Monday, September 12, 2005
I've always looked upon all these Austen-atics, who flurry about the internet, flock to reading groups and the tons of post-Austen books and movies with a type of suspicious confusion. I have read Pride & Predjudice, Emma, Susan(I think the title is--the one made up of letters) and Sense & Sensibility and watched Mansfield Park on TV, but have never been struck by this...obsessive love for the woman or her works. They were pleasant and entertaining reads, and S&S made me at turns annoyed and excited, but I've always looked upon them in bewilderment, drifting towards the novels when I am in bookstores in the vain hope of a new edition unlocking what it is that makes Jane Austen so great to this mass of people.
On reviewing my thoughts, Austen seems to...tame for me. I have yet to read Persuasion in all its nuances and unrequited love/second chance at love, but Austen comes across as too genteel for me. I have this...fondness for the subtle wildness lurking behind the seemingly tamed words of the Victorian women authors and poets: the Bronte's or Emily Dickinson or Elizabeth Barrett. That their solitude and genteel life masked a wildfire that Austen's works lack for me. Maybe I'm melodramatic and am reading things into things that perhaps aren't there.
But this ties into my writing and how I realized that my path to success can't be dictacted by what everyone else is doing, that I can't continue to try and discern how to do what others are doing, to not continue to step back and circle round the illusion of my desire in hopes to penetrate it--that I am Me and not anyone Else.
I just finished A.S. Byatt's Possession and was impressed at the subtlety of the novel. It was literary without seeming literary, and yet Byatt didn't write the book with the object of shoving her education and career into your face, but she didn't also "dumb it down" for fear of turning the masses off by big words and philosophies. I really liked this book, which is a surprise to me because I am normally turned off by story-within-a-story type books, and I also am amazed(and need to re-read) at how Byatt turned me from a reader distantly interested in what the main protagonists--Roland and Maud--discovered into actually rooting for them to uncover it before their antagonists did--the subtle suspense was very well written as well. Because I so enjoyed this book, I don't know whether I want to see the movie version(I'm also a fan of Gwyneth Paltrow), but I've heard that it's v. different from the book, but we'll see.
i can be. anything.
12.9.05
