Gudrun meets in the Tyrolean Alps. We not only get to picture them from the descriptions of their body, but we get to know their interior life from these tutorials on various subjects they expatiate upon.

Gerald Crich urges his mare to face the train

Gudrun & Ursula watch in horror as Gerald Crich urges his horse to confront the train

One of the scenes that would dismay any reader is that of Gerald Crich urging his nervous mare to stand still as the goods train thunders past, screeching, at a level crossing. He uses the whip and spurs with overmastering force, to the point the horse’s flanks start bleeding. It’s a piece of animal abuse that should have been far more offensive than the tepid ‘obscenity’ that caused the novel to be banned in the UK for a decade. 

June 25 has been fixed as the date for the next session, Poetry, with no specific theme.

Shakespeare’s 457th Birthday – Apr 23, 2021

This year the Shakespeare session in April was well-attended on Zoom and featured readings from the Plays, the Sonnets, and one of his long poems, The Rape of Lucrece. In addition, we had two gifted singers, Thommo and Geetha, who gave a beautiful rendition of Sonnet 31, which was recorded and is included in this blog. This session was a lovely bouquet for William Shakespeare on his 457th birthday.

William Shakespeare’s statue on Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon

In the past year we have come across new discoveries about Shakespeare which are worth setting down. The Shakespeare grave effigy by Nicholas Johnson in Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon is now believed to be a definitive likeness, commissioned by WS during his lifetime. The evidence gathered by Prof. Lena Cowen Orlin, professor of English at Georgetown University buttresses this. See:

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2021/mar/19/shakespeare-grave-effigy-believed-to-be-definitive-likeness

Shakespeare grave effigy by Nicholas Johnson in Holy Trinity church in Stratford-upon-Avon believed to be definitive likeness commissioned by WS during his lifetime

Did you know that William Shakespeare carved his name into the wooden panelling of the Tabard Inn in Southwark, London, alongside the names of Ben Jonson, Richard Burbage and others? This came to light in a podcast by the Folger Shakespeare Library under the title Shakespeare and The Tabard Inn. See:

https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/tabard-inn

William Shakespeare  carved his name into the wooden panelling of the Tabard Inn in Southwark

The reference to it was spotted in Edinburgh University Library by Martha Carlin, Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. See:

https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/shakespeare-roisterer-tabard-inn 

Shakespeare was long thought to be a solo artist but he collaborated to a fair degree. In fact, five of his ten last plays involved collaborators. At the beginning of his career, and especially at the end, he had many who worked with him, although it is his name that stands on the famous First Folio Edition of 1623, brought out seven years after his death. It contains 36 of his plays.

First Folio Edition of Shakespeare's Plays

Ben Jonson’s commentary on the picture engraver Droeshout, is on the left, the most famous words being:

O could he have but drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he has hit
His face; the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass:

The text was collated by two of Shakespeare's fellow actors and friends, John Heminge and Henry Condell, who edited it and supervised the printing. They appear in a list of the 'Principall Actors' who performed in Shakespeare's plays, alongside Richard Burbage, Will Kemp and Shakespeare himself.  See:

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/shakespeares-first-folio

Shakespeare’s income came not from the sale of his plays but his investment with others in a joint-stock company of actors who performed the plays at the Globe Theatre, or delivered command performances for a fee at the royal court. Shakespeare invested in the Globe Theatre when it was rebuilt after a fire, and later in the Blackfriars Theatre. He retired a wealthy man, and went back to Stratford-upon-Avon, where he had bought several properties.

Swan by the river Avon with Trinity Church in the background

Ian McEwan – The Children Act, Mar 26, 2021

 

First edition, September 2, 2014

In the novel the law confronts profoundly and sincerely held religious beliefs. Fiona Maye is a high-court judge fifty-nine years old.  She is the Duty Judge, who deals with any kind of legal emergency, when somebody needs a rapid decision. The duty lasts for a week at a time.

In the instant case, the boy almost eighteen, needs a blood transfusion to save him, but he is refusing it on religious grounds as he is a Jehovah’s Witness. The hospital can’t proceed against the will of the patient, for it would be tantamount to criminal assault.

Judge Fiona Maye decides to visit the boy to ascertain his state of mind; though unorthodox, the procedure is not without precedent. But this sets off emotional consequences in Adam Henry, the boy, and novel follows the ensuing chain of events arising out of the meeting. Her own childlessness plays into Fiona Maye’s own emotional attachment.

She is compassionate and self-sufficient as a person, very rational as judges ought to be, indifferent to religion but respectful of people’s beliefs. She feels for the boy, and admires his artistic abilities, and his creativity in music and poetry. But like many rational people she is unable to weigh up her own personal problems. She begins to see in the boy the child she never had. The novel is about the boy as much as the judge.

The case turns on the Children Act of 1989, and hence the name.  In its very first clause the Act says:

“When a court determines any question with respect to the upbringing of a child, the child’s welfare shall be the court’s paramount consideration.”

The child’s welfare is central – not the parent’s needs or the parents’ faith.

In an interview Ian McEwan speaks of  a judge by the name of Alan Ward who did preside over a Jehovah’s Witness case. Judge Ward did go and visit the boy who was a ward of the court. Alan Ward went to the boy’s bedside, and they talked about football non-stop. Judge Ward ruled that the hospital could treat against the boy’s will. The boy made a recovery. Later Judge Ward took him to a Manchester United match, and the boy met all his football heroes. Seven or eight years later, the judge learned as a footnote in the papers, that in his twenties the boy got ill again, went to the hospital, and died there, refusing the transfusion. Alan Ward told the story to Ian McEwan while they were waiting for a concert to begin, and McEwan thought what a gift this was – he had actually heard the essence of a short novel – it rarely happens like that.

Poetry Session – Feb 26, 2021

The poetry session of February did not have a special theme, but because the bi-centenary of Keats’ death fell in the same week on Feb 23, two readers dealt with Keats. There were worldwide celebrations of Keats with special readings and plays and a visual tour of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome where the poet died in the arms of his beloved friend, the painter Joseph Severn.

Poems lose a lot in translation. One of them in Bengali by the modernist poet Jibanananda Das was particularly subject to loss as his imagery is soaked in the rural countryside of East Bengal. Robert Lowell observed that poetic translation requires not so much translation per se as the composition of a new poem based upon an original in another language.

The other poem in Hindustani of a colloquial kind, did not suffer as much, as many have an ear for the language in India. But nevertheless a gloss in English has to be provided, according to our rule.

Thommo offered a lyric from a rock song, and why not, since Bob Dylan won the Nobel Literature Prize. Thommo sang it for us and promised a better version for the blog. Certainly many songs have unforgettable lyrics, whether of loss or joy, and need to be kept alive in the popular imagination. But since we recall it along with the music it is difficult to separate the two.

We sampled some living poets, older poets long dead, and even an ancient poet – David who became a King of the Israelites circa 1000 BCE. This brings the matter of translation again, from ancient Hebrew. Many may know the psalms only from the translation available in their own language; we heard its recitation in the 400-year old English of the King James Version that Geetha used.

Virginia Woolf – Mrs Dalloway, Jan 29, 2021

 First Edition 1925, The Hogarth Press

The novel really has no story or plot. It’s about a party. It begins with Clarissa Dalloway going out to buy flowers for the party she’s holding in her house that evening; and ends when the party is breaking up after the VIPs have been standing around and watching each other, exchanging trivia and gossip.

Through all the meandering prose, consisting of long sentences that ramble on ruminating on everything, we hear not the narrator’s voice, but the staccato fits and starts of what’s going on in people’s minds. The longest sentence of 196 words mimics the prolixity of Proust whom Virginia Woolf (VW) greatly admired: 

And everywhere, though it was still so early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats; Lords, Ascot, Ranelagh and all the rest of it; wrapped in the soft mesh of the grey-blue morning air, which, as the day wore on, would unwind them, …

Characters like Septimus Smith are introduced who have no connection with the  main theme of people attending the party, except that his suicide by impaling himself on iron railings becomes an overheard conversation at the party – and any talk of death disturbs Clarissa. Septimus is like a patient carried around on a stretcher throughout to render a dose of medical barminess to the barmy goings on of the rich and ineffectual people in the novel.

If you consider the number of suicide cases among retuning American soldiers from tours of duty in the Middle East, it seems we are no better now at treating Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD, then called shell-shock). An analysis in 2016  indicates that an average of 20 American veterans die from suicide per day. The solution obviously lies in ending such wars, and not in spending useless billions on mental health for veterans.

What do we learn about the party-going elite from the upper crust of London society? First, we learn that they cannot hold a conversation on any serious subject. Second, that there seems no sparkle of wit in them (should we blame Virginia Woolf for that deliberate omission?). Third, that persons of average intelligence from the lower classes would have more gumption. And fourth, they are entirely devoted to the trivia of who is going up and who is coming down in their society.

A study of Clarissa, the central character in the novel will find she is a victim of her desire to hold parties that celebrate nothing – getting people together only to  announce that she as a hostess has the drawing power to pull in people of substance to a perfectly dull affair. She’s also a nervous wreck who requires much cosseting, and soothing, and has never put her talents to any use. The idle rich, one might call them. In her preoccupation with minutiae, she seems to be losing her marbles as well.

The film Mrs Dalloway, screenplay by Eileen Atkins, is available on Amazon Prime and free on YouTube. It’s a marvellous film with the incomparable Vanessa Redgrave playing Clarissa, unflappable on the surface, as hostesses should be, but  teeming with feelings within. Geeta remarked it’s a novel without a story. Please see this film if you can. It’s not only a beautiful rendition of the novel, but the screenwriter has managed all the disparate scenes so that they make the faithful account of a day’s journey. It all comes together to yield something tender and bruised at the end.

There is a lot of description that borders on the poetic with similes often used:

– She read on Lady Bruton's face, as if it had been a dial cut in impassive stone, the dwindling of life

– as if he had set light to a grey pellet on a plate and there had risen up a lovely tree in the brisk sea-salted air of their intimacy

– the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp

– she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish

Humorous Poems – Dec 11, 2020

 

The variety of poems spanned old favourites like Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and recognised poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Byron. Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl continue to figure annually. Unusually we had a scientist, Haldane, in their midst. It is obvious these authors get much relish out of writing humorous stuff that shows the world and themselves in a comical light.

It comes at the end of a year that in real life gave us few laughs, barring the gaucheries of Mr Trump. POTUS at one point suggested research into treatment of the novel coronavirus by injecting disinfectant into the body. As a result the group’s WhatsApp conversations within the reading group are filled with haikus, tetrameters, and story lines sending up POTUS in waves of laughter. We would have been entirely thankful for the comic relief he afforded – had he not also been responsible for countless Covid deaths among his followers by instructing them to flout the elementary means of protection mandated by keeping distance, wearing masks, and not gathering in crowds.

Covid-19 has given rise to poetry that matches its malevolence, like Scott Momaday’s In the Time of Plague:

We endure thoughts of demise
And measure the distance of death.
Death too wears a mask.
But consider, there may well be good
In our misfortune if we can find it. It is
Hidden in the darkness of our fear.

If limericks do not figure among the holiday offerings of KRG, this one by Anonymous tells why:
The limerick packs laughs anatomical
In space that is quite economical
But the good ones I’ve seen
So seldom are clean
And the clean ones are so seldom comical.

Devika made up her face with eyebrow pencil and lipstick of different colours; the effect resembled Tā moko, the permanent marking practised by the Māori people of New Zealand. KumKum showed up in a bright witch's costume with a wilting crown of croton leaves:

Joe was dressed as a colourful Bene Israel rabbi, or a Paris priest, who had decided to scandalise his flock:

Kavita showed up in a conical hat;

Priya appeared with numerous moles and a trishul. Arun is here in spectacular face paint:

And Thommo as a black-hat cyber hacker –

Geeta was in humanitarian garb as a nurse administering the Covid-19 vaccine:

Zakia smiles in a moustache, while Pamela makes her appearance as a witch in black with a long nose and claws:

and Geetha in a cape:

Arundhaty who won the costume prize is shown below in full-length modelling her dress:

The group are all gathered for the event:

Everyone agreed the next novel (Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf) for Jan 2021, though short, is a formidable book; ‘tough’ was the word used. It is slated for Jan 29 reading.