Sunday, May 11, 2014

True confessions

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post inspired by Gwen Raverat's curmudgeonly Uncle Frank, who described having failed to finish a particularly dull book despite "repeated charges at the point of the bayonet."  And I coyly mentioned that there were three books mentioned in my Overwhelming List with which I have had similarly spectacular failures, despite the fact that they are much-loved, much-acclaimed, and should be right up my alley.

Several of you were kind enough to share your own thwarted attempts to read authors you felt you "should" enjoy.  From Henry James to Barbara Pym to Leo Tolstoy, reading of your literary nemeses made me feel a bit better about my own. One of you even confessed via email to disliking the much-touted D. E. Stevenson, and that confession helped me even more, since my own failures should—based on reviews of fellow bloggers and even based on their general sales histories—be almost as enjoyable to me as Stevenson.

But before I make my own confessions, I was planning to mention an article I saw a few years ago about the books that people feel they should read, but don't.  When I tried to search for it, however, I found a whole variety of other articles on the same topic.  For example, there's this one from last summer at Bookriot, which lists 20 titles, including some bestsellers that are (or were, a year ago, at least) de rigueur.  I was rather pleased to note that I've read 14 of the 20, and that the remaining 6 don't cause me any guilt at all (well, okay, maybe a wee bit of guilt at not having read Great Expectations...)

Buzzfeed came up with 22 books and (apparently just to make me feel bad) ranked Great Expectations number 1, but I've read 17 of the others, so that should balance out my neglect of Dickens, right?  I was going to say that Treasure Island seems like an odd choice, but then I remembered that I haven't read it either...

And The Guardian did a list of 10 last fall as well.  My now-archnemesis is #3, but of the rest I've only missed one, The Lord of the Rings, which some will no doubt find a shocking oversight, but which I've never even so much as considered reading.  I haven't seen the films either.  [Pause for shocked gasps of dismay.]

Sadly, I never did find my original list, which as I recall focused particularly on highly-acclaimed but weighty tomes such as Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and George Eliot's Middlemarch.  But I did learn that this readerly guilt is a more popular theme than I ever knew before.

One thing that all of these lists have in common is that general readers rarely feel guilty for neglecting women writers.  The Brontës and Jane Austen seem to be about the extent of it.  But of course my perspective is a bit different, and while I feel no guilt at all for giving Tolkien a miss, and little enough about Great Expectations, my middlebrow dislikes make me feel bad indeed.  

I always feel that I must just be missing something, that the failure must be in me as a reader.  So, any snarkiness in the following is perhaps a bit defensive on my part.  How I do hate failing to appreciate works that other people love!

The first of my dislikes I practically handed to you on a silver platter in my earlier post: "a perennial bestseller, and the source of an equally classic and popular film adaptation."  I mean, really.  Apart from Gone with the Wind, perhaps (which, it suddenly occurs to me, I have never read either...), what could I have been talking about but Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca?  I wanted to love it, I really did, but it just felt overdone.  Looming portentousness (one of my very favorite expressions, which I don't think I've had cause to use here before) in every single sentence. Perhaps part of the problem is that I saw Hitchcock's film first, but even that can't explain the problem fully, as, though I am a serious Hitchcock aficionado, Rebecca has never been one of my favorites of his films either. Looming portentousness again, for sure.  Fortunately, neither du Maurier nor Virago, who have been keeping virtually all of her work in print, need any promotion from me!

In fact, as it happens, all three of the novels that defeated me are currently in print from Virago.  The second is the one I'm perhaps most conflicted about, because other bloggers have written enthusiastically about it and Nicola Beauman has declared it one of the best novels of the postwar period, but yet...I have to say it...I absolutely loathed it.  For me, Elizabeth Jenkins' The Tortoise and the Hare seemed (much like her earlier Harriet, now reprinted by Persephone, which I did at least manage to finish) surly and sadistic and thoroughly off-putting from page 1.  I suspect that Jenkins was, in both novels, exploring the nature of victimhood and cruelty, and doing so in a very serious, uncompromising way, and I'm sure I'm missing out. But alas, I just couldn't find a way into it.

Jenkins' novel is my most conflicted dislike, in the sense that I felt I should like it but in fact disliked it so strongly. But the last of my three is the most bewildering and the one that causes me to toss and turn through sleepless nights (okay, not really, but I do feel bad about it). Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is one of my favorite novels, life in the immediate aftermath of World War II is one of my favorite themes, and the short stories and journalism of Mollie Panter-Downes are both among my favorite "home front" reading.

Why, why, why, why, WHY, then, have I failed on three separate occasions to finish Panter-Downes' final novel, One Fine Day, a kind of tribute to Woolf's novel, telling of one day in a woman's life in the days just after the end of the war and reflecting upon the psychological, economic, and physical damages of war and on the arrival of postwar austerity?  It's untenable. Of the three novels I'm discussing here, One Fine Day is the only one I've made multiple attempts to read, but I can't help feeling that it must be a favorite just waiting to happen.  It's also the only one I am likely to attempt yet again.  Wish me better luck next time!

So there you have it.  Those are my guilty displeasures. Oh, the tremendous weight that has lifted from my mind in getting them off my chest! (Slight exaggeration again, but I do feel better.)

I shall have to think of an appropriate penance.  Perhaps reading Great Expectations?

21 comments:

  1. Thank you for confessing all that, I hope you feel lighter in spirit. I love Rebecca, enjoyed One Fine Day & am lukewarm about Tortoise & the Hare (& still haven't read Harriet). I don't think penance is in order but Great Expectations is one of my favourite books & a wonderful introduction to Dickens if you've never managed to read him. It's one of his most restrained books & I think you'd enjoy it if that's any encouragement!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. On the one hand, Lyn, your support has made me feel better. On the other hand, now I feel bad for not having read Great Expectations, if it's one of your favorites. It's a vicious circle!

      Delete
    2. Just forget that such a man as Charles Dickens ever existed - that's my advice! Life's too short to read authors you're not attracted to.

      Delete
  2. Have to run off this morning, so I haven't time to read this whole posting (though of course I SHOULD) but I'll just mention now, in full confessional mode: I DON'T LIKE DOWNTON ABBEY

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But Susan, have you watched The Bletchley Circle? We're only now watching season 2 (no spoilers, please!), and it's weaker than season 1, but I just love the whole milieu and the attention to women's lives in the postwar years. But apparently there won't be a season 3... :-(

      Delete
    2. I'm so sorry to say that while I am very impressed with Bletchley Circle (and the sets and clothes and lovely knitwear) as it has gone on, I found it too intensely nerve-wracking for me, and I regretfully had to stop watching by the penultimate episode (Season 2 just finished on Buffalo's PBS, which we get in Toronto).

      On the other hand, I can never never get enough of Foyle's War. The Cold War episodes are brilliant.

      Delete
    3. Uh-oh, we still have three episodes left. Season 1's final show was making us fidget in our seats, so we'll have to brace ourselves for the remaining episodes of season 2.

      Another confession: Have never seen Foyle's War. Yikes!

      Delete
    4. Never seen Foyle's War? Oh my goodness, Scott. You must. Totally. Hands up everyone who agrees.

      If you can get the series at your library or wherever, you can go back to 1940 and all the way up to post-war austerity Britain.

      Delete
    5. Foyle's War is wonderful, I loved it. I also enjoyed Series 1 of the Bletchley Circle (haven't seen Series 2 in Australia yet) although I thought the plot was a bit far fetched by the end. Great cast, though.

      Delete
  3. A kindred spirit! I groaned my way through One Fine Day and wanted to smack the main characters in the book...quite hard, if I'm honest. Since Nicola Beauman thinks highly of it there just might have to be a second attempt at some point but I'm not holding out much hope of changing my mind.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Oh, thank you, Darlene, this makes me feel better! The other two I thought I would like, didn't, and just moved on. But One Fine Day just seems so right for me. All the pieces are there and I want them to fit together. Perhaps my fourth attempt will be the one where everything falls into place!

      Delete
  4. You. Don't. Like. Rebecca.

    Oh Scott.... Words fail me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I know! This is why it was part of my shameful secret. So many people love it, and it seems like I should too, but alas. Although I didn't dislike it nearly as much as Jenkins' book, I did feel rather like I was wading through molasses. Portentous molasses, no less!

      Delete
  5. I don't like Rebecca much either but then I don't like any books where the over-whelmingly atmosphere is doom and gloom-laden. Cue Wuthering Heights....

    Great Expectations was ruined for me by the terrifying film which was dished up to us, aged 11, at boarding school. I don't think I ever got over the first scene, nor seeing Miss Havisham mouldering amidst her wedding feast. It then wasn't helped by doing it for GCE O Level. In fact I can only now, fifty years on, read any Dickens with enjoyment.

    I detest Gone with the Wind.

    I shall now retreat and hide behind the potted palms......

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Wonderful, Cestina. I am so enjoying encouraging people to confess their literary dislikes! Oddly, I kind of liked Wuthering Heights. Somehow the doom there seems a bit craggier, tougher, even more realistic in some strange way, while the doom is Rebecca seems to be too soft and padded with soft, silken pillows. Not sure those descriptions make any sense whatsoever, but that was my impression.

      Oh, dear, now I don't know whether to read Great Expectations or not! :-)

      Delete
  6. I liked One Fine Day, and at the same time when I realized it was, on a basic level, about how life without servants would never be the same as it had been with them, I couldn't take it seriously. But I could empathize with the main characters feelings about life....I'm not articulating this too well. (We had tornado warnings all last night, slight flooding in the basement, and other difficulties due to weather which are still filling my thoughts and emotions). I've read Rebecca. I liked it. I will never reread it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. No, I think you said it very well, Kristi. I'm often somewhat conflicted in reading novels of this period, between identifying with the characters and therefore with their servant woes, and remembering that no one I know has servants and somehow we all still muddle along!

      I grew up in the Midwest, so I know all about those sleepless nights. Hope things calm down soon and give you some peace!

      Delete
  7. HA! I was forced to read Great Expectations as a high school freshman and haven't willingly read another of Dickens' works since. Can't abide him.

    Life is too short (and my TBR list too long!) to bother with authors or specific books that whatever their appeal to other people, don't appeal to me.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I love that even just in the comments here there are readers who love Dickens and those who can't abide him! I agree with you. There's far too much wonderful stuff to read in one lifetime anyway, so go your own way and enjoy the discoveries you stumble across!

      Delete
  8. Oh Scott, I'm so with you on all three. I couldn't finish any of them. Though I did enjoy Jenkins' Harriet. I think the characters in T&H weren't terribly interesting and Rebecca was just too overwrought. I've also had a hard time with La Whipple. Reading her, so far, has been like banging my head against a nicely-upholstered wall. Chintzy. Elizabeth Taylor is another one I'm just not into. Oh well.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, overwrought might have been the word I was grasping for to describe Rebecca. But I know so many other people love the novel, maybe for that very quality! I love Whipple and Taylor (in fact I have a Taylor review coming up soon), but then, I do love a nicely-upholstered wall! :-)

      Delete

NOTE: The comment function on Blogger is notoriously cranky. If you're having problems, try selecting "Name/URL" or "Anonymous" from the "Comment as" drop-down (be sure to "sign" your comment, though, so I know who dropped by). Some people also find it easier using a browser like Firefox or Chrome instead of Internet Explorer.

But it can still be a pain, and if you can't get any of that to work, please email me at furrowed.middlebrow@gmail.com. I do want to hear from you!