So, hope you’re going okay. The end of 2011 was just a haze of activity, so excuse the absence. As a prize for sticking around/being good at Google/being a spambot, here’s a post to illustrate my mental declivities during the final months of 2011.

Running commentary on my reading of Madame Bovary:

Page 5: God, I can’t wait until Vronsky shows up.

Page 19: Where’s Vronsky?

Page 45: Where’s Vronsky?

Page 116: Okay, there’s a big party. I bet this is where Vronsky comes in.

Page 125: Where’s Vronsky?

Page 140: I just don’t know how someone with a name like Vronsky is going to show up in this tiny French town. It doesn’t make any sense.

Page 210: This book is practically over, and no Vronsky.

Page 267: OH MY GOD, TOTALLY WRONG BOOK. IT’S LIKE I HAVE NO BRAIN CELLS OR SOMETHING.

End: Pretty good book though.

Some day I shall regret being so open with all of you.

Hope you’ve all had a great year of reading. Looking forward to another.

It really took me a long time to get into the Russians. I’m 24 now, and I’ve only read Crime and Punishment so far. Does Nabokov count? Well, I’ve read Lolita. But those are kind of the bare minimum, aren’t they? So I decided to get serious with Anton Chekhov’s Ward No. 6 and Other Stories, 1892-1895. You know something is serious when it has a date range in the title. It means: whoa, this guy did good stuff in other years, too. I’ve already posted a review of Murder, one of the stories in the collection. The other stories offer plenty of insight into Chekhov’s life and interests. Chekhov was a doctor, and the story Ward No. 6 is set in a mental hospital; Chekhov loved gardening, hence The Black Monk’s protagonist Kovrin considers ‘A few Observations on Mr Z’s Remarks on Double-Trenching in New Gardens’ light reading.

What I really love about Chekhov’s stories arises from its genre, which I guess you could call Russian realism. Selecting a diverse range of characters to portray, Chekhov throws in observations spanning class and gender. From parsimony to prodigality, details and decisions are invoked to present a straightforward yet dramatic picture of 1800s Russia. The lightness of Chekhov’s touch belies the intrepidity with which he surveys the ingredients of the personal present, such as tricks of personality and situation entrapment.

Even more specifically than Russian realism, Chekhov is a master of the aesthetics of consequences. Stories like A Woman’s Kingdom, which details the life of Anna Akimovna, the heiress of a bustling industrial business, investigate the doubled-edged blessing and curse of belonging to the middle class. Anna’s business is heavily reliant on the poor treatment and management of its workers, a fact which both plagues and bores her. The institution of marriage is assiduously mined, too–The Two Volodyas has as its focus Sophia Lvovna who, married to one man, lusts after another. Sophia’s lack of self-restraint or understanding is her flaw, and though it is not fatal within the confines of the story, her leisurely floundering evokes pity and exhaustion.

Though Hemingway criticised Chekhov as an ‘amateur writer’, his stories are remarkable despite their deceptive simplicity. His slice-of-life style, which allows him to resist relying on resolution for meaning, sees him invest his characters with enough shovel, as it were, to dig their holes. And to immobilise without even taking out the rope, well that’s definitely something.

Anne Elliot has an arrogant father and two sisters who treat her like a scullery maid. More interestingly, she has an old flame, Captain Wentworth, who is now wealthy and will barely speak three words to her. Anne is probably in my top two favourite Austen heroines. She is sensible but her sensibilities are not cloying, and her suffering is intimately shared. Captain Wentworth is as dashing, cruel and agitated a lover as Darcy. Another ‘seemingly unrequited love’ story–I could drink this stuff up with a straw.

sunday nights have lately been a source of guilty pleasure. abc1 (or is it bbc1?) were running a jane austen made-for-tv bumper extravaganza. man, those were a good 3 weeks. the first one i saw was persuasion. i hadn’t read that, so i ordered a copy (but that’s a story for another day). i didn’t think i had read mansfield park, so i pulled it out to ‘prepare’ for the tv version. first, i found this copy. but i knew i had an older one somewhere, a mauve 99p type publication with a typeface so stout it makes courier new look like mary-kate olsen. that one had the 14-year old me’s signature inside, and various declarations as to the identity of my future husbands (i’m still waiting, darren hayes.) this made me pretty perplexed as to whether i had read it or not, and whether it would count for the year’s 50. a peruse of the first pages is usually a pretty good clue, but no moment of realization twinkled out at me. i’m going to count it, though, i make the rules. by the way, the editor should slap himself/herself on the wrist. there are whole lines left out of this version. i had to pick up the mauve disaster to fill in the gaps. shame shame!

i get high on jane austen. there was an article in the age about how the telemovies showed how trashy austen’s stories were, minus the dialogue of those 19th century broads and the men who dug them. well, duh. there wain’t no mills and boon around in the 1800s. mansfield park is ok in this respect, poor girl falls in love with her handsome and kind cousin, cousin falls in love with dainty rich little miss who moves down the road, many walks are had in groves, etc.

but this is probably my least favourite jane austen book. fanny price is so goddamn perky and perfect. it’s not a rare criticism, but her absolute capacity for forbearance, while clearly influenced by her contemporaries’ social mores, can get pretty painful. fanny’s love rival, mary crawford, is pretty and scintillating and fun. austen just has to do too much work to convince you that you shouldn’t be rooting for her. characters keep saying how pretty and necessary fanny is getting; still, it’s a bit hard to find her interesting. she kind of just sits there and goes ‘my cousin will never fall in love with me’.

even the eventually romantic ending shows how aware austen is of how dull and passive her main character is. she doesn’t deign to go into any detail about how the happy couple finally fall in love. it’s all put away quite neatly in a paragraph or two. which is probably quite sensible really, because as all us casanovas know, it’s all about the chase. but mansfield park is really more a case of the cat sitting in the middle of the circle, watching the mouse while it runs around showing its juicy tail. and then the mouse comes and sits on the cat’s lap and they watch doctor who.

the verdict: still bloody fun though.

Yes, it’s about hunger. It is about the nameless protagonist’s addiction to a state so all-encompassing that it allows and eventually requires the sufferer to forego usual/rational thought and deed, but is so unsustainable that desperate measures are necessary to maintain his existence. It is also about denial, physical and psychological. Knut Hamsun’s direct, modernist style stuffs the reader into the narrow crevice between the narrator’s brain and his skull, evoking painful awareness. His compulsion towards the state of hunger is a way to escape from the ideas which are too large for his head: short, frequent, violent bursts of inspiration are frittered away by the mind now too skittish from lack of nourishment to contrive an activity for the next half an hour, let alone put together a piece denouncing the despised Immanuel Kant, or a one-act drama set in the Middle Ages. These attempts at greatness (and money-making) are made, but endangered by his weakness, his faintness, and an absence of funds sustained by continuous freudian acts.

Hunger, or escape, is the only resolution, the only goal. Hamsun challenges the mind with the hunger artist’s (a Paul Auster term) peripatetic days, featuring street names so unfamiliar to this reader that they might as well have been imaginary. His vagrant meanderings take as signposts multiple mesmerising short-term plans, more often than not the recollection of an acquaintance, or an office, where he might go and beg money or earn a living. Forays to his editor’s officer, or Kierulf the baker, or a shop assistant who owes him change, have various outcomes which are invariably negative. He is downtrodden, but the downward steps are his own. The novel ends with what seems a peripeteia, but is really a continuation; it is a radical way of sustaining the pain, the escape to facilitate further escapes, a solution which is not a resolution.

This edition includes a pedantic translator’s appendix and note, which is reassuring and (by reason of its distaste of the two earlier translations) amusing. It also includes an introduction by way of an essay by Paul Auster, which is passionate and involving.

Well, what a way to prove that not much changed between 1813, when George Wickham first terrorised the Bennets, and 1885, when Georges Duroy plagued the ladies of Paris. The political intrigues and serial seductions of Guy de Maupassant’s Bel-Ami take a form similar to what I imagine might happen if John de Mol trained a raft of cameras on Paris’ veriest rascal. Duroy, who has very little talent but is blessed with a bounty of good looks and charm, sleeps his way to the top of his profession. His most potent weapon is his moustache, which seems to literally transfix women. Never mind that one of them, Madame Forestier, is clever in her own right and serves as the most important stepping stone in Duroy’s career. Never mind that one of them is married to one of the richest men in town. The ladies fall to pieces for the facial hair. There are plenty of meditations on the fine entity that is Duroy’s moustache. Bel-Ami also reproduces very nicely the effects of a moustache – it looks amazing, you can get stuck in it, it’s tickly, but at the end of the day you’re glad it’s happening to someone else and not you. Quite excellent.