Reading

[lunabee34]

The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this book as a kid, and I enjoy it just as much now. So many Victorian novels for children are moralizing and, frankly, boring. But this is delightful and strange and whimsical, a nice bit of fairy tale and fantasy that reads like someone could have written it yesterday.



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The Carrier of Ladders by W.S. Merwin

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


I usually like Merwin, but wow. This was not for me. The complete lack of punctuation makes these poems really hard to read IMHO. Most of them read pretty nonsensically to me. I have no idea what he's talking about most of the time. There's lots of rivers and birds and gloves and shoes. Some of them are clearly about the forced removal of indigenous peoples, and I think some of them are about the Holocaust; but I could be totally off-base. :(



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Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This is such a wonderful mixture of hope and pathos.

I'm so glad that Arkady and his father rekindle their close relationship and that they each have happy endings with Katya and Fenichka. I feel so terrible for Basarov's parents who cannot understand their son (because he constantly pushes them away). I also feel for Pavel (who loves in vain) and Madame Odinstov (who cannot allow herself to love at all).

Basarov annoys me. I get that he's a portrait of a certain type of revolutionary, but his unwillingness to form genuine relationships with others does not endear him to me.



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Where Three Roads Meet: The Myth of Oedipus by Salley Vickers

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I've read about Freud and have a passing familiarity with the major concepts of his work, but I've never read any primary texts. I think this book would mean more to me if I was more conversant with Freud. I knew almost nothing about his personal life, so I was interested to learn about his extensive health problems. He apparently spent about two decades in debilitating pain with his mouth destroyed because of cancer that left him unable to speak or eat very successfully; he had to use a device to prop his mouth open painfully, and he clearly had a great deal of shame re: eating because he always did it privately. Learning more about his personal details makes me wonder how many of his theories (like orality, etc) stem from his own trauma.

This book did make me think about Oedipus Rex differently. I've read Oedipus a jillion times. I teach it almost every semester. I've always assumed that Jocasta and Laius exposing Oedipus was just an accepted, if distasteful, part of their society; many ancient societies practiced infanticide for a variety of reasons after all. But this book makes me wonder just how infant exposure was regarded during the time in which Oedipus is supposed to be set (which is, of course, more ancient than the time in which Sophocles was writing). Next, the book begins with a poem that includes the lines: "I, Jocasta, knowingly said / 'Bring my son to my bed.'" Vickers posits that Jocasta knows the whole time that Oedipus is her son, specifically because of the family resemblance + the scars left behind on his ankles. I think that's an interesting take on the myth.

Definitely worth a read (it's short and quick), but I didn't like this as well as I wanted to (maybe because it's so slight?).

ETA 2024: I've given this an additional star on reread. I liked the book much better this time around and found it much less slight than I did the first go round. On this read, I especially liked the focus on Oedipus as willfully deceiving himself about aspects of his life and the tension in his character between that deception and the driving need to know.



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Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles by Jeanette Winterson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I enjoyed this. The author interweaves POV narration from herself, Atlas, and Hercules. Hercules is a dick who is extremely concerned with his dick, but he's supposed to be off-putting. I absolutely love the end of this; it's such an unexpected ending. It makes me smile.

Also a very quick read; about the same length as the retelling of Oedipus in this series but it doesn't feel as slight.

ETA 2024: My positions have reversed on these two books on reread. LOL I didn't like this one as much this go round. Way too much of Hercules masturbating and raping women and thinking about raping women. I did enjoy everything about Atlas, however, and the end is still a delight.



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Comments

[lyr]

Learning more about his personal details makes me wonder how many of his theories (like orality, etc) stem from his own trauma.

ALL of them. Seriously. It's the most blatant case of someone metaphorically letting his ass hang out in public I've ever seen. It never fails to amaze me that he clearly didn't realize how obviously he was baring his innermost issues to the entire world.

[lunabee34]

Ha ha ha ha.

*wipes eyes*

Do you think he was truly that oblivious, or do you think he realized he was trying to explain himself?

[lyr]

Having read some of his work, I am pretty certain he was actually that utterly not self-aware. It's painfully ironic, I know.

[kore]

We had to read Dora at a liberal arts college with no context, no biography, none of that stuff, and the first couple of minutes of the seminar was just people asking "Did he....KNOW how much of his own psychology was in this?" And the consensus was NOPE.

(Everyone was on Dora's side, which I loved. YOU FLOUNCE, GIRL.)

[lunabee34]

That's one of his case studies, right? What is her original complaint and what does he diagnose her with?

[lyr]

Okay, so Dora (18 at the time) lives with her parents, who don't have a good relationship. But they are really close with another couple, and the wife of that couple is having an affair with Dora's dad. The husband of that couple has been making passes at Dora since she was 14 which really scares her, and her father refuses to believe her or protect her even though she's been telling him about it all along. Dora gets the feeling that her father thinks this other man deserves Dora as compensation because dad has taken his wife. Dora's been losing her voice from the trauma. Freud declares that she's suffering from delusional hysteria brought on by fear of her own desire for this man as a surrogate for her father, because of course Electra complex. There's also some stuff about dream interpretation; Freud interprets all of her trauma nightmares as fear of her own sexual desire. Dora, outraged, quits therapy. Freud calls this a therapeutic failure.

But wait! A year later Dora comes back to tell Freud that she confronted the other couple and they finally admitted she'd been telling the truth about everything all along and her symptoms cleared up. Freud still notes this as a failure and decides that he had missed that maybe Dora was actually attracted to the wife of the couple all along.

[executrix]

Just as Oscar Wilde said that America went from barbarism to decadence with no intervening stage of civilization, psychoanalysis went from saying all women were sexually abused to saying that no woman was sexually abused, they were hysterical fabricators, with no intervening stage of, well, trying to find out if an individual was actually sexually abused.

[lyr]

I am reminded of a meme I encountered yesterday:

1870s: "Doctor, my wife has had four children, zero orgasms, and can't vote. She cries all the time. What's wrong with her?"

Doctor: "Clearly she's hysterically insane."

[executrix]

Patient: "My wife has had four children, zero orgasms, and can't vote. She cries all the time."
Doctor: "So, what brings you here today?"
Patient: "It's funny, whenever I have a meal or my wife brings me a drink, I get a stomachache and I feel kind of dizzy."

[lyr]

Doctor: Clearly your wife has hysteria and you are experiencing sympathetic symptoms.

[executrix]

Fraulein Marple: My sympathies, madam. What a shame that your husband perished so sadly from sympathetic symptoms.
Inspector Lugg: Move it along, nothing to see here, folks.

[lunabee34]

This is why I love you both. *grins*

[lunabee34]

Oh, that's a therapeutic failure alright, but not on Dora's part. Poor, poor girl. :(

[lunabee34]

Oh dear. :/

[china_shop]

I know I loved The Princess and the Goblin, but I remember almost nothing about it now except the princess climbing a staircase. (Was there a secret passage?) Maybe time for a re-read. :-)

[lunabee34]

Yes! A secret passage into the mountainside.

There's a sequel, The Princess and Curdie, which I could have sworn I also have, but I can't find it anywhere, and looking at the description maybe I never did have it. IDK I'll just read it off Project Gutenberg.

[china_shop]

I might have had an omnibus of the two, but I remember even less about the sequel. :-)

[lunabee34]

Fortunately, they are in public domain, so it won't be any trouble to find them both for free.

[princessofgeeks]

I love your reviews. Hoping to find time to read more soon. Been soooo distracted and focusing on TV instead.

[lunabee34]

*nods nods*

I'm the opposite. I can't get lost in TV anymore unless it's a nature documentary.

[kore]

Ooh, I need to read both of these.

[lunabee34]

I hope you enjoy!

[gloss]

I love Turgenev; I really need to reread F&S.

[lunabee34]

This is the only book of his I've read, but I really enjoyed it; this edition has a very good introduction that was helpful to someone like me who didn't know a lot of the historical context before reading.

[executrix]

I can't remember the author or title, but fairly recently I read a book comparing three different translations of another Turgenev work. Now, that's being a nerd. Many Russian novels were available in French before English, and a luckless translater of Fathers and Sons started the book with "Bazarov opened the door and threw his eyes on the sidewalk."

[lunabee34]

I love your nerdliness, though! Translation is an act of creation; it's so so important in the way it transforms a work.

What a line. It's like baby's first fanfic. I bet Madame Odinstov has limpid orbs.

[executrix]

Oedipus Tyrannos is totally valid today--it teaches us that when you have a plague, you look at the motherfucker in charge.

[lunabee34]

Ha ha ha! Yes, indeed.

Also, not to, as one student said of Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, "go all psycho on people's asses"--at least not before determining their identity.

[oracne]

I remember reading some George MacDonald as a kid, but I might have been too young for them - I remember being a bit lost with the prose style.

[lunabee34]

I'm interested to check out more of his books now that I've revisited this one. I started The Princess and Curdie, so I'll report on that one once I've finished. :)