Review: “The Mill on the Floss” by George Eliot [1860]

The souls by nature pitch’d too high, by suffering plung’d too low. – p. 454

I have always had the impression that George Eliot’s writing was distinctly cold and subdued, choosing to critique society and explore social hierarchies rather than write romances with happy endings. My only experiences with Eliot’s writing are her rather odd fiction, Silas Marner and The Lifted Veil, both which meanders from what she is known for. But The Mill on the Floss begs to differ – it is so intense and so utterly romantic, thankfully not in a cringe-worthy way, that this must be one of the most emotional and moving books I’ve ever read.

Beginning at Dorlcote Mill in St. Oggs, the Tulliver family and their relations, with its numerous aunts and uncles, are established. Maggie Tulliver, with her dark hair, wild eyes and tanned skin, is a passionate and precocious young girl and never far from the reach of trouble. Constantly derided and scolded despite Maggie’s best intentions, Maggie can’t seem to win the love of her family. Only her father, Mr. Tulliver, sees his daughter’s attempts and is the only one who ever defends her, affectionately referring her as his ‘little wench’. Here is a scene after Maggie has chopped off all her hair:

‘Come, come, my wench,’ said her father soothingly putting his arms round her, ‘never mind. You was i’ the right to cut it off if it plagued you. Give over crying: father’ll take your part.’

Delicious words of tenderness! Maggie never forgot any of these moments when her father ‘took her part’. – p. 74

The relationship between Mr Tulliver and Maggie is one of the highlights of the story. The tenderness and love that shines through is unmistakable and never fails to grasp my heart. Aside from her father, Maggie adores and idolises her older brother, Tom, with whom she shared a close and affectionate relationship while they were both children. As Tom reaches adolescence, he develops strong ideas about justice and what is right and wrong. His strong ideas of morals, where there is no room for shades of grey, will play a part in the later division between Tom and Maggie.

When the siblings are in their mid-teens, Mr. Tulliver loses one of his many court cases and is consequently bankrupted and loses the mill. This shakes up the family significantly and life changes forever for Tom and Maggie. Tom finds solace in his work, proving himself to have a head for business, while Maggie finds newfound faith in the bible and religion. As a result, Maggie becomes calmer and subdued, her passionate and fiery nature now in check. As the two siblings grow up, they also grow further apart with their different temperaments now more distinct than ever and also suffering from hardship.

Maggie grows into a beautiful young woman who, while still subdued, finds her passionate nature threatening to boil over the mask she has created. She finds herself attached to two impossible and unsuitable men. The first, Philip Wakem, a wealthy but deformed childhood friend whose lawyer father was also the force behind the Tulliver’s bankruptcy and the second, Stephen Guest who is informally engaged to Maggie’s sweet and gentle cousin. Torn between her love and attraction to these men and her desire to do right by Tom, Maggie finds herself in an impossible situation because it is both  Philip and Stephen who are able to provide the one thing Maggie craves more than anything and which is something Tom never gives freely – love.

I absolutely loved this book and it is now one of my utmost favourite books. The story has left me reeling and the ending devastated me. I’m still a little angry about it. While the story was beautiful throughout, there was always a sense of foreboding that something terrible was going to happen. I loved Maggie and Mr. Tulliver who had the the most beautiful father-daughter relationship I’ve ever read. I didn’t quite get the same sense between Maggie and Tom. Maggie is a character that is difficult to forget and I feel desperately sorry for her, always an outsider despite whatever she did. Have some tissues nearby when you read this.

Library Loot

Many of the books I reserved early in the year have seem to all come in at the same time so now I have a precarious tower of library TBR as well as my TBR made up of my purchases. My reading has slowed down because I’ve been too exhausted and I’m always ready to nod off after two pages (sorry George Eliot!).

Library loot:

• The Various Haunts of Men – Susan Hill
• Herge: The Man Who Created Tintin – Pierre Assouline
• The Lost Symbol – Dan Brown (yes, yes, I know)
• Handling the Undead – John Ajvide Lindqvist
• The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
• Wetlands – Charlotte Roche
• At Home with Books – Estelle Ellis

It seems that I have subconsciously picked out gothic-ish books. I enjoyed Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In last year and his latest sounds just as interesting. I also think I might have a fascination with Swedish fiction now. I’m most fascinated by the Herge biography since I’m a huge fan of Tintin. I never tire of re-reading the comics or re-watching the excellent animated series. At Home with Books is one of my favourite ‘coffee table’ books but it’s getting quite outdated and old now. The featured ‘modern’ libraries looks very mid-90s (when the book was published) but the more traditional style libraries still look amazing. It showcases various personal libraries and also provide tips and advice on book collecting and how to care for books. I should get myself a copy of this book since it’s the fourth time I’ve borrowed it. It’s fantastic and quite voyeuristic, I suppose.I think it’s time somebody updated this.

And don’t judge me because Dan Brown’s in there with the rest. I think I’m set for the short Easter break.

Review: “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” by L. Frank Baum [1900]

We’re off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of Oz! Because, because, because, because …

No, that wasn’t in the book but they are the lyrics of the wonderful and catchy songs featured in the 1939 MGM classic movie of the same name. L. Frank Baum’s original book varies somewhat to the version most of us know and love. One of the significant difference is that Dorothy doesn’t wear the ruby slipper because they are actually silver in Baum’s version.

The story begins in Kansas where Dorothy, a young orphan, lives on a dry and desolate farm with her Uncle Henry and Aunt Em. There is nobody else for miles and the landscape and its people are tired and grey. A cyclone suddenly sweeps through the farm one day and Dorothy, who had run back into the house to find Toto, her dog, finds herself and the house transported to the land of Oz by the cyclone.

In Oz, Dorothy discovers that she is in the Munchkin land, which is filled with colour and beauty in contrast to her home back in Kansas. There, she meets the Good Witch of the North who congratulates her for killing the Wicked Witch of the East by landing her house on top of the witch. Needless to say, the young Dorothy is horrified and asks the good Witch how she can get home to Kansas.

‘The road to City of Emeralds is paved with yellow brick … so you cannot miss it. When you get to Oz do not be afraid of him, but tell your story and ask him to help you.’ – p. 25

And so Dorothy sets off along the yellow brick road and during her journey, she meets the Scarecrow, who desires a brain, the Tin Woodman, who desires a heart, and the Cowardly Lion, who desires courage. During their journey to the Emerald City, the three characters unknowingly display their desired traits without the need for the wizard’s magic.

Since this is already a well known story, there’s nothing much else to add. Undoubtedly, the book is more in-depth than the movie but also rather more philosophical about human nature and inner strength. We would like more courage, brains and heart and if only we looked a little deeper within ourselves, we would discover that we already possess them and do not need a wizard’s magic.

Lazy Sundays

Today was one of the best Sundays I’ve had in a long while. What did I do? Nothing, except lolling around at home watching I Dream of Jeannie DVDs and reading. In the morning I got right into The Mill on the Floss and I’m a quarter of a way through. I’d been struggling with it during the week because I’d been too tired to read it and this is a book that needs your undivided concentration. George Eliot did not write for those who are too lazy to appreciate her work. I’m liking Floss and I love Maggie. The relationship between Mr Tulliver and his ‘little wench’ is already pulling at my heartstrings.

In the afternoon, with the temperamental weather spitting rain and blowing heavy wind one minute then unleashing a blazing sun the next, I laid in bed and read The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and it was simply delicious. While I’m a huge fan of the movie, I did like the book and thought it was a little more darker, unnatural but more philosophical than how it was portrayed in the movie. And it made me quite nostalgic simply reading a book that had lovely illustrations inside.

I hope your Sunday was as pleasant and relaxing as mine!

(Painting: Portrait Of Marguerite Guillaumin Reading by Armand Guillaumin)

Lost Books

I’m a huge fan of the T.V. show Lost (except half of season two and most of season three which were quite dreadful) and I love how ingrained and significant literature is in the show. Characters would nonchalantly read a book that would turn out to contribute or hint at a deeper level in the plot. And even if you’re not a fan of the show, the writers do manage to insert an impressive list of literary titles with classics and philosophy featured heavily.

(Jacob reading Everything that Rises Must Converge by Flannery O’Connor)

This site - http://lostbooks.blogspot.com/ – has a list of all the books that have featured on Lost, its context and episode. Definitely worth checking out, even just for the titles.

New Orange Penguins

The titles of the next batch of the popular Orange Penguins have been released! There are 75 titles this time in celebration of Penguin’s 75th year. They all look so exciting and I want so many of them already. I’m a bit disappointed that they’re publishing The Wizard of Oz and  Nausea after all the trouble I went to find them and have just recently bought them! Also delighted, but also very annoyed, that Shirley Jackson is being published too along with M.J. Hyland’s debut novel (which I also just got).

I’m pretty excited that they’re publishing Muriel Spark since I’ve heard many positive reviews of her writing on other blogs. The list is quite inspiring and I love it. There’s a few F. Scott Fitzgeralds, Kafkas, interesting inclusions of writings by Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol, plays and some excellent Australian writing.

At the moment, there doesn’t seem to a list up and only a video which is slightly annoying. You can view it here:

I’ve listed them here but I can’t make out some authors.

• The Wizard of Oz – Frank L Baum
• Foe – J.M. Coetzee
• Dangerous Liaisons
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
• The Prophet
• The Thirty-Nine Steps
• One Hundred Great Books in Haiku
• The Invisible Man
• Obernewtyn
• The Lady in the Lake – Raymond Chandler
• Seven Little Australians
• Poems – Michael Leunig
• The Little Prince
• Our Sunshine – Robert Drewe
• Alice’s Adventure in Wonderland
• Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K. Jerome
• Three Tales from the Arabian Nights
• I Can Jump Puddles – Alan Marshall
• It’s Raining in Mango – Thea Astley
• Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
• The Psychology of Love
• The Ghost Road – Pat Barker
• Washington Square – Henry James
• The Trial – Franz Kafka
• Therese Raquin – Emile Zola
• Hamlet
• How the Light Gets In – M.J. Hyland
• The Go-Between – L.P. Priestly? Hartley?
• Gulliver’s Travels
• On Natural Selection – Charles Darwin
• Pygmalion – George Bernard Shaw
• Howl, Kaddish and other poems – Allen Ginsberg
• The Shiralee – D’arcy Niland
• Beowulf
• Postcards from Surfers – Helen Garner
• From Russia with Love – Ian Flemming
• Hard Times -Charles Dickens
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
• The Sheltering Sky – Paul Bowles
• Civilisation and its Discontents – Sigmund Freud
• The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx (what about Engles?)
• Raffles
• Nausea
• The Jungle Book
• The Philosophy of Andy Warhol – Andy Warhol
• The Call of the Wild – Jack London
• Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
• The Lost Estate – … Alain-Fournier
• Hedda Gabler and other plays – Henrik Ibsen
• How we are Hungry
• Confessions of an English Opium Eater – Thomas de Quincy
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
• A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
• Selected Poems – John Keats
• Book of Longing – Leonard Cohen
• The Inheritance of Loss – Kiran Desai
• Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
• In the Winter Dark – Tim Winton
• Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
• Surrender – Sonya Hartnett
• The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Playing Beatie Bow – Ruth Park
• The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
• The Periodic Table
• The Happy Prince and other stories
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
• Around the World in Eighty Days
• The Power of One – Bryce Courtenay
• Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
• Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
• To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
• The Hound of the Baskervilles – Arthur Conan Doyle
• Inferno  – Dante

Edit: Penguin has put up the official list. And also thanks to Dominique for posting the link to the list earlier. It’s pretty exciting!

What do you think of the list?

Review: “The Professor” by Charlotte Bronte [1857]

The Professor is the last book published, posthumously, by Charlotte Bronte. It is also ironically her first novel which was consistently rejected by publishers during Bronte’s lifetime even after the success of Jane Eyre. Having read Villette first, one can’t help but compare the similarities.

The Professor follows William Crimsworth as he attempts to make his own way into the world. After graduating from Eton, William refuses a Church living and a marriage to his wealthy cousin and is disowned by his wealthy relatives. William is an orphan, whose mother died in childbirth, and his two Lord uncles have taken care, begrudgingly, of his education. Alone in the world and determined to make his own living by his own hands, William seeks out his only other living relative, a much older brother who turns out to be quite the brute. On the advice and recommendation of his brother’s acquaintance, Hundsen, William leaves England and goes to Brussels to seek out teaching positions.

In Brussels, William quickly secures a position teaching English (the title professor merely refers to that of a teacher) in M. Pelet’s school and in the neighbouring girls schools owned by Mlle Zoraide Reuter. Suffice to say, there are a few love affairs:

“And your heart is broken?”

“I am not aware that it is; it feels all right – beats as usual.”

“Then your feelings are less superfine than I took them to be; you must be a coarse, callous characters, to bear such a thwack without staggering under it.” – p. 228

The essence of the story, however, is how William Crimsworth makes his own way through the world with nothing but his own mind and hands and with no other help other than deserved references. In a society that was so hierarchical and classed, William work ethic and determination is truly admirable and inspirational.

While I enjoyed the novel, I struggled with it particularly through the bits that had more French language than English. Constantly flipping to the notes at the back really took me out of the story but this was the same reason why I struggled with Villette too and it’s nothing to do with the book itself. Well brought up people in nineteenth century England knew both French and English. I never really warmed up to the characters except the excellent and eccentric Hundsen but I suppose the characters were the result of their situation in life. As the only novel written from a male point of view by Bronte, I think it’s an interesting book in the Bronte cannon.

For those who have read Villette – what do you think? Are they both the same books or does each have their own significance?

Review: “We Have Always Lived in the Castle” by Shirley Jackson [1962]

Shirley Jackson’s classic American gothic tale is narrated by eighteen-year-old Mary Katherine Blackwood, also known as Merricat. From the beginning, Merricat’s distinct way of narration and flow of her mind is obvious:

I have often thought that with any luck at all I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister, Constance, and Richard Plantagenent, and ‘Amanita phalloides’, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in my family is dead.” – p. 1

The mention of the Amanita phalloides is a sly reference to the mystery surrounding the Blackwood family which consists only of the two sisters and their elderly and ill Uncle Julius. Six years earlier, everybody else in the Blackwood family died from arsenic poisoning. Constance was accused of putting the arsenic in the sugar because she didn’t take any that fateful night. Furthermore, Constance had admitted to washing out the sugar bowl before the police arrived but was later acquitted of the murders. The rest of the village refuse to believe Constance’s innocence and continue to ostracize the already despised Blackwood family

The Blackwoods live isolated on their property hidden away from the rest of the village and protected by overgrown trees and plants. There, the girls live a well ordered and methodical life. Constance, being ten years older than Merricat, is preoccupied by her vegetable garden, cooking and baking and looking after Uncle Julius. Merricat, despite being eighteen, is only allowed to do certain things that Constance allows such as carrying tea things but not allowed to pour the tea. Uncle Julius, seeming to suffer from a form of Alzheimer’s although it is never mentioned, works on his book about the infamous Blackwood poisoning but continues to forget where in time he is. The trio live quietly in this manner until their estranged Cousin Charles comes knocking one day, breaking the rhythms of the house and family to the distress of Merricat.

Merricat is a fascinating character. She is in a way quite infantile but, at the same time, she is very protective of Constance and does everything she can to protect her from the scorn of the village. There are several oddities to Merricat who, on the surface, can seem to be extremely superstitious. She believes in signs and protective totems, having nailed a book to a tree and buried a boxful of silver coins to secure their property. She believes in magic words that loses their protective powers once they are uttered. I thought that Merricat might have suffered from a minor form of autism while Joyce Carol Oates, in her afterword, suggested a form of paranoid schizophrenia. Considering these, Merricat is a most unreliable narrator and, as readers, we can never be sure of what she says. Castle is a suspenseful and terrific read with a brilliant twist and revelation. I’m hooked onto Shirley Jackson!

More New Books

I couldn’t help myself and I bought myself more new books. Granted, I have been looking for these titles for awhile now and they’re pretty difficult to find in stores.

• The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
• How the Light Gets In by M.J. Hyland

I had no idea Oxford Press published Wizard of Oz and I particularly love the cover. It makes it look a little more grown up when reading it on the train. I had bought Wizard of Oz previously but I kept getting the wrong version. They were either abridged, adaptations or variations of the original version. I would have liked the annotated Wizard of Oz but that’s a little too expensive at the moment. I’m a huge fan of the movies, including the lesser known Return to Oz, but I have never read the books. With How the Light Gets In I complete my collection of M.J. Hyland’s books. This title has been particularly hard to get even on ebay.

Booking Through Thursday

This week’s BTT:

In honor of National Grammar Day … it IS “March Fourth” after all … do you have any grammar books? Punctuation? Writing guidelines? Style books?

More importantly, have you read them?

How do you feel about grammar in general? Important? Vital? Unnecessary? Fussy?

This sounds pretty bad but I can’t really recall ever being taught grammar. I’m sure I was taught in primary school but it wasn’t exactly emphasised. Apparently, as I discovered not so long ago, that my generation was the victim of a new style of teaching that kind of left grammar out of the curriculum. So – grammar isn’t my strong point which is pretty embarrassing especially since I did my honours in English and plan to do a doctorate in English in the near future.

I should do one of those little day courses that goes over the grammar but it seems that the more I’m told about it, the more confusing it becomes and the worse my grammar gets! I skimmed through Lynne Truss’ Eat, Shoots and Leaves but that was more about punctuation. I’m pretty lax towards grammar but I do get a laugh when somebody writes ‘grammer’ and not ‘grammar’.