Getting to Know "The Stranger"

I've finished sifting through the murky mind of Albert Camus, for now. The Stranger was nothing like what I had anticipated. I bit off more than I could swallow with The Fall, but not more than I can chew. 

Both of these novellas can be ingested, though not wholly digested, in a single sitting. I read The Fall entirely one afternoon this week on a riverside park bench, book in one hand, coffee in the other. If you're the type, the current weather is ideal for getting one's mind into a state conducive to Camus.

The title tells the story, really. Meursault is an unfeeling man that Camus dares the reader to relate to. He can be charming, eloquent, and innocent in the right moments, but you will always find yourself repelled by him.

"East of Eden": Wrap-Up, Next Up

“ ‘The nature of the universe loves nothing so much as to change things which are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be.’ ”

–Lee, reading from Marcus Aurelius (563). 

I’m not going to list all of my favorite quotes from East of Eden. I would mostly end up listing all the pages on which Samuel Hamilton speaks at length. An all-time great character among the literature I’ve read, to be sure. But I keep coming back to the above quote when thinking about inheritance and fate in this novel. I wonder how much a quote like this can compel a novelist to write. Maybe Steinbeck stumbled across this quote somewhere, and suddenly his direction for the novel became clear. The use of a predecessor in one’s work, especially a quote as spot-on as this, is a kind of inheritance all it’s own, don't you think?
What I would like to explore in this post instead of more quotes: the inversion of character/roles, self-indulgence, war, and the ending. No funny business. I’m diving in deep.

"East of Eden" Parts 1 & 2, plus (!) a Short-Fiction Digression

I must have scrapped and revised this reflection a dozen times or more, for though it is with great ease that one approaches, indulges in, and converses about East of Eden, it is with equal parts subtlety and gumption that one claims to have grasped the spectrum of this Steinbeck masterpiece.

The core of Eden, the framework from which the text is derived and upon which it is fashioned, is Eden. Genesis, that is: the creation and the fall of Adam and Eve, their sons Cain and Abel, their tumultuous relationships (with God), and their ill-fated choices. To call Eden a "retelling" or "repurposing" of the origin story would trivialize what Steinbeck has accomplished in crafting this mesmerizing work. The text cannot be held to a lamp and traced over Genesis like a commercialized stencil. The Adam and Eve of old cannot be superimposed over the Adams and Eves of Eden so that one suddenly is enlightened—"Ah! It has all become clear; how could I not see it before?"—to the genius of every Steinbeck masterstroke.
Reincarnation (ironically blasphemous in this context) is a more accurate representation of Steinbeck's technique in this novel. From Genesis, these icons of history, these pillars of mankind, the very origins of sin, are divinely reincarnated into the men and women of Steinbeck's twentieth-century American landscape. Reincarnated metaphorically, in that the characters are descendants neither of God, nor Adam, Eve, and Cain, but of man. Imperfect man, who imagined such an origin story to explain away man's faults. Imperfect man, who longs not only to distance himself from his past mistakes, but to find, or return to, innocence and perfection, or Eden.
The reincarnation is literal, too, however, as the Trasks and their kin relive the errs of Genesis as though they are possessed of spirit. More recent novels that I am familiar with, Possession by A.S. Byatt and The Hours by Cunningham, have similarly possessed characters who inherit the actions and wills of their predecessors (likely influenced by Steinbeck, among others). Steinbeck's characters are not ignorant of the comparisons (evidenced during their reading of Genesis in part two), nor do not shy away from confronting what hand fate plays in their plot. And that concept—fate—is Eden's great crossroads.

Fate, or agency.
Does man bend to the whims of his environment and his heredity: to the very whims of God? Or can he chose to deviate from these obstacles, this disastrous pattern, that would doom him to repeat The Fall?
Timshel...

Intermezzo...

Steinbeck's "East of Eden" is what we'll be reading for the better part of March, lady(/ies) and gent(s).

I'll be diving in this weekend; hopefully you all are wrapping up AK, or will be taking the plunge into EoE conmigo!

Now,
A digression on what lies beyond...

AK was tremendous... ly long. Steinbeck is long, too, but I predict much breezier. In AK every page had the potential to be swampy and dense. Was it the Russian influence? The times? Idk.
Steinbeck has a much better meter and momentum to his prose. Poetic even. It shouldn't be a struggle at any one point, if intuition serves.

But, for the sake of length and endurance, I want to put Nabokov's Lolita on the backburner.
Let's read some quicker novellas before that, shall we? Maybe even a short story collection?

I nominate:
-The Stranger by Camus, &
-Heart of Darkness by Conrad

What do you guys 'n gals think? Yay? Nay? Nominate your own?
Work with me here, people!

“Anna Karenina”: She loves him, she loves others not, but at least we're Russian and not French!

Instead of a cookie-cutter wrap-up, or a point-for-point address of the points in my last post, I'm just going to cover a few of the aspects that were most essential to my reading of Anna Karenina.

First off, I like quotes. Here's a few noteworthy ones:

Favorite Anna Karenina Quote:

“All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow” (40).

            Before Stepan Arkadyevitch slips this gem into the tail end of his soliloquy, a naïve, pre-rejection Levin talks of love, and explains that in romantic love, there can be no real tragedy. I feel that, having gone through the gauntlet of emotions that Russian aristocracy (apparently) demands, Levin, once a cynic, would now agree to this insightful quote that he had previously dismissed as the musings of a romatic. If Anna Karenina has a protagonist, Levin is the closest we get: his journey from rejected bachelor to rural patriot/conscientious brother to family man and beacon-of-honesty is a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman, from what I can gather. The quote itself sums up the most positive outlook one can imagine for the rest of the novel: for every shadow—every midlife crisis, every hint of infidelity, every ominous reminder of one’s mortality—there somewhere corresponds beauty and light in the world. The shadows cast by Anna's handiwork are foiled by the light in the Levin's lives.

Honorable Mention for Favorite Quote:

“She felt herself clad in an impenetrable armor of falsehood” (132).

            Anna Karenina, what a mess you made of your life. This early quote comes from Anna’s consciousness, wherein she marvels at how naturally, how effortlessly she can deceive her husband to whom she had so long been faithful. “Clad in armor” writes Tolstoy, a phrase that suggests how safe she feels, as though she were vulnerable before, and now she, Anna, is battle-ready, eager for the coming war. Later, encountering her husband for the last time, Anna acknowledges his tenderness (seemingly for the first time), but “some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender” (637). This substantiates the anecdote/cliché that “the woman’s war is in the home,” although not in a sense that is supportive of the female perspective. That Anna feels empowered by an armor of “falsehood” was originally disconcerting; in retrospect, it is an indictment of her flawed character, and ironic in the sense that someone so armored could be so prone to insecurity.

Least Favorite Quote:

“Yes, you have conquered me, and I am yours” (394).

            I have yet to see any film of AK, but I am willing to bet that of all the quotes in the novel, this one makes it into the film, and is overdramatized for its romanticism the reckless abandon so glorified in the film medium.

Set apart from the novel, this quote might inspire love, passion, and all that one aspires to have in a relationship. Perhaps if Kitty had spoken this, then that sentiment might resound. But it is Anna that speaks this quote, and Anna’s romantic life can hardly be idealized.
Conquered? Can the conquering of a married woman be something transcendent? I say no. If anything, Anna conquered Vronsky, with the supernatural allure she emanates over the opposite sex. Vronsky merely followed the scent, and gave her the opportunity to betray her loyalty to her husband.
Is Anna really Vronsky’s? Again, her devotion wavers. She risks her affair to return her attention to Seryohza. She goes out into a ball comprised only of her husband’s friends only to return in tears: a desperate plea for attention, and for her past life. She shows no maternal love for Annushka, and is satisfied in being unable to birth any more children to Vronsky; an attitude that shocks and appalls those in the know.
Anna’s sentiment in being conquered is more an omen than a new dawn, and this quote inspires resentment in myself toward her.

...

"Anna Karenina": First Impressions

I will admit: getting a feel for the landscape of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina was more troublesome than expected. Whereas the prose and rhythm of Tolstoy's text (in translation) are eloquent and accomodating, the substance was not as easy to digest.
I'd like to give my impressions of the first third of the novel: the characters, the plot, and the themes that stick out in my mind. Hopefully you've had a chance to embark on your own furlough of the Russian uppercrust by now, per Tolstoy...

Hey you guys, follow my lead...

FIRST UP: "Anna Karenina," Tolstoy

*January, not July =/

Constructive feedback is welcome.
Get to reading, commenting and posting; I wanna see some hustle out there!

-Kyle