Reading Roundup, May 2023

[phantomtomato]

First up is Imre: A Memorandum by Edward Prime-Stevenson. This is short, so I went into it expecting a punchy story, and could not have been more wrong. The opening is many paragraphs of our narrator, Oswald, describing the physical and personal virtues of his new friend and love interest, the titular Imre. Somehow I was still shocked when, starting around 40% through and continuing… far past that… he has a “Who is John Galt?”-level monologue about his entire gay sexual history. It is not a punchy story!

What I’ve liked about it is seeing so many familiar structures in this century-old novel. There’s this bit wherein the narrator has a big sad miscommunication because he’s sure!! that Imre is not gay!! and so his own feelings must be buried forever, which could come straight from a fanfic:

I got to bed, concluding among other things that so far from Imre's being homosexual—as Uranian, or Dionian-Uranian, or Uranian-Dionian... or what else of that kind of juggling terminology in homosexual analysis—my friend was no sort of an Uranistic example at all. No! he was, instead, a thorough-going Dionian, whatever the fine fusions of his sensitive and complex nature! A complete Dionian, capable of warm friendship, yes—but a man to whom warm, even passionate, friendship with this or that other man never could transform itself into the bitter and burning mystery of Uranistic Love,—the fittest names for which so often should be written Torment, Shame, and Despair! Fortunate Imre! Yet, as I said so to myself, altruistically glad for his sake, I sighed... and surely that night I thought long, long thoughts till I finally slept.

I also read the one (1) fic in this fandom, Imre: An Addendum by black_bentley, which is delightful and perfectly in-tune with the original. It should really be stapled onto the end, it just makes so much sense.

The largest chunk of my month went towards Some Do Not ... by Ford Madox Ford, volume one of Parade's End. After finishing In Memoriam, I wanted to know how WWI felt when written by someone who'd served in it. There's about a million other options for this and given that the characters are inspired by the war poets, I suppose I should have tried Good-Bye to All That. I bought this copy of Parade's End at a cute used bookstore in Montreal this year, though, so I decided to start with what I owned.

My initial reactions to it are that I like the prose, but not the dialogue; I'm not as interested in any of the characters as I thought I would be, but Sylvia and Valentine are the most interesting of who's there; Ford does detail incredibly well, but sometimes to the detriment of my understanding when it's cultural references of that specific moment. It was very easy for me to get lost in the book, as in not fully comprehending what had just happened on the last page, but also very easy for me to get lost as in reading fifty pages in one sitting.

It's very class-conscious in a way that I appreciate. It's socially acceptable for everyone to mix together, but they all have different attitudes towards money, depending on how they got theirs and how much of it they have. I'm especially interested in the status of Valentine Wannop, who is the primary love interest, and her family, a mother and a brother, who are left without seemingly any funds after the family patriarch dies. On the one hand, Valentine worked as... maybe a scullery maid? She talks about sleeping in the kitchen—in order to support her mother, but on the other, her and her mother keep a charming country house with guest rooms and the narrator, Christopher, describes her as fitting the social role of a lady once he meets her in appropriate dress. I suppose it's the up and down nature of their finances that's interesting, and how there's always the lurking implication that she would be of perfectly good social standing if her family were just steadier. This contrasts with Sylvia, Christopher's wife/witch of all ages, who's got family money and superficial charm but is personally vile underneath all that.

Or, like, personally vile if you want to believe it. Christopher kind of has a mid-novel switch over from hating his wife to blandly tolerating her, and perhaps that's because of the shell-shock he picked up during the time skip between parts one and two, I don't know. I cannot figure out Sylvia's whole deal. I hope we get to. I might totally miss it, though, that's also possible.

I'm excited to get to the second volume and see the war when Christopher is in France.

I read The Summer House, Later by Judith Hermann on a recommendation from myhaus_spaeter. I read it in English, in translation from the original German, and it was a good translation! I mean, not that I speak German, but each of the stories felt like polished, well-considered prose. I really liked it.

Because it’s a collection of short stories, some stood out more than others. I liked the eeriness of the opening story, The Red Coral Bracelet, which struck me as similar in form to a Victorian mystery/adventure but with surreal elements and a much smaller scope. There’s haunting line from the end of Hurricane (Something Farewell) that’s stuck with me:

Cat misses you and says you’ll be coming back soon; I say — yes.

The stories generally feature young women in perhaps the late 1980s or the 1990s, largely in and around Berlin, and describe various romantic experiences that aren’t happy. They’re not unhappy in a catastrophic sense, which I appreciate. They’re unhappy in that specific and wistful way that ill-considered romances during young adulthood can tend to be. That’s why I love the line above: the young woman has run back home and left Cat, her poorly-fitting lover. Friends also left behind cover for her. She’s never coming back, though.

I don’t know the city of Berlin but I do know New York, and the one story set there (Hunter Tompson Music) persuades me that Hermann does setting details very persuasively. Setting details in general are done well. There’s some beautiful description in these.

Hermann writes in a version of third person, mostly, which fascinates me: it’s a sort of disembodied outsider. There’s at least one story in first person, and there are some with at least more recognizable-to-me stretches of third which expose a POV character’s thoughts, but in The End of Something it’s at its most extreme. A character named Sophie narrates the story while sitting in a cafe, but we never learn who she narrates this story to.

Sophie looks up at the sky over Helmholtz Square, as though to compare. The sky over Helmholtz Square is pale and heavy with rain. Sophie turns away and looks around the cafe, holding the coffee cup with both hands. She still looks cold. She squeezes her eyes shut and clears her throat, her expression rather reserved, distant.

It’s clearly not Sophie’s POV, as her emotions are entirely observed, and the narrator makes asides about things that she cannot see. I found it incredibly compelling. Well, perhaps not for the reasons meant—I didn’t particularly care about the story that Sophie was telling—but the structure gripped me.

Comments

[black_bentley]

I'm so glad you liked Imre, it's adorable, and the language is just so brilliantly overblown in the way that only a Victorian book can be <333 and thank you so much for the rec! (I promise I will actually reply to your comment, I'm still basking in it at the moment.)

As for WW1 fiction, the book I'd recommend most by someone who was there is Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. It's one of my absolute favourites, and is the book that sparked my interest in WW1. It's the middle volume of a trilogy, but can definitely be read on its own - I read it years before I read the other two. And All Quiet on the Western Front is tremendous.

I still haven't been able to face starting Parade's End /o\ I have got The Good Soldier, though, so maybe I should start with a less intimidating Ford...

[phantomtomato]

<3 <3

It’s such a fun short book! Totally worth the read for a vision of what openly queer Victorian literature could have been, in the AU where we got tons of it. I’ll never be upset about the brilliant slashy canons that we do have, but Imre’s honest embrace of its gay leads is great.

I’ll add both to the list! Especially the Sassoon book—that’s a very helpful tip that the middle of a trilogy stands alone.

Haha the Ford brick that I own is 900 pages or so? It’s massive and I’m not planning to attempt more than one volume per month, which would still allow me to finish by the end of the summer but without so much… overwhelm. At least the first volume is the longest, so I’m through the hardest part!

Also this is embarrassing, but I cannot wrap my head around the pronunciation of the name “Tietjens.” It’s bad enough that I’m debating firing up my HBO (errrr, MAX) app to watch the first few minutes of the miniseries adaptation and see if it’s pronounced in there.

[black_bentley]

Yeah I've just checked and my copy of Parade's End is just over 900 pages /o\ and I haven't got the first idea how one would pronounce "Tietjens" either! I feel like it's going to be one of those names where either you say it exactly as it's written, or it sounds absolutely nothing like that...

The Sassoon is a great book <3 the others in the trilogy are also very good, especially the first one, but Infantry Officer is definitely my favourite. Although he's generally known more for his poetry than his prose, I do think that book is probably his best work. He did actually consider writing a novel about homosexuality, but never did. He was a friend of E. M. Forster, and he read the manuscript for Maurice at some point in the 1920s.

(I will curtail my Sassoon-based ramblings now...)

[phantomtomato]

There's a line in the first volume that describes it as "a name pronounced like tea-tray" but (a) that character is slightly confused as she tries to recall this person, and (b) I cannot remotely envision that. Aaah! If only one of those fanvids on YouTube included dialogue haha.

Aw, I like your Sassoon insights! Share them any time. It's so helpful to get advice from someone who really knows an author's body of work—I would flounder without these kind pointers, and there's no reason to reinvent the wheel when someone's already figured it out! I would have loved to see his novel about homosexuality. I adore Maurice as much for its context as I do its content. There's something so special about capturing (even if edited across decades) openly queer sentiments and interests from an era in which they could not easily have been published. It's a beautiful time-capsule.

Also, I don't know if anyone's put together a journal article that has a timeline of which people saw the Maurice manuscript when, but that absolutely should exist. I don't know any 20th c. British lit academics, unfortunately! But that would be such a fun thing to see compiled.

[myhaus_spaeter]

Yay! I’m so happy you enjoyed the stories in Summerhouse, Later! Hermann does do location details really well! My favorite story was Sonja. Not so much the story itself (like your experience with The End of Something) but the way she perfectly captures the grey and cold Berlin winters spent in smoke filled bars, freezing in the cold around 1am (because all the cool parties start after midnight) as you search for the right building to attend parties in the old warehouse districts (where rent is basically nothing), and the liminal summers by the Spree where one seems to be constantly running into people one knows. And the way people drift in and out of each other’s lives. And I agree, the narrative perspectives are really fascinating. Coupled with her youngish protagonists, they evoke for me the kind stories about “a friend of a friend” that get passed around (and gradually distorted in each retelling) in a friend group or “scene”. And I love the theme of “waiting for something” and deferring life decisions until “later”. For some reason I didn’t quite see the romantic relationships as ill-matched (though now that you point it out, it is true). The question of whether the couple “matched” never occurred to me as I was reading, probably because I saw those relationships as “place-holders” for something that not even the protagonist is sure of, something to occupy one’s time as one waits for “later”, for what one really want out of life…except later never comes…it’s never the right time, the right person…

[phantomtomato]

Oh, I very much agree, it’s a “friend of a friend” vibe—sometimes literally so, in the story! Yes many have the sort of absurdities/distortions that feel like they’ve been built on late nights of gossip, only these are transcribed to paper.

I think that your framing of the relationships as placeholders because the women are waiting for something is also apt. I suppose I’d fit my ill-matched descriptor in as like: a subconscious decision that the characters are making to pick a partner who isn’t suitable as more than a placeholder, who won’t be able to last as more than a placeholder, and what’s interesting is the variations in how that plays out for them. We get them breaking it off with the men they choose, some men who break it off first, some relationships that never materialize (particularly in “Hunter Tompson Music”), etc. I often found the male half of the relationship to be as interesting as the female half, especially when there was a sense of the guy’s unease being cast into this role. “Sonja” is a perfect example! The guy is the narrator in that one and he’s a real piece of work, of course, but you also get such a clear sense of how Sonja’s total absence of communication is upsetting to him and means he can’t envision the sort of commitment that she turns out to want. And it’s not that I’m rooting for a happy romance in that story (or any of them), but I did wonder how it might have gone differently if she had, you know, talked to him at any point and given their relationship a chance to grow into something they both wanted. (Sort of. He was a shitbag, so.)

[myhaus_spaeter]

I reread “Hunter Thompson Music” today and was thinking about how the mysterious girl presented the narrator with the potential for some kind of change, and the narrator is frustrated but also relieved by her elusiveness. Like how he stays in a hotel because it means, supposedly, that he could leave anytime, but we know that is unlikely. Like how Sonja could be so many different people for the narrator “Sonja” because she hardly spoke. Her elusiveness was part of the appeal. In a way she is a better match for him than his girlfriend because he can be his insufferable self in her “empty” presence. And she put up with it because she also wanted something out of him and didn’t feel the need to actually know him. But I agree that they are also ill-matched in the sense that they can’t seem to have normal human communication (pretty much none of the couples do. Half the time they are talking past each other, having their own conversations in their own heads.) The relationship seemed full of “possibility” that only exists as long as it’s never realized. I find this fixation on optionality in these stories really fascinating. And it’s also interesting how in “Hunter Thompson Musik”, “Sonja”, and “Hurricane”, it’s the woman who exists the narrative and abandons the men in their story

[phantomtomato]

Yeah, I think that regardless of whose perspective the story uses to frame the relationship, we see the other person as not fully real. It’s like the game that the women play in the second story, Hurricane, where they imagine future lives with other people in the pub—harmless as a game! But when we see nine months of Sonja being used for this sort of fantasy, even though she and the narrator aren’t having sex, it’s clear that the make-believe what-if construction of her strange presence is overriding what she might be like as a person. She seems like a messy person, to be clear; existing in someone’s proximity for a year and then declaring that he should marry you and father a child upon you is very strange behavior. But all of the romantic-ish relationships in the book seem to exist in this liminal dream state which shows that their participants are using them as placeholders, I think.

[regshoe]

Ah, no, a punchy story is not what Imre gives the reader :D It was written by someone who also wrote a 700-page-long non-fiction exploration/defence of homosexuality in history and society, and I think it shows! But it is a lovely story, and I'm glad you enjoyed it (and that you've found the fic, which is brilliant).

[phantomtomato]

Isn't the fic just? What great timing that black_bentley put this together for our most recent Yuletide! <3 I'm always delighted to find that something new-to-me has a little fannish history.

Have you read that 700-page exploration? Talk about a brick! I did like the almost essay-ish nature of those long monologues in Imre. They were a great insight into a perspective from the era, and those are always so useful when thinking about how to give life to a character living through it.

[regshoe]

I have not read it, although I've dipped into occasional passages—it looks very interesting but is a bit daunting.

And, yes, I agree about the perspective of Imre! One thing I really like about the book is how parts of it early on feel so similar to so many merely-slashy books from the same period, but then it actually goes there—it's an example of how to do that in a properly historically-authentic way, I suppose.