Semester’s End

This semester I wrote a sixteen-page literary theory paper.

I passed a literary theory oral exam.

I wrote a seven-page American lit paper.

I wrote my first annotated bibliography.

I wrote a seventeen-page American lit paper.

I wrote two short stories and heavily revised one of them.

I worked at the writing lab explaining comma splices.

I worked as an academic assistant for two classes.

I taught seniors Shakespeare on Fridays.

I edited one of my novels.

I read approximately twenty-five books and fifty articles for various classes.

I have a feeling this was the easy semester.

Parnassus on Wheels

I know someone who knows someone who named their son Morley after this author.  While killing twenty minutes at a pretty awesome used book store, it occurred to me to look for any of Christopher Morley’s books, since they are evidently out of print.  Parnassus on Wheels, at $2.50, was the right price, so I picked it up to bring with me to work the next day as a quick, fun read.

And that’s what it was, quick and fun.  It’s about Helen McGill, a middle-aged woman who runs the farm for her brother Andrew, a popular New England author in the vein of Thoreau.  One day, a unique horse and cart appears at her front door–Parnassus on Wheels, run by an eccentric ex-schoolteacher named Mifflin, is a moving bookshop.  Mifflin wants to sell Parnassus to Andrew, but to prevent her brother from abandoning the farm for a trip around the countryside, Helen buys Parnassus herself.

What ensue are homey and homely pleasures as Helen brings literature to the common farmer and Mifflin never does end up getting to the train station.  After altercations with homeless men and her brother Andrew in pursuit, Helen and Mifflin (and Bock the dog and Peg the horse) decide that Parnassus and each other are to valueable to give up.  With charming illustrations and plenty of action and philosophical musing, this 1917 novella is not only a pleasant afternoon but also a justification for the eternal importance of reading.

7.5 / 10.0.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

I read one of these short stories, “Nawabdin Electrician,” when it was first published in the New Yorker.  It was about an electrician whose magical skill with machines preserved his position on the staff of a great man’s house, while the electrician tried to swindle and get ahead in life, to feed his thirteen daughters.  I enjoyed the story and promptly forgot about it.

The first time I saw In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin was when I shelved it at the bookstore where I used to work.  We’d received two copies in our shipment, and to my memory, neither of them sold, but I recognized the author’s name and filed the book away in my mind.  I myself resolved to wait until it was in paperback before I spent the money, which was an enormous mistake, because I, like you, needed to read this book as soon as possible.

Because it was a finalist for the National Book Award and deserves the acclaim that it’s getting as one of the most influential books of the year.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders is about contemporary feudal Pakistan, but in true modernist faction, the book presents a variety of perspectives, good and bad.  Only the sum of the perspectives, taken together, gestures toward a larger truth, which was why my first encounter with Mueenuddin lacked the scope and impetus of reading the whole collection.

The story that moved me most was “About a Burning Girl,” which I had mentioned briefly in a previous post, as well as the title story, which is near-perfect.  If you are concerned about injustice or require proof of the fallen state of man, read this story.  Read this book.  The people–actual people, true and whole–will stay with you, embodying the definition for linked short stories: not one but all together tell the story.  It’s the story of a nation.  And what a story.

10.0 / 10.0.

The Penelopiad

Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad is Penelope’s version of The Odyssey.  Her act of witnessing becomes a testimony for the often overlooked death of the twelve maids, executed by Telemachus and Odysseus upon Odysseus’s arrival home.  Penelope, narrating from beyond the grave, weaves the story (pun intended) with the voices of the maids themselves, often in the form of a chorus in alternating chapters.  Penelope’s struggles against her parents, her in-laws, Eurycleia, and the suitors is the stuff, of course, of epic.

Nevertheless, this story didn’t really work for me.  An older, wiser, deader Penelope reflecting on the events alienated me from the story.  When she told what happened to her, I was interested; but when she mentioned running into Helen in the afterlife, I was not.  Also, the voices of the maids, stylized in songs, dialogues, dramas, and an academic lecture, were still overlooked, even in the book that professed to vindicate them.  I was not persuaded that Penelope understood the meaning of their deaths any more than Odysseus did.  The feminism was simply too heavy-handed.

The coolest part was Penelope’s description of her mother, who was a Naiad, but unfortunately that was matter of five or so pages.

It was an interesting commentary on myth, and the way that storytelling can distort the truth; but I thought that The Penelopiad contributed to rather than excoriated the problem.  If it was a satire, it was too subtly cast for me.  Instead, I wanted Penelope’s story narrated by the contemporary Penelope, or the maids’ story narrated by one of the maids.

5.5 / 10.0.

The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro is a cerebral novel about a butler of a great country house, which, in the 1950s, got sold out of the family to an American.  The protagonist, Stevens, is encouraged by his new employer to go on a motoring trip around the countryside, which Stevens allows himself to do.  During the trip, Stevens muses upon what makes a butler truly distinguished, and also upon the events of his past which have made him who he is.  His relationships with his employer, with his father, and with Miss Kenton, the housekeeper, have shaped him more than he realizes.

The reason I liked the novel was because Stevens is an unreliable narrator.  His voice is so authoritative, so perfectly pitched to communicate his status of being a true gentleman’s gentleman, that it’s some time before I realized all was not well with Stevens.  This gradual discovery of Stevens’s inner self is what makes the ending for such an academic novel surprisingly emotional.  The evening of the English country house and what it has meant for English nationalism is a fitting backdrop for the evening of a man who cannot let go of the past.

9.0 / 10.0.

November 2009

Stuff I’ve Been Reading, November 2009

1. Don’t Cry by Mary Gaitskill (for my fiction writing class)
2. Thud! by Terry Pratchett (for fun)
3. Hamlet by William Shakespeare (for the Shakespeare class)
4. The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (for the world literature class)
5. Odd and the Frost Giants by Neil Gaiman (for fun)
6. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (for my literary theory class)
7. The Emperor Jones by Eugene O’Neill (for my American literature class)
8. Firebirds Rising edited by Sharyn November (for fun, but it wasn’t)
9. Brother, I’m Dying by Edwidge Danticat (for my fiction writing class)
10. King Lear by William Shakespeare (for the Shakespeare class)
11. In Other Rooms, Other Wonders by Daniyal Mueenuddin (for fun, and it was)
12. Dune by Frank Herbert (travel book)
13. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (for fun)
14. “Discourse in the Novel” by Mikhail Bakhtin (for my literary theory class)
15. The Faerie King by Chera A. Cole (for fun; a NaNoWriMo novel)

And there you have it.