Notre Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo

Gah! Yes, I am still alive. No, my fingers were not chewed off by fire ants, making it impossible to type. And this 7-yr-old laptop, although a triceratops among Arabian stallions, is still plodding along. There has been absolutely nothing standing between me and the blogosphere... except a series of houseguests interspersed with illnesses and various commitments which my duty-bound sense of knightly honor compelled me to fulfill. So, you know, there was some life I had to live. I do apologize for leaving with a cliffhanger, four weeks from the end of the year, my loyal readers waiting to discover whether I held up for the final month and fulfilled my new year's resolution! So here is the next installment, as the great saga of 2011 drew to a close...

The title Notre Dame de Paris is often translated as The Hunchback of Notre Dame, which I found to be unfortunately misleading. The book isn't entirely, or even primarily, about the hunchback Quasimodo, although he is an important character. The title refers to the cathedral of that name, around which the book revolves and in or near which all the major action takes place. I had previously read Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, so I went into this book expecting it to be historically focused, descriptive and detailed. It was. I did not realize, however, that Notre Dame was so intensely focused on architecture as an art form, the eventual decline of architecture due to the development of the printing press, and the architecture and evolution of the city of Paris itself. I found these sections of the book to be the most fascinating, and they enabled me to look at art, architecture and the growth of a city through new eyes. I would recommend the book for these sections alone.

The plot, which follows the unfortunate lives of several people who exist on the fringes of society, explores themes of fate and social conflict. The story arc of Quasimodo's affection for Esmeralda gives the book an additional tragic slant, and when combined with the tragedies of the decline of architecture and the cathedral and of the ill-fated lives of Esmeralda and Claude Frollo, the overall effect is sombre, dark and gothic, like the Notre Dame cathedral itself.

Around the World in Eighty Days

It was the last week of August and I wanted a fast-paced adventure to send summer off. Jules Verne didn't let me down. The premise is simple, but leaves plenty of room for plot twists. Phileas Fogg, a man of mechanically precise routine, wagers a large sum that he can travel around the world in eighty days. Accompanied by his loyal but occasionally bumbling servant, he embarks on a journey which allows no room for delay or missed connections. Fogg is pursued around the world by Detective Fix, who believes Fogg to be a bank robber and has vowed to arrest him as soon as the warrant arrives. Will Phileas Fogg's mathematical precision bring him back to London in time, or will natural disasters and human error result in his forfeit of £20,000?
     This novel was originally published as a serial, which is obvious by the cliffhanger at the end of nearly every chapter. Part of the appeal for Verne's original audience was the descriptions of exotic countries and of various steamers and railway lines. The reader could truly become an armchair traveller as s/he followed Fogg's progress in a biweekly French magazine.
     I was struck by Fogg's mathematical precision and imperturbable calm in the face of repeated delays. No matter how difficult the situation appears, Fogg remains unruffled. If he loses time in one leg of the journey, he is confident that he will make it up at a future time. In his mind, all delays and mishaps are foreseen and prepared for. This brought a smile to my face one day while I was sitting at a red light, 13 minutes away from a destination at which I was due in 7 minutes. Fogg remained placid in the face of a major financial loss; why should I chafe over a few minutes?
     Plot movement depends heavily on weather developments, local occurrences, human ingenuity and pushing the limits of mechanical performance. Throughout the novel we see industry and nature bump up against each other, sometimes with thrilling resolutions. Verne's opinion of industry and modernity remains resolutely positive throughout the book.  The railway doesn't trample nature or destroy the livelihood of peasants, it slips quickly through forest and plains, avoiding dangers and inconveniences along the way.  This positive view of modernity and industrialization contrasts sharply with the opinions of D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy, the authors I read in the two weeks preceding this one. At first I thought that part of this could be attributed to Verne's location in the 1870s, versus that of Lawrence in the 1910s-20s: perhaps Lawrence saw effects of industrialism that Verne never anticipated?  But this hypothesis is faulty as Hardy was a compatriot of Verne's, publishing in the 1870s as well.
     Despite the positive outlook of Around the World, I don't wish to paint Verne as a saccharine optimist; some of his other works show a much darker point of view.  The most famous example is Verne's lost novel, Paris in the Twentieth Century. Verne wrote it in 1863 but his editor suggested he set it aside for 20 years (do most editors take such a long view of things?) because it was too dystopian and technologically unbelievable. Verne put it in a safe, and it was discovered by his great-grandson in 1989 and published in 1994. That's right, just 17 years ago.  Oh, and some of the unbelievable things Verne predicted? Gasoline-powered cars, mutually assured destruction, electric chairs, calculators, computers, the internet, high-speed trains and skyscrapers. Nothing about Wonder Bread though...perhaps too dystopian for a Frenchman.

Stats:
mathematicalicious hero: Phileas Fogg
goofy manservant: Passepartout
warrant-less stalker: Detective Fix
Fogg's pasttimes: reading newspapers, playing whist
there was a lot of: trains, steamers, generous tips, exotic locales, delays, improvisations
there should have been more: adding more description would have slowed the plot down too much, so I will excuse the general lack of  food (I really need to start eating something before I write these blog entries!)
this book makes you want to: be prepared, pay attention, keep calm and carry on, visit a place you've always wanted to see, not freak out when your precious schedule encounters a slight delay
this book makes you glad you don't have to: sit on a steamship for 21 days to get from Tokyo to San Francisco or be cremated alive with your deceased husband in an Indian suttee, everything else sounds pretty good...well, except for the opium den. And the railroad tracks ending in the middle of a jungle. And the typhoon. Also being captured by Indians and dueling on a moving train.

20.000 Leagues Under the Sea

If you're looking for a novel that's smart yet fun, this is it.  Jules Verne is known as one of the fathers of science fiction, and while reading this book I tried to imagine the reception of his work by an unsuspecting public in the 1860s.  His contemporary readers were delighted by descriptions of incredible inventions, unusual animals and exotic places. I would have been too, after spending the day scrubbing clothes on a washboard or shoeing horses.

     20,000 Leagues Under the Sea chronicles the adventures of Captain Nemo and his incredible submarine. The narrator, Professor Arronax, specializes in marine biology, and some of the descriptions of marine life forms tend toward extremely detailed scientific categorization. I know a conch from a coral, but he lost me at Carcharodon carcharias (great white shark). Despite this, the book contains enough adventurous episodes, scientific niftiness and intriguing oddities to hold the attention of most readers.  I, for one, am now interested in making anemone jam...but living in a landlocked state, I can safely remain at the stage of armchair speculation.

     Verne's work isn't all sunshine, however.  Even though his editor removed most of his pessimistic and dystopian slant, it is still visible in the brooding, vengeful character of Captain Nemo. Nemo was partly based on Odysseus, the title character of  Homer's Odyssey. After tricking Polyphemus by saying that his name is "nobody" (Nemo is Latin for "nobody"), Odysseus wanders the seas for ten years, tortured by the deaths of his crew members. This parallels Captain Nemo's name and experience. Nemo is also a champion of the oppressed, and throughout the novel he assists those suffering from war and colonial oppression. Verne points out that the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution have done nothing to alleviate the potential for cruelty humans embody. On the contrary, in many cases human cruelty, like travel and manufacturing speed, is multiplied by technology. In the words of Captain Nemo, "It is not new continents the earth needs, but new men."

      Analysts often point out Verne's prescience in describing future inventions such as gasoline-powered automobiles, submarines, electric lights, even the internet (a worldwide telegraphic communications network). Scientifically-minded people are often able to make accurate predictions (hypotheses), but could a few of these correlations be a matter of causation, in which readers were inspired to pursue precisely the discoveries and inventions that were detailed in his books? Is it possible that some polar explorers, pioneering oceanographers or rocket inventors were Jules Verne fans? Let's see.  Admiral Richard Byrd said on the eve of his polar flight, "Jules Verne guides me." William Beebe, one of the first men to explore the depths of the sea in a bathysphere, became interested in oceanography after reading 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Robert Goddard, the father of rocketry, was an avid Verne reader as a child. As the author of Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury, observed, "...we are all, in one way or another, the children of Jules Verne." And lest you think all the good ideas have been scooped, Verne described some technologies that haven't yet graduated from fiction to fact (Captain Nemo's salt water-derived electricity comes to mind). So introduce your child, younger cousin or neighbor kid to Verne, and you may find yourself in the audience thirty years hence as s/he accepts the Hubbard Medal or the Nobel Prize in Physics (under stage lights using Nautilus-inspired power, of course).

Stats:
Byronic hero: Captain Nemo
Narrator: Professor Arronax
Faithful sidekick: Conseil
Token Canadian: Ned Land
Source of all food on the Nautilus: the seas
Savage humans: are found even in "civilized" countries
There was a lot of: scientific descriptions, mysterious happenings, dangerous adventures
There should have been more: this book was well-balanced; I wouldn't change it. On one hand I would like more back story on the crew and how they came to sail with Nemo, but that would have taken away from the mysterious atmosphere
This book makes you want to: learn more about marine creatures, travel the polar seas, live according to your personal code of honor, help those who need help, remember that you can't fully understand a person's actions without knowing that person's history
This book makes you glad you don't have to: live on a submarine forever, fight a giant squid, listen to Ned Land obsess about eating meat, be haunted by the desire for revenge
    

Madame Bovary

I spent the week of April 17-23 in rural France with Emma Bovary, who unfortunately did not receive the  psychological help which would have so greatly benefited her.  If you have a friend who is exhibiting Bovary-like symptoms, such as lounging all day in a silk dressing gown while reading Danielle Steele novels and maxing out credit cards on boutique.com, I beg you to stage an intervention. I recommended that Emma get herself an education and a sense-of-entitlement-ectomy immediately, but she refused to comply.  Charles told me quite seriously that such a surgical procedure would be dangerous, as it could disturb the spleen. I complimented his mental vacuity, at which he became choked up and said, "Aw shucks" (direct quote).

     Upon my return home, I was initially relieved to get away from the unpleasant situation in the Bovary household.  However, an unsettling awareness soon crept upon me. Emma Bovary is everywhere. Gustave Flaubert, that terrible genius, took the flaws which occasionally arise in nearly every western individual and fashioned them into a formidable literary character.  You know that guy down the street with the average job and the really expensive car (and wristwatch, and tv)? Conspicuous consumption. Madame Bovary.  How about the girl who always tells you how perfect her boyfriend is, even though you get a little confused because it's a different boyfriend every month? Emotional insecurity and romantic idealization. Madame Bovary.  That friend who is always bored because everything is so cliche, so unoriginal, so beneath him, and he really deserves something better? Ennui plus sense of entitlement. Madame Bovary.  And how about that thing I just spent the entire paragraph doing: pointing the finger at everyone but myself?  You know it. Madame Bovary!  Now that you're depressed to the point of eating arsenic directly from the jar, remember that there was no escape for Emma because she chose to isolate herself and wallow in self-pity.  When we see a little of Madame Bovary in ourselves, we can make the opposite choice and perform the sometimes painful -ectomy.

     Whether you think Emma's dissatisfaction with life was caused by anomie, ennui, acedia, boredom or general malaise, the result is her melodramatic refusal to integrate herself into her social reality, followed by a descent into manic dysfunctionality complete with fainting spells, (not so) secret infidelities, massive debt and arsenic. Oh, Emma!  Flaubert's talent shines in his creation of a masterpiece novel which is built on these incredibly banal characters and a rather boring but realistic plot. It's as though he were competing in an Iron Author competition in which the announcer states, "For characters you have a stupid doctor, his spoiled and dissatisfied wife, a scheming pharmacist and a greedy moneylender.  The plot: their deluded, self-satisfied daily lives. You have five years to finish...Go!" And so he went. The result was this scathing commentary on the bourgeoisie which Flaubert so detested. In lauding Flaubert for his realism and his influence on later authors, I offer you the words of James Wood in How Fiction Works:

      Flaubert decisively established what most readers and writers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is   
       almost too familiar to be visible. We hardly remark of good prose that it favors the telling of brilliant detail; that it 
       privileges a high degree of visual noticing; that it maintains an unsentimental composure and knows how to withdraw, 
       like a good valet, from superfluous commentary; that it judges good and bad neutrally; that it seeks out the truth, even 
       at the cost of repelling us; and that the author's fingerprints on all this are paradoxically, traceable but not visible. You 
       can find some of this in Defoe or Austen or Balzac, but not all of it until Flaubert.

Stats:
Country bumpkin: Charles Bovary
Archetypal fool: Emma Bovary
Swindler: Monsieur Lheureux
Dangerous liaisons: Rodolphe and Leon
Two-faced saboteur and enabler: Monsieur Homais
There was a lot of: spending money, fainting, pouting, wishful thinking, cheating (financial and marital)
There should have been more: descriptions of food and eating. Come on, this is France! Couldn't she have bought some fancy cheese once in a while?
This book makes you want to: live an examined life, clearly label all household poisons and store them on a shelf away from the sugar
This book makes you glad you don't have to: stare into an empty abyss of meaningless years stretching before you...then shrug and pick up a haute couture magazine

One for all, all for one!

I know, you've all been dying to read my illustrious opinion of The Three Musketeers. I shall now elaborate: I present, for your reading enjoyment, my Saturday Evening Post! *groan*
     Moving along...Dumas has certainly earned his reputation as one of the greatest novelists of all time. (I can't complain about Lord Sudley's translation either, although it's not the most recent.) D'Artagnan was dashing; Athos, inscrutable; Porthos, hilarious; Aramis, kind of a pansy. I certainly did not expect to laugh so hard or so often while reading The Three Musketeers, but Dumas pokes fun at human weaknesses and tendencies in a most delicious manner.  He was also very good at mixing plot-driven action with dialogue passages.
     Regarding the differences between the children's abridged version and THE REAL DEAL,  the kids' version did a good job of portraying the characters and their personalities, and it didn't dumb down the plot in terms of addressing human issues like jealousy, revenge, manipulation, ambition and courtly love...but it left out the entire siege of La Rochelle!   Several subplots and minor adventures were also cut, surely to shorten the story, but I suppose the siege was dropped because the editors decided that the underlying religious conflict is beyond a child's understanding (and the siege wouldn't make sense without it).  Let's face it, the intricate theological arguments driving the Huguenot/French Catholic conflict cannot be summed up by "eenie meenie minie moe, papal authority's gotta go" or "one fish, two fish, sacramental eucharist". Dumas doesn't give much background or explanation before presenting the siege.  He rightly assumed that his audience was familiar with the religious and political situation of the time, but if you don't know popes from puritans, a five minute rendezvous with Lady Wikipedia will give you enough info to properly enjoy this novel.
     I highly recommend The Three Musketeers to anyone who likes plot-driven novels.  We see many conventional plot devices in the first half of the novel, but in the second half, the single character of Milady takes over and drives the plot in a very unconventional way. Although the characters are not one-dimensional, we do not see much of their internal struggles or dialogues, and at the end of the book the characters themselves seem mostly unchanged by their experiences. Perhaps Dumas believes that people remain fundamentally unchanged by their environments. Perhaps he just likes to spin a tale.

Stats:
Favorite character: Athos
Femme fatale: Milady de Winter
Guy you want to slap: Monsieur Bonacieux
Bad guy who wasn't bad enough: Count Rochefort
Funniest scene: the breakfast bet. or Athos locked in the cellar. or D'Artagnan's would-be duel with Athos. or Porthos' dinner with the Coquenards. or Aramis' dialogue with the Jesuit and the priest...
There was a lot of: food, wine, women, swordplay, melodrama, Catholicism  (Dumas, he's so French)
There should have been more: positive strong female characters (to balance the negative strong female character)
This book makes you glad you don't have to: wear tights, faint when surprised (women), carry a purse (men), duel everyone who smirks at you, flog a servant, hide in a convent, flatter the royal family, be branded for a felony, retrieve jewels from the English
This book makes you want to: insult people thoroughly, send secret letters, order monogrammed handkerchiefs, spend your significant other's money (hey, they're good for it!), gamble until you've won your opponent's horse, avenge somebody

Heavy on the intrigue

This week I'll be galloping through Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers.  Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I must point out that I read an abridged children's classics version of this book... repeatedly... from about the ages of 6-8.  My brothers and I would cut out paper swords, fashion makeshift cloaks from scarves and march down the hall shouting, "One for all and all for one!"  That said, the glaring fact that my childhood abridged version was about 60 pages, while the novel itself is 630 (this translation, anyway), proves that I have not, in fact, read this book!  Also, in an unfortunate example of phonics-gone-wrong, my 6-yr-old self understood the main character's name to be Dee-ART-again....but I have long since redeemed myself, having a undertaken a couple semesters of self-directed French study as penance.  Nevertheless, I shall only ever read this book in translation, as my pronunciation of French is still quite brutal, and the only result of my acquaintance with Dumas' original text would certainly be the regrettable murder of a classic novel.  This week, I look forward to comparing the plot differences between my old childhood favorite (read: bowdlerized) version and THE REAL DEAL.  I also look forward to a long tale of historical intrigue and romance spun by a master storyteller.

P.S. Don't worry, Kurt. I won't make you be Porthos this time.