Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin (1833)

 

Eugene Onegin

Alexander Pushkin is apparently a big thing in Russia and even I have heard the name mentioned, though I have never read anything from him before. As I understand it, he primarily wrote in verse and “Eugene Onegin” is his attempt at writing a novel in that format.

The main character of “Eugene Onegin” is the title character. Eugene is a dandy and a playboy who lives a dissipated life. When he inherits an estate he gets into serious money, but also relocates to the countryside. Here he meets a number of people. Lensky is a young poet, he befriends. Olga is a pretty, airheaded girl whom Lensky intends to marry, and Tatyana is Olga’s more bookish sister.

Tatyana is infatuated with Eugene, but when she spills her heart to him, he gently, but firmly, rebuffs her. She is severely shaken by that. Eugene is upset with Lensky for pressing him into boring company and takes his revenge by showing excessive attention on Olga. This upsets Lensky who challenges Eugene to a duel. Lensky looses, Olga quickly marries someone else, and Eugene disappears.

Years later, Tatyana, seemingly gotten over the affair, marries a general or prince or something like that and then meets Eugene Onegin again. Now he realizes what he has lost, but that door is now closed and there is no way he can get her back.

For a story written in verse, this is reasonably tangible and accessible. It has an actual plot! Not perhaps the most exciting plot, it does lean heavily into romantic clichés, but quite lucid considering the format.

I have never entirely understood the idea of poetry or fully appreciated it. Poetry seems suited to express small, profound truths or emotions, such as haiku poetry, or intimate sensibilities, such as streams of thought, but that also seems to be more modern use of the format. Traditionally, the rhymes and strict rhythmic syntax are useful for singing and proclamation, i.e. an oral presentation of the text and therefore practical more than arty.

Pushkin seems to place himself in between these positions. He wants to tell a story as a novel, but rather than using the far more flexible standard prose form, he restricts himself to the rules of the verse. It is difficult for me not to see this as an affectation. An ambition of writing a Homerian story, suitable for declamation or to present the story in the more elegant and charming format of verse.

Personally, I am not charmed by verse. It looks restrictive and makes expressing the story far more challenging, but maybe that is the point; to show he can do that. In which case it becomes a self-gratifying project. Well, what do I know, I do not understand poetry.

I understand that for Russian speakers, Pushkin’s work should be quite an experience, taking the language to another level. I do not speak Russian and therefore read an English translation, so I am simply impressed that the translator managed to find suitable rhymes and stick to the format even in translation. That cannot have been easy. Unfortunately, I am not getting any big revelation of use of language or what can be done in verse. That part went over my head.

The book is surprisingly easy to get through. The verse form at least has the advantage that the reading becomes rhythmic and makes reading an almost automatic exercise. The lack of obscurity in the text also made for an easy read and I am grateful for that.

This is not stuff that roams through my mind for a long time. Rather, it was a book to get through and I happy it was easy. Poetry buffs may have a different opinion, but that is their issue.

 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo (1831)

 

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” is a favourite for adaptation. Wikipedia lists 16 cinema adaptations alone with numerous television and stage plays to boot, including several ballets. Curiously, I do not think I ever watched any of them, not even the Disney version, but you must have lived under a rock to not at least get the gist of it.

Victor Hugo’s novel is a sprawling piece of work. He happily changes lead characters throughout, to leave former leads out of the picture for hundreds of pages. Sometimes he even has entire chapters without any characters.

One of his characters is Pierre Gringoire, a poet and philosopher. His stage play tanks so with nothing to his name but the cloths he wears, he joins the homeless outcasts of Paris. A gypsy girl by the name Esmeralda saves his life by formally marrying him (though not in spirit). Gringoire will appear a few times, mostly as a witness, but a few times as an agent.

Esmeralda is a young woman, presumably a gypsy (Roma, would be the modern term) who earns her living by dancing and singing on the street and performing tricks with her pet goat. Esmeralda is deeply infatuated with a captain of the guard, Phoebus.

Phoebus is a vain libertine of a character. He is officially betrothed to a wealthy (though insipid) girl, but that does not stop him from trying to get into the pants of Esmeralda, especially since she seems willing. When that goes horribly wrong and Esmeralda is accused of stabbing him, he renounces her and returns to his betrothed.

It was not Esmeralda who stabbed him though, but a priest at the Notre Dame cathedral, Claude Frollo, who had been following Esmeralda. Despite his wows, he is deeply infatuated with the girl, sort of a love/hate relationship. When Phoebus is about to take Esmeralda’s virginity, it is he who jumps forward to stab him. Not for Esmeralda’s sake, but because nobody else can have her. He even tries to kidnap her using his pet cripple, Quasimodo, but that also fails.

Quasimodo is the eponymous hunchback of Notre Dame. He is deformed and deaf, supposedly a halfwit, but very strong. When Frollo’s abduction scheme fails, Quasimodo is blamed. In the stockade, the only one showing mercy and offering him water is Esmeralda, earning her his eternal fealty.

The overriding theme seems to be that everybody wants somebody else, so nobody gets what they want. Frollo and Quasimodo wants Esmeralda. Esmeralda wants Phoebus and Phoebus does not care about anybody but himself. Only Gringoire seems to accept his lot and is the only one coming out of this on top.

The astounding thing to me is how moronic the principal characters are. The argument would be that it is love that messes with people’s brains, but seriously, it is a hard call who of these characters is most stupid. The amount of self-sabotage and recklessness all round is incredible. Granted, without it there would be very little story, but it bothers me when the drama hinges on people making idiotic decisions.

Put a gun to my head, Esmeralda would be the worst. Not for staying principled when standing her ground against Frollo, but for assigning so much faith in the worthless Phoebus, who has literally nothing to his credit but a handsome uniform. Her empty headed idiocy would be a good match for the moronic Phoebus, but it is also what ultimately costs her her life and she never realizes that.

The failure of finding relatable characters, with the possible exception of Gringoire, makes it a disappointing read. You can only spend so much time with idiots. I also find Hugo’s narrative style problematic. The novel does not feel planned, at least not structurally, but evolves from spur of the moment decisions. My impression is of a writer who writes about what he feels like today, with little care of what went before or whether it fits into a general narrative. Tying such a sprawling narrative into a whole would be challenging and I do not think Hugo is altogether successful there.

Obviously, I am in the minority here. The stature of this story demonstrates that beyond a doubt. You do not make 16 movies on a novel people do not like. I just wonder if anybody actually read the novel or simply base their opinion on various sanitized versions of it.

“The Hunchback of Notre Dame” does not rank very high for me and I am not rushing out to watch any of the 16 movies. There are a few more novels by Victor Hugo on the List, so he will get another chance to convince me of his claim to fame.

   

The Red and the Black: A Novel of Post-Napoleonic France - Stendhal (1830)

 

The Red and the Black

Stendhal’s (with the civilian name Henti Marie Beyle) book, “The Red and the Black” is a satirical portrait of France in the late 1820’ies, during the restoration after Napoleon and immediately before the revolution of 1830. Stendhal’s France is divided into the haves and the haves-not, the conservatives (ultras) and the liberals and the capital versus the province. Despite the revolution, it is still a playground for the rich and ripe with nepotism and corruption. To navigate this France is more about knowing the right people than merit.

Here we find our protagonist, Julien Sorel, a poor son of a carpenter from a small town in the province of Franche-Comté. Julien is ambitious and dreams of greatness. His big hero is Napoleon whom he tries to emulate in everything he does. As a possible way out of his current straits and towards greatness, he is being trained by the local priest. This training amounts to learning Latin and entire passages of the bible by heart and less so the actual religious doctrines. Form rather than content. This skill however lands him a job as a tutor for the children of the local Mayor, M De Renal and, more importantly Mme de Renal.

Julien is at heart a good person, his instincts are right, but he is convinced that he must emulate his hero and be Machiavellian and manipulative in his actions to get anywhere in life. Because of this doctrine he must seduce Mme de Renal. To do that will be a great victory, but exactly what to do with that victory, he has not really considered. As it happens, Mme de Renal is taken by this young man and despite himself Julien falls in love with her, something that is difficult for him to admit to himself. My guess is that Julien falls in love with her because Mme de Renal is the only honest character in the entire book.

Eventually this affair becomes public, and Julien is forced to leave. He takes a degree in theology in Besancon and when the head of the seminary leaves for Paris he brings along Julien. Julien becomes the secretary of Marquise de la Mole and through this becomes a witness to high society life in Paris. Torn between his innate integrity and his Machiavellian doctrine, he manages to become indispensable to the Marquise and seduce his daughter.

Stendahl uses Julien Sorel both as a witness to the France he is presenting and as a personification of the dilemmas and absurdity of getting along in various circles of this country. The motivation of honour and greatness sometimes works for Julien, but at other times leads him into trouble, more often than not of a ridiculous sort. There is a very high level of hypocrisy everywhere, and many of the characters act more according to how they think their actions are perceived, than what is genuinely in their own best interest. Julien is trained as a priest, but I cannot recall him ever having a pious thought. Mathilde de la Mole is more in love with romantic passion than any of her suitors and M De Renal arranges his entire life to impress those around him, oblivious that he is becoming a public cuckold.

Stendahl’s writing is incredibly witty, and his observations are knife-sharp, but his satire never becomes unrealistic, and he is never mean to his characters. It is the realism that keeps everything grounded and, which I love, functions as a window into life in France at this time. It is also because of this realism the comedy works here. Stendhal’s characters stop short of being clowns or caricatures but are character types we would recognize. We are not quite laughing at them but smile with amusement.

This makes “The Red and the Black” a very amusing read and I love the way Stendhal writes. He could have produced an unlikable protagonist with that doctrine of his, but there is a sympathy, a sense that underneath Julien has good instincts, that allows us to identify with him and we do not reject him. At least not entirely.  Julien is France in 1830. Misled, confused, a hypocrite, but at heart good.

“The Red and the Black” is in my top-5 of the books I have read so far on the List. Highly recommended.

 

The Betrothed - Alessandro Manzoni (1827)

 

The Betrothed

I am not accustomed to Italian novels on this list, but this one, “The Betrothed”, is apparently one of the most famous Italian novels and hence included on the List.

We follow a young couple from a village outside of Milan in the seventeenth century. He is Lorenzo, a young silk weaver, and she is Lucy, a bashful young girl. They want to get married, but the curate, Don Abbodio, refuses to wed them because he has been threatened by thugs not to do so. The thugs belong to the local noble, Don Roderick, who wants the girl for himself. An attempt to capture her by force fails but sends the young couple on the run and thus starts an adventure.

They get help from a Capuchin friar called Christopher who sends Lucy to one and Lorenzo to another monastery in Milan. Both end up in trouble, Lucy betrayed by a nun and kidnapped by a gangster and Lorenzo gets unintendedly involved in an uprising and accused of treason, causing him to hide out in Bergamo. Their adventures are many and through them we get introduced to many aspects of life in seventeenth century Italy.

There is the food shortage and ensuing riots in Milan, the havoc of war when passing soldiers of various origin plunder everything they can get their hands on and send the local population fleeing, seriously deepening the food shortage crisis into a shortage of anything but misery and finally the plague, killing left and right, high and low. Throughout, the authorities tasked with handling these crisis’s are completely inept or corrupt, deepening rather then alleviating the disasters with either lack of or self-serving actions. The only authority that effectively deal the string of disasters is the church and that is mainly driven by a few energetic characters.

While the apparent story of Lucy and Lorenzo is both interesting and touching, “The Betrothed” can be read as an allegory of Italy in the nineteenth century. I can definitely see that. In a very direct way, the author goes to great pains to describe the situation around the various crisis’s, more than is strictly necessary for the story of Lucy and Lorenzo, but in order to make us understand what is going on. This insight is interesting in itself but it also helps us to understand some social and political dynamics with relevance to the nineteenth century.

I am thinking that the allegory can be taken a lot further. Lucy and Lorenzo may represent the Italian people who wants to be united but is not allowed because out outside agents. Greedy nobles (Roderick) who stops at nothing, self-serving politicians, outside powers, in the book Spanish, German and French soldiers, in the nineteenth century, French and Austrian troops battling it out in Italy and keeping the place occupied. The role of the plague as an allegory is a bit mystifying, but may represent disasters outside human control, but to which we can respond irresponsibly or sensibly. A clear message it is that much of the trouble is unnecessary as they are created by irresponsible or self-serving people or are aggravated by the same. Probably a good picture of the fragmented Italy in 1827 and in many ways even today.

Lucy and Lorenzo do get each other, it is that kind of story, and so the author promises that also the Italians will get each other and hopefully learn by the mistakes of the past.

As a reading experience, “The Betrothed” was an interesting book to read. The adventures of Lucy and Lorenzo sometimes loses a bit of momentum when the narrative turns tangential, but these tangents may actually be the best part of the book as they provide so much insight. Especially the section about the plague in Milan was gripping and interesting. Since our own experience with the pandemic, there is so much to recognize here. The powerlessness in the face of an indiscriminate killer, the draconian steps to curtail the contagion, the strange conspiracies springing up, especially to blame somebody for the disaster or refuse to accept it for what it is. We have so recent been exactly there. When I read about the Lazaretto in Milan, the picture I saw were those of the over-crowded hospitals in Bergamo in March 2020.

“The Betrothed” is a recommended read and one I understand Italians will insist is essential.

     

The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper (1826)

 

The Last of the Mohicans

One of the most famous early American novels, “The Last of the Mohicans” by James Fenimore Cooper, helped paint a picture of the frontier that has lasted through the centuries. Although a contemporary audience typically will associate the American frontier with the prairie or the sunbaked southwest, there was a time before where the frontier was in the woods of New England.

Fort William Henry on the southern edge of Lake George in what is today the state of New York, is the host of a British detachment under the command of Colonel Munro. It is the year 1757 and the British and the French are at war. Rumor has it that the French are approaching with what may be superior numbers. At this very moment Munro’s daughters, Cora and Alice decide to pay their father a visit. Cora and Alice are escorted by Major Heyward and a singing master David Gamut. Their guide is an Indian named Magua.

On their way to Fort William Henry, they encounter the band of Hawkeye, the scout and the Mohicans Chingachgook and Uncas, father and son. They see Magua is up to something and takes control of the party. True enough, before long they are besieged by Magua and a band of Huron Indians, aligned with the French. Cora, Alice, Heyward and Gamut fall into the hands of Magua, but are eventually freed by the Hawkeye’s band just as the ritual torture was about to start.

Although the band arrives safely at Fort William Henry, the peace is short lived. The fort is attacked by the French and their Huron allies. Badly outnumbered and outgunned Munro is forced to surrender. Although granted free passage, the Hurons fall onto the train and massacres the women and the infirm. Cora and Alice are again captured by Magua. He is leading them north to his own tribe with sinister plans for the girls. Tracking him a few days behind, Hawkeye, Chingachgook, Uncas, Heyward and Munro must catch up with Magua if they want to see the girls alive.

I read “The Last of the Mohicans” as a child and although I remember liking it, I quickly realized I had forgotten everything else. Poor memory is sometimes a blessing and it felt like a first read.

When “The Last of the Mohicans” is good, it is really good. This is especially the case in the chase scenes, whether the band is chasing Magua or being chased. There is a fast pace to these scenes and a level of detail just enough to keep me riveted and being able to visualize the chase. The chase across Lake George stands out in particular. Cooper was a good action writer.

Cooper is also good at writing on the wilderness itself. You get the feeling he has seen these places and has some experience with outback life, if not life on the Frontier itself. The skills of Hawkeye and the Mohicans are described in convincing detail, and I can imagine generations going out into the forest to emulate Chingachgook and Uncas with the book as their guide.

Cooper obviously have a lot of respect for the Native Americans, their skills and their culture and he deserves a lot of credit for that, yet he is also a product of his own time where racial differences were a very real and insurmountable barrier between people. The Indians are frequently called savages and not just the Hurons and you can hear the regret that these are just Indians and thus cut off from being something better. Hawkeye for all his praise and respect for his Indian friends must mention in every second sentence that he is a man without a cross, meaning pure white origin as if that somehow makes him a better person.

It is such a pity that Cooper does not dare to bridge the gulf. There may be some adherence here to the actual separation, also in the period of the narrative, but I sense that Cooper wants to bridge it. There is a budding romance between Uncas and Cora that would have been beautiful if it had been allowed to unfold, but Cooped seems afraid to go that far. Cooper also laments the fate and plight of the Indians, besieged and forced to make way for the whit people as they are. He places word in the mouth of some of the Indians that demonstrates his understanding, but he does not finish the step. Their fate is lamentable but it is just too bad, he seems to think.

The real problem with “The Last of the Mohicans” however is in the plot. As others before me have pointed out, Cora and Alice’ visit to their father is hopelessly unmotivated and ill-timed, but without it, there would be no story. The same with the singing master Gamut, his presence is unexplained, and he has not function but comic relief except he is not funny at all. While these may be the most glaring plot holes, there are numerous decisions and actions throughout the story that feel contrived or unmotivated but the only thing I can do as a reader is to just to accept and flow with it.

If you take into account that Cooper was not a modern writer, nor a contemporary writer of the times he writes about, he did do an amazing job with “The Last of the Mohicans” and the millions of readers worldwide are testament to that. Wikipedia lists 11 different movie or serial versions of the story in a addition to a number of German versions of the story! I am dying to see Bela Lugosi as Chingachgook in Der Letzte Mohikaner from 1920!

Hugh!

Life of a Good-For-Nothing - Joseph Von Eichendorff (1826)

 

Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing

Lately, the books on the List have been having a dark streak with the possible exception of “Tomcat Murr”, though even that had some sinister sides. “Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing” (“Memoirs…”) is the direct opposite. It is light and easy in every sense.

A (very?) young man leaves his village carrying only the cloth he wears and his fiddle. He gets a ride with two ladies and plays for them so nicely that they offer him a job in the palace gardens. Soon he is even promoted to be a tollkeeper. The young man, whose name we never learn is hopelessly in love with one of the ladies, whom he keeps referring to a “my lovely lady”, but as he assumes she is a countess, he never approaches her. Instead, he plays his fiddle and put flowers for her wherever he can.

One night he discovers that the other lady is the one looking for him and that his own “lovely lady” is together with another man and his hope shatters. He immediately embarks on a journey to Italy, gets kidnapped by bandits, are taken to a castle in the mountains, where he is treated as a lord, barely escapes and hang out in Rome. In Rome he thinks he has found his girl again and indeed he is told she is looking for him, only to find out she already left for Austria, so now he needs to get back home and find her there.

The conclusion, which I shall not reveal here, includes so many revelations and mistaken identities that I am entirely confused myself, but, happy ending, the end.

This is super light and super short, 120 easy pages, and anything that resembles a crisis is resolved within a page or two. Our hero is never really in any danger, or rather, no danger he cannot easily escape from, and he usually gets by simply by playing some music. People are really nice to him and those that are not, are just pretending. Meanwhile, the sun is always shining, people are happy and well-fed and dancing is only just one song away. It actually sounds very much like a Hollywood golden age musical.

It is so brief, rushed and light that I cannot really say it made a lot of impression on me. It is like a piece of candy, nice and sweet and gone in minutes. It is difficult to be upset with it because it is so harmless, but at the same time, the novel feels more like a synopsis of a much larger and deeper book. My guess is that I will have forgotten about it in a few weeks.

Yet, this tiny novel is praised as a masterpiece of late German Romanticism and apparently it presents a lot of elements hailed as typical of this movement. Classless love, the freedom, the appreciation of beauty, both natural and human made such as music and painting. Eichendorff was a celebrated poet, and a lot of his poems are included in the book, though I am not qualified to tell if the appreciation is deserved.

I suppose it is nice to also get some lighter and happier fare than the gloomy stuff of late but there is simply not enough meat on this for me to truly recommend it.

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner - James Hogg (1824)

 

Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

This is a case of a novel that is more interesting from a technical point of view than from its subject matter. Not that this is entirely uninteresting, but the technical devices of “Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner” (or “Confessions…” as I will shorten it to from now on) are both very advanced for its time and used in a very interesting manner and this alone is good enough reason to read it.

“Confessions…” is divided into three segments. The first is “the editor’s” description of events that happened a little more than a hundred years in the past. A Scottish nobleman was briefly married to a fiercely religious woman and managed to have two sons before she moved out to live with her priest, the Reverend Wringhim. George, the older stayed with the nobleman, while the younger, Robert stayed with the mother. Though never explicitly stated, it is implied that the Reverend is the actual father of Robert, though for such religious people that would be absolutely unheard of.

George and his father are jovial types and George is well liked and described as a fairly ordinary young nobleman. Robert, on the other hand, is a dark, brooding type and very religious. During a game of tennis, he seeks out George and starts interfering in everything George does, presumably to convince him to see the light. Eventually George is murdered. His father’s housekeeper investigates and eventually finds out Robert did it after which Robert disappears.

The second part takes the form of a found manuscript written by Robert. It essentially tells the same story, but instead of the third-party objectiveness of the first section, this is a highly subjective first-person account and as such dramatically different. For once, Robert is not only deeply religious, he is also righteous and convinced that he is among the elect who can do no wrong because they are already admitted to heaven. This gives him a free ticket to do whatever he wants and a conviction that whatever he believes is correct and everybody else is wrong.

Robert also meets early on a person who never really introduces himself, but acts as Robert’s friend and supporter. Together they hatch a plan to eliminate people who are in the way of the true faith and start off with a minister. Successfully done, George is the next on the list. The impetus for these murders seems to be from Robert’s friend and he does seem to have uncanny abilities such as assuming the voice and looks of other people. Slowly it is implied that this friend is some sort of demon or devil haunting Robert and when Robert starts to suffer lapses in memory after which it appears he has been conducting unspeakable crimes, he has to flee. Not only the law, but also his supernatural friend.

The third part is again the editor explaining how he found the manuscript in a grave, somehow giving credence to the story as a “found manuscript”.

The technique of telling a story from two different perspectives is novel in the early nineteenth century and is particularly interesting because it highlights the unreliable narrator. Who do we trust more, the impartial third-party narrator with limited access to the details or the first person narrator with full access but also personally invested in the story? Not to mention, severely religiously biased.

Then of course there is the almost satirical portrait of a person so convinced of his religious doctrines that his views, actions and morality are far outside what we would consider the norm, even in a more religious age than today. I suspect this is the real agenda of the author and it certainly does make these cultist types highly suspicious. Most dangerous seems to be how completely impervious they are to other opinions and common sense. This is something that can frustrate even in our current day and age.

In my opinion, however, the most interesting element is that of the demon. With twenty-first century glasses on, Robert is schizophrenic and suffering from a split personality. An invented friend that feeds him with subconscious impulses he might otherwise have suppressed and leaves him with blank periods in his memory are typical schizophrenic symptoms. Though for an author in the early nineteenth century to describe a schizophrenic case sounds unlikely. Psychiatry was not that developed at the time, but we are really close here. The other possibility is the religious one that this pious type is haunted and corrupted by the devil and simply fails to recognize it because hellish and strict orthodox dogma are so very similar. In this understanding, Robert is suitably punished for his religious intolerance and arrogance. This is far more down the line of a nineteenth century writer and, of course, supporting the satirical agenda, but I cannot help reading a mental patient case story into this and that ambivalence is super interesting. Maybe it is implied that demonic intervention is causing schizophrenia?

“Confessions..” could easily be made into a horror movie today and I would not be surprised to learn this has already happened. Wikipedia mentions a Polish movie and several screenplays, but the big Hollywood production seems to be pending.

Apparently, it was the inspiration for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and I can definitely see that.

Certainly, an interesting read.