Deju vu

Sometimes, I think that I could write a whole series of posts about reactions to my reading habits by people at the gym. I'm not sure why, exactly, but this keeps cropping up. Most recently while waiting for a zumba class, a personal trainer (who I have never spoken to/seen before) came up to me to ask what I was reading and what it was about. It happened to be The Woodlanders, and after I summarized he gave me a look of half sympathy for my poor plight in reading it, and half incredulity that I would choose to read it. He then said "well, at least you can work out after reading it and get the tension out."

Now, I realize this isn't much of a story, and is not, really, all that noteworthy. However, you need to understand something about my brain. I generally go through life thinking that I'm semi invisible, that I don't really register on people's radar, and that I can be as idiosyncratic as I please because no one will really notice. It always really jars me when someone comments that they've been observing some behavior of mine or that they were talking about me, etc. In some ways this is similar to being a Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.

In all seriousness, though, I think if I wasn't already writing this blog I should start one called "Awkward Encounters with Men at the Gym," since not all my awkward encounters relate to the list project, but they sure happen all. the. time.

So close

And yet, so far. I still have one Thomas Hardy to go after The Woodlanders. Sigh. Sad. I really had hoped that this one would be my last.

Have you noticed that no one ever cites Thomas Hardy when you ask them about their favorite author? There is a reason for that, and The Woodlanders epitomizes that reason.

Look, I don't need my books to be The Happy Hollisters. I get it, bad stuff happens, that's where we get plot, etc. But seriously, Hardy, seriously? Gah. It's like a bad Country Western song or that romance novel at the start of Romancing the Stone (shot my dog and burned my Bible). It's like he is punishing his characters simply for existing. I can't tell if he delights in their pain, in taking anything they ever desired and turning that against them, or if he's just super depressed, but either way, it gets very old very quickly. This one was another where pacing was important for me; I had to just plow through it as quickly as possible and get on the other side.

My other recent read was Brave New World; I don't really have anything to say about it, certainly nothing that likely hasn't already been written in millions of high-school papers. It wasn't what I was expecting, though, I will say that.

Hey, Jude

Don't make it bad. Take a sad song, and make it better. Yes, pretty much the whole time I read Jude the Obscure, I had that song in my head. Oh, well. I have very conflicted feelings about Thomas Hardy (though I did like Tess of the D’Urbervilles, though it was triggering).

I was actually grooving with this one for awhile. It was moving along, and it was pretty interesting. Sue started out as a really interesting character, but by the end I pretty much hated her. Still, at first I was really enjoying the complexity of her relationship with Jude, and enjoying that they both had passions and intellectual lives that were their own. While some of the issues it explores are timeless/still relevant, it is very much of a specific historical moment, in terms of gender roles and divorce. It addresses a time of immense, albeit subtle/suppressed upheaval; well, I guess verge of upheaval.

The novel explores a number of issues, but the main guiding issue is the idea that "the word kills," referring to societal norms, law, values, and roles, as well as religion and religious believes. Sue particularly chafes under these words, but Jude is the one who ultimately is crushed. That said, near the end I really just wanted to knock Sue over the head.

Arabella is a bit of an interesting character as well. She would be interesting for a re-write from her perspective. I didn't exactly like her, but she is fascinating, and I think we're likely more sympathetic to her than Hardy's contemporaries were.

Fortunately, I did not have Meg Manning's challenge when I read The Sun Also Rises. Mind you, I'm not a Hemingway fan (you can tell I grabbed both of these while wondering in the library and picking books that were close together alphabetically speaking), and this didn't change my mind. But I found it overall painless, despite my lack of interest in bull fights. I was struck by how much time the characters spent drunk, and how understanding and relating to being drunk likely would make the book make more sense. Oh, well.

I'm either bored or traumatized, but it's all good

I don’t have anything to say about Love in the Time of Cholera. Really don’t. I feel bad, because I know that I should love Marquez and that many people thinks this book is amazing, and it has all this nuance I am sure. But I just was bored. I didn’t really enjoy 100 Years of Solitude, per se (I always think of it as 1000 years of solitude; it certainly felt long enough), but it is rich and complex. I found Love in the Time of Cholera surprisingly bland. And that’s really all I have to say. Really. I’m sorry.

Ah, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. The question here really is, how do you like your portrayals of violence against women? We’ll take a second shot at this when we get to The Handmaid’s Tale.

But for now, let’s start with Hardy’s novel. It’s beautiful; Tess is an amazing character. I love her voice and the way we are in her head, and yet not in so many ways. But, I found this one extremely hard to read. It may not have been the best week for me to be reading a work where one of the main themes is violence against women. If you do read it, be prepared. There were times when I just had to stop reading for a few seconds.

What really stood out to me was the victim blaming that permeates the novel. Obviously as the rapist Alec is horrible, but Angel is not much better (her parents are equally victim blaming; gah). One way that we justify victim blaming is through dehumanizing victims. Throughout the novel, Hardy repeatedly brings up Tess’s humanness and the ways the different characters view Tess. Angel muses on the fact that Tess is fully human, a full person living her own true and real life, not just a thing defined in relation to him. At the same time, Angel clearly doesn’t fully comprehend this or what it means, which is why Angel ultimately is able to be so incredibly cruel to Tess.

Alec doesn’t even pretend to see Tess as a full person. He completely defines her in relation to him, to his needs and desires. That’s why he rapes her in the first place, and why later, after he thinks he has changed/ “converted,” he still only thinks of his need to absolve his guilt over his actions, not what Tess needs.

Next time, The Handmaid’s Tale and Howards End.