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

[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.