Conspicuous Consumption

It's nice, in one's ramblings around the internet, to hear about a forgotten novel, download it from Guttenberg , and, upon reading it, to discover that it's actually good. This is the case with The Tortoiseshell Cat , a novel by the prolific and, as far as I can tell, entirely forgotten, Naomi Royde-Smith. The Tortoiseshell Cat was published in 1925, a few years before Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness , which some seem convinced was the first lesbian novel in English.  Royde-Smith's novel follows a character, Gillian, to whom lesbians—one in particular—are attracted, and who may have lesbian tendencies herself. It's hard to say, because though she is well read, widely traveled, and perceptive about literature and the arts, she is astoundingly naive, particularly in her lack of understanding of love, and the things people can do and feel when in its grip. The first two-thirds of the novel plays the protagonist's naivete for laughs. In the last third,...

     C.P. Cavafy felt that his poems fell into three categories: historical, philosophical, and hedonistic or sensual. Of course these categories are never entirely separate in poetry or in life, but one of the arresting things about Cavafy's work is that no matter which of these categories is at the fore, one always senses his unique consciousness hovering over it. His friend E.M. Forster described him as "a Greek gentleman in a straw hat, standing absolutely motionless at a slight angle to the universe." Whether Cavafy is surveying history, philosophy, or homoerotic sex, it's always from that slight angle.  Cavafy wrote in Greek and was known for the care, precision, and craftsmanship which went into his work. Unfortunately, those of us who can't read Greek can only assume that much of this is lost in translation. Having said that, the spare simplicty of Cavafy in Keeley and Sherrard's version is effective: Their modernist precision seems just right. One can...

I'm in the midst of my year of reading Virginia Woolf. I plan to read all the novels, at least, but it will be hard to resist going back to the letters, the essays, and the journals. Perhaps because I'm focused on Woolf these days, her name seems to come up a lot, and in the last month or so I've encountered a claim that startled me, but does seem defensible: Virginia Woolf was a better critic than she was novelist. In both cases those who spoke this heresy acknowledged that they were being heretical in that slightly irritating "I know I'm being naughty, but . . . " manner, but again, I don't find the claim indefensible. I look forward to going back to the essays to see if any of them, or all of them taken together, could be as wonderful as Mrs Dalloway.  Someone must have noticed that Mrs Dalloway is one of the great modernist novels of the city—the influence of Joyce's day in Dublin is hard to miss. Mrs Dalloway spends her day, of course, in London ...

 Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander is the first in his Aubrey-Maturin series of sea novels—novels that are perfect as novels of derring-do on the high seas, but also so much more than that. I've just finished this initial installment for maybe the third time: These books compel one to read them and read them again. For the lovely language of which they are made, the characters we become fascinated with, the look into a distant time—the Napoleonic wars—and place—on board ships and in port towns, they are true classics. O'Brian says somewhere that he kept two sets of Jane Austen at home, one downstairs and one upstairs. Apparently he never wanted to be far from the novelist who, it seems clear, was his mentor and inspiration. Like Austen, the Aubrey-Maturin novels take place among a small defined group of people who live under a rigorous code in a small defined space. Like Austen, he finds the world among those people in that tight space, and shares it with us in a ...

A lot of people enjoy recently written novels about people like themselves, people who live at roughly the same time, and do and say roughly the same sorts of things that they do. Borrowing from a quip Eliot Weinberger dropped in an interview —"I don't want to read about divorce in the suburbs, I can make a phone call and hear about that."—I can't help but think of these kinds of books as "divorce in the suburbs novels." Of course if that's the sort of thing those people enjoy, they should go right ahead in their search for the next Corrections . (I don't really remember what that novel was about—does anybody?—but it's a safe bet it contained at least one suburban divorce.) For some of us, though, fiction provides a way to expand our worlds, to move beyond the people and places we know to different places, different cultures, different times. Published in 1749, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones takes us to Augustan England, and as some other old ti...