tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21999286272490316812024-02-19T00:23:11.675-06:00LWNLiterary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comBlogger121125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-31254016898616570132016-09-14T17:30:00.000-05:002016-09-14T17:30:07.134-05:00<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Modern Masterpieces<br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Magnificent Ambersons<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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Coming in at #100 on the Modern Library’s list is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Magnificent Ambersons</i>, by Boothe Tarkington, an engaging story
of a midwestern American family with a supremely spoiled son.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The attitude taken to this family and
this young man is through the eyes of the community in which they live.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It illustrates that persistent issue of
class in American society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
community views the family with a mix of respect and distain because of their
wealth and arrogance, which is manifested through the son. The son’s behavior
is unacceptable but allowed to pass without correction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“He’ll get his comeuppance,” the
townspeople say, chorus-like. </div>
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The novel is epic and grand, in the style of novel
writing of the time (it was published in 1918 and won the Pulitzer Prize in
1919).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Similar in theme to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sister Carrie </i>(#33 on the list), it uses
the story of George Amberson and his family to reflect the social flux at the
time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>George’s family enjoys their
prestige, which is gained through inherited wealth and a “good name,” but as they
ride through life on this reputation, which is unearned, other families are building
their own prestige through work and earned wealth and influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>George, raised to expect everything and
give nothing, not even polite interaction, is oblivious to this shift and to
the portent of his fall from grace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>George is the person, recognizable in every generation, who thinks that
things will always remain the same because they are good for him and therefore
there is no reason for change.</div>
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“Comeuppance” is the theme of the book, and it is a
wonderful word. Examined too closely it comes to seem nonsensical, but in
context, it is the perfect word to attach to this young man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The community/chorus can see clearly
that the entitlement he enjoys cannot last because he doesn’t do anything to
maintain it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is his mother’s
golden child, and whatever natural attributes he might have (if he does have
any at all) wither with time because he does not do anything to better
himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He thinks that he is
already as good as a person can be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>We have all seen this character, in fiction and in real life, the attractive
sparkle who starts to dull in comparison to others, but who regards himself as
the only star in the sky.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Magnificent
Ambersons </i>is a joy to read. The impression of the enjoyment persists long
after.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was made into a movie,
with the screenplay adaptation by Orson Welles, and with himself somewhat
miscast as the George, who is much younger in the tale than Welles appears on
screen. Nevertheless, it is a compelling performance and presentation and it
aptly amplifies the fine qualities of this masterful story.</div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink</a>, </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-8460988320388141962016-07-20T08:51:00.000-05:002016-07-20T08:51:07.476-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbaVHPEnfCYsvQcULAM7s06KK9Y1jfpaI-eQVwgKburTL-zKoGrqXiPhOprnoKdc1pyDcfQEPYK2aPndkmB0YPGyXFa4AYjojMaIfueMaae-0Bsac_aHWevETZfQSnVZ_TSO7YzLyhZ-1E/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbaVHPEnfCYsvQcULAM7s06KK9Y1jfpaI-eQVwgKburTL-zKoGrqXiPhOprnoKdc1pyDcfQEPYK2aPndkmB0YPGyXFa4AYjojMaIfueMaae-0Bsac_aHWevETZfQSnVZ_TSO7YzLyhZ-1E/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
Grapes of Wrath<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">A big topic of conversation these days is the
idea that we currently live in the Anthropocene Era; that is, the era defined
by the effects of human beings on the natural world, most tellingly the
climate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the same time, there
are frequent news stories of “eco-refugees” – people seeking asylum because
weather disasters have made their home countries uninhabitable. The linking
idea is that human endeavors have caused catastrophic changes to the natural
environment, with the result being earthquakes, tsunamis, and droughts that
forever alter landscapes and resources. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>With
this lens, John Steinbeck’s epic, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Grapes of Wrath </i>(#10 on The Modern Library’s list), has renewed relevance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>People
live in the natural world, but people also (and no other species does this)
impose artificiality on it. Nature reacts, in turn imposing conditions that
make it impossible for people to live in the environment. Is a dust bowl a “natural”
disaster when over-farming and over-population have rendered an area of land
incapable of recovering from a cyclical drought?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The natural and the political collide.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Grapes of Wrath</i> is a great novel for
many reasons, but it is especially intriguing to perceive its echoes in our own
time. The novel tells the story of the Joads, who have to leave Oklahoma and
try to head for greener pastures, quite literally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are among a vast migration of people who left their
homes and tried to make it to California, where the farming was excellent and
jobs were in abundance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are
extremely poor people, like so many migrants of our current age, with nothing
left to lose but health and life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
is significant that the novel starts with descriptions of the landscape and
weather.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A turtle makes an appearance
before any human does, and gains character and story trajectory in a passage in
which the humans are anonymous agents in the turtle’s life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a story of a world and its
human inhabitants in battle with one another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Steinbeck
has a way with characters, and the compelling force of this story is the Joad
family and the many people they encounter along the way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a great read, for all ages of
readers, because of the language and style of the narrative with its biblical
overtones, because of Steinbeck’s rendering of dialogue and dialect, and
because of the sheer drama of it all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is, like many other novels on the list, a book you can’t put
down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The novel is biblical not in
the sense that it is trying to convey religious doctrine, but in the sense that
it evokes the Judeo-Christian mythology that is the heritage of these
Americans.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good myths often
involve a journey fraught with hardship and obstacles, illustrating the
enduring character of people, promising something quasi-magical at the end,
once the obstacles are overcome.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The traveler encounters other people along the way and shares stories
and histories with them, thus breaking wide open his personal world and making
him a citizen of the larger one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This story has exactly all of these elements. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>America
is a great land for migration because there are no political borders to
cross.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not to say that the Okies
from the dust bowl were welcome in the communities they travelled to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The poor and dispossessed are
traditionally regarded with suspicion, their poverty seen as a mark of their
undesirability at a basic level.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But in America, the fact of free movement has made migration a part of
the country’s character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>People like the Joads leave their homes because they have to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They can’t make a living in the
destroyed land, and the financial institutions – always stronger than any
individual – take away what little they own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They repossess it, in fact, because the system of money
lending means the people never really owned it to begin with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So they acquiesce, they leave, they
reach optimistically for the promised land. They journey and struggle and find
moments of abject tragedy<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
moments of beauty, strength, and community along the way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Grapes of Wrath </i>is a great American
novel that should be read by everyone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink</a>, </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-76640174867857265762016-06-08T15:56:00.000-05:002016-06-09T00:02:42.717-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbaVHPEnfCYsvQcULAM7s06KK9Y1jfpaI-eQVwgKburTL-zKoGrqXiPhOprnoKdc1pyDcfQEPYK2aPndkmB0YPGyXFa4AYjojMaIfueMaae-0Bsac_aHWevETZfQSnVZ_TSO7YzLyhZ-1E/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgbaVHPEnfCYsvQcULAM7s06KK9Y1jfpaI-eQVwgKburTL-zKoGrqXiPhOprnoKdc1pyDcfQEPYK2aPndkmB0YPGyXFa4AYjojMaIfueMaae-0Bsac_aHWevETZfQSnVZ_TSO7YzLyhZ-1E/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Edith Wharton<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Edith Wharton is a prolific and
reliable writer of the early 20<sup>th</sup> century who fits the category of
true novelist. That is to say, though each of her novels certainly stands on
its own, and it is possible to have a favorite among them, it is the cumulation
of her insight and style that makes her work significant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On
the Modern Library’s list are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Age of
Innocence</i> (#58) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The House of
Mirth </i>(#69).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Like
Henry James (who was a contemporary and friend) and Graham Greene, Wharton has
a certain arena of life, a certain thematic thread, and a certain attitude on
which she builds her stories, which make them recognizably hers.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Wharton
was an early feminist—a disposition that would be clear from her novels even if
you were not aware of the biographical detail.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her protagonists tend to be women who recognize the multiple
layers of swaddling hindering them in their quest for identity and a place in
the world. Reading these characters, it is not hard to see why the women’s
liberation movement was bubbling up then.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>These
novels are not political polemics, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are good reads. They are solid stories told in clean
prose of people in their ordinary lives (albeit from the distance of a century
and with the details of “ordinary” that distance entails).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are witty, realistic, and sensory,
with characters who stick with you, like people you know.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novels have the best quality
a novel can have: You hate to reach the end. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Wharton,
like James, wrote about the higher classes of society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her realm was New York.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The people in her stories are
privileged, or once were, and move in fancy environments, or those in contrast
to their fancy norm.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Wharton
writes about this milieu with knowledge but also with the stance of an
outsider.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is compassion in
her attention to detail, but it is layered with wry skepticism. She might seem
to be celebrating this society and its better qualities, but she is also exposing
its absurdities and, more to the point, its dangerous qualities:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the psychologically denigrating
expectations it imposes on its women. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Love gets cynical coverage in Wharton’s hands.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is a masterful prose stylist and a
masterful storyteller, so the dark side of romantic pairing can sneak up on
you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And of course marriage
eligibility and the necessity of young women to be married are scoffed at. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Age of Innocence </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">involves a planned marriage between two
people well suited, in societal terms, for each other that is disrupted by the
appearance of a woman who is everything but suitable for society.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Countess Ellen Olenska is an
American who has married a foreign Count, which is good.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she wants to divorce him, which is
bad. There is mutual attraction with a man who is destined for the aforementioned
suitable marriage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both behave
honorably, but Ellen’s life defies the rules of her society, and so her actual
behavior is irrelevant.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The House of Mirth </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">involves a woman, Lily Bart, who at
nearly 30 is almost too old to marry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She contrives to keep a suitable partner on the hook while she explores
the possibility of another partner, but the gears keep moving around her,
putting her acceptable destiny and her desired destiny both in jeopardy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Wharton’s
humor is biting yet artful; her insight is deep and multidimensional.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She sees a whole world and has thoughts
about it which she shares through nicely wrought scenes. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The opening paragraphs of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Age of Innocence,</i> for instance, are
very funny, painting a picture of the New York opera society and its patrons
that stops just short of parody. These are not comedies, however.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tragedy also permeates the novels, as
it must when the central conflict is self against the world. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink</a>, </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-38264002035241614192016-04-13T15:59:00.000-05:002016-04-13T18:00:41.788-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCpcw8YkPQWMICwn1z4Wa8-KTgEHL9zMkXoxYLdoSKcuImurBLNTjm68tdOfOhVLAFOSsh7iotUBfVl2NVjxUmUIFL3lb5bpnzaWMesxX4vv-BZgOBkh3dDH4fZ41RuyXtiOBWsTdZ5VgD/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhCpcw8YkPQWMICwn1z4Wa8-KTgEHL9zMkXoxYLdoSKcuImurBLNTjm68tdOfOhVLAFOSsh7iotUBfVl2NVjxUmUIFL3lb5bpnzaWMesxX4vv-BZgOBkh3dDH4fZ41RuyXtiOBWsTdZ5VgD/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
Heart of the Matter<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Graham Greene is a writer who never
disappoints.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, of his
many novels published in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, only one—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of the Matter—</i>makes the Modern
Library’s list at #40.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Written
and published at the tail end of World War II, set in Africa with British
characters, this is a story about moralism. It involves a main character who
commits acts against his core beliefs and then makes an ultimate decision that
he understands to be a generous one designed to set things right again. The
paradox is, however, that it represents a special kind of self-absorption: the
superior notion that he has the right to determine what is best for others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the attitude of the so-called
“white man’s burden” espoused in tandem with imperialism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This man, therefore, is a metaphor for
the British in Africa.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
novel is more than a fable or allegory.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A signature style of Greene’s is that his novels tend to have a
detective-story feel, and also have something of an O. Henry twist to them. The
story unfolds as if a mystery was presented to be solved. He writes with the sensibility
of a filmmaker: the stories present themselves visually and viscerally. They
are easy and engaging reads, while also intellectually and morally
involved.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Greene
published between the early 1920s, when he was himself only in his 20s, and the
early 1980s, within a decade of his death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His stories are contemporary to his time. This makes him
truly a writer of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. Greene is a go-to writer for
me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each of his novels is fully absorbing,
of the kind that you’d rather not break from until it’s done, and then rather
not have it done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is a
similarity to them that borders on formulaic (like a detective novel), but his
eye for detail and the depth of his compassion save them from being mere
entertainments (though they can be that as well). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The End of the Affair,
The Quiet American, </i>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Third Man
</i>top my list of favorites from Greene’s hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of the
Matter</i> was singled out for acclaim, perhaps because of the overt moral argument
it presents. Like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bridge of San Luis
Rey</i> (reviewed in the previous column), this novel is one about Catholicism.
The dogmatic ethics contrast with the seemingly unruly native society, allowing
the story to explore the nature of adherence and accommodation. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Some of the ideas that arise
from this story are these: Pity has erosive effects. Sticking to rules doesn’t
work in the real world, not for everyone at least, not when the society is
heterogeneous and imbalanced, when some people are privileged and some are not.
Rules-following might be a luxury of privileged people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Religious dogma, particularly Catholic
tenets, might be suffocating, unsuited to real life by real people.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Life is unpredictable, and a single
person cannot know what is best for other people or even for himself, even when
his faith in himself is unshakeable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>People are intriguing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Those we have to live with are baffling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>People might not get what they deserve; they might well just
continue on in a life unburdened by the demands of consistency.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Mostly, though, this novel
falls in the category of a good read. Greene’s writing is flawless. His characters
are believable while also representing a new world for the reader. The themes
make you think and the plots keep you engaged. And because of his prolific
output, one Graham Greene can lead to another, which is a good habit to have. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink,</a> </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-27867024288727539732016-03-16T15:02:00.000-05:002016-03-16T23:04:08.072-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnyjPZ1Nr1oI9GNsd-iZw4_Y0pIs5sipRH1zi0WqRZkXOyRWovUN8gNZrZ_fWoHbGOMGWSucCS2eMNJRW3z7bnfwKov0X0FsAv1n-UUAv7e7wWld09m3ZUunnOCvUh2SWk82oA1YTdD2v/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdnyjPZ1Nr1oI9GNsd-iZw4_Y0pIs5sipRH1zi0WqRZkXOyRWovUN8gNZrZ_fWoHbGOMGWSucCS2eMNJRW3z7bnfwKov0X0FsAv1n-UUAv7e7wWld09m3ZUunnOCvUh2SWk82oA1YTdD2v/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
Bridge of San Luis Rey<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The conceit of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bridge of San Luis Rey</i> (by Thorton Wilder, #37 on The Modern
Library’s list) is that it’s written by a scholar 200 years after an incident—the
collapse of a rope foot bridge—that had been explored and recounted at the time
by a monk whose work was subsequently largely (but not entirely) lost.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Five people died when the bridge
collapsed and the monk’s exploration of these lives was meant to reveal the
meaning behind their deaths. Why these five people? Why together on this
bridge?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
monk, as would be expected, approaches from the premise of Catholicism, and
with that bias seeks to confirm that God’s hand guides all events. The question
he wants to answer is whether death is foretold in a person’s life. The questions
the narrator (and the writer) seeks to answer are a bit more complicated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is, can we in this modern age
accept the relatively easy premise of the first scholar’s work?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
novel is constructed in five parts. The first explains the circumstance of the
story and the intent of the narrative. The next three tell the stories of the
five people. The last examines the scientific inquiry that the monk brought to
his analysis of the event.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
is something in the tone of the first and last sections that seems to be baiting
our skepticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even the titles of
each section convey this: “Perhaps an Accident,” and “Perhaps an Intention.”
The middle sections read as short stories in their own right, each standing on
its own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are old-fashioned in
style, not of the style of the modern short story, but in the style of an old
tale of people and events that are of interest to later generations.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
five people who died are connected in various ways in life. There are family
relationships among some of them, and mentorship and patronage relationships
among others. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their stories are
largely sad and plagued by dissatisfactions, but in the telling of them, they
are all normal human stories, with nothing melodramatic to them. They are not
overtly pointed toward the support of the monk’s theory, as might be the
temptation in a less skilled writer’s hands. This collection of stories builds
a philosophical inquiry told in considered and gentle prose. The key to this
story is expressed in the last section:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“The discrepancy between faith and the facts is greater than is
generally presumed.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Why read this book?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like Willa Cather’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death Comes to the Archbishop</i>, this
novel presents an intriguing view of Catholicism not just as a religion but as
a cultural influence in the New World. The story takes place in Peru, and some
of the characters are natives while others still have ties to old Spain. The
characters span a range of classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The novel presents a world that is in setting, customs, and time foreign
to American readers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It keeps its
distance with its overlay of modern perspective, but at the same time immerses
the reader in the telling of the victims’ lives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is linguistically rich without a word going to waste. It
is a tiny book, easy to read, readable in one sitting, that leads us into a
state contemplation, pondering questions of cosmic significance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink</a>, </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-10147962323749642742016-02-03T15:01:00.000-06:002016-02-03T17:02:28.801-06:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiav2_U3iOi_HgRkmuXVO_dgT9W7_qxSlBKQ6_xssQv-MIBaKdcaOOfbK8TtOYGwsCENOYknf2xPlILv_HU66kPabuGn9MU3X6g3OOeERyBqjZpiQ_M6f6pk-L1Dtrln1HK-sCxJH2RrDgP/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiav2_U3iOi_HgRkmuXVO_dgT9W7_qxSlBKQ6_xssQv-MIBaKdcaOOfbK8TtOYGwsCENOYknf2xPlILv_HU66kPabuGn9MU3X6g3OOeERyBqjZpiQ_M6f6pk-L1Dtrln1HK-sCxJH2RrDgP/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>Books
for Boys and Other Humans</b></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b><br /></b></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There are two novels on the Modern
Library’s list that are credited with turning generations of adolescent boys
into readers of literature.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One is
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord of the Flies</i> (#41, William
Golding) and the other is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catcher in the
Rye</i> (#64, J.D. Salinger). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>To
be sure, the primary appeal is that the characters themselves are adolescent
boys, with their myriad confusing, angry, wild and joyful impulses, trying to
make their way through to adulthood, that boring, concession-filled state.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Both
of these novels are extremely well known.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord of the Flies </i>is a
fantastical story of what would happen if a passel of boys were left to govern
themselves (spoiler alert: it doesn’t end well).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catcher in the Rye</i>
is a realistic story of a boy more or less alone in New York City and in life,
or so he fears.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>With
their being so well known, the question is, how did they achieve their status?
What qualities have made each not only reach successive new generations of
readers—or, more importantly, reluctant readers—but also endure as classics of
literature with the ability to touch adult readers as well? These novels do not
have a lot in common with one another on the surface.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What they do have in common is something that is a pillar of
good storytelling: character.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Think
of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catcher in the Rye</i> and you think
of Holden Caulfield.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Holden could
be your little brother, and with trepidation you watch him as you watch your
brother struggle through his preternatural cynicism, knowing that he is
unreachable, hoping he’ll make it okay to the other side. You understand his
anger and confusion, his disgust with everything ordinary. You get a charge out
of his foul-mouthed mode of expression, though you are supposed to
disapprove.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You feel the
undercurrent of his vulnerability.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> the little brother, you see
in Holden a reflection of your own inner self.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Holden articulates for you what you’ve always felt to be
impossible to articulate.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You love
him, and thus love yourself.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Your
little brother could also go the way of the boys in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord of the Flies</i>. They are so ungovernable, yet longing for
governance. They are unformed creatures sorely in need of a firm adult hand,
that guidance that in this story is literally absent and in the lives of so
many young people lacking in essence if not in body. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Without
someone to teach them and control them, they create their own hierarchies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They play out the naturalness of the
human animal in society. Their approach is a mix of instinct—for self-preservation,
for dominance—and the inborn inclination to form a structure around themselves
in order to create meaning beyond mere basic need.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both instincts are equally human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can see how easily your little brother might become one
of these archetypal members of society: the strong, the bullied, the wise, the
incapable. And again, if you are the little brother, here is a range of
characters you could mold yourself after, as well as those you secretly fear
you are.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Even
as adults we struggle with these fears and aspirations: Who can I become, and
what idiocies and unacceptable futures must I face down on my way?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Thus
both novels achieved something extraordinary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They speak directly to the adolescent sensibility,
particularly the male one (which is not so well served as the female).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And they embed themselves in the
reader’s mind, so that the adult can read with a kind of duality,
simultaneously as a wild adolescent and as the person he did eventually become.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink</a>, </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-2887543517644257002015-11-23T16:53:00.000-06:002015-11-23T19:55:52.636-06:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The Great Gatsby<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
Great Gatsby, </span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
masterwork, is one of those books that is so well known, it’s tempting to
believe you don’t actually have to read it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You do, though.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Or at least you’d be depriving yourself of a tremendous experience if
you did not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This novel is #2 on
the list of Greatest Novels of the 20<sup>th</sup> Century for good reason.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The plot of the story is based
on some classic themes: love triangles, infidelity, class conflict, crimes of
passion.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a morality tale and
it is quintessentially American.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is also a work of art.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Many attempts have been made to
turn this book into a movie, which is to say, to turn this piece of writing
into a piece of cinema.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The temptation
is obvious, what with all the costumes and the music and party scenes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But film rendering fails.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The book has things going on that film
cannot do justice to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For
instance, the structure:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nick
narrating; Nick orchestrating meetings; Nick running into people out of scene
(as it were, who “are” or “were” end up being key players to Gatsby’s story);
Nick philosophizing; Nick hypothesizing; Nick remembering; Nick observing. A
successful film translation might leave Nick out, and have the filmmaker be
Nick’s eyes and thoughts. But why bother? The book is perfect.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The art of writing allows a
person’s experiences—Jay Gatsby’s—to be seen and also to be remarked.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To be noted through the eyes of people
who do not know his story fully.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To be interpreted through the experience of the observer—Nick
Carraway.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The art of writing
allows the reader to layer upon the narrator’s interpretation of the character’s
life his or her own experience and philosophies and attitudes. To shift points
of view along with the narrator and also along with the characters in
opposition to the narrator.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
art of writing allows a story to be told that is burdened and layered with
philosophies existing outside the narrative.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The art of writing allows words to be collected in one place
that not only create a scene, describe a character, evoke an atmosphere, but
also in themselves create rhythm and sound as in the last line of the novel: “So
we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessy against the past”
has the hard beat of the repeated “b” and the liquid pull of the repeated long “e”.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The trio of phrases and the doubling up
of “against” create a lyricism that is actually unnecessary for the conveying
of the core idea of the sentence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It is a metaphor bordering on senseless that manages to evoke an image
of hard human labor and brings to mind, if only subconsciously, the myths of
ancestors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It captures the essence
of the story just told and stands in poetic juxtaposition to the prosaic
(though also eloquent) first line of the story: “In my younger and more
vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in
my mind ever since,” which introduces us, quite efficiently, to our narrator
and the stance from which he approaches the story he is about to invent.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">This story is about Jay Gatsby,
the Great Gatsby, with his social climbing and ill-placed obsessive love, his
need to receive admiration and create wealth and exude philanthropy, who is the
pulse of the Jazz Age, that great cultural upheaval, but it is a story invented
by Nick Carraway. Another character as narrator would have told a different
story. As written, this story is a novelist’s story. Nick is a novelist. He is
tolerant and unjudging but engaged and sensitive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He needs to attach meaning to these scenes he witnesses and
participates in, even the parties, which in themselves have no meaning
whatsoever. He makes Gatsby a tragic figure, where someone else might have made
him a pathetic one, or a throwaway news item. Through Nick, we readers see
Gatsby’s story as the Great American Story. And in the end, Nick makes
melancholic poetry of Gatsby’s traumas but leaves Gatsby and his world behind and
moves on to something else. He goes on with his own life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Nick is not Fitzgerald.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It would be a simplistic mistake to
assume he is. Fitzgerald is the great creator of Nick and of Gatsby and of West
Egg and of the whole glorious beautiful thing we readers get to enjoy.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons ofBlack Ink</a>, </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-815991815731022132015-10-26T15:19:00.000-05:002015-10-26T15:19:05.721-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The Ginger Man </span></i></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Number 99 on the Modern Library’s
list, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ginger Man</i>, is a very
interesting and somewhat problematic novel by the Irish-American writer, J.P.
Donleavy<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">I count this novel, along with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Road</i>, as falling outside the norm
of novel writing established by the other novels on this list. It is a
startling piece of prose, the kind that demands a leap of readerly faith, both
because of the style of the narrative and because of the treatment of its
female characters. Read by a lover of literature, it is new and exciting in
style. Read by a woman, it is objectionable and hard to take. The problem comes
when the reader is both.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">This is not the only novel on
the list in which the female characters get treated badly, but it is realistic
enough and unrepenting enough that from the vantage point of 2015, a reader
might find it frustrating to see the women put up with such treatment and not
walk out on their own and make their own lives. (Admittedly, Edna O’Brien’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Country Girls—</i>a stupendous and groundbreaking
novel from the mid-1960s that did not make the list— raises the same feelings,
though with different effect.) What it comes down to is intention. The object
of the novel is not to make a story of the struggles between the sexes for
equal voice (as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Country Girls</i> does)
but to tell of the adventures of a roguish, charming, exasperating young man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Sebastian Dangerfield is the
young man, a character, like his creator, with feet in both America and
Ireland.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This peculiar inborn
duality of Irish-Americanism is one of the compelling features of this book.
Sebastian and his companion live simultaneously in two cultures that are historically
so closely connected as to create a unique culture. They are men of the
post-World War II era, affected by it but not owning up to the effect. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Sebastian is a ne’er-do-well of
the first order. He is a man with no civic responsibility. Everything he does
is for his own pleasure, although that pleasure is of a damaging and nihilistic
sort. The damage <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>is overtly done to his wife and child,
less obviously to himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is a
charmer and an abject bastard, and he doesn’t care. Or does he? A telling line
in his voice comes in the last pages of the novel: “I think I am weary of my
terrifying heart.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is that
uncommon glimpse of self-awareness that saves Sebastian from having the book
slammed shut on him by an unsympathetic reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">This is a “picaresque” novel,
which is a term I myself, reader though I am, had not heard until well into
adulthood. It means a narrative in which the character moves through life from
one adventure to the next, and it is used effectively to paint a scene of a
time, as it allows the character to encounter a wide assortment of people and
places that are not necessarily logically connected (logical in the literary
sense, that is; life itself is rarely logical). It is a technique that releases
the narrative from the obligation of cause, effect, and resolution.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The novel relies heavily on
dialogue, and the dialogue is naturalistic and vernacular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Therein lies another compelling
feature. These voices are amusing and moving. We enter into their conversations
mid-stream, and they don’t let us go through their whole raucous life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">In the end, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Ginger Man</i> is an enjoyable ride,
hitting all the emotions in the range from exuberance to melancholy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe we can leave the solving of
social ills to other writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in Philadelphia where she works as an editor for a medical
publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the
Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink,</a> </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of
dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and
lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most recently in
RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-57261845173392028642015-09-28T13:30:00.000-05:002015-09-30T00:09:43.106-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b>A Room with a View</b></span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><b><br /></b></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There is nothing like falling in love, although
when it goes smoothly it can be quite boring to outside observers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Luckily for fiction, it rarely goes
smoothly.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">E.M. Forster’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Room with a View</i> (#79) is the nicest romance on the Modern
Library’s list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, it
is a romance with issues and impediments, and in Forster’s masterful hands a
compelling tale that travels back and forth between sensuous Italy and farcical
Britain.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lucy is a well-bred, obedient young
woman with something smoldering inside her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Through the coincidences of British upper-class travel she
twice crosses paths with a father and son who might be well-bred but are not
necessarily obedient, at least not to British propriety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The father, Mr. Emerson, is romantic
and philosophical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His voice is
the foil to the reliable expectations laid out before Lucy, which she had
readily bought into.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It isn’t that
Lucy is not allowed to be herself; it’s just that even as herself she hadn’t
felt any inclination to rebel against her predictable, respectable future.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But Lucy has a passionate soul. We can
see it in her piano playing: she plays Beethoven with a particular, almost
unsettling degree of feeling. We even see it in her relationship with her
younger brother Freddy, who is at the age between boyhood and manhood and is
overflowing with impetuous life, tolerated and indulged by his mother and his
sister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lucy has a certain
something, which is perceived by Mr. Emerson’s son, George, but not at all by
her chaste beau, soon fiancé, Cecil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And therein manifests Lucy’s conflict.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The older people in this story are very
interesting, and an examination of their characters and their relationships
could fill pages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is Mr.
Emerson, Lucy’s mother Mrs. Honeychurch, Lucy’s cousin and chaperone Charlotte,
a romance novelist named Miss Lavish, and the local vicar Mr. Beebe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They have created little families for themselves
among one another, but each is without a life partner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is fun and sociability in their
lives, there is friendship and companionship, but there is no romance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If Lucy and Charlotte hadn’t encountered
the Emersons on their Italian sojourn in Florence, Lucy might have grown
predictably into the same enjoyable but non-romantic life, and she might have
been satisfied with it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But she
did meet the Emersons, and each of these older people, in his or her own way,
encourages the young ones toward love, which in<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> this
novel is synonymous with life.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A motif is the celebration of the nude
male as the symbol of art, passion, and freedom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Florence, this type of art surrounds the British visitors
and challenges their aesthetics and their morals (as does the sometimes violent
passion of the Italian people).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Back in England, it is echoed in a spontaneous, playful swimming outing
with Freddy, George, and Mr. Beebe (representing three ages of a man), which is
accidentally seen by Lucy, Cecil, and cousin Charlotte.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are scandalized, mostly on behalf
of the young, pure women, but maybe they are only very slightly
scandalized.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe at least two of
them are also awakened to the beauty that life contains. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The tone and the structure of this
novel are like a piece of Beethoven’s music – the “Moonlight” sonata comes to
mind.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The novel is melodic, with a
somewhat brooding undercurrent punctuated by bright notes of joy and also with
discordant notes that sit a moment and then resolve themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is what falling in love, real
love, is like as well: the uncertainties induce extreme unhappiness, even
sparks of irritation and anger.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>But then the merest appearance of the object of one’s infatuation is
like shafts of sun, like a snatch of song in perfect harmony. The real love
between Lucy and George illuminates the inadequacies of the supposed love
arrangement between Lucy and Cecil.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Once that light is shined, it can’t be turned off again. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The message of this novel is an exuberant
one, celebrating happiness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mr.
Emerson says it best:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“<span style="color: #181818;">Do we find happiness so often that we should turn it off
the box when it happens to sit there?”</span> he asks a conflicted Lucy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And: “<span style="color: #181818;">By
the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes--a transitory Yes if you like,
but a Yes.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in Philadelphia where she works as an
editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>She is also the Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink,</a> </i>a Literary Writers Network
publication. She has a degree of dubious practical use, in German, and is a
lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists. She has had a few short
stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-74694152153809261322015-08-31T14:00:00.000-05:002015-08-31T22:41:57.855-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">As I Lay Dying<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">To
me, one of the most satisfying novels on the Modern Library’s list and one my
favorites from its prolific author, William Faulkner, is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">As I Lay Dying </i>(#35).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Its chief appeals are its black humor and modernist experimental style. “As
I lay dying,” you can hear the unfortunate Addie Bundren say, “Just look what
all these idiots around me were doing.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In the seriousness of their endeavors, they succumb to ludicrous
situations. And in their ridiculousness they unveil a great world.<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The story is told as first-person narrative from a rotating
cast of about 15 characters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Their
intellectual acumen is varied.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Some are very young. Some have a loose grip on sanity. Some are
obsessive. Some are fairly wise and grounded at moments. Some are selfish. Some
are always striving to do the right thing. Some have big secrets. Some have a
marvelous way with words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Many of
the characters we learn about through others before hearing from them directly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The dying woman, though the story pivots around her, appears
in her own voice in only one passage more than halfway through the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her passage is, among other things, a
meditation on words.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a
poetical articulation of what Faulkner does in this novel through strings of
words, dialect, punctuation and italics that add up to repeated immersions into
other people’s consciousnesses – like mind-melding sometimes, or like
half-drowning in psychology, and sometimes like sensory overload, or like
watching a high-rise being built or a sculpture emerge from a lump of clay. The
story builds persistently. Understanding grows and blossoms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It comes back around to that note of
black humor: after everything everyone has been through, the father shows up at
the end (I won’t say in what circumstance) and you want to say on their behalf,
“Are you <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">kidding</i> me?!”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The basic outline of the plot can be gathered only after a
full reading of the book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Addie
married Anse years ago and had several children. She lived with them away from
where she grew up, and they understand that she wants to be buried back where
she came from.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So once she dies,
they undertake to transport her body in a casket one of the sons made, in a
wagon pulled by mules across some miles of landscape, including wild waters. They
make it after several days, with the decaying body still in the wagon in the
casket. What they’ve lost in the journey, and what they’ve contended with
during it and before it are the juicy meat of the story.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Faulkner was a virtuoso and became a cultural icon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As cultural icon, later in his life, he
was critiqued for not knowing personally enough of the actual people from whom
the Civil Rights movement grew and around whom it swung.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His astoundingly profound understanding
of people, and his equally astounding ability to bring that understanding to
life through words earned him that stature and with it the unreasonable
expectations not bestowed on other writers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wrote of the South; therefore, he should have been, in
his writing, a political activist – like Steinbeck, perhaps.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He fell short, in some eyes, of the
obligation of a cultural contributor.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Faulkner as novelist is obliged only to know his own
characters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this aspect of the
duties of novel-writing, Faulkner is the ultimate role-model.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He has no peer in American literature
thus far.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His novels are
fundamentally character studies, and this one is the prime example.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The world is created by individual
people and their individual stories meshing together even where the characters
themselves pass each other by in communication and comprehension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is, as an added bonus, funny and
poignant and stylistically magical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It has a rhythm that rushes and slows and turns back on itself and
rushes again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each word, and each
missing word, paints the landscape in which these people dwell. Each expression
serves to fill out their living portraits.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Faulkner wrote to write, and this novel should be read to be
read.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink,</a> </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-89906376899259332302015-07-27T14:04:00.000-05:002015-07-27T14:04:08.317-05:00Modern Masterpiece<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The
Maltese Falcon<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The Maltese Falcon</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">, by
Dashiell Hammett (#56 on the Modern Library’s list), is one of the few entries
that could be described as genre fiction. It is known as detective noir, along
with Hammett’s many other works (and with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Postman Always Rings Twice</i>, reviewed in an earlier column) it adheres to
that genre’s standards of scene and atmosphere (dark, rainy, and cynical) and
character (isolated, noble, and cynical). It is also a hugely entertaining
novel that holds up to repeated readings.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
story is so complex that you’re left with the nagging notion that it doesn’t
actually hang together. But it’s a story in the best sense of “story”:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>what happens? and then what happens?
and then what happens?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Maltese falcon is an object of mystery and value that has a whole host of characters
spinning around it. The story starts with the private detective Sam Spade – by
now an iconic American figure – who, we’re told, “looked rather pleasantly like
a blond Satan,” and a mysteriously fetching young woman who has lost her sister
to a dubious romantic entanglement. Soon Spade’s partner, Archer, enters, and
soon he meets with a mysteriously bad end. She is just a shade to the wrong
side of innocence (or is she?), suspecting the worst kinds of depravity but
unable to bring herself to articulate her fears.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spade has seen it all and worse, and in his world-weariness is
able to emit a sympathetic placidity even as he himself is accused of bad acts.
No wonder a string of clients in dire trouble put their faith in this man.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
Maltese falcon is an object whose value may be intrinsic but is more likely
gained by the interest people have in it, a value that increases the more people
that are interested. And there lies its value as a literary device,
representing what is wrong with society<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>– American society in particular – that human life can be so willingly
wasted in pursuit of a mere hunk of metal.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
people interested are many. Their stories intersect with one another,
unraveling and remeshing as secrets are uncovered by this relentless detective.
Their goodness and their badness may at times be one and the same. They are
described in exquisite detail, their physical features reflecting, as once was
considered geniunely<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> reliable (see Henry VIII, see
physiognomic research of past centuries), their inner character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Hammett
the writer is famously known to have been black-listed during the McCarthy era
for famously not naming names. His life and character, his reputed romantic and
sentimental nature along with his hard-headed loner mentality and his intimate
knowledge of the profession of detection (he was once a Pinkerton agent) show
through the pages of his creations. The prose is the artwork. You can learn to
roll a perfect cigarette from this book, how to wear a hat, how to pick your
way, figuratively and literally, through the mess of the world. You can get drunk
off the copious liquors imbibed and those half-drunk and left behind. You can
get a headache from the kicks the characters take. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spade
always has an attractive woman on his arm and several more lined up waiting for
their chance, notably his late partner’s bereaved wife, but in the end he is
alone, doing his job, impelled by his own sense of justice in this grimy world.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Georges
Simenon wrote similar stories of similar atmospheres in France. The Swedish
writer Henning Mankell currently writes in the same genre reflecting the noir
of his country and time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hammett’s
is an American view. The unique Americanness of his era carries through to our
understanding of our country today. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Noir is a great genre, allowing deep and broad exploration in
a highly readable form, and this novel is a masterful example.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-9002208790717117442015-06-29T14:00:00.000-05:002015-07-27T14:01:33.508-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">All the King’s Men <o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">All
the King’s Men</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">, by Robert Penn Warren (#36 on the Modern
Library’s list) is a story of political corruption and of the trickling-down
effect of a political machine, the lust for power that drives it and the
infection it spreads. Narrated by Jack Burden, a young man enamored of and caught
up in the machinations, the novel is complex in characters and plotting and
vibrant in its prose.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
opening scene sets the tone and establishes the metaphor of the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It says, with journalistic immediacy
and in zinging, popping style like that of the Beats (though written a decade
before them), this: You could go careening off the road, mesmerized as you are
by speed, the power of your car, and the gleaming black road – brand-new – laid
out before you.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could drop a
wheel off the edge, lose control, and go hurtling to an untimely death
witnessed by people who don’t seem to matter much to society, who have seen it
before, who remark on it briefly and sardonically before returning to their
labors. Or you might catch yourself in time and avert your own tragic demise. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
central figure of this story, Willie Stark, quickly became the iconic
politician, one who seeks power and more power, manipulating people and ruining
lives just because he can.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is
the image of the corrupting influence of power, and of the denigration of the
notions of a Democracy, which at the time the story is set (late 1930s) was a
hot topic the world over. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Just
as compelling are the stories dependent on Willie’s, the stories of Jack
Burden, his childhood friend, Adam Stanton, the woman he’s in love with, Ann
Stanton (Adam’s sister), and his mentor, Judge Irwin. Jack is happy to be taken
up by Willie Stark, to be an important person to this important man, to swagger
around town with Willie’s gang, who have nicknames instead of real names, like
gangsters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is happy to maintain
what he believes is his impartiality as a newspaper reporter. He is happy to
reel into this world these other people from his earlier life. He believes he
can see through Willie, and keep him in proper perspective. He casts his descriptive
judgment on Willie: the man with the Christmas tie and the schoolteacher wife.
He sees himself as in-the-know, smart and connected, cool, immune to
influence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s just as immune to
Willie’s growing perfidy as he is to Adam’s high moralism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He knows himself and knows what’s what.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
Jack’s self-delusion is the power of this story. How strong a personality do
you have to be to withstand the personality of someone like Willie Stark? How
many tiny little compromises to the relentlessness of that personality does it
take to break down your own? You take these tiny little steps in the name of
picking your battles, in the name of furthering your own career, in the name of
avoiding conflict, or even maybe out of moral laziness. And then one day you find
you’ve gone a step too far. You find you have put aside your own ethical values
and are yourself a corrupt individual, without claim to scruples.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
story takes place on the grand scale of American political office, where the
power of corruption is supposed to matter the most. It was supposedly (though
the author reportedly disclaimed this) based on a real politician who was <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>big at the time. Over the decades, the story has played out
again and again, to the point that it almost goes without saying that
government is a machine operated by a small ambitious and unscrupulous group,
excluding all of us weary laboring menials. But this story also hits at the
level of individual lives, in the workplace, for instance: it is no coincidence
that Willie Stark is called “Boss.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All the King’s Men, </i>Jack’s
myriad compliances and appeasements lead to abject tragedy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In life, the outcomes can be subtler. It
is a cautionary tale, told with brilliance. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-50579298076740559442015-04-27T15:29:00.000-05:002015-04-27T20:32:15.853-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dystopia<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Novels
depicting a dystopian world of the writer’s future are intriguing, entertaining,
and frightening, especially when read from a time vantage point well past when
the novel’s future was supposed to have happened.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is then that the novel’s staying power is tested and the
predictive intelligence and imagination of the writer is spot-lighted.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i> (Aldous Huxley, #5) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i> (George Orwell, #13), along with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Clockwork Orange</i> (Anthony Burgess,
#65, discussed in a previous column) are the books on the Modern Library’s list
that fit this description.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would
not have ranked them, relative to one another, the way the Modern Library did,
but this is not the first time we have not seen eye to eye.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I would also have included Margaret
Atwood’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Handmaid’s Tale</i> on the
list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maybe a separate list
covering just this genre is needed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Phrases
and notions from each of these books have entered into our common vocabulary and
consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Big Brother,” from
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i>, is arguably the most entrenched.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has also been co-opted in this
post-ironic age of voyeuristic/exhibitionistic television “reality” dramas to
the point that it’s quite possible the label is no longer associated with
Orwell’s vision of an intrusive and controlling government and the loss of
personal privacy at all levels.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Which is more frightening than the novel is. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>From
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i> we get
mood-controlling drugs and specially designed test tube babies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These days, psychopharmaceuticals are
so ordinary and prevalent that the pharmaceutical companies are now making up
disorders to go with the drugs. And the animal way of making and delivering
babies has seemingly become optional.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
disintegration of society in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Handmaid’s
Tale</i> starts with the elimination of cash transactions, which is so common
now as to be unremarkable. Surrogacy for procreation, depicted so disturbingly
in the novel, is also, while not exactly mainstream, no longer an abhorrent
oddity.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Obviously,
these novels all made a mark, reflecting the atmospheres, and fears, of the
times in which they were written, and capturing so well the logical
trajectories of then-current developments that they read now as prophetic. This
is a literary merit of each.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I prefer <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i>
because I prefer Orwell’s writing style to Huxley’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Orwell’s writing is clean and swift.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wastes no words (as he was<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> famously known to advise) but does memorable things with
the language. His characters are unique.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>His plots unfold with a kind of stomach-churning relentlessness.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>By
contrast, Huxley’s writing is pedantic and can become boring.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(In fact, his other novel on this list,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Point Counterpoint</i>, I dismissed as
practically unreadable.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i> has just as compelling a
premise, and just as well constructed and detailed a fantastical world, but the
writing does not sing like Orwell’s does, and its characters do not live quite
as fully off the page.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Similar
things could be said of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Handmaid’s Tale</i>.)<br />
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i>, in its succinctness, is a thing of
beauty.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like some other slim
novels on the list, it is made to be read again and again.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Let’s
say the criteria for “best” in a novel include the art of the story, the
artistry of the writer, the significance of the novel culturally, images that
achieve iconic value, and themes that transcend the writer’s own time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then let’s say that among the novels here judged “best,” some
are more best than others.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-82341532266364493292015-03-09T14:00:00.000-05:002015-03-11T02:17:48.534-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><o:p> </o:p></i><b style="line-height: 150%;"><i><o:p> </o:p></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Sister
Carrie</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Number
33 on the Modern Library’s list is a novel by Theodore Dreiser called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sister Carrie</i>. Dreiser has another novel
on the list, called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An American Tragedy </i>(#16).
He could as well have given <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sister Carrie</i>
that title.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead he named it
for not just the main character, but for the main character held in a certain
perception. Carrie Meeber is someone’s little sister. The name Sister Carrie
also invokes religious sisters—nuns. Both little sisters and nuns are pure and
uncorrupted, which Sister Carrie is not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
imagine this story’s attitude is one of disapproval or disappointment about the
track Carrie’s life took. I imagine Sister Carrie in the eyes of this novel is
seen as a fallen woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I read her
more as an admirable character, a woman who followed her own bliss an<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>d did for herself. Carrie is also a typical woman of her
time—not a traditional one, but a representative one—making her own way in the
world rebelliously and without apology. Carrie is a triumphant character.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
second main character, George Hurstwood, is a tragic character. When applied
correctly, “tragic” doesn’t mean merely sad or heartbreaking. It means also something
born of destiny.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A tragic
character is one whose fate is in some way preordained by his own decisions and
actions, maybe by his own personality. When the tragic end comes, especially in
well-wrought literature, its heartbreaking qualities and its inevitability
arrive together. Pathos is suffering of the innocent; tragedy is suffering of
the not-innocent, who are not the same as “bad” (their suffering would be
something else—justice, maybe). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>George
is a not-innocent who sets his own destiny in motion by a bad decision.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
novel also tracks the idea of the American Dream—great fortune achieved by a
person not born to it. This ideal set America off from the old countries, where
birthplace was seemingly immutable: If you were born a younger daughter to a
small-town working class family (as Carrie is), you grew up to be a woman who
married a small-town working class man and produced more of your same kind (as
her sister attempts to do). Carrie achieves instead a certain flavor of the
American dream, reaching fame and fortune through strategic relationships. She
meets along the way similar self-made people, men especially, including
George.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Her sister and
brother-in-law disapprove, and their disapproval also serves to push Carrie
into the very realms they look down on, or perhaps are jealous of, as they
struggle in maintaining their class standing as the country industrializes and
the cities, where the work is, become like testing grounds for surviving or thriving,
or neither. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">George started out a man who could help Carrie achieve the
material lifestyle she desired, but as Carrie rises, George declines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He commits a theft in the service of
his wooing of Carrie, and the rest of his life unfolds from the basis of that act.
Carrie acts in an amoral fashion, some would say; George acts criminally. Carrie
treats people callously; George puts his future at risk for the sake of
pleasing her. Carrie gains the material success she desired. George loses his
comfort and the dignity and respect he once had. Their fates do not seem to fit,
moralistically speaking. They are literary fates, and also true and
realistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 150%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sister Carrie </i>is a powerful story with
indelible characters. It gives a very interesting portrait of America at a
turning point in the country’s economic (and thus social) development.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of the many vibrant scenes, one sticks
in my mind especially: George is destitute in New York City, hoping to have a
place to sleep that night, and he encounters a man who is a huskster for the
homeless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This man stands in the
middle of Times Square and cajoles, like a carnival barker, passers-by to
donate the price of a bed in a flophouse, and thereby one by one gets this long
line of homeless men off the street for the night. Here are the rich and the
poor, the fortunate and the forgotten, the capitalistic and the socialistic, the
flip sides of the coin that is America, illustrated in 1900 as vibrantly as
they play out even today.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: orange;"><a href="http://10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>,</span> </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-25204805726810427602015-02-09T15:00:00.000-06:002015-02-10T10:38:29.045-06:00Modern Masterpieces
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century</span></i></b><b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran </span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i>On the Road</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">Read
enough novels and you start to develop the notion that there is such a thing as
“the novel,” that there is a norm, differences in style, voice, attitude, and
structure notwithstanding.</span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;"> </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">And
then pops up a novel that subverts this notion. One on the Modern Library’s
list is Jack Kerouac’s </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">On the Road</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">
(#55).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> This novel occupies a place on another
list of mine: the 10 books that have most influenced my life. (Naming your top
10 books is a challenge active in the social media realm right now. Try it; it’s
interesting and amusing. Also, by exchanging lists with friends, you’ll surely
get some more titles for your must-read list.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> Kerouac
is, like Hemingway, an exhaustively discussed and analyzed American author,
with himself as an artist as much the topic as his work—and with good reason,
as Kerouac is the type of writer whose own self is inseparable from his
creative output. <i>On the Road</i> is a
piece of writing that comes straight from the gut. I believe if you read this
book for the first time at the wrong age, it will land like a lump or pass
right by you. But if you read it at the right time, it will lift you high. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> The
premise of the plot is a trip by car across the United States. The car is
supposed to be delivered from the West coast to the East coast; the young men
driving it are hired to complete this job. What happens in the course if this
trip is an exultant meditation on just about everything in life, in the
language of jazz. Jazz music at
that time was crazy and heretical. It had entered an era of experimentation
that exploded it out of its shell of “America’s classical music.” It was, depending on the listener’s
stance, impossible to listen to, hardly resembling music at all, or a portal to
the greatest aesthetic and spiritual experience ever. The magic of <i>On the Road</i> is how the writing captures
the essence of this music. The language and rhythms of this writing are the
typewritten equivalent of bebop jazz. Read one, listen to the other, and you
have in your possession the spirit of that time in American life. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> These
people in this novel are outsiders, of course. They are not the norm. But they
portended the great upheavals that the country was about to face. They were the
avant-garde of the generation gap that itself became a norm. And this is why
the novel is so influential.
Through the courage, the rebellion, the rogue nature of Kerouac comes a
work of semi-fiction that lets a young reader of a certain inclination know that
other things are possible. Other lifestyles, other ways of viewing the world,
other—more esoterically—aesthetic experiences exist for the curious, the
restless, the disenfranchised, the creatively driven citizens of the
world. There are paths to
fulfillment through art that haven’t yet been forged. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> Kerouac’s
own life is not one, perhaps, to be emulated. He himself did not quite break
free of the conventions to which he was born. He stayed with his mother, he
stayed with his wife, he stayed tied to the small town and to the ethnicity of
his origin. He carried in his
psyche all the conflicts of all of the above and then some, and they ended up
killing him young. But what he
left behind, creatively speaking, rises to the level of the religious, in this
reader’s humble opinion.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher. She is also the Associate Editor
for <i><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<!--EndFragment-->Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-6323130865094380332015-01-12T10:30:00.000-06:002015-01-13T17:20:16.200-06:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i>Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Tobacco
Road<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">A
recent <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New Yorker</i> article about
paperback book publishing reminded me about Erskine Caldwell’s entry on the
Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels of the 20<sup>th</sup> century, number 91, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tobacco Road</i>, as well as<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>his other well-known work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">God’s Little Acre, </i>which is more
memorable in my experience.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Caldwell’s writing straddles that thin line between literary writing and
pulp fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is possible that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tobacco Road</i> makes the list while <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">God’s Little Acre </i>doesn’t because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tobacco Road </i>is somehow less pulpy,
somehow more elevated.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Like
many novels on this list, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tobacco Road</i>
was considered obscene when it was published because of its depictions of sex
and sexuality, in particular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Also
like many of the list’s novels, it remains shocking in some of its scenes and
themes, though not always the same ones that earned it obscenity charges originally.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is the story of an abjectly poor
white family in Georgia in the era of the Great Depression. They are
share-croppers growing increasingly poverty-stricken while adhering stubbornly
to their notion that they are independent and can fend for themselves. The
story includes weird physical afflictions, weird romances, weird phobias and
obsessions, and a starkly realistic style with no romantic overlay to give
these people any nobility in their down-trodden state. There is something
almost clumsy about the writing at times.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Caldwell is said to have meant his writing to be a form of
social and political protest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
wrote what he knew of his own Southern American society to bring attention to
the terrible circumstances in which people were living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Steinbeck did the same thing, but with
a desire to ennoble his characters that Caldwell doesn’t seem to capture.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Or perhaps Caldwell didn’t have the
same kind of starry-eyed faith in humanity that comes through as a Steinbeck
characteristic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Both write with a
style that is somewhat raw and anti-lyrical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Caldwell’s is more brutish, even, like the German
expressionists’ paintings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Another
comparison Caldwell has to endure is with his fellow Southerner, William
Faulkner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Southern gothic” is the
label commonly applied, an unfairness to each of them (and countless other
writers) that betrays the prejudice and bias still present in the American
literary world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unfortunately, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tobacco Road</i> is built on a premise that
is hard to reconcile with open-minded reading: that the protagonist family is
especially pitiable because they are white, not black, but are living at a
level “worse than” or “lower than” the black families around them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is supposed to be an added
injustice to this family, as if being white alone entitled them to a better
standard of living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Putting this
offensive premise aside (with difficulty), the depiction of this family is
refreshingly unflinching.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are
not nice people;<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> they are not innocent victims of
circumstance. Through their ignorance, they make things worse for themselves. They
are ridiculous and frustrating to an onlooker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet this picture of a sector of America is appalling, and
Caldwell’s writing style makes it impossible to look away.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Where Faulkner also
depicts blacks and whites living side-by-side in a broken society, where
Steinbeck also depicts people brought lower than low by poverty, they both do
so with empathy and with careful story construction, which allow their
characters to have humanity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Caldwell goes for luridness. This work is more similar to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Jungle</i>, by Upton Sinclair, a
muck-raking call-to-arms-against-injustice, which is apparently what it was
meant to be.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is more similar to
pulp fiction than to literary fiction or even to intentioned protest fiction
because of the luridness and the feeling that comes across that the story is
meant to titillate and engross rather than reveal and edify. However, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tobacco Road </i>does all of these
things.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Likewise <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">God’s Little Acre</i>, with a bit more tawdriness.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">There are, in the end, multiple ways to take this
novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Caldwell doesn’t have the power
and skill that the other writers mentioned do, but he gets the job done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This novel leaves a gritty taste in the
mouth, or maybe more aptly, an irritation in the consciousness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-37670139750818366672014-12-08T15:00:00.000-06:002014-12-09T00:18:05.464-06:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why Conrad?<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Number
1 on the Modern Library’s list of best novels (and on many other similar lists)
is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i>, by James Joyce. Number 3
is<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> A Portrait of the Artist as a Young
Man,</i> and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>number 77 is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finnegan’s Wake</i>, both also by James
Joyce.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have no intention of
reviewing these novels (well, maybe <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait
of the Artist</i>), but bring them up only to point out that this well
acknowledged best English-language novelist ever is represented three times on
a list of 100 entries. D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Henry James also appear
three times each.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The powerhouses
of American literature—Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck—appear
three times, three times, twice, and once, respectively.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Joseph
Conrad appears four times (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Secret
Agent, </i>#46; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nostomo, </i>#47; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of Darkness, </i>#67; and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Jim, </i>#85).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This strikes me as an
overrepresentation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Not
that Conrad doesn’t belong on this list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of Darkness, </i>in
particular, is without question a great novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Likewise <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lord Jim</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Conrad has a distinct style, unique
among his contemporaries or, really, any other writer on this list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He wrote in English, which was a
foreign language to him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He creates
in his writings indelible atmospheres and profound depths.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of Darkness </i>you get sucked into the very mire of the
scene, captured and entwined into the stinking, cloying natural elements of the
journey.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In all of the novels you
come away with the sense of having been absorbed into an impenetrable mystery—what
is it all about? Part of this is his way with the language.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Part of it is the exotic and oppressive
settings of the stories. Part is the plots. “Squalorous” is a word aptly
applied to any of his novels. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Conrad
left his mark on the history of literature throughout the 20<sup>th</sup>
century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The four novels of his on
the list were published in 1899, 1900, 1904, and 1907 (the first, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of Darkness</i>, was published
serially first and then in a volume in 1902, which presumable qualified it for
this list). The dark themes of his novels are harvested by subsequent writers—see
Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>See—it hardly bears mentioning—Francis Ford Coppola’s
masterpiece film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apocalypse Now. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His contributions unquestionably
enriched our literary canon.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
who reads Conrad now? <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An
admittedly small and informal survey reveals a generational pattern to Conrad’s
inclusion on required reading lists, applying not only to age but also to the
educational ideologies of schools.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The generation above mine remembers reading several of Conrad’s
novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The generation below seem
never to have heard of him (with the exception of those whose schools follow a
classical education). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All those
surveyed recall a less than enjoyable experience. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If we only get 100 slots, why do some (albeit great) writers
show up so frequently while others are passed over completely?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Golden Notebook </i>(Doris Lessing), or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waiting for the Barbarians </i>(J.M. Coetzee), or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Awakening </i>(Kate Chopin)?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of Darkness</i> is worth
reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is an enthralling and
disturbing—perhaps even disturbed—novel<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is worth reading because it delves
into the deepest reaches of the human psyche and experience through the
metaphor of journey through a dark and challenging landscape where people are metamorphosed
from socialized humanity to something raw and frightening though none the less
human.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is also linguistically
challenging and dark, edifying from a writerly standpoint.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Heart of Darkness </i>and you may feel inclined to explore Conrad’s
other works for the draw of their strangeness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But you don’t need The Modern Library to lead you there with
four—count ‘em, four—entries.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania,
and works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink,</a> </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-55216265043133276472014-11-10T15:00:00.000-06:002014-11-11T10:47:23.693-06:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s200/Annette.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">I,
Claudius<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Number
14 on the Modern Library’s list of 100 Best Novels of the 20<sup>th</sup>
Century is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I, Claudius</i>, by Robert
Graves, published in 1934. This novel purports to be the autobiography of
Tiberius Claudius, a member of the Roman ruling family in the time of Julius
Caesar.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From this basis, Graves
gives us a historical novel with the intimacy of a first-person eye-witness
account.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Why
is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I, Claudius </i>a great novel? Let’s
start with the character Claudius.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In contrast with his family, friends, and rivals, he is a poor physical
specimen: he stutters and he is half-crippled. This means he is considered weak
and stupid, dismissible at best, abusable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But as we come to find out, Claudius is far from stupid and
far from weak.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He uses these
perceptions as a cloak to hide his actions and manipulations, and he becomes a
great man in the context of his time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>More
than this, Claudius is a great literary character.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His personality is so fully formed by this author, Graves,
that he is as if real—living, breathing, thinking, feeling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is clever and funny, likeable,
sympathetic, and, finally, shockingly ruthless.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, he <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">was</i>
real; his life is a historical fact, after all. It took place approximately
2060 years ago, and in a language long dead, but in Graves’s hands, Claudius
and his contemporaries could be our contemporaries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He lives on the page and he continues to live after the back
cover of the book is reluctantly closed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(In fact, Graves went on to write a sequel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Claudius the God and His Wife Messalina</i>.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>First-person
narration <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>tends to do this: to create an indelible
character whose story has immediacy and intimacy. It conveys a different style
of truth than another attitudinal approach would. Certainly, it provides a more
visceral experience, a kind of juiciness, than a historical recitation does. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Next
what makes the novel great is the material Graves has to work with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Countless literary works have been
harvested from Roman history, rich as it is in drama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The intricacies of relationships, the political and social
rules dictating behaviors and fomenting rebellions right down to the very
personal; murder, mating, elevation and debasement, loyalty, remorse, betrayal,
grief; all of the most intense emotion-rousing, reaction-inciting aspects of
humanity bubble in the stew of this history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And we devour and nourish ourselves from that stew to this
day. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
finally there is the artistry.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
Romans left behind a remarkable body of literature and primary-source history
themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what imagination it
takes to construct fiction out of this ancient heritage!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Other authors have done it before and
since, but of the 20<sup>th</sup> century novelists, Graves’s work merits its
place among the best of fiction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I, Claudius</i> and see if
you don’t yearn to know more about this man and the men and women around
him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(If you do, go to Edith
Hamilton, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Roman Way, </i>and then see
if you can resist her previous work, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Greek Way</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are not
fiction; they are very strictly nonfiction, history-teaching, scholarly works
but imbued with the novelist’s spirit.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>And consider that this novel was written and published during a
revolutionary time in the history of the English-language novel, when the
contemporary, the ordinary were the topics of choice.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Could
Claudius stand tall beside John Dowell (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Good Soldier</i>), Jake Barnes (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sun
Also Rises</i>), Charles Ryder (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brideshead
Revisited</i>)?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He could.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Could he stand alone?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-6646631024349875902014-10-13T16:30:00.000-05:002014-10-13T18:57:33.251-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Kipling
and London<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Rudyard
Kipling and Jack London are both writers I’ve always associated with adolescent
boys’ adventure stories and therefore have not felt the need to acquaint myself
with.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It turns out that Kipling’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kim</i> (#78 on the list) and London’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Call of the Wild</i> (#88) also inhabit
the category of “pleasant surprises.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>They
are very different novels, written by two people in very different
circumstances, but they have several things in common as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kim
</i>conveys surprisingly incisive views of cultural difference seen through the
eyes of a young boy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Call of the Wild</i> contains a
surprisingly incisive view of the workings of the canine mind. (For two other
examples of a human writer getting convincingly into the mind of a dog, read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Story of Edgar Sawtelle</i>, by David
Wroblewski, which is fiction, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Hidden Life of Dogs, </i>by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, which is
nonfiction.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These two novels also
fulfill that most wonderful promise of literature of transporting you, the
reader, to a new and foreign place you will never have the chance to experience
first-hand.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Both
writers write about events and settings they know very well, being made of
them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Kipling was British, raised
mostly in India in that peculiar cultural and ethnic environment of the British
Raj, which figures frequently in British literature of the early part of the 20<sup>th</sup>
century.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London was American, some
would say quintessentially American, being of the West of the late 1800’s, a
land of challenge and opportunity often presented as the embodiment of the
American spirit.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kim</i>’s protagonist is a young boy; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Call of the Wild</i>’s is a dog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each is in his way a displaced person:
Kim the son of Irish and English parents abandoned to the streets of India,
passing as an Indian boy; Buck a farm dog stolen and pressed into service as a
Yukon sled dog.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each is forced to
live a life outside the expectations of his “breed” and each survives by the
strength of his own core being. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These characters, thrown against their wills into their
present circumstances, go from incident to incident, encountering new strange
and influential characters at every turn, only to be shoved in a new direction
and never to see them again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
grow along the way, gaining experience and control through hardship and near
misses of both the dangerous and safe, affectionate kind. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kim</i> was published in 1901 and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Call of the Wild </i>in 1903, making
them both novels not truly belonging to the 20<sup>th</sup> century (similar to
Henry James’ novel), more so because they were stories intended to entertain
and illuminate with no pretensions to prescience. Both were originally
published serially and they have that cliff-hanging, bated-breath pacing and
tone that can be so enjoyable when done well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are done very well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The writers’ mastery over their craft is plain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are both contemporary novels, so written
in the real time and on the real experience of the writer and<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>
yielding a satisfying immediacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They
each convey wisdom of the kind that grows out of culture clash—old cultures
against each other, or a new culture establishing itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And each is, fundamentally, an
adventure story: exciting and suspenseful, the kind of reading that might make
you miss your train stop. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Prejudice,
as we all know, is not admirable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It also carries with it the risk that you might miss out on some good
reading.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink,</a> </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-6060184340973546712014-09-15T15:30:00.000-05:002014-09-16T17:52:09.466-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A
Clockwork Orange<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Number 65 on the Modern Library’s list
is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Clockwork Orange</i> by Anthony
Burgess, one of my favorite novels of all times and also one of my favorite
movies (made by Stanley Kubrick).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>There are distinct reasons for both being favorites but the unifying
appeal is Burgess’s superbly imaginative linguistics.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Like
Orwell’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1984</i> and Huxley’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brave New World</i> (both also on the list),
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Clockwork Orange </i>depicts a
dystopian world of the not terribly distant future in which the things ordinary
people are currently discomfited by have logically grown to oppressive
proportions.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The protagonist and
narrator is Alex, an anti-hero if there ever was one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is a truly appealing and appalling young teenaged thug
living with his overly permissive, useless parents in anarchical urban England.
He is lively, intelligent, and dandyish, with a seemingly paradoxical love of
Beethoven.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Along with an ethos of
hedonism and violence, he and his friends have developed a richly expressive
language that leans heavily on Russian. (The book was published in 1962, amidst
the Cold War.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>As
an amateur linguist and full-blown philologist, I revel in this aspect of the
novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is intriguing and
amusing to read. The language is only one compelling aspect, however, and in
some ways the superficial one. As teenage slang provides cover to its users so
they can talk about what they need to talk about without comprehension or interference
from adults, the invented language dresses up the narrative, which is of a
society degenerated into a mess of hierarchically ordered exploitative
violence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Alex’s
attitudes and actions are of the type we are frightened of, being apparently
senseless and uncontrollable.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
is more intimidating to an unsure adult than a strong boy of adult physicality with
no internal constraints on his behavior?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The fear is both physical and moral:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This boy could do us harm, and we are the ones who should
have taught him better. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alex
himself is also a victim, however, to passivity on the part of his parents,
misplaced hyper-control from school and law authority (think of the
zero-tolerance policy common in present-day elementary schools), and finally
psychological torture in the name of the greater good by dispassionate social
scientists, the most frightening prospect of all. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
beauty of the novel is how it constructs a feeling of connection between the
reader and Alex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He should be our
worst nightmare, but instead he is disturbingly attractive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is the narrator of our decline, the
commentator on our faults.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He
pulls the veil off all the things we don’t want to own up to.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alex will grow up, if he does not end
up lobotomized in some fashion or other, into an adult, as will his
friends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He embodies the trend of
the world, set in motion by this thing called society, in which no individual
is compelled to take responsibility in his or her own time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He should be a warning, but he is
charming and captivating and sets us off-balance.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
book itself is slim and quick.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
writing is irresistible. You have to dive right in to the slang, accepting it,
comprehending through context.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
first paragraph alone contains more than a dozen neologisms, not to mention the
novel grammar and stylistic constructs of Alex’s speech.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so you immediately take your place
there in the milk bar, poised to accompany this character through his story, embedded,
as it were—complicit.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink,</a> </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-71436951630479631742014-08-26T23:26:00.001-05:002014-08-26T23:26:50.556-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 19px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reflections from the Well</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Writing Craft, Creativity & Inspiration</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-b971b432-15b1-b3d0-4495-3fd2017fb18d" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 11pt; margin-right: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="320px;" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/fTnvKdJhD_NRczCYaAyW2COytugky-sPDAySPQiT_1Fz4mYob6INg-vXk3GTcz_BlUKM1oeR4gLVWHqMT6T8ZAs0GKVOQmURde3yINec3XpHxs_0my4dgontgWqrw0LksQ" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="427px;" /></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By Alexander Slagg</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><br /></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Is the End Just the Beginning?</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I was recently inspired to read Walt Whitman’s </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Leaves of Grass </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">again, especially the poem “Song of Myself.” I needed some inspiration and guidance from a source that championed individuality and encouraged a sensual relationship to all that life has to offer. Walt Whitman was my man. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I recall last reading this iconic collection and poem back in the summer of 2002. I have vivid memories of riding the bus from my apartment in San Francisco to my first “real” editing job far out in Marin County, reading a tattered copy as the sun-scorched Northern California landscape unspooled outside the window. As I rolled along in air-conditioned comfort, I remember being awed by the spiritual depth and breadth of this work — some mid-19th century dude had put to paper these expansive mystical observations. Amazing! And I was intrigued by Whitman’s erotic themes. Again, some mid-19th century dude had written this. Amazing! “Song of Myself” read like a secret peek into someone’s diary from a long time ago. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The first thing that caught my attention this time around was in the introduction, which details some of the collection’s writing and publishing history. Whitman did not simply gather this collection of work and then release it to the world — end of story. The first edition was published in 1855. By the time Whitman died in 1892, he had published from 6 to 9 subsequent editions (depending on how you define an edition) of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Leaves of Grass.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> With each edition he revised and tinkered with his masterwork, rephrasing, reorganizing, shifting around content, adding content. With the death-bed edition of </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Leaves of Grass,</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"> the collection had grown from 12 poems to almost 400 altogether.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As an artist, what is to be made of this constant tinkering and reworking? When is a writing project done? Whitman continued to update “Song of Myself” and other poems from the original edition for more than 36 years. In my own experience, this onerous dedication to refining a creative work seems extreme. I like to believe that every creative project is on its own time frame and has its own unique gestation period. But I also think that it’s very easy for an artist to get sucked into the revision quagmire. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I finished writing my first novel in 2007, the initial draft having taken about two and a half years. Over the past seven years I have workshopped it and gone through extensive rewrites. I’m currently on draft four. When will this project be done? Not soon enough for my tastes. The thought of sitting down to work through subsequent drafts is about as appealing as a rusty nail through my hand. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Through the entire rewrite process, I’ve wanted to do nothing else but move on to the next project (which I’ve done here and there, eventually returning to another draft of my novel). My natural artistic temperament is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Walt Whitman. I definitely think of myself as a one-and-done artist. I want to capture the initial inspiration — and keep having that experience over and over again. That’s where the buzz is for me. That is my writing raison d’etre.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">But I’ve stuck with the rewrite process of my novel, as difficult as it’s been. Why? I guess it’s because I want to grow as a writer. Rewriting forces you to look at your writing and find ways to improve and refine it. Do it enough, and you’ll grow as a writer. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I’ve come to believe that there are two complementary energies that are needed to be a complete artist: inspiration and integration. You need to be open to inspiration’s calling and you need to be able to work the craft afterword, refining your creative vision and, over time, integrating those improvements into how you approach subsequent projects. Through a commitment to this ying-yang process, you can become the most whole and developed artist you are capable of becoming. </span></div>
<br />Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-21728783311790269612014-08-11T15:30:00.000-05:002014-08-14T23:54:40.750-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The Sheltering Sky<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Paul Bowles’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Sheltering Sky </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(#97 on the
Modern Library’s list) is his most famous work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is known for his own travels as well as his travel
writing, and this is, on its surface, a story of adventurous traveling.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A couple, Port and Kit, take themselves
to North Africa, unmooring themselves from their familiar world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They encounter a culture quite in
contrast to their own in all moral and aesthetic values.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They throw themselves into danger from
which they cannot, and do not, extract themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Bowles is a masterful
writer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He does not provide a
context for this story, as in “this is how we do things, and this is how they
do things.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Instead, this is an
instant immersion, like going to live with a foreign family and having to learn
everything about the family—their habits, their version of normal, their
history, their private unexplained expectations—and learn language comprehension
at the same time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is like
throwing yourself into a dark deep sea in order to learn how to swim. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may learn to comprehend, you may
learn to swim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You could instead
lose your self and lose your life. In the meantime you see things you never
imagined seeing. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">This story is a travel
story; it is also an existential treatise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It’s a commentary on culture clash, imperialism, human
violence, xenophobia, Western arrogance.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It depicts a culture rebelliously impervious to the expectations of “us.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It covers love and marriage, the
vulnerability of femaleness, ego-insecurity. It is nihilistic, it is beautiful:
the world is beautiful but we humans are tiny, we are brutalized. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
book was written in the aftermath of the Second World War, a time when the
world had seemingly lost its foundation and any notion of moralism had cracked
apart, shattered into pieces impossible to put back together again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>War has done this over and over,
especially war based on one defined people against another defined people, when
the definitions must become simplified and the nuances of humanity, the
commonalities, must be ignored and negated so that the struggle can achieve its
own life and grow epic. For the war to exist, the players must decide to turn
away from learning about one another. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sheltering Sky</i>
is not about World War II. It is about what it is about: two people who for their
own reasons accept within themselves the fate they’ve set in motion and make
themselves victims of a situation they could easily have avoided by staying
home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">The writer’s great
poetic sense and deep intellect are evident in every sentence, making this a
novel to be read again and again, if you can stand it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It has pungency. It is dark and
exultant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a multilayered
sensory experience with countless indelible images.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The woman of the couple is taken essentially as a slave and
(being female) used sexually in most horrendous ways. The men who take her have
mythic habitus, huge and black-clad in flowing robes against a relentlessly
barren-looking landscape that hides teeming life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We understand that this couple has agreed, as most travelers
do not, to leave behind their set of norms and instead to experience—in the
most profound understanding of “experience”—what this new environment will
subject them to. They do not turn away.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As part of their agreement, however, they also do not judge, when
judgment might be valuable.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">It does not end
well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no redemption in
this story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unless, as redemption,
you count the prose itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> sublime satisfaction is gained at the same time that an
unbearable unsettled feeling is delivered.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
are many ways to read this novel—as story, as allegory, as philosophy—which is
what makes it a great novel, of which there are many but also too few. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor
for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink,</a> </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-33039587500518418792014-07-28T23:32:00.000-05:002014-07-28T23:32:35.482-05:00<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 19px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Reflections from the Well</span></div>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">On Writing Craft, Creativity & Inspiration</span></div>
<b id="docs-internal-guid-9f119899-8059-13aa-81b7-0fb412035f7c" style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-left: 11pt; margin-right: 11pt; margin-top: 0pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><img height="320px;" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/2Agp1BF7gNhhHkHDIWl1cCGYd6EKNYI5RN_gnb6yikzrjx0a_1XdSnh1znrkonOyjbM7K_s-XfFNDkZHZdLobjxz3qq-w9I_NJ4jAEE08fM9x6GuvkIfZJpTVMq7H2zeLg" style="-webkit-transform: rotate(0.00rad); border: none; transform: rotate(0.00rad);" width="427px;" /></span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">By Alexander Slagg</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /><br /></b><br />
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: bold; text-decoration: underline; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Time Travel, of a Different Sort</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I did some time traveling recently. Like any good sci-fi movie, my life had reached a crisis point and only going back in time would provide the change I needed to resolve this problem and move forward to live happily ever after. My conduit for this journey into the past was the summer intern at my day job, Myles. Once upon a time, I was Myles, a shaggy-haired college student with a constantly receding horizon that was my future, open and without limit. I am no longer Myles, I am me: an aging creative guy now with children and adult responsibilities, feeling the dueling pressures of grownup responsibility and creative ambition. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Myles was introduced to the plot line of my life at work one morning when my manager brought him by my cubicle and introduced him. He dressed casually but appropriately for office life, wearing tan khakis and a Greg Norman polo shirt. It wasn’t readily apparent that he would serve as a catalyst for change. On our first meeting, he came across as slightly privileged and the product of an insular suburban life — but a fitting reflection of my own upbringing and younger self. The internship was simple: throughout the summer, I was to teach Myles the finer points of writing and editing marketing materials. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We began this process in earnest, emailing our communications back and forth, though we were separated by only a cubicle wall — an early lesson in the ways of corporate life. I assigned him some writing to edit and made plans to meet up to review his edits and to walk him through my own editing process. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Around this time, I was creatively cramped on a number of fronts, having great difficulty getting started on my next creative project. I had hit a writing roadblock. The bricks of this particular wall stemmed from recent life turmoil: getting divorced and now raising two young children myself. This new development in my life had knocked me off kilter, causing me to contemplate my priorities. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">While married, I managed to fool myself into thinking that I was no longer a self-absorbed “artist” living for myself and my creative mission. I was a partner, and soon enough a father. I now had these other </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: italic; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">more important </span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">roles to play. But this was not entirely true. I continued to write and do other creative projects. There wasn’t much “choice” in it. This was what I did — art. Now I had to find ways to squeeze it in with my growing responsibilities. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Not until my marriage imploded and I suddenly found myself responsible for the lives of a four- and six-year-old did I start the real process of figuring out how I was going to juggle all these wants and needs crowding my life. And in that process, I suddenly came across this new wall now blocking access to my creative flow. Questions were bubbling up from some subterranean aquifer inside me. These questions essentially boiled down to: Why was I wasting precious time and energy on creative projects when I should be devoting myself to supporting my children and their inexhaustible needs? The parental urge to self-sacrifice can be strong, and I was feeling it keenly.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I grappled with this question for weeks, maybe months. It was on my mind when I woke in the morning, while driving to work, doing the dishes, laying down for bed at night. It was pervasive. I was thinking about it on my drive over to the coffee shop to meet up with Myles and go over his editing. I was sitting at a wood table not far from the entrance, setting up my laptop. A flash of sunlight played off the door’s glass surface as Myles entered, momentarily blinding me as he sat down. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">We chatted for a bit and drank our coffee, going over the editing assignment before moving on to conversation about music and writing. Myles was relating to me the genius of George RR Martin, but my mind was a million miles away, wondering why I was even having this conversation about writing — a topic that felt like a far-off luxury that I could no longer afford. Tuning back into the present, I decided to pose to Myles the question that had been eating away at me. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“Why do you write?”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The reality of the coffee shop seemed to telescope around us as the words passed through my lips. The expression on Myles’ goatee-framed face was one of quizzical contemplation. It was in this moment that the time travel occurred. I was no longer sitting in the older, experienced editor’s seat. I had warped back into the seat of the young writer unmolested by the grind of life experience. The answer that came from Myles’ mouth were words that once could have come from my own.</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">“I’ve never really thought about it before. I want to be a published author because I think it would be cool. I write because it's cool.”</span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The truth of his words struck me. I was inside Myles when he uttered these words. I felt the nonchalant innocence of them. And that carefree feeling stayed with me as I was pulled back into the future and to the present. There were no outward signs that anything mindblowing had just occurred as we packed up our computers and headed our separate ways into the stifling summer heat. But I felt like a different person as I motored down the highway and back to my flat in the city. I felt renewed. </span></div>
<b style="font-weight: normal;"><br /></b>
<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.15; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Myles’ simple words had given me a key to open all of the locks and undo the chains of adult responsibility that had so tightly bound me. He had reminded me that creativity does not operate through a set of logical rules, so I should not make logical demands of it. I did not need a reason to write. Sitting down to write is its own reward. Giving yourself time to do something simply because you enjoy doing it, because it’s cool, is a necessity.</span></div>
<br />Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-80687629982331985622014-07-14T16:00:00.000-05:002014-07-15T20:33:37.416-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</span></i></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><br /></span></i></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Deliverance<o:p></o:p></span></i></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What constitutes “the best” in novels?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is a question that came up again
and again for me as I read through the Modern Library’s list.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I accepted at the outset, having
scanned the list before beginning to read, that the old familiar bias permeated
it—what has been popularly referred to as the “dead white men” bias.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even with this level of acceptance, #42
on the list, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deliverance</i>, by James
Dickey, was shocking to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
not in a good way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deliverance</i> is probably best known
through its film adaptation with Ned Beatty and Burt Reynolds representing the
opposite ends of the manliness spectrum. It is the story of a group of men
seeking to reconnect with or rekindle their masculinity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The narrator/protagonist is the
“sensitive” one, not especially weak but not especially virile either, eager to
test himself but not the one with the quasi-suicidal compulsions. It is a man’s
tale of a typical kind, in which the civilized man regains his self-identity by
confronting the challenge of violence presented by nature and by uncivilized
men.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
novel also belongs to what I’ve come to recognize as a subgenre of
misogyny:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>an artistic backlash
against the growing feminism of the time, and most particularly against female
sexuality (see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Straw Dogs</i> for a
another stunning example). <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An
iconic scene is that in which the least manly of the men is raped like a pig by
the subhuman men.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As is revealed
in the last scene of the book, however—a scene mercifully or perhaps wisely
left out of the movie—his position wasn’t so much pig-like as woman-like. In
this last scene our sensitive protagonist returns home to his wife after this
harrowing, chest-hair-growing adventure and proceeds to screw her (vulgarity
intended), as is his right and duty, in a way that mimics his fellow traveler’s
ordeal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The author is not content
just to depict this parallel; the character himself remarks on it and defines
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In this scene the author
commits not only an attitudinal sin but also a stylistic one.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He might have left this parallel to us
readers to discern for ourselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The impression <a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a>would have been just as
distasteful, but literarily it would not have been the club to the head that it
is. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>This
novel is obscene—not merely pornographic, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tropic of Cancer</i>, but objectionable in its sex-based themes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Depicting the notion that men struggle
with their manliness is not enough, it seems. This novel has to do so at the
express expense of women.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Moreover, the sensitive man becomes fully male again only by embracing
extreme violence. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deliverance</i> was published in 1970.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As it happens, so was a novel
powerfully influential in my reading life, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Bluest Eye,</i> by Toni Morrison.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>How this consciousness-shifting work was passed over while so many of
the white men, dead and alive, made the list is baffling. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
story told in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bluest Eye</i> is
harrowing also, but this author’s understanding of humanity is deep and
compassionate (while also furious). Morrison’s novel is not shock-worthy but
rather, in its wisdom and eloquence, quite necessary.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
intentionally gave away the key scenes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deliverance</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I don’t want anyone else to bother reading
this book.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>With your free time, go
read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bluest Eye.</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">
lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and works in Philadelphia as an editor
for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is
also the Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a Literary Writers Network publication. She has a
degree of dubious practical use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of
fiction and lover of lists. She has had a few short stories published, most
recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2199928627249031681.post-5140227323962084692014-06-09T12:30:00.001-05:002014-06-10T13:57:24.439-05:00Modern Masterpieces<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEidu-U9bdF3eq9GSUQF8ft4oHXpnm0LLfZMWHbWhPKShvmQH6z3HHd4Hww_ljBnWECg_lGMg5H9pVltg6_C-ifg7-rayyJkBI1sANgEiea9O_YcOGCEfatRvvJ7KDAnIrzIsH7ZbcgBaQEK/s1600/Annette.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Reviewing the 100 Best Novels of the 20th
Century</i><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">by
Annette Ferran<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Pleasant Surprises<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Number 94
on the Modern Library’s list is a novel I’d never heard of, by an author I’d
never heard of: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wide Sargasso Sea </i>by
Jean Rhys. It has a melodious title but a suspicious premise, purporting to be
a prequel (as we might call it now) to the massively famous and iconic gothic
novel known the world over and impressing generation after generation, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jane Eyre</i>. The claim made by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wide Sargasso Sea</i> was that it would tell
the story of the mysterious third character of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jane Eyre, </i>who is present but hardly human in that story, Rochester’s
crazy wife in the attic.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What a
pleasant surprise, then, to find that this novel delivers on its promise in a
most enjoyable way.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This novel is
not up to the caliber of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jane Eyre</i>,
to be sure, though it is passionate and impressive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For one thing, it is a slender volume and written in the more
straightforward, if not to say sparse, style of its own era instead of the florid
prose of Brontë.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It recreates a
time long before that of its writing, before even the time of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jane Eyre</i>’s writing, and carries an
undertone of historical fiction, which instills an artificiality or at least a
distance between the reader and the story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Other old novels we continue to read may carry us back to
long-ago times but do so with a feeling of immediacy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are not “historical” novels but rather contemporary
novels read 100 or more years after their writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Read anything by Jane Austin, for example.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are characteristics of the novel,
not necessarily detriments, as it stands nicely on its own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rochester’s
wife, known then as Antoinette Cosway,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>grew up on a colonialized island as a spirited and attractive young
woman with some mother troubles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>As depicted by Jean Rhys, she is a fully fleshed out character with a
personality, a history, a day-to-day life, and most importantly a psychological
make-up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>How she got to the state
of madness, how she became, instead of her own person, merely a tool, an
impediment to someone else’s happiness, how she was given a new and comparatively<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a> ugly name, how she was transported from the idyllic setting
of her upbringing to the harsh environment of her married life (and beyond) are
all played out in this imaginative story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It is not
necessary to know <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jane Eyre</i> to be
able to enjoy <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wide Sargasso Sea.</i>
Having read <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wide Sargasso Sea</i>,
however, it is interesting to reread <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jane
Eyre </i>(though really, any excuse will do) and intertwine the new dimensions
of this character into that story.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Bertha’s story becomes that much more frightening:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>here is a woman who lost her humanity
and becomes imprisoned through other people’s agency, people who were supposed
to protect her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has gone mad
because she lost control over her life and lost contact with everything she
loves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rhys succeeded in enriching
a story that didn’t seem to need enriching.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She also created a story that doesn’t need to be read as a
derivative work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is real unto
itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why,
then, is this novel so little known?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It made enough of an impression to be included as one of the 100 best
novels of the 20<sup>th</sup> century by a panel of experts in literature but
not enough to have made it into the collective consciousness of avid readers,
or, for that matter, high school or college English classes.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is worth noting also that Jean Rhys
is one of the mere handful of female writers who made the list, chosen from presumably
the scores who wrote and published in the hundred years that passed between
1900 and 2000.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Without
this list, I would not have known of the existence of this novel.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Without my self-imposed challenge, I
probably would have skipped it just based on its premise.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Luckily, neither of those negatives
came to pass.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;">Annette
Ferran</span></b><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 11.0pt;"> lives in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, and
works in Philadelphia as an editor for a medical publisher.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She is also the Associate Editor for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.10ktobi.org/" target="_blank">10,000 Tons of Black Ink</a>, </i>a
Literary Writers Network publication. She has a degree of dubious practical
use, in German, and is a lifelong avid reader of fiction and lover of lists.
She has had a few short stories published, most recently in RE:AL.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
Literary Writers Networkhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01138264415129697470noreply@blogger.com