[HN Gopher] 'I had to grow up before I could cope with Middlemarch'
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'I had to grow up before I could cope with Middlemarch'
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 76 points
Date : 2022-12-24 13:13 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
| olvy0 wrote:
| A personal tangent. In the spirit of the OP, I guess.
|
| I read Justine (1st book of the Alexandria Quartet) back in my
| early 20s, circa 1993.
|
| The way I found it was utterly weird. I was helping my dad sort
| out his old stuff my mom wanted him to throw away, mostly lots of
| yellow late 50s early 60s notebooks from his college. And some
| old English books. And Justine. My dad said he couldn't remember
| where he got this book, and said somebody must have given it to
| him back in the 60s, and he never read it.
|
| I've never heard of it or Lawrence Durrel, but I knew about
| Gerald Durrel due to My Family and Other Animals which was
| something that recommended for kids around the early 80s, I
| guess, and I think I even read it when I was much younger.
|
| I assumed Justine was a dime detective or spy novel, since I knew
| that's the stuff my dad likes. Or some biography. Nothing too
| literary for him, thank you very much. He asked if I wanted to
| read it or he'd throw it away. I looked at the blurb, which
| didn't tell me much, shrugged and said ok. I was between books.
| The book was a 60s printing, yellow pages, somewhat
| disintegrating, but all pages were intact.
|
| So I read it. It was tough. But I persevered. And I liked it.
| Very much. Well, the sex scenes were kinda shocking but by that
| time I've read more explicit ones.
|
| And to my surprise I discovered that the science fiction novel
| Icehenge, by Kim Stanley Robinson, which I read and re-read and
| re-read 7 years prior at even a more impressionable age, was very
| much a tribute to Justine. At least its middle part. It even
| includes a science-fiction in-universe pastiche of Cavafy's The
| City.
|
| Icehenge and Justine remain sort of embedded in my brain. As
| Cavafy's "The City" in Durrel's translation (attributed to one of
| the fictitious characters in the novel itself) , which in my
| opinion is the best translation. I'm able to recite it by heart
| to this day, and there are days when I'm highly tempted to print
| it and hang above my desk at work. But I wouldn't like the
| questions. I think.
|
| I've wanted for 20 years now to read the rest of the Alexandrian
| Quartet, but I've never gotten around to it. Swamped by school
| and then by work and then by family. Maybe someday. And maybe
| I'll be disappointed.
|
| As for His Dark Materials. I read it too, but didn't like it,
| something didn't click. Except The Golden Compass which was good.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Why edit the Guardian title from the original? Isn't the fact
| that it's Philip Pullman being quoted that gives the quote depth
| and resonance and even more meaning than its unattributed version
| above?
| dredmorbius wrote:
| HN tends to remove authors' names from titles. See, e.g.:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7518157>,
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27480495>
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >I also removed the author name from the title. For the most
| part, we keep author names out of HN titles. It's a trick I
| learned from pg for keeping the focus on content rather than
| personalities. Of course there are always exceptions. --dang,
| April 2, 2014
|
| >Generally we remove author names from titles. --dang, June
| 12, 2021
|
| In this case, the content of the title gains its power from
| the author.
|
| >Of course there are always exceptions.
|
| This should be one of those exceptions and Philip Pullman's
| name restored to the title as originally published.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| FWIW, I don't necessarily _agree_ with HN practice.
|
| I'm simply stating what it is.
|
| (I'm not staff, just another member.)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| I hear you: I'm NOT shooting the messenger. Or dang, who
| IMHO is a holy man to be able to keep HN as good as it
| is.
| Jun8 wrote:
| > The book I discovered later in life The Master and His
| Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World
| by Iain McGilchrist, published in 2009. In this and his later
| book, The Matter With Things, McGilchrist investigates the
| extraordinary difference between the characteristic modes of
| perception, cognition and response of the two hemispheres of the
| brain. It's like coming across an entirely new colour.
|
| This book sounds interesting, brought to mind _The Origin of
| Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind_ (https://en
| .m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_...). This year
| I saw this book at Half Price Books and, primed by Westworld
| quickly bought and read it. It wasn't good: interesting premise
| argued in a just so way without much substantive evidence.
|
| > The books I am currently reading ... Dick Davis's translation
| of the Shahnameh
|
| Shahnameh had and continues to have enormous cultural influence
| not just in Iran but in all neighboring cultures, perhaps akin to
| the Bible in Western tradition. Davis's new translation converts
| the couplets in prose, with some parts kept in poetic form, is
| highly accessible and praised
| (https://www.npr.org/2006/03/29/5309016/new-translation-of-
| pe...). I suggest complementing the reading with miniatures of
| key scenes you can find by googling or you may forego a full
| translation and go with the abridged but fantastically
| illustrated book by Hamid Rahmanian
| (https://www.amazon.com/Shahnameh-Persian-Kings-Illustrated-S...)
| uxp100 wrote:
| You are not the first person I've heard say that about "The
| origin of consciousness..."
|
| Seems like it is an influential (to culture) book with a great
| title that was really never very good.
| dbspin wrote:
| The book is worthwhile just for its opening chapters which
| outline the various perspectives on consciousness prior to
| the point it had been written. Some of which have been
| obfuscated in summary since.
| wpietri wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's an excellent book of exploration and
| speculation. Whether his hypotheses are _true_ is an
| entirely different question, but one that doesn 't interest
| me very much for that book.
| pge wrote:
| In saying that about Middlemarch, he may also be alluding to
| Virginia Woolf's famous comment that the book was "one of the few
| English novels written for grown-up people."
| williamscales wrote:
| Yes, this quote is included in the article
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| > The books I could never read again: Lawrence Durrell's
| Alexandria Quartet ... found the mixture altogether too rich
|
| That's pretty rich in itself, coming from the author of "His Dark
| Materials," which whether you like it or not, is so
| metaphorically and allegorically over-rich with respect to the
| author's obvious angst and disdain for Catholicism specifically,
| and organized Christianity generally, as to be ... well, almost
| un-rereadable by any thoughtful person.
| antiterra wrote:
| I mean, have you read Durrell's Alexandra Quartet? It
| definitely has a sort of melodramatic angst to it akin to the
| tone of Twilight. I like it regardless, but I definitely can
| understand the his opinion.
| moomin wrote:
| I'm more concerned about the fact the three books barely hang
| together into a single narrative than that he's determined to
| ape CSLewis in the opposite direction.
|
| (For the record, I consider Lewis the better writer, but grief
| the "Simple Christianity" can get a bit much at times.)
| samsari wrote:
| I also found His Dark Materials a lot harder to read the second
| time, when I was in my 20s, compared to the first time I read
| it in my teens. That said, I have to admit he's grown up a lot
| further since then; his new series, The Book of Dust, which is
| set 12 years earlier is a lot more mature in its themes.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| I don't think the entire Book of Dust trilogy will be in the
| past. La Belle Sauvage is, but The Secret Commonwealth
| followed an older Lyra to the steppes.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, but please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar.
| It just ruins threads.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| Fair enough, but I wasn't commenting in any way on religion,
| but on the over-wrought quality of Pullman's allegory. At
| least, that was my intent. Apologies to all if I missed fire.
| gjm11 wrote:
| For what it's worth, I'm a curmudgeonly atheist who found
| that HDM steadily decreased in quality over the course of
| the three books as it ramped up the anti-religious
| emphasis. It's definitely not the case that the only people
| who find it annoying are those who feel that their own
| religion is being attacked.
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| Me too!
| simonh wrote:
| I'm genuinely troubled by the implied suggestion that
| thoughtful people should avoid, or be put off by works they
| either disagree with or find uncomfortable, or might dislike
| for any reason. Anything can be read and analysed by a
| thoughtful person.
|
| I visited a relative in hospital recently and found myself
| listening to the audio of a super-trashy TV show a patient in
| the next bed was watching. It was fascinating. The acting was
| wooden and stilted as though being read out from the page, the
| dialogue was so direct and explicit it was painful "You know
| why I hate him so much, because he cheated me out of my
| inheritance!". It was almost Mexican soap opera level. And yet
| it was captivating, because I found myself wondering about the
| business model that produces such material, who the audience
| is, what it's like to be an actor on a drama like that. Even if
| something is terrible, there's so much to analyse to discover
| why it's terrible, and why some people might like it anyway.
| taylorius wrote:
| That was a bit of a switcheroo. Starting off exhorting us to
| not dismiss creative works just because they might seem
| lowbrow, and then revealing that the "entertainment value"
| you got from a soap opera was to try to imagine how anyone
| could profitably produce such rubbish! :-D
| simonh wrote:
| I'm not in any way struggling to imagine it, and I'm not at
| all dismissing it, that's not what I mean at all. There is
| no switch. Clearly people do produce content like that and
| it has a ready audience. I have no problem with that, it
| gave me a newfound appreciation for the dynamics that make
| such material successful and its economics.
| stevenwoo wrote:
| You cut out the rest of the sentence which I think is important
| "but I shall never disparage anything I once loved, because the
| love was real." I actually had trouble reading the His Dark
| Materials trilogy because I was so unfamiliar with some of the
| details of Roman Catholicism until some people helped me with
| it but it's no different to me than almost any other
| fantasy/science fiction where the religious stuff comes to the
| fore ala A Canticle for Leibowitz or the Dune series. I had
| more issues where there are several points in the His Dark
| Material trilogy where in lieu of showing or plot actions
| illustrating something there are long exposition dumps that are
| disguised as overheard conversation which felt like a crutch.
| indigochill wrote:
| > other fantasy/science fiction where the religious stuff
| comes to the fore ala A Canticle for Leibowitz or the Dune
| series
|
| My feeling is HDM is to Dune what Eragon is to Lord of the
| Rings. The former in these comparisons don't apply much
| imagination to their real-world influences.
|
| The latter in these comparisons are still clearly inspired by
| real-world themes and tropes, but they're more imaginative in
| how they combine and diverge from their inspirations,
| probably owing to a richer depth of experiences and
| influences that the respective authors had been exposed to.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > My feeling is HDM is to Dune what Eragon is to Lord of
| the Rings.
|
| This is an interesting comparison. I have not read Eragon,
| but I have read reviews that say it's a transparent
| reskinning of _Star Wars_. Assuming that 's true, the form
| of an analogy between Eragon and Lord of the Rings would be
| Eragon : Lord of the Rings :: Star Wars : The Sword of
| Shannara
|
| But that's one of those somewhat-malformed analogies where
| the relationships cross the :: instead of mirroring each
| other to either side of it. Like "Shakespeare : Tolstoy ::
| Romeo and Juliet : War and Peace"; there isn't actually a
| relationship between Shakespeare and Tolstoy, but if you
| have three of the elements, you can force the fourth.
| joe__f wrote:
| I have read HDM a number of times, as a child and as an adult.
| As an adult I noticed the points you're making and had to read
| around them a little. I still love the books and have learnt
| many things from reading them.
| setgree wrote:
| I consider myself a thoughtful person and I enjoyed reading HDM
| as recently as 2020 ;) There is no need to broadly insult
| everyone who likes a book. Each to her own.
|
| Having said that, I felt 'the golden compass' holds up much
| better than the sequels -- better character development, less
| didactic, amazing word building.
|
| (Edited to avoid potential spoilers)
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > amazing word building
|
| There are some misfires. And though I assume you meant to say
| "world building", the word building is a particular weak
| point. He decided that, in an alternate history where the
| word for electricity derived from the Arabic word for amber
| rather than the Greek one, it was perfectly plausible for the
| modern form of an original "anbar" to be "anbar". That can't
| happen.
|
| If you want to see a series of novels with strong word
| building, check out Katharine Kerr's Deverry series. ;D
| jgrahamc wrote:
| I didn't feel that she was devoted to him. She was someone
| experiencing a first love, she'd been through a lot, she was
| losing the ability to read the alethiometer, and Will had the
| knife.
| [deleted]
| imajoredinecon wrote:
| Dunno what I'd think if I reread them now, but when I was 8 I
| (1) devoured the whole trilogy for the characters/worldbuilding
| and (2) didn't notice the religious metaphor. Seems like this
| might be the way to evaluate a kids' book?
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > (2) didn't notice the religious metaphor.
|
| There are processions of angels bearing the corpse of a dead
| god. It's not so much a religious metaphor as an out-and-out
| religious story. What's not to notice?
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| Impressive ego that you consider yourself the archetypal
| "thoughtful person" and can determine what all other
| "thoughtful" people will or will not enjoy.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take threads further into flamewar.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| walnutclosefarm wrote:
| Thanks. I like my ego too.
|
| Seriously, though, I agree, the phrasing I used was a little
| over-wrought itself. My apologies. My point really was that
| if Pullman believes that Durrell's book was "too rich" to be
| re-read by him, he should understand that the limitations in
| Durrell's work that lead him to that conclusion are over-
| present in his own His Dark Materials.
| sdwr wrote:
| I feel validated for loving mcgilchrist's master+emissary now.
| Haven't read HDM in a looong time now, but it was formative for
| me, especially the bittersweet ending. The symbols and talismans
| captivated me.
|
| Looking back, it's still masterful how it hangs together. As YA
| fiction, it has to be about blossoming sexuality. Monkey as id,
| relationship with animal as childhood-level affection, catholic
| repression in the first book (literally locking the animals
| away), then fighting god, overthrowing the authority figure to
| move into a mature understanding of love. The knife and universes
| as a metaphor for decision-making and branching lives (literally
| named Will).
|
| Plus the ending dovetails wonderfully into the actual lived
| experience of the author, who spent all that time building a
| fantasy and has to let it go.
|
| And I love the concept of the aliens in the last book, that use
| coconuts as wheels and travel on natural highways.
| daxfohl wrote:
| Middlemarch is also my favorite classic novel. So many good
| observations there. One of my favorite quotes, "But we all know
| the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity
| increases directly as the square of the distance." (I was in
| Kyrgyzstan at the time). I definitely fall into that category,
| but a bit intentionally less so than before reading this.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| I'm trying to understand what that quote means.
|
| Is it that they feed themselves first and only give what they
| don't need and that amount grows as their own income/wealth
| grows?
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| It describes someone who is generous giving to institutions
| acting elsewhere but miserly to those directly around them.
| jimmytidey wrote:
| I don't know the book, but I assume the criticism is that a
| rich person can give money to alleviate suffering, but by the
| same token their wealth means they will not have to
| experience the suffering intimately. The richer they are, the
| more money they can give, and, also, the more remote the
| suffering.
| daxfohl wrote:
| I interpret it as meaning someone who goes way out of their
| way to feed hungry people on other continents but won't spare
| a penny for someone at their doorstep. Admittedly that could
| be way off.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Yes, the person on our doorstep is 'lazy', 'dirty',
| threatening, etc. For that person, we call the police or
| have laws passed to criminalize them.
| daxfohl wrote:
| So mathematically the relationship is actually cubic, of
| `d` minus a constant.
| uvesten wrote:
| https://archive.ph/miSbe
|
| Argh.
| wpietri wrote:
| "I shall never disparage anything I once loved, because the love
| was real."
|
| That's some good advice.
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