This weekend I finished “The Circle” by Dave Eggers, an interesting book in itself and even more interesting for the problems of novel-writing that it casts into relief. It does certain things so well, and others so badly, which is something you don’t see that often in fiction. Continue reading
I haven’t reread it, though it’s been on my list and on my mind. I’m thinking about it today because of an interesting comment in AustenBlog’s review of Longbourn by Jo Baker:
“We think Ms. Baker was shooting for something less mercenary and more ambitious: the Wide Sargasso Sea of the Jane Austen oeuvre; by which we mean a paraliterature title that strives for literary achievement as well as, or perhaps even more than, popularity. We have long wondered why no one has written such a novel.”
This has set me to wondering: what would such a novel be like? Continue reading
A woman fascinated by vintage clothing who decides to start wearing a corset on a daily basis is a book subject that would naturally interest me. Rachel, my first-person narrator, travels to 1815 and starts wearing a corset (along the rest of the period-appropriate outfit), and I am curious about how that must have felt to her. (Though not enough to actually dress up like that.) Even if the author’s corset — the waist-squeezing, hourglass-figure-imposing kind adopted in the 1830s and worn for the better part of the next century — is different from the c. 1815 model, which left the waist largely as it was, there still must have been a sense of confinement and required uprightness alien to our elasticized age. What would that be like? What practical problems would the author encounter? So when I found a review copy lying around the office, it vaulted to the top of my to be read pile.
“Victorian Secrets” by Sarah A. Chrisman was fascinating, although not in the way I expected and probably not in the way its author intended. Continue reading
A book read twice already, with distinct displeasure, might not seem to deserve a third attempt. But Juliet Barker’s “Wild Genius on the Moors” and Jude Morgan’s “Charlotte and Emily” stirred my interest in Emily Bronte, not merely as a person, but also as an artist. Better prepared, I am reading her book very differently, with a new appreciation for what is, no question, one of the most singular achievements in 19th-century literature. Continue reading
I’ve been away from this blog for so long I feel almost obliged to fashion some adroit explanation — picnic, lightning — but the truth is, I was doing other things. Reading, writing, rethinking, rewriting. (When does rewriting have an end? I can only say, not yet.)
After “The Golem and the Jinni” I proceeded to read a string of amazing books I wish I had stopped to write about, for now I cannot do justice to them: Continue reading
Four days after I finished, finally waking up from the dream that was “The Golem and the Jinni,” which I found as amazing as anything I’ve read in a long time, with its own fevered internal logic. Where else would a mythological Northern European Jewish creature meet a mythological Middle Eastern Arab creature, but in 1900 New York, where immigrants of every kind brush shoulders and start new lives? She’s female, sexually demure, made of clay and able to read minds. He’s male, sexually wild, made of fire and able to sculpt metal with his bare hands. Naturally, they fall in love, since they are apparently the only two nonhumans trying to pass as humans in all of New York, a bond that transcends their many differences. Continue reading
The Jane Austen Project: A Novel 