Stuff I read over the fall

[cahn]

I ended up reading a few things over the fall :)

Don Karlos, Infant von Spanien (Schiller; trans., Oxford ed.) - So, uh.

Me: falls in love with particular translations of Dante and hates other translations
Also me: Makes negative judgments about Don Carlos based on the ancient Gutenberg translation
Also me: Does not like Antony & Cleopatra until I see the actual play
Also also me: Makes negative judgments about Don Carlos based on reading rather than watching it

I don't regret this, because it led to becoming friends with selenak via her being very nice about me being dumb, which led to lots of further adventures with regards to the Enlightenment and now also Classics, but this is all just to say that I do feel a little stupid about not having gotten this translation to begin with. It's in straightforward iambic pentameter which sometimes obscures the exact original text but is very clearly written in modern English and doesn't obscure the actual meaning of what's going on nearly as much as the Gutenberg text to a modern eye. (I don't have it with me right now, but when I do I'll copy out a part or two.) And also I did get a chance to watch a video (regie, but still) a few years back. So all in all, on this reading, I got a much better sense of all the characters, enough to fall in love with them: Posa (who loves Carlos and loves humanity in general and has great hopes for both of them, but has the fatal flaw that when one of his plots starts failing, he always decides that the answer is to patch on another, more complicated, plot -- which -- someone needs to write an AU where he's a software engineer/manager), Carlos (who is trying so hard, but never has enough information to quite get anything right), the King (who starts opening up to Posa's firebrand words, and is legit terrifying when he understands that Posa has rejected him), the Queen (who understands everything but can affect none of it). And there are so many hilarious parts, like where Alva and Domingo (Carlos' antagonists) try to sweet-talk the Queen, and she's like, uh, wow, how is it that I have such good friends that I didn't even know I had??

The opera Don Carlos, which I also watched a lot of, definitely loses a lot both of the characters' multifaceted personalities and of backstory. It does gain in sheer emotive power what it loses in intellectual power, because, I mean, well, Verdi, and the way the characters are simplified tends to amplify the emotiveness, so it's just... different. (A lot like how Verdi's Macbeth is different from Shakespeare's Macbeth, for that matter, and I love them both.)

The Heart of Princess Osra and The Prisoner of Zenda (Hope) - So, uhh, it turned out I wanted to do some research on Ruritania as a place, and previously I had only ever read "The Sins of the Bishop of Modenstein" (in sixth grade or so), which I still like best of all the stories in Osra. (The Bishop is so clearly written to be the fan-favorite character! The Hentzaus, in both books, are clearly written to be the fan-favorite family! Now some of the Hentzaus (of whom history tells us of many) have been good, and some have been bad; and the good fear God, while the bad do not; but neither the good nor the bad fear anything in the world besides. Hence, for good or ill, they do great deeds and risk their lives as another man risks a penny.)

Somehow I had got the idea that Zenda was set in the 1700's, probably from the fact that Osra actually is set then, so it was a surprise that it was a contemporary novel. I liked it! The end was bittersweet! I actually prefer Osra in many ways (even though I find Flavia to be a much better character than Osra for the most part), perhaps because it gives more scope for unabashed romanticism (Hope gets in a ton of great lines like the above), and perhaps because I had a major crush on the Bishop in sixth grade :)

I haven't been able to bring myself to read the sequel to Zenda yet; I have been spoiled for what happens at the end.

Sieben Jahre (Kinkel) - ...I guess I never did write a review for this, so here you go! This German book about the Seven Years' War is just the awesome book about Frederick the Great (henceforth Friedrich) and his love/hate relationship with his brother Henry/Heinrich, as well as several of their other Hohenzollern siblings (most notably Wilhelm, Amalie, and Wilhelmine) -- and the tangle of love and torment and death that bound them all, particularly during the time period of the Seven Years' War -- and a ton of other super interesting characters too.

It's more than 800 pages, which means that everyone's here and gets a moment to shine: the Hohnezollern brothers' extremely-put-upon wives Elisabeth Christine (Friedrich's wife, married under duress, who somehow still loves Friedrich after years of being neglected) and Luise (Wilhelm's wife and Elisabeth Christine's sister, who also undergoes years of being neglected but... somehow... seems to still be likeable after that??) and Melusine (Heinrich's wife, beautiful and witty but also married under duress; Heinrich is as gay as Friedrich is) (and I think one of the things I really admire about this book is that you can see why the brothers treated their wives so badly, and even empathize with them a bit, without ever trying to say that it was at all okay or that they were at all justified in doing so, which they were not); Friedrich's lover and chamberlain Fredersdorf (I really love this guy, 10/10, no notes, and his awesome wife Caroline even gets a tantalizing bit of screen time, leading to my asking for her for Yuletide); Maria Theresia, Friedrich's enemy/rival (and -- in his words -- "The only man the Habsburgs have produced in several centuries, and it's a woman." (Also period-typical misogyny in this book, why do you ask? but again, it's never condoned, and there is a large set of really great women characters of all sorts, including MT herself)); Heinrich's friend-with-benefits and diarist extraordinaire, Lehndorff (who is both absolutely the sweetest guy and at the same time you can see why Heinrich never ended up with him); the former page Marwitz (who has a History, so to speak, with both Friedrich and Heinrich, and whose snarky and irreverent commentary on everything made me fall in love with him maybe even more than anyone else); the super-competent general Seydlitz; the black page who serves Wilhelm (who, the Afterword tells me, was briefly mentioned in Lehndorff's diaries -- but gets a whole fleshed-out backstory and POV scenes in the book, as well as the names Mmadi Make/Hannibal).

The book has a sweeping scope that covers everything from the royal court to battlefields, from discussions of war strategy to fraught familial conflict to intimate conversations between characters, and while it primarily covers the seven years of the title, there are also a few flashbacks to important moments in some of the characters' lives. The book begins, for instance, with Heinrich's memory, as a 4-year-old, of their father, the Soldier King, confronting the rest of his children with over-the-top verbal and physical abuse after 18-year-old Friedrich tries to escape with his friend/lover Hans Hermann von Katte, whom the Soldier King then orders to be executed. (4-year-old Heinrich, of course, does not understand any of this at the time.)

The relationship around which the entire novel is constructed is the Friedrich-Heinrich axis. Heinrich was cursed to always live in the shadow of his fourteen-years-older brother, in several senses. There's a very familiar dysfunctional/abusive-family dynamic going on here that the novel delineates intensely, where Friedrich deals with his own abusive upbringing (including his father exerting all kinds of control over him, demanding fealty and submission, e.g., forcing him to marry) by... exerting all kinds of control over Heinrich, demanding fealty and submission, e.g., forcing him to marry. And since he's not quite as bad as the Soldier King (not hard!) Heinrich ought to be grateful, eh? But also, Heinrich, like his brother, is brilliant and super-competent and hard-working (when he has a reason to be) and has a head for strategy, and the two of them also (in addition to having the above dynamic) understand each other better than anyone else does; which is another reason he can never escape from his brother. To this already-unstable dynamic now add Wilhelm, the middle brother (*), who is the one the Soldier King actually liked (might you imagine how Friedrich felt about that, even if he doesn't admit it to anyone, least of all himself?), who is super lovable and nice (to everyone except his wife) and whom Heinrich himself feels that he loves far more than Friedrich, but who does not happen to possess the hard-edged brilliance that both Friedrich and Heinrich have. Now, to this mix of love and seething resentment, add a war...

It will surprise no one who reads this that I have A Lot of feelings about this book for a number of reasons, and also a metric ton of feelings about the Friedrich-Heinrich relationship. The abusive-family dynamic is just so accurately and sensitively rendered, where all the family members have various dysfunctional defense mechanisms (Friedrich punches down, Heinrich tries to be super logical... except when he's not, Wilhelm tries to be a peacemaker, Amalie goes around being prickly to everyone) and everyone just goes around hurting everyone else because it's what they know how to do, and it's easier than actually being self-aware. And the character arcs when various characters do struggle towards self-awareness are very much appreciated! The Friedrich-Heinrich relationship in particular hits all of my tropey buttons in terms of fealty and power dynamics (there's a great scene where Heinrich clocks that Friedrich is demanding that he kneel, he starts to, and then -- and only then, when it's clear Heinrich is going to knuckle down -- does Friedrich assert that haha, just kidding, dearest brother, I won't make you kneel!), conflict between two different sets of what the character perceives as his duty, fraught family relationships --

Also. ase observed that I am a sucker for the trope of truly seeing and being truly seen -- it's one of my bulletproof tropes (and isn't that what we all wish for, in a sense?) -- and that is a thread that runs all through this book, most particularly with Friedrich and Heinrich, where for both of them, no matter how much they hate each other at times, the other is the one who can truly see him, the one who understands who he really is, and that more than anything is the unbreakable bond between them.

(*) There is also a youngest brother, Ferdinand. Poor Ferdinand, he always gets left out of everything. He's in the book, but I can't even remember if he has any lines at all.

Comments

[cahn]

<333333 Maybe we are both nice! :D

I forgot what I wrote about a scenario where Posa and Katte change places exactly, but I do remember it includes Posa deciding the solution to Fritz' situation and less than stellar escape planning was to start an incredibly complicated scheme ....while meanwhile, Philip can't put his hand on why exactly he feels slightly let down at meeting Katte, who is nice but....

OMG this is awesome! Oh POSA. But like, maybe that would work better than Fritz's lack of any planning...? And poor Philip, sort of -- probably better to be let down a little now than a lot later, though... :)

Also. Like. We must have talked about this before, but I don't remember (and I meant to put it in the post but also forgot to do that): I came out with shipping glasses on, totally thinking Elisabeth had a Thing for Posa that she would absolutely 100% never act on, and vice versa (though Posa may not even realize that himself, he's too busy setting up his plan for Carlos to be in love with Elisabeth). They understand each other so well! The Marquis goes to see her right before he dies and explains everything to her! That WHOLE SCENE, omg. She understands him completely in a way that Carlos does not! He knows her! AUGH! :D