Fancy inviting guests and not treating them properly!

 A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, first published in 1924

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

A Passage to India explores what happens when worlds collide. It centers around the experiences of an Indian man and doctor, Dr. Aziz, his British friend Mr. Fielding, and two British women, Mrs. Moore and Miss Quested. Mrs. Moore has come to Chandrapore from England with Miss Adela Quested, who is considering getting together with Mrs. Moore's son, Mr. Ronny Heaslop. Mr. Heaslop is a local government official under Britain's colonial reign. Miss Quested and Mrs. Moore are anxious to taste the 'real India', but when Dr. Aziz takes them on a journey to the local Marabar Caves, the 'real India' (or maybe just the CRAZINESS IN THE AIR) gets to Miss Quested, and she accuses Dr. Aziz of attacking her in one of the caves. 

Dr. Aziz is arrested immediately, and the Brits and Indians are stoked into a fervor and frenzy. Mr. Fielding is the only one to stand against his peers, attesting continuously to his friend Dr. Aziz's innocence. Mrs. Moore believes Adela has made everything up, but she won't say so publicly, and she dies on a return trip to England. Ultimately, in a bizarre twist, and after we are sure in several moments on our own with Miss Quested that this is the case, she admits that she made the whole thing up (or maybe she hallucinated it? It's quite unclear) WHEN SHE IS ON THE WITNESS STAND (drama much?). 

Dr. Aziz is released, but of course this has completely poisoned his attitude toward the British, with whom Dr. Aziz and his friends had previously had a sort of tenuous-not-quite-almost-working relationship. Aziz begins to doubt Mr. Fielding's loyalty, especially when Mr. Fielding takes Adela Quested under his wing after her bizarre actions at the trial. Aziz and Fielding drift apart, and eventually Fielding returns to England. After a miscommunication, it seems Fielding has married Adela back in England, and Aziz is furious, feeling utterly betrayed. In the final scenes of the novel, Fielding returns to India, where Aziz discovers that Fielding has in fact married one of Mrs. Moore's younger children, Stella. This still feels like a betrayal as Fielding is still friendly with Heaslop and has married his sister, but they reach a fragile reconciliation just before Fielding returns home to England. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbers, 

  Since so few people read my blob in a consecutive sort of way, I'm going to go ahead and blob on the next novel on the list. As I said in my last blob, it was trippy to read this book, a British white man's exploration of colonial rule in India, right after reading Lahiri's collection of stories centered on Indian experiences, but that's just the way the (random list of books selected) cookie crumbles!

I liked the writing of this book, and the questions it made me ask myself, but I can't say I enjoyed reading the second half of it, once Dr. Aziz was imprisoned. It was more like I went from a gentle read in the beginning to frantically reading to the end to see if things would be put right. But maybe that's exactly how I was supposed to experience it! Anyway, here are my thoughts, as usual in a bit of a hodge podge! I have a lot of thoughts, and Forster is a lovely writer, so buckle up and grab a cozy cuppa!

Chandrapore, a city of gardens: They rise from the gardens where ancient tanks nourish them, they burst out of stifling purlieus and unconsidered temples. Seeking light and air, and endowed with more strength than man or his works, they soar above the lower deposit to greet one another with branches and beckoning leaves, and to build a city for the birds. I loved this description of the city.

The whimsy of before - Like I said, the first half or third of the book has a playful, almost whimsical quality. Here are some of my favorite examples, many of which are foreshadowing for more darker moments ahead.

'Mr. Mahmoud Ali, how are you?'
  'Thank you, Dr. Aziz, I am dying.'
 'Dying before your dinner? Oh, poor Mahmoud Ali!'
'Hamidullah here is actually dead. He passed away just as you rode up on your bike.'
'Yes, that is so,' said the other. 'Imagine us both as addressing you from another and a happier world.'

'Does there happen to be such a thing as a hookah in that happier world of yours? lololol.

'Saying nothing?' He had as a matter of fact said, 'Damn Aziz' - words that the servant understood, but was too polite to repeat. One can tip too much as well as too little, indeed the coin that buys the exact truth has not yet been minted. hagh.

I thought this was funny, but then later it was not so much.... 

They were discussing as to whether or no it is possible to be friends with an Englishman.

'I give any Englishman two years, be he Turton or Burton. It is only the difference of a letter. And I give any Englishwoman six months. All are exactly alike. Do you not agree with me?'

Poetry: They listened delighted, for they took the public view of poetry, not the private which obtains in England. It never bored them to hear words, words; they breathed them with the cool night air, never stopping to analyse; the name of the poet, Hafiz, Hali, Iqbal, was sufficient guarantee. India - a hundred Indias - whispered outside beneath the indifferent moon, but for the time India seemed one and their own, and they regained their departed greatness by hearing its departure lamented, they felt young again because reminded that youth must fly. This was such a beautiful moment.

What makes an exile an exile? It was the Anthem of the Army of Occupation. It reminded every member of the club that he or she was British and in exile. I thought it was odd that the Brits called themselves 'exiles', when in fact they were essentially colonial overlords. But I guess most of the time colonists don't refer to themselves directly as 'colonial overlords'. ;) Interesting how it gives them a kind of victim mentality in their head, when in fact, they're wresting control of an entire country away from its own people.

On being obligated to name race: Ronny was ruffled. From his mother's description he had thought the doctor might be young Muggins from over the Ganges, and had brought out all the comradely emotions. What a mix-up! Why hadn't she indicated by the tone of her voice that she was talking about an Indian? This was a great moment. Ronny is mad that his mother told him a story (about Aziz) and didn't immediately clarify that he was Indian. It reminded me of several times I've referenced in this blob how POC writers are often expected to name the race of their characters explicitly and immediately, yet so many readers (esp. white readers) assume whiteness unless otherwise stated.

Home is not where you hang your hat

'You never used to judge people like this at home.'

'India isn't home', he retorted, rather rudely. Ooh, this was such an interesting exchange between Ronny and his mother. I liked that Forster created British people who were trying to essential not be 'the worst', but who were still flawed and still on a journey that felt reasonable. Ronny is not on a journey, but his mother is.

I already hated Ronny, and then... Ronny had repressed his mother when she enquired after his viola; a viola was almost a demerit, and certainly not the sort of instrument one mentioned in public. RUDE! Obviously violas are THE BOMB.COM. My sister is an excellent violist, in case you didn't know, as is one of my very best friends, and they also sit closest to the cello section so obviously there's a kind of kinship. 

On posing as gods

'We're not out here for the purpose of behaving pleasantly!' 

'What do you mean?'

'What I say. We're out here to do justice and keep the peace. Them's my sentiments. India isn't a drawing-room.'

'Your sentiments are those of a god,' she said quietly, but it was his manner rather than his sentiments that annoyed her.

Trying to recover his temper, he said, 'India likes gods.'

'And Englishmen like posing as gods.' OOh, this was another great exchange between Ronny and his mom. 

Mangoes, mangoes! Juicy juicy mangoes!

'Visitors like you are too rare.'

'They are indeed,' said Professor Godbole. 'Such affability is seldom seen. But what can we offer to detain them?'

'Mangoes, mangoes.' haghaghahgha. I loved this line.

A robin. A swallow. A crow!

'Do you know what the name of that green bird up above us is?' she asked, putting her shoulder rather nearer to his.

'Bee-eater.'

'Oh no, Ronny, it has red bars on its wings.'

'Parrot,' he hazarded.

'Good gracious no.'

The bird in question dived into the dome of the tree. It was of no importance, yet they would have liked to identify it, it would somehow have solaced their hearts. I loved this exchange, even though Ronny and Adela were a very weird couple during the times that they were on. As a bird lover, I love that they were bonding over trying to name the species, and how it pulled them into a kind of reverie together.

Did your hands brush against each other in a garden?

Ronny's face grew dim - an event that always increased her esteem for his character. Her hand touched his, owing to a jolt, and one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lovers' quarrel. Each was too proud to increase the pressure, but neither withdrew it, and a spurious unity descended on them, as local and temporary as the gleam that inhabits a firefly. It would vanish in a moment, perhaps to reappear, but the darkness is alone durable. And the night that encircled them, absolute as it seemed, was itself only a spurious unity, being modified by gleams of day that leaked up round the edges of the earth, and by the stars. Again, not shipping Ronela (or Adenny?) but this was a wonderfully beautiful moment. 

What about love?

'What about love?'...Not to love the man one's going to marry! Not to find it out until this moment! Not even to have asked oneself the question until now. Perhaps part of Adela's bizarre accusations of Aziz stems from her own existential crisis. These are the questions she's asking herself in the cave just before things go down.

Guests, or prisoners?

He would prefer to give breakfast to all four; still, guests must do as they wish, or they become prisoners. I love this line so much. 'Guests must do as they wish, or they become prisoners'. So fantastic.

Mrs. Moore & Mr. Fielding - They knew one another very little, and felt rather awkward at being drawn together by an Indian. The racial problem can take subtle forms. In their case it had induced a sort of jealousy, a mutual suspicion. He tried to goad her enthusiasm; she scarcely spoke. Forster wrote really poignantly about race, and race relations, in a way that I haven't seen a lot of white authors do. he also centered dual protagonists in Dr. Aziz and Mr. Fielding, which allowed him to not otherize the Indian experience, but also not to lay claim to it as his own, which I thought was really artfully done.

Why can't our besties be besties?

Loving them both, he expected them to love each other. They didn't want to. I love this line. It's so true! Sometimes we bring our favorite people together and assume they'll love each other because we love them both, but sometimes it just isn't so!

Sheeple sheeple sheeple

He was still after facts, though the herd had decided on emotion. Nothing enraged Anglo-India more than the lantern of reason if it is exhibited for one moment after its extinction is decreed. I can't imagine Forster was all that popular in England after publishing this, since his stance is pretty clear, and he's fairly vicious about the Brits. This made me like Forster all the more.

Using the n-word

I've never seen the n-word used to describe non-Black people, so it was a surprise to see it pop up several times in this work in relation to the Indians. Such vitriol and hate in the word.

The hexus

The evil was propagating in every direction, it seemed to have an existence of its own, apart from anything that was done or said by individuals. This was so poignantly done, the idea that the evil was just growing and festering without direction or leadership, per se, and it reminded me of the hexus in Fern Gully.

Palestine - Her friends kept up their spirits by demanding holocausts of natives, but she was too worried and weak to do that. There were several moments after the Brits were supposedly attacked via Adela that reminded me of Israel and Palestine in this moment. It felt like the British response was deeply out of proportion with the 'alleged' crime, and while there are of course also Israeli hostages of Hamas, there are times where the response from Israel has felt not so far off from 'demanding holocausts of natives'.

The last throes of friendship

This is the final scene between Aziz and Fielding, during which they are, very dramatically, both on horseback.

'Clear out, you fellows, double quick, I say. We may hate one another, but we hate you most. If I don't make you go, Ahmed will, Karim will, if it's fifty-five hundred years we shall get rid of you, yes, we shall drive every blasted Englishman into the sea, and then' - he rode against him furiously - 'and then', he concluded, half kissing him, 'you and I shall be friends.' 

  'Why can't we be friends now?' said the other, holding him affectionately. It's what I want. It's what you want.'

  But the horses didn't want it - they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks through which riders must pass single file; the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, 'No, not yet', and the sky said, 'No, not there.' Such an eloquent conclusion. Aziz's sentiments also reminded me of RRR (so named for its actors, but also translated in the English version as Rise-Roar-Revolt), a fantastic period drama by S. S. Rajamouli, who co-wrote the film with V. Vijayendra Prasad. I watched it last year because watched as many Oscar-nominated films as possible, and the song "Naatu Naatu" from RRR was nominated (and won!) the Oscar for best original song. It's a rather long film by American standards (3 h 7 m) but I high recommend!

Terms New to Me (this is just a smattering, as there were many)

bulbul - a tropical African and Asian songbird that typically has a melodious voice and drab plumage. Many kinds have a crest. (I LOLed at the 'drab plumage'. Mean-spirited! I'm sure it's not drab, bulbul.)

chuprassi (alt. chaprassi) - an official messenger : functionary, overseer, servant, porter, bearer.

howdah - (in South Asia) a seat for riding on the back of an elephant or camel, typically with a canopy and accommodating two or more people.

izzat - honor, reputation, or prestige.

nautch - (in South Asia) a traditional dance performed by professional dancing girls.

pan (probably paan) - an Indian after-dinner treat that consists of a betel leaf filled with chopped betel (areca) nut (Areca catechu) and slaked lime 

purdah - the practice among women in certain Muslim and Hindu societies of living in a separate room or behind a curtain, or of dressing in all-enveloping clothes, in order to stay out of the sight of men or strangers. In looking back at The Home and The World, by Rabindranath Tagore, I see he was essentially describing purdah, though I can't recall if he called it that specifically. I liked that later, Fielding and Aziz discussed their pasts, and when Aziz showed Fielding a picture of his (deceased) wife, it was a very big deal because it was, in essence, lifting a purdah for Fielding. Here's his response:

He looked back at his own life. What a poor crop of secrets it had produced! There were things in it that he had shown to no one, but they were so uninteresting, it wasn't worth while lifting a purdah on their account. What would you reveal to someone to share vulnerability? Where would you lift purdahs looking back at your life?

pukka (informal British) - genuine; of or appropriate to high or respectable society; excellent.

shawm -  medieval and Renaissance wind instrument, forerunner of the oboe, with a double reed enclosed in a wooden mouthpiece, and having a penetrating tone.

topi - When worn by itself, the taqiyah can be any color. However, particularly in Arab countries, when worn under the keffiyeh headscarf, they are kept in a traditional white. Some Muslims wrap a turban around the cap, called an ʿimamah in Arabic, which is often done by Shia and Sunni Muslims. In the United States and Britain, taqiyas are usually referred to as "kufis". "Topi" is a type of taqiyah cap that is worn in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, and other regions of South Asia. Many different types of topi caps include the Sindhi cap, worn in Sindh, and the crochet topi that is often worn at Muslim prayer services. The topi cap is often worn with shalwar kameez, which is the national costume of Pakistan. (from Wikipedia)

Lines I Liked

• She watched the moon, whose radiance stained with primrose the purple of the surrounding sky. In England the moon had seemed dead and alien; here she was caught in the shawl of night together with earth and all the other stars.

• What does unhappiness matter when we are are all unhappy together? Reminded me of both the opening of Anna K and a Proust line about only being unhappy for a day at a time.

• India had developed sides of his character that she had never admired. Such a great line.

• When English and Indians were both present, he grew self-conscious, because he did not know to whom he belonged. For a little he was vexed by opposite currents in his blood, then they blended, and he belonged to no one but himself. This was such an incredible moment when a group disbanded and a servant sorted out his identity before moving along with his day.

• On twittered the Sunday bells; the East had returned to the East via the suburbs of England, and had become ridiculous during the detour.

• The heat had leapt forward in the last hour, the street was deserted as if a catastrophe had cleaned off humanity during the inconclusive talk. Again, this is such a visually stunning line.

• Astonishing even from the rise of the civil station, here the Marabar were gods to whom earth is a ghost. The Marabar are the caves where Aziz takes the women on a tour.

• It was early in morning, for the day, as the hot weather advanced, swelled like a monster at both ends, and left less and less room for the movements of mortals. STUNNING.

• Men try to be harmonious all the year round, and the results are occasionally disastrous. lololol this is in reference to the fact that many animals hibernate, or just take a portion of the year to rest up, be a little salty if they want, and how humans are perhaps the worse off for not doing so.

Referents and Reverberations

This line, about a benevolent Indian called the Nawab Bahadur - 'Despite my advanced years, I am learning to drive', he said. 'Man can learn everything if he will but try.' reminded me of Mrs. Sen from The Interpreter of Maladies, and how in different worlds, different types of cars, different timescapes, they were struggling with the same thing.

This line: Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? reminded me of this line, from Proust, Volume V, The Captive: "But are there perhaps other worlds more real than the waking world?"

This line: Every third servant is a spy. reminded me of my blob title for To Kill a Mockingbird - Every third Merriweather is morbid.

This line: Life never gives us what we want at the moment that we consider appropriate. Adventures do occur, but not punctually. reminded me of The Hobbit, and this part of that post: 

Gandalf is responsible for getting Bilbo involved with the adventure (of course; Gandalf is always involved in the "I have an ulterior motive but it's in everyone's best interest" kind of mind games) and Bilbo is having NONE of it at the beginning. "We are plain quiet folk and have no use for adventures. Nasty disturbing uncomfortable things! Make you late for dinner!" He's almost gotten Gandalf to leave and he says, "Sorry! I don't want any adventures, thank you. Not today."

[But sneaky Gandalf puts a mark on his door that says BURGLAR LIVES HERE LOOKING FOR AN ADVENTURE (okay, I looked it up and it's actually "Burglar wants a good job, plenty of Excitement and reasonable reward" - close enough!) - only some compact, runish form of that phrase - and the adventure comes looking for Bilbo anyway.] No punctuality from adventures! Make you late for dinner!

Mrs. Moore, Adela, Mr. Fielding

'I like mysteries but I rather dislike muddles,' said Mrs. Moore. 

'A mystery is a muddle.'

'Oh, do you think so, Mr. Fielding?' I loved this exchange. 

To shout is useless, because a Marabar cave can hear no sound but its own. Creepy!

Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle; they could not tell. Well blobbers, I'll leave you, then! I'm going to start a hygge cozy winter book bingo next, I think, so there may be a delay before I return for my next entry! In the mean time, keep safe, keep warm, and keep cozy! And keep reading!

I was hoping you could make me feel better, say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, first published in 1999

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Interpreter of Maladies is a series of collected stories that center on Indian experiences across a multitude of geographies. The stories examine everything from love lost to the deep-rooted growing pains of moving across the world and trying to adjust. They are touching, poignant, and carry a kind of universal weight that leave you marked. 

Spoiler Over (but not really, and you know it ;) - Continue Here

Well hello, dear readers!

 I finished this story collection a little while ago, and have actually already started and finished A Passage to India, which was a fascinating book to read right after this one. More on that in the next blob! Here are my thoughts!

Jhumpa Lahiri has also published three books in Italian. WOW. Anyone who can not only be fluent in multiple languages, but PUBLISH NOVELS in more than one language, and write the way Lahiri writes, is just... chef's kiss! My hat is off to you. 

I enjoyed this collection of stories, though if you have read my blob, you know story collections are really not my favorite. I decided I would give you little snippets from each of the stories, as there are only nine total. 

A Temporary Matter, or when Shoba and Shukumar lose their son and try to find each other in the dark

In each of these, the bold is Lahiri's actual title, and the italics are my rendering of the plot. This first story is about a couple who have suffered the tragic loss of their child-to-be, and how they rekindle pieces of their relationship during a series of scheduled blackouts.  

• He looked now for something to put the birthday candles in and settled on the soil of a potted ivy that normally sat on the windowsill over the sink. Even though the plant was inches from the tap, the soil was so dry that he had to water it first before the candles would stand straight. Planting a candle in the pot made me think of one of my favorite short stories from when I was younger, The Heat Death of the Universe, by Pamela Zoline - Someone has planted a hot dog in the daffodil pot. 

• All day Shukumar had looked forward to the lights going out.

• He wondered would Shoba would tell him in the dark.

• Something happened when the house was dark. They were able to talk to each other again.

When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine, or when East Pakistan (and Mr. Pirzada) ceases to be a part of India

In reading this, I was reminded again how little I know about the history of other countries, and I felt like I really need to do another round of World Studies and World History, so we'll just cue that up for somewhere down the road. This story is about Mr. Pirzada, who is away from home, and how he becomes an extended member of an Indian couple and their young daughter, during a time when things are explosively unsettled in India.

• In search of compatriots, they used to trail their fingers, at the start of each new semester, through the columns of the university directory, circling surnames familiar to their part of the world. This was such a beautiful line, and reminded me how privileged I am. Never have I felt so foreign in my home that I searched a phone book for familiar surnames. What a beautiful way to find community.

• Mr. Pirzada - Each evening he appeared in ensembles of plums, olives, and chocolate browns. He was a compact man, and though his feet were perpetually splayed, and his belly slightly wide, he nevertheless maintained an efficient posture, as if balancing in either hand two suitcases of equal weight. His ears were insulated by tufts of graying hair that seemed to block out the unpleasant traffic of life. God, I love that line about the ear hair blocking out the traffic of life. :)

• Mr. Pirzada brings candy to the young girl, and she always thanks him, to which he replies once: 'What is this thank-you? The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me when I return an overdue book, the overseas operator thanks me as she tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.' 

• Now that I had learned Mr. Pirzada was not an Indian, I began to study him with extra care, to try to figure out what made him different. This story was such an artful and thoughtful way to examine a historical event through the eyes of a child. Of course, nothing about Mr. Pirzada or the girl and her parents has actually changed, but the political world shifts and then poof! Just like that, he is no longer 'Indian'. 

Interpreter of Maladies, or the exoticization of a home country and love, unrequited

This one was beautiful but also made me so sad. It centers on a family, Mr. and Mrs. Das, and their three children, and Mr. Kapasi, a man who drives them on a tour to see famous places in a part of India. Mr. Kapasi, it turns out, does interpreting at a doctor's office for patients who speak other languages, and when Mrs. Das is alone with Mr. Kapasi, she tells him she's been feeling unwell, and asks for him to say something. When he has nothing to offer, she says:

• I was hoping you could make me feel better, say the right thing. Suggest some kind of remedy.

Mr. Kapasi falls in love with/becomes enamored with Mrs. Das during their little jaunt, and happily imagines a world where they become romantic pen pals, after he takes a photo with them and she offers to send it along to his address. Later, though, he takes them to another place and the monkeys are overwhelming to the Indian-but-no-longer-used-to-India family, and the address floats away in the wind.

A Real Durwan, or Boori Ma's wrongful expulsion from her only home by her supposed 'neighbors'

This story chronicles the sad tale of Boori Ma, a woman who has supposedly become homeless and attached herself to a small collection of apartments after partition. The neighbors claim to have her interests at heart, but when they get a communal cistern tap and it is stolen, they turn on Boori Ma and she is expelled from their midst. 

• Such comforts you cannot even dream them. This is a line Boori Ma says, allegedly about her life before. I love the line. 

• It was true that prickly heat was common during the rainy season. I had to look this up - apparently prickly heat is a kind of itchy heat rash. Boori Ma is told perhaps she has a bad case, but she's sure that she has little insects living in her bedding. (I FEEL YOU, Boori Ma! When I had bedbugs it was the PITS.)

Sexy, or Miranda's dalliances with Dev (and India) and eventual compassion for Laxmi's cousin

Sexy was interesting. In some ways it felt a little out of place to me, or like it was from a different collection. It was probably my least favorite, but that may also have been because I don't feel a lot of empathy or connection to a character who is sleeping with another woman's husband. It follows Miranda, a white British woman, during her affair with an Indian man, Dev, and at the same time Miranda is consoling a co-worker, Laxmi, whose cousin's husband has just left her for a woman he met on a plane. The worlds collide eventually when Laxmi's cousin comes to town and Miranda ends up watching Rohin, the cousin's son. He tells Miranda that she looks 'sexy', trying out a word he's heard his parents use, and this seems to break the spell of Miranda's affair.

Mrs. Sen's, or the intense growing pains and excruciating adjustment period of immigration

I think this might have been my favorite story. It follows Eliot, a young white boy, during a time when he is baby-sat by a recent Indian immigrant, Mrs. Sen. She is trying and struggling to adjust to life in New England, and her husband is attempting to get her to learn to drive independently so that she can do more things and move about more freely, but she is terrified. 

• Eliot, if I began to scream right now at the top of my lungs, would someone come? This reminded me of when my nephew's father first moved to the US from Senegal. He described the suburbs to me once as so lonely, and asked me why people would want to live so isolated from each other. I had never thought of them like that before, and most of the time in the city, I hate how many people are around. But I understand that as someone habituated to family compound living, being in places where you have relatives and old friends around every corner, the American 'dream' could feel so empty.

• Brimming bowls and colanders lined the countertop, spices and pastes were measured and blended, and eventually a collection of broths simmered over periwinkle flames on the stove. I wanted to eat everything that Mrs. Sen was cooking. 

Mrs. Sen, when she's trying to enter an intersection: 'Impossible, Eliot. How can I go there? 
'You need to wait until no one's coming.'
Why will not anybody slow down?'
'No one's coming now.'
'But what about the car from the right, do you see? And look, a truck is behind it. Anyway, I am not allowed on the main road without Mr. Sen.' I felt so deeply for Mrs. Sen here. When I first learned to drive, I was terrified. My sisters used to joke that I'd drive for half an hour before the auto-lock went off, because I'd be going less than 15mph that whole time. I still remember the first time I went on a highway. It was with the school's Driver's Ed instructor, and she had the perfect temperament for it, but it still stands out as one of the scariest moments of my life. And I know how many roundabouts there are in the Boston area, and entering those can be like a nasty game of Double Dutch (something I've never been skilled at).

• 'My sister has had a baby girl. By the time I see her, depending if Mr. Sen gets his tenure, she will be three years old. Her own aunt will be a stranger. If we sit side by side on a train she will not know my face.' This was such a beautiful and painful line. 

This Blessed House, or a young Hindu couple's fierce battle over Christian paraphernalia

This story was about Twinkle and Sanjeev, a young Indian couple who have recently moved into a home in Connecticut, and discover all kinds of Christian paraphernalia. Twinkle is endlessly amused by it, building a shrine to every surprising knickknack, and Sanjeev is (in my mind, quite understandably) confused about why she wants to honor things she doesn't hold any belief in. They compromise in the end. It was not my favorite story.

The Treatment of Bibi Haldar, or a desperate woman's non-traditional path to becoming whole

I liked this one - it was another one of my favorites. Somewhat similar to Boori Ma, Bibi Haldar is a kind of social pariah, living with her brother and his wife in an apartment building. She is prone to attacks and bizarre medical incidents like seizures, and this makes her generally deemed as unfit for marriage. She's stuck sort of pingballing around the building, desperate to advance to the traditional stages of womanhood.

• 'I will never dip my feet in milk,' she whimpered. 'My face will never be painted with sandalwood paste. Who will rub me with turmeric? My name will never be printed with scarlet ink on a card.'

• Her soliloquies mawkish, her sentiments maudlin, malaise dripped like a fever from her pores. God, this is a beautiful sentence.

• To get her to quiet down, Haldar placed a one-line advertisement in the town newspaper, in order to solicit a groom: 'GIRL, UNSTABLE, HEIGHT 152 CENTIMETRES, SEEKS HUSBAND.' LOLOL. Yes, Haldar, that will definitely bring the men in droves.

• It was rumored by many that Bibi conversed with herself in a fluent but totally incomprehensible language, and slept without dreams.

The Third and Final Continent, or a young man's journey from solo immigration to center of a family

This story was also one of my favorites. It centers on a man who is originally from India, goes to school in London, and then ends up at MIT in America. He wants to rent a room for a time before his wife is to arrive, and so he encounters Mrs. Croft. Here's one of their exchanges.

For a moment she was silent. Then suddenly she declared, with the equal measures of disbelief and delight as the night before, 'There's an American flag on the moon, boy!'

'Yes, madame.'

'A flag on the moon! Isn't that splendid?'

I nodded, dreading what I knew was coming. 'Yes, madame.'

'Say, splendid!'

This time I paused, looking to either side in case anyone were there to overhear me, though I knew perfectly well that the house was empty. I felt like an idiot. But it was a small enough thing to ask. 'Splendid!' I cried out. He knows Mrs. Croft is old, but it turns out she is 103. Her daughter comes and leaves her soup in the refrigerator, because Mrs. Croft can't open the cans herself. Mrs. Croft is spicy and for sure a bit demented, but the man grows to love her. 

• Mrs. Croft's was the first death I mourned in America, for hers was the first life I had admired; she had left this world at last, ancient and alone, never to return.

Lines I Really Liked

• What resulted was a disproportionately large hole the size of a lemon, so that our jack-o'-lantern wore an expression of placid astonishment, the eyebrows no longer fierce, floating in frozen surprise above a vacant, geometric gaze.

• Most of all I remember the three of them operating during that time as if they were a single person, sharing a single meal, a single body, a single silence, and a single fear.

Words New to Me

durwan - a porter or doorkeeper; a person whose job is to guard the entrance of a large building

Well, blobbists, there you have it! I'm off to blob on another adventure centering on the experience of Indians, this time from a British white man's perspective. I'll leave you with a line I particularly liked from the man in the last story.

In my son's eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

Sending love to all of you, and hoping that you live lives beyond your own imagination. Good night!

But there are still the hours, aren't there? One and then another, and then you get through that one and then, my god, there's another.

The Hours by Michael Cunningham, first published in 1998

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Hours follows three women over the course of a single day: Virginia Woolf, the famous writer, Clarissa Vaughan (aka Clarissa Dalloway, but not the original fictional one), and Laura Brown, a housewife who is reading Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. If it sounds meta, that's because it is. Our women are in three different time periods, in three different geographies. Here's the breakdown:

Setting 1: Richmond, a suburb of London, 1941 - Virginia Woolf; we follow a day in her life, watching her write Mrs. Dalloway, hosting a tea party for her sister and her nieces and nephews, inhabiting her sense of suburban claustrophobia

Setting 2: Los Angeles, 1949 - Laura Brown; it is her husband's birthday, so she makes several cakes, runs away from her life briefly to a hotel to read Mrs. Dalloway, returns and feels intensely trapped

Setting 3: New York City, late 20th century - Clarissa (Dalloway) Vaughan; Clarissa is throwing a party for her close friend, Richard, who is a famous writer and living with advanced AIDs

Note: they are listed in chronological order by year, though they happen in various orders throughout the book.

Spoiler (Not Really) Over (But Let's Pretend): Continue Here

Hello, dear blobbists!

  If that seems like a rather sparing summary, well, there you have it. The book doesn't contain a lot in the way of plot (OK, there's a 'party' or a hosting of people happening for each woman, several cakes are baked, flowers are bought, a friend dying of AIDS throws himself out a window, and Virginia low key tries to run away to London proper) or rather I guess I should say it's not particularly driven by the plot, which, if you know me, is typically not my favorite kind of writing. 

  I will also say, quite frankly, that I did not care for this book. I thought I would like it, as I am a big Virginia Woolf fan, and I read Mrs. Dalloway earlier on the list. While I didn't like that book quite as much as I love To the Lighthouse, I would still say Woolf is one of my favorite authors. I think precisely because that's the case, I didn't like this literary exploration. It felt a bit like I was reading a creative writing prompt, like, "what if I extrapolated this 'one day' concept to three inter-related versions of a woman?" And maybe that's interesting to some people, but it didn't resonate with me. I'm honestly kind of surprised it got the fame and clout it did, and I wonder if he hadn't centered Woolf's work, if that still would have been the case.

 That said, I shall blob on it just the same. Here are my overall reflections, in no particular order. 

Writing as a (famous) person in a fictionalized way

I think my biggest issue with this book was that Cunningham decides to include Virginia Woolf as one of his three characters, and then writes from her point of view, which feels, to me, presumptive at best, and offensive at worst. Sure, he's claiming this is a 'fictionalized' version of her, but he also carefully made all the particulars around her true to her life, so does he honestly not think he's impact people's perception of her actual life? 

He references her migraines and hearing voices, as well as depression, and I know that he did research on and gathered notes from various journals and sources, but as a person who lives her own life with depression, anxiety, and OCD, I wouldn't want anyone else speaking for me. And the fact that he starts the book off with the day of her suicide just seems really icky to me, like how dare you assume you know or can imagine what may have been running through her head? He also uses a lot of her own work - pages from Mrs. Dalloway, parts of her suicide letter to her husband - and while it's clearly legal, it seems like freeloading to me.

A little too 'cutesy' for my taste

OK, nothing about this book is cutesy, but I couldn't think of a better word. What I'm referring to here is the way that Cunningham creates these symmetries and circular components by doing things like renaming characters with the same first letter of their names from Mrs. Dalloway, or introducing a side lesbian love interest to mirror the one in Mrs. Dalloway, or SPOILER - when we find out at the end of the novel that 'Richard', of Clarissa's world, is Laura Brown's toddler, Richie. It just fit together a bit too neatly for my taste, which also leans itself to that sort of 'writing a thesis'/'creative prompt' vibe.

Not just depressing, somehow much worse

I love reading literature by great female authors who also struggled with depression because I see reflections of myself in their work. Somehow, this book was not so much depressing as it was, overwhelmingly dark. At one point, Richard's cloistered apartment is described as 'having, more than anything, an underwater aspect'. I think that describes how this book made me feel. I suppose it's a special ability of a writer to make you feel so deeply uncomfortable and claustrophobic, but it wasn't an experience I enjoyed. Here are some examples of this murky darkness.

He will watch her forever. He will always know when something is wrong. (ok, that's nice, right?) He will always know precisely when and how much she has failed. oh, ok, that's where we were heading.

She herself is trapped here forever, posing as a wife. She must get through this night, and then tomorrow morning, and then another night here, in these rooms, with nowhere else to go. She must please, she must continue. Says who? I don't know that I fully bought this supposed trapped housewife claustrophobia. It felt like Cunningham was just writing based on a reading of "The Feminine Mystique".

For an instant, no more than that, she has imagined some sort of ghost self, a second version of her, standing immediately behind, watching. It's nothing. This. There was so much of this in the novel.

It would be as simple as checking into a hotel room. It would be as simple as that. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer matter. Think how wonderful it might be to no longer worry, or struggle, or fail. 

Hard to tease out what Cunningham's writing was actually like

Something else I struggled with, which was very apparent by the fact that I initially underlined some lines I liked, and then underlined almost nothing from the second half of the novel, was really teasing out Michael Cunningham's writing. I mean, sure, ostensibly, the whole novel is his 'creation', but if you take out the cutesy Mrs. Dalloway fan-fiction gimmicks, and you take out Virginia Woolf's actual (sacred) life, where is Michael Cunningham? And I think I just kept getting really caught up in the little tricks and twists and it really kept me from getting to know or really enjoy his personal writing style, which ended up feeling obfuscated.

The women, in a nutshell

Here's each woman encapsulated in one line.

Clarissa

Still, she loves the world for being rude and indestructible, and she knows other people must love it too...Why else do we struggle to go on living, no matter how compromised, no matter how harmed?

Laura

In another world, she might have spent her whole life reading.

Virginia

I'm taking a walk. (Real talk, she's running away.) Does it seem mysterious?

The way we smell

Blobbists, do you think we have a particular and unique smell? There's a line where Clarissa reflects on Richard's personal smell, and a friend of mine mentioned that a boyfriend didn't like her natural smell, and I really just feel like I've never thought of a person and thought, yes, that's their SMELL. I mean, sure, if they wear perfumes, or use specific lotions or soaps, but do we really have an US smell?

She goes to him, kisses the curve of his forehead. Up close like this, she can smell his various humors. His pores exude not only his familiar sweat (which has always smelled good to her, starchy and fermented; sharp in the way of wine) but the smell of his medicines, a powdery, sweetish smell. He smells, too, of unfresh flannel (though the laundry is done once a week, or oftener) and slightly, horribly (it is his only repellent smell) of the chair in which he spends his days.

A bit of levity

So, don't read this book if you're looking for laughs. Here's the one time I laughed, which turns out to actually be quite morbid in the end. 

Clarissa: 'Good morning, my dear', Clarissa says again.

Richard: 'Look at all those flowers.'

Clarissa: 'They're for you.'

Richard: 'Have I died?'

Special people who make you feel special

Okay, so Clarissa ends up taking the parts of this that seem like a compliment and making it more about how Richard is egotistical, which is not at all true in my case, but the initial parts of these lines reminded me of my good friend, Mar:

Richard cannot imagine a life more interesting or worthwhile than those being lived by his acquaintances and himself, and for that reason one often feels exalted, expanded, in his presence. It is all but impossible not to believe, at least in his presence and for a while after you've left him, that he alone sees through to your essence, weighs your true qualities...and appreciates you more fully than anyone else ever has. This is how I always feel after talking to her or spending time with her, and I loved that the line made me think of her. <3

Lines I liked

• Don't we love children, in part, because they live outside the realm of cynicism and irony?

• In the morning heat of June, with the robe whisked away, the chair in its bold new fabric seems surprised to find itself a chair at all.

• She is the animating principle, the life of the house. 

• The apartment has, more than anything, an underwater aspect.

• She has caught up with herself.

• Richie, on his mother: He is devoted, entirely, to the observation and deciphering of her, because without her there is no world at all. 

• He looks insane and exalted, both ancient and childish, astride the windowsill like some scarecrow equestrian, a park statue by Giacometti.

Referents and Reverberations

Certainly this book had some obvious referents, like Mrs. Dalloway. In addition, two lines stood out.

• I seem to have fallen out of time.  This line reminded me of a line from Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

• You don't need to charm or entertain. You don't need to put in a performance. This line reminded me of a line from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Words I Learned

equipoise - noun - balance of forces or interests; verb - balance or counterbalance (something)

Well blob-friends, I'll leave you with a few lines from Richard, who I think was ultimately my favorite character. 

Richard smiles wistfully. 'Oh well, omens,' he says. 'Do you believe in omens? Do you think we're taken that much notice of? Do you think we're worried over like that? My, wouldn't that be wonderful? Well, maybe it's so.' 

'I took the Xanax and the Ritalin. They work wonderfully together. I feel wonderful. I opened all the blinds, but still, I found I wanted more air and light. I had a hard time getting up here, I don't mind telling you.' lollll

I'm afraid I can't make the party. <3

 I think I found the scene where Richard falls out of the window particularly resonant because of Hotel New Hampshire, and that book's line, 'Keep passing the open windows.' Here's my blob bit from that book, which was the first on this second list of hundred, so many books (and 8 years!) ago:

'Keep passing the open windows' is a reference to a sort of morbid but optimistic catchphrase the family passes on to each other from time to time -- it's an allusion to an artist who jumps out of an open window and commits suicide, but leaves a note proclaiming, "Life is serious but art is fun. It is hard work and great art to make life not so serious." I love the confusing poetry of these lines, and the idea that, even in times of great darkness, we can remind each other to simply 'Keep passing the open windows'. [2015 - Survive Alive!] Because Irving is a realist and not remotely bound to the perfect happy ending, one member of the family doesn't manage to keep passing the open windows. But the harmony in the novel's outcome and its ultimate triumph is not in the glamour of a simple and comfortable traditional happy ending, but the messy and raw, yet stunningly brilliant beauty of a complex and nuanced denouement.

So with that, I'll leave you, reminding you all to keep passing the open windows, and embark on Interpreter of Maladies, after which I'll be on my final ten books.

Behind him's the fawn. Before him's the buck.

The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, first published in 1938

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Yearling is a tender tale of hearts being full to the brim, broken in two, and the intensities of affection and longing in the wilds of Florida in the early 1900s. Our cast of characters is listed below. 

The People:

The Baxters (Ezra/Penny/Pa, Ory/Ma, Jody)

The Forresters (Ma, Pa, Lem, Buck, Mill-wheel, Fodder-wing)

The Huttos (Grandma, Oliver)

The Creatures:

Flag (a deer/the yearling), Old Julia, Rip (hunting dogs), 

Old Slewfoot (a persnickety and mean-spirited bear)

The Florida Scrub:

A particular corner of the universe that includes Jody's home (Baxter's Island) and a few neighbors near the town of Volusia

This story is, I think, rather well known, so you may well know what happens, but I'll share a few pertinent details anyway. Jody is a young boy, about 12, I think, living a homesteading sort of life in Florida with his parents, Penny (Pa) and Ory (Ma). They are a happy trio, for the most part, though life is rough, and they largely live hand to mouth. They hunt for their meat, grow their own crops, keep their own livestock, and get water from a local sinkhole, as they don't have a well. They have one set of neighbors a few miles away, the Forresters, who are a rambunctious bunch, and are all men (or boys) except for Ma Forrester. The youngest Forrester, Fodder-wing, so named because of an ill-fated attempt at flying that left him crippled, is Jody's best friend. We follow Jody through a year or so of his adolescence, as he learns to hunt and track with his father, how to tend the crops, and the hardships and difficult choices that need to be made when living so close to nature. Jody longs for a companion, as an only child (his siblings all passed when they were young), so he eventually manages to get his parents to allow him to adopt a baby deer when it is stranded without a mother. He raises the fawn as his own, and eventually names it Flag. They are bosom friends, and Jody feels a joy he has been seeking his whole young life. As Flag ages, though, he becomes more and more like the buck he is growing into, and his shenanigans, once considered cute or annoying, become downright life-threatening to the family. Flag eats the seedlings of the family's crops not once, not twice, but three times, and when a six-foot fence fails to keep him out, Jody's father tells him he must kill the deer. They can't afford to lose another whole season of crops, Penny is ailing, a flood devastated the local game, and Flag is too attached to the family and to Jody to survive in the wild. Jody refuses, of course, and desperately looks for a way out. When he is unable to find one, he returns home with Flag, and his mother, frustrated and feeling like she's out of options, tries to shoot Flag herself. She's a poor shot, though, so she only injures the fawn, and in the end, Jody must race after his injured best friend and kill it. There's a clear symmetry between Jody coming of age and the fawn becoming a yearling, and the brutality that life hands us sometimes as we come into maturity.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well, blobbists, 

 I finished this book about a week ago, but I needed an emotional break before I could even consider blobbing about it. Real talk, I cried for about an hour after I finished the book. I made the smaller and cuddlier of my two cats, Pixie, sit with me for a long time, and I marinated on why it was hitting me so hard. I mean, the book is a work of art, imho. If you haven't read it, even knowing how it ends, I STRONGLY recommend you pick up a copy. It's one of the tenderest stories I've ever read. Finishing it felt a bit like having my heart and soul bared for all to see, and I felt so vulnerable and raw. 

I think part of what hit me was reflecting on the intensity of affection we can develop for pets or fur family, and I thought, well, at least I didn't have to kill my pet! But then I kind of did, because I had to make the difficult decision to put down my previous cat, Suzy Chubsters, after a serious illness and an extended period of her not eating or drinking. It wasn't as violent or graphic as Jody's situation, but he also only knew Flag for a year, and Suze was my girl for 10 years. 

Whew. Tearing up. Anyway, it's not a bad thing to be reminded of her, or of how much I loved her and still love her. It's just emotional, is all. That said, here are the rest of my thoughts on the book, in no particular order. This is another long one, and I won't apologize. (I will not apoloGize for what I have aWOken in you, Sookie!) The book deserves it. <3

The book of LOLS and aws

If you follow my blob, you likely know that I like to write in my books, a habit I started in emulating my cool next-door neighbor. ;) Some people find it distracting that I've written in my books, but I think every book I read is a conversation between me and the work, and I love knowing that I've left the mark of how a book made me feel along the way. Common margin notes of mine include "HMPH" or "BARF" when something is racist/misogynistic/icky, but if I had to summarize the notes of this book, it would be the book of "LOLs" and "awws". There are so many funny zingers and so many great characters, and there are even more moments of expected and then wholly unexpected tenderness in this harsh wilderness. 

The Florida scrub, an essential character in the novel

I read a bit about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings after I finished the book (I don't like to know much in advance), and it seems that she was writing for a long time, but really sort of came into her writerly self when she moved to a 72-acre orange grove in Florida. She got really deeply connected to the land and its natural flora and fauna, and developed close relationships with its human inhabitants. Some of the people she met were the inspiration for the novel. I have to say, I've never considered myself a big Florida girl, what with my exceedingly pale skin and my visceral dislike of heat, but this book made me want to frolic and ramble in the Florida wilds. Here are a few lines that I think capture the Florida scrub and the Baxters' homesteading lifestyle well. I do want to take a moment to acknowledge that the indigenous inhabitants of this present-day part of Florida have been wiped out, the Timucua and Mayaca peoples, and remind my readers that homesteading was not started on a blank slate of land uninhabited by others, as romantic as that notion may be. 

• The peace of the vast aloof scrub had drawn him with the beneficence of its silence.

• The Baxter's smokehouse: The smoke-house was dark and cool, odorous with the smell of hams and bacons, dusty with the ash of hickory. The rafters, studded with square-headed nails for the hanging of meats, were now almost bare. Three shoulders of ham hung, lean and withered, and two bacon sides. A haunch of jerked venison swung beside the smoked alligator meat. Just in case you forgot we were in Florida, there's that GATOR MEAT!

• The clearing, the island of tall pines, made up the world. Life in other places was only a tale that was told, as Oliver Hutto told of Africa and China and Connecticut. This resonated with me, as I feel like my hometown felt like the whole world for a long time.

• Jody, to his Dad, on choosing the land to settle on: 'How come you to pick it, Pa?'

• Jody's dad: 'I jest craved peace, was all.'

• Human beings were a stranger sight in the lonely place of live oak islands and saw-grass ponds and prairies than the creatures.

• The sun came out. The clouds rolled together into great white billowing feather bolsters, and across the east a rainbow arched, so lovely and so various that Jody thought he would burst with looking at it. The earth was pale green, the air itself was all but visible, golden with the rain-washed sunlight, and all the trees and grass and bushes glittered, varnished with the rain-drops. Don't you just want to be there with Jody, and live in that day?

Jody Baxter, our protagonist, a tender-hearted, frolicsome boy

I think it's interesting that this book has been cast as a YA novel in today's world, though YA wasn't a genre when it was first published. I have a lot of complicated feelings about that. I guess my most prominent thoughts are: 

• I would be terribly sad to think that only young people would ever read this novel. I think people of all ages could have incredible reading experiences with it, and I read it at 37, and it was deeply powerful. 

• I don't want to underestimate what young people can process or handle, as I know that the reality is our young people are fierce, talented, incredible, multi-layered humans, and they have immense capacity for feeling and art. That said, this book is heavy. It wrecked me, and I'm not sure I would have been emotionally prepared for it when I was a typical YA reader's age.

That said, here are some of my favorite lines about Jody, to sketch out his character for you. 

• He would like anything that was his own. This motif is so poignantly painted, and it's underscored by the fact that Jody's siblings have all died when they were young, leaving him the only child, but also the only young thing, in his home, a fact which makes his heart ache with loneliness.

• He lay for a moment in torment between the luxury of his bed and the coming day. Ooh, that's me every day.

• His father was the core of safety. Jody's connection to and love for his father is another critical part of this story, and I think Rawlings does such an incredible job of showing how precarious this thread can be in a life as rough and wild as the one the Baxters were living. Penny survives the novel, but he has several extremely close calls, and as a reader, you wonder how Jody would learn the essential wilderness skills his father is teaching him were something to happen to Penny.

• Again Jody longed for something of his own. Fodder-wing would give him the fox squirrel, even, he believed, the baby 'coon. But past experience had taught him not to aggravate his mother with another mouth, no matter how small, to feed. 

• Jody, reflecting after hunting and killing a deer with his father - He wondered by what alchemy it was changed, so that what sickened him one hour, maddened him with hunger the next. It seemed as though there were either two different animals or two different boys. This was one of my favorite passages in the book.

• Jody's exchanges with his mom are so great. Here's one of his first efforts: "Ma, we got milk a-plenty. Cain't I git me a leetle ol' fawn for a pet for me? A spotted fawn, Ma. Cain't I?'
• Ma: "I should just say not. What you mean, milk a-plenty? They ain't a extry drop left from sun to sun. Ma is painted perfectly; she's hard, and sometimes seems hard-hearted, but she is a practical woman living a hard kind of life, through and through.

• Jody does NOT like to be teased about girls, and he very adorably and hilariously gets annoyed when some of the older boys have big battles over women. Here's Jody just before he throws a potato at a girl he has been accused of liking. "Jody glowed with a sense of virtue. He longed to be good and noble. (throws potato) He was humiliated. Yet if he had to do it over again, he would throw another potato at her, a larger one. lololol. This was so well done. 

• Pa, to Jody, after throwing the potato: How on earth come you to do it? 
• Jody: I just hate her. She made a face at me. She's ugly.
• Pa: Well, son, you cain't go thru life chunkin' things at all the ugly women you meet. LOL.

• When Oliver asks Jody to get a message to Twink, his girl, and Jody initially says no. Oliver: I thought you were my friend. Being friends, Jody thought, was a nuisance. heheheheheh. Here's the note he writes back to Oliver:

Dear ollever; yor ol twinkk has dun gode up the rivver. im gladd. yor frend jody. He read it over. He decided in favor of a greater kindness. He crossed out 'im gladd' and wrote in its place 'im sorry'. He felt virtuous. I love this note so much.

• Without Penny, there was no earth. 

• But Flag lived in a secret place in his heart that had long been aching and vacant.

• Without Penny, there was no comfort anywhere.

Fodder-wing, Jody's bestie and youngest of the Forrester clan, tender and parent to many animals

Okay, so I know I've mentioned this elsewhere in the blob, but my spoiler alerts are not really a perfect system. In order to tell you how I felt about a book and share it's most beautiful nuggets with you, I am invariably going to spoil parts of the plot. So, #sorrynotsorry

• Fodder-wing dies in the book. It's painfully sad, and I cried for a solid half hour at this part, too. Jody comes to visit his friend, knowing he was sick, but not knowing he has died, and then he ends up helping the family grieve, though he has no idea how to go about it. Jody whispered 'Hey'. Fodder-wing's silence was intolerable. Now he understood. This was death. Death was a silence that gave back no answer. Fodder-wing would never speak to him again.

• Pa Forrester: 'The one we cain't spare was the one was takened. And him a swivveled, no-account thing, too.' The Forresters, a sturdy, boisterous, often troublesome brood, are broken by the loss of Fodder-wing, and it's absolutely heartbreaking to witness. 

• Ma Forrester, to Jody: 'You pore lamb.' She began to cry again. 'Wouldn't my boy of loved to seed your fawn. He talked about it and he talked about it. He said, 'Jody's got him a brother.' Jody has brought Flag with him (in fact, Fodder-wing is the one who ends up naming him, having thought of Flag before his death) and there's something so desperately poignant about these two boys connecting over their devotion to woodland creatures.

• Jody, reflecting on Fodder-wing's death after watching a family of raccoons: Suddenly it seemed that Fodder-wing had only now gone away with the raccoons. Something of him had been always where the wild creatures fed and played. Something of him would be always near them. Fodder-wing was like the trees. He was of the earth, as they were earthy, with his gnarled, frail roots deep in the sand. He was like the changing clouds and the setting sun and the rising moon. A part of him had always been outside his twisted body. It had come and gone like the wind. It came to Jody that he need not be lonely for his friend again. He could endure his going. Well, and just when I had stopped crying this set me going again. I think I'd like this line read at my funeral. It's just so cyclical and natural and moving. I would like to be where the wild creatures feed and play.

• Jody, on seeing Eulalie Boyle flirting with a ferry boy - Jody was swept with resentment, not of her, but of the ferry-boy. Eulalie in a remote fashion belonged to him, Jody, to do with as he pleased, if only to throw potatoes at her. LOLOLOLOL. 

Penny Baxter, short and sturdy, sure-footed and star tracker and huntsman, humble and brave

I think the ending of the novel, where Penny tells Jody he has to kill Flag, is so gut-wrenching in part because we have spent the novel idolizing Penny with Jody. He is kind, he is so sweet to Jody, he humors his fancies, and he takes his side when Ma is being hard-hearted or overly practical. He doesn't make decisions lightly, and he loves the wilderness he shares breath with, and so when he is the one to make this proclamation, we know, deep in our hearts, that there must really be no other way. Here are some of my favorite Penny bits.

• 'Tell the truth, Jody,' he said, 'and shame the devil. Wa'n't the bee-tree a fine excuse to go a-ramblin'?' The opening scene is Jody having gone 'a-ramblin' as his dad puts it, aka basically ignoring his chores and frolicking in the woods. I think all children should get to go 'a-ramblin', and I would like to do more of it myself. :)

• But Penny's bowels yearned over his son. He gave him something more than his paternity. He found that the child stood wide-eyed and breathless before the miracle of bird and creature, of flower and tree, of wind and rain and sun and moon, as he had always stood.

• His father was stern about not taking more of anything, fish or game, than could be eaten or kept.

• Jody, to Penny, after a terrible snake bite: How you comin, Pa?
• Pa: 'Jest fine, son. Ol' Death gone thievin' elsewhere. But wa'n't it a close squeak!' I love this line so much. Death gone thievin' elsewhere. But a close squeak!

Ma Baxter, voice of reason, arbiter of the milk rations, maker of delicious pone and biscuits

Ma is definitely cast as the 'bad cop' of Jody's parents quite often, but I loved her character, and thought she was really artfully and thoughtfully fleshed out. 

• Jody's mother had accepted her youngest with something of detachment, as though she had given all she had of love and care and interest to those others. Like this - what an intricate detail to show the intensity of loss borne by a mother who buried so many of her previous children. 

• Her good nature rose and fell with the food supply. Let's be honest, so does mine, and mine is nowhere near as precarious as the Baxter's. I went camping with my sisters once on a road trip, and when it was suggested we share a can of lentils for a dinner one night, I went ballistic. I'm probably not the best candidate for wilderness living, at least not without the ability to stockpile crops, canned goods, etc. ;)

• Jody: Ma, Pa says I kin go bring back the fawn.
• She held the coffee-pot in mid-air. 
• 'What fawn?' Lololol. I love the image of the coffee-pot floating mid-air.

• Jody: 'Ain't his eyes purty, Ma?'
• Ma: 'They see a pan o' cornbread too fur.'
• Jody: 'Well, ain't he got a cute, foolish tail, Ma?'
• Ma: 'All deer's flags look the same.'
• Jody: 'But Ma, ain't it cute and foolish?'
• Ma: 'Hit's foolish, a'right.' lolololol.

• Jody waited eagerly for the rest of the tale, then understood that was all there was to it. It was like all his mother's tales. They were like hunts where nothing happened. LOL. I loved this line.

• She would not have gone empty-handed even to the house of an enemy.

Grandma Hutto, not actually Jody's Grandma, but kin nonetheless, and Ma Baxter's nemesis

It's not totally clear what the connection is between Penny and Grandma Hutto, but they have a deep affection for each other, and Ma Baxter does NOT share this warm and fuzzy feeling for her. Their interactions are hilariously spicy.

• She drew gallantry from men as the sun drew water.

• Something about her was forever female and made all men virile.

• Jody: 'You'll love Flag, Grandma. He's so smart, you kin learn him like a dog.'
• Grandma Hutto: 'Course I'll love him. Will he git along with Fluff?'
• Jody: 'He likes dogs. He plays with ourn. When they go on a hunt, he slips off another way and meets up with 'em. He loves a bear hunt good as the dogs.'
• Penny: 'You tell her all them things, you'll leave nothin' good for her to find out about him. Then she mought find out some o' the bad.'
• Jody: 'They's nothin' bad about him,' he said passionately. 
• Ma: 'Only jumpin' on the table and knockin' the tops off the lard cans and buttin' oer the 'taters, and into ever'thing worse'n ten young uns. heh heh heh heh heh

• Penny asks after Grandma Hutto, to which she replies: 'You know I'm made outen whalebone and hell.'
• Penny: 'Ain't the whalebone gittin' a mite limber?'
• Grandma Hutto: 'Tis, but the hell's hot as ever.' God, I love this exchange. I would like to tell people I'm made out of whalebone and hell. Maybe I'll start. ;)

The crane dance - Magic birds were dancing in a mystic marsh.

If you read my blob, then you probably know that I've become an avid birder. If I'm not reading, I may well be out in the marshes, watching the birds. Since this is the case, I had a particular affection for this scene, when Jody and Penny come upon a crane dance.

The cranes were dancing a cotillion as surely as it was danced at Volusia. Two stood apart, erect and white, making a strange music that was part cry and part signing. The rhythm was irregular, like the dance. The other birds were in a circle. In the heart of the circle, several moved counter-clock-wise. The musicians made their music. The dancers raised their wings and lifted their feet, first one and then the other. They sunk their heads deep in their snowy breasts, lifted them and sunk again. They moved soundlessly, part awkwardness, part grace. The dance was solemn. The outer circle shuffled around and around. The group in the center attained a show frenzy. 

And then after: They had seen a thing that was unearthly. They were in a trance from the strong spell of its beauty. 

Flag, our titular yearling, Jody's bosom buddy, affectionate, mischievous, loving, and wild

• The fawn was alone in the night, as [Jody] had been alone. The catastrophe that might take his father had made it motherless. It had lain hungry and bewildered through the thunder and rain and lightning, close to the devastated body of its dam, waiting for the stiff form to arise and give it warmth and food and comfort. I'm only now realizing the symmetry here also, in that Jody worries he'll lose his crucial parent, just as Flag has lost his. 

• Suddenly Jody was unwilling to have Mill-wheel with him. If the fawn was dead, or could not be found, he could not have his disappointment seen. And if the fawn was there, the meeting would be so lovely and so secret that he could not endure to share it. 

• Jody, on getting the fawn to trust him: His heart thumped with the marvel of its acceptance of him. Haven't we all felt this as pet owners or parents? This marvel that a creature would trust us, accept us, love us?

• He remembered his father's saying that a fawn would follow that had been first carried. He started away slowly. The fawn stared after him. He came back to it and stroked it and walked away again. It took a few wobbling steps toward him and cried piteously. It was willing to follow him. It belonged to him. It was his own. He was light-headed with his joy.

• Jody: 'Look, Ma, I found him.'
• Ma: 'I see.' LOL.
• Jody: 'Ain't he purty, Ma? Lookit them spots all in rows. Lookit them big eyes. Ain't he purty?'
• Ma: 'He's powerful young. Hit'll take milk for him a long whiles. I don't know as I'd of give my consent, if I'd knowed he was so young.'
• Penny: 'Ory, I got one thing to say, and I'm sayin' it now, and then I'll have no more talk of it. The leetle fawn's as welcome in this house as Jody. It's hissen. We'll raise it without grudgment o' milk or meal. You got me to answer to, do I ever hear you quarrelin' about it. This is Jody's fawn jest like Julia's my dog.'

• When Jody first gives his milk to Flag: The fawn blew and sucked and snorted. It closed its eyes dreamily. It was ecstasy to feel its tongue against his hand.

• When Jody brings Flag inside the cabin after a bear attacks their livestock: Its sharp heels clicked on the wooden floor. Its ribs lifted and fell with its breathing. He had been cudgeling his wits for an excuse to bring the fawn inside at night to sleep with him, and now he had one that could not be disputed. He would smuggle it in and out as long as possible, in the name of peace.

• It had to be shut in the shed when the Baxters ate. It butted and bleated and knocked dishes out of their hands. 

• Jody, on his mother: She could not understand how clean the fawn was, and would not admit how sweet it smelled.

• He loved him more than ever, in his sin.

Referents and Reverberations

I suppose some of these aren't surprising, but some of them caught me unawares. The notes reminded me of Joe in Great Expectations (wot larks!), the parental relationships reminded me of the young boy in Winesburg, struggling to connect with his mother, the southern dialects and somewhat mischievous young boy antics reminded me of Huck, and the intensity of the relationship between Flag and Jody reminded me of how important the garden feels to Mary.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens

Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson

Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

Lines I Loved

• The afternoon was alive with a soft stirring.

• He was addled with April. He was dizzy with Spring.

• A mark was on him from the day's delight.

• He stood now in the close odorous dusk of his store like a captain in the hold of his ship.

• Watchfulness lived sentinel in his brain.

• It was all the better for being secret.

• They had seen marvels, and the older they were, the more marvels they had seen. He felt himself moving into a mystic company.

• They sat smothered under the thick air of sorrow that only the winds of time could blow away.

• Dinner and supper had both been meager and indifferently cooked, as though she took her revenge from behind her own citadel, the cook-pot.

Words That Were New to Me:

clabber - noun - milk that has naturally clotted on souring. verb - curdle or cause to curdle.

feist - a small hunting dog, descended from the terriers brought over to the United States by British miners and other immigrants

fetter-bush - an evergreen shrub, Lyonia lucida, of the heath family, native to the southern U.S., having clusters of fragrant, white flowers

furbelow - noun - a gathered strip or pleated border of a skirt or petticoat. verb - adorn with trimmings.

mumbledepeg - a game in which the players try to flip a knife from various positions so that the blade will stick into the ground

tar-flower - (Bejaria racemosa) a woody evergreen shrub that produces fragrant and showy white to pinkish flowers

Well, blobbers, we've done it! I've cried at least two more times while crafting this, but I have MADE it to the end of this entry. I'll leave you with a few closing lines.

Pa to Jody, on wishing Grandma Hutto really was his grandmother. Folks that seems like kin-folks, is kin-folks. Yes. Folks that seem like kin-folks is kin-folks. Period. Friendfam, foundfam, bosom buds. Kinfolk, all.

He could go neither forward nor back. Something was ended. Nothing was begun. This is how Jody feels at the end of the book, and it feels so relatable.

It was unbelievable, Jody thought. He was wanted. Jody tries to run away after Flag's death, but he gets overwhelmed and frightened, and then begins to worry his parents actually aren't looking for his return. But he finds his father waiting with open arms, and he aches with warmth, knowing he is wanted. 

And so I'll leave you to your beds, dear readers, hoping that you have kin-folk of your own, whether real or imagined, and that you lay your heads on the pillow tonight knowing you are wanted, at least by me. Sweet dreams, keep each other safe, keep passing the open windows, and keep safe. Good night.

Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson, first published in 1919

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Winesburg, Ohio is a collection of stories that center around the denizens of a small town in Ohio in the early 1900s. It takes us into the hearts and minds of the local characters, revealing not just their daily habitudes, trials, and tribulations, but also their quirks, their idiosyncrasies, and their darkest secrets. The characters occasionally intertwine in the various stories, and the whole work is knit together as a kind of 360 degree panorama of a slice of life at a moment in time. I'm sharing my attempt to make sense of the connections between the characters below. 

 Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Well, well well, dear blobbists,

    It has been some time since my last blob, and as usual, I've read many other books between this one and the last blob entry. This is my latest book bingo (I think the eleventh I've undertaken, now) and I've really been enjoying the last few books. I'm going to do a blob post at some point about all the various book bingos, so we'll save my thoughts on those books for later. 

   For now, let's focus on Winesburg. I have to say two things: (1) I stopped, started, re-started, and re-read this book probably six different times. To be fair, short stories are really not my favorite genre. That being said, (2) I loved this book. It definitely took me a few tries to get squarely into the world of Winesburg, but when I did, I was totally hooked. I know Sherwood Anderson is not a name I knew before reading this book, so I let myself read the introduction to my edition, and here are some nuggets I found interesting. 

At the age of 36, he left behind his business and moved to Chicago, becoming one of the rebellious writers and cultural bohemians in the group that has since come to be called the 'Chicago Renaissance'.

It was in the freedom of the city, in its readiness to put up with deviant styles of life, that Anderson found the strength to settle accounts with but also to release his affection for the world of small-town America.

Narrow, intense, almost claustrophobic, the result is a book about extreme states of being, the collapse of men and women who have lost their psychic bearings and now hover, at best tolerated, at the edge of the little community in which they live.

 Irving Howe wrote those lines, and I think they're very poignant. I felt a real kinship with Sherwood as I read and re-read this novel. I, too, grew up in small-town America, and the middle of Pennsylvania is really not so different from the middle of Ohio. I, too, relocated to a larger city, and I, too, feel I must both 'settle accounts with' and 'release affection for' my hometown, especially in recent years and political times. 

Okay, so fair warning, this blob entry is on the long side, but I promise it's worth it. Because Sherwood Anderson lays out his novel as 22 'grotesques' or 'vignettes', I've chosen to give you little windows into my favorite ones, which, as it turns out, is almost all of them. #sorrynotsorry 

So grab a mug of tea, a pumpkin spice latte (they're 20 years old, did you know? ;)), or your cozy beverage of choice, and come with me to a world of pure imagination! Wait, strike that, reverse it! Come with me to small-town Ohio, and let's meet the Winesburgians together.

The Book of the Grotesque, aka the faces of Winesburg [For each vignette, I'll list Anderson's title in bold, and the italics are my take on it]

I love that Anderson references the 'grotesque' style, which, if you didn't know, means this: a style of decorative art characterized by fanciful or fantastic human and animal forms often interwoven with foliage or similar figures that may distort the natural into absurdity, ugliness, or caricature. 

From Merriam-Webster: 

During the Italian Renaissance, Romans of culture took a great interest in their country's past and began excavating ancient buildings. During their excavations, they uncovered chambers (known in Italian as grotte, in reference to their cavelike appearance) decorated with artwork depicting fantastic combinations of human and animal forms interwoven with strange fruits and flowers. The Italian word grottesca became the name for this unique art style, and by 1561 it had mutated into the English noun "grotesque." The adjective form of "grotesque" was first used in the early 17th century to describe the decorative art but is now used to describe anything bizarre, incongruous, or unusual.

 Here are some lines I liked from the opening story: 

• Why quarrel with an old man concerning his thoughts?

• You can see for yourself how the old man, who had spent all of his life writing and was filled with words, would write hundreds of pages concerning this matter. The subject would become so big in his mind that he himself would be in danger of becoming a grotesque.

Hands, aka Wing Biddlebaum's worst enemy

One of the things I loved most about Winesburg was the names. They feel so perfectly fictional and yet also so perfectly apt. Wing Biddlebaum was one of my favorites. Wing Biddlebaum was a school teacher, beloved by his male students, but after one of his students has a nightmare and recounts a (fictional) story of Wing Biddlebaum acting inappropriately with him to his parents, the families run him out of town. 

• Wing Biddlebaum, forever frightened and beset by a ghostly band of doubts, did not think of himself as in any way a part of the life of the town where he had lived for twenty years.

• The story of Wing Biddlebaum's hands is worth a book in itself. Sympathetically set forth it would tap many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men. It is a job for a poet.

• He was one of those men in whom the force that creates life is diffused, not centralized. Under the caress of his hands doubt and disbelief went out of the minds of the boys and they also began to dream.

• Although he did not understand what had happened he felt that the hands must be to blame. This is such an amazing line.

Paper Pills, aka Doctor Reefy's written musings and perseverations as a man in love

• The story of Doctor Reefy and his courtship of the tall dark girl who became his wife and lent her money to him is a very curious story. It is delicious, like the twisted little apples that grow in the orchards of Winesburg.

• Only the few know the sweetness of the twisted apples.

The name of the town itself is so poignant as well, as the orchards and farms and fields are woven into the narrative.

Mother, aka Elizabeth Willard, wife of the local hotel owner

Elizabeth Willard, if you consult my perfectly sketched out character map (LOL) is George Willard's mother. George is about the closest thing we have to a protagonist in this novel, though other people's opinions of him in the town vary. I felt for mother. She comes up again, so stay tuned.

•  It seemed like a rehearsal of her own life, terrible in its vividness.

• The hotel was continually losing patronage because of its shabbiness and she thought of herself as also shabby. 

• 'He is groping about, trying to find himself', she thought. 'He is not a dull clod, all words and smartness. Within him there is a secret something that is striving to grow. It is the thing I let be killed in myself.'

The Philosopher, aka Doctor Parcival, a man with plenty of money but very few patients

I loved Doctor Parcival because he reminded me of my sister, who is currently an excellent doctor, but struggling with a deeply broken system of primary care that's leaving her burned out and overrun again and again. Doctor Parcival may have found a magical solution, though I don't think he's sharing his secrets ;0)

• The lid of the left eye twitched; it fell down and snapped up; it was exactly as though the lid of the eye were a window shade and someone stood inside the doctor's head playing with the cord.

• 'If you have your eyes open you will see that although I call myself a doctor I have mighty few patients...There is a reason for that. It is not an accident and it is not because I do not know as much of medicine as anyone here. I do not want patients.' See! Simple! He doesn't want patients!

• The tales that Doctor Parcival told George Willard began nowhere and ended nowhere.

• Sometimes the boy thought they must all be inventions, a pack of lies. And then again he was convinced that they contained the very essence of truth.

Nobody Knows, aka George Willard's secret late night rendezvous

There are quite a few romantic/courtship tales in this book, but this was one of my favorites.

• Through street after street went George Willard, avoiding the people who passed. He crossed and recrossed the road. When he passed a street lamp he pulled his hat down over his face. He did not dare think. In his mind there was a fear but it was a new kind of fear. He was afraid the adventure on which he had set out would be spoiled, that he would lose courage and turn back.

• Louise Trunnion came out across the potato patch holding the dish cloth in her hand. 'How do you know I want to go out with you,' she said sulkily. 'What makes you so sure?' lolololol.

• The young newspaper reporter had received a letter from Louise Trunnion. It had come that morning to the office of the Winesburg Eagle. The letter was brief. 'I'm yours if you want me', it said. He though it annoying that in the darkness by the fence she had pretended there was nothing between them. 'She has a nerve! Well gracious sakes, she has a nerve,' he muttered as he went along the street and passed a row of vacant lots where corn grew. haghaghaghaghaghagh. Louise is like note? What note. Nope. Wasn't me. But she does come out and smooch George a bit. ;)

Godliness, aka Jesse Bentley's greed for glory and its supposedly biblical repercussions

This story veers away from the others a bit in that it's broken into four parts. I won't go into the specifics of what happens in all of them, but it centers around Jesse Bentley, mostly in his old age, as a farm owner, father and then grandfather, and man of God.

• The Bentley farming men - A kind of crude and animal-like poetic fervor took possession of them. On the road home they stood up on the wagon seats and shouted at the stars. What a beautiful line.

• Jesse Bentley was a fanatic. He was a man born out of his time and place and for this he suffered and made others suffer.

• Like a thousand other strong men who have come into the world here in America in these later times, Jesse was but half strong. He could master others but he could not master himself.

• He would have given much to achieve peace and in him was a fear that peace was the thing he could not achieve.

• He grew avaricious and was impatient that the farm contained only six hundred acres. Pish posh! Just six hundred acres! Jesse's a bit of a tough cookie to like, if you hadn't picked that up yet.

• David Hardy, Jesse's grandson, after running away - He could not believe that so delightful a thing had happened. With her own hands Louise Hardy bathed his tired young body and cooked him food...He thought that he would have been willing to go back through the frightful experience a thousand times to be sure of finding at the end of the long black road a thing so lovely as his mother had suddenly become. Louise is Jesse's daughter, and for various reasons, she doesn't exactly shower David with affection. I so felt for little David when he got found after running away and finally felt his mother's affection and care.

• Later when he drove back home and when night came on and the stars came out it was harder to get back the old feeling of a close and personal God who lived in the sky overhead and who might at any moment reach out his hand, touch him on the shoulder, and appoint for him some heroic task to be done. Jesse gets a little (okay, a lot) obsessed with what God's plans are for him, and it gets a little creepy and eventually scares David away, much to Jesse's chagrin.

• Louise, on trying to fit in - It seemed to her that between herself and all the other people in the world, a wall had been built up and that she was living just on the edge of some warm inner circle of life that must be quite open and understandable to others. She became obsessed with the thought that it wanted but a courageous act on her part to make all of her association with people something quite different, and that it was possible by such an act to pass into a new life as one opens a door and goes into a room. Man, don't we all feel that way sometimes? I know I sure do. I walk by houses that are lit warmly at night in the city, and I think, just one simple set of steps and I could be over that threshold, thrust into that warmth. 

A Man of Ideas, aka Joe Welling, self-proclaimed journalist extraordinaire

• Joe Welling - Joe himself was small of body and in his character unlike anyone else in town. He was like a tiny little volcano that lies silent for days and then suddenly spouts fire.

• He was beset by ideas and in the throes of one of his ideas was uncontrollable.

• Although the seizures that came upon him were harmless enough, they could not be laughed away. They were overwhelming. Astride an idea, Joe was overmastering. His personality became gigantic. There's something so artistic in the way Anderson writes; he paints with words, and this is a great example.

• Joe, giving advice to George Willard, on how to write newspaper articles for the Winesburg Eagle - Becoming more excited Joe Welling crowded the young reporter against the front of the feed store. He appeared to be lost in thought, rolling his eyes about and running a thin nervous hand through his hair. A smile spread over his face and his gold teeth glittered. 'You get out your note book', he commanded. 'You carry a little pad of paper in your pocket don't you? I knew you did. Well, you set this down. I thought of it the other day. Let's take decay. Now what is decay? It's fire. It burns up wood and other things. You never thought of that? Of course not. This sidewalk here and this feed store, the trees down the street they're all on fire. They're burning up. Decay you see is always going on. It doesn't stop. Water and paint can't stop it. If a thing is iron, then what? It rusts, you see. That's fire, too. The world is on fire. Start your pieces in the paper that way. Just say in big letters 'The World Is On Fire.' That will make 'em look up. They'll say you're a smart one. I don't care. I don't envy you. I just snatched that idea out of the air. I would make a newspaper hum. You got to admit that... I should start a newspaper myself, that's what I should do. I'd be a marvel. Everybody knows that. This cracked me up. Got that, everyone? All newspaper articles should just start with THE WORLD IS ON FIRE, and then go from there. 

Adventure, aka Alice Hindman, clerk at the dry goods store, left behind by Ned Currie

There are a lot of characters I felt empathy for and maybe some concern about their well-being, but I don't want to give the impression that this is a sad book. It's contemplative, and raw, and true, but it is also warm, and vivid, and full of care. Alice's story was like that. She falls for a man named Ned Currie and he moves to a big city and then doesn't return for her like he said he would. She ends up living with her mother, and she won't let herself fall for other men. 

• After running around in the rain at night and attempting to offer herself to a nearly deaf old man - 'What is the matter with me? I will do something dreadful if I am not careful', she thought, and turning her face to the wall, began trying to force herself to face bravely the fact that many people must live and die alone, even in Winesburg.

Respectability, aka the opposite of disgusting, vile, misogynistic Wash Williams

This story was hard to read, because, as you can see from my character map, Wash Williams is an asshat. I did like the description of him, though.

• Wash Williams, the telegraph operator of Winesburg, was the ugliest thing in town. His girth was immense, his neck thin, his legs feeble. He was dirty. Everything about him was unclean. Even the whites of his eyes looked soiled.

The Thinker, aka Seth Richmond, destined to play second fiddle to George Willard

How are you doing, blobbists? Need a break? Take a break! Stretch, get a snack, pet a cat or whatever animal you may or may not share your home with. Come back when you're ready!

Seth Richmond is one of a few people about town who have some strong feelings about George Willard. 

• Seth's mother, on trying to scold him - So determined was she that the boy should this time feel the weight of her wrath that, although she would not allow the marshal to interfere with his adventure, she got out a pencil and paper and wrote down a series of sharp, stinging reproofs she intended to pour out upon him. The reproofs she committed to memory, going about the garden and saying them aloud like an actor memorizing his part. I loved this image. She can't bring herself to scold her son, and he always has a good excuse for his behavior, so she tries to practice in the garden to be mean.

• He was lonely and had begun to think that loneliness was a part of his character, something that would always stay with him. This loneliness, or disconnectedness, is a running theme in Winesburg, but like I said, it's not depressing. I think it more so speaks to the idea that we all have periods of of our lives where we feel invisible, or misunderstood, or apart from the masses.

• With calm eyes he watched the gesticulating lively figures of his companions. He wasn't particularly interested in what was going on, and sometimes wondered if he would ever be particularly interested in anything.

• He was depressed by the thought that he was not a part of the life in his own town, but the depression did not cut deeply as he did not think of himself as at fault. 

• 'George belongs to this town... It's different with me. I don't belong. I'll not make a fuss about it, but I'm going to get out of here.' Interestingly, lots of people think George belongs to the town, and fits with the town, though George himself wants to leave Winesburg.

• George tells his friend Seth to go flirt with Helen on his behalf, which Seth doesn't want to do, so he goes out with Helen himself instead - Seth and Helen walked through the streets beneath the trees. Heavy clouds had drifted across the face of the moon, and before them in the deep twilight went a man with a short ladder upon his shoulder. Hurrying forward, the man stopped at the street crossing and, putting the ladder against the wooden lamp-post, lighted the village lights so that their way was half lighted, half darkened, by the lamps and by the deepening shadows cast by the low-branched trees. In the tops of the trees the wind began to play, disturbing the sleeping birds so that they flew about calling plaintively. In the lighted space before one of the lamps, two bats wheeled and circled, pursuing the gathering swarm of night flies. God, this is maybe one of my favorite passages in literature of all time. It just feels so intimate and so magical. It reminds me of when Montag first meets Clarisse in Fahrenheit-451: 

The autumn leaves blew over the moonlit pavement in such a way as to make the girl who was moving there seem fixed to a sliding walk, letting the motion of the wind and the leaves carry her forward. Her head was half bent to watch her shoes stir the circling leaves. Her face was slender and milk-white, and in it was a kind of gentle hunger that touched over everything with tireless curiosity. It was a look, almost, of pale surprise; the dark eyes were so fixed to the world that no move escaped them. Her dress was white and it whispered.

• Seth turned half around on the bench, striving to see [Helen's] face in the darkness. He thought her infinitely more sensible and straightforward than George Willard, and was glad he had come away from his friend. lololol. That's right, Seth!

Tandy, aka the quality of being strong to be loved

This story is bizarre, and mostly takes place as a conversation between a stranger and a man sitting with his five-year-old daughter.

• He wanted to cure himself of the habit of drink, and thought that by escaping from his city associates and living in a rural community he would have a better chance in the struggle with the appetite that was destroying him. His sojourn in Winesburg was not a success. The dullness of the passing hours led to his drinking harder than ever.

• To Tom Hard and his five-year-old daughter - 'Drink is not the only thing to which I am addicted. There is something else. I am a lover and have not found my thing to love. That is a big point if you know enough to realize what I mean. It makes my destruction inevitable, you see. There are few who understand that.' Isn't that a great line? 

• 'There is a woman coming. I have missed her, you see. She did not come in my time. You may be the woman. It would be like fate to let me stand in her presence once, on such an evening as this, when I have destroyed myself with drink and she is as yet only a child.'

• 'They think it's easy to be a woman, to be loved, but I know better. I understand,' he cried. 'Perhaps of all men I alone understand. I know about her struggles and her defeats. It is because of her defeats that she is to me the lovely one. Out of her defeats has been born a new quality in woman. I have a name for it. I call it Tandy. I made up the name when I was a true dreamer and before my body became vile. It is the quality of being strong to be loved. It is something men need from women and they do not get.' Okay, so I obviously don't think it's easy to be a woman, but I loved this exchange.

Loneliness, aka Enoch Robinson and his room when his shadow people all left

Enoch was another one of my favorites. His story is about a time when he lived in New York, and first he had people over to his apartment all the time, but then, after a while, he decided to stop letting people in. Here's how it plays out.

• Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. 

• He never grew up and of course he couldn't understand people and he couldn't make people understand him.

• The story of Enoch is in fact the story of a room almost more than it is the story of a man. 

• In a half indignant mood he stopped inviting people into his room and presently got into the habit of locking the door. He began to think that enough people had visited him, that he did not need people any more. With quick imagination he began to invent his own people to whom he could really talk and to whom he explained the things he had been unable to explain to living people. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits of men and women among whom he went, in his turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch Robinson had ever seen had left with him some essence of himself, something he could mould and change to suit his own fancy, something that understood all about such things. Okay, so I know this makes Enoch sound pretty unhinged, but as an introvert, I was kind of like, I get it! Just make up your OWN people, Enoch! ;)

• There must have been two dozen of the shadow people, invented by the child-mind of Enoch Robinson, who lived in the room with me.

• On trying to let a woman into his life - 'I wanted her to understand but, don't you see, I couldn't let her understand. I felt that then she would know everything, that I would be submerged, drowned out, you see.'

• 'Things went to smash. Out she went through the door and all the life there had been in the room followed her out. She took all of my people away.' 

• 'It was warm and friendly in my room but now I'm all alone.' Poor Enoch!

"Queer", aka what Elmer Cowley wants under no circumstances to be

Elmer Crowley is another member of the Winesburg community who doesn't care for George Willard. 

• On a salesman pitching them on fasteners instead of buttons - "You better grab your things and get out! We're through being fools here! We ain't going to buy any more stuff until we begin to sell. We ain't going to keep on being queer and have folks staring and listening. 

• Elmer, to his father, explaining his harsh reaction - "Well, I meant it. I think we've been queer long enough." Scratching his grey beard with his long dirty fingers, the merchant looked at his son with the same wavering uncertain stare with which he had confronted the traveling man. 'I'll be starched,' he said softly. 'Well, well, I'll be washed and ironed and starched!' I loved this so much. I'm going to start saying this. I'll be starched! I'll be washed and ironed and starched! I mean, I haven't starched anything in like 2 decades, but it's a great saying.

• George Willard, he felt, belonged to the town, typified the town, represented in his person the spirit of the town. Elmer Cowley could not have believed that George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret unnamable desires visited also his mind. Did he not represent public opinion and had not the public opinion of Winesburg condemned the Cowleys to queerness?

• Elmer had lived in Winesburg for a year and had made no friends. He was, he felt, one condemned to go through life without friends and he hated the thought. Aw, Elmer, no one should go through life without friends! You could be friends with Enoch! Or Alice!

The Untold Lie, aka what Ray Pearson can't or won't bring himself to say to Hal Winters

This story was interesting. Again, a little or maybe a lot misogynistic, in that it's about how trapped men feel when they get a woman pregnant and feel obligated to marry her, but still poetic.

• Most boys have seasons of wishing they could die gloriously instead of just being grocery clerks and going on with their humdrum lives. 

• Hal Winters, to Ray Pearson, an older man - 'I've got Nell in trouble. Perhaps you've been in the same fix yourself. Shall I put myself into the harness to be worn out like an old horse? Shall I do it or shall I tell Nell to go to the devil? Come on, you tell me, Whatever you say, Ray, I'll do.'

• He knew there was only one thing to say to Hal Winters, son of old Windpeter Winters, only one thing that all his own training and all the beliefs of the people he knew would approve, but for his life he couldn't say what he knew he should say.

• Hal, when Ray finally decides to share his thoughts - 'You came to tell me, eh? well never mind telling me anything. I'm not a coward and I've already made up my mind. Nell ain't no fool. She didn't ask me to marry her. I want to marry her. I want to settle down and have kids.'

• Ray, to himself - 'It's just as well. Whatever I told him would have been a lie.'

Drink, aka Tom Foster's night of thrilling fantasy

I loved this story about a sweet boy, Tom, getting drunk. It reminded me of when David gets drunk in David Copperfield. 

Davy, on the first night he gets really drunk out with Steerforth and friends: Somebody was leaning out of my bedroom window, refreshing his forehead against the cool stone of the parapet, and feeling the air upon his face. It was myself. I was addressing myself as 'Copperfield,' and saying, 'Why did you try to smoke? You might have known you couldn't do it.' Now, somebody was unsteadily contemplating his features in the looking-glass. That was I too. I was very pale in the looking-glass; my eyes had a vacant appearance; and my hair - only my hair, nothing else - looked drunk. Oh yes, Davy, just your hair looked drunk, I'm sure. ;)

• All through the night as the train rattled along, the grandmother told Tom tales of Winesburg and of how he would enjoy his life working in the fields and shooting wild things in the woods there. She could not believe that the tiny village of fifty years before had grown into a thriving town in her absence, and in the morning when the train came to Winesburg did not want to get off. I felt so bad for his grandma! Things work out okay for them, after all, but what a shock that would be!

• In an odd way [Tom] stood in the shadow of the wall of life, was meant to stand in the shadow.

• [Tom] had always the power to be a part of and yet distinctly apart from the life about him.

• The most absurd little things made Tom Foster happy. That, I suppose, was why people loved him. In Hern's Grocery they would be roasting coffee on a Friday afternoon, preparatory to the Saturday rush of trade, and the rich odor invaded lower Main Street. Tom Foster appeared and sat on a box at the rear of the store. For an hour he did not move but sat perfectly still, filling his being with the spicy odor that made him half drunk with happiness. 'I like it,' he said gently. 'It makes me think of things far away, places and things like that.' Yes, Tom! I couldn't agree more! I love the smell of coffee.

•  And then came the spring night when he got drunk. Tom was wild on that night. He was like an innocent young buck of the forest that has eaten of some maddening weed. The thing began, ran its course, and was ended in one night, and you may be sure that no one in Winesburg was any the worse for Tom's outbreak. In the first place, the night was one to make a sensitive nature drunk. The trees along the residence streets of the town were all newly clothed in soft green leaves, in the gardens behind the houses men were puttering about in vegetable gardens, and in the air there was a hush, a waiting kind of silence very stirring to the blood.

• Tom Foster's voice arose, and for once in his life he became almost excited. 'It was like making love, that's what I mean. Don't you see how it is? It hurt me to do what I did and made everything strange. That's why I did it. I'm glad, too. It taught me something, that's it, that's what I wanted. Don't you understand? I wanted to learn things, you see. That's why I did it.' Tom adorably tells George Willard that he's been gallivanting about with Helen White, with whom he is smitten, and George gets upset because he knows for a fact Helen White has not gone out with Tom at all that evening, but Tom is just on cloud nine with his little fantasy ride

Death, aka one of Elizabeth Willard's lovers

'Mother' is back. She has a brief, almost non-existent love affair with Doctor Reefy (his wife has long since died) that mostly consists of very deep conversations.

• She remembered the arms of men that had held her when adventure was a possible thing for her. Gah, this is such an exquisitely complex line!

• Elizabeth, on feeling stuck - 'I wanted to get out of town, out of my clothes, out of my marriage, out of my body, out of everything. I wanted to run away from everything but I wanted to run towards something too.' Elizabeth sprang out of the chair and began to walk about in the office. She walked as Doctor Reefy thought he had never seen anyone walk before. To her whole body there was a swing, a rhythm that intoxicated him. When she came and knelt on the floor beside his chair he took her into his arms and began to kiss her passionately. 'You dear! You lovely dear! Oh you lovely dear!' he muttered and thought he held in his arms not the tired-out woman of forty-one but a lovely and innocent girl who had been able by some miracle to project herself out of the husk of the body of the tired-out woman. Doctor Reefy did not see the women he had held in his arms again until after her death.

• Elizabeth's father gives her $800 as an 'escape fund' when she is first married - As for the eight hundred dollars the dead woman had kept hidden so long and that was to give George Willard his start in the city, it lay in the tin box behind the plaster by the foot of his mother's bed. Elizabeth had put it there a week after her marriage, breaking the plaster away with a stick. Then she got one of the workmen her husband was at that time employing about the hotel to mend the wall. 'I jammed up the corner of the bed against it,' she had explained to her husband, unable at the moment to give up her dream of release, the release that after all came to her but twice in her life, in the moments when her lovers Death and Doctor Reefy held her in their arms. Alas!

Sophistication, aka George Willard's coming of age

• George Willard, the Ohio village boy, was fast growing into manhood and new thoughts had been coming into his mind. All that day, amid the jam of people at the Fair, he had gone about feeling lonely. He was about to leave Winesburg to go away to some city where he hoped to get work on a city newspaper and he felt grown up. He felt old and a little tired. Memories awoke in him. To his mind his new sense of maturity set him apart, made of him a half-tragic figure. He wanted someone to understand the feeling that had taken possession of him after his mother's death. 

• There is a time in the life of every boy when he for the first time takes the backward view of life. Perhaps that is the moment when he crosses the line into manhood. The boy is walking through the streets of his town. He is thinking of the future and of the figure he will cut in the world. Ambitions and regrets awake within him. Suddenly something happens; he stops under a tree and waits as for a voice calling his name. Ghosts of old things creep into his consciousness; the voices outside of himself whisper a message concerning the limitations of life. From being quite sure of himself and his future he becomes not at all sure. If he be an imaginative boy a door is torn open and for the first time he looks out upon the world, seeing, as though they marched in procession before him, the countless figures of men who before his time have come out of nothingness into the world, lived their lives and again disappeared into nothingness. The sadness of sophistication has come to the boy. This line reminded me of this moment in the last Proust installment: 

Revolving the gloomy thoughts which I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion and in my absent-minded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought I recognised in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.…Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” and almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon the two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Marks’s had, recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place–from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge–in the series of forgotten days. As you know, Proust can be a bit verbose, but something about the boy walking through his hometown, measuring his steps and his thoughts, echoed for me.

• George and Helen climbed the hill to the Fair Ground, coming by the path past Waterworks Pond. The feeling of loneliness and isolation that had come to the young man in the crowded streets of his town was both broken and intensified by the presence of Helen. What he felt was reflected in her.

Departure, aka when George leaves Winesburg in his rear view

Well blobbists, we've reached the last vignette I'm highlighting! And sooprize! George is actually not so delightfully happy in Winesburg, he's ready to move up and out. Here's how Anderson recounts George's last day in town:

• Young George Willard got out of bed at four in the morning. It was April and the young tree leaves were just coming out of their buds. The trees along the residence streets in Winesburg are maple and the seeds are winged. When the wind blows they whirl crazily about, filling the air and making a carpet underfoot.

• All through his boyhood and young manhood George Willard had been in the habit of walking on Trunion Pike, He had been in the midst of that great open place on winter nights when it was covered with snow and only the moon looked down at him; he had been there in the fall when bleak winds blew and on summer evenings when the air vibrated with the song of insects. On the April morning he wanted to go there again, to walk in the silence. He did walk to where the road dipped down by a little stream two miles from town and then turned and walked silently back again. When he got to Main Street clerks were sweeping the sidewalks before the stores. 'Hey, you George. How does it feel to be going away?' they asked.

• After George counted his money he looked out the window and was surprised to see that the train was still in Winesburg. The young man, going out of his town to meet the adventure of his life, began to think but he did not think of anything very big or dramatic. Things like his mother's death, his departure from Winesburg, the uncertainty of his future life in the city, the serious and larger aspects of his life did not come into his mind. 

• He thought of little things - Turk Smollet wheeling boards through the main street of his town in the morning, a tall woman, beautifully gowned, who had once stayed overnight at his father's hotel, Butch Wheeler the lamp lighter of Winesburg hurrying through the streets on a summer evening and holding a torch in his hand, Helen White standing by a window in the Winesburg post office and putting a stamp on an envelope.

• The young man's mind was carried away by his growing passion for dreams. One looking at him would not have thought him particularly sharp. With the recollection of little things occupying his mind he closed his eyes and leaned back in the car seat. He stayed that way for a long time and when he aroused himself and again looked out of the car window the town of Winesburg had disappeared and his life there had become but a background on which to paint the dreams of his manhood. This is the last line of the novel.

Lines I Particularly Liked

• I was a Democrat here in Winesburg when it was a crime to be a Democrat. In the old days they fairly hunted us with guns. (Tom Willard, father to George, husband to Elizabeth)

• As he grew more and more excited the red of his fingers deepened. It was as though the hands had been dipped in blood that had dried and faded. (Tom Willy, local bartender)

• Have you ever thought it strange that I have money for my needs although I do nothing? (Doctor Parcival)

• Louise and her husband did not live happily together and everyone agreed that she was to blame. (Louise Bentley, daughter to Jesse, mother to David Hardy)

• In the darkness it will be easier to say things. (Louise Bentley, trying to find the courage to flirt with John Hardy)

• The bartender had come to woo, not to threaten, and was angry with himself because of his failure. (Ed Handby, in love with Belle Carpenter)

• In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. (George Willard and Helen White, the night after the fair)

Referents and Reverberations

In case you've forgotten, this is the section where I mention what books this book reminded me of, whether they came before (referent) or after (reverberation).

• The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
• Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
• David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
• The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
• Fahrenheit-451, Ray Bradbury

Now, before I leave you to the rest of your evening, I'll share my favorite passages. 

In her bed, during the long hours alone, the little fears that had visited her had become giants. Now they were all gone. 'When I get back to my room I shall sleep,' she murmured gratefully. Elizabeth Willard

There in the country all sounds were pleasant sounds. I love sleeping with the windows open at my mom's house, hearing the wind and the insects and the birds.

It was early evening of a day in the late fall and the Winesburg County Fair had brought crowds of country people into town. The day had been clear and the night came on warm and pleasant. On the Trunion Pike, where the road after it left town stretched away between berry fields now covered with dry brown leaves, the dust from passing wagons arose in clouds. Children, curled into little balls, slept on the straw scattered on wagon beds. Their hair was full of dust and their fingers black and sticky. The dust rolled away over the fields and the departing sun set it ablaze with colors. In the main street of Winesburg crowds filled the stores and the sidewalks, Night came on, horses whinnied, the clerks in the stores ran madly about, children become lost and cried lustily, an American town worked terribly at the task of amusing itself. I love this description so much. The county fair is a big part of my life, and the description some century later hasn't changed all that much.

George and Helen arose and walked away into the darkness. They went along a path past a field of corn that had not yet been cut. The wind whispered among the dry corn blades. As a girl who grew up walking and running around fields of corn, I loved this line.

There is something memorable in the experience to be had by going into a fair ground that stands at the edge of a Middle Western town on a night after the annual fair has been held. The sensation is one never to be forgotten. On all sides are ghosts, not of the dead, but of living people. Here, during the day just passed, have come the people pouring in from the town and the country around. Farmers with their wives and children and all the people from the hundreds of little frame houses have gathered within these board walls. Young girls have laughed and men with beards have talked of the affairs of their lives. The place has been filled to overflowing with life. It has itched and squirmed with life and now it is night and the life has all gone away. The silence is almost terrifying. One conceals oneself standing silently beside the trunk of a tree and what there is of a reflective tendency in his nature is intensified. One shudders at the thought of the meaninglessness of life while at the same instant, and if the people of the town are his people, one loves life so intensely that tears come into the eyes. This feels quintessentially Sherwood Anderson - it's complex, a bit haunting, but also full of an intense affection and warmth. 

Here's hoping that when you go to bed tonight, blobbists, your fears are no longer giants, all sounds are pleasant sounds, the wind whispers among the dry corn blades, and you love life so intensely that tears come into your eyes. 

I'm off to my next book.