Review: The Secret History, Donna Tartt

Yeah, I remember the rule. I remember the exception to the rule. It turns out Animal Farm is exactly what you get when you make rules that you know you want to break. I started jonesing so hard for The Secret History, and when I saw it at a book sale last week, I was all, Blah blah rationalization, this copy here is a trade paperback and my copy is only mass market, this and that, it’d be better to have this copy than my copy.

Once I got it home, I tried to kid myself that I wasn’t going to read it. I checked out five books from the university library that I’ve been wanting, and I started reading (and enjoying!) one of them. But you know how when you are craving one particular book with all of your being, that book suddenly becomes Plato’s book? And all the other books in the world, which were perfectly reasonable a few days ago, are suddenly just shadow-illusions on the cave walls? That’s what happened to me. After a while I gave in. I’m only human.

When I read this book the first time, on my study abroad year, I was enthralled. I skipped all my Friday classes (and I only had classes on Tuesday and Friday) because I couldn’t bear to stop reading long enough to talk about the symbolist imagination. However, I considered it possible in retrospect that this was a function of my state of mind at the time. I was very depressed (bad meds + far from home + constant massive fights with then-boyfriend), and I felt very, very intense about nearly everything I read. I sobbed over Emily of New Moon and thought about how it was all just a Symbol For My Life. I hated We Have Always Lived in the Castle and sobbed because I had no good books to read and that was just a Symbol For My Life. So as you can imagine, I have been doubting the remembered intensity of my The Secret History reading experience. I suspected it would all be much more chill this time around.

NOPE.

The Secret History is about a boy called Richard who goes to a small liberal-arts college in Vermont, joins a strange, exclusive Classics program, and makes friends with the strange, exclusive Classics students, of which there are five apart from him: patrician orphaned twins Charles and Camilla; louche, studious Henry; wealthy Francis with a house in the country; and the bigoted joker Bunny. Richard, who comes from a poorish California family, has made up a complicated mess of lies about his background and is anxious to be friends with all of these people. They become friends, and one thing leads to another, and they end up killing Bunny.

To me, there are few things more suspenseful than stories about people who have committed crimes and might get found out. The Scottish play has me practically screaming with tension every time I read it, and The Secret History is just the same. I was deeply resentful of every life intrusion (work, meals, sleep) that kept me from carrying on reading it straight through. I was even forced to the expedient of reading it while walking to and from work, an activity at which I am very skilled but in which I prefer not to engage, as it reminds me embarrassingly that Past Jenny (in her tween years) felt that reading while walking proved to everyone else that she was above the things of this world. Oh, Past Jenny.

The adjective I would use for this book, and please appreciate that this is a high compliment from me, is elegant. Tartt has a trick of having her characters reveal things casually that shock the narrator and the reader, and at the same time seem perfectly plausible, indeed inevitable. Her characterization is sharp and yet ambiguous enough that you are not sure, when the book ends, who has done what and for what reasons. As Richard wonders about the behavior of each of his friends, you wonder too; you flip back and reread certain passages, trying to tease out the motives of each of the characters in light of what you now know. It’s not showy, the way she does it. It’s elegant.

Plus, you know, as a classics geek, I love it that this book makes Latin students seem super dangerous and dark and edgy. This is not necessarily the typical portrayal of Latin students, but it appeals to me: Watch out for us classics people. We are loose cannons and might push you off a cliff if you cross us. Or we might not. YOU JUST DO NOT KNOW.

In sum, this book is just as gripping as I remembered, and I also think it is an incredibly good book, what with all the writing and the characterization and the making you sympathize with murderers and the LATIN STUDENTS CAN KILL YOU. Read it, please, if you haven’t already. I feel like I have been going around saying lukewarm things about it since reading it a few years ago, when really it deserved raves. If I said something lukewarm to you about this book, disregard it! Listen to me now when I say it is superb and you must read it tomorrow. I would like to turn around and read it all over again, except that would be pushing things a little far, when I have these Dodie Smith memoirs and these amusing Lissa Evans books and Juliet Gardiner’s The Thirties sitting on my couch.

When I lent this book to my sister, she said it was basically Special Topics in Calamity Physics with older, less sympathetic characters. This isn’t altogether fair, but there is a certain family resemblance. The Secret History is more tense, and more polished, and I tend to feel that the group of students is better characterized in it than in Special Topics. Special Topics has that raw, intriguing style of writing, and a more twisty and complex plot. I think if you enjoyed one, you’d be fairly likely to enjoy the other; but if you disliked one, it’s still perfectly plausible that you’d like the other.

What other people thought:

things mean a lot
Book Snob
reading is my superpower
Stella Matutina
Flight into Fantasy
Stephanie’s Confessions of a Book-A-Holic
Six Lit[erate] Chicks
The parenthesis and the footnote
Seriously Reading

Let me know if I missed yours!

Review: Angels of Albion, Jane Robinson

The university library here doesn’t have Bluestockings. I know, right? It’s this massive fancy university library, and yet somehow it allows other patrons to check out The Thirties when I really wanted me to have it, and besides that it doesn’t have Jane Robinson’s Bluestockings. I was all excited to read about the first women to attend British universities, but when I searched “Jane Robinson”, I discovered instead this book Angels of Albion about the memsahibs during the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

I thought that was going to be quite cool too. I am interested in the evolution of British rule in India, and all that started with this rebellion. Basically, the British army administration came up with this new guns that required you to bite something in order to fire the guns (yeah, yeah, I’m hazy about guns and how they work), and the things you had to bite were coated with cow and pig fat. So the Hindus and the Muslims were all really angry, and there was this massive rebellion where everyone got messily slaughtered, including a whole bunch of British women out there with their husbands and children. And everyone in Britain was all, OMG INDIANS ARE EVIL even though most of the soldiers trying to subdue the rebellion were also Indian.

It is difficult to write a book about women and children being slaughtered without engendering in the reader the sense that the slaughterers are monsters. Robinson includes long excerpts from the diaries, letters, and memoirs of women present during the Rebellion, while adding contextual information that, by and large, is the context for the women, not for the Rebellion. I’m sure she didn’t intend to give the impression that the Indians were monsters and the women poor victims–and indeed, she frequently pauses to note the bigoted content of the letters and memoirs, or to make ironic asides about what insular jerks the British men and women had been prior to the Rebellion–but the book as a whole leaves you with only one side of the story.

Basically I am not sure what Jane Robinson was trying to do with this book. She says in the introduction she wanted to give voice to the British women who survived (or didn’t), and yes, that happens, but I do not necessarily feel like it happens in a way that contributes anything new to the discourse on this event. Most of the book, except the chapter on Indian women of the rebellion (Robinson notes sadly that far fewer records survive on the Indian women), was a long litany of bad things happening to white women and their husbands and children. I got tired of it, and then I was cranky. This may or may not be Jane Robinson’s fault.

Also, here is the memory of a little boy from the Rebellion:

[I had] another brother, a baby born in the preceding February, remembered clearly as he formed the subject of interesting speculations as to whether he would be spitted on a bayonet, or covered with oil and burnt alive when the rebels came.

I KNOW THAT IS NOT FUNNY (but that is really pretty funny) (um, unless those things really happened to the baby eventually, in which case, not funny). Kids are just like that. His poor mother.

Why I am constantly getting soaked on my way home from work

It’s because I believe in percentages, not in probability. I took against probability on one of our family vacations to Maine, when we stopped in Washington D.C. on the way there to visit some friends. The newspaper was running an article, I remember, that said that one in ten black men in Washington D.C. had a criminal record, and I could not wrap my head around this.

“So if you take any ten black dudes from Washington D.C.,” I said, “one of them will always have a criminal record.”

“According to this article,” said my mother.

“But what if you happen to pick ten black men who are all not criminals?” I said.

“What if you flipped a coin twice, and it came up heads both times?” my mother pointed out. I think she was trying to demonstrate why my argument didn’t work against what the newspaper had said, but at the time I thought, oh my God, yeah, and that totally happens. And my belief in probability crumbled like badly-kneaded bread. Several years later when I read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, I was all like, Dudes, you are not special. Probability isn’t true and you just have to accept it.

I don’t have a problem with percentages. If I counted my books and found that 40% of them were hardback, I could accept that. But if I tried to tell myself that it was a four in ten chance any individual book I grabbed at random from my bookshelves would be a hardback, I would feel like I do when I try to trick myself into wanting to wash the dishes. Like, nice try, self. Next time, try bribing me with cookies.

I bring this up because my belief in percentages rather than probability has been causing me some trouble with weather forecasts. Every day before I go to work, I check the weather, and if it’s supposed to rain that day, I’ll take flip-flops and an umbrella, so my work shoes and purse (respectively) won’t get wet on the walk back from work.

The problem arises, I have realized lately, because when the weather forecast says 40% chance of rain, my brain interprets it to mean that if it does rain, and it might, the intensity of the rain will be 40% of the intensity that the sky could manage at full capacity. So I don’t bring my umbrella, because I don’t mind getting a little bit wet. Then it rains really hard, and it is like I have never heard of rain before, and I am outraged at the weather forecast for misleading me. As I try to figure out a way of walking that will keep me the most dry, I compose angry letters to the weather forecasters:

Dear Weather People,

I hate you. My purse is all wet and although I cannot look in a mirror until I get home, I suspect there is mascara dripping down my face. This is your fault for being a damn liar. It was not supposed to rain this hard today. Consider this letter a gauntlet slap in the face, and meet me on the green with pistols at dawn.

Hatefully,
Jenny

They never meet me on the green with pistols at dawn. That’s good because I am a terrible shot and would definitely lose.

The end.

The heat is melting my brain

And that is why I posted one of my Diana Wynne Jones posts instead of scheduling it. And that is why it’s presumably showing up in your Google Reader. PAY IT NO MIND. It will post properly in August. I am stupid today. I have been out in the heat all morning and now it is hot in my apartment and I am doing laundry, which is using up more of my attention than you might anticipate. Also, I am very stupid all the time.

Review: Promises of Love, Mary Renault

Obligatory pre-gushing blurb: Vivian, a nurse in between-the-wars England, meets Mic, a pathologist and the latest in a string of close friends of her flighty, unreliable brother. Though Mic initially seems interested in Vivian because of her resemblance to her brother, they soon become good friends and then lovers.

I am experimenting with keeping a reading journal. I have not decided exactly what sort of thing you write down in a reading journal, but one thing it is definitely good for is saving anecdotes and quotations that I like. Then when I am done reading, I can go back and see if I want to copy any of them out for y’all, or copy them into my commonplace book to keep forever. When I was reading Promises of Love, I wrote down about fifty trillion quotations from it, and I’d have written down more had I not been perpetually weighing the relative merits of using the time to write things down (thereby expressing in pen and ink my not inconsiderable delight with Mary Renault) or to read more pages. Mary Renault’s modern novels are flawed, but I love the way she writes her characters’ interactions:

“Look.” He twirled the [paint] into an ascending spiral. “There’s a lyric of Catullus exactly that shape. No, it’s gone.” The viscous mass had settled, leaving only a few concentric rings. “Landor,” he said. “One of those terse quatrains. See, Mic?”

“You and your patterns.” Mic got up. “Get yourself a microscope. You’ve a vicious taste for illusive syntheses.”

“Of course they’re elusive. So’s everything worth bothering with.”

They talked–in this alone like her expectations–of indifferent things: town-planning, Swedish architecture, the sick staff-nurse, whose blood-cultures as it happened had been in Mic’s charge. Yet Vivian did not feel that they were taking shelter or concealing themselves in these things: they were a background, an accompaniment to what was really being said, for which words were instruments too harsh and shrill.

Renault’s modern novels deal in an incredibly interesting way with communication, how both successes and failures in communication can mean profound things about and have profound impacts on the relationships of the characters. I love the feeling I get, when I’m reading her books, that every word is considered. A character may say something by accident, but Renault never will.

The flip side of that is I never know what she’s thinking. Mary Renault is one of the most self-concealing authors you ever saw. I suppose this would thrill Roland Barthes, but it bewilders me. Her characters do and say and think such peculiar things. I just do not know what to make of them. I want to go back in time and shake Mary Renault and demand she explain to me what she exactly thinks about gender and creativity and sexuality. But of course trying to figure out what statements her books are making is part of the reason they interest me.

In spite (or because) of this bewilderment, I spent the whole of Promises of Love in a state of euphoria. It smelled old and delicious, and I kept lowering my nose into it and inhaling. More than that, I was overwhelmed with love for this book just because of its utter MaryRenaultiness. I wouldn’t recommend it for a Mary Renault novice, as I don’t think she’s at her radiant Fire from Heaven best in it, but I am so happy I got to read it. Lovely university library.

Some other bits I liked:

The flat…was beginning to take on the mannerisms of educated poverty–the streaky stained floor, whose string rugs were already present to her mind’s eye; the amateurish paintwork, in cheeky but successful colour-combinations; the aura of half-dry distemper from the walls; a little oil-stove in a corner giving out more smell than warmth.

It was like seeing someone off by train; the clock crawling through the last minutes, the futility of one’s remarks increasing with the last-minute effort to be significant.

She was quite well aware that she was talking, not to him, but to a suit of well-cut conversational clothes tailored, like his material ones, by a craftsman to whom fit and finish had become second nature. His pretences at self-revelation–the lightly deprecated indiscretion, the note of emotion suppressed a second too late–were merely the touches that distinguished Savile Row from the Strand.

Review: The Purity Myth, Jessica Valenti

This summer has been one long lesson in disagreeing with people I agree with. As a liberal girl growing up in Louisiana, I have been far more accustomed to disagreeing with people I disagree with, but here in this liberal university town, I am surrounded by a whole bunch of people who agree with me. This is really nice in a way, as I can say things about gay rights to someone I hardly know without fearing that I have just inadvertently issued the opening salvo of a debate. But in another way, it is frustrating. When people who disagree with me ignore arguments that prove them wrong, or repeat little sound-bytes that don’t really mean anything, or fail to give any genuine consideration to the views they hold, I consider that to be evidence that they are Wrong. And I am Right. No such pleasing dichotomy presents itself when I spot similar problems in the remarks of people who agree with me.

Oh, and also, when I disagree with people who agree with me, I start to feel like I am conducting that nasty kind of one-upmanship where you are only disagreeing to prove that you are the most open-minded participant in the conversation. And I do not want to be that girl. It reminds me of how my ex-boyfriend used to describe church camp. He said that no matter how holy anyone was being, someone else was going to find a way to be holier, like, “I don’t think telling ghost stories on our bunk beds is the best way to walk with Jesus right now.”

Which is why I’d rather disagree with people I disagree with.

Which brings me to Jessica Valenti’s The Purity Myth, a book about a topic dear to my heart, which is the reducing of women to their sexuality, and valuing (or more often devaluing) them on that basis. I really enjoyed Yes Mens Yes!, a collection of essays about women and sexuality and consent that Valenti co-edited, and I have been looking forward to reading The Purity Myth ever since I learned of its existence. I enjoy righteous indignation as much as the next person, and I really think that when it comes to society and women’s sexuality, much righteous indignation is warranted.

Valenti is an engaging writer, and I agree with her of course and I think the problems she’s describing and the people that perpetuate them are wrong. Of course. But I have heard a lot of these arguments before, so they did not please me with their novelty; and if I didn’t already agree with her, I would not be moved by the arguments she presents in this not-very-weighty book. I would think she was sharply and (here’s the key point) not always convincingly dismissive of studies that might suggest conclusions contrary to her beliefs. I would think she made no effort to be respectful of her ideological opponents, and this weakened the book. I would think, as indeed I do think, that she was not careful about providing context to the examples she claimed were highly significant.

She notes that men’s magazines are a good place to look “if you want to see the purity myth in action”, and cites in particular an article from an online men’s magazine called “Training Your Girlfriend” (to give you sex whenever you want it). Okay, that’s gross, and it’s disrespectful to women and it does, as she claims, reinforce “the notion that women are sexual gatekeepers and men the potential crashers”. All v. bad.  But like, have you seen all those girly magazines? That have all the big screamy headlines about training your boyfriend to bring you sparkly presents and marry you tomorrow in a costly but tasteful wedding? I dunno, it seems unfair to get mad at men’s magazines, when women’s magazines are equally culpable for the reinforcement of unfriendly and reductive gender roles.

Or in another part, Valenti quotes Douglas Rushkoff’s essay “Picture Perfect” where he says that his high-school desire to “go steady” with a girl “had nothing to do with her, really. Her purpose was merely to assert and define my masculinity….She had only to prove I was not a fag.” Valenti says “Women cannot continue to be the markers by which men measure their manliness.” Well, no, but that’s not really what Rushkoff is saying. If a dude wants to prove he’s straight, going out with a girl kind of works. Right? Am I crazy?

Whoever had this book before me wrote in the margins in pencil (tsk), and in one spot when Valenti says some religious group feared girls having the chance to have sex “without consequences”, it said in the margins “Why should sex have consequences?” And I just wanted to share that with y’all because it made me laugh. Why indeed? And why food also? I would like to be able to eat a whole pack of Oreos without my skin breaking out. Universe, please arrange this.

Because this review has been quite negative, I would like to reiterate that I almost completely agree with Jessica Valenti. I read The Purity Myth for Women Unbound, and I STILL BELIEVE that society is full of crap and father-daughter purity balls are creepy. And this is another reason I don’t like disagreeing with people I agree with, because I have to spew disclaimers all over the place or else feel like I am arguing on behalf of the people that want to stop Gardasil and refuse to give people emergency contraception. What about you, internets? How do you manage when you disagree with people you agree with? Would you rather be able to praise your political candidate in ringing tones in front of all your coworkers, or bask in the agreeable feeling of being in a persecuted (but Correct!) minority?

People what also had read this book:

Book Addiction
The Book Lady’s Blog
Peace of Brain

Tell me if I missed yours!

Review: Wartime, Britain 1939-1945, Juliet Gardiner

I love the idea of social histories, but they rarely live up to what I expect from them. Until now. Juliet Gardiner is the perfect social historian. Wartime, a social history of Britain during World War II, is massively huge, which is part of the reason it took me so long to read. The other part is that it constantly made me cry, and I had to stop reading it and get Kleenex, because of how finest an hour it was in Britain.

Gardiner has an unerring instinct for the perfect quotation from each personal account she quotes, the perfect human-interest anecdote for every wartime development. She covers so many different aspects of life in wartime and manages to make them unbelievably vivid and interesting. For example, she writes about life during the blackout and how miserable it was for everybody, which I’d never thought much about before. One of my favorite stories from the entire book pertained to the blackout. In 1940, the clocks sprang forward for Daylight Savings in the spring, and then they never fell back in the autumn; in May 1941, they put the clocks forward again, and Britain was several hours ahead for four years, to give people extra light at nights.

Funny story: The Mass Observation Archive or Pew or, I dunno, Gallup or something did a study to ask people why they were volunteering to work on Air Raid Precaution, and one person responded, “It was the New Year. I must have been drunk. I am STRONGLY anti-Chamberlain.”

I cried when I was reading the part where France had surrendered to Germany, and the people of Britain nevertheless had high morale. Leonard Woolf “had that strange sense of relief–almost exhilaration–at being left alone, ‘shut of’ all encumbrances, including our allies–’now we can go it alone’ in our muddled, makeshift, empirical, English way.” Oh, Britain.

After the first major Blitz bombing, which devastated London’s East End, Winston Churchill went out to the East End to see the people affected by the bombing. His aides were afraid that he would be mobbed by citizens angry by his failure to protect them, but (pause to get myself a Kleenex because writing this down is making me cry) instead they all came swarming up to his car and said “We thought you’d come and see us! We can take it. Give it ‘em back,” and Winston Churchill (much like me because how could you not?) started crying.

There is much to admire in Britain’s behavior during the war, but Gardiner doesn’t gloss over the country’s bad behavior either. She writes about the mockery and injustice that women faced even as they filled vital industry positions during the war; she writes about the unjust imprisonment and internment of Communists or people thought to be German sympathizers. (To the country’s credit, there was apparently a fair amount of outrage over this, and the practice was almost entirely discontinued by 1942.)

Basically Gardiner brings wartime Britain to life. She doesn’t exhaustively discuss every subject that might be of interest (as an American myself, I was interested to know more about Anglo-American relations before and during and after America’s entry into the war), but pretty nearly. This may be the best social history in all the land. Of course I have not yet read Gardiner’s The Thirties, but I’m going to the library tomorrow to check it out. Huzzah!

If you’re American, let me quickly revise your expectations so you will not be disappointed: Juliet Gardiner is often not to be found in American libraries and bookshops. This is very sad, but now at least if your library does turn out to have her, you’ll be pleasantly surprised, rather than crushingly disappointed if your library is lacking in this regard.

Did you review this? Leave me your link!

Review: The Latin Letters of C. S. Lewis, ed. and trans. Martin Moynihan

May I tell you a cute story? It’s very cute, and I can’t proceed with this review until I tell you the cute story, so if you are not in the mood for a sweet story, you should depart precipitously. Once upon a time there was an Italian priest called Don Giovanni Calabria who read C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters and loved it. He wanted to write to C. S. Lewis to express his admiration for the book, but he didn’t speak English, and he suspected (rightly) that C. S. Lewis didn’t speak Italian. Knowing that Lewis was a scholar of the classics and knew Latin, he wrote to him in that language, and they carried on a correspondence! In Latin!

Lewis and Calabria corresponded periodically over the course of seven years, from Calabria’s first letter to Lewis until Calabria’s death in 1954, after which Lewis continued writing now and then to another member of Calabria’s congregation. Their relationship is touching. They always write to ask each other for prayers, and they ask each other for guidance on theological questions. It is sweet.

As sweet as this is, I don’t know that I’d have been interested in these letters if they had just been published in English. Most of the letters are from Lewis to Calabria, rather than the other way around, so you don’t have a good sense of the correspondence as a whole. The letters discuss the wars, schisms in the church, and the moral tone of the present century, but they are short and cannot explore the issues deeply.

However, I read the Latin half of the letters, and that was fun. The editor helpfully put the Latin and English text on facing pages, so when I got confused about syntax or vocabulary, I could refer to the translation to set me straight. I most pleasingly referred to the translation more rarely as I carried on reading, which made me feel great about myself and totally ready to translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses which I am absolutely going to do one of these days because I love Ovid and Fagles didn’t translate him.

Fagles’s Odyssey: Stories I know in the second quarter

Books seven through twelve of the Odyssey contain a lot of the stories I remember from my Latin II class: The Cyclops, the cattle of the sun, the Lotus-eaters, Scylla and Charybdis. Odysseus is washed up on the shores of Phaeacia and comes to the court of King Alcinous, who welcomes him warmly (his wife Arete slightly less warmly, as she suspects him of deception) and offers him transport back to Ithaca. As Alcinous offers Odysseus hospitality in his hall, he notices that Odysseus weeps when he hears the bard sing of Troy, and he asks him to tell them all the things that have befallen him. Odysseus agreeably tells him the woeful story of all the misery he has suffered since the fall of Troy.

For some reason I had it in my head that Odysseus had been criticized for not caring about losing his comrades. I don’t know why I thought this! It seems to me he cares every time. He’s cautious about sending his people into danger; when useless Eurylochus refuses to go back to Circe’s lair because he’s too chicken, Odysseus lets him stay by the ship (faithful Achates would never have pulled that kind of crap). After meeting a companion of his in the underworld, he promises to go back to Circe’s island to give his friend a proper burial. Each time he loses a comrade or a ship, he speaks of grieving for them, and he weeps when he remembers all the people he has lost in and since the Trojan War. Poor dude.

Am I defensive? Perhaps a smidge. My sublessor, whose book this is, has written lots of uncomplimentary notes in the margins about Odysseus: Full of himself; HUBRIS; I like these “heroes” less and less; I’ll bet he loves the sound of his own voice. I do not appreciate these little asides. Odysseus is not full of himself – or, well, okay, he is a little bit, but with good reason! – and if he does have a tiny little hubrissy fit after he gets away from Polyphemus, I think that’s perfectly fair! The dude did just eat two of his crew members, and if Odysseus hadn’t outwitted him, he’d have eaten the rest of them too.

Oh, check it out, also. When Odysseus has gotten Polyphemus drunk and told him that his name is “Nobody”, he stabs out his eye with a burning piece of wood. Polyphemus starts hollering, and his friends come to see what’s going on.

“What, Polyphemus, what in the world’s the trouble?
Roaring out in the godsent night to rob us of our sleep.
Surely no one’s rustling your flocks against your will–
surely no one’s trying to kill you now by fraud or force!” [shout the other Cyclopses]

“Nobody, friends,”–Polyphemus bellowed back from his cave–
“Nobody’s killing me now by fraud and not by force!”

“If you’re alone,” his friends boomed back at once,
“and nobody’s trying to overpower you now–look,
it must be a plague sent here by mighty Zeus
and there’s no escape from that.
You’d better pray to your father, Lord Poseidon.”

FUN FACT: Odysseus gives his name as ou tis, not anybody, and this is the name Polyphemus uses to shout to his friends. In their response, however, they use the word me tis, no one, which sounds the same as metis, cunning. I mean, well-played Homer, eh? Odysseus’s cunning is overpowering Polyphemus! Sadly this delightful play on words is untranslatable. But I am glad that Fagles mentions it in a note.

The scene where Odysseus visits the Underworld is excellent. For one thing, Tiresias (and others) drinking the blood of the sacrificed animals before they can talk to Odysseus is a creepy image. For another, I always like it when people get to go to the Underworld and still come out alive – Hercules, Orpheus (sad!), Aeneas. Now my undying favorite is Aeneas’s visit, for reasons that I will reveal to you when I inevitably read Fagles’s Aeneid, but Odysseus has a pretty good trip there too. He runs into his mother, and cries to hear of how unhappy his family is in his absence. In a particularly striking moment, he also sees Achilles, who you will recall was willing to die young as long as his name could be remembered. In the Underworld he’s singing a different tune:

No winning words about death to me, shining Odysseus!
By god, I’d rather slave on earth for another man–
some dirt-poor tenant farmer who scrapes to keep alive–
than rule down here over all the breathless dead.

I don’t remember this scene at all, but it casts a rather sad light over everything Achilles was striving for in the Iliad. You have to think that Milton had this in mind when he has his Satan say it’s better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Not according to Achilles, dude. I’d feel sorry for him if he hadn’t killed Hector and then been a complete tool about it.

Odysseus still can’t get home:

but mine
lies low and away, the farthest out to sea,
rearing into the western dusk
while the others face the east and breaking day.
Mine is a rugged land, good for raising sons–
and I myself, I know no sweeter sight on earth
than a man’s own native country.

In case I haven’t convinced you yet about Fagles:

Go forth once more, you must…
carry your well-planed oar until you come
to a race of people who know nothing of the sea,
whose food is never seasoned with salt, strangers all
to ships with their crimson prows and long slim oars,
wings that make ships fly.

It’s sexy, no?

Gender bias

You know how sometimes you have really strong reactions to things that you never thought you cared that much about? Like this one time I was reading through course descriptions at various universities to see what their course-books were (I was craving nonfiction, and this is before I discovered book blogs), and I saw this course about the poetry of the Hugheses. As in, Ted and Sylvia. I’m not even that big a fan of Sylvia Plath: I love her poetry but I think she would have been maddening in real life. But I was gripped with this unbelievable visceral rage at the professor who wrote the course description and referred to her as half of “the Hugheses”.

Regarding gender-neutral language, I have always been more or less in support of it. In practice it is rather cumbersome but I approved of it on an intellectual. I think the use of “he” (“the average reader will find that he likes Fagles the best of any translator of epic poetry”) and “man” (“man has sought for centuries to invent a story as awesome as the Odyssey but cannot with any surety be said to have succeeded”) as representative of humanity more generally is (yet another) symptom of that really unpleasant thing of thinking of men as the default, and women as the other thing. On the other hand, I have never, while reading a book that employs gender-biased language, felt the sensation of being excluded. Plus I always suspected it would feel weird and affected if an author ever did the thing they sometimes recommend, of alternating the use of “his” and “her” when referring to a generic person.

Then on Thursday I was going through proof pages of this one book, and I read a sentence that said (something like) “The reader may find herself bogged down in blah blah blah very technical stuff about New Latin.” And you know those scenes you see in high school movies where the very popular girl invites the shy new girl to come hang out with her and her popular friends. You know, how the shy new girl wasn’t expecting it at all, and you can see the shock and joy all over her face? THIS WAS JUST LIKE THAT.

I don’t know how to describe how great it felt. I was suffused with this massive, exhilarating sense that I was being recognized. A lot of the books I read at this internship, they are very serious and important books. Even when they are interesting, engaging, and well-written, I feel like the authors are writing for an audience of loftier intelligence and learning than mine. The book whose proof pages I was inspecting was a translation of a Latin text, which I think had something to do with it, because Latin makes me happy like ice cream. When I read that sentence, “the reader may find herself,” I felt like the translator had written his book with me in mind. I am a her! I may find myself bogged down in technical stuff about New Latin! That may happen to me! (And indeed it did.)

It was amazing! I wanted to make a large banner that said “GENDER-NEUTRAL LANGUAGE IS MORE AWESOME THAN YOU MAY HAVE REALIZED” (I know, catchy, huh?) and go tromping up and down the streets alerting everyone to how great a feeling to have a book assume you as its readership. I know this sounds like a very lame and unconvincing attempt at personalizing a dull linguistic gender debate. But I can’t help it. That’s exactly how it went down. I think that I have never truly appreciated how inclusive inclusivity can be.

Have you ever had such a reaction? Do you have strong feelings one way or the other about gender-neutral language?