Book #10: The Jungle

Book #10: The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

January 25, 2013


This is another book that I had previously attempted to read. I first picked up The Jungle in the 9th grade. See, the book had been mentioned in my history class, because we were studying that time period or something, and I was curious about the gruesome working conditions that were described in the book. I found the book on my English teacher's shelf, and flipped through until I found what I was looking for. And I must say, Sinclair's descriptions of the conditions in these Chicago stockyard slaughterhouses and meat-packing warehouses are quite disturbing. I felt sick to my stomach, and I put the book back on the shelf. 10 years later, I finally picked it up again and read the whole thing.

The descriptions were still difficult to read, but I was into the story enough to push through it. The protagonist, Jurgis Rudkus, is a Lithuanian immigrant. He comes to the United States, and to Chicago, with his elderly father, his young bride-to-be Ona, and her brother, cousin, widowed-stepmother, and multiple half-siblings. Jurgis has heard the same tales about life in America that led so many other immigrants here in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Jurgis is optimistic; he's a strong young man, and he believes that in this land of opportunity, he'll be able to work hard enough to give his family a good life.

Almost right off, the naive and ignorant family is taken advantage of, and they arrive in Chicago with very little money to their names. They find that the famous stockyards are a disgusting dump (quite literally), yet Jurgis marvels at how efficient everything seems. He feels very fortunate when he gets a job straight off, but the other members of his family are not quite so lucky.

The family is swindled right and left. They buy a house, but it's more of a "rent-to-own" sort of deal. They all suffer from the conditions in the factories. Elzbieta's children have to work, as does the tiny, delicate Ona. Stress from barely making ends meet, being overworked, and starvation rip the family apart. Jurgis's father dies after becoming ill from working in a cellar where meat is pickled; his frail wife, overworked and starving, dies giving birth to their second child (who dies as well); his toddler son dies after the rotten wood that made up the sidewalk in front of their house (or rather, the house where they paid rent to live in the freezing attic that had only half of its floorboards, after Jurgis spent time in "gaol" and the family lost the house that they "owned" after one late payment) collapsed and sent him into the rain-filled, muddy street, where he drowned. Okay, the book was getting a little over-dramatic by then, but you get the point: life was really shitty for the working class in that time. Any time that Jurgis started to feel some kind of hope, something terrible would happen and he would be in dire straits yet again.

100 years later, how different have things become in our country? Certainly food-packing and sanitation has improved (this book had a big part in bringing about some of the first of those policies in our country), but the big problem has not. What motivated the owners of those meat-packing companies to cut corners, to work their men to death and underpay them, to not take the time to ensure that their food was safe for human consumption? Greed. Companies are still greedy; the concern now wouldn't be with diseased meat, but what about chemical additives? What about the terrible conditions on these huge corporate farms?

Now obviously, since this book was published, the welfare system has been set up, so certainly people starving to death isn't as dire of an issue...but it still exists. The welfare system itself is pretty screwy, so some people who should be getting it aren't, and many people who don't really deserve it do. The problem for people in today's economy is debt (I know it's a problem that I've been dealing with): student loan debt, consumer debt, mortgages, etc. People sign on for these things, but then aren't able to keep up on the payments, and end of losing everything (just as Jurgis and his family did). Things come up, they keep falling behind...they just can't get out from under it. And there are plenty of institutions out there ready to take advantage of people who are in desperate financial situations. Too many people, like Jurgis and his family, learn it the hard way: there aren't many people out there that you can trust, and there are plenty of companies that are looking to bleed you dry.

Obviously this book is a work of Socialist propaganda. This was before "Socialist" became a dirty word in America. Sinclair expresses optimism in the book, through Jurgis's enthusiastic involvement with the party and its politics, that the Socialist party in America would grow and would overthrow the traditional two-party system. Um...yeah. Some of Sinclair's ideas about a communist future are amusing (the "technological" ideas of one Socialist in the book are dated, but present the idea that Socialists are not backwards, and indeed look to embrace the ways that technological can make people's lives better). Some of the ideas seem half-baked, such as one convoluted explanation for people would be compensated for their labor after the "revolution,"  but it's clear why the ideas of the Socialist party would appeal to someone like Jurgis, who has been torn up and spit out by the Capitalist machine. The way that Sinclair puts it, Socialism does seem like a logical solution to so many social issues. Unfortunately, the growth that Sinclar predicted in the party met some huge snags; for example, Sinclair mentions how in Germany, at that time, a third of the voters were Socialists. And those numbers continued to grow...until a certain individual came into power and formed a certain  Nazi Party, outlawing Socialism and executing Socialists in the Holocaust. And in the United States, of course, there was a little something called the Cold War, and Senator Joseph McCarthy going after any big-name person who'd ever had even the loosest association with the Socialist party.

More recently, President Obama has been accused of being a Socialist, especially with relation to the universal health plan. Whenever I heard pundits use that word in the negative, I would think, well, what the hell is wrong with being a Socialist, anyway? The way the characters in The Jungle make it sound, the whole spirit of being a Socialist involves looking out for everyone, making sure that everyone at least gets what he or she needs to live a worthwhile life. Everybody doing their part, living harmoniously, peace on earth...why does that have to be "hippie bullshit"? Why can't it be the way things actually are?

Because greed is real. Hate is real. And too many people are either hateful and greedy themselves, or feel like hate and greed are too powerful to stop. But people today aren't blind to the corruption in politics; they know how much power the corporations have, how they line the pockets of the politicians to get what they want. That's what the people were protesting about on Wall Street and all across America. The 1% who have everything...they're no different than the people running the show in Jurgis's world.

I guess the question still remains: as human beings, are we good enough to battle against hatred and greed? Are we strong enough to ignore the millionaire televangelists and follow the real teachings of Jesus, or to stand up to American companies that outsource their work instead of contributing to our economy, or to stop fast food corporations from taking over the world? Since learning about Socialism and Communism, I always thought that they were good in theory, but could never work in practice. I think I was about 13 when I started becoming socially aware. 13, and I had given up on my fellow man. I do wonder if Upton Sinclair would be so optimistic about the fate of mankind today.

Solidarity fist, a symbol associated with the Occupy Wall Street protests. People dedicated months to these protests, and what good did they do? They made the country a little bit more aware of the lack of balance in our country, I suppose.

Credit cards, which have brought many an American to financial ruin.

Book #9: We Need to Talk about Kevin

Book #9: We Need to Talk about Kevin by Lionel Shriver

January 20, 2013


The title of this book is somewhat ironic. Now that Kevin is the topic of conversation, it is far too late for the conversation to occur...or is it? The story is told from the perspective of Eva, Kevin's mother. Kevin, 17, is locked away in a New York state juvenile detention facility. His crime? Murdering 11 people and injuring two others with a crossbow, most of the killing taking place in the school gym as he took down a teacher, a cafeteria worker, and other students. Nearly two years after the infamous Thursday, Eva begins writing letters to her late husband Franklin, in an effort to try to understand what happened and why...and to finally have the conversation that Franklin had been avoiding all of his son's life.

The reader is meant to figure out throughout the course of the novel that Franklin is dead. At first, it is implied that he and Eva are merely "separated," as they'd been discussing divorce before Thursday happened. But more and more obvious clues are dropped throughout the story; I figured out that Franklin would be one of Kevin's victims before Celia, his little sister, even came into the story, though I was embarrassed that I hadn't figured it out sooner. But I was drawn in to the story and its characters, especially the narrator Eva.

In her letters, Eva tells the story of Kevin's life and her relationship with her son, while keeping Franklin up-to-date on the happenings in her current, miserable life. She still lives in the same New York suburb, risking run-ins with the family members of her son's victims and other hostile community members on a daily basis. At the beginning of the book, it is revealed that one of the parents, the mother of a beautiful girl whom Kevin had shot through the heart with an arrow like some deranged cupid, had tried to sue Eva, I guess for being so negligent of a parent that she would "allow" her son to become a murderer. The case was dropped, and when I figured out that not one, but two members of Eva's family had been victims that day as well, I felt angry on behalf of the protagonist.

But the more pressing issue in the book was Eva's relationship with her son, whom she'd been reluctant to have in the first place. I understand women like Eva, who are well-educated and well-traveled and view themselves as being a little above the "ordinary" people who have boring jobs and who live in the suburbs and drive SUVs and live their lives for their children. There are some things that I like about her: I agree with many of her criticisms about contemporary American life (though I would not yell out these views in public, as she often does in the book, nor would I wear my pride and superiority on my sleeve the way that she does), and I understand her hesitation to have children. I'm still young myself, so I have lots of time to decide (or to at least find myself in a situation where having children would even be a question), but some of the ideas in this book will definitely come back to haunt me when it becomes relevant.

Franklin is more old-fashioned, you could say, than his wife. He wanted the happy family, suburban life that his wife scorned. But she got pregnant for his sake; she loved him that much. They seemed so different from each other, but they do say that opposites attract. There was a film version of this made a couple of years ago, and though Tilda Swinton as Eva garnered a Golden Globe nomination (I think she's too light-complected to play the Armenian Eva, though I'm sure they didn't make that an issue in the movie; she does have Eva's self-described "androgynous" vibe), the film mostly flew under the radar. John C. Reilly, an actor who is ridiculously versatile (he's one of my favorites) played Franklin in the film. Though as I read the book I didn't see him as Franklin, Franklin had John C. Reilly's distinctive voice, sounding both burly and soft-hearted at the same time. I may watch the movie just to see his performance.

Anyway, Franklin is a likable but infuriating character, though I guess it was easy for me to become annoyed with his blindness to Kevin's "issues" since I had the advantage of knowing what was coming. From the start, it was clear that Kevin was not a normal child. As a baby, he was wrathful, and wanted nothing to do with his mother. Eva reflects, with no small amount of guilt, that perhaps he could sense her own hesitation, the fact that she had not been overcome with motherly love and joy when he was first born. Kevin's relationship with his parents is very different. With his father, he takes on the pretense of being a happy-go-lucky kid, accompanying his father on outings to museums and battleground sites with forced enthusiasm. With his mother, he is surly and sarcastic, sometimes quite mean...but honest.

As Kevin gets older, Eva sees some terrible signs that her son is a malicious sociopath. But whenever he finds himself in a compromising situation (encouraging a girl in his kindergarten to scratch her eczema rashes until they bled profusely; being the obvious culprit when a neighbor's bike is tampered with; getting caught throwing hunks of bricks at racing cars from an overpass), he is always able to convince his father that he is a victim, unfairly targeted or in the wrong place at the wrong time. His mother knows him better, but any attempt to discuss it with Franklin is futile. As a reader, I found myself hoping in vain that Franklin would see the light, that he and Eva would finally come together as a team and really talk about Kevin, stopping the tragedy that I already knew was going to happen.

I also found myself hoping that Eva, the one person who seemed to really know Kevin (though not the only person in his life who was suspicious; his father was the only one who saw him as being a completely innocent, upstanding young man), would find some way to connect with him, and I would get frustrated with her when I saw opportunity for her to do so. She could have taken his comments in stride; she could have made a joke of it. As a pretty easy-going person, I would have laughed it off if Kevin had verbally disemboweled me at dinner, complimenting him on his ability to see past even his own mother's bullshit and hypocritical tendencies. But Eva was too prideful. Or rather, she was too afraid to try to connect with him; any attempts that she made (and they were few and far between) were half-hearted, and she would later admit that her own son's mind was like a "foreign country." She'd made her fortune traveling to other countries and unraveling their mysteries for curious travelers, but her son's mind was one place she was too afraid to venture.

So who is to blame for Thursday? Eva does blame herself, in some ways, though she knows that it is pointless to do so. She knows it will not bring back Franklin or Celia. She knows that it will not make Kevin, who never seemed to care about anything or anyone at all, sorry for what he did. At the end, it seems that he is starting to allow himself to appear as more of a human being. In a television interview, he defends his mother when questioned about the lawsuit that was filed against her, and a camera shot shows that he has a picture of her taped on the wall next to his bed (the same picture, Eva notes, that she'd noticed had gone missing from the house after Celia's birth). At their last meeting before his 18th birthday (after which he will be transferred to an adult prison, though his sentence is very light considering his crime...he calculated it perfectly, doing is deed 3 days before his 16th birthday, forcing the state to prosecute him as a minor), he gives her the glass eye that he'd stolen from his sister's dead body, and even faintly apologizes for what he did. He admits that he doesn't know why he killed all those people, though some clues were dropped in the narrative. He tells his interviewer on TV that he was disgusted with the nation of "watchers," and was simply giving them something to watch. But when he explains to his mother why he didn't kill her, too, he reveals that he wanted her to be one of the audience members...he was doing it for her, at least partially. To hurt her? Impress her? Test her? It isn't clear.

In the end, Eva admits to herself (and to Franklin) that she does love her son. She even has a room waiting for him in her apartment when he gets out of prison. In spite of all of her perceived flaws as a parent (because it is so easy to look and judge...I don't have kids, but I work with kids, and I cannot think of anything more complicated than being a parent), she is a good mother, practically saintly with the love that she still has for this murderer who is her child, even though she doesn't naively expect that he will come out of prison as a completely reformed, "normal" person. At times in the book, it does seem that Kevin is some sort of irredeemable sociopath, a monster, and that infanticide on Eva's part might have been justified (not that she ever considered it). But he's not a monster...he's a human being. Eva believes that he can somehow be redeemed, even though his entire life indicates just the opposite.

Though this book was written over a decade ago (in fact, Kevin's fictional massacre takes place just days before the infamous Columbine High School shooting), it is certainly timely, as in the past year there have been a couple of public shootings that have made headlines in the US: the movie theater in Aurora, Colorado and the elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. The shooters in both of these instances were young men in my own age bracket, not troubled teens. Many people (including actor Morgan Freeman) decried the media for extensively covering these atrocities, especially for splashing the faces of the killers everywhere. Eva makes a similar comment in the book as she recounts real-life instances of school violence that happened around the time of the one her son committed. The killers became stars; the victims faded into obscurity. Surely the attraction of instant fame (however infamous) would be irresistible to some troubled people? Especially someone like Kevin, who saw no point in life, who was resentful of the everyday bullshit all around him (an attitude that Eva probably doesn't realize he picked up from her). Before, people went out of their way to avoid him; after Thursday, everyone wanted to get inside his head.

I'm sure that most parents don't worry that their babies will grow up to be killers. Those crimes are few and far between, thank goodness, in the large scheme of things. But what about having a kid who grows up to be a woman-beater or a child-abuser? Or even just an all-around jerk? Eva decries parents who claim to "not like" their own children. It only speaks to the complexities of love, even the love between a parent and child, that only after Kevin committed his horrible crime that Eva was able to find some things that she actually liked about this son of hers whom she, for better or worse, really loves.

(to the left) The black ribbon in remembrance of the victims of the school shooting just over a month ago. 20 young children killed, and several adults. One teacher was shot after she'd hidden her class in a coat closet, telling the killer (whose name I have chosen not to remember) that they were in PE. 


(to the left) Several people were shot and killed at a midnight premiere screening of The Dark Knight Rises in a Colorado suburb. This led the nation to wonder: are we safe anywhere? Descriptions of the real-life killer remind me of the fictional Kevin. Reportedly, the killer's mother was not surprised when she heard what her own son had done.

Book #8: Love in the Time of Cholera

Book #8: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (translated by Edith Grossman)

January 14, 2013

I hesitated to add this book to my list. Not because I felt like it wasn’t worth reading (it was), but because there was a part of me that felt like I wouldn’t be reading the “real” book, and that somehow, it wouldn’t “count.”

See, I studied translated poems in a course that I took on European literature in my undergrad days. I wasn’t into poetry until I read Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil (translated, of course, from the original French). This version had the originals and the translated poems, side-by-side. I imagine that translating poetry would be quite difficult; only a complete moron would think it’s as simple as translating each and every word. I even wrote an essay about how translations can change the message, the feel, of a poem, and it made me feel as though I had not really experienced Baudelaire, or Rilke, or Gogol, or any of the other foreign authors that we read that semester.

Now, okay, prose is different from poetry, and translators don’t necessarily have to worry about duplicating rhyme, meter, etc. But there are nuances in every language, things that just don’t translate, things that are culturally significant to the people who speak that language primarily. I have a lot of reverence for the complexities of language, because I struggled mightily when I took Level 1, 2, and 3 in 8^th, 9^th, and 10^th grades, respectively, switching to French 1 in 11^th for an “easy A” (which I got), but also because, after 3 years, I still couldn’t say or understand any more in Spanish than when I’d started. When I took three semesters of Spanish in college, I got my worst undergrad grade in Spanish 3 (a C…*shudder*). For whatever reason, I haven’t been able to learn another language. Not that I’ve put in the effort.

Anyway, I comfort myself in knowing that the author himself is still living (I was under the mistaken impression that this book was older than it was, and though it takes place many decades ago, it was published in my lifetime), so I would hope that any published translations in English would get run past him. Or something. I don’t know. But I’m going to shift gears dramatically here, and I am going to talk about…love.

This book is about love. At times it focuses on familial love: the love between Florentino Ariza and his unwed mother, the love that made Lorenzo Daza risk so much to give Fermina the life of a privileged young lady. But this book is mostly about romantic love, sexual love, love that lasts for only a moment and love that lasts for a lifetime. The story revolves around Florentino and Fermina, who meet when they are young (Fermina is only 14, and still in school, while Florentino is a young apprentice of sorts at the local post office). Florentino, an absolutely hopeless romantic, falls in love with her on first sight, and is in love with her for the rest of his life, even as they both love others.

There are many things that I do not like about Florentino. At the beginning of the book, as he is eating flowers (to the point of being physically sick) and mooning over Fermina, a girl whom he barely knows but loves desperately for all of his life, he seems like a complete sap. Though dramatics over romance is a part of Latin culture (the book takes place in an unnamed Caribbean city, though it could be speculated that it is in Columbia, where the author is from…apparently he is quite the Shakira fan), it is acknowledged in the text that Florentino is not normal.

Fermina is fascinated by this romantic young man, who plays a violin waltz that he wrote for her outside of her window and writes her passionate love letters, but she is very practical. My favorite line in the whole book is: “…she was also not convinced that love was really what she most needed to live.” This is in reflection on her marriage to Dr. Juvenal Urbino, a respected physician in their city whose innovations in urban hygiene kept the deadly cholera plague at bay. After Florentino waited for her for four years, after her father found out about her secret engagement to him and she was kicked out of her prestigious (and terribly strict) Catholic school and dragged her away on a many months-long trip to see relatives, she ultimately rejected Florentino. She married Dr. Urbino, even though she did not really love him…though she came to in time.

Meanwhile, Florentino becomes a ladies man. What bothers me about all of his relationships is how much suffering he caused…not meaning to, only wanting to find some relief from the ache of losing Fermina, but still. One woman, a married poet who kept pigeons, had her throat slashed by her husband when he saw the message that Florentino had painted teasingly on her stomach: This pussy is mine. Or Florentino’s last lover before he finally got to be with Fermina, a teenage student who was left in his care by her parents while she was at a local boarding school. He was in his 70s. After Florentino stopped sleeping with her, her grades dropped dramatically. When she learned of his relationship with Fermina, she killed herself.

When Florentino learned this, from a telegraph from his assistant (who he also loved, but never got to sleep with), he decided to forget it, put it out of his mind. In the end, he got what he’d spent years longing for, Fermina all to himself, on a private boat. Even though they are old, they are able to begin a love affair (to the chagrin of Fermina’s children), which is nice. But still, all the damage he caused…did Florentino deserve to get what he wanted in the end? I’m not entirely certain.

Fermina was not necessarily trapped in an unhappy marriage. Dr. Urbino did have an affair on her, and she left him for a couple of years, and they reunited happily. She seemed more bitter about growing old. The story seemed to tell a lot more about their earlier years, and their later years, while the middle years (from about mid-thirties to sixties) is somewhat blurred. She never loved Florentino during all of those years, but she did think about him, and wonder about rejecting him, even feeling a bit of guilt about it. But she reflected (more than once) that she did not regret marrying Dr. Urbino, and she was devastated at losing him.

Dr. Urbino, at the beginning of the book, makes some observations that imply that he has seen many people commit suicide because of love. He also observed that the symptoms of cholera sometimes resemble the symptoms of being “love sick.” Someone in the book, at some point (probably Florentino, but I’m not 100% sure) said that dying for love is the best way to die, or something to that effect. I don’t believe that, and I’m certain that Fermina would agree. Most of Florentino’s loves are fleeting in the book, though his love for Fermina never dies, even after more than half a century, even though she did not love him in return.

I was very drawn into this book…not so much for the love story itself (being the obnoxiously practical person that I am), but for the author’s descriptions of the unnamed city. I love books that take place in exotic settings. I would have wanted to know more about the struggles between the “Conservatives” and the “Liberals” that, while so much a part of the book, is really not explored in depth. I also would be interested in knowing the class system in this city, which was still so traditional even during a time of dramatic change. I would imagine that the elite (like the Urbino family) were light-skinned, of European descent. Some mention is made of natives and black people, and while their place in this society was not clearly defined, some remarks were made by characters to imply that black or “mixed” people were considered in a lower class (Fermina in particular made disparaging remarks about black women, especially when learning that her husband’s mistress was a “mulatto”).

I will admit that this book forced me to reflect on the romantic love (or too often, lack thereof) that I have experienced in my life. I’ve had my heart broken twice, when I was 17 and when I was 18. I have guarded my heart since then, and though I do want to find love (even just a physical love, like the many, many, many, many relationships that Florentino had in the book), I still feel like I am too vulnerable, for some reason. But I’ll keep in mind that my life won’t wait for me, and I won’t be young forever. It’s never too late to find love, would be a major message in this book…but why wait if you don’t have to?

(to the left) A parrot. There's a lot of bird imagery used in this book. Dr. Urbino dies trying to catch his pet parrot while it's sitting on a tree branch. The prostitutes who Florentino befriends are called "birds of the port." 

(to the left) Jason Radnor as Ted Mosby on How I Met Your Mother. In one episode, it is revealed that Love in the Time of Cholera is his favorite book. He is a hopeless romantic himself, and, much like Florentino, has many love affairs in an effort to find love. Unlike Florentino, he is not trying in vain to replace a love that he cannot have, but rather trying to find his true love (which we know happens...I mean, hello, that is the premise of the show!). There are some cute moments in this show, and some very funny ones, but I have not been fond of the more recent episodes. The actors just look too old to be as silly as they are. Except NPH...that guy is absolutely ageless.

Book #7: The Witches of Eastwick

Book #7: The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

January 8, 2013


Prior to reading this book (which is Updike's best known, but not most lauded), I'd only read one text by the author, the short story "A&P" about a disgruntled young man working at a dead-end job at the grocery store who up and quits after a confrontation between his uptight boss and some scantily-clad girls. One review of the book (printed on the back of the text) describes Updike's writing style as "impressionistic art," and I thought that that was a good way of putting it. That's what I both enjoy and find frustrating about Updike: he just loads the narrative with these fascinating, far-from-cliche descriptions and metaphors and similes, but sometimes it's easy to get lost in those descriptions. That was definitely the case with this book, but once I got used to Updike's style (I can vaguely remember, as an undergraduate, feeling a little disoriented the first time I read "A&P"), I was able to get into the story...so much so that some nights, I literally couldn't put it down, even after I'd met my reading "goal" for the day.

I've been framing a lot of these entries around comparisons between the text itself and other takes on it in popular culture. The Witches... was made into a movie, of course, but I've only seen it once, and the movie was halfway through at that. I felt pretty lost, but I enjoyed Jack Nicholson's performance as Satan personified (Darryl Van Horne), though I thought the special effects were really cheesy. Anyway, from what little I saw, I can say that the movie is very VERY different from the book. That's all I have to say about that, except that throughout my reading, I did imagine Nicholson as the demonic, rambling, charming, awkward character.

The story takes place in the fictional town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, which is a quaint little coastal village. It's the late 1960's (the book was published in the mid-'80s), a time of great change and tension in our country. This was a time of rock-n-roll, war, and women's liberation, and even little New England towns were not immune to these. The three main characters of the text are Alexandra, Sukie, and Jane, three divorcees who are also witches. It's unclear whether they came into their powers as they began rejecting the bonds of marriage, or if their powers came on after their husbands were gone. Alexandra's husband, reduced to dust (by her? by the pressures that marriage put on him?) is in a jar at the top of her kitchen shelf; Sukie's husband became the flat place-mats on her dining table. The three women get together to bond over snacks and alcohol, and also to kind of recharge their powers, the three of them being more powerful as a coven than alone, of course.

All the talk about the women finding their powers after shedding their oppressive marriages (for it seems that their husbands themselves were not the problems, but rather the institution of marriage to which they were bound), and the "cone of power" that they created together, and all of the imagery of dancing by moonlight...it all made me think of the women's empowerment stuff that was popular around that time, getting in touch with Mother Nature, yada yada. If you look or listen to some of that old feminism stuff, it kinda sounds like "witch" talk, and I'd bet that some uptight conservatives at that time even took it as such. What Updike did here was, he merely made it "reality" in the world of these characters, in Eastwick...rather than the metaphorical powers of independence and sexual liberation, these characters have real powers, powers that can strike a create a storm on a sunny day or strike a pesky dog or squirrel (or even a person) dead.

As I read the book, I constantly questioned Updike's stance on feminism. The connection between this book and feminism is not only obvious, it is undeniable. But at times, I almost felt that he took on an anti-feminist stance. I mean, these women are unhappy with their lives at the start of the book. Being single mothers has left them near poverty, in spite of their powers, and when Van Horne arrives in town, they no longer find satisfaction in their once-powerful coven. In spite of their powers, these women are given to the emotions and behavior that are often negative stereotypes of women: worrying about their age and weight (especially Alexandra, a kind of "matriarch" for the group), making crude remarks about the women with whose husbands they are sleeping (I have nothing against a woman "getting hers," but when one partner in a love affair is married, that's messed up...and these women had even slept with each others husbands!), and becoming jealous to the point of homicide when their beloved Van Horne marries young and pretty Jenny.

Van Horne is an interesting character, for sure. At first, he seems like a big-time swindler. He moves into this huge old mansion that hasn't been occupied in years, and he fills it with junk. He doesn't pay any of his bills. He claims to be a chemist, working on some kind of power-producing mix of elements or something. But he successfully charms all three witches...perhaps literally charming them, putting them under a spell. It almost seems as if Van Horne is some kind of demon. Not THE devil...he doesn't seem self-assured enough, but definitely something not-of-this-world (a couple of clues to this: he calls Easter a "depressing day" for him; when he gives the guest sermon at the Unitarian church, he denounces God for putting so much care into creating horrible little insects and parasites, and jokingly claims that he would have done better). He engages in sexual acts with all three women at once, as well as separately. He encourages the women in their respective artistic pursuits (Alexandra, to become a big-time sculptor; Jane, to improve her already-expert cello-playing by challenging her with Bach; Sukie, a journalist, by encouraging her to write novels), which seems nice at first, but ultimately hurts all three women in various degrees (probably Jane the most, as she becomes obsessed with the music, neglecting her children, and is heartbroken when her cello is destroyed by her dog).

Jenny comes into the picture as the grown orphan of the Gabriels. Sukie had been sleeping with her boss Clyde, who went off on his blabbermouth wife one night and beat her to death with a fire poker before hanging himself. The witches like Jenny, who is younger (but seriously, not much younger...what is with the obsession with age?), and innocent, and eager-to-please. But they turn on her when she first moves in with, then marries Van Horne, whom they all three loved and wanted for themselves. They curse her to get cancer and die, which she does...after which, her husband flees with her brother, for they were carrying on an affair practically right in front of her, in that dilapidated mansion. In the end, the witches, no longer satisfied and feeling that their powers are individually fading, conjure up new husbands, and that's the end of the book.

I felt like that right there, the ending, was almost anti-feminist itself. I feel like it says more about the state of the world today than about the characters themselves. These women wanted marriage when they didn't have it, and wanted to be rid of its shackles once they were in place. Marriage isn't sacred to them, just as it isn't sacred to really anybody anymore. Alexandra especially reflects on how her marriage with Ozzy (whom she remembers more with affection than bitterness) shaped her in ways that she resented. I believe in monogamous love between two people, and I believe in marriage. Of course being with someone that long will affect the kind of person that you evolve into...your life, your personality, is always shaped by the people you encounter on a day-to-day basis. That's what you sign on for with marriage, and I don't think enough people understand that going in. You're going to change...your partner is going to change, too. The point of marriage is to change together, and to get through the hard times.

As I watched a wedding on a TV show today, I began to tear up. I'm a sucker for weddings. I love weddings. But I don't think I'd ever have a traditional one myself...in a white dress, in a church, with the vows, yada yada. The traditional wedding ceremony no longer reflects the values of our society. The white dress...come on, most brides aren't virgins, so who are we trying to fool? 'Til death parts us...how many people follow that one? Not many anymore. So while I love the romantic fantasy of a wedding, I simply don't feel that it's an appropriate ceremony to commemorate a marriage today. There's no clear connection between a wedding and a marriage.

Even though I didn't particularly like any of the characters in this book (I do like Alexandra, though I found her obsessing about her weight and her age to be annoying; Sukie seems like she'd be fun to hang out with, but not very trustworthy, especially to any married woman), I really enjoyed the book itself. I love books that make me think, and this book definitely gave me a lot to think about. My favorite bit of the whole book was a piece of advice that Alexandra gave to Jane. Jane, even in her mid-thirties, is somewhat insecure about herself as a lover, calling herself a "boring lay." Alexandra advised that she not worry about it from the man's perspective, but to consider her own needs, telling her friend to look at her partner as being a tool for her pleasure, kind of like a vibrator. This dehumanization of men might be offensive to some, but I found it a refreshing view of sex. I mean, a man's gonna get his pleasure as long as he comes...which he will, it's so easy for them. But for a woman, it's much harder, especially if she is insecure. As I said, I'm no conservative...I definitely thought that the witches were justified in their (mostly) harmless spells against the obnoxious, holier-than-thou women in their town. But to do those things on top of sleeping with their husbands...that's just adding insult to injury, pettiness, not something that I would want to associate with being a strong, independent woman.

(To the left) Jack Nicholson, who is an amazing actor in almost everything he's in. This picture was just too bad-ass to pass up. 

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(To the left) A cello. Updike includes a lot of descriptions of Jane playing Bach on her cello in the book. When I was an undergrad I lived with a woman who played the cello. She didn't play it very often, though. I put on a couple of Bach cello suites as I wrote this entry. It's actually really beautiful stuff.

Book #6: Frankenstein

Book #6: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

January 1, 2013


I will admit that I was a little hesitant to start this particular book. This is another one of those that has been sitting on my shelf for more than 2 years (in fact, it is the last one that I've completed...a library trip will be in order when I get off of work tomorrow). I tried to read it the summer after I graduated from college, but I found the beginning to be boring. I'll admit, I probably would have become just as frustrated with the beginning of Great Expectations if I'd started reading it at that time. It's the same reason why it took me a while to get into Jane Austen. Those 19th century writers (and not just the British ones, Nathaniel Hawthorne) could be really long-winded. They didn't seem to understand the concept of a "run-on sentence." I put the book aside, justifying it by telling myself that it wouldn't really be one that I could use in any of the classes that I was teaching, so why should I waste my time on it?

I found the going much easier this time around. Maybe because I've read more literature from that time period since I first tried to read it? Maybe because my goal in reading it was different? Whatever the case, I still found some parts of Frankenstein to be boring, particularly when the main title character was waxing philosophical, or was all "woe-is-me" (which is basically the vast majority of the novel). But in this review, I'm going to focus on how the story in this novel, which is hailed as being a pioneering novel in the genres of horror and science fiction, is very different from the images of Frankenstein and his monster that are so prevalent in popular culture.

So first off, Victor is usually depicted as being a mad scientist, with crazy hair and a laboratory with a high tower, and Igor his assistant, and the whole shouting of "it's alive!"...yeah, none of that is in this book. Victor is actually a pretty young guy throughout, creating the monster when he is a student in Germany (he is Swiss by birth). He comes from a nice family: his father, an older, wealthy gentleman, had been his mother's guardian before they had married. Victor grew up traveling with his philanthropist parents, and when he was still a little kid, they adopted a girl named Elizabeth, who would later be Victor's wife. He also has two younger brothers. His parents are supportive of him going to school to study science, which has fascinated him all of his life. His chosen academic field is called "natural philosophy," but I guess the modern equivalent of that would be biology.

Anyway, Victor is ambitious and curious. He spends a lot of time studying corpses in tombs and cemeteries, which does seem really crazy, but he justifies this by explaining that he was never superstitious, and his curiosity about anatomy overpowered any fears. I guess that makes sense. But then, he claims that he discovers how life is created, or something like that.

In popular culture, the creation of the monster is understood like this: he was made of gathered body parts, and was zapped to life by a lightning bolt. Or something like that. But in the book, the details of how the monster is created are very vague. I mean, obviously Shelley didn't really know how to create something and bring it to life, because at that time such a concept was purely fiction. But the narrator, as he explains his story to a ship captain who took him on board and saved his life, says that he will not explain how he did it, because he doesn't want anyone to duplicate his work. The terrible results make this reasoning pretty obvious.

So the monster comes to life, and Victor is so scared by it, because it's ugly and huge. But he'd wanted to make it large! And the fact that it was ugly, well...as I said, the author doesn't explain what the thing was made out of, but it's assumed that he was assembled using body parts. Victor faints, the monster flees...but of course, that's not the end of it.

Now, the monster itself is popularly depicted in this way: huge, green-skinned, with short black hair and a weirdly box-shaped head. Not so in the book: he is huge, definitely, but his skin is described as being more like a mummy's, and his hair is long and tangled, and he has glowing eyes. The monster is also depicted as being inarticulate, communicating with grunts and unintelligible cries of rage. But the monster in the novel is quite eloquent, having learned French while hiding in a hovel next to the cabin of some poor peasants.

The monster wanted to find love, and to find a purpose for living. When he is rejected by others and forced to hide, he becomes resentful of people. He finds where Victor came from, and murders his creator's little brother, resulting in the hanging of an innocent servant girl in the Frankenstein home. Victor comes home to this desolation, and though he knows the truth, he is unable to explain it to anyone because...well, who would believe him?

The bride of Frankenstein (or rather, his monster) is another popular image. The idea of her existed in the book: the monster confronts Victor and tells him to make him a wife, or the deaths will continue. Victor wimps out in this endeavor, and the monster is true to his word, killing Victor's best friend, his bride on their wedding night, and Victor's father dies of a broken heart. Victor dedicates the rest of his life to bringing down his monster, and that's how he's found by the ship captain, far north of civilization, literally chasing the monster to the ends of the earth.

I think that Shelley meant for both the monster and Victor to be pitiable creatures. But, as I found Pip in Great Expectations, I thought that Victor was a wimp. I mean, if he'd had the balls to handle what he'd created in the first place, things might have ended happily for everyone: the monster would have been accepted by at least the person who created him, and nobody would have had to die. And Victor was always falling ill whenever he was depressed: the guy spent more time laying around moping than actually doing anything. I am always surprised, in novels written during or about this time period, how much leisure time people of even moderate wealth were afforded. When Victor was actually determined to create the monster a bride (thus halting the violence that had already started), he traveled to England to gain the expertise necessary to do this (why, though?). Yet he and his friend (who was killed on this trip) spent time touring England, visiting friends...for months they did this! Must be nice!

Now, I actually did feel badly for the monster. As he himself said, in the beginning, all he wanted was to be accepted by someone, to have some connection to the world that he'd been brought into. In the end, he survived his creator, but he swore to go to the North Pole and burn himself to death, eliminating any trace of his ghastly, unnatural form. You know, as I was reading the monster's part of the story, I found myself remembering the adaptation of this book that was done for the show Wishbone. Ah, Wishbone, that well-read little dog. If you're not familiar with the show: this little dog is dressed up and reenacts famous stories, while there's a somewhat related plot going on involving his pre-teen owner or something. I thought of that episode, which I vaguely remembered, but I do remember feeling bad for the monster in that, too. I'll have to find that video on the Internet somewhere (I'm sure it won't be a hard, a lot of people liked that show and I'm sure someone's put it up on YouTube or something) and watch it again, and see how they depicted the monster on the show.

Anyway, I'm glad that I finally read this book. Through my graduate courses, but also through my little endeavor here, I'm discovering that people are always growing and changing as readers...as long as they continue to read. The fact that I read this book which once intimidated me makes me even more excited for what I'll read next. I have no idea what it will be, but I'm going to comb over my (still very long) list and find what titles they'd have available at the small library at the mall (the old library was destroyed in a flood four and a half years ago; the new library is going to be finished soon, I guess). My goal is to have at least one more book finished before my spring semester begins.

(on the left): Wishbone! I don't know who he's supposed to be in this picture. But wasn't he adorable? I'm not about dressing up my dog or anything, but Wishbone really rocked those 19th century duds.

(on the left): A popular (and inaccurate) depiction of Victor Frankenstein and his monster.