Strictly Good and Evil

Since I can't help reading whatever happens to be in front of me, yesterday morning was spent devouring Marquis de Sade's Eugénie de Franval. Disturbing as though it was, at least it wasn't graphic or terribly upsetting, that is not in the way that makes you randomly burst out crying at the supermarket or swear off sex. The collection of the marquis' writings was lying around because my fiancé has to read Philosophy in the Bedroom for class, which surely is a different story altogether.

Back to Eugénie. She is the daughter of Monsieur and Madame de Franval. The latter is only fifteen years old at the time of her marriage, and the former is a terrible bastard, the narrator kindly informs us from time to time. Not that we need to be told - the fact that Franval already has formed the plan to seduce his own daughter at the time of her birth is quite the telltale sign.

Franval keeps Eugénie away from her mother from the very beginning, and brings her up in a way to make her disregard norms, laws and morals. At the very least he does have the decency to wait until she reaches the age of fourteen to seduce her... Then, annoyed by the interference of Madame de Franval, he proceeds to frame his wife, forging letters and the like to make her out to be having an affair, and supporting her lover with her husband's money. Somewhere on the side of screwing his daughter, literally, and screwing his wife, figuratively, he manages to find the time gets a holy man imprisoned.

There is nothing balanced or nuanced about this novella. Franval is the most evil creature to ever grace the pages of fiction. The fact that he repines (after his wife and daughter both died, he got mugged down to his underwear and basically had lost pretty much everything) doesn't really alter that fact. His wife on the other hand is the purest of the pure. Despite her husband's evildoings, she never stops loving him - in fact her dying wish is that he be forgiven. The daughter is just a lost lamb, pure at heart but led astray by the inherent evil of crime, or perhaps more to the point, by her freaky father.

Despite this very black and white picture, there is something of very lucid insight into the human mind, and even of compassion. Dostoevsky's social pathos springs to mind. Marquis de Sade may have been a lot of things, and a captivating writer is one of them.

Books to bring over the Atlantic

I just moved from Sweden to Florida, and finally starting to feel settled in enough to write a blog post. The worst part of moving was choosing which books to bring. I filled my carry on with books. Unfortunately I couldn't just pick my favorites - I had to go with the lightest ones. It ended up being quite a random list.

• The Salmon of Doubt by Douglas Adams - a lovely collection of essays.
• Poem collection by Swedish poet Dan Andersson - I've never so much as looked at it before, but now I did, and I really liked it, so I couldn't leave it behind.
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - because I was reading it at the time. I finished it on the plane and will post my thoughts on it soon.
• Literary Theory, A Very Short Introduction by Jonathan Culler. It's a mystery why I brought this. It is tiny, that is it.
• Three anthologies of European poetry - The Romantic Era, From Three Centuries and Between the Romantic Era and WWI. The poems are presented in their original languages and with a literal translation (to Swedish). They're part of a great series of 18 books, stretching from Ancient Greece to the aforementioned poetry collections. I own them all, but there was no way to bring them.
• Konsten att läsa tankar by Henrik Fexeus. The art of thought reading. I haven't read it yet, and it's probably stupid, but seemed interesting enough.
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. Of course!
• Big Sur, Vanity of Duluoz and On the Road by Jack Kerouac. The two former because I haven't read them yet, the latter because it's my lucky travel charm.
• In His Own Write by John Lennon - because my Lennon biographies were too big to bring (it hurts a bit to think about it), and well, I love it.
• Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez - because I recently read it and want to convince my fiancé to read it too.
• The Autumn of the Patriarch by Marquez as well, because I bought it in a second hand book store many years ago and completely forgot about it, that is I've never read it. Plus it's small. 
• Essays by Montaigne. I've only read a few of them, but loved them and been intending to read more for quite a few years now. 
• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry - in Japanese. For refreshing my knowledge of said language. 
• The Madwoman in the Attic by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Very important work about the tradition of female writers, aka another book I haven't got around to reading yet.
• The Red Room by August Strindberg. Instead of bringing a Swedish flag... and because I want to reread it.

That's it. I'm trying not to think of the lonely books in the attic back home. But I can't believe I didn't get a single Dostoevsky with me. They were just too thick and heavy. Oh well... it's not as if I'll actually be missing those books, it was just depressing to pack them away. Now I'll just have to try not to assemble a big collection here, to avoid going through the same thing the next time I move to a new country.

Parting with the books

I am in the somewhat miserable process of packing my whole life into two suitcases (since I'm moving from Europe to the States). Owning a good 600 books, any fool could see some of them will have to stay behind. (Although, I am quite tempted to TRY and squeeze them down into my two bags, just for fun.)

All my clothes won't fit either. I can't bring the family dog. Obviously I will miss my friends and family sorely. But when I had to pack down my books... that's when it really hit me.

It's like leaving parts of me behind. They are my identity. I feel lost without my Kerouac collection, lonely without my John Lennon biographies, devastated without my Dostoevsky. They're completely different from other material things. They have souls.

To be honest, most of my books have been put away in boxes for the last two years, ever since I went to Japan, so I had only the most precious fifty or so books to pack today. But there's a reason those fifty weren't packed away - they're the most meaningful ones.

And I must admit, it really hurt to put away my beautiful literature anthologies and novels like Wuthering Heights, not knowing when I'll see them again. I'm trying to tell myself that if I end up staying a long time over there, I'll get them sent over, and if I decide to go back, they'll be here waiting for me. It's not as if I'm throwing them away.

Even so, I was howling like a lunatic... until one of my suitcase ate all my clothes, still weighing but 16 kg. That means I can stuff the other one with books! No, not quite, but I'll be able to bring a few!

Now comes the terror of choosing which ones. I should be able to bring 20 or 30 paperbacks, but I am tempted by my beautiful anthologies. If I do take them it'll probably be more like 10 paperbacks.

Which books would you pick? I'll be back with my list.

Deconstructing Pride and Prejudice

Okay, not really. Snip from Wikipedia:

"Deconstruction generally tries to demonstrate that any text is not a discrete whole but contains several irreconcilable and contradictory meanings; that any text therefore has more than one interpretation; that the text itself links these interpretations inextricably; that the incompatibility of these interpretations is irreducible; and thus that an interpretative reading cannot go beyond a certain point."

There's your pretentious bit of academic gibberish for the day. No, actually it's quite fascinating, but it's not what we'll be doing right now. I only mean deconstructing as in deconstructing the idea that Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice isn't... bollocks.

Die-hard Austen fans, I apologize. I'm not trying to insult you. It's just that I can't figure it out. Being a sucker for romantic 19th century novels myself one would think I were deep in your midst. I love Wuthering Heights, and I can't say Jane Eyre isn't good.

After finishing Love in the Time of Cholera I needed something else to read. Pride and Prejudice has beaten me quite a few times already, dare I give it another try?

The backside of my edition reads:

"In a remote Hertfordshire village, far off the good coach roads of George III's England, a country squire of no great means must marry off his five vivacious daughters. At the heart of this all-consuming enterprise are his headstrong second daughter Elizabeth Bennet and her aristocratic suitor Fitzwilliam Darcy – two lovers whose pride must be humbled and prejudices dissolved before the novel can come to its splendid solution."

It sounds great. Entertaining, interesting and meaningful. All the right ingredients are there. But somehow, the finished product has never done anything for me.  Perhaps it's just because I haven't finished it. The cover does talk about the novel's "splendid solution".

I've started to read it more times than I care to remember; I've even tried to listen to the audio book version. I did read more than half of it, but to no avail. And I'm not the kind of person to easily give up on a novel. If I start reading one, I finish it. Apart from this one. Maybe it's circumstantial; maybe it's just not for me (but it should be!).

I guess I will have to give it another go, and actually finish it before I judge it. I might like it. After all it is considered a classic, and is quite widely loved.

If not I will submit Pride and Prejudice to a vicious, verbal assault that will go completely unnoticed. Which also means no one will hear its screams. Mwahaha!

Love and Decay

"My heart has more rooms than a whorehouse," sighs Florentino Ariza, in great harmony with the general spirit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of Cholera. Because even though he spends fifty years waiting for Fermina Daza, object of his adolescent infatuation, by no means is she the only woman he ever loves. Neither does Fermina Daza's juvenile love for Florentino Ariza stop her from dearly loving her husband during fifty years of happy marriage, nor her long, happy marriage stop her from falling back in love with Florentino Ariza.

After having been rejected by Fermina Daza, Florentino Ariza whiles the years away in no less than 622 love affairs. Obviously some of these are casual encounters; yet others seem to reside in some of the nicest suits of his brothel of a heart.

It's all about timing. If Florentino Ariza had made a pass at Leona Cassiani in time, they might have shared a long and happy life together, and he might have forgotten about Urbina Daza. According to the narrator, Leona Cassiani and Florentino Ariza are the real loves of each other's lives. If Urbina Daza's father had not made her travel with him for a year she might never have rejected Florentino Ariza. Marquez plays with these little twists of fate quietly, without ever directing the reader's attention to them. They are just part of being human.

A picture of Urbina Daza and Florentino Ariza in their old age, from the 2007 movie. 

This novel is a celebration of love; love of all shapes and varieties. It is a manifest for love happening in any and all circumstances: in old age, in youth, between old men and young women, in the time of cholera. 

Ah, the cholera. Despite the title it is never all that central. It is merely the background picture; a subtle shadow present throughout the book. It may not be in sharp focus, but it is always there, like a quiet threat; a reminder of mortality. 

Aging serves to much the same purpose as cholera, only more bluntly. Love in the Time of Cholera has by no means a linear story, but it still offers a very real picture of how the characters move through middle, old and older age, slowly decaying. Still, in the midst of this decay, there is extraordinary, as well as ordinary, love. 

More than trying to deliver some message, though, this novel is an exquisite work of art; a pure pleasure to read. Despite its subject it never becomes sappy, tacky or banal. It is an ode to life and to love, bursting at the seams with humor and narrative joy. 

On the Road - the movie

Jack Kerouac's magnum opus was published in 1957, and despite numerous rumored attempts (Francis Ford Coppola obtained the rights 31 years ago), no film adaptation has been made - until now. Fifty-three years after the novel charmed the pants of the whole world and Kerouac became an overnight celebrity, On the Road, the movie, is filming!

It is hard not to chew on one's nails. On the Road is a novel that could translate beautifully to the big screen. Likewise, On the Road is a novel that might prove to be a complete disaster in its movie incarnation.  Walter Salles is directing, and José Rivera is the screenwriter. Coppola held onto it until he was sure he had the right people for the job, and that is more reassuring than anything. Dare we dare to say - this movie has the makings of a classic?

You can find an in-depth review of the script here. Apparently the movie begins with Sal's father passing away - something only briefly mentioned in the book - and goes on to follow Sal's friendship with Dean from the very beginning. Parts that appear to have been expanded include Marylou and Carlo Marx. The script supposedly includes a scene where Dean passes around a mug of coffee and benzedrines. Judging from this (not relayed in the novel) it seems the movie is going to be more focused on mood and characters than on fundamentally clinging to every single letter of the book, and of course that is applauded here at Madame Bovary's.

Garrett Hedlund is cast as Dean Moriarty. With his faux innocent smile and boyish good looks he seems like the perfect choice for Dean, the charming, fun loving con man.

Garrett's previous movies include Eragon, Death Sentence and Four Brothers.

Left: Garret Hedlund; right: Neal Cassady (Kerouac's inspiration for Dean)

Starring as Sal Paradise, Kerouac's alter ego, is Sam Riley.

Left: Jack Kerouac; right: Sam Riley

Riley doesn't look as handsome as Kerouac did in the 40's,  but he definitely fits the bill to be the same type - the melancholy, quiet drunk.

Carlo Marx (alter ego of Allen Ginsberg) is portrayed by Tom Sturridge, and Old Bull Lee (William Burroughs) is played by Viggo Mortensen (who really is a good actor) Kristen Stewart is cast as Dean's first wife Marylou. Her acting usually leaves a lot to be desired, but given that Marylou is supposed to be somewhat lost and confused it might work. Kirsten Dunst makes a (presumably small) appearance as Camille, Dean's second wife.

All in all, the cast is looking pretty good. The movie will be out in 2011, hopefully not too full of factual errors and misconceptions.

Bob Dylan

While Bob Dylan hardly will become the next Nobel Prize laureate, he does deserve the epithet literary genius. Eleven minute tracks, exaggerated use of the harmonica and his unique vocals (not seldom ridiculed) turn some off, but nevertheless Dylan is a giant. Personally I love how he conveys so much emotion with his singing, but his lyrics are unquestionably his greatest feat.

Some of his songs are relevant, important and engaging. Some are playful, mysterious and endlessly intriguing. Some are just sentimental in a way that sends a chill through your core.

Someho, a song like The Times They Are A-Changin' still feels fresh and urgent even though it was written almost fifty years ago.

"Come mothers and fathers

Throughout the land

And don't criticize

What you can't understand

Your sons and your daughters

Are beyond your command

Your old road is rapidly agin'

Please get out of the new one if you can't lend your hand

For the times they are a-changin'" (Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-changin', 1963)

Of course, the times happen to be changing now too, so maybe that's it. Perhaps they always are.

And then there are the songs that might as well be short stories. The ones that have so much detail, so many words, to keep you coming back again and again. And no matter how many times you do, you still can't figure it out. Take Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts. 





And then, my personal favorites. The ones that seem to resound deep within your heart. The ones that feel like you wrote them yourself. And who could describe that feeling better than Dylan himself?

"Then she opened up a book of poems

And handed it to me

Written by an Italian poet

From the thirteenth century

And every one of them words rang true

And glowed like burnin' coal

Pourin' off of every page

Like it was written in my soul from me to you" (Bob Dylan, Tangled Up In Blue, 1974)

Dylan on the unwelcome yet ecstatic feeling of desiring the wrong person:




Dylan's finest songs are both ethereal and incredibly insightful. It doesn't matter if they've been played a million times. I still get the same rush every time I hear Like A Rolling Stone. 

If you haven't seen it yet, I strongly recommend the movie I'm Not There from 2007. The performances are amazing and the use of Dylan's music exquisite.