Silas Marner by George Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Back in the fall of 1963 I was practice teaching at New Bedford High School. I didn't get to choose any of the books I taught and I was distressed that I had to teach Silas Marner. I had read it myself in high school not so long before and didn't like it at all and couldn't see the point of it all. Too sentimental, too stilted in language, too unrealistic.
But of course I sat down with the book and a notepad and started to do some close reading, as they taught us to do in those days. And a masterpiece was revealed. It is a simple story of a cynical and self-absorbed man who reacted to a great disappointment in his youth by becoming a hermit and a miser and the arrival on his doorstep of a little child for which he must take responsibility. The love of this child replaced the love of gold in his heart and his need for help from his neighbors drew him to become part of the community.
A book that is not likely to appeal to a typical 16-year-old. I'm not sure I got anybody to appreciate or even to understand it. I remember we spent a lesson on strange words and the puzzled looks when I said "westcoat" was pronounced "westkit" and "wainscot" was pronounced "wainscut." An early introduction for the students to the sly and illogical ways of English pronunciation.
The one person to whom the book did appeal, and who grew to understand and appreciate it was of course the teacher. What a difference four years had made in my ability to grasp Eliot's ideas and to see the beauty of her language. And if four years improved the book, I assure you 45 more years has improved it even more. Not all the books we re-read after so many years seem as good as they did in the past - this one improved tremendously. It has become a favorite and I will undoubtedly re-read it again very soon.
2011 No 172
The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'm going to stick my neck out here and proclaim this recently published book by Julian Barnes a classic. It won the 2011 Booker so I don't have to stand alone in declaring it an unusually perceptive and beautifully written novel. Of all the wonderful books I read this year - and there were boatloads of them in 2011 - this one stood out.
Perhaps the book's impact was so strong because a couple of months ago an old friend sent me some letters that I had written to her in 1962 and 1963. The shock of reading my own words, long forgotten, was intense. I had just read Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, a book that I loved but thought at the time was obscure. I had a distinctly negative reaction to some other author, justly so. I was so very young, so silly, emphasized all the wrong things and overlooked the important events that were happening in my life.
In Barnes' novel the narrator is sent a letter than he wrote many years before, which he has remembered as very different from the actual letter he is now faced with. The letter makes him re-examine the story he has told himself about his life and the lives of his friends from the past. The treatment of memory and one's personal myth is brilliant. The Sense of an Ending is a book not for youth but for old age. Stunning.
2011 No 173
Middlemarch by George Eliot
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Over at the dovegreyreader blog a year-long reading of George Eliot's masterpiece is underway. The idea is to read the part of the book that would have been published back in 1871 and 1872. Would our reading experience change when we had only a small part of the book before? Would we, like the reeaders of the 19th century, wait eagerly for the next section of the novel to be published?
The reading began with part I on 1 December 2011. And yes, having only that small part of the enormous novel in front of me slowed me down and helped me to pay closer attention to the structure of the narrative, the way the characterization of Dorothea and Casaubon developed, and the hitherto overlooked (by me, probably not by other readers) perceptiveness and indeed wisdom of Dorothea's sister, Celia.
And yes, I'm restless thinking about when the next part of the serialization will be available.
Mary, I had not thought of it but you are right. The Sense of an Ending may be wasted on the young. I also enjoyed the book.
Happy New Year! Don't be a stranger.
Posted by: Fay | Sunday, January 01, 2012 at 10:39 AM