Books of 2019 Part 3: 20-11
20) The Festival of Insignificance - Milan Kundera
Kundera is one of those writers that I’ll happily forget about for a while or when thinking about writers I love, yet I always get a great deal of enjoyment when I pick up a new one. This has all his characteristic quirks, but it feels a little glib relative to others that I’ve read. It’s not that his musings on the ‘insignificant’ figures in our lives and throughout modern history aren’t diverting and engaging, but quite simply he condenses them into what is a short and somewhat shallow narrative of friends interacting and socialising around Paris over the course of a few days. So I felt that there were more depths that Kundera could plumb but elected not to, and to keep it more of a few pithy notes and comic fables. It’s an entertaining read but just doesn’t have the profundity of his meatier works.
19) Lean on Pete - Willy Vlautin
Picked this one up for no reason except that the film adaptation was mildly well received - yet I haven't seen the film, don't have a huge interest in it, but just decided to give this a read since I'd at least heard about it. And the fact is it's really quite a good read. It's a depressing, picaresque story that has a lot of The Grapes of Wrath ((my #26 book of 2013) influence on it as Charley, our lead character, drifts from misfortune to misfortune and desperate situation to desperate situation. But it also echoes Steinbeck's clinical detachment; Vlautin isn't hugely interested in explaining Charley's psychology although his character and values are aptly demonstrated through his actions and the dreams he narrates. It's an interesting read as well because all the misfortunes and injustices that do happen to Charley are real-world and the people he meets on his travels are ultimately well-meaning in their various ways (with some exceptions) but Charley's itinerant upbringing and lack of solid family bonds give him a lack of trust and a misanthropy that lead him onto further vagrancy and wayward behaviour when there may be easier options on offer. It's a very bittersweet tale that is also curiously ambivalent.
18) Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
I always find reading Vonnegut an odd experience. He always strikes me as the kind of intellectually expressive writer over whom first-year literature students - specifically male ones - would get all hot and sweaty. But in full self-awareness mode there's still quite a lot of first-year male literature student in me, and so I always quite enjoy his blend of post-structural literary observation, ironic self-abasement, speculative fiction and schoolboy crassness. It's always offbeat, absurdist and drily amusing with his key shortcoming being a difficulty in structuring some plots. In this non-novel the lack of plot structure is perhaps even more glaring than usual, because there's specifically no direction to this; it's just a collection of autobiographical, semi-autobiographical and fictional observations set around a high-concept sci-fi novel he tried and failed to write. But that just gives Vonnegut licence to write and pass commentary on anything and everything he wants. Some of his observations here are witty and engaging, while some - including his definition of what constitutes visual art and the value placed on it - I found remarkably astute. It's largely a nothingness book overall but it's a fun framework through which to view a collection of writings and skits. And, as uncomfortably as it tends to sit with me, I do find Vonnegut's writing stimulating and entertaining even if it is also juvenile and precocious at times.
17) Stonemouth - Iain Banks
This is kind of a weird book, or my reaction to it is kind of weird. Because I was quite enthralled during the reading of it: it’s a curious crime drama that interweaves the dynamics of a rival crime family saga akin to The Godfather (my #19 book of 2015) with a tale of personal romantic misadventure, all kind of intertwined with a bit of a coming-of-age story. But ultimately I left it feeling a bit unfulfilled, like there was nothing especially interesting or deep at the heart of it, and it felt just a bit like Iain Banks riffing on a handful of stock criminal characters he had in his back pocket, and using the protagonist Stuart as our ‘gonzo’ fish out of water conduit into this Cold War-esque underworld equilibrium. The fact is that the crossroads of the story, the central mystery, and the whole inciting incident that we relive through Stuart’s retrospective flashbacks, are kind of shallow and all tied up in adolescent sexual politics, which is fine as narrative fodder (and indeed the story chugs along very smoothly hence my getting caught up in it) but there’s really nothing else at the heart of this. It’s not got the twisted morality parable that the Godfather presents, nor the meditations on ambition and infamy that Brighton Rock (my #25 book of 2014), for instance, does. It’s really just a story of horny teenagers set against a backdrop of crime syndicates in drizzly Regional Scotland. I guess it's really Banks' skill as a storyteller that makes it work as far as it does, but I just can't reflect back and find anything more than a story I was wrapped up in for a while.
16) My Father's Moon - Elizabeth Jolley
This was a very enigmatic, and quite elusive read, but one I enjoyed a lot. It tells various timelines in the life of Jolley's semi-autobiographical protagonist: while she's at school, as a student nurse during WWII, and later as an unmarried mother trying to work with a small child in tow. I felt like only one of these timelines - the war one - really had a full and deep exploration within this book (which is part one of a trilogy, so I'm hazarding a guess that the other timelines and general life of the protagonist may be explored further in subsequent parts), as well as being the only one that reached a coherent endpoint. So the timeline does a lot of haphazard jumping around, while the narrator could best be described as ambivalent if you're being generous. She does a number of questionable and sketchy things, including some that are fairly malevolent for no obvious reason, and also suffers from a typical first person narrator syndrome where her inner workings are quite elusive. But despite these things, I was quite engaged with the story and also found myself liking and sympathising with the narrator, possibly against my better judgement. I think there's a certain self-aware irony in a lot of what she does, while the emotional crux of the story being tied in the past to her connection with her father or in the future relationship with her daughter, all which makes her ultimately a sympathetic figure even while doing the wrong thing or coming across as selfish or callous. I still don't know if I've got much understanding of the horrors of war, the pathos of being a caregiver in an austere environment, or even her aims and motivations, but despite the lack of answers or outcomes it was an enjoyable read.
15) Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower Part 4) - Stephen King
#ContinuingSeries
Working my way further through this literary minefield. This is an oddly structured book, since it starts where book three left off, in this high-adrenaline meta-Arabian nights kind of scenario where the travellers need to stump a psychotic, suicidal AI monorail with a riddle (yes, really). But then it takes on Roland telling his companions about the instigating events that led him to where he is now, and I was a bit distracted at first thinking it would be a short interlude, whereas in fact it takes up 90% of the novel, all of this volume pretty much dedicated to his flashback narrative. It returns in many ways to the western-sci fi mashup of the first book, in that it is set in a frontier-esque landscape but introduces little elements of fantastical origins throughout so the world-building has an unsettling uncanny familiarity - but not. The story is intriguing and at times really compelling, but I also found it a bit oppressive and claustrophobic when it did start dawning on me that most of the book would be set here. The main reason for this is that there is a complete dearth of laudable characters. It does shift the narrative focus among a number of different players in the story and it feels like there isn't one - beyond our obvious protagonist/narrator and his associates - who is morally 'good', and the narrative tends to paint everybody as either on the right side (and therefore good) or irredeemably evil on the other. This felt a bit oppressive because there aren't any good character arcs beyond Roland's himself, and it started to drag a bit knowing it was only filling in back story and yet being stuck in the company of so many horrible people who you know are - in some way - going to 'win' in the end. By the end of it I felt that Roland's character was better explained and more intimately detailed, so it fulfils its purpose and King does a good job of committing to the themes and the fatalism inherent from the beginning. It just felt like it could have been economised a bit and some of the players' parts in the saga just lightened since there weren't redeemable qualities in any of them. I found the character of Cordelia particularly disappointing, in that she went from simply misguided and ill-intentioned and got more and more evil as the story went on, and the whole time I was hoping that she might take an about face and be the deus ex machina figure our heroes needed. The character who instead comes out of the woodwork later as the surprise saviour only takes that role because they haven't really been mentioned at all since their introduction. That felt a bit of a wasted opportunity to explore a bit more moral relativism by exploring that character's story in more detail where so much time is dedicated to the countless villains who we know are going to continue being bastards. Regardless, in the end it's painted the world in more vivid colour and driven the story to the next important chapter which I'll obviously continue with, but probably not until next year.
14) The Takeover - Muriel Spark
I think by this point I can fully say the main reason I enjoy Spark unfailingly is that you never have any idea what you're going to get when you open one of her stories. This is her at her cruel and biting best; it's like an Iris Murdoch story in that there are lots of characters all intertwined with each other and we're sort of plonked in the middle of it and expected to catch up as we go along. What we get here in this book - which was part two of "Spark's Europe", a collection of stories containing observations about continental Europe, along with "Not To Disturb" (my #33 book of this year) and "The Only Problem" (still to come) - is a ruthless lampooning of the ultra-rich bathing in the luxury and lethargy of Europe. She pokes fun of the byzantine nature of Italian cultural norms by way of their local laws and customs (which reminds me a lot of the likes of Corsican and Sicilian stereotypes), while also portraying a cast of characters of various levels of unsympathetic greed and absurdity. It's ultimately a high farce, where we're never certain of exactly who will be 'taken over' or by whom. The central relationship between the self-serving, generous but naive Maggie and the even-more-self-serving, stupid but crafty Hubert is a strange and increasingly surreal buffet of barbs and frustrating torts. While it is readable as a farce, it's more of a kaleidoscopic mess of ascerbic wit. I feel due to its own byzantine plot structure it doesn't hit the mark dead-on, but the success it does have lies in its many unhinged excesses, so ultimately it's actually kind of a delightful chaos.
13) Mrs Craddock - William Somerset Maugham
This was an interesting read. As the blurb suggested it might, it feels a little bit dated now as the 'class mismatch' at the heart of the story - the wealthy Bertha Ley falls for the lower class Edward Craddock and decides against all the advice of her peers to marry him - doesn't have so much relevance these days. But Maugham manages to draw some interesting themes out of it, and in fact some of the more engaging themes felt potentially unintentional, where Bertha comes across as an intellectual head-in-cloud type not only in her taste in art and music but also in the way she loves and expresses emotion. The conflict between her impassioned and sensitive nature and the down-to-earth and callous Edward's homey, simple character is manifested in interesting ways. It gives way to Maugham's characteristic philosophical meditations on God, the nature of love and humanity's need to strive for something greater. In this case the question kind of lingers a little longer than it did in The Razor's Edge (My #7 book of 2017) for instance, because it quite starkly establishes a simple earthly life in opposition to a pursuit of higher ideals and posits that one may be superior or more fulfilling. Bertha is an interesting and ambivalent conduit to that debate and conflict, and I found my sympathies with her wavering and juxtaposing quite a lot, and that made for an interesting experience.
12) My Cousin Rachel - Daphne Du Maurier
I naturally picked this up after Du Maurier landed the coveted #1 spot of 2018 with Rebecca (despite me already knowing the plot). And this is a very intriguing narrative, all told. For a long time I struggled with it, for the simple reason that our first person narrator Phillip is such an insufferable imbecile. It became apparent quite early on what a naive fool he was, so it began to feel a bit interminable at times as there were 200 odd pages to go and I could only see him digging a wider and deeper chasm for himself to plunge headfirst into. But Du Maurier is obviously no fool, so throughout Phillip's obsessive subservience to a foolhardy love and lack of self-awareness, there is an ongoing mystery as to the real nature of Rachel's character and precisely what happened during her marriage to Phillip's late cousin and confidante Ambrose. For the most part it doesn't seem to matter, because Phillip's foolishness is so singular in its purpose that it's irrelevant whether Rachel was an innocent victim of Ambrose's mania or a malevolent gold-digger - Phillip will direct the own conclusion to the story regardless - but Du Maurier has enough control over her characters and the narrative to keep the plot engaging and moving along until the end. I still kind of cringed throughout as I didn't have a lot of sympathy for our narrator and that led to a few struggles with identifying with the central conflicts, but as a mystery construction it's definitely very enjoyable and ultimately very effective.
11) Persuasion - Jane Austen
#AnAustenAYear? #Unofficially?
It seems everybody I know loves this book, so it felt like the logical next Austen for me to read. I'm now left with only two I haven't read, what will be next year's? I've also seen the BBC adaptation of this with Sally Hawkins as Anne, because Bec saw it and took a great liking to Rupert Penry-Jones who plays Wentworth. So I knew the basic storyline here but, as with any condensed adaptation, the BBC film missed a lot of the detail. There isn't, however, a great deal of detail to the plot: Anne and Wentworth have a history whereby Anne rejected him due to family objections; Wentworth returns and Anne isn't sure about his feelings now that the marriage would be more amenable to her family connections. Given Anne's situation, and her character, there isn't much at stake here, like in Emma (my #60 book of 2017). But where Emma felt facile and vapid to me due to the superfluous plot machinations and lack of character depth, this is far more successful simply because Austen makes love the only stakes that matter here. There's a comfort to the whole scenario; the Elliott family are not well off but they're content; one of the sisters is well married; the patriarch is being courted by someone unsuitable but nothing seems greatly dire. But Anne's regret, and her yearning for a second chance, feels fulfilling and satisfying without anything to lose more than feeling a bit of further regret and resignation. It's a sweet tale in its simplicity, without the need for a huge amount of complexity to the themes.
Kundera is one of those writers that I’ll happily forget about for a while or when thinking about writers I love, yet I always get a great deal of enjoyment when I pick up a new one. This has all his characteristic quirks, but it feels a little glib relative to others that I’ve read. It’s not that his musings on the ‘insignificant’ figures in our lives and throughout modern history aren’t diverting and engaging, but quite simply he condenses them into what is a short and somewhat shallow narrative of friends interacting and socialising around Paris over the course of a few days. So I felt that there were more depths that Kundera could plumb but elected not to, and to keep it more of a few pithy notes and comic fables. It’s an entertaining read but just doesn’t have the profundity of his meatier works.
19) Lean on Pete - Willy Vlautin
Picked this one up for no reason except that the film adaptation was mildly well received - yet I haven't seen the film, don't have a huge interest in it, but just decided to give this a read since I'd at least heard about it. And the fact is it's really quite a good read. It's a depressing, picaresque story that has a lot of The Grapes of Wrath ((my #26 book of 2013) influence on it as Charley, our lead character, drifts from misfortune to misfortune and desperate situation to desperate situation. But it also echoes Steinbeck's clinical detachment; Vlautin isn't hugely interested in explaining Charley's psychology although his character and values are aptly demonstrated through his actions and the dreams he narrates. It's an interesting read as well because all the misfortunes and injustices that do happen to Charley are real-world and the people he meets on his travels are ultimately well-meaning in their various ways (with some exceptions) but Charley's itinerant upbringing and lack of solid family bonds give him a lack of trust and a misanthropy that lead him onto further vagrancy and wayward behaviour when there may be easier options on offer. It's a very bittersweet tale that is also curiously ambivalent.
18) Timequake - Kurt Vonnegut
I always find reading Vonnegut an odd experience. He always strikes me as the kind of intellectually expressive writer over whom first-year literature students - specifically male ones - would get all hot and sweaty. But in full self-awareness mode there's still quite a lot of first-year male literature student in me, and so I always quite enjoy his blend of post-structural literary observation, ironic self-abasement, speculative fiction and schoolboy crassness. It's always offbeat, absurdist and drily amusing with his key shortcoming being a difficulty in structuring some plots. In this non-novel the lack of plot structure is perhaps even more glaring than usual, because there's specifically no direction to this; it's just a collection of autobiographical, semi-autobiographical and fictional observations set around a high-concept sci-fi novel he tried and failed to write. But that just gives Vonnegut licence to write and pass commentary on anything and everything he wants. Some of his observations here are witty and engaging, while some - including his definition of what constitutes visual art and the value placed on it - I found remarkably astute. It's largely a nothingness book overall but it's a fun framework through which to view a collection of writings and skits. And, as uncomfortably as it tends to sit with me, I do find Vonnegut's writing stimulating and entertaining even if it is also juvenile and precocious at times.
17) Stonemouth - Iain Banks
This is kind of a weird book, or my reaction to it is kind of weird. Because I was quite enthralled during the reading of it: it’s a curious crime drama that interweaves the dynamics of a rival crime family saga akin to The Godfather (my #19 book of 2015) with a tale of personal romantic misadventure, all kind of intertwined with a bit of a coming-of-age story. But ultimately I left it feeling a bit unfulfilled, like there was nothing especially interesting or deep at the heart of it, and it felt just a bit like Iain Banks riffing on a handful of stock criminal characters he had in his back pocket, and using the protagonist Stuart as our ‘gonzo’ fish out of water conduit into this Cold War-esque underworld equilibrium. The fact is that the crossroads of the story, the central mystery, and the whole inciting incident that we relive through Stuart’s retrospective flashbacks, are kind of shallow and all tied up in adolescent sexual politics, which is fine as narrative fodder (and indeed the story chugs along very smoothly hence my getting caught up in it) but there’s really nothing else at the heart of this. It’s not got the twisted morality parable that the Godfather presents, nor the meditations on ambition and infamy that Brighton Rock (my #25 book of 2014), for instance, does. It’s really just a story of horny teenagers set against a backdrop of crime syndicates in drizzly Regional Scotland. I guess it's really Banks' skill as a storyteller that makes it work as far as it does, but I just can't reflect back and find anything more than a story I was wrapped up in for a while.
16) My Father's Moon - Elizabeth Jolley
This was a very enigmatic, and quite elusive read, but one I enjoyed a lot. It tells various timelines in the life of Jolley's semi-autobiographical protagonist: while she's at school, as a student nurse during WWII, and later as an unmarried mother trying to work with a small child in tow. I felt like only one of these timelines - the war one - really had a full and deep exploration within this book (which is part one of a trilogy, so I'm hazarding a guess that the other timelines and general life of the protagonist may be explored further in subsequent parts), as well as being the only one that reached a coherent endpoint. So the timeline does a lot of haphazard jumping around, while the narrator could best be described as ambivalent if you're being generous. She does a number of questionable and sketchy things, including some that are fairly malevolent for no obvious reason, and also suffers from a typical first person narrator syndrome where her inner workings are quite elusive. But despite these things, I was quite engaged with the story and also found myself liking and sympathising with the narrator, possibly against my better judgement. I think there's a certain self-aware irony in a lot of what she does, while the emotional crux of the story being tied in the past to her connection with her father or in the future relationship with her daughter, all which makes her ultimately a sympathetic figure even while doing the wrong thing or coming across as selfish or callous. I still don't know if I've got much understanding of the horrors of war, the pathos of being a caregiver in an austere environment, or even her aims and motivations, but despite the lack of answers or outcomes it was an enjoyable read.
15) Wizard and Glass (The Dark Tower Part 4) - Stephen King
#ContinuingSeries
Working my way further through this literary minefield. This is an oddly structured book, since it starts where book three left off, in this high-adrenaline meta-Arabian nights kind of scenario where the travellers need to stump a psychotic, suicidal AI monorail with a riddle (yes, really). But then it takes on Roland telling his companions about the instigating events that led him to where he is now, and I was a bit distracted at first thinking it would be a short interlude, whereas in fact it takes up 90% of the novel, all of this volume pretty much dedicated to his flashback narrative. It returns in many ways to the western-sci fi mashup of the first book, in that it is set in a frontier-esque landscape but introduces little elements of fantastical origins throughout so the world-building has an unsettling uncanny familiarity - but not. The story is intriguing and at times really compelling, but I also found it a bit oppressive and claustrophobic when it did start dawning on me that most of the book would be set here. The main reason for this is that there is a complete dearth of laudable characters. It does shift the narrative focus among a number of different players in the story and it feels like there isn't one - beyond our obvious protagonist/narrator and his associates - who is morally 'good', and the narrative tends to paint everybody as either on the right side (and therefore good) or irredeemably evil on the other. This felt a bit oppressive because there aren't any good character arcs beyond Roland's himself, and it started to drag a bit knowing it was only filling in back story and yet being stuck in the company of so many horrible people who you know are - in some way - going to 'win' in the end. By the end of it I felt that Roland's character was better explained and more intimately detailed, so it fulfils its purpose and King does a good job of committing to the themes and the fatalism inherent from the beginning. It just felt like it could have been economised a bit and some of the players' parts in the saga just lightened since there weren't redeemable qualities in any of them. I found the character of Cordelia particularly disappointing, in that she went from simply misguided and ill-intentioned and got more and more evil as the story went on, and the whole time I was hoping that she might take an about face and be the deus ex machina figure our heroes needed. The character who instead comes out of the woodwork later as the surprise saviour only takes that role because they haven't really been mentioned at all since their introduction. That felt a bit of a wasted opportunity to explore a bit more moral relativism by exploring that character's story in more detail where so much time is dedicated to the countless villains who we know are going to continue being bastards. Regardless, in the end it's painted the world in more vivid colour and driven the story to the next important chapter which I'll obviously continue with, but probably not until next year.
14) The Takeover - Muriel Spark
I think by this point I can fully say the main reason I enjoy Spark unfailingly is that you never have any idea what you're going to get when you open one of her stories. This is her at her cruel and biting best; it's like an Iris Murdoch story in that there are lots of characters all intertwined with each other and we're sort of plonked in the middle of it and expected to catch up as we go along. What we get here in this book - which was part two of "Spark's Europe", a collection of stories containing observations about continental Europe, along with "Not To Disturb" (my #33 book of this year) and "The Only Problem" (still to come) - is a ruthless lampooning of the ultra-rich bathing in the luxury and lethargy of Europe. She pokes fun of the byzantine nature of Italian cultural norms by way of their local laws and customs (which reminds me a lot of the likes of Corsican and Sicilian stereotypes), while also portraying a cast of characters of various levels of unsympathetic greed and absurdity. It's ultimately a high farce, where we're never certain of exactly who will be 'taken over' or by whom. The central relationship between the self-serving, generous but naive Maggie and the even-more-self-serving, stupid but crafty Hubert is a strange and increasingly surreal buffet of barbs and frustrating torts. While it is readable as a farce, it's more of a kaleidoscopic mess of ascerbic wit. I feel due to its own byzantine plot structure it doesn't hit the mark dead-on, but the success it does have lies in its many unhinged excesses, so ultimately it's actually kind of a delightful chaos.
13) Mrs Craddock - William Somerset Maugham
This was an interesting read. As the blurb suggested it might, it feels a little bit dated now as the 'class mismatch' at the heart of the story - the wealthy Bertha Ley falls for the lower class Edward Craddock and decides against all the advice of her peers to marry him - doesn't have so much relevance these days. But Maugham manages to draw some interesting themes out of it, and in fact some of the more engaging themes felt potentially unintentional, where Bertha comes across as an intellectual head-in-cloud type not only in her taste in art and music but also in the way she loves and expresses emotion. The conflict between her impassioned and sensitive nature and the down-to-earth and callous Edward's homey, simple character is manifested in interesting ways. It gives way to Maugham's characteristic philosophical meditations on God, the nature of love and humanity's need to strive for something greater. In this case the question kind of lingers a little longer than it did in The Razor's Edge (My #7 book of 2017) for instance, because it quite starkly establishes a simple earthly life in opposition to a pursuit of higher ideals and posits that one may be superior or more fulfilling. Bertha is an interesting and ambivalent conduit to that debate and conflict, and I found my sympathies with her wavering and juxtaposing quite a lot, and that made for an interesting experience.
12) My Cousin Rachel - Daphne Du Maurier
I naturally picked this up after Du Maurier landed the coveted #1 spot of 2018 with Rebecca (despite me already knowing the plot). And this is a very intriguing narrative, all told. For a long time I struggled with it, for the simple reason that our first person narrator Phillip is such an insufferable imbecile. It became apparent quite early on what a naive fool he was, so it began to feel a bit interminable at times as there were 200 odd pages to go and I could only see him digging a wider and deeper chasm for himself to plunge headfirst into. But Du Maurier is obviously no fool, so throughout Phillip's obsessive subservience to a foolhardy love and lack of self-awareness, there is an ongoing mystery as to the real nature of Rachel's character and precisely what happened during her marriage to Phillip's late cousin and confidante Ambrose. For the most part it doesn't seem to matter, because Phillip's foolishness is so singular in its purpose that it's irrelevant whether Rachel was an innocent victim of Ambrose's mania or a malevolent gold-digger - Phillip will direct the own conclusion to the story regardless - but Du Maurier has enough control over her characters and the narrative to keep the plot engaging and moving along until the end. I still kind of cringed throughout as I didn't have a lot of sympathy for our narrator and that led to a few struggles with identifying with the central conflicts, but as a mystery construction it's definitely very enjoyable and ultimately very effective.
11) Persuasion - Jane Austen
#AnAustenAYear? #Unofficially?
It seems everybody I know loves this book, so it felt like the logical next Austen for me to read. I'm now left with only two I haven't read, what will be next year's? I've also seen the BBC adaptation of this with Sally Hawkins as Anne, because Bec saw it and took a great liking to Rupert Penry-Jones who plays Wentworth. So I knew the basic storyline here but, as with any condensed adaptation, the BBC film missed a lot of the detail. There isn't, however, a great deal of detail to the plot: Anne and Wentworth have a history whereby Anne rejected him due to family objections; Wentworth returns and Anne isn't sure about his feelings now that the marriage would be more amenable to her family connections. Given Anne's situation, and her character, there isn't much at stake here, like in Emma (my #60 book of 2017). But where Emma felt facile and vapid to me due to the superfluous plot machinations and lack of character depth, this is far more successful simply because Austen makes love the only stakes that matter here. There's a comfort to the whole scenario; the Elliott family are not well off but they're content; one of the sisters is well married; the patriarch is being courted by someone unsuitable but nothing seems greatly dire. But Anne's regret, and her yearning for a second chance, feels fulfilling and satisfying without anything to lose more than feeling a bit of further regret and resignation. It's a sweet tale in its simplicity, without the need for a huge amount of complexity to the themes.
posted by Sean's Beard at 9:04 PM
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