Tag: Classics Club #2

A Fortunate Man

~ Jane ~ 22 Comments

At the end of the 19th century Johannes Sidenius, a Lutheran pastor, lives with his wife and 11 children in a small provincial town in east Jutland. Stern and pious, curt and inhospitable, Pastor Sidenius is more likely to question his parishioners on their religious inclinations that offer them the expected coffee and sympathy. Set apart from the community by his aloof indifference, his wife, after so many childbirths in quick succession, the strain of living in dire poverty and a reluctance to countenance any sort of secular behaviour has taken to her bed. Their children go to school but otherwise are kept to themselves, there are hymns around the piano, prayers and homework. Their appearance, with their unusual neck collars, long curling hair for the five boys, and hair plastered to their skulls with a plait at each temple running in front of their ears for the girls, sets them apart from their peers. Life is frugal and meagre, and silent unless you’re invited to speak. But they’ve inherited a strict sense of duty and are eager to emulate their parents’.

Not Peter Andreas though. Almost from birth he’s like a stranger in the home. He burns with shame at their odd appearance that keeps him singled out. He climbs out of his bedroom window at night to skate with his classmates and kiss the girls. He dreams of engineering and developing a new canal system which will bring Jutland into contact with the rest of Denmark and bring Denmark into contact with the rest of Europe. Not for him a life of humble gratitude, he wants to be rich, rich and famous.

At last, he’s allowed to leave home for Engineering college in Copenhagan; he drops his apostolic names and becomes simply Per. He says goodbye to his family and sets his sights on a glorious future.

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The Time Machine

~ Jane ~ 18 Comments

This was my Classics Club spin read and what a fun surprise it was! Written in 1895, a group of Victorian gentleman meet every Thursday for dinner. Only referred to by their professions, one week their discussion turns to Time-Dimension, and the possibility of moving through space and time, when the Time Traveller shows them the Time Machine he’s been working on.

These meetings provide the frame for an extraordinary adventure that the Time Traveller recounts to them the following Thursday – when he arrives late, limping, haggard and covered in dust. After draining a few glasses of champagne he begins his story.

He has travelled through space,

‘the sky took on a wonderful deepness of blue ,a splendid luminous colour like that of early twilight; the jerking sun became a streak of fire, a brilliant arch, in space; the moon a fainter fluctuating band; and I could see nothing of the stars, save now and then a brighter circle flickering in the blue.’

until clumsily landing by a huge white statue in the year Eight Hundred and Two Thousand.

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A Passage To India

~ Jane ~ 12 Comments

Set in the fictional city of Chandrapore, on the edge of the River Ganges and against the backdrop of the British Raj and the movement for independence, A Passage to India revolves around Mrs Moore who has just arrived in India to visit her son Ronny Heaslop, the young city magistrate; and she’s brought with her Adele Quested, a school teacher who might possibly become Ronny’s wife.

Mrs Moore and Adele are surprised that the British are so isolated from India, that their lives are so insular, the club house so important and their behaviour so bigoted. Cyril Fielding is the exception, he’s the headmaster of the government school and organises for Mrs Moore and Adele to join him for tea with some of his local friends, including Aziz, a young Muslim doctor working in the British hospital.

Dr. Aziz, enchanted by Mrs Moore organises an outing to some local caves at great expense to himself for all the trappings he thinks the British need for a picnic. Ronny lets Adele go as Cyril will go with them and provide an escort but all goes horribly wrong when Aziz loses sight of her. She eventually emerges from the caves, bewildered and covered in scratches; and is seen in the distance getting into a car. Aziz is immediately arrested for assault and put in prison to stand trial.

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The Master of Ballantrae

~ Jane ~ 21 Comments

Reminding me of those lovely old Gainsborough films, the story is told through the memoir of Ephraim Mackellar, Lord Steward for forty years on the Durisdeer estate in Scotland.

It all begins in 1745 with the eighth Lord of Durisdeer, at home with his eldest son James, the Master of Ballantrea, popular and wild, he loves wine and cards, women and being in on the fight; his younger son, Henry, and Miss Alison Graeme, an orphan from a remote part of the family who has lived with them since a girl and is the heir to a considerable fortune. Now it’s understood that there’s an understanding between the Master and Miss Alison and as the Durisdeer land is heavily mortgaged, they need that money; Alison is very willing.

When news arrives that Prince Charles Edward; has landed in Scotland attempting to reclaim the throne for his father and proclaim him James VIII of Scotland our James, the Master of Ballantrea has his head turned by the sense of adventure and leaves to join the Jacobite rebellion. Henry, left at home with Alison to run the estate, hears news that the uprising has failed and believing James to be dead, takes the title of Lord Durisdeer and Alison as his wife. Oh dear.

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North and South

~ Jane ~ 28 Comments

Rebellion, acceptance and education are at the core of this brilliant novel.

The Hale family live comfortably in the South of England until the Reverend Hale has a crisis of conscience, he can no longer follow the teachings of the church and decides he must give up his living. His old University friend owns property in the Northern mill town of Milton and offers this to the Hales’. Their daughter Margaret is distraught. The South is sunny and gentle, full of friendly faces, flowers and grass and birds tweeting in the hedgerows, and she’s to give this up for the squalid harshness of The North, from the little she’s heard it sounds cold and grim. And how will her brother Frederick find them? After taking part in a mutiny on board ship he’s now in exile somewhere in the world, if he’s caught he’ll be hanged, how does she get word to him that they’ve had to leave their dear home?

They arrive in the North and it’s everything Margaret feared, perhaps even worse. The mill owner, John Thornton, is a proud haughty individual. He has no time for book learning, from poverty he’s built up his business to be one of the most successful cotton mills around. He lives at the mill with his mother who’s devoted to him because of his success and the power he holds, and his sister who’s devoted to him because of all that he can provide.

Margaret has left the safety of the south with it’s old-world order of land owners and their feudal workers for the new modern world of industrialisation and entrepreneurs, and she finds herself adrift; her haughty demeanour comes into full play when met by the forthright behaviour of the locals who stare at her openly, and speak before being invited too!

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Lolly Willowes

~ Jane ~ 34 Comments

What a fantastic and surprising start to this year’s reading!

First published in 1926, it all begins so conventionally. A large, comfortable house in the Somerset countryside, filled with Lolly, brothers and parents’ following the traditions set by previous generations of Willowes’ and the brewing business they founded. Then with the death of her mother and her brothers’ leaving home, Lolly continues as housekeeper and much loved daughter to her father. But when he dies the brothers’ decide that Lolly should leave her home and the countryside and move in with her older brother and his family in London.

Good Old Aunt Lolly, she’s very handy with the sewing basket, at looking after nieces and nephews, she can make up numbers at dinner parties and only needs the small guest bedroom. She’s 28 and too inclined to enjoy her own company; definitely a spinster for the shelf.

But behind this conventional beginning there’s been a quiet drip of information that tells us this isn’t the tale we’re expecting. Lolly never calls herself Lolly, she affords herself the respect of being Laura Willowes, and she has a firm interest in the business of brewing, brewing that goes alongside her love of botany.

Botany and flowers, powerful and forgotten herbs, the earth is what she loves; and one day the greengrocer adds a spray of beech leaves to her bouquet; they’re from his sisters’ garden in the Chiltern Hills. Laura finds a map of the Chilterns and arranges her escape to the village of Great Mop.

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Brave New World

~ Jane ~ 19 Comments

It’s 2540 a.d, or the seventh century of Our Ford, meaning 632 years after the production of the first Model T car. It’s a shiny new world order that runs itself on consumerism and prizes itself on absolute social stability.

Not achieved through a political or economic revolution, this new quality of life could only be found through a personal revolution of the souls and flesh of human beings, a revolution that purged the minds of the laboriously acquired inhibitions of traditional civilisation, and the messiness of choice. But how did they achieve such a revolution?

The Bokanovsky Process provides a foolproof system designed to standardise human products into a scientific caste system. If you’re Alpha or Beta then you’re ‘normal’ – one egg, one embryo, one adult; but the Gamma, Delta and Epsilon castes are derived from eggs that have been bokanovskified; the egg will proliferate and divide – the most humans from one egg has been over 16,000 in London alone; providing the government with a docile workforce they can control.

For the Alpha and Beta castes it’s almost a fertility cult, everyone belongs to everyone else; the government expects promiscuity and encourages it with rewards, while reproductive rights are controlled through an authoritarian system that sterilises two-thirds of women, issues contraceptives and surgically removes ovaries when it needs to produce new humans.

At the heart of the World State’s control of its population is a rigid control and psychological conditioning that maintains obedience; as well as proscribing Soma, the drug that clouds the realities of the present and replaces them with happy hallucinations; it’s a tool for producing social stability through anonymity, lack of thought, expression and individuality. It’s a utopia that cherishes technology and gives easy access to every desire, there are no signs of ageing, no poverty, disease, unhappiness or war.

But what if there’s a backlash? What happens when Bernard Marx, who’s 8cm too short for an Alpha and feels like an outsider, wonders what it would be like to experience the full range of human emotion; or when Lenina, who on the whole is very happy, thinks she actually enjoys seeing the same man for four months? They get together and take a holiday to the ‘reservation’.

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Reading The Divine Comedy

~ Jane ~ 13 Comments

It had to come to an end, my ‘project’ reads which I read slowly with my friend Liz have so far been excellent. Fun, insightful, educational and given us a lot to talk about; even Finnegan’s Wake, which at times filled us with fury, we still managed to finish and left the impression of a worthwhile struggle.

So after reading The Aeniad last year, the natural step was to Dante and his adventure into the underworld with Virgil as his guide. We began with sharpened pencils, clean notebooks, enthusiasm and crisp new texts. The background politics of Medieval Florence and Dante’s family was fascinating.

In 1300 Dante Alighieri was one of the most prominent citizens of his day, but in 1301 his party was ousted from power and in 1302 at the age of 36 he was accused of corruption and exiled from Florence, until his death in 1321.

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Dandelion Wine

~ Jane ~ 30 Comments

‘It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed. Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow. You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.’

Summer in Green Town, in the backwaters of Illinois, and the summer of 1928 seen through the eyes of twelve year old Douglas Spalding. It begins in June, putting up the porch swing and picking the dandelions to store in the cellar until it’s time to make the wine with his grandfather. It’s a summer that will bring new sneakers, that make him run faster and the disappointment of saying goodbye to his best friend. A summer when a neighbour builds a happiness machine; Mr Jonas, the magical junkman sits under his persimmon coloured umbrella, and Doug and his younger brother Tom save the carnival Tarot Witch from certain death. It’s a summer of warm twilights, freshly made ice cold lemonade, and fear of The Lonely One.

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