Wednesday book meme, it's-still-Wednesday-right edition

[missroserose]

It's been a week. Not as physically intense as last week, but I've been feeling even more tired; I suspect I'm fighting off another cold. Hurrah, wintertime in a cold damp crowded city. :P Given how many moving parts my schedule has, I'll take "tired but still functioning" over "full-blown sick for a week and out of it for another week" any day...which doesn't mean I don't hope I'm feeling better tomorrow. It'd be nice to be able to clean the house properly without running out of steam halfway through.

What I've just finished reading

My Cousin Rachel, by Daphne du Maurier. I'm a little torn on the ending (er, spoiler warning? It was written in the 1920s...and it's a gothic novel, so it's pretty heavily foreshadowed); read one way, it comes across very much as "uppity womenfolk who refuse to adhere to social norms get what's coming to them", but I think there's an equal argument to be made for the "overly restrictive societies are toxic to those who would transcend them, and therefore the tragedy isn't that she didn't fit in but that Philip couldn't grow out of his narrow-minded upbringing and appreciate her for who she was - and since this culture gives men all the power, she was ultimately the one who suffered" view. Appropriately enough for the genre, the intent is left ambiguous, although I suspect my preferred reading is somewhat less so.

Howl's Moving Castle, by Diana Wynne Jones. Much as with the movie, I admired parts of this story very much, but the whole just...didn't quite gel. The whole thing felt scattered, with individual scenes working quite well but not really quite hanging together. I've been thinking about it on and off for weeks, and ultimately I think what's missing is any kind of emotional anchor. To paraphrase Desire, ever story ever told is about somebody wanting something, and here I just don't feel that wanting from...any of the characters, really. Even after her transformation and undertaking her quest, Sophie seems mostly complacent, and Howl of course has made a career out of not facing his feelings. Some of he worldbuilding is similarly patchy, but that's frankly small potatoes compared to the lack of clarity in character motivation; without it, we're left with a couple of people who...do various things, because maybe they think they'd like to, or maybe it's better than whatever else they could do, but there's not really any urgency or particularly high stakes involved.

Norse Mythology, by Robert Carlson. Somehow this ended up on my Kindle - I probably picked it up on the cheap because I was looking for an overview - and it turned out to be a quick read, basically a longish blog post. I did appreciate that it included links to further reading, including the Poetic and Prose Eddas (our sole source for many of these myths, as they were transmitted almost entirely in the oral tradition for much of their lifespan and only written down piecemeal, by people dedicated to preserving them when Christianity had mostly overtaken the culture). It doesn't get into a lot of the individual myths, but the background is useful; I'd wondered for a while why most of the Norse myths seem to be about Odin/Loki/Thor (answer: we know there were stories about the other gods because the Eddas refer to them, but they've been lost over the centuries).

What I'm currently reading

Norse Mythology, by Neil Gaiman. Creation myths fascinate me. The cultures that tell them are so diverse, but there are so many parallels - flood myths, the melding of elements, the creation of people out of earthly materials by divine beings who may or may not have known what they were doing. You really start to see where Jung got his ideas about archetypes and the collective unconscious.

Zer0es, by Chuck Wendig. Our titular hackers - a social engineer and rabble-rouser, an Arab Spring hacktivist, a hardcore libertarian Vietnam vet cipherpunk, and a full-on troll - have been accosted by a Shadowy Government Agent and deposited at The Lodge, there to perform unspecified acts of computer wizardry for the government in exchange for clean records. Said Government Agent has mentioned to his boss that they seem of...less than stellar quality, to which the boss has replied that they were hand-picked (so to speak) by a computer algorithm referred to as Typhon. Given that Typhon was the name of one of the scariest and most deadly monsters in Greek literature, I'm sure this is going to go just fine and our (not-quite-) heroes will do their jobs and get to go home with no trouble at all.

My Brilliant Friend, by Elena Ferrante. I'm not enjoying this story as much as I'd like to, and it took me a while to figure out why. There's a strong streak of crab mentality amongst the characters; the two main characters are both extremely gifted, but when they display their gifts they're mocked and belittled for it by their peers. Even social climbing of a more acceptable sort - Lila, at seventeen, works out a marriage arrangement that lifts her family out of poverty and provides opportunities for her father and brother to start their own business - is disparaged, with several of her friends referring to her 'selling herself'. (Which, okay, that's not an unfair assessment, but what alternative do you propose?) The narrator continues to study in school with some effort (and to Lila's envy), but sees no real future for herself and her knowledge; neither of them seem to have much in the way of long-term goals. While this certainly feels like an accurate portrayal of how poverty affects your mentality, it's honestly kind of depressing to listen to.

What I plan to read next

Ancillary Sword. I really want to find out what Breq does next.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I haven't read Howl's Moving Castle, but that was the impression I had from the movie, definitely.

[missroserose]

It's a flaw the book and the movie both share, unfortunately. I feel like the movie is more interesting - not only does it have the stunning visuals, but the worldbuilding holds together better and it has a few moments of real awe even without the characters as anchor. I don't think I'll be revisiting the book anytime soon.

[osprey_archer]

Replying slightly belatedly to discuss My Cousin Rachel! I think that in the end the weight of the evidence falls on the second interpretation: the framing story where Philip compares himself to the hanged man who murders his wife suggests that he sees himself in those terms now, that he thinks he deserves to be punished for what he did but knows that he won't - hence the comment that they no longer hang murderers at that crossroads.

But it is a rather delicate balance and it would be easy enough for someone to read it the other way if they had a mind. There's a recent film adaptation and I'm super curious to see it now - if they give more substance to the accusations against Rachel, if they try to make her more of a femme fatale. I thought it was pretty clear, by the end, that Ambrose's paranoia was solely the product of his disease and not Rachel's fault at all - and Philip picks it up with a vengeance at the end because to him the fact that she's leaving him must mean that she's evil.

The other thing that struck me is how little Rachel deviates from societal expectations of women: she's pretty and gracious and charming and very feminine. And yet she's still too alien for the norms to accommodate her, because she's a free agent - unmarried, and with no wish to be married. Do you think she would have married Philip if he had asked her (clearly, instead of the coded way he does in the book), before he had given her the estate? I think it could go either way - she's fond of Philip, and she does seem to love the estate, so she might say yes. But she might also say no.

[missroserose]

I agree; I think du Maurier definitely leans toward the second interpretation too (although it is appropriate to the genre to leave it up to the reader!). I feel like there's a really excellent paper or three to be written on du Maurier's complicated attitudes toward women (feminist sometimes, regressive other times) as expressed through her literature and choice of genre (for a group of stories that usually center around women, gothic fiction's always been extraordinarily ambivalent about female independence). But I never did get my English degree, sigh.

That is interesting about how incredibly threatening a woman with free agency is, isn't it? She has the potential to upend the entire system...In The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England, the author repeatedly returns to Chaucer's Wife of Bath (from The Canterbury Tales) as an example of medieval femininity, I suspect because there are few others in the surviving period literature; and yet most of the times he brings her up he mentions that most female time travelers shouldn't emulate her behavior, because her status as a wealthy widow gives her privileges and freedoms that most women don't have. Perhaps it's not surprising that the trope of dissatisfied women poisoning their husbands was so popular. Apparently the only path to any sort of freedom was to be a wealthy widow! And even then, you have to be careful not to attract the attention of a man you might have to reject; to quote an article I just read, "Women spend their lives negotiating survival and bodily integrity and humanity in the home, on the streets, in workplaces, at parties..." It's a little disheartening how little contemporary culture has changed on that front; to a disturbing degree, our autonomy and basic human rights still depend on male tolerance, protection, and forbearance.

To that end, I don't think she would have married Philip if he'd asked her outright; she cares for her autonomy too much. But they might have negotiated a happier outcome all around. Or perhaps not; Philip seemed extremely discontented with the thought of half a loaf (i.e. her haring off to Italy every winter) until he was faced with the prospect of none. Either way, I suspect it was the uncertainty that he found intolerable, the power she held over him.

Weird aside: I saw the trailer for the new My Cousin Rachel some time ago, and for some reason I was completely convinced that Daniel Radcliffe was playing Philip? Which was part of what had me interested in the book in the first place, since I was curious if it was something he could pull off in his post-Potter career, and I had half-pictured him in the role while I was reading it. And then after I was done reading I went Googling and discovered that no, it was some dude I'd never heard of, and as near as I can tell Daniel Radcliffe was never even involved in the production. I have no idea where my brain got the idea that he was.

[ivy]

Oh man, Zer0es sounds like it would make my head explode, haha.

[missroserose]

Wendig actually appears to have done his research, although of course I'm not a professional-grade nitpicker, just professional-adjacent. :) You'd have to ask Brian how it stands up - although you may have to listen to a twenty-minute recounting of how much he enjoyed the book, heh. You might like it - it has all the hallmarks of a scrappy-underdog story so far.

[ivy]

Huh! Maybe better than expected, then!