#40 - The Waste Land

So it took me 12 hours after the initial reading, but I get it! And it's beautiful, it really is. I enjoy so much of the other work of the era, it's hard not to - although there is some manner of extra intensity added to it through poetry. The Fisher King, fertility and futility, Eastern and Western approaches, all very cool post-war themes that were expertly explored in this surprisingly short poem. 

I read my girlfriend Amy's (still love saying that) version of The Waste Land from the Norton Anthology of Literature. It was annotated, which was great and I later discovered wholly necessary if I were going to get through any of the work and its multiple languages, but it also wasn't typeset to preserve the breaks as designated. This gave me some initial confusion as to the different paragraphs and voices found in the work, something that I found a lot smoother in my subsequent reads.

The thing that aggravated me about The Waste Land wasn't the references or changing voices or the different potential explanations. It was the lack of that accessible - or nearly-accessible - base way of understanding it that gives the reader something to grasp on as they got through it. I found that even after I finished the first read, the core concept of the 'waste land' was somewhat lost to me. My first annotated read with Amy was better, but then I started being faced with denial - why my limited understanding was wrong, why this subverted that - and I was left even more frustrated, because there wasnt that starting frame to try and work higher-level thought off of. Reading more analysis and then rereading it made the poem now digestible, but it still lacked any kind of real resonance for me because I lacked that base plank.

Ulysses, in the end, after all of the form and structural changes, can be about an average day in Dublin, if you TRULY insist. There is the second reachable version of the Odyssey, bringing a thorough second set of meanings to every piece of the book. Then there are the thousands of references and allusions and things which add colour and interpretation and connection to other art, which make it magical, but only as something to look out at beyond the piece.

Instead, this felt like hanging from the monkey bars. My feet had nothing to stand on, so I couldn't appreciate the bars I was reaching desperately for, and I certainly couldn't enjoy the sights and stars around me. 

It is a great work, and I know it's only because I haven't given it time to open itself up to me, but this just wasn't impressive for me.

6/10

#39 - A Tale of Two Cities

This is my second crack at Dickens, having read and not enjoyed Oliver Twist when I was younger. His was actually my first experience with 'serial writing', something that I've now had a lot more experience with through the list. With Tale of Two Cities, Dickens manages to hit both the good and the bad of serial writing. The format allows, even indulges you to riff on something without real purpose. In the case of Melville, that means pointless chapters on colours and pseudoscience and architecture. But in the best cases, like Tolstoy, key moments of the story can be given their due. Dickens does both, with some fluff and some excellent diatribes.

Some of his best extended passages were in the settings and characterization. The book was really cinematic - not beautiful necessarily, just specifically very logical to film. There have already been 7 movies produced based on the book, as well as all other manner of adaptation. In part this speaks to the thoroughness of Dickens' descriptions, but also to what he doesn't show. Many of the characters were two-dimensional and created to represent one trait or archetype. While there was some ambiguity on it in the early stages, by the end of the story there was a clear delineation of good and evil, with only a couple of exceptions (Jerry) to prove the rule. For a refreshing change, it wasn't only the women - though Lucie was the innocent angel on a pedestal, and Madame Defarge was a bloodthirsty monster, they also had the incorrigibly stuffy Mr Lorry, and Charles as too-noble-to-be-noble. The only two characters that showed any change showed it as a direct reaction to the extent of their characters - the Doctor's shoemaking and Carton's final decision show what happens when their archetypes get pushed to breaking.

Because of the richness of the visuals, as well as the predictability of the characters, the whole story had something like a sense of fate to it. I know that the point Dickens wanted to make about the French Revolution was one of chaos, but it didn't come across that way to me. When things happened, they may not have made sense, but they all had a certain sense of divine fate around them. Whether they were factually innocent or guilty, what must be, will be. Darnay's acquittal in the first trial seems just as predestined as his guilt in the second. That's what makes the ending so much more satisfying - it's really the first example of a character in the book taking charge and breaking the natural flow of history. Even the Defarges eventual rise was dependent on waiting for the time to be right - but Carton's actions were something truly special.

Based almost solely on the ending, I'm going to give Dickens a solid grade on this one.

8/10