Friday reads

It's the first week of february and I'm still reading Middlemarch. I was definitely nervous about tackling a book of this size, but for the first few days it was going well. Unfortunately I lost momentum about half way through. I liked Dorothea immediately, despite her obvious flaws, and looked forward to seeing her develop over the course of the novel. Some of the subplots were less interesting, particularly the political/ historical parts. I see that Eliot is deliberately showing different types of marriages (and relationships in general), I just wish she had dedicated more time to the Dorothea storyline. I'm now about 100 pages from the end so you can expect an 'I finished Middlemarch!' post soon.

I haven't read much else while I've been focused on Middlemarch, but, to my surprise, I finished Hateship Friendship Courtship Loveship Marriage. Sometimes I think Munro is something you have to be in the mood for, so I've been reading stories sporadically. Like Middlemarch, Hateship is very much about marriage but also about growing old. Many of the stories have a Munro-like quality of stretching over long periods of time, so that often older people are reflecting on their youth. That in itself is a really interesting relationship (aside from the obviously very interesting relationships between people she explores). My next (and third) Munro will be Runaway, which I bought last month.

Beloved, Toni Morrison

Synopsis: Sethe was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Her new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.

"Anything dead coming back to life hurts"

'Beloved' was not what I expected. For one thing, I couldn't have been prepared for how devastating it was. It took me a while for me to gather my thoughts into something mildly coherent. Therefore this isn't really a review, just some of my reactions.

I was surprised by the 'magic realism' element, i.e. Beloved coming back to life (I know its ambiguous as to whether Beloved actually is that same child). I like ghost stories, not because I like being scared but because the appearance of a ghost is a good way for a writer to explore the living characters' relationships with the dead, and how the past connects to the future. In Rebecca, for example, Mrs. de Winter believing she hears Rebecca's ghost reflects her own anxiety about her predecessor. This quote from The Secret History sticks with me:

"There are such things as ghosts. People everywhere have always known that, and we believe them every bit as much as Homer did. Only now, we call them by different names. Memory. The unconscious." 

And memory is definitely a theme in 'Beloved'. How could it not be, with the narrative shifts between characters, times and places? This structure put me off at first, and I think its one of the main reasons people dislike the book. But if you're struggling with it, I'd say stick with it: the story comes together, and it makes sense for the narrative to be jumbled. Sethe talks about the concept of "rememory", which involves reliving the past. The past is unbearable for most of the characters,and they find various ways of repressing it, but it is never gone. Sethe warns her daughter Denver about "rememory" by telling her:

"if you go there--you who never was there-- if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again; it will be there for you, waiting for you. So, Denver, you can't never go there."

But part of Sethe's tragedy is that the past is undeniable. And Sethe does "go there" at the end of the novel, with catastrophic results which mirror the first tragedy.

Do you have any thoughts on 'Beloved'? I think its a very multi-layered novel, and I've only really touched on one element of that here, but if you have anything to add I'd be glad to hear it.