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!

Madame Bovary, c'est moi

"Madame Bovary, c'est moi." 

Gustave Flaubert might have written Madame Bovary in much the same spirit as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote; aspiring to warn the masses against reading too much (like there could be such a thing). But apparently he himself felt an affinity with his widely despised character. Apparently enough of an affinity to say that he was Madame Bovary.

Poor Emma Bovary set herself up to fail. Her avid reading of romantic novels led her to have certain expectations. No one told her about the difference between reality and fiction, and hence she went through life expecting to be swept away by great love and craving luxury. Of course, all there was in store for her were disappointing love affairs, debt and arsenic.

This blog is a statement of sorts. A confession. I plead guilty. Guilty of romanticizing, fantasizing and idealizing à la Emma Bovary.

The Madame Bovarys of this world may annoy some, but this is a place for shameful indulgence. A place devoted to immersion into all things fiction.