Surviving Finnegan

"The babbelers with their thangas vain have been (confusium hold them!) they were and went; thinggging thugs were and houhnhymn songtoms were and comely norgels were and pollyfool fiansees."

FW Fact: Scholars estimate Joyce worked between 60-70 different languages into the Wake. Just some of the languages used are Dutch, Norse, Lithuanian, Czech, Ukrainian, and Polynesian.

Fun FW Tip of the Day: Type the above FW quote into a Microsoft Word document and watch your Spellcheck freak out!!! :)

Surviving Finnegan

"And even if Humpty shell fall frumpty times as awkward again in the beardsboosoloom of all our grand remonstrancers there'll be iggs for the brekkers come to mournhim, sunny side up with care."

Yesterday was one of the happiest moments of my life, when Joseph Campbell's A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake arrived on my doorstep. And not a moment too soon. Ten pages into FW, I'm a little confused....but here's the kicker....not completely turned off to it. I can't explain it. After the lethargic plot of Kim, I'm so grateful to not have to think too much and try too hard to keep up with a plot that just reading words, even nonsense words, is somewhat of a relief.

I've read several blogs about FW over the past few days, all with varying degrees of advice for how to read the Wake. The most interesting suggestion I came across was to read the book out loud. The writer says that since Joyce was Irish, and the Irish tradition of storytelling is oral (think of an Irish pub and all the songs!), the book is meant to be read out loud, and if you do this, it will make more sense. And scarily, he's right. When I started to sound out some of the words I couldn't read, it was then that the syllables turned into something lucid.

Campbell's book so far is very interesting. I've realized there's not going to be much in terms of a plot with FW, but there seems to be so much under the surface that I don't want to miss anything good. Kind of like an archaeological dig. I like riddles and hidden things in literature so this is a bit fascinating to me. The Key is actually very easy to read. Hopefully this open-mindedness will continue.

Surviving Finnegan

"The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonner-ronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian mintrelsy."

Probably the best description of falling down since Eddie Murphy imitated his Aunt Bunny falling down the stairs in Delirious.

April '10's Literary Dirtbag Award

My apologies for totally forgetting about this, in the wake of bribing myself to finish Kim.

April's MLLD Award goes out to the Russian guy from Kim who smacked the lama in the face and tears up his Wheel of Life picture that the lama worked so hard on. That was just wrong. I was glad when Kim rolled him down the hill and kicked him in the groin. I would have kicked him more than once there. Although in hindsight, I should probably thank this guy for bringing some action to an otherwise action-free novel. :)

The only other character who came close last month was Cecil Vyse from A Room With a View. I didn't think boring characters qualified as dirtbags so I couldn't really nominate him. :)

#78...Kim

"I tell you I am fearful man, but, somehow or other, the more fearful I am the more dam-tight places I get into."

I was actually introduced to Kim about twenty years ago without knowing it, when, as a Brownie Girl Scout, we played "Kim's Game". This game consisted of putting several different objects into a shallow box, that is initially covered over with a cloth. The cloth is removed for a minute or so, and your job is to look at everything in the box, try to remember as much as you can about what's in the box and what it looks like, and then write it all down when the minute is up and the box gets covered back up. The more you remember, the more likely you are to win.

Kim's Game is only a small part of Rudyard Kipling's novel. Kim is introduced to us as an Indian orphan who steps up to help a Tibetan Lama, who is on a quest to find a special river. The lama believes bathing in the river will remove all sin. Kim joins his quest, as he is also on a quest to find a red bull on a green background, which his father told him will come to help him. Kim and the lama set out on the Great Trunk Road, which is sort of the Indian version of a superhighway, and along the way, Kim unknowingly becomes involved in some espionage for the British through his horse-trader friend Mahbub Ali. They later stumble upon his father's Irish regiment, the Mavericks....whose flag has a red bull with a green background. Kim is 'adopted' by this regiment when it is discovered that the documents he has always worn around his neck show that he is part Irish. He is sent to a school for white children with the lama's money, where he learns English and is to be trained to be a surveyor. However, Kim is unable to let go of his Indian upbringing, and sneaks off on his vacations to spend time with Mahbub and his friend Mr Lurgan, learning about espionage and spying.

At the end of his schooling, he returns to the lama and their quest to find the river for 6 months before he will begin working for the government. He means to stay as the lama's student or 'chela', but along the way he discovers another spy, Hurree Babu, and saves him from danger. They track two Russian spies, and meet up with them, and when one of them attacks the lama, Babu takes the two men away so that Kim can take their notes, maps and letters. He and the lama continue to look for the river, but the lama becomes ill and so does Kim. At the end, the lama finds his river, Kim turns over the letters and maps to Babu and the government and everyone is happy.

In summary: I did not enjoy this book. There were days when I did not read it at all, and days where I read half a page and that was it. I found myself completely unconcerned with the fate of any of the characters, none of whom resonated with me. If they had all died at the end, I wouldn't have felt bad. Even the background 'spy' story wasn't that compelling, but those sections were marginally more interesting to me than the parts where they were wandering around looking for the river. All of the foreign names of the characters began to blend together; I had to look back in the book more than once to make sure I had them straight.

This was the first book on the list so far where I debated whether or not to finish it. I have to say that feeling was a bit surprising. Before I read Kim, I thought I had read some of the worst books of all time (i.e. The Magus, The Ginger Man, Loving, etc). But oddly, at no point even during the 600+ pages of The Magus did it ever occur to me to stop reading. It made me wonder if the books I had read before that I didn't like were actually all that bad. At least those books engendered feelings (even if it was irritation or hostility) whereas Kim was about as emotionally flatlined as you get. I would have a more emotional experience reading Webster's Unabridged Dictionary than I did reading Kim. :) I guess if there is any positive experience I got out of reading Kim, it would be that I learned something about myself and my reading preferences.

Well, I'm sure Kim will look like a trip to Paradise after I get started with my next epic adventure, Finnegan's Wake. Look out for my new featurette, Surviving Finnegan, premiering this week.

Grade: D

Update

I hope all of you are having as nice of weather where you are as we're having here. It's heavenly.

Kim is going very slowly. I chalk that up to several things. 1)The nice weather....being outdoors gives me less time for reading, although I spent about an hour out on the deck reading yesterday, 2)We're totally taken in by back episodes of Entourage and The Tudors, and 3)the story for whatever reason is just not captivating to me. Maybe, as with so many of the books I've read, the story will mercifully pick up steam in the last 1/3-1/4 of the book, but right now, it's just another picaresque hero on the lam, with all sorts of strange friends, getting into countless scrapes and somehow worming his way out of them. It's like Under the Net in India. I really like the lama's character, but as with so many of the stories I've read lately, Kipling decided to pull his character out mid-story.

Am also wondering how Kim, Augie March, and Brideshead Revisited could be higher on the ML list than Angle of Repose.

I realize that with every page I read of Kim, I am one page closer to Finnegan's Wake. When I start that one up, I will be adding a new daily featurette to Journeys, called Surviving Finnegan, where I will be sharing literary frustrations, incomprehensible quotes, and possible hypotheses on what the hell Joyce is thinking (or smoking), just to keep myself sane. :) Feel free to check in and share your Finnegan experiences. It'll be a blast.

Pam

#79....."A Room With A View"

“Take an old man’s word; there’s nothing worse than a muddle in all the world. It is easy to face Death and Fate, and the things that sound so dreadful. It is on my muddles that I look back with horror—on the things I might have avoided. We can help one another but little. I used to think I could teach young people the whole of life, but I know better now… ‘Life’, wrote a friend of mine, ‘is a public performance on the violin, in which you must learn the instrument as you go along.’”

One of my favorite movies is While You Were Sleeping, a hilarious romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. It tells the story of a woman who falls in love with a stranger she sees everyday from afar, but has never officially met. Their lives collide when she comes to his rescue when he is attacked at a subway station, and while he is in a coma, is mistaken for his fiancée by his family. Bullock’s character, Lucy, is without any family in the world, and she is taken in as one of their own by Peter’s family. Because she is so happy to finally be loved and be part of a family, she doesn’t correct their assumption about her relationship with their son, figuring as long as he’s comatose no one will know the truth, but the weight of lying to his very loving family begins to weigh on her conscience….especially when she begins to fall for Peter’s brother Jack. Things get complicated when Peter regains consciousness and actually proposes to her. Lucy realizes that she must come clean with everyone before making the biggest mistake of her life. If you haven’t seen it, rent it now.

E.M. Forster’s novel, A Room With a View, reminded me so much of this movie, because the two main characters are both named Lucy and both struggle with the impact of telling lies to their friends and family. Forster’s novel begins in Florence, Italy (ironically where Lucy from While You Were Sleeping wants to go on her honeymoon), where we meet young, innocent Lucy Honeychurch and her maiden lady chaperone, Charlotte Bartlett. The ladies have just arrived at an Italian pension and are distressed because they were promised rooms that would have a view of the Arno River. They’re overheard by an older man, Mr Emerson, who agreeably offers to switch rooms with them, since a view doesn’t matter as much to him and his quiet son, George. This is agreed upon, and Lucy and Miss Bartlett become intimately involved from this act with the Emersons (who are thought unsuitable) and the other pension guests: the annoying parson Mr Beebe, the radical author Miss Lavish, and later, another self-obsessed parson, Mr Eager. Lucy is portrayed as a woman with her own thoughts and feelings, and is not as conventional as those around her would prefer. She gets into trouble when she goes sightseeing alone, and witnesses a murder in the Piazza, but luckily faints into the arms of the erstwhile George, who falls in love with her at that very moment. When he kisses her on an outing into the hills, which Charlotte witnesses, both women flee Florence for Rome, where Lucy meets the stuffy, insufferable Cecil Vyse. He proposes to Lucy three times, and she finally accepts on the third occasion, even though her family and most of her neighbors hate him because he is a snob and hates people.

Back in England, at the Honeychurch home at Windy Corner, Lucy discovers that Cecil has arranged to let a cottage in town to none other than the Emersons. George befriends Lucy’s brother Freddy, and as they spend more time together, Lucy begins to warm up to George, until the one day where George tells Lucy that she cannot marry Cecil because 1)Cecil’s a snob and hates people, 2)Cecil doesn’t allow Lucy to have her own thoughts and feelings and is trying to brainwash her, and 3)George loves Lucy and knows she loves him too. He kisses her again. Although Lucy lies to George about her feelings for him, later that night she breaks off her engagement with Cecil because she knows George is right about him. She then lies to her family, telling them there is no one else she is more interested in, and that she wants to go traveling in Greece, instead of admitting she is trying to escape George. Plans are set in motion for her to go to Greece when she discovers that the Emersons are moving away so that George can get away from her. He does not know the engagement is over. On her way out of town, Lucy meets up with Mr Emerson, whom she initially lies to about going to Greece with Cecil, but then breaks down and tells him about the end of her engagement. Mr Emerson encourages her to go find George so they can be together, and that telling lies and making big mistakes is the worst part of life. The book ends with her marrying George and having her whole family pissed off that Lucy lied to them instead of just being honest. Like Lucy in While You Were Sleeping, Lucy Honeychurch's honesty with herself in the end brings her love.

I have to admit that although I liked A Room With a View, it wasn’t the page-turner I think it could have been. I expected to blow through this book in three days, but it took almost two weeks. The last 1/3 of the book was really good, but for me, the middle 1/3 dragged horribly. Up until George moved to Windy Corner, it was seriously boring, partly because I hated Cecil, and partly because Cecil was making Lucy boring. I also have to wonder if all clergymen in 19th /early 20th century England were as stuffy and pompous as they seem to be portrayed so frequently in classic literature. Jane Austen, I believe, wrote the book on irritatingly proper and self-centered country parsons— I hate Mr Collins from Pride and Prejudice more than anything. I just have a hard time believing that men of God, who are ostensibly supposed to love all God’s children, could be so obsessed with money and social status. But that seems to be how it was!

My heart also went out to Lucy’s character. Although it created a big mess, I understood why she wasn’t forthcoming with her feelings for George. She had Charlotte telling her that he was a socialist, and the negative feelings of the other pensioners in Italy towards the Emersons didn't help. I noticed that she seemed to warm up to George when her brother started to get along with him. Having Cecil’s thumbs-up when he arranged for them to be in Cissie Villa seemed to recommend them as well. She didn’t want to disappoint her mother, who initially seemed excited by her engagement to Cecil, but then at the end, is relieved when she calls it off. So in that sense Lucy was not the only one who was lying!

Not my favorite of the list so far, but definitely not the worst. Here's hopin' the other Forster books upcoming will have a bit more drive to the narrative.

Grade: B+