#82....Angle of Repose

"There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone."

Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose is a beautiful, triumphant, bittersweet epic that brings together the lives of his main character, Lyman Ward, and his grandparents. Lyman is a historian, confined to a wheelchair by a bone disease and an amputated leg, living in California in the house his grandparents built. His wife has recently left him for someone else, and rather than looking towards a bleak future, or living in the painful present, Lyman chooses to delve into the past by writing a book about his famous grandmother, Susan Burling Ward. Enlisting the help of his caretaker's free-spirited daughter Shelly, he begins to go through the papers and letters his grandmother left behind to piece together her life story and the unusual relationship she had with her husband, Oliver.

Susan Burling is an Easterner, living among the wealthy literati, attending art school. Her life changes on the night she meets Oliver Ward, a quiet, gentle miner from the West. When Susan's love interest, the wealthy Thomas Hudson, marries her best friend Augusta, Susan decides to marry Oliver and move West, having little or no idea of the trials and hardships that will accompany the life of a cultured woman in the uncivilized wilds of California and Idaho. As the trusting Oliver is screwed in business again and again by unscrupulous opportunists, Susan becomes dissatisfied with her life and disappointed in her husband, and turns to her writing and drawing to support her growing family. While pining away for her past life back East, she misses out on the present and pushes those who love her away, until the one day she makes a fatal mistake and causes a tragedy that permanently damages her marriage. As he goes through Susan's papers, Lyman begins to see the parallels between the mistakes his grandparents made and his own life, and in the end, "wonders if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather."

I cannot say enough good things about this book. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area for a few years, Stegner's descriptions of the ruggedness of the California, Colorado and Idaho landscapes are dead-on and beautiful. His depictions of marriage as either an intersection of two lives, or two lives that lean against each other but never connect, is profound. The message of forgiveness for past wrongs, never taking anything for granted, and living each day firmly in the present is one that will stay with me for a long time. I was completely brought into the story, hoping against hope that Oliver would find the security and opportunity he was repeatedly denied, and that Susan would learn to accept her situation rather than continue to resist it. Alas, I was disappointed on both fronts.

This was a beautiful story depicting the culture clash between the civilized East and the uncivilized West. Finding out that it was based on the life of a real woman, Mary Hallock Foote, made the story even more compelling. Everyone should read it.

This book also counts towards both of the reading challenges I have set for myself this year...The Chunkster Challenge and the Battle of the Prizes, American Version. Those are on the sidebar if you want to join up too.

Grade: A+

February's ML Literary Dirtbag

After much debate (and about 100 more pages of Angle of Repose) I've chosen Anna Quayne as this month's MLLD. The Death of the Heart kicks off with her whining to her friend about Portia's messy room (hello? Has she ever met any teenagers EVER?), and admitting she's read Portia's diary on the sly and doesn't like what she sees. She kind of has a thing going with Eddie, whether it's against her will or not, because she encourages her husband to hire him at his business to get him out of her hair, and at the end begs her husband NOT to fire Eddie even though he deserves it. She knows exactly the kind of guy Eddie is, yet she lets Portia hang out with him. It made me really glad that she doesn't have kids of her own, and made me hope beyond hope that Portia got the hell out of Dodge after the year was up.

I have about 25 pages left of Angle of Repose, so a review should be forthcoming. :)

February's Nominees for ML Literary Dirtbag Award

Yes, folks, it's about that time. And for the first time since I began Journeys, I am actually having to 'reach' a bit to come up with someone truly deserving of this award this month, which is a nice and welcome change after months of enduring obvious, over-the-top scumbags like Sebastian Dangerfield and Gerald Scales.

Here is what I have so far. Feel free to vote in the poll on the sidebar, or you can email me your candidates too:

1)Anna Quayne from The Death of the Heart: the prim-and-proper, cold-as-ice, sneaky diary-reading guardian of poor Portia Quayne. She probably also had something going on with Eddie. What a great role model.

2)Yvette from A Bend in the River: it sounds like she slept with anyone with a pulse. What a 'ho.

3)Augusta Hudson from Angle of Repose: the supposed best friend of Susan Ward, she is rich, uber-possessive, marries the man Susan loves, and then proceeds to hate the man Susan ultimately marries, leaving Susan constantly torn between her best friend and husband. Way to be supportive, Augusta!!! She grates on my last nerve.

Coming to Theaters....

I was shocked this morning when I went to IMDb.com and discovered that no one has ever made Angle of Repose into a movie. From what I've read (and I'm about 2/3 through the book), this is a story just BEGGING to be taken to the big screen. The scenery alone from A of R would be phenomenal.

Well I did a little more digging and it turns out Angle of Repose is in development as we speak, with Castle Rock Entertainment. Whoooo hooooo!!! No cast list or anything yet, so I was wondering from those of you who've read the book, who your ideal cast list for this one would be.

Update

You know you've been watching the Olympics for too long when curling starts to look like fun.

Angle of Repose is great so far. It's a very easy read. It became even more interesting to me when I discovered today that it is based on the life of a real woman, Mary Hallock Foote, who was a writer and illustrator like Stegner's fictional Susan Burling Ward. Like Susan, Mary was also Eastern born, well bred and very literary, who married a miner and followed him to the wilds of California and Idaho. Her articles and illustrations of her experiences were published in magazines back East; they helped people visualize the unsettled and 'uncivilized' parts of the American West.

Here is a great link to learn more about Mary Hallock Foote, her husband Arthur and their Western life, and see some of her awesome illustrations.

http://www.idahohistory.net/prospector_feb04.pdf

Libris Interruptus...Book Returners Anonymous

Have any of you out there ever returned a book to a bookstore for any reason...and what was the excuse you gave the clerk when you returned it? I was unemployed in the Winter of 2008-09 and I read Bernhard Schlink's The Reader in, I kid you not, about 6 hours (a really good book if you haven't read it yet). I returned it to Target because 1) I knew I wouldn't read it again because it was super-sad, and 2) it was still in beautiful condition. They asked no questions. I returned Ken Follett's The Pillars of the Earth to Barnes and Noble last year after reading a grand total of 50 pages and deciding it was the most boring book I had ever read....and I was honest with the lady at the counter. And I know most people love that book with a devotion that borders on papal reverence, so I was super disappointed.

What about you guys?

#83....A Bend In the River

“People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness and men lived in a perpetual dawn.”

A Bend in the River follows the story of Salim, who retreats from his ancestral home on the western coast of Africa and takes over a small trading goods store deep in the wilds of central Africa, at a bend in the river where civilization and the lack thereof intersect. Salim takes this job for several reasons: uprisings in his hometown, escaping from an unwanted engagement, and wanting to make something of himself. He is warned by the previous owner of the store, Nazruddin, to know ‘when to get out’. Salim arrives to see he will be living on the fringes of existence, in a town that has gone back to bush and rubble after colonial rule. He befriends other ‘foreigners’ who live in the town, and when a slave boy, Metty, is sent to him from his parents, he employs Metty in the shop.

Salim is also responsible for Ferdinand, a boy from the jungles who will be attending school in the town. Salim jealously watches while Ferdinand gets the schooling, education and opportunities that are closed to him. When the country is taken over by an anonymous President, new things begin to happen in the town. Modernization arrives in the form of the “Domain”, a series of modern buildings and a ‘polytechnic’, where Ferdinand gets to attend more school and Salim’s friend Indar, also from the upper-class coast, arrives as a speaker. Unlike Ferdinand, who blindly spouts the dogma he is taught at school, Indar has concerns about the direction of the country, as Salim has had all along. Through Indar, Salim meets Yvette, the young wife of Raymond, a man whom the President favors. Salim begins a passionate affair with Yvette, but when Raymond’s favor drops with the President, things go sour for Salim and Yvette. At the same time, things also start to go sour for the town. There are tribal uprisings and attacks against the President and his minions. Shop owners who have been there forever sell out and leave. Salim begins to feel the nervousness of being trapped, and decides to visit Nazruddin in London, where he becomes engaged to his daughter Kareisha. Upon returning to settle accounts in the town, he finds that the President has sold his shop to someone else, and he is under suspicion from the police. When he is imprisoned, Ferdinand, who has risen to the post of commissioner, bails him out of jail and puts him on the first steamer out of town before the arrival of the President, who is coming to execute everyone of prominence in the town.

One of the main themes of the book is a Latin saying inscribed on the town lycee building, Semper Aliquid Novi (‘always something new’). It is so appropriate to the seeming impermanence of settlements in Africa. The ruins of colonial buildings are still visible in the town, which begins to grow anew after independence and again under the Presidential rule, and Salim realizes that the current civilization he is living in could just as easily be reduced to rubble:

“The ruins, spread over so many acres, seemed to speak of a final catastrophe. But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and in fact was still working towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone.”

Nothing seems to stay the same in Africa. Even the rise and fall of people in the President’s favor, such as Raymond’s rise and fall from grace, and the improbable rise of Ferdinand, an African raised in the jungle, show that importance as a human being can also be changed at a moment’s notice, and someone with the President’s ear one day can be ignored and forgotten the next.

Another element of the story I found fascinating was Naipaul’s treatment of African history. Salim says that, as Africans, “we never asked why; we never recorded”, since natives were unable to read and write. They relied on the oral tradition of passing stories down among family members. Salim, in talking about a story he heard from his grandfather, notes that “without my own memory of the old man’s story I suppose that would have been a piece of history lost forever.” Africa has to rely on educated Europeans, like Raymond, to record their history for posterity. However, absent from these dry European histories, which rely primarily on documentation, are the true experiences of the African natives and their traditions and beliefs. Salim becomes very angry reading over Raymond's journal articles, saying:

"[Raymond] gave no reasons and looked for none; he just quoted from the missionary reports. He didn't seem to have gone to any of the places he wrote about; he hadn't tried to talk to anybody....He knew so much, had researched so much. He must have spent weeks on each article. But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than Indar or Nazruddin or even Mahesh....Yet he had made Africa his subject."

A lot of noise has been made in other reviews about Naipaul’s treatment of women in this novel. Women seemed to fall into one of two categories: modern working woman, and object of obsession. Ferdinand’s mother, Zabeth, is a single mom who runs her own business in the bush, and Salim’s fiancée, Kareisha, is still single at 30 and becomes a pharmacist. Shoba, who is idolized by her husband Mahesh, and Yvette, who really seems to get around, aren’t portrayed as particularly ambitious women, who rely on the men around them to bring them their security. I did not enjoy the scene where Salim loses it and beats up Yvette, but I don’t think it says anything overarchingly negative about all women everywhere.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. And my enjoyment was unexpected, and definitely wasn’t enjoyment in the traditional sense. The story was dark, foreboding, and at times apocalyptic in its story of the rise, fall and disappearance of civilizations and rule in the wilds of Africa. Not usually my thing at all, but I have to admit I was sucked into the story, and was actually begging Salim to do as Nazruddin told him and “get out” when things started to go badly in town. The ending was a bit ambiguous for my taste, but that's probably the way Naipaul wanted it to go down. This book should remind all of us how lucky we are as Americans to have stability, democracy and education in our country.

Grade: B+