What are you reading now?

[vinteuil]

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... yes, I think I prefer Trollope (and early Thackeray) to Dickens.

If asked for Dickens recommendations I wd go along with Our Mutual Friend, Bleak House, Dombey and Son, Little Dorrit. His journalism is well worth reading.

Can't agree about Zola. Far too loud. Stendhal or Flaubert more my tasse d' oolong.

But. of you haven't read Middlemarch yet, I'd pause Dickens and treat yourself to that, instead.

absolutely! Who was it who said that, for all its faults, it was the one English novel written for grown-ups?

EDIT : Virginia Woolf, of course : "for all its imperfections is one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."

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... I'd put Eliot and Gaskell as a priority among the Victorian novelists.)

... yes, very much so.

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[Alain Maréchal]

I take the point about Zola, but i have a particular interest in N3 and his legacy, and having previously read many of the single works I am now reading Les Rougon-Macquart in order. I've reached L'œuvre so don't stop me now!

[vinteuil]

I take the point about Zola, but i have a particular interest in N3 and his legacy, and having previously read many of the single works I am now reading Les Rougon-Macquart in order. I've reached L'œuvre so don't stop me now!

... and after les Rougon-Macquart, when your addiction to the roman-fleuve is completely establisht, presumably you will launch yourself in to Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, Roger Martin du Gard's les Thibault, Jules Romain's les Hommes de bonne volonté ...

I feel exhausted at the mere thought.

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[Alain Maréchal]

... and after les Rougon-Macquart, when your addiction to the roman-fleuve is completely establisht, presumably you will launch yourself in to Romain Rolland's Jean-Christophe, Roger Martin du Gard's les Thibault, Jules Romain's les Hommes de bonne volonté ...

I feel exhausted at the mere thought.

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...but I set aside Proust (expected to be my final traversal) in order to tackle Zola, so unless i return to Proust before anything else my literary OCD will kick in! The rules are; I'm allowed one non-fiction between each volume of the Zola, and the same with Proust, and only then can I consider something hefty in English. Also, my extended stay in Loire-Atlantique helped my reading but cut down on my listening, so...

[Don Basilio]

It was Virginia Woolf that said the Middlemarch was the only novel written for adults.

I was very, very moved by George Eliot when young - I cried almost all the way through Silas Marner, but reading her recently I find I admire rather than enjoy. Her prose style is lumpy, isn't it?

But Rosamund in Middlemarch is a triumph of the banality of evil pettiness and selfishness. Probably only a woman could have conceived her.

There's good bits in Margaret Oliphant.

[vinteuil]

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... I too found George Eliot enormously moving *.

I'm not sure that I wd call her prose 'lumpy' - there is something magnificent about the closing paragraphs of Middlemarch :

“Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone. But we insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely-touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which have no great name on earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Yes - a vote in favour of Mrs Oliphant too.

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[ * - as a too-bookish teenager I rather liked to see myself as a Dr Casaubon. Now that I am old, I realize I was never much more than a Mr Brooke. But I'm happy with that. ]

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[muzzer]

I’ve read several Zola (in translation) and loved them all. Middlemarch I think I need to read again to fully appreciate. I will check out OMF Dickenswise. There’s a large to be read pile as ever, including the second half or so of Proust. Am currently knee deep in The Recognitions by William Gaddis. A little as I find with Pynchon, it’s the underlying ideas that are more compelling than the prose. Also a collection of essays by Gaddis. He was obsessed with the player piano, which he saw as key in the mechanisation/commoditisation of culture and of course has modern resonances.

[Dermot]

I like R.L. Stevenson’s comment on Zola. I paraphrase as I cannot find the exact quotation.

When we get up in the morning, we all go to the lavatory. Now unless you are Emile Zola, you do not consider this the most important event of the day.

[Dermot]

Wandering off topic, but sometimes fact appears to be the creation of a comic novelist.

When Henry Vizetelly was charged with, and convicted of, obscenity at the Old Bailey in 1889 for publishing the novels of Zola, his incompetent defence counsel was the aptly named Mr Cock Q.C.

[Alain Maréchal]

Wandering off topic, but sometimes fact appears to be the creation of a comic novelist.

When Henry Vizetelly was charged with, and convicted of, obscenity at the Old Bailey in 1889 for publishing the novels of Zola, his incompetent defence counsel was the aptly named Mr Cock Q.C.

What Vizetelly should have been charged with was fraud - selling an incompetent translation. He used the Rosa Newmarch method - if he didn't understand a passage in the original he made it up. I am not aware of the details of the case but assume it was Nana that caused the trouble, and Thérèse Raquin.

[Don Basilio]

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... I too found George Eliot enormously moving *.

I'm not sure that I wd call her prose 'lumpy' - there is something magnificent about the closing paragraphs of Middlemarch :

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Thank you for reminding me of that, vinteuil.

Has anyone mentioned Wilkie Collins. At least The Moonstone and The Woman in White?

[DracoM]

And Handmaid?..............yeah, well, maybe, first time, but Netflix, hullabaloo, etce tc,...............
Try 'Alias Grace'. Crikey.............!!!

[vinteuil]

Has anyone mentioned Wilkie Collins. At least The Moonstone and The Woman in White?

... both excellent - as also Armadale and (my favourite) No Name



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[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

... both excellent - as also Armadale and (my favourite) No Name

- my favourite of his works, too.

[Richard Tarleton]

- my favourite of his works, too.

Haven't read No Name, but the other three

A marvellous mid-Victorian romp - may I recommend Under Two Flags, by Ouida - hugely enjoyable , a sort of precursor to Beau Geste, The Four Feathers etc.....

I did somehow manage to plough through George Eliot's Romola aged about 15 or 16 - Florence in the time of Savonarola.

PS the sentence All rowed fast, but none so fast as stroke is attributed, unverifiably, to Ouida...