Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (aka Samuel Clemens)
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
Huck Finn begins in Missouri with a boy who doesn't want to be "sivilized", a slave who doesn't want to be sold down the river, and a mean drunk of a father. Huck's being raised by Miss Watson and the "old widow" in St. Petersburg, Missouri. His father left town at the end of Tom Sawyer, the precursor to this novel, but he returns at the beginning of Huck Finn when he finds out Huck has come into some money. Huck's dad steals him away from the widow and Miss Watson and they go off to a little cabin by the Mississippi. Huck is mostly happy, though his father is a raging alcoholic, because Huck likes to live off the land, and enjoys catching fish for dinner and not needing to be "sivilized". After a few too many rip-roaring beatings from his dad, however, Huck hatches a plot to run away. He slaughters a pig they have taken and drags the blood everywhere to make it look like someone has come in and murdered Huck. He steals off on a raft he found a few days earlier that he has loaded up with food, and he hides out in Jackson Island. He chances upon Jim, Miss Watson's slave, who has run away because he heard Miss Watson talking about selling him down south, and the two become friends. They soon find out that Jim has been accused of killing Huck, however, and begin their escape. They plan to head to Cairo, Ohio, where Jim can buy his freedom, but realize after some time that they are, in fact, heading south. They have a series of crazy adventures along the way, including a trip onto and off of a floating house, a series of cons with the "Duke" and the "Dauphin", a run-in with a Hatfield-McCoy style family feud, and Jim's eventual capture by none other than relatives of Tom Sawyer! Huck pretends to be Tom when he realizes who they are, and when Tom arrives, he pretends to be his own brother, Sid, and they hatch a plan to help Jim escape. After hatching a ridiculous number of incredibly complex plots to help Jim escape, Tom and Huck execute a hapless plot to free Jim that ends with Jim getting recaptured and Tom getting shot in the leg. Tom and Huck's true identities are revealed, and Tom makes a full recovery, only to inform everyone that Jim has been free for two months because Miss Watson felt so bad for threatening to sell him down river that she freed him in her will. Tom and Huck head back to St. Petersburg, but Huck doubts he will stay for long, because he doesn't want to be "sivilized" again.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
-As exciting as the end of the book is, the real denouement comes when Huck realizes that he'd rather go to hell than give Jim up as a runaway slave. He feels torn for a large portion of the novel about helping Jim, as his "morality" has taught him that he should not break the law and shouldn't help a slave to run away from someone who has helped him (Huck) in the past. My ever-astute grandmother pointed this out in an email to me just a few weeks ago, saying, "Weren't you proud of Huck when he decides that even if he was to be sent to hell itself, he was not going to turn in Jim as an escaped slave? That was a heroic decision." I was, indeed, proud of Huck at that moment.
-My grandmother also asked me what I thought of the new attempts to "sanitize" Huck Finn by removing the "n-word" and replacing it with the word slave. I think we need books like Huck Finn to remind us of what our past contained. I found this book challenging to read, and after spending years asking students not to use the "n-word" in our "safe spaces" in their schools out of respect for my request not to give "permission" or "license" to people to use it who would use it in a derogatory way, it was quite hard to come across the word again and again and in the way that it was originally intended. But that difficulty that I experienced while reading is one that I think we must all continue to challenge ourselves to experience. Racism still exists; discrimination still exists; African-Americans are still facing the repercussions of slavery, and they are still working to pull themselves up socio-economically, and these are issues we CANNOT forget. If it causes us some discomfort, then good - let us lean into the discomfort, and remind ourselves that we must not forget our past and we must continue to work hard to forge the kind of future that we believe in.
-Huck is an amazing liar. He has an innate ability to prevaricate on the spot, which serves him well in various situations, like when he disguises himself as a girl (though his lie doesn't succeed in that case), or when he calls himself George Jackson when he gets caught up in the Grangerford-Sheperdson family feud, or when he becomes Tom Sawyer, his good friend, to help save Jim. At one point, he gets so caught up in his sundry disguises that he forgets his name. Ever crafty, he bets his new friend Buck that he can't spell his name, and gets him to reveal his pseudonym. (Buck's spelling needs work, though - "Yep, I can, G-E-O-R-G-E J-A-X-O-N.")
-Twain has a flair for descriptions, and says at one point that it "looked late, and smelt late." He follows up, saying, "You know what I mean - I don't know the words to put it in." I know what you mean, Mr. Clemens. There's a night smell, and a just after the rain smell, and a winter and a fall smell.
-When Huck tries to masquerade as a girl to get information on Jim's escape and where he's suspected to be hiding, Judith Loftus calls him out on his lie. She calls him out in the following summary: "You do a girl tolerable poor, but you might fool men, maybe. Bless you, child, when you set out to thread a needle don't hold the thread still and fetch the needle up to it; hold the needle still and poke the thread at it... And when you throw at a rat or anything, hitch yourself up a tip-toe and fetch your hand up over your head as awkward as you can, and miss your rat about six or seven foot... And, mind you, when a girl tries to catch anything in her lap she throws her knees apart; she don't clap them together, the way you did when you catched the lump of lead. Why, I spotted you for a boy when you was threading the needle; and I contrived the other things just to make certain." Smart lady. :0)
-Huck experiences a short-lived joy with the Grangerfords before an all-out war ensues. I loved the way Twain described the Colonel - "He was sunshine most always - I mean he made it seem like good weather."
-Tom's plans for Jim's escape are frustratingly perverse. At first, they seem comical (we must use knives instead of shovels to dig a hole under Jim's hut), then ill-advised (we must deliver Jim a pie with a rope ladder baked in it so that he can escape from his hut. which is on the ground level.), then downright infuriating (we have to tell everyone that someone is planning to help Jim escape before we actually escape with him). The irony of Jim being free to begin with is bittersweet; Jim is free, which is great, but Huck also feels validated in having questioned Tom's morality in being so willing to help free a runaway slave. (Jim was free the whole time, which Tom knew, so Tom was only willing to help because he knew Jim was free to begin with.)
All in all, I enjoyed this book. I found the plot to be a bit dull in the middle (with the Duke and the Dauphin and their various escapades) but the beginning and end were delightful.
I'm off (finally!) to lose myself in a classically circuitous canon of Russian lit, that famous favorite, Battles and Tranquility. Oh wait, that's not right, it's Combat and Restfulness. Something like that, you get the picture.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
Monday, January 17, 2011
The yellow butterflies would invade the house at dusk.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
This tale of magical realism takes place in the town of Macondo. Macondo is founded by Ursula Iguaran and Jose Arcadio Buendia. They leave their original town because Jose Arcadio kills a man (Prudencio Aguilar) and they are haunted by his spirit. So they set off into the wilderness, followed by a few of Jose's friends, and they found Macondo. Jose Arcadio and Ursula have three children: Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadio (confusing, right?) and Amaranta. The novel follows each of these characters and their eventual descendants as well as the town itself, over the course of one hundred years. (Thus the title.) The story is full of too many twists and turns to name them all, but common themes over the generations include attraction to inappropriate family relations (aka incest), war, procreation, sex with whores, fortune telling, moments of magic, both seemingly real and seemingly fantastical, love, hate, happiness, sorrow, and solitude. The story takes us through the lives of three more levels of Arcadios and an extreme amount of Aurelianos (20, to be precise) and ends up with the last 2 family members, Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula, having a torrid love affair (they are aunt and nephew, in case you were wondering) and giving birth to a child, who they decide to name, CAN YOU GUESS? Aureliano. Yes. Amaranta dies in childbirth and Aureliano finally deciphers the code the gypsy/wizard Melquiades has left (which was written in Sanskrit, of course) and reads his family's history as well as the future, which foretells that Macondo will cease to exist and that his child, Aureliano, will be dragged away by ants. Which happens. Um, yeah. Everyone else dies in the book some way or another, like I said, too many generations to give you all the specifics. If you have to answer a quiz on it, I'd guess (a) Aureliano (b) Jose Arcadio (c) incest or (d) all the above.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
This was an interesting read, though I must admit that I greatly enjoyed the first 150 pages or so and then was both bored and annoyed that the story continued on through so many generations. I understand that some cultures reuse names with great frequency, not just reusing a family name over generations, but having 4 or 5 or 20 Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios just got REALLY frustrating. And it didn't help that Marquez would claim that because they shared a name, they all had these shared traits, which only further made all of them blend together.
Highlights:
- The descriptions in this book are truly exquisite. Definitely reminded me of Steinbeck's sentences in East of Eden. Here's one for you to enjoy:
"They got into a small carriage that looked like an enormous bat, drawn by an asthmatic horse, and they went through the desolate city in the endless streets of which, split by saltiness, there was the sound of a piano lesson just like the one that Fernanda heard during the siestas of her adolescence."
- Magical realism. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, in this novel it plays out as sort of extended willing suspension of disbelief. The events of the novel take place in a grounded village, with human beings, and amidst very "real" events like wars and births and deaths, but some things are stretched, or merely exist, without explanation or question. For instance, some people in the novel live to be 150 years old, flying carpets are featured in one part of the story, and the dead frequently resurface as important characters in the novel. This leads to a sort of stylized reality, which gives Marquez the freedom to discuss nitty gritty events that I'm sure actually happened in Colombia, but to intermingle them with fantasy and place them in a land that exists ostensibly out of time and outside of a natural, known geographical location.
- Sort of in the same vein as magical realism, Marquez included several characters who suffered from manias of sorts. They were described in a sort of comical way, or in a sort of frantically amusing way, but they were symptomatic of real problems, which I thought was interesting. For example, one character, Rebeca, when she is first adopted by the Buendias, eats dirt and the whitewash paint off the walls of the house. She won't eat real food, and the family has to try several tactics before they are able to rid her of the habit. But as time goes on and stressors play a role in her life, Rebeca returns to eating dirt and whitewash. This reminds me of real-life manias like people who compulsively eat toilet paper, or their own hair. Each moment of "magical reality" made me wonder where Marquez's inspiration derived from and whether the origin was real or imaginary.
- Some of the interactions between family members reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited). I enjoyed the comic simplicity and the sort of loaded balance between extremely heavy emotions and events and trivial conversation.
- The totally bizarre occurrences, as well as the eloquently miserable ones, like the banana plague, the insomnia plague, Rebeca rotting in her house but being surrounded by yellow flowers, the yellow butterflies that follow Mauricio Babilonia, Pietro Crespi, a pianola man, and his love for Rebeca, then Amaranta, and his tragic demise, and many more.
Lowlights:
- Some of the relationships are sort of gross. When Aureliano falls for a girl in town named Remedios, who is 9 (he's somewhere in his 30s at this point, I think), it felt a little too Humbert Humbert for me. She marries him when she's 13, and dies at fourteen with a baby in her belly. Gives me the heeby jeebies to think about being married, let alone pregnant, at that age. Also, several (and I mean, SEVERAL) family members engage in relationships with cousins, adopted siblings, and aunts/nephews.
- By the time we got to the later generations, I literally couldn't keep the characters straight. Aureliano Buendia goes off to war and has 17 sons named Aureliano, all of whom are systematically murdered by the government. Each character, however, gets developed, but then simultaneously sort of detaches from everyone else. Ursula, the matriarch, is my favorite character, and keeps whipping everyone into shape well into her early 100s, even though she goes blind and manages to hide it from everyone. But so many of the other characters pull away from life, or pursue love with an intensity that leads to death (either their own or their lover's) that it becomes hard to remember who you actually cared about or felt an affinity for in the story. Macondo goes from being a town that has not seen death in its early days, to a town that sees the death of all 35 of the Buendias.
- There was very little dialogue in this book. I don't feel that books have to have dialogue to intrigue me, but the lack of dialogue meant that I was quite literally told the story by the author, which means I don't really have a chance to create my own feelings or understandings about characters based on their words and interactions, and I have to trust what the author is dictating to me. Not my favorite style of writing or reading.
I didn't really understand the way solitude featured in the novel. Marquez referred more and more often to solitude as the book progressed, but the characters who were feeling this solitude were constantly surrounded by the rest of the Buendia family. I understand that one can feel completely alone even when surrounded by others, but I guess I sort of expected someone to actually be alone when they were feeling the solitude. I also didn't really understand how it was relevant to the story.
Ultimately, this was a book I really enjoyed the first half of, and which I'm pretty sure I only understood half as well as Marquez would have liked. If you've read it and feel you have thoughts or opinions to share, please feel free - I'm certainly open to anyone else's interpretations and ideas.
I'm off to the deep south, slave days, and unusual friendships.
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
This tale of magical realism takes place in the town of Macondo. Macondo is founded by Ursula Iguaran and Jose Arcadio Buendia. They leave their original town because Jose Arcadio kills a man (Prudencio Aguilar) and they are haunted by his spirit. So they set off into the wilderness, followed by a few of Jose's friends, and they found Macondo. Jose Arcadio and Ursula have three children: Colonel Aureliano Buendia, Jose Arcadio (confusing, right?) and Amaranta. The novel follows each of these characters and their eventual descendants as well as the town itself, over the course of one hundred years. (Thus the title.) The story is full of too many twists and turns to name them all, but common themes over the generations include attraction to inappropriate family relations (aka incest), war, procreation, sex with whores, fortune telling, moments of magic, both seemingly real and seemingly fantastical, love, hate, happiness, sorrow, and solitude. The story takes us through the lives of three more levels of Arcadios and an extreme amount of Aurelianos (20, to be precise) and ends up with the last 2 family members, Aureliano and Amaranta Ursula, having a torrid love affair (they are aunt and nephew, in case you were wondering) and giving birth to a child, who they decide to name, CAN YOU GUESS? Aureliano. Yes. Amaranta dies in childbirth and Aureliano finally deciphers the code the gypsy/wizard Melquiades has left (which was written in Sanskrit, of course) and reads his family's history as well as the future, which foretells that Macondo will cease to exist and that his child, Aureliano, will be dragged away by ants. Which happens. Um, yeah. Everyone else dies in the book some way or another, like I said, too many generations to give you all the specifics. If you have to answer a quiz on it, I'd guess (a) Aureliano (b) Jose Arcadio (c) incest or (d) all the above.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
This was an interesting read, though I must admit that I greatly enjoyed the first 150 pages or so and then was both bored and annoyed that the story continued on through so many generations. I understand that some cultures reuse names with great frequency, not just reusing a family name over generations, but having 4 or 5 or 20 Aurelianos and Jose Arcadios just got REALLY frustrating. And it didn't help that Marquez would claim that because they shared a name, they all had these shared traits, which only further made all of them blend together.
Highlights:
- The descriptions in this book are truly exquisite. Definitely reminded me of Steinbeck's sentences in East of Eden. Here's one for you to enjoy:
"They got into a small carriage that looked like an enormous bat, drawn by an asthmatic horse, and they went through the desolate city in the endless streets of which, split by saltiness, there was the sound of a piano lesson just like the one that Fernanda heard during the siestas of her adolescence."
- Magical realism. For those of you unfamiliar with the term, in this novel it plays out as sort of extended willing suspension of disbelief. The events of the novel take place in a grounded village, with human beings, and amidst very "real" events like wars and births and deaths, but some things are stretched, or merely exist, without explanation or question. For instance, some people in the novel live to be 150 years old, flying carpets are featured in one part of the story, and the dead frequently resurface as important characters in the novel. This leads to a sort of stylized reality, which gives Marquez the freedom to discuss nitty gritty events that I'm sure actually happened in Colombia, but to intermingle them with fantasy and place them in a land that exists ostensibly out of time and outside of a natural, known geographical location.
- Sort of in the same vein as magical realism, Marquez included several characters who suffered from manias of sorts. They were described in a sort of comical way, or in a sort of frantically amusing way, but they were symptomatic of real problems, which I thought was interesting. For example, one character, Rebeca, when she is first adopted by the Buendias, eats dirt and the whitewash paint off the walls of the house. She won't eat real food, and the family has to try several tactics before they are able to rid her of the habit. But as time goes on and stressors play a role in her life, Rebeca returns to eating dirt and whitewash. This reminds me of real-life manias like people who compulsively eat toilet paper, or their own hair. Each moment of "magical reality" made me wonder where Marquez's inspiration derived from and whether the origin was real or imaginary.
- Some of the interactions between family members reminded me of a Wes Anderson movie (The Royal Tenenbaums, The Darjeeling Limited). I enjoyed the comic simplicity and the sort of loaded balance between extremely heavy emotions and events and trivial conversation.
- The totally bizarre occurrences, as well as the eloquently miserable ones, like the banana plague, the insomnia plague, Rebeca rotting in her house but being surrounded by yellow flowers, the yellow butterflies that follow Mauricio Babilonia, Pietro Crespi, a pianola man, and his love for Rebeca, then Amaranta, and his tragic demise, and many more.
Lowlights:
- Some of the relationships are sort of gross. When Aureliano falls for a girl in town named Remedios, who is 9 (he's somewhere in his 30s at this point, I think), it felt a little too Humbert Humbert for me. She marries him when she's 13, and dies at fourteen with a baby in her belly. Gives me the heeby jeebies to think about being married, let alone pregnant, at that age. Also, several (and I mean, SEVERAL) family members engage in relationships with cousins, adopted siblings, and aunts/nephews.
- By the time we got to the later generations, I literally couldn't keep the characters straight. Aureliano Buendia goes off to war and has 17 sons named Aureliano, all of whom are systematically murdered by the government. Each character, however, gets developed, but then simultaneously sort of detaches from everyone else. Ursula, the matriarch, is my favorite character, and keeps whipping everyone into shape well into her early 100s, even though she goes blind and manages to hide it from everyone. But so many of the other characters pull away from life, or pursue love with an intensity that leads to death (either their own or their lover's) that it becomes hard to remember who you actually cared about or felt an affinity for in the story. Macondo goes from being a town that has not seen death in its early days, to a town that sees the death of all 35 of the Buendias.
- There was very little dialogue in this book. I don't feel that books have to have dialogue to intrigue me, but the lack of dialogue meant that I was quite literally told the story by the author, which means I don't really have a chance to create my own feelings or understandings about characters based on their words and interactions, and I have to trust what the author is dictating to me. Not my favorite style of writing or reading.
I didn't really understand the way solitude featured in the novel. Marquez referred more and more often to solitude as the book progressed, but the characters who were feeling this solitude were constantly surrounded by the rest of the Buendia family. I understand that one can feel completely alone even when surrounded by others, but I guess I sort of expected someone to actually be alone when they were feeling the solitude. I also didn't really understand how it was relevant to the story.
Ultimately, this was a book I really enjoyed the first half of, and which I'm pretty sure I only understood half as well as Marquez would have liked. If you've read it and feel you have thoughts or opinions to share, please feel free - I'm certainly open to anyone else's interpretations and ideas.
I'm off to the deep south, slave days, and unusual friendships.
Monday, January 10, 2011
There is nothing to do until tomorrow. I can't sleep.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
This Dickens novel straddles, as the title suggests, two cities: Paris and London. Our story begins with Doctor Manette being "recalled to life." He was imprisoned for an unknown cause for about 20 years in a Parisian prison, and in the opening chapters of the book, he is brought back to London and reunited with his daughter, Lucie, by a banker and family friend, Mr. Lorry. The next major event is Lucie and the Doctor serving as witnesses at the treason trial for Charles Darnay. He is accused of being a traitor and is about to be brutally murdered, but at the last minute, he is acquitted because the defense points out that another man, Sydney Carton, looks just like him. This is apparently enough for an acquittal; clearly they didn't have enough Law and Order episodes to teach them how to prosecute properly. Incidentally, Darnay was not really a traitor, but we find out he is actually a FRENCHIE, Charles Evrémonde. Charles falls for Lucie, they get married, they have a daughter named Lucie (because they're clearly unoriginal when it comes to naming) and all seems to be going swimmingly. The Doctor is all better from having been in prison (mostly - he regresses from time to time by going back to making shoes, the occupation he was allowed to perform in prison). Charles wants to tell the Doctor his real name, and the Doctor says he only wants to know on the wedding day. Charles tells him on the wedding day, and after the lovebirds go on their honeymoon, Daddy goes back to making shoes. UH OH! Oh, and Sydney professes his love for Lucie, but says he doesn't want to be with her, he just wants her to know that he would do ANYTHING for her. Really. Anything. So we store that nugget away and Charles gets a letter from his old servant - did I mention his uncle was killed because he's a really nasty rich Monseigneur who treats laborers like dirt and because the revolution is now RAGING in France? - saying that he has been imprisoned and that only Charles can save him. So Charles decides, HEY! why don't I go to France and help old Gabelle out. So he goes, and guess what - he is IMMEDIATELY imprisoned. Lucie finds out, comes to France with her dad, and daddy the Doctor is a hero in the new regime because he was a well-known prisoner in the Bastille. Charles is imprisoned for over a year, but the doctor is able to get him set free. The very same day, however, Charles is re-imprisoned, and we find out that the people who have charged him are Monsieur et Madame Defarge, who were the old servants of Doctor Manette but are now CRAZED REVOLUTION BLOOD-THIRSTY monsters. AND, in a surprising turn of events, we find out that the doctor's hero-status is no good at the second trial because... DUN DUN DUN... he wrote a secret letter in prison describing the people who got him put in prison (it was a pair of noble brothers who asked him to tend to a patient who turned out to be a servant woman one of them was sleeping with after he killed her husband, and these evil brothers were... DUN DUN DUN... the MONSEIGNEUR AND HIS BROTHER, aka, Charles's uncle and his daddy. Whoops! Charles didn't know about this history, he was only a baby at the time. He knew his uncle was no saint, but nothing about the history with the doctor) and he vowed to get revenge against the whole family, including, unfortunately, the descendants, being Charles. So Charles is getting ready to die and everyone feels bad that the Doctor knew ever since the wedding that his son-in-law's family led to his imprisonment after he told the government about what they had done to the servant girl and her husband. In yet another twist, we find out that Madame Defarge was the sister of the servant girl - EEk! So much connectedness. Anyway, Sydney Carton comes over from England and he stages a switchout, sacrificing himself in Charles's place. Charles, Lucie, the Doctor, little Lucie, and Mr. Lorry all go back to England, and Sydney is executed by guillotine.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
I enjoyed this book, though I felt at some points that the surprises weren't all that surprising, given how few major characters there were in the plot. There was also an intense amount of foreshadowing, which was simultaneously really cool and REALLY ANNOYING.
The first page has an amazing description that sets the scene. It, of course, begins with the famous lines, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." But it also contains the following lines, abridged here:
"...there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history...there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread."
This is unbelievable - it definitely falls under the heavy foreshadowing section mentioned above, but how inCREDIBLE is that description? A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
- Madame Defarge knits throughout the story, and we find out about halfway through the story that she is knitting a register of names and descriptions of the people that fit the names so that the revolution can properly EXECUTE them. Nice, right? I knit scarves for my buddies, Madame Defarge knits DEATH SENTENCES.
- Mr. Lorry works for Tellson's bank, which is crucial to the story in that the bank is one of the few organizations that continues to work in both cities during the tumultuous revolution. Dickens has a marvelous description of the Tellson employees here:
"When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment."
- There were so many crazy plot twists that when the Doctor's secret prison letter is revealed and the Monseigneur and his brother are described as twins, I was like - I KNEW IT! Sydney and Charles are twin brothers, too! But guess what? They're not. Their freakish look-alikeness is just a Dickensian twist of fate.
- The doctor has an interesting role in the novel, in that he is pretty weak and wounded in the beginning of the book, then becomes strong, then really takes the lead when they go to France to save Charles, saves Charles, and then loses it completely when Charles is recaptured. The doctor goes out to implore higher ups to save Charles a second time, but when he comes back, he demands to know where his shoe bench is so that he can finish his shoes.
- Sydney knows full well that he plans to die, and the title of this post is from his musings to himself on the night before his death. He follows Lucie's path around the city, walking where she walked each day to the prison to stand in a spot where Charles could sometimes see her, and he thinks about his life and how it was meaningless until this moment. I love the simplicity of the title phrase.
- Sydney meets a seamstress who is also to be executed. She is terrified, and at first she thinks it is Darnay, because she met him in prison before, but when she realizes it is not, she whispers, "Are you dying for him?" To which Sydney responds, "And his wife and child. Hush! Yes." She then asks to hold his hand, and they go to their deaths, hand in hand until the very last.
- The BEST scene in this book (in my humble opinion) is the SHOWDOWN between Miss Pross and Madame Defarge. Miss Pross is Lucie's faithful maidservant who has been with her for life. She has stayed at home to cover for Lucie's departure, because at the end of the novel, Lucie and her child have a death warrant out because Defarge wants their heads. Miss Pross is a mostly comical character in the novel, but she is utterly devoted to Lucie. She also stoutly refuses to learn French because, as she says, she is "an Englishwoman." When Madame Defarge appears looking for Lucie and her daughter, the two face off. Miss Pross realizes that the longer she can get Mme Defarge to stay, the longer Lucie and her daughter have to continue their escape. Dickens notes that the two women are cursing each other in their separate languages; neither one understands the words, but they both understand the intent. Mme Defarge is outraged when she realizes the rooms behind Miss Pross are empty and Lucie and her daughter have gotten away. She lunges at Miss Pross, but Miss Pross grabs her around the waist, and after a few minutes of struggling, Defarge's pistol goes off and Miss Pross realizes that Mme Defarge is dead. She composes herself and then runs to the meeting point where she connects with Lucie. Mme Defarge's absence is noted by her friend, The Vengeance (I KNOW! amazing name, right? I think I'm going to start going by The Rancor. like it?) Mme Defarge's knitting waits for her at the execution, but she does not come.
All in all, this book definitely captured my attention. It is very different from Great Expectations, and it was certainly interesting reading them back to back. This one was much more plot-driven, whereas I feel that Great Expectations really enriched each scene, setting, and character. Fascinating back-to-back read.
I'm off to some time by myself. Back in a hundred years or so!
(HAhA. I am SOOOOO funny. Did you get it?)
Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary
This Dickens novel straddles, as the title suggests, two cities: Paris and London. Our story begins with Doctor Manette being "recalled to life." He was imprisoned for an unknown cause for about 20 years in a Parisian prison, and in the opening chapters of the book, he is brought back to London and reunited with his daughter, Lucie, by a banker and family friend, Mr. Lorry. The next major event is Lucie and the Doctor serving as witnesses at the treason trial for Charles Darnay. He is accused of being a traitor and is about to be brutally murdered, but at the last minute, he is acquitted because the defense points out that another man, Sydney Carton, looks just like him. This is apparently enough for an acquittal; clearly they didn't have enough Law and Order episodes to teach them how to prosecute properly. Incidentally, Darnay was not really a traitor, but we find out he is actually a FRENCHIE, Charles Evrémonde. Charles falls for Lucie, they get married, they have a daughter named Lucie (because they're clearly unoriginal when it comes to naming) and all seems to be going swimmingly. The Doctor is all better from having been in prison (mostly - he regresses from time to time by going back to making shoes, the occupation he was allowed to perform in prison). Charles wants to tell the Doctor his real name, and the Doctor says he only wants to know on the wedding day. Charles tells him on the wedding day, and after the lovebirds go on their honeymoon, Daddy goes back to making shoes. UH OH! Oh, and Sydney professes his love for Lucie, but says he doesn't want to be with her, he just wants her to know that he would do ANYTHING for her. Really. Anything. So we store that nugget away and Charles gets a letter from his old servant - did I mention his uncle was killed because he's a really nasty rich Monseigneur who treats laborers like dirt and because the revolution is now RAGING in France? - saying that he has been imprisoned and that only Charles can save him. So Charles decides, HEY! why don't I go to France and help old Gabelle out. So he goes, and guess what - he is IMMEDIATELY imprisoned. Lucie finds out, comes to France with her dad, and daddy the Doctor is a hero in the new regime because he was a well-known prisoner in the Bastille. Charles is imprisoned for over a year, but the doctor is able to get him set free. The very same day, however, Charles is re-imprisoned, and we find out that the people who have charged him are Monsieur et Madame Defarge, who were the old servants of Doctor Manette but are now CRAZED REVOLUTION BLOOD-THIRSTY monsters. AND, in a surprising turn of events, we find out that the doctor's hero-status is no good at the second trial because... DUN DUN DUN... he wrote a secret letter in prison describing the people who got him put in prison (it was a pair of noble brothers who asked him to tend to a patient who turned out to be a servant woman one of them was sleeping with after he killed her husband, and these evil brothers were... DUN DUN DUN... the MONSEIGNEUR AND HIS BROTHER, aka, Charles's uncle and his daddy. Whoops! Charles didn't know about this history, he was only a baby at the time. He knew his uncle was no saint, but nothing about the history with the doctor) and he vowed to get revenge against the whole family, including, unfortunately, the descendants, being Charles. So Charles is getting ready to die and everyone feels bad that the Doctor knew ever since the wedding that his son-in-law's family led to his imprisonment after he told the government about what they had done to the servant girl and her husband. In yet another twist, we find out that Madame Defarge was the sister of the servant girl - EEk! So much connectedness. Anyway, Sydney Carton comes over from England and he stages a switchout, sacrificing himself in Charles's place. Charles, Lucie, the Doctor, little Lucie, and Mr. Lorry all go back to England, and Sydney is executed by guillotine.
Spoiler Over: Continue Here
I enjoyed this book, though I felt at some points that the surprises weren't all that surprising, given how few major characters there were in the plot. There was also an intense amount of foreshadowing, which was simultaneously really cool and REALLY ANNOYING.
The first page has an amazing description that sets the scene. It, of course, begins with the famous lines, "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." But it also contains the following lines, abridged here:
"...there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death, already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in it, terrible in history...there were sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about with muffled tread."
This is unbelievable - it definitely falls under the heavy foreshadowing section mentioned above, but how inCREDIBLE is that description? A-M-A-Z-I-N-G.
- Madame Defarge knits throughout the story, and we find out about halfway through the story that she is knitting a register of names and descriptions of the people that fit the names so that the revolution can properly EXECUTE them. Nice, right? I knit scarves for my buddies, Madame Defarge knits DEATH SENTENCES.
- Mr. Lorry works for Tellson's bank, which is crucial to the story in that the bank is one of the few organizations that continues to work in both cities during the tumultuous revolution. Dickens has a marvelous description of the Tellson employees here:
"When they took a young man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment."
- There were so many crazy plot twists that when the Doctor's secret prison letter is revealed and the Monseigneur and his brother are described as twins, I was like - I KNEW IT! Sydney and Charles are twin brothers, too! But guess what? They're not. Their freakish look-alikeness is just a Dickensian twist of fate.
- The doctor has an interesting role in the novel, in that he is pretty weak and wounded in the beginning of the book, then becomes strong, then really takes the lead when they go to France to save Charles, saves Charles, and then loses it completely when Charles is recaptured. The doctor goes out to implore higher ups to save Charles a second time, but when he comes back, he demands to know where his shoe bench is so that he can finish his shoes.
- Sydney knows full well that he plans to die, and the title of this post is from his musings to himself on the night before his death. He follows Lucie's path around the city, walking where she walked each day to the prison to stand in a spot where Charles could sometimes see her, and he thinks about his life and how it was meaningless until this moment. I love the simplicity of the title phrase.
- Sydney meets a seamstress who is also to be executed. She is terrified, and at first she thinks it is Darnay, because she met him in prison before, but when she realizes it is not, she whispers, "Are you dying for him?" To which Sydney responds, "And his wife and child. Hush! Yes." She then asks to hold his hand, and they go to their deaths, hand in hand until the very last.
- The BEST scene in this book (in my humble opinion) is the SHOWDOWN between Miss Pross and Madame Defarge. Miss Pross is Lucie's faithful maidservant who has been with her for life. She has stayed at home to cover for Lucie's departure, because at the end of the novel, Lucie and her child have a death warrant out because Defarge wants their heads. Miss Pross is a mostly comical character in the novel, but she is utterly devoted to Lucie. She also stoutly refuses to learn French because, as she says, she is "an Englishwoman." When Madame Defarge appears looking for Lucie and her daughter, the two face off. Miss Pross realizes that the longer she can get Mme Defarge to stay, the longer Lucie and her daughter have to continue their escape. Dickens notes that the two women are cursing each other in their separate languages; neither one understands the words, but they both understand the intent. Mme Defarge is outraged when she realizes the rooms behind Miss Pross are empty and Lucie and her daughter have gotten away. She lunges at Miss Pross, but Miss Pross grabs her around the waist, and after a few minutes of struggling, Defarge's pistol goes off and Miss Pross realizes that Mme Defarge is dead. She composes herself and then runs to the meeting point where she connects with Lucie. Mme Defarge's absence is noted by her friend, The Vengeance (I KNOW! amazing name, right? I think I'm going to start going by The Rancor. like it?) Mme Defarge's knitting waits for her at the execution, but she does not come.
All in all, this book definitely captured my attention. It is very different from Great Expectations, and it was certainly interesting reading them back to back. This one was much more plot-driven, whereas I feel that Great Expectations really enriched each scene, setting, and character. Fascinating back-to-back read.
I'm off to some time by myself. Back in a hundred years or so!
(HAhA. I am SOOOOO funny. Did you get it?)
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