An Airline Magazine Surprise

Many of us dismiss airline magazines as sources only of information about such airline matters as maps of terminals and lists of snacks for sale, along with a few fluffy travel articles; the magazines are generally good only for leafing through for five or ten minutes before settling in with one's book or perhaps a movie or a nap. However, on a very recent trip, I was pleasantly surprised by the June 2011 issue of American Airline’s “American Way” magazine. It included an interesting, fairly thoughtful article about Hemingway, tied to this year’s being the 50th anniversary of his death, as well as an editorial about Beryl Markham. Granted, the Markham piece was mostly about her aviation history rather than about her literary work, but still, I was pleased that the issue devoted this amount of space to literary figures.

Memorable Deaths in Literature

Another "memorables" list, this time "Memorable Deaths in Literature":

-Romeo and Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet” (Shakespeare)
-Hamlet, Ophelia, Gertrude, Claudius, and Laertes in “Hamlet” (Shakespeare)
-Nell in “The Old Curiosity Shop” (Dickens)
-Beth in “Little Women” (Alcott)
-Anna Karenina in “Anna Karenina” (Tolstoy)
-Lily Bart in “The House of Mirth” (Wharton)
-Emma Bovary in “Madame Bovary” (Flaubert)
-the children in “Jude the Obscure” (Hardy)
-Lennie in “Of Mice and Men” (Steinbeck)
-Quentin Compson in “The Sound and the Fury” (Faulkner)
-Roberta in “An American Tragedy” (Dreiser)
-Dimmesdale in “The Scarlet Letter” (Hawthorne)
-Ralph Touchett in “The Portrait of a Lady” (James)
-Catherine in “A Farewell to Arms” (Hemingway)
-Myrtle Wilson in “The Great Gatsby” (Fitzgerald)
-Phineas in “A Separate Peace” (Knowles)
-Tom Robinson and Bob Ewell in “To Kill a Mockingbird” (Lee)
-Simon and Piggy in “Lord of the Flies” (Golding)
-Owen Meany in “A Prayer for Owen Meany” (Irving)
-The sisters in “The Virgin Suicides” (Eugenides)
-Old Yeller in “Old Yeller” (Gipson)
-Charlotte in “Charlotte’s Web” (White)

"A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman"

The English writer Margaret Drabble is best known for her many novels written over a long career, several of which I have read and enjoyed. She is also a biographer of writers and a scholar of English literature. She has written far less short fiction, but readers are fortunate that the short stories she has written have been collected in a new book, “A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman: Complete Short Stories” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Most of Drabble’s fiction, long and short, focuses on women characters, usually professional women in England. The stories are feminist in a non-explicit, non-didactic, moderate, English way. In this collection, most of the main characters are working through some issue or conflict, often related to being a woman in today’s world, and trying to understand their own feelings about the issue at hand. For example: How does it feel when your verbally cruel husband dies, and is it OK that your main feeling is relief and freedom? How does it feel when you think you might be dying, and you are so afraid for your young children to experience their mother’s death and absence? How does it feel to be so in love with a house and a way of life that you don’t care which man you have to marry to get it? How does it feel to allow your imagination to get too involved in the affairs of a man you met briefly on a train, and what does it mean that you allowed this to happen? How does it feel to be involved in a long term affair but know that you will never be able to be together more than the occasional meeting or brief vacation? How does it feel to break someone’s heart without even realizing you are doing it? The reader cannot help getting involved in these situations and dilemmas. And, as it perhaps goes without saying for a writer of Drabble’s stature, the writing is quietly assured and quite beautiful. I have the feeling that Drabble isn’t as well known in the U.S. as she should be; readers who have not read her work, please consider doing so; this collection of stories would be a good place to start.

"Family Dancing"

I recently read and posted (6/8/11 and 6/12/11) on two of David Leavitt’s novels; my comments were lukewarm. I have now (belatedly!) read his collection of short stories, “Family Dancing” (Knopf, 1984), perhaps his most well-known book, and now I “get” why his work has been praised by both critics and the reading public. His stories, as the title indicates, are all about families, and the many ways their members are entangled, are happy, are miserable, misunderstand each other, and drive each other crazy, yet provide a glue and a center for its members, drawing them back to each other again and again. There are certain common themes throughout many of the stories: divorce, cancer, mental illness, the connections of siblings, the gay brother, and the family home or summer cottage that keeps its hold on family members long after the children have dispersed to their adult lives. These stories are very readable and compelling.

"The Summer Without Men"

“The Summer Without Men” (Picador, 2011), by Siri Hustvedt, is a strange little novel. The narrator, Mia, a poet, has just been left by her longtime husband, Boris, and has had a sort of nervous breakdown. During the course of this novel, she spends the summer near her mother, and gradually recovers an interest in life, as she connects with her mother and her friends, a group of young girls whom she teaches poetry, and her neighbor Lola and her family. Mia is an extremely well-read person, and writes of philosophy, medicine, and more. She is interested in figuring out the differences between women and men, and what makes relationships and marriages work or not work. There are a number of intriguing events and scenes, as well as some bravura speeches about life and literature, in this quirky but compelling novel, a novel that appears to follow its own rules, and is ultimately both thought-provoking and satisfying.

Memorable Journeys in Novels

Another "memorables" list: Memorable Journeys in Novels

-Jane Eyre’s days wandering on the moors in “Jane Eyre” (Bronte)
-Leopold Bloom making his way around Dublin in “Ulysses” (Joyce)
-Clarissa Dalloway walking around London in “Mrs. Dalloway” (Woolf)
-Marlow’s journey down the Congo River in “Heart of Darkness” (Conrad)
-the Joads’ journey from Oklahoma to California in “The Grapes of Wrath” (Steinbeck)
-Sal Paradiso's and Dean Moriarty’s travels through America in “On the Road” (Kerouac)
-Jasmine’s journey from India to and within the United States in “Jasmine” (Mukherjee)
-Sister Mary Joseph Praise's and Dr. Thomas Stone’s voyage across the ocean from India to Africa in “Cutting for Stone” (Verghese)

"The Lemon Table"

I am apparently on a bit of a Julian Barnes kick (see my posts of 5/21/11 and 5/26/11). I have now just finished another of his short story collections, “The Lemon Table” (Knopf, 2004), and am becoming more and more of a fan of Barnes. This collection is lovely but sad. It focuses on age and mortality; in the last story, we are told that in China the lemon represents death. The stories are not so much “about” aging and death as about how we humans think about those topics, and deal with their inevitability in our lives. The stories take place in a wide variety of times and places, and the characters are varied as well. These stories keep the reader’s attention, and there are a few surprises. One of my favorites is “The Fruit Cage,” about a long marriage seen through the son’s eyes; this story reminds us that no one, not even family members, really knows the true nature of any given marriage. One of the saddest stories is “Appetite,” in which a wife reads recipes from favorite cookbooks to her much-loved husband who is disappearing into his dementia; only the recipes still give him pleasure, but sometimes -- unpredictably -- at the cost of hurting his wife’s feelings with his harsh remarks. In another poignant story, “The Story of Mats Israelson,” missed messages and lost opportunities keep a pair of would-be lovers apart for perhaps 30 years. Each of these eleven stories is beautifully crafted; each character is both unique and somehow universal; the writing is evocative and beautiful.