Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Paradise

Paradise by Toni Morrison

Category: I have owned the paperback for about seven years, but never got around to reading it until now.

My thoughts: Wow. Like Edith Wharton, Toni Morrison comes into my life every once in awhile, and I am reminded what an amazing writer she is, and her words become absorbed into my bone marrow. This is the fourth novel of hers that I have read—the predecessors being Sula, Song of Solomon, and The Bluest Eye (in 11th grade, I tried to read Beloved for a research paper, but I stopped…let’s just say that it was too much for me at the time).

Paradise is the story of an all-black town, Ruby, Oklahoma, its inhabitants, and what they will do to keep things the way they want them to be. It is also the story of the women of the Convent, a mansion/former school on the outskirts of the town that, in the minds of Ruby’s inhabitants, threatens their hard-won peace because it is inhabited by “unconventional” women (each of whom, in her own way, is in search of and in need of paradise). The book opens with an assault on the Convent women at the hands of nine Ruby men (“They shoot the white girl first” is the jarring opening line of the novel). The men, descendants of former slaves who were once excluded from every place they sought refuge, have a perverted sense of right and wrong, of who belongs and who doesn’t, because of their ancestors’ experiences.

Like other novels by Toni Morrison, Paradise is…inscrutable. I had to take notes and reread the first three chapters, and I admit that I still don’t understand the enormity that this book encapsulates. Paradise is not easy or comfortable or linear. But it is a damn good book. The novel contains ideas of patriarchy, intra-racial discrimination, and religion, and throws uneasy questions in the reader’s face. As with her other novels, in this one Toni Morrison produces some of the most heartbreaking (and disturbing) images I have ever read. What stuck with me, and I know will remain with me for years, is her description of a young woman slicing her skin open. I’m glad I finally decided to read it, though. Now, I just need to read Beloved…I think I’m ready.

Great passage: What she knew of them she had mostly forgotten, and it seemed less and less important to remember any of it, because the timbre of each of their voices told the same tale: disorder, deception, and, what Sister Roberta warned the Indian girls against, drift. The three d’s that paved the road to perdition, and the greatest of these was drift.

Next up: Lipstick Jungle (because I’m in the mood for a little light reading)

Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Happy Birthday Edith Wharton!

Photo credit: www.biography.com

In honor of Edith Wharton's birthday (she was born on January 24, 1862), here's another great passage from The Custom of the Country: "Undine did not believe that her husband was seriously in love with another woman--she could not conceive that any one could tire of her of whom she had not first tired..."

Thursday, January 19, 2012

The Bell Jar



The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Category: I first read The Bell Jar in 11th grade AP English. This was the first time I had ever read anything Sylvia Plath wrote. All I had ever heard about her was that she committed suicide.

My thoughts: I think the idea of “Sylvia Plath, suicidal poet” has superseded the notion of “Sylvia Plath, talented writer.” And she was quite talented. The Bell Jar is a fictionalized account of Plath’s own assignment at a New York magazine during college, descent into a hellish breakdown, suicide attempt, and hospital stay complete with shock treatments. Esther Greenwood is the story’s protagonist. It is also a glimpse into the expectations placed on women during the 1950s. Esther’s attempts at making herself into a writer are not taken seriously, and she is groomed to believe that she should forget career aspirations if and when she becomes a wife and mother. Interesting that Plath went to Smith, as did Betty Freidan, author of The Feminine Mystique, and Gloria Steinem--both of whom very publicly rejected limitations placed on women.

Reading about Esther’s hospitalization reminded me of a biography I read about Marilyn Monroe—the idea of a young woman with a lot of personal demons living and being treated in an era that had a long way to go in terms of understanding and treating mental illness. It's heartbreaking. It also made me think of similarities in the lives of Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe. Both were troubled women who struggled for artistic credibility, were married to literary men and died within months of each other.

The nice thing about rereading books is that your view of the world has changed in the years between, and you have a new or different understanding of things. When I first read The Bell Jar, I had only a vague idea about the Rosenbergs (Esther’s summer assignment occurs around the time they were executed amidst Cold War suspicions). Also, back in 11th grade, I had no idea that Madison Avenue, where the women’s magazine’s office is, was so famous (thank you, Mad Men).

And there’s this: Plath writes, “I strolled into the kitchen, dropped a raw egg into a teacup of raw hamburger, mixed it up and ate it.” Was this a thing in the 1950s? It sounds awful. Anyway, rereading The Bell Jar reaffirmed something that I first glimpsed in 11th grade and saw again years later when I read Sylvia Plath’s journals: the woman was an amazing writer.

Great passage: There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

Up next: Paradise by Toni Morrison

Saturday, January 14, 2012

The Warmth of Other Suns

Author: Isabel Wilkerson
Category: I began reading this book in August of last year. I took a break from reading it because of all the reading I had to do for an art history class I took in the fall. But I went back to it after the class was over.

My thoughts: In short, this book is awesome and a great reading experience. The Warmth of Other Suns is a super-comprehensive look at the Great Migration. This was a period in the 20th century when Southern blacks migrated to Northern and Western cities. The book is part history lesson and part sociology lesson and mainly focuses on the stories of three people: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney, Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, and George Starling. Ida Mae, her husband, and children decided to say good-bye to Mississippi after a relative was beaten nearly to death and, as was par for the course, no legal action could be taken. Robert Foster left Louisiana to move to California and realize his full potential as a surgeon. George Eastman left Florida and moved to New York to escape a “necktie party” (i.e., a lynching) as potential retribution for trying to get orange grove workers to organize. Interspersed among these stories are facts about the Great Migration and vignettes about others whose lives were touched by it, like basketball great Bill Russell and Wilkerson’s own mother.

Our protagonists learned that their troubles did not end once they left the South. Robert Foster’s journey to California alone proved to him that discrimination did not end once he left Southern borders, and he endured a arduous journey through the West, where he could not find a hotel that would allow him to stay there for the night, and thus was awake and driving for an ungodly amount of time. Ida Mae witnessed white flight and the formation of the inner city in Chicago, where there were instances of sometimes brutal resistance to a black family moving into an all-white neighborhood. George Starling had escaped a lynching that brought down many of his brethren in the South, but had to endure demoralizing discrimination in the North—he could go into a bar in Penn Station and have a drink, but the bartender would break the glass when he finished his drink rather than reuse it. George’s family was also touched by the growing problem of drug addiction in the inner city. This lesson of the less-than-stellar side of the migration reminded me of A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry, Richard Wright’s Native Son, and the beloved TV show Good Times (all set in Chicago—one of the Great Migration’s receiving stations).

The Warmth of Other Suns illuminates a movement in history that has received too little attention, but has affected the lives of so many—and the United States itself. The book reminded me of Bound for Canaan, Fergus Bordewich’s work about the Underground Railroad and another comprehensive look at ordinary people who slowly created change in America.

Great passage: They had gone off to a new world but were still tied to the other. Over time, the language of geographic origin began to change; the ancestral home no longer the distant Africa of unknown forebears but the more immediate South of uncles and grandparents, where the culture they carried inside them was pure and familiar.

Saturday, January 7, 2012

The Custom of the Country

Coffee tastes better with a good book.


Category: I read this book about 9 years ago, when I wrote my senior thesis about the theme of marriage in Edith Wharton’s fiction.

My thoughts: Every once in awhile, Edith Wharton strolls into my life to remind me what an absolute rock star she is. Although The Age of Innocence is the first Edith Wharton novel I fell in love with (not the first I read—that was Ethan Frome, which I did not care for), The Custom of the Country is probably my favorite Edith Wharton novel. This is a little odd because the main character, Undine Spragg, is a complete cow. In this novel, Edith Wharton gives us an unflinchingly unlikeable character. To call Undine Spragg selfish is the understatement of the decade. She uses the people around her, including her own parents, to get ahead. She marries and divorces without thought to the consequences of her actions. And yet…it is kind of hard to completely condemn her. As a woman, Undine is denied the opportunity to use her shrewdness and cunning in the business arena like the men around her, so she has to use it in other ways. Although she is a horrible person, she is a very compelling character (a bit like Michael Corleone in The Godfather). And she absolutely refuses to be beaten—she'sdefinitely a survivor. She was sometimes down, but could never be counted out (she is an interesting foil to Lily Bart, a Wharton character from The House of Mirth who I’ll hopefully get a chance to write about here). Also, Undine made me laugh when trash talking a character named Looty Arlington is (and with a name like that, who can blame her?)

When I first read the novel, I was struck by how Edith Wharton was able to portray the notion of how complicated marriage is—that some people fail to think of what married life will be like. Edith Wharton showed what happened after the wedding was over…that the marriage between a rich man and a beautiful woman does not necessarily lead to “happily ever after.” The reader also gets the feeling that Wharton believes people do not take marriage seriously.

I like to think that, in many ways, The Custom of the Country is the also story of the United States at the time. Through Undine Spragg’s story, we see the shift of power from old moneyed families to ruthless nouveau riches clans who elbowed their way to significance, the trend of American “dollar princesses,” newly minted states, and the emergence of the United States as a fledgling world power. In my opinion, The Custom of the Country is a perfect example of what a great writer Edith Wharton was.

Great passage: "The turnings of life seldom show a sign-post; or rather, though the sign is always there, it is usually placed some distance back, like the notices that give warning of a bad hill or a level railway-crossing."


Next up, The Warmth of Other Suns

Inaugural Post

I love reading, and have for years. I also enjoy writing about what I’ve read. So this is a chance for me to do exactly that. Simple enough. So hopefully, I’ll write about books—books I’ve read, books I’ve reread, books I was supposed to read but didn’t (of which there are, unfortunately, quite a few). When it comes to reading, I am a magpie (hence the name of the blog). I like fiction, biographies, even young adult books. Occasionally, I may meander to other topics, like movies or even food. Especially if I’m in the midst of reading a lengthy book. So here goes nothing! First up, I'm rereading The Custom of the Country.