literature or Literature
I just finished Graham Greene's Heart of the Matter for a bookgroup. We read it because some of the group believes it is a "classic." It felt very melodramatic to me.
Made me think back on John Banville's The Sea which won a booker.
Both books felt unsatisfying. . . Greene's was easy to read, had a plot and a sympathetic if guilt ridden main character. Banville's was a struggle to read, had a pathetic main character who was completely self absorbed and really made no effort to live a life.
Some great moments in Greene's book that really highlight the neediness of people, their dependence on others to meet those needs (even though this is largely if not entirely unsuccessful) and other people's willingness or even desire to get caught up in this endless farce. Scobie continually tries to get his wife to stop being miserable or at least showing the misery so he can stop feeling like he needs to make her feel better. What a mess.
Good Lines
If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery. He forgot Fraser: he forgot everything but the scene ahead: I shall go in and say, ‘Good evening, sweet heart,’ and she’ll say, ‘Good evening, darling. What kind of a day?’ and I’ll talk and talk, but all the time I shall know I’m coming nearer to the moment when I shall say, ‘What about you, darling?’ and let the misery in.
It’s the same with everybody, I think. When we say to someone, “I can’t live without you,” what we really mean is, “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.
Oh the power of depression and our willingness to participate. Why do we do this? It is a kind of self absorption or hubris.
Death
But his novel is predictable and melodramatic and in some ways just bad.
Were these characters facing "universal" dilemmas?
Were these stories that people could relate to across time and place?
In some ways, I'd have to say yes. Lots of people are self absorbed and never live their life and recognize that the narrative of their life is made up or remembered inaccurately. Other people are guilt ridden and sympathetic. Good people who do "bad" things and can't live with themselves. But that's not enough. In addition to talking about universal experiences, don't they have to give us some insight into them or help us to see them differently or in a new way? Or not . . .
I felt as if the main character in The Sea did not make me see himself any differently. He just tired me out with his wasted life.
The main character in Greene's book made me feel sorry for him and to feel somewhat viscerally the pain and anguish he was going through but I also just wanted him to slough off the guilt. . . I wanted Greene to show me why that wasn't possible.
What was good was that we see how a person can do really contradictory things. This is very realistic.
I was much more engaged with Scobie and understood his moral predicament better than in The Sea. But is that just a reflection of me?
Another thing is that The Sea feels like it was worked too hard . . .
Will be interesting to compare the suicide in Heart of the Matter with The Stranger. What other suicides in classics? Kate Chopin's The Awakening.
Why are novels that portray the colonial world so reminiscent of one another as this dreary, hopeless and always taken advantage of place. Was this true? And if it was, why did so many contribute to such a sorry place. Seems a caricature to the colonial world with all its worst faults exaggerated.
Heart of the Matter: If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?
Okay, let's look at Calvino's list:
Calvino's What Makes a Classic
Made me think back on John Banville's The Sea which won a booker.
Both books felt unsatisfying. . . Greene's was easy to read, had a plot and a sympathetic if guilt ridden main character. Banville's was a struggle to read, had a pathetic main character who was completely self absorbed and really made no effort to live a life.
Some great moments in Greene's book that really highlight the neediness of people, their dependence on others to meet those needs (even though this is largely if not entirely unsuccessful) and other people's willingness or even desire to get caught up in this endless farce. Scobie continually tries to get his wife to stop being miserable or at least showing the misery so he can stop feeling like he needs to make her feel better. What a mess.
Good Lines
If I could just arrange for her happiness first, he thought, and in the confusing night he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—that no human being can really understand another, and no one can arrange another’s happiness.
People talk about the courage of condemned men walking to the place of execution: sometimes it needs as much courage to walk with any kind of bearing towards another person’s habitual misery. He forgot Fraser: he forgot everything but the scene ahead: I shall go in and say, ‘Good evening, sweet heart,’ and she’ll say, ‘Good evening, darling. What kind of a day?’ and I’ll talk and talk, but all the time I shall know I’m coming nearer to the moment when I shall say, ‘What about you, darling?’ and let the misery in.
It’s the same with everybody, I think. When we say to someone, “I can’t live without you,” what we really mean is, “I can’t live feeling you may be in pain, unhappy, in want.” That’s all it is. When they are dead our responsibility ends. There’s nothing more we can do about it. We can rest in peace.
Oh the power of depression and our willingness to participate. Why do we do this? It is a kind of self absorption or hubris.
Death
But his novel is predictable and melodramatic and in some ways just bad.
Were these characters facing "universal" dilemmas?
Were these stories that people could relate to across time and place?
In some ways, I'd have to say yes. Lots of people are self absorbed and never live their life and recognize that the narrative of their life is made up or remembered inaccurately. Other people are guilt ridden and sympathetic. Good people who do "bad" things and can't live with themselves. But that's not enough. In addition to talking about universal experiences, don't they have to give us some insight into them or help us to see them differently or in a new way? Or not . . .
I felt as if the main character in The Sea did not make me see himself any differently. He just tired me out with his wasted life.
The main character in Greene's book made me feel sorry for him and to feel somewhat viscerally the pain and anguish he was going through but I also just wanted him to slough off the guilt. . . I wanted Greene to show me why that wasn't possible.
What was good was that we see how a person can do really contradictory things. This is very realistic.
I was much more engaged with Scobie and understood his moral predicament better than in The Sea. But is that just a reflection of me?
Another thing is that The Sea feels like it was worked too hard . . .
Will be interesting to compare the suicide in Heart of the Matter with The Stranger. What other suicides in classics? Kate Chopin's The Awakening.
Why are novels that portray the colonial world so reminiscent of one another as this dreary, hopeless and always taken advantage of place. Was this true? And if it was, why did so many contribute to such a sorry place. Seems a caricature to the colonial world with all its worst faults exaggerated.
Heart of the Matter: If one knew, he wondered, the facts, would one have to feel pity even for the planets? If one reached what they called the heart of the matter?
Okay, let's look at Calvino's list:
Calvino's What Makes a Classic
- The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: 'I'm rereading…', never 'I'm reading….'
- Would I reread these books? No. Would I reread the struggle, Yes.
- The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.
- Treasured experience? No. What books have been a treasured experience. Anna Karenina, Pride and Prejudice, Things Fall Apart (but may have been the time I read it), Home, Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, The Sound and the Fury,
- The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual's or the collective unconscious.
- Not really sure what Calvino means here. a particular influence . . . I have thought about both of these books after reading them, but actually The sea more than the Heart of the Matter, which seemed pretty straight forward.
- A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.
- This might be true of both
- A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.
- Well definitely the sea but that too me is not a plus its more a sign of modern times where every book is a self indulgent solipsism. Great line in book I'm reading right now: about how the self doesn't matter it doesn't even exist. What self? When? (The Rise and Fall of great Powers)
- A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.
- Hmmm, maybe The Sea but I don't know about Heart of the Matter. What it seems to be saying is that humans cannot live up to our highest expectations so most of us set them pretty low. When we do set them high, we disappoint ourselves. What is the heart of the matter? Doesn't seem to be love. Almost seems to believing fully in something better then oneself, outside oneself. Perhaps Heart of the Matter is the opposite of The Sea. . . Maybe it would have new things to say.
- The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.
- Not been around long enough
- A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular (dusty?) cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.
- People talk about it alot but can't pin it down . . . Maybe Heart of the Matter. Maybe the Sea.
- Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.
- Can't say about these
- A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.
- No
- 'Your' classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.
- Yes to both of the books. I didn't remain indifferent after thinking about the sea. Was not indifferent to the Heart of the Matter, but it did not evoke big emotions.
- A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.
- No. Although Heart of the Matter did remind me of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. . .
- A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.
- A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.
Comments
Post a Comment