cahn

Via selenak <3 This book is a novelistic look primarily at the women (specifically the wives and lovers) associated with the most famous Romantic poets (Byron, Shelley, Keats). It is well-written and compelling, extremely relevant to my interests, and also part #12345 or so of an ongoing series of "Reasons why I, especially as a woman, am glad I did not live hundreds of years ago" (which... I guess... is probably a good thing for me to keep in mind, these days...) and, as sort of a corollary to that, an implicit stirring polemic in favor of no-fault divorce and antibiotics. (Neither of which existed at the time, of course, but gosh, no-fault divorce and antibiotics would have made SO many people's lives so much better in this book!) Also against bloodletting :PP

Our best-beloved high school Brit Lit teacher, Dr. M, told us all kinds of stories about these people. He was, I think, a proponent of the "teach the kids literature and literary history through sensationalistic gossip" mode that I found in salon many years later -- and it works! Even decades after Dr. M's class, I came in knowing enough that the names and many of the love-affairs (especially the most sensationalistic ones) were familiar, though of course I didn't know very many details. Even (especially?) Byron; though we never read any Byron in class, he was certainly a very sensational figure. (I think Dr. M's plan was that we would go off and read Byron on our own -- the same way that he announced, when we did the Canterbury Tales, that he was forbidden to teach us "The Miller's Tale" because of it being too R-rated, and we all promptly hared off and read it outside of class -- although I found Byron enough not to my taste that I never read very much of him even with that.)

What I was struck by most about this book was just how trapped the women are by... everything, by societal expectations, societal disapproval, family situations, the constant spectre of sickness and death; all the women were more-or-less (sometimes less) sympathetic but were placed in situations where they were either miserable or making other people miserable or both. (I can't quite say that about the men -- there were a couple of men that were not very sympathetic -- but at the same time you could see them all being trapped too.) But I didn't get the impression that the author was trying to make a point about that in particular, or at least not any more than any other point; I think this was just how it was.

A few notes about some of the women POV characters:

Augusta Byron (Leigh) - I knew enough to draw in a breath when her half-brother George was mentioned, even before the reveal of her last name :P Anyway, she is awesome, my favorite -- a truly nice character but never boring, and you can see why she and Byron got along so well; their bantering conversations in the book are really some of my favorite bits. Definitely one of the characters where I was Put Out that her life was as miserable as it was :P Lord Byron himself was charming and dark and you could both see why everyone fell in love with him and also that it must have been awful to have been his wife or lover (though in Augusta's case, mostly because of the societal issues).

Mary (Godwin/Wollstonecraft) Shelley - Intellectual and intense, the Mary POV sections were perhaps the most compelling for me, and also could be frustrating, in the way that when you empathize with a character, you don't want the character to do the stupid things that you know you would do (or maybe actually did as a young person) in her place :P I felt like she had a lot of extremely understandable strong feelings! And often you could see how the strong feelings were acting against her best interests! Percy Bysshe Shelley, on the other hand, was... well... there's an xkcd about guys like him :P I also really enjoyed her scenes with Byron, of all people -- very platonic, no attraction, and that's actually very refreshing, to me as well as to the characters.

Caroline Lamb - these were my least favorite sections. I remembered from Dr. M that she had some struggles with mental illness, and Morgan makes her manic behavior quite as sympathetic as possible -- but it still wasn't all that fun to read for me. William Lamb was less of a presence in the book but seemed, well, passive and patriarchical but mostly pretty reasonable, especially in comparison to Byron and Shelley. Not that this is saying a whole lot!

Annabella Millbank (Byron) - Byron's long-suffering wife. Annabella is clearly -- in fact textually -- even less of a reliable narrator than the others. I found the style of her sections really interesting -- they're distant and mannered and very distinct from the other characters' POV, and really point up how she fabricates her own story that may or may not (often does not) match up to reality, but certainly matches up to her own interests. And at the same time Byron was just terrible to her! But one can see how she is almost optimally ill-suited to him! selenak told me about how she was absolutely horrible to their daughter, Ada Lovelace, and that is certainly consistent with the way her character is delineated here.

Fanny Brawne - I think part of why Fanny was here was just as a contrast to the other characters. (Keats doesn't interact particularly strongly with Byron and Shelley.) She seems to be the only one, out of all of them, whose issues don't arise out of an intensely conflicted adolescence, whether it was because of her circumstances (Mary -- I haven't mentioned her father, William Godwin, but he was a piece of work in the novel, one of those guys who can totally twist everything to "rationally" argue how it benefits him; the type is familiar) or because of her personality (Caroline). She is the only one where it seems like she actually maybe had fun. (Well, Augusta may have had fun in her childhood -- but the way the chapters are laid out, the awful parts of her life get a lot more documentation.) Of course one knows it all has to go wrong, because Keats and Brawne, but after reading about everyone else it's almost a relief to just be dealing with death instead of death plus a whole ton of dysfunction. (Of course, there are hints that if he had lived, perhaps this love story too would also have devolved into dysfunction. But maybe it wouldn't have. For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!)

But, in conclusion: no-fault divorce for Harriet Shelley and Annabella Byron, please and thank you, and hey, I'll take it for Mary Shelley too, and alllllll the antibiotics and NO bloodletting for not just Keats and Byron but also all the babies and small children who died in this book >:(

Also, I did a little reading about the next generation and they all seem rather interesting too; I want the sequel :PP

Via selenak, of course :) This was a very interesting and somewhat odd historical fiction book about Francisco Goya, the painter, and his life and times in the late 18th and early 19th centuries (the book begins with the Spanish court talking about Marie Antoinette's recent death -- so ~1793 -- and ends around 1800). I must admit that Spain is a big hole in my already-very-spotty knowledge of Europe, although opera fandom and salon helped a lot by filling in at least a couple of gaps about Philip II, the Escorial, and the Duke of Alba (and Philip V who thought he was a frog, but who does not appear in this book at all). Now, of course, Philip II was a couple of centuries too soon for this book (even I knew that!) but he's namechecked a couple of times, as is Fernando Álvarez de Toledo (Third Duke of Alba), again centuries too early but the forerunner of the Duchess of Alba in this book, who is a major character (María Cayetana de Silva; her husband Don José Álvarez de Toledo is a minor character).

Goya I knew absolutely nothing about, except that I knew he was a painter, and I knew (hilariously, from a Snoopy cartoon) he'd painted a kid with a dog (Google tells me this is his famous "Red Boy" painting). One of the really cool things about the book is the way it functions as an art guide (and one with a whole lot more context than usual art guides) to some of Goya's famous paintings. I only started following along with the wikipedia list of his paintings once I hit the middle or so (I read the first half on a plane and during a retreat), but I wish I'd done that the whole time! I know so little about art that it was helpful to have the "interpretation" of it right there (Feuchtwanger often includes the reaction of various people to the art piece, as well as Goya's feelings about it).

Indeed the book is dictated by the art, to a certain extent: if you look at Goya's pictures in chronological order (as I have now done), he does these sort of nice standard pictures until... about 1793, when the pictures start getting more interesting (and indeed the book starts with Goya making a breakthrough in his art). And then around 1800 is when he starts doing these crazy engravings that start looking much more modern -- like, you can totally see them as an artistic bridge between Bosch (namechecked in the book) and Dali (who obviously was yet to come far in the future) -- his book of engravings, Los Caprichos, is what the book ends on (and the title is taken from that of the last Caprichos engraving, Ya es hora).

It is curiously missing in any real sort of character arc -- I mean, Goya keeps talking about how he's progressed in life and thinks about things so differently now, but really he seems to me to be pretty much the same at the end as the beginning, except more battered by life. It's his art that has progressed, though. Instead of a character arc we have an art arc, I guess!

The book also cheerfully uses all the most sensational theories about Goya and the Spanish court possible, with the effect that it is quite compelling but does veer a bit into "wow, this is Very Soap Opera" at times. Basically, everyone is having torrid love affairs with everyone else, and all of that becomes totally relevant to all the politics that's going on. Some of this is attested historically, and some of it is less so. On one hand, Manuel Godoy, the Secretary of State, does appear to have had a close relationship with Queen Maria Luisa (Wikipedia, at least, does not think that there is any direct evidence they were lovers, but at least it's clear there were rumors). But as far as I can tell from Google, Maria Cayetana, Duchess of Alba, did die mysteriously, buuuuut there isn't any evidence at all that she died as a result of a botched abortion of Goya's baby. (Did I mention Very Soap Opera?? Yeah.)

It's sort of shocking to me that the book ends before any of the War of Spanish Independence, which happens just a few years later (which again, since I know zero Spanish history I just found out about while reading various wiki articles after reading this) or Goya's resulting engravings on The Disasters of War (ditto), although I guess all the signs are there as to what's going to happen -- it's not that different from what Feuchtwanger did in Proud Destiny, where even I know that the French Revolution is going to happen, but he doesn't show it in the book.

Requisite Feuchtwanger things: 1) protagonist is irresistable to the ladies and has multiple women who are crazy about him, check 2) small child dies, check.

Ranking in Feuchtwangers: I think the Josephus trilogy is still my favorite, and Jud Süß is still the one I'm most impressed by, but I did like this quite a bit, especially when I had the visuals to go with it.

So people keep giving me books to read and I have been so way behind on posting about them, so uh I'm just going to post something quick about a few, even though they deserve much longer posts.

-The Girl from Rawblood (Catriona Ward) - 4/5 - this one part of the Catriona Ward kick which is all the fault of rachelmanija. I really liked this one! I felt that Sundial, while compelling, also didn't invest me overmuch in the characters, except for Callie, and that took a while -- but this book I felt both had compelling characters and a deep compassion for all of them. I read this in conjunction with rachelmanija over chat (we'd make sure we were synched for each chapter) which was super fun, although it did mean that occasionally we'd figure out plot twists ahead of time that I'd never have figured out on my own (since we were having twice the amount of epiphanies/making twice the number of connections that we would have by ourselves, as well as discussing after every chapter instead of my barrelling straight through). But also ALL THE WARNINGS (most flagrantly, content note for early-20th-century insane asylums and also there is a very graphic bit with rabbit dissection that both of us skipped -- lots of other terrible stuff too, but those were the ones that were so bad that I, who have basically no triggers or squicks, flinched). This was also a good book to read with someone else because we could stop ourselves from reading chapters late at night. (...There are definitely chapters you don't want to have read late at night and be trying to sleep after reading. It doesn't have a terrible awful no-good ending -- in fact, there's a lot of grace to the ending -- but the book itself is a Gothic horror book.) rachelmanija's much better review is here.

-Josephus, The Jew of Rome, Josephus and the Emperor (Lion Feuchtwanger) - 4/5 - selenak mentioned these as part of her never-ending quest to feed me books and history I am ignorant of, and I was like, wait, the Josephus of Antiquities of the Jews? Sign me up! (We read bits of Josephus in my college Bible class, and I'd always meant to read more of his work.) I found these quite interesting -- Josephus, the titular and main character of the saga, had a much more interesting life than I had realized (I knew basically nothing about him except that he'd written that one book), and Feuchtwanger makes him a complicated character who can sometimes be frankly unlikeable at times, but whom I found always fascinating. Feuchtwanger was Jewish, and these books were written in the 1930's and 1940's... much of the books is concerned with the Jews of that time and their relationship with the Roman Empire, both as a whole (e.g., the wars, as well as various Roman policy) and in individual cases (Josephus himself being the prime example of someone whose life, as Feuchtwanger portrayed it, was continually clashing between his Jewish identity and his Roman identity).

It also brings up nascent Christianity and Josephus' investigation into Christianity's roots (which selenak told me is the only reason why Josephus' work was saved in the first place, as opposed to his rival Justus, who is a minor but important character in the book (I hilariously was convinced that if there was a fandom for this book, Justus/Josephus would be the juggernaut ship -- there are a lot of very shippy tropes and language surrounding their relationship) whom we only know about because Josephus mentioned him in his books). And at one point it raises the question, what's the role of deceit in religion? In the sense of, is it okay if a religion (Christianity, in this case) is founded on a lie? Or on stories that may have some truth but other parts of it are not truthful? (Uh, doubly relevant for me, which is why it struck me so profoundly even though it's a quite small part of the book.) Anyway -- there's a lot going on in these books, more than the... margin of this post will contain. I haven't even gotten to the great plot thread with my fave Lucia in the third book! :P Anyway, very interestingly chewy books, I thought! Perhaps more interesting to someone who is already interested in the subject material (I was interested in both Josephus and the meta questions Feuchtwanger brings up).

(His book The Oppermanns is supposed to be re-released this week in English. (The link goes to a 2001 print version but I believe the print is being rereleased this week with the e-book.) This is a contemporary novel about a German Jewish family during Hitler's rise to power. I'm going to check it out, when I surface from Yuletide-related reading...)

-Luckenbooth (Jenni Fagan) - 3+/5. This was an odd and interesting book, courtesy of a rec by cenozoicsynapsid. I am not quite sure I liked it so much as I admired it -- it's a story of, well, various events that take place in a single building in Edinburgh during the 20th century, in a sort of dystopian-magic AU of our world, and it's doing some interesting things structurally, with each of three sections being the weaving together of stories of three different sets of people in slightly different but overlapping eras (each section is in a distinct time era and has its own arc): so, nine different sets of people. This sometimes worked well and sometimes not as well -- some sets were interesting stories, both for the way they intersected with the through-line and in their own right (the medium! the miner who is afraid of daylight!), though there was at least one set (perhaps not surprisingly, the one with William Burroughs -- if any of the others were people I should have heard of, I don't know it) where I just didn't care about the set of people in those chapters. This was definitely one of those books where I had no idea what was going on for a while (I'm still not sure I figured out everything), and I do enjoy that. I also feel like it was odd enough that I'm not sure I recommend it! But I'll probably put it on my Hugo ballot, because it needs more challenging material and less The Same Five Authors Over And Over Again, not that I am bitter. This one also has all the warnings! graphic murder, rape, etc.