I chose to read Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov for the Classic Circuit without having any idea what the book was about. I had some vague recollection that I had read someone’s blog post about it once and it sounded good but beyond that I could not go. I could even get the book for free online and it was just shy of 200 pages. How could I go wrong? Except it turned out the online free version was abridged and when the book arrived from the library it was 445 pages! So much for short. But it turned out that it didn’t matter.
Illya Illyich Oblomov is landed gentry. He owns a large estate — Oblomovka — and three hundred peasants. When the story opens Oblomov is reclining on his divan in his apartment in St. Petersburg. For the next 150 pages or so he remains on his divan, in his dressing gown determined to deal with two problems — he is being forced to move from his apartment so the building can be renovated and he just got a letter from his estate bailiff explaining that things on the estate are rather dire. But Oblomov, so used to not doing and having others do for him, can’t sort either of the problems out. A “friend” who is really a moocher and a thief, arrives and after making sure Oblomov knows what a great imposition it all is, agrees to help Oblomov at least find a new apartment. As for his estate, the brother of his new landlady agrees to “help” him out with that.
Throughout the entire book Oblomov is either laying down or eating huge amounts of food or ineffectually worrying about things and then putting off their resolution until the next day or next week. Only in one section of the book does he ever show any kind of oomph and that is when he falls in love with the young and beautiful Olga. But even Olga can’t make him resist the grasp of oblomovshchina and the two separate. If it weren’t for Oblomov’s devoted and industrious friend, Stoltz, taking his affairs in hand and looking out for him, Oblomov would have ended his days as a beggar on the street.
There are so many different elements at work in this book I don’t know where to start and probably can’t begin to cover them all. First, you need to know this book is funny. It’s not in your face funny, it’s a subtle funny that plays with irony and the alternating affection and disgust that Oblomov inspires in his reader. Oblomov is pathetic but yet does not inspire pity. He is not stupid or lazy or incapable, his friend Stoltz makes sure we know that; the two were at university together and Oblomov studied law, read poetry and philosophy, and was an art and music connoisseur. Nor does Oblomov suffer from depression. He doesn’t suffer from anything.
Oblomov’s deep and all-pervavise inertia, his oblomovshchina, comes to represent a dying way of life. Through a dream Oblomov has early in the book we glimpse what life on the estate in Oblomovka was like and had always been like and what growing up there meant to Oblomov. The life and ways of Oblomovka are contrasted with social changes represented by Stoltz. Stoltz is not landed gentry. His father was German and his mother was Russian and he has made his way in the world through becoming educated and working hard. He is wealthy because he has earned it not because it was given to him.
Throughout the entire book we have a continual rubbing together of these two ways of life represented by Oblomov and Stoltz. Stoltz is always busy, always on the go, traveling throughout Europe for both work and pleasure. He takes pride and joy in his work and the things that he can do because of it. Oblomov reclines on his divan marveling at Stoltz’s busyness and is glad he doesn’t have to do that. He is always voicing aloud how sorry he is for people who have to be busy and work, always running here
I’m not a big mystery or crime novel reader even when it comes to the “golden age of detective fiction.” So it was with some trepidation I signed up for the Classics Circuit tour (be sure to check out who else is hosting and what they are reviewing). I chose to read Michael Innes’ The Ampersand Papers because, one I had never heard of Innes before, and two, it had a literature theme to it.
When I do read mysteries I like a certain type generally exhibited by P.D. James and Amanda Cross. That type is either a story in which character is just as important, if not more so than the crime. Or, barring that, there is something quirky and gently humorous about it. In The Ampersand Papers I happily got both.
Lord Ampersand, tired of all the scholars showing up at his castle’s door wanting to have a look through the family papers, scours the castle and has every last scrap put up in the tour that looks out over the sea. The inside stone staircase is crumbled and impassible, supposedly due to a long ago attack on the castle, and the only way up to the “muniment room” is via a rickety wooden staircase that curves around the outside of the tower built by a previous Lord Ampersand who liked to go up to the tower roof for a bit of birdwatching.
Not long after all the papers are hoisted up to the muniment room, Lord Ampersand learns that there might be some actually worth quite a lot. A cousin, Adrian Digitt, it turns out, was good friends with Byron, Shelley, Coleridge and other literary luminaries of the day. Lord Ampersand and family live in genteel poverty at this point so the prospect of tidy sum see him charging his son, Archie, with finding a scholarly expert to go through all the papers in the tower for as little pay as possible.
This brings Dr. Sutch to the castle and to his death on the staircase which just happens to plunge onto the beach at the feet of Sir John Appleby, a well known and retired Scotland Yard Inspector.
The death of Dr. Sutch doesn’t take place until over a third of the way through the book. Up until then we get to the know the family quite well. Lord Ampersand’s son, Archie, is next in line to inherit the estate. Next in line after Archie is cousin Charles Digitt. We also meet Lord Ampersand’s ditzy wife, his two daughters, neither of whom have married, and cousin Deborah Digitt. Then there is the butler, Ludlow, who would do Jeeves proud. Oh, and how could I forget Mr. Cave, the speleologist who Dr. Sutch meets on the beach below the castle tower one day and strikes up a friendship, two geeky peas in a pod.
So by the time Dr. Sutch plunges to his death, we know that just about everyone has a motive. And Sir John’s investigations turn up a further complication. In addition to the valuable papers, there might be Spanish gold hidden somewhere in the castle.
In the end, of course, Sir John figures everything out. He uses the same information the reader has which I appreciate. I hate it when the solution is one I could never get because the author has withheld a vital piece of information. Even with the clues, however, I didn’t figure out who did it, but that’s ok. I just appreciate that Sir John’s explanation for everything is completely plausible and not surprising.
I can happily add Michael Innes to my short list of mystery writers to read when the rare mood comes upon me. I think in addition to what I have already mentioned, Innes’ appeal comes from a certain light charm. There is a sense that Innes, who is actually an Oxford ac
I started a new book on my commute and lunch break today, Oblomov by Ivan Goncharev.
The Classics Circuit is going to be doing 19th century Russian literature the end of June into July. Last year or maybe longer, a blogger or bloggers (wish I could remember who! Was it you?) read Oblomov and liked it quite a lot. I had never heard of it before but it sounded good so I put it on my to-read list. I didn’t think much about it until the Russian tour sign up (sign-up closes Friday, May 21st so if you are interested in participating there is still time!). I’ll be in school this summer (my last summer in school, yay!) so looked over the list of possibilities hoping to find a short one so I could participate. I could have done short stories but Chekov didn’t sound appealing nor did any of the others.
My eyes landed on Oblomov. How long is that I wonder? And can I get it on my Kindle? I checked my favorite free book download site and there it was! Even better it was only 169 pages. So doable even with school. I signed up.
Then I realized my Bookman is in the middle of The Count of Monte Cristo on the Kindle and would probably be at it for quite some time. So I decided to get the book from the library. It came in yesterday.
Imagine my surprise to see this huge 440 page book! Wow, I thought, there must be a lot of additional materials in the book to pad it out that much. I looked. A three-page translator’s note, a two-page forward, a ten-page introduction. The rest is all novel. How could this have happened? It’s a recent translation, does the story suddenly have more words than it used to? I checked back on the book download site and discovered buried in the description of the book a note that the free digital version is abridged. Well that explains it.
Sign-up may not have closed yet for the Russian tour but I figured I had better start reading it now otherwise there is a good chance I wouldn’t be finished in time.
So I started reading it on the train this morning. Got through the introduction. I started on the actual novel during my lunch break, sitting in the warm sunshine and cool breeze and occasionally being sprinkled by the fountain in the courtyard. Here is how it begins:
One morning in his apartment in one of those big houses on Gotokhovaya Street, which could have accommodated the whole population of a country town, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov lay in bed.
The reader is given to know pretty quickly that Oblomov does not get out of bed very often. It isn’t that he is unable to get up or is ill, he just prefers to spend his days reclining in peace and quiet. It’s not Proust, but the sentences are often long with lots of clauses so it is somewhat complicated reading. Plus there are the Russian names. So far there are only two characters, Oblomov and his servant Zakhar. I can do those.
I am so far enjoying the book but somehow feel like I should be reclining in my own bed while reading it. That’s what imagination and weekends are for, right?
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After reading Edith Wharton’s essay The Vice of Reading back in November I wanted to find out more about her so when she was chosen to make the rounds of the Classic Circuit I thought it would be a good opportunity to finally get around to reading the Hermione Lee biography I’ve had sitting on my shelf. Unfortunately I underestimated the sheer bulk of the book and how long it would take me to read and have not made it even halfway through. Even so, it still feels as though I’ve had a full meal. The book is great and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to know more about Wharton. Just be prepared for immense amounts of information and detail.
One of the things I am enjoying most about the book is that it isn’t your traditional life narrative – she was born, she got married, she published, she became famous, she died. Lee progresses through Wharton’s life to be sure, each chapter is a different stage in her life and career, but within each chapter we go forward and backward in time so the chapter about Wharton’s childhood isn’t just about her childhood. It expands to encompass how different aspects of Wharton’s childhood affected her and played out later in her life.
Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones and called “Pussy” by family and friends, comes from an old New York family. It is said that the saying “keeping up with the Joneses” refers to her father’s family. She was the third and last child, born so many years after her older brothers that there were rumors she was illegitimate. Wharton spent a large part of her formative years in Europe and when her father moved the family back to New York it was quite a culture shock for her. She may have lived in New York but it never felt like home.
Wharton had curly red hair and was never considered to be very pretty. She never received a formal education, though she was able sometimes to sit in with her brothers’ tutors. She mostly educated herself, reading her way through her father’s “gentleman’s library.” Her mother, Lucretia, was stern and disapproving of her daughter’s reading and desire to be intellectual. She was constantly pushing her into society and attempting to make her conform to what girls and women of money should be.
Even though Wharton began at a young age to write, she published only a few poems, essays and a story or two. She didn’t actually turn to writing as a profession and begin actively working until she was in her late thirties. After that there was no stopping her. She hated the illustrations the publishers made her have in her books, especially the ones in House of Mirth. She surprised her publishers because she was not the submissive, genteel lady, but very vocal in her opinions and demanding – Wharton knew what she wanted and she knew her worth and did not hesitate to tell her publishers that she would go elsewhere if they could not meet her requests.
Wharton wrote fiction, short stories, nonfiction, essays and she even tried her hand at plays. She was also successful as a garden designer.
All this and, as I said, I am not even halfway through the biography. Wharton is turning out to be a fascinating character. Her two autobiographies are, according to Lee, very finely crafted stories. Wharton was very private and careful about what she wrote about herself. She left out large part
We got a couple inches of snow today so when I got home I had the pleasure of shoveling it. Most of the time I enjoy shoveling snow. There is something so oddly satisfying about it. But tonight I was not looking forward to it. The temperature is 7F and the wind is picking up making it currently feel like -11F. Why not wait until tomorrow to shovel, you ask, surely it will be warmer in the daylight. Nope. Tomorrow we are being told to expect windchills of -25F. Best to do it tonight.
How does one dress to shovel in such weather? Two pairs of socks and lovely snowboots, sweat pants underneath snowpants, two shirts underneath a sweatshirt, a thick scarf wrapped around the neck, a pair of gloves underneath a pair of mittens, a heavy winter parka with hood pulled up and hood flaps velcroed across the face. I shoveled as fast as I could and actually ended up being warm except for my ears and cheeks. I don’t know why my ears were cold since they were covered, but there you go.
Now I know I was going to post some bookish stuff tonight but the snow event has frozen all my thoughts. One that didn’t freeze is the thumb thing (via Magers and Quinn), a cool little reading accessory that slips over your thumb and holds the pages of your book open so you can read more comfortably with one hand. And it even comes in a variety of colors.
I started reading Novel on Yellow Paper for the Slaves discussion at the end of the month. I’ve only read about 20 pages and I am already loving it. It dashes and dodges all over the place, sort of but not quite what I would call stream-of-conciousness but very similar. And even though the author and characters are British, for some reason it reminds me of when I was a kid listening to my aunts from Oklahoma talking. They’d barely ever pause for breath, their conversation would leap around, they’d interrupt a story to tell another story and then go back to finish the first story, and sometimes they would say things that should have made absolutely no sense but for some reason did. If you want to join in on the discussion for the book, there is still time to get yourself and copy and read it.
I’m also reading Hermione Lee’s biography of Edith Wharton. It is a magnificent biography and Wharton is turning out to be a fascinating subject. I am reading the bio for the Classic Circuit Edith Wharton tour. Edith will be visiting the blog on the 22nd, though I fear I won’t be completely prepared because the book is huge and reading time has shrunk dramatically. I severely miscalculated on the time needed to read this one by a deadline. We’ll see how far I get. I did discover today that Hermione Lee has a great website. I think if I were drawing up a list for a literary dinner party her name would be on it.
Okay, my brain is feeling a little thawed out. I must go now and take advantage of it by attempting to make some intelligent comments in this week’s class discussion.
Posted in Books, Classics Circuit, Personal, Slaves of Golconda
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Today I welcome Elizabeth Gaskell on her Classics Circuit blog tour. The idea behind the Classics Circuit is to celebrate and encourage the reading of classic works. The Classics Circuit intends to do for dead authors what blog tours do for living authors. Anyone is welcome to join in, so if you feel inspired, don’t be shy, sign up! Sign up for the February Harlem Renaissance tour will start in a few weeks. Currently the Wilkie Collins tour is winding down and Gaskell will be out and about through the end of December. In January Edith Wharton will be making the rounds. You can find everything you need to know on the Classics Circuit blog.
I’ve always wanted to read Gaskell but the works of hers that I knew about were so huge I put them off and put them off. I never thought of looking up whether she had written anything short. It turns out, she has. Lois the Witch comes in at a slim 100 pages. Published in 1859 or 1861 depending on the source, it is the only one among Gaskell’s writings set entirely in America.
Gaskell was fascinated by Americans and America. She had several American friends and correspondents. She thought of America as being a wild and mysterious place even though many of her friends lived in very civilized Boston. In spite of her interest in America she never did set foot there. This fact did not mattr when it came to writing Lois the Witch, however. Gaskell did her research.
The novella is the story of Lois Barclay, eighteen and recently orphaned. She has no family left in England. On her deathbed, Lois’s mother entreats her to go to her uncle in America. A letter is written and after her mother’s death, Lois sets sail to strange shores. But, it is Lois’s misfortune to arrive in Salem, Massachusetts a few months before the Salem witch craze strikes.
She presents herself at her uncle’s house only to find that he is on his deathbed. He leaves behind a wife, Grace Hickson, and three children. The eldest, a son named Manasseh, a girl, Faith, the same age as Lois, and a another girl, Prudence age twelve. They are a righteously Puritan family who don’t look kindly on Lois’s “Popish ways.” Lois is taken in by the Hicksons but never exactly welcome.
In spite of the lack of hospitality and family feeling, Lois does her best to fit in. She is a good, kind girl who does what she is told and contributes to the running of the household. No one can say a bad word against her until accusations of witchcraft break out.
I don’t know what Gaskell’s sources on the Salem witch trials were, but her accounting of the 1692 trials is accurate. Except for Cotton Mather she changes the names of those involved and takes some liberty with the story but adheres closely to the events.
The only thing I didn’t like about the story is the narrator breaking into it from time to time. She does so as a way to move the story forward through narrative summary instead of through writing out the events. The narrator also breaks in to remind and explain to the reader that these events happened long ago and that even England accused and killed people for being witches at one time. It seemed when she did this that she was also defending America from being labeled superstitious and backwards. Aside from these narrative interruptions, the story is enjoyable and, I think, a good, and short, introduction to Gaskell.
Information on Gaskell and America comes from an article entitled “Alligators infesting the stream: Elizabeth Gaskell and the USA&rdq
