Reading Roundup, October 2024
Oct. 25th, 2024 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoThe Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther is this term’s reading group book—sort of. We finished the (quite short) book by early October, and are now discussing the opera adaptation. It’s very fun! I appreciate getting to see both a text and its adaptation in close proximity, especially a text and an adaptational medium that I would never have chosen to approach on my own.
The story follows Werther, a sensitive and artistic young German man living in the late 18th century. It’s primarily an epistolary novel: we get his story as told in letters to his absent friend, Wilhelm, as he meets and falls irrevocably in love with a woman named Charlotte. Only, Lotte is betrothed to Albert, and Werther knows he should not love her—but he is also a man of great passions, and he does, oh boy does he love Lotte.
The joy of reading this in a group is in having context presented to you by people who know better. I appreciate this novel much more for knowing the era into which it was written and how it was received. Apparently, Werther divided the generations—for young Germans living when it was published, it had the cultural import of like… My Chemical Romance in the 00s, or Nirvana in the 90s, etc. This grand portrayal of the bigness of adolescent/young adult emotions which approaches them with the severity that they feel like they should earn. The stakes are life and death! It’s the age of loving someone so strongly that it seems it should kill you. And so while I can’t say I enjoyed Werther as a novel, I can appreciate the reason why it might connect with readers, both then and now.
My discontent comes down to, well, age and point of view. Werther is obsessed with Lotte, and there’s no avoiding that. I’ve experienced Lotte’s position. I’ve cared for, and been friends with, someone whose obsessive romantic attraction to me forced the end of the friendship. Werther, to me, is creepy. I understand from the discussion that not every reader will feel that way, and he can be quite sympathetic to some, but he was not for me.
My primary point of interest in the novel is in the narrative perspective. I love the absent friend Wilhelm who receives all of Werther’s letters; I am fascinated by what must exist in that relationship in order to have made it so strong and intimate by the point that we meet Werther. I was not the only person who picked up on a queer connection between Werther and Wilhelm—and in Werther’s writing, he repeats what we are to believe were Wilhelm’s entreaties to him. Why is our friendship not enough? Won’t you let me come to retrieve you, and care for you as you mourn your inability to be with Lotte? This reads as very gay. I love the choice for Werther to narrate all of his sections to this trusted, invisible friend. He is honest in a way that exposes all of his biases, and so I trust Werther’s account in a perhaps-unexpected way: I understand how he will color his recounting of an event, and I get the vague sense of what sorts of things he will leave out, and so I trust him because I know how to read between the lines. The narrative switches, after Werther’s suicide, to an ‘impartial’ editor character—but we don’t know who this editor is, how he came by these letters, or his connection to the other characters in the story. I don’t trust that narrator! I have no sense of his biases. But the choice of how to continue the story beyond the death of its original narrator is fascinating, and I enjoyed thinking about it very much.
A Glass of Blessings - Barbara Pym
Our delightful first-person narrator is Wilmet Forsyth, a 1950s middle-class London housewife in her thirties. Pym takes the basic premise of boredom with one’s marriage amidst a backdrop of neighborhood gossip and makes it a compelling piece of character work as we’re exposed to each player and their dramas through Wilmet’s judgmental eyes.
I want to be clear: Wilmet is more enjoyable for her pettishness. Pym threads the needle between her narrator expressing biases and the narrative recognizing those biases—you’re never really expected to agree with Wilmet’s verdict on any of her acquaintances in order to proceed with the story. What I think helps, though, is that you probably will—while Wilmet is not a terribly accurate judge of character, she is a funny one and has sharp insights, and some critiques (of a minister’s spending or a man’s obsession with his car) will probably land. She’s like a friend who always brings good gossip, but who you know will gossip about you in turn. These are not unpleasant relationships, if you mind your expectations!
We meet Wilmet when she is looking for some occupation. Not employment, she happily scorns that, but she is bored and wants to fill her days with more than shopping. This leads her to become involved with her parish community (she attends a church called St. Luke’s, and the majority of the extended cast are here) and, at the same time, she connects with her best friend’s brother, Piers. Piers and the St. Luke’s crowd end up connecting in unexpected ways, especially as Wilmet introduces more people to the St. Luke’s network—she recommends a housekeeper for the rectory, which cements her ties to the three clergymen who serve the church.
The strength of this novel is in having so many interesting characters for Wilmet to observe. Objectively, Wilmet does very little. She goes places and talks to people, but the romances and deaths and controversies really belong to the wider cast. She manages a crush on Piers, but her giddiness shows largely in her telling of her own feelings, not in any dramatic actions to express that. Pym handles a dozen overlapping plotlines beautifully, and they all feel like authentic experiences for people in those roles during that era. If you enjoy careful observations of behavior and personality, or you like comedies of manners, this book is a great option.
I did love Piers, the gay brother who Wilmet crushes on before realizing that he’s not going to reciprocate her interest. But I’m amazed at how indirect his portrayal is! He has a live-in partner (Keith) who we meet in multiple scenes towards the end of the novel, but despite that, the book uses almost no language to even hint at their relationship. I clocked one clear reference from Wilmet’s mother-in-law, Sybil, who is the most accurate judge of character in the whole story. Even the subtle school novels of a half-century prior are plainer than this!
And also, despite Piers being textually queer, I had no fannish impulse towards him. I was entirely taken by handsome priest Marius Ransome and his Roman Catholic convert friend—or perhaps the slightly-older handsome priest who gives good sermons and who appears in just one scene. (Marius is notable for giving insipid sermons; I am into the idea of jealous priest sex.) Am I absurd for feeling that Marius got at least as many subtextual markers of queerness as Piers? Despite his story ending in a marriage, I really felt that we were supposed to read him that way! Anyway, I think that he’s my favorite of the wider cast.
Werther is this term’s reading group book—sort of. We finished the (quite short) book by early October, and are now discussing the opera adaptation. It’s very fun! I appreciate getting to see both a text and its adaptation in close proximity, especially a text and an adaptational medium that I would never have chosen to approach on my own.
The story follows Werther, a sensitive and artistic young German man living in the late 18th century. It’s primarily an epistolary novel: we get his story as told in letters to his absent friend, Wilhelm, as he meets and falls irrevocably in love with a woman named Charlotte. Only, Lotte is betrothed to Albert, and Werther knows he should not love her—but he is also a man of great passions, and he does, oh boy does he love Lotte.
The joy of reading this in a group is in having context presented to you by people who know better. I appreciate this novel much more for knowing the era into which it was written and how it was received. Apparently, Werther divided the generations—for young Germans living when it was published, it had the cultural import of like… My Chemical Romance in the 00s, or Nirvana in the 90s, etc. This grand portrayal of the bigness of adolescent/young adult emotions which approaches them with the severity that they feel like they should earn. The stakes are life and death! It’s the age of loving someone so strongly that it seems it should kill you. And so while I can’t say I enjoyed Werther as a novel, I can appreciate the reason why it might connect with readers, both then and now.
My discontent comes down to, well, age and point of view. Werther is obsessed with Lotte, and there’s no avoiding that. I’ve experienced Lotte’s position. I’ve cared for, and been friends with, someone whose obsessive romantic attraction to me forced the end of the friendship. Werther, to me, is creepy. I understand from the discussion that not every reader will feel that way, and he can be quite sympathetic to some, but he was not for me.
My primary point of interest in the novel is in the narrative perspective. I love the absent friend Wilhelm who receives all of Werther’s letters; I am fascinated by what must exist in that relationship in order to have made it so strong and intimate by the point that we meet Werther. I was not the only person who picked up on a queer connection between Werther and Wilhelm—and in Werther’s writing, he repeats what we are to believe were Wilhelm’s entreaties to him. Why is our friendship not enough? Won’t you let me come to retrieve you, and care for you as you mourn your inability to be with Lotte? This reads as very gay. I love the choice for Werther to narrate all of his sections to this trusted, invisible friend. He is honest in a way that exposes all of his biases, and so I trust Werther’s account in a perhaps-unexpected way: I understand how he will color his recounting of an event, and I get the vague sense of what sorts of things he will leave out, and so I trust him because I know how to read between the lines. The narrative switches, after Werther’s suicide, to an ‘impartial’ editor character—but we don’t know who this editor is, how he came by these letters, or his connection to the other characters in the story. I don’t trust that narrator! I have no sense of his biases. But the choice of how to continue the story beyond the death of its original narrator is fascinating, and I enjoyed thinking about it very much.
A Glass of Blessings - Barbara Pym
Our delightful first-person narrator is Wilmet Forsyth, a 1950s middle-class London housewife in her thirties. Pym takes the basic premise of boredom with one’s marriage amidst a backdrop of neighborhood gossip and makes it a compelling piece of character work as we’re exposed to each player and their dramas through Wilmet’s judgmental eyes.
I want to be clear: Wilmet is more enjoyable for her pettishness. Pym threads the needle between her narrator expressing biases and the narrative recognizing those biases—you’re never really expected to agree with Wilmet’s verdict on any of her acquaintances in order to proceed with the story. What I think helps, though, is that you probably will—while Wilmet is not a terribly accurate judge of character, she is a funny one and has sharp insights, and some critiques (of a minister’s spending or a man’s obsession with his car) will probably land. She’s like a friend who always brings good gossip, but who you know will gossip about you in turn. These are not unpleasant relationships, if you mind your expectations!
We meet Wilmet when she is looking for some occupation. Not employment, she happily scorns that, but she is bored and wants to fill her days with more than shopping. This leads her to become involved with her parish community (she attends a church called St. Luke’s, and the majority of the extended cast are here) and, at the same time, she connects with her best friend’s brother, Piers. Piers and the St. Luke’s crowd end up connecting in unexpected ways, especially as Wilmet introduces more people to the St. Luke’s network—she recommends a housekeeper for the rectory, which cements her ties to the three clergymen who serve the church.
The strength of this novel is in having so many interesting characters for Wilmet to observe. Objectively, Wilmet does very little. She goes places and talks to people, but the romances and deaths and controversies really belong to the wider cast. She manages a crush on Piers, but her giddiness shows largely in her telling of her own feelings, not in any dramatic actions to express that. Pym handles a dozen overlapping plotlines beautifully, and they all feel like authentic experiences for people in those roles during that era. If you enjoy careful observations of behavior and personality, or you like comedies of manners, this book is a great option.
I did love Piers, the gay brother who Wilmet crushes on before realizing that he’s not going to reciprocate her interest. But I’m amazed at how indirect his portrayal is! He has a live-in partner (Keith) who we meet in multiple scenes towards the end of the novel, but despite that, the book uses almost no language to even hint at their relationship. I clocked one clear reference from Wilmet’s mother-in-law, Sybil, who is the most accurate judge of character in the whole story. Even the subtle school novels of a half-century prior are plainer than this!
And also, despite Piers being textually queer, I had no fannish impulse towards him. I was entirely taken by handsome priest Marius Ransome and his Roman Catholic convert friend—or perhaps the slightly-older handsome priest who gives good sermons and who appears in just one scene. (Marius is notable for giving insipid sermons; I am into the idea of jealous priest sex.) Am I absurd for feeling that Marius got at least as many subtextual markers of queerness as Piers? Despite his story ending in a marriage, I really felt that we were supposed to read him that way! Anyway, I think that he’s my favorite of the wider cast.
