Very Early In My Life It Was Too Late

The Lover is fraught with a tension and an unburdened yearning that makes it fairly crackle with breaking energy. It is a most extraordinary journey along a winding river of passion. It ultimately flows out into the sea, that vast accumulation of experience where Duras resolves her story.

Duras treats the mother's madness ironically, with a melancholy understanding and generosity of spirit that dispels revulsion and arouses pity. The mother is not loathsome, but innocent, a victim. She has been done in by the harshness of the world, and her daughter is strangely sympathetic.

I finished The Lover over the weekend. It's a very short novel, more like a novella, really, at 115 pages, and a fascinating read. If you're interested in the novel, you should check out Litlove's post on Duras. There she discusses The Lover plus Duras' life and reputation.

It's a story about a girl of fifteen who lives in Indochina with a difficult, poor family -- her mother and two brothers -- and who has an affair with older Chinese man. But the novel doesn't stay focused solely on the affair; it skips around in time, telling stories of the narrator's later life in France and of what happens to her family members. We watch her as she realizes she wants to be a writer, and as she struggles with her love/hate relationship with her mother, and we see all this from different perspectives in time. At the beginning of the novel Duras describes the beginning of the affair, and at the novel's end she describes the lovers' fate, but in between, Duras takes us to many different years, often abruptly with rapid switches.

But while the girl merely abides her mother, she loves her younger brother poetically, without reserve, though with some sadness and condesension. He is beautiful but not bright, romantic but dull-witted, but terribly fragile. Sadly, she knows, her brother, in all his wild, mysterious appeal, is like a glorious blossom that blooms overnight, then dies the next day.

The girl also loves her older brother, no matter that he's brutal, corrupt -- a crude, dissolute man, stupidly dependent on his mother and sister -- a wastrel. And still she loves him, even as she fears him, because, in a different way, like his mother and his brother, he is helpless.

The girl loves the man who possesses her, her lover. Their love is erotic, immediate, carnal, unrestrained. It is physical, tumultuous, and devastating. Their love encompasses the sweating of bodies, tears flowing out at orgasm, and the rumpled, spent sheets of sex.

The girl loves other young women, especially the beautiful, remote, 17-year-old Helene Lagonelle. This love eclipses all her other loves, even that for her younger brother. It is the aching, gnawing, impossibly unfulfilling love of desire:

I sit on the bench . I'm worn out by the beauty of Helene Lagonelle's body lying against mine . . . . Even the body of my younger brother, like that of a little coolie, is as nothing beside this splendor.

The novel is generally considered highly autobiographical in nature. In c. 1983, the unnamed narrator, an aged woman living in Paris, considers her history as a fifteen-year-old girl living in French Indochina during c. 1929. Her father was a colonial officer and her family.

The Thirteenth Tale By Diane Setterfield Is One Such Gripping, Skillfully-told Story

The grip of a story is a powerful thing, a compulsion that at once pleases and binds the reader as she meets the characters whose lives she must follow until their destinies are revealed and their problems resolved. The grip of a story skillfully told is another thing altogether, when not just curiosity compels the reader, but also compassion. The Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield is one such gripping, skillfully-told story.

It is a story set in a lonely English countryside of indeterminate time, populated by characters that would be very comfortable in a Bronte or Dickensian novel. Indeed, Ms. Setterfield, a first-time published author, has a style very reminiscent of those classic writers. It grips because the characters are mysterious yet powerfully motivated, the plot is masterfully constructed, and the seeming contrast between the desolateness of the setting and the complexity of the story so intriguing.

The book centers primarily around the lives of Vida Winters, a prolifically-published but enigmatic author, and Margaret Lea, an amateur and unknown biographer to whom Ms. Winters finally reveals her life story, the purported “Thirteenth Tale.” This tale is woven as various supporting characters, primarily family members, are introduced and developed, and while one is intrigued by their lives, one wonders what they have to do with Ms. Winters. They are characters with rudimentary, strange personalities and hints of deep, very dark pasts. They all contribute to the story equally, one thinks until the end, when it is revealed that the story in fact revolves entirely around a critical, unexpected few. Ms. Lea narrates the overarching story, the one that includes her meager, mysterious life, which is similar in a critical way that neither she nor Ms. Winters suspects, and it is through the discovery of that common element that Ms. Lea is revealed to the reader as both a foil and a friend of Ms. Winters.

The plot is masterfully constructed, presenting itself as a mystery right off when Ms. Winters invites Ms. Lea to her estate, and then proceeding through a series of interviews between the two, in which a horrific past that had been deftly withheld for many years is revealed. The intertwining elements, interactions between Ms. Lea and various, seemingly-unconnected people, become the subtle means by which the story is brought together. One thinks Ms. Setterfield might delight too much in the use of red herrings, until one witnesses the rapid braiding in of those people and details into one thick, powerful story. The atmosphere is very Bronte-esque, all lonely English moors, desolate estates, and conflicted people, but with enough distinct detail to make it original and convincing.

You can tell that Ms. Setterfield truly enjoys the art of storytelling; she is not just in love with words. She writes herself that “the 13th Tale is a love letter to reading, a book for the feral reader in all of us, a return to that rich vein of storytelling that our parents loved and that we loved as children.”

The book hinges on the story of Miss Winter's life. Miss Winter who is shamelessly an amalgam of Daphne Du Maurier and Agatha Christie, including all the creepy bits of Daphne Du Maurier's past that it's best not to dwell on. Miss Winter is an inveterate liar. She can never tell the truth, so when she does tell the truth there is a key fact omitted. A fact that is obvious to anyone familiar with this genre. The story about the girls, if you pay close attention shows a story of not just the mentioned twins, but a story of three girls. Yes, that is the big "secret." Three not two. The ghost is just another little girl, who happens to be a cousin or perhaps half sibling to the twins and could pass for either one of them and is probably born of rape.

I should probably mention I am now going on to spoil other books for you too, The Woman in White being the first up. The "Woman in White" being the illegitimate daughter of the heroine's father, and therefore her half sibling, mimics the girls relationship to each other in The Thirteenth Tale. The evilness of the twins is seen as similar to The Turn of the Screw, while the godsend governess is Jane Eyre, oh, and of course, the house is then destroyed by fire. Here's an idea Diane Setterfield, try to write something original. Don't jumble all these other books together, reference them and then make the reader wish they where reading them instead of your choppy writing style with made up words like "twinness." Don't care if it's in the Urban Dictionary, it's not in the real one and sounds stupid.

The twinness more than anything is what got on my nerves. The changes of "We" to "I." Which I could easily see without the writer going, hey, did you see that. In fact Setterfield seemed so insecure in her own powers of weaving red herrings and hints throughout the book the she went out of the way to say "Hey, you caught that right?" and if you didn't, "Women in White, cough cough." Well, yes, I did, I'm not an idiot, by the way, I just started your book and there's three girls not two, this better not be what the next 300 pages is building up to.

Of course it was. Also if I have to hear one more thing about the mystical bonds of twins I may vomit.
Margaret always felt alone because she had a twin that her parents never told her about. Boo hoo, confront your parents and move on with you life. The only character I think I could spend any time with was the cat Shadow... too bad he has to live with Margaret. Also, why do you always drink hot cocoa? Don't appear to own a computer and then have a weird angel/ghost hallucination at the end? Why Margaret? WHY!?!

Stranger In A Strange Land Is A Great Flawed American Novel

Two years after his novel Starship Troopers, which incurred charges that he was a militarist, Heinlein offered up Stranger in a Strange Land, which would establish him as a free love guru of the hippie generation. That must be like attending West Point in the morning, and leading a protest at Berkeley in the afternoon. Certainly somebody must be confused here—either Heinlein or his critics?
But those who try to force Heinlein into an ideological corner are missing half the fun. This is science fiction, after all, and it is supposed to be provocative. Does anyone really think Asimov wanted to live as a citizen on the Foundation planet of Trantor? Was Herbert advocating large sandworms as his preferred form of mass transit? Did Burgess go out tolchocking with his droogs? Hardly! But Heinlein’s narrative voice is so powerful and insinuating, readers are tempted to read his fictions as manifestos for a better way of life.

For those familiar with the work of Rudyard Kipling, the story begins in somewhat familiar fashion, and apparently was inspired by Heinlein's then wife Ginny, who suggested a science fiction twist on the Jungle Book stories. This was in 1949, but it was not actually until 1961 and after a number of false starts that Heinlein was to finish the mowgli-like tale of a human raised by Martians. As the sole unexpected progeny of a first disastrous Martian expedition, Valentine Michael (Mike) Smith is returned to earth 25 years later as a young man with no concept of what it is to be human. Mike is basically Martian, and not only has an entirely Martian philosophy to life, but some seriously superhuman abilities.

Heinlein sets up this portion of the story with considerable style, dropping his neophyte hero into an alien world of politics and business, for by a twist of the law, Mike may just technically own the entire planet Mars, lock stock and barrel. Confronted by those who would attempt to cheat him of this inheritance, he is badly in need of some friends and protectors, and finds these in the shape of several wildly differing characters. Gillian (Jill) Boardman is a nurse at the hospital where Mike is incarcerated, and after a chance meeting with the technically incommunicado man from Mars, becomes increasingly interested in his plight, especially when it becomes clear the authorities are peddling a fake man from mars on the television news.

But Smith is as innocent as a babe in the Martian woods, and only the intervention of a group of new-found friends prevents him from handing over these rights. With the help of journalist Ben Caxton, nurse Gillian Boardman and lawyer Jubal Harshaw, among others, Smith is sprung from his hospital internment and assisted in securing his fabulous wealth. We have seen this plot twist before—for example, in serious fiction such as Dostoevsky’s The Idiot or its popular film equivalent Forrest Gump: the naïve but good-hearted simpleton overcomes the scheming and obstacles of an indifferent or hostile society.

This part of the story might have made for a reasonably interesting novel in its own right. But Heinlein is merely warming up for his main act. Once Valentine Michael Smith is rich and free to reach for all the gusto he can, he sets up a free love organization—sort of a cross between Amway, a swingers party and a UFO cult. I’m not sure what wavelengths Heinlein was tapping into when he wrote this novel in the 1950s and early 1960s—after all Esalen would not be founded until the year after the novel was published, bra-burning wouldn’t kick in for another seven years, and the Summer of Love was not even the glimmer of a wisp of a dream. But our author was clearly wired into the impending social changes that would sweep the country in the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination.

To some degree, Heinlein helped pave the way. And he certainly contributed to the jargon and concepts of the time. He gave us the word “grok” (a Martian term meaning to understand in a deep and thorough way)—a veritable gift to all later Scrabble players and crossword puzzle constructors. He anticipated the water bed, an essential accoutrement for all those under the sway of flower power. He invented the water sharing ritual fifteen years before Perrier opened up its first US office. Yes, he may have been old enough to join AARP, but Heinlein knew more about the essence of the Sixties generation than any of their parents were able to grok.

When Ben Caxton is presented with an opportunity to engage in a tryst with Mike and Jill, he flees in horror and confusion, and again one can't help but think this is mirroring some inner demons at work in the mind of Heinlein. That by the end of the novel, Mike has founded a commune of free thinking and free loving disciples speaks volumes, though if Heinlein manages to throw off most of his shackles, he can't quite divorce himself from one particular prejudice of his times. To his credit, he tries very hard to present his female characters in an enlightened manner, giving them power and intelligence, but beneath the surface lurks an old fashioned male chauvinist and as such he can't seem to help building them up only to knock them down again. He never has his male characters be blatantly unpleasant to the women, but the patronising attitude is often demeaning in the extreme and what is written as jovial banter often reads as a fetish with physical (not violent) domination.

In conclusion, Stranger in a Strange Land is a great flawed American novel. The prose is certainly dated in a rather charming way, and the plot gets lost toward the middle in navel inspecting introspection, but there are moments throughout that will shock and antagonise the reader, which is certainly the mark of a powerful author at work. The ending is a touch bizarre, and the last page in particular should have been ripped out at the editorial stage leaving behind a far more satisfying ending, but this is part and parcel of the passion this novel engenders, and so in a way this flaw, like all the others, can be forgiven and perhaps even groked in the fullness of time.