Pronunciation Blues

I suffer from what I suspect is a common malady among avid readers: the vocabulary I know in print is much larger than the vocabulary I regularly hear or speak. Thus when I do use a word that I have only seen in print, I don’t always know how to pronounce it, and on some occasions, have embarrassed myself by mispronouncing it. Sometimes the word originates in a non-English language, and sometimes it is just not a widely spoken word. Unfortunately, in English, unlike in some other languages such as Spanish, spelling doesn’t give a clear and logical indication of pronunciation. I have recently discovered pronunciation guides online, so if I know ahead of time that I want to use a word, perhaps in a conference paper, I can look it up and listen to the correct pronunciation. But if the word occurs to me spontaneously in conversation, and I am unsure of the pronunciation, I have two strategies, depending on my audience. Most often I just think of a different word to substitute. But if I am with friends, I may say “XXXX” (my guess at how the word is pronounced) and then say airily “or however that word is pronounced.”

The new "Jane Eyre" movie

I saw the new (2011) movie version of Charlotte Bronte’s “Jane Eyre” yesterday and liked it. Of course the movie is a bit different from the book, as all movie adaptations are. A major difference is that the narrative is not in chronological order; the film starts with Jane’s desperately fleeing Thornfield Hall after she finds out about Rochester’s mad wife in the attic, and shows her miserable days on the moors before she reaches safety at St. John’s house. Then there are flashbacks to her childhood with her cruel aunt and at the dreary orphanage. Certain scenes are necessarily omitted, or skimmed over, but the basic bones of the story are there. Mia Waskowska is excellent as Jane, effectively showing her stillness, her held-in passionate feelings, and the rare but powerful outbreak of passionate expression of anger or love. Although -- or maybe because -- it is a very controlled performance, I found I couldn’t take my eyes off this actress. I liked Michael Fassbender as Rochester less; he lacks the strong, dramatic presence that the role requires, in my opinion. In any case, Rochester’s initial rudeness and arrogance, as portrayed in the novel, are downplayed, as they have been in other filmed adaptations. The movie is also enhanced by the presence of the always wonderful Judi Dench as Mrs. Fairfax. I will admit that I was happy just to have the chance to relive this rich and compelling story. After reading the novel many times, teaching it several times, and seeing several movie and television versions of it, I never tire of the story of this plain, unfortunate young woman who somehow, despite all the difficulties and sadness of her childhood, has the strength and confidence to stand up for herself no matter what, acknowledges and allows herself to feel and express passion, and has the ethics and self-respect never to compromise her beliefs. Charlotte Bronte’s creation, Jane Eyre, is truly unique and inspiring, even today, and I think this film by director Cary Fukunaga does her justice.

"Seven Loves"

I liked Valerie Trueblood’s recent short story collection, “Marry or Burn,” so much (see my 4/9/11 post) that I then found and read her 2006 novel, “Seven Loves” (Little, Brown). Trueblood is now one of my favorite contemporary writers. Her writing is wonderful and rich, and brings to mind a term used in anthropology: “thick description.” “Seven Loves” tells the story of May through important events and “loves” throughout her long life. Each chapter focuses on one love, not in chronological order: her mother, her husband, her lover, her son, the police officer who tried to save her son, a co-worker at May’s post-retirement job, and an attendant at the nursing home she lives in at the end of her life. Each of these elicits a different type of love from May, some conventional and some not. There are other loves woven into the chapters too, besides these seven, such as May’s love for her two daughters. The chapters interconnect and sometimes go over the same territory from different angles, sometimes from the perspectives of other characters. May is a wonderful, complex character, precisely portrayed, very believable and knowable, yet full of surprises as well. Her mother is also particularly well described and compelling. May's life illustrates the way we sometimes deeply connect to someone who isn’t necessarily a family member or a romantic attachment. One of the best chapters is the one about May after her stroke; she is shown in her full humanity, the same May we have known since she was a child, a woman who happens to have had a stroke, rather than a person defined by the stroke. This novel is full of insights and telling details; it was a great pleasure to read. Highly recommended.

Guest Blog: On "Freedom"

My friend Mary wrote me the following comments about the long novel "Freedom," which I struggled with some time ago (see my posts of 11/8/10, 11/11/10, and 11/13/10); I am happy to publish her thoughtful response as a guest blog entry.

Mary's comments:

As I read your recent posts about the subject of marriage in novels, I thought about Jonathan Franzen's book "Freedom." The marriage of Walter and Patty, two of the main characters, looked far different from the outside than the inside. Interestingly, as their seemingly happy marriage began to unravel, their mutual friend Katz (although himself part of their trouble) felt disoriented by the loss of what had felt like his home base.

I've been curious about this book since I read a practically worshipful review of it in the New York Times and then your own rather negative one. My reaction was in between, but closer to yours. I too found myself having to push through parts of it. It was part zingy satire, part saga, part family history, part current events -- with way too much stuffed in between. I found the descriptions of such things as the coal mining scheme and the endangered birds particularly tedious. It took me a long time to care much about the characters. They seemed to be intentionally "types," used for the purposes of satire, so it was hard to really feel for them. If I am going to have to live with characters for as long as this long book required, I'd like to feel a little more connected to them.

Toward the end of the book I began to like it more. Those last pages had the momentum that I didn't feel earlier in the book, and the writing itself just seemed better. There were parts where I found myself nodding at certain dead-on observations, beautifully phrased. It felt like finally genuine feeling had broken through the thick air of smirky satire that permeated most of the book. It just took too long to get there.

Marriage is a Mystery

People say that you never really know what someone else’s marriage is truly like, and I agree. Even the marriages of one’s parents (although I believe that my parents had the best marriage ever), other relatives, and close friends contain reserves and mysteries. I, like you I am sure, have had the experience of being surprised to hear of serious problems and/or impending divorces for couples whom I thought were happy, even models of good marriages. As I was thinking about this, I realized that I get at least as much of my “information” about marriage from books (fiction and nonfiction) as from “real life.” Even in books, however, authors are selective in what they share about the marriages they portray, and consciously or unconsciously shape the perceptions of their readers. Still, I regard literature as an important source of knowledge about marriage, as about so many things. One reason I am thinking and writing about this now is that I realize that several of my last few postings were on books portraying marriages (e.g., 3/15/11, 3/21/11, 4/9/11, 4/11/11, and 4/12/11). These and other books provide evidence that no matter how ubiquitous marriage is, each marriage is unique, and each marriage exists and grows in its own ways, with its own joys and travails, its own fluctuations over the years. As someone who has been married a long time, known a lot of people, and read a lot of books, I am somewhat knowledgeable about marriage, yet still sometimes feel quite ignorant about the mysteries of marriage in general and about the marriages of those I know.

"Must You Go?"

The noted English historian and mystery novelist Antonia Fraser’s new book, “Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter” (Doubleday, 2010), tells, as the title indicates, of her long love affair with and marriage to the eminent playwright Harold Pinter, who died in 2008. Unlike recent books by Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates about their husbands’ deaths and the aftermath in their own lives, Fraser’s book focuses on the long years of her relationship with Pinter, and describes his illness and death only briefly, although movingly. Theirs seems to have been a great and satisfying love, enhanced by their mutual joy in the intellectual, artistic, writing life. The book emphasizes the positive and mostly skims over the negative; perhaps this is the (stereotypical, I know!) British “chin-up” stance? Or perhaps it is because Fraser knows how fortunate she and Pinter were to have the life and love they had, and prefers to focus on that rather than on bumps in the road, or on its end. The book’s title comes from Pinter’s asking Fraser at a dinner party, “Must you go?”, which became the fateful beginning of their relationship, after which they never seemed to have wavered, despite their need to end two marriages in order to be together. Of course the title also refers to Pinter’s death. Because the book is based on Fraser’s diaries, it is perhaps not quite as satisfying as a more unified narrative; on the other hand, readers benefit from the immediacy of the diary entries, and from the feeling of having a window into these two great writers’ lives as they were lived. The book is full of stories about the couple’s writing, their travels, and their famous friends, yet there is no sense of boastfulness or superiority displayed. Fraser comes across as a thoughtful, down to earth person. Pinter occasionally had a temper, and sometimes became depressed, but overall seemed to have been a brilliant and caring person, dedicated to his art as well as committed to fighting injustice in the world. This is a truly touching love story. The book is enhanced by a generous selection of photographs, many in color.

"Three Stages of Amazement"

Carol Edgarian’s “Three Stages of Amazement” (Scribner, 2011), intrigued me because it focuses on the financial crash of the past three years and its effects even on many prosperous people, and because it is set in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live. Silicon Valley figures prominently, as do the wealthier neighborhoods in and around San Francisco. The upper middle class but spread-too-thin-financially main characters, Charlie and Lena, are very believable, as are some of the other vividly portrayed characters, particularly Lena’s extremely wealthy uncle Cal and his wife Ivy. We understand and sympathize with the sort of trap Charlie and Lena have fallen into: their ambition has led them to a place where they risk failing on a spectacular level. They are not simply ambitious, however; Charlie’s goal of inventing a robot that can perform surgery in poor countries, directed by a doctor elsewhere, is altruistic as well. We also sympathize with the couple’s deep sadness about the death of one twin girl at birth and the ongoing illness of the other infant twin girl, with the toll Charley’s long work hours and frequent travels take on the marriage, and with Lena’s emotional deprivation and frustration at being left to handle taking care of her two children (they also have a five year old son), including the pain and complications of having a chronically ill child, practically alone. One of the main themes of this novel is, in fact, marriage and its difficulties as well as joys. Charley’s and Lena’s marriage is a beautiful, loving, yet fragile and threatened relationship, realistically delineated. Something that bothered me as I was reading this novel, though, is that there is something unsettling, almost jittery, about it. There is not necessarily anything wrong with that; good literature is often unsettling. I imagine the author intended this impression. But I am not sure the rewards of the novel justify this sort of jumpiness. On the other hand, I read the novel quite quickly, indicating that I enjoyed it, so I won’t be too critical of it.