I dina cair muckle far Rob Roy

Photo courtesy of Undiscovered Scotland

If I were to attempt to rival the sheer braininess of KT’s last post, I would put myself to the task of writing something about Roy Roy by Sir Walter Scott that has to do with the constant British use throughout the eighteenth century of an “Other” (often Scottish) as a way to define themselves as a nation. Unfortunately, having a decidedly English bent to my exploration of Britain as a whole, I’m afraid I am not as up the task as a scholar of Scottish history would be (or perhaps a good literary critic either). Thus, I am left to the task of discussing Rob Roy in my usual plebeian form of choice: the basic book review.

Rob Roy primarily tells the story not of its eponymous character but of a would-be poet named Francis (Frank to his buddies) Osbaldistone. In his desire to be a poet, Frank incurs the displeasure of his businessman father who assumed that his only child would take on the family business. (What, exactly, the family does other than deal with large amounts of money is one of the many things in Rob Roy that is not made particularly clear.) Mr. Osbaldistone Senior, thus incensed at his son’s betrayal of the familial calling, packs Frank off to live with his uncle, Sir Hildebrand, and his motley crew of rather stupid sons. In exchange, Sir Hildebrand sends his one brainy, but otherwise quite malignant, son (Rashleigh Osbaldistone) off to take on the family business that Frank so dislikes. Whilst staying with his uncle and rowdy country cousins, Frank falls in love with Sir Hildebrand’s ward, Diana Vernon, a remarkably plucky excuse for a heroine. Their love, of course, is forbidden since Diana must either marry Sir Hildebrand’s idiot son Thorncliffe or be confined to a nunnery. (Why these are the only two options is another loose plot point.) Needless to say the wicked Rashleigh gets up to all kinds of plotting when Frank’s father heads off to do unnamed but very important business on the Continent and it is up to Frank, Diana and (where did he just come from?!) Rob Roy to stop Rashleigh’s ruination of Osbaldistone family business.

That convoluted plot explanation aside, I assure you that the book was about as easy to follow (by which I mean not very). Having just finished it, I am still at odds to truly explain the latter half, wherein Rob Roy appears and the Jacobite Uprising of 1715 occurs, almost as an afterthought, whilst Frank and Co. traipse around the Highlands looking for some papers Rashleigh has stolen from Frank’s father’s firm. Indeed why Frank had to leave Sir Hildebrand’s and go into Scotland at all is rather unclear to me, as is most of his time in Scotland since it is primarily conducted in an unintelligibly written Scottish brogue. Rob Roy, while confusing to me in many ways, did make me recognize one of my all time top ten book pet peeves: writing accents out. Forgive me, but I honestly feel that the potency of the Scottish accent would have just as easily been communicated if anything said by any Scottish person in the book were simply written in plain English and followed by something like “he said in a thick Scottish brogue.” That would have saved us poor non-Scottish readers passages like “it was a Hieland loon gied the letter to that lang-tongued jaud the gudewife there.” What?!

The brogue and the plot aside, Scott did manage to have one shining moment in a book that otherwise left me longing for Ivanhoe. The two paragraphs below are by far the best parts of Rob Roy, even in their very bleakness. As there is little I can say to follow up the feeling in these passages, I will end my review here by saying that Rob Roy is a book that could have benefited from either more or less in the way of plot (it could have been a fascinating character study of the Osbaldistones if Scott had simply left Frank with Sir Hildebrand and his sons and one which I’d wager could have petered out just as disappointingly at the end as Rob Roy actually did) and definitely a lot less brogue.

In the second half, Frank and his buddies are captured successfully by English troops and then Rob Roy’s fearsome wife, Helen. After Helen gets them, another Englishman (Morris) happens upon the band of Highlanders and Helen stonily orders his execution after he pathetically begs for his life. Scott gives us these moving, if grisly, passages:

“The victim [Morris] was held fast by some, while others, binding a large stone in a plaid, tied it round his neck, and others again eagerly stripped him of some part of his dress. Half-naked and thus manacled, they hurled him into the lake, there about twelve feet deep, with a loud halloo of vindictive triumph, above which, however, his last death-shriek, the yell of mortal agony, was distinctly heard. The heavy burden splashed in the dark-blue waters, and the Highlanders, with their pole-axes and swords, watched an instant to guard, lest, extricating himself from the load to which he was attached, the victim might have struggled to regain the shore. But the knot had been securely bound; the wretched man sunk without effort, the waters which his life had disturbed, settled calmly over him, and the unit of that life for which he had pleaded so strongly, was for ever withdrawn from the sum of human existence.”

The reader, feeling the agony and horror of this act, is then taken along with Scott’s remorse and his feeling when he, as Frank, adds, “…I know not why it is a single deed of violence and cruelty affects our nerves more than when these are exercised on a more extended scale. I had seen that day several of my brave countrymen fall in battle: it seemed to me that they met a lot appropriate to humanity; and my bosom, though thrilling with interest, was affected with nothing of that sickening horror with which I beheld the unfortunate Morris put to death, and in cold blood.”

Romance and forests (and maybe a few vampires)

Her beauty, touched with the languid delicacy of illness, gained from sentiment what it lost in bloom...now entered another stranger, a young Chevalier...in [whom] elegance was happily blended with strength, and had a countenance animated, but not haughty; noble, yet expressive...

I had an existential crisis the other day when one of my good friends (NOT an English major) told me she was reading Twilight. Now, I am of the opinion that while this book is explosively popular, that just makes it explosively popular trash teen fiction of the Buffy-meets-Mr Darcy type, mixed with a little early Anne Rice and, I don't know, Nora Roberts. Obviously Stephanie Meyer has been able to tap into some deep yearning teenage girls have to marry and have raucously violent sex with glittery, undead 100-year-old teenage boys, but that still doesn't make the books good, and neither does throwing in the odd symbol (here, have an apple).

While I was on my high horse, however, ranting about this to said friend, I realized something. One, that I probably should read the book before I judge (another issue for another post) and two, that a lot of what I read on an every day basis for my Popular Literature program was, in fact, described as trash at one point or another.

Case in point: Anne Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest. This is a story about a beautiful orphan girl named Adeline who is taken in by a family running from their debts in Paris to the French forest, where they take refuge in an abandoned abbey. Here, in the various nooks and crannies that ruined abbeys are wont to have, they find a manuscript which appears to be the diary of a man who had been imprisoned there, a rusty dagger, and a skeleton.

Eventually this family meets the owner of said abbey, a Marquis who decides he wants to marry Adeline. Unfortunately for him, he is accompanied by a handsome young chevalier by the name of Theodore, who quickly forms a very intense (and yet chaste) attachment to Adeline and spends much of the rest of the story fighting off the evil Marquis and his henchmen with one arm while supporting the swooning Adeline with the other. There is blood, swordplay, incest, lost-and-found nobility, and an outrageously happy ending. It's amazing - and yet the subject matter would seem to be undeniably trashy.

Critics of the time declaimed it as unrealistic, superstitious and likely to make young women hysterical over nothing. Jane Austen wrote a whole novel, Northanger Abbey, that basically said that silly girls who read silly novels like The Romance of the Forest will get silly, irrational ideas and start to see ghosts and specters and murder everywhere they look, and will have to be talked down by sensible (if a bit effeminate) men who they will eventually marry.

Other novels I have read recently can be accused of the same flaw. The Great God Pan, Lady Audley's Secret, and She: A History of Adventure all involve a lot of sexuality (if not actual sex), a lot of coincidence, and a real penchant for sensationalism. In that case, who am I to say that the intense-yet-chaste nature of Adeline and Theodore's relationship has more literary merit than the similar relationship between Edward and Bella?

Well, the simple answer is that I'm an English student. This means that while I am not the most educated person on the face of the planet, and while I have a profound lack of knowledge of literary criticism that I blame squarely on my American education, I can recognize literary theme, sociological contexts, and moral, spiritual and social issues in texts.

This also means that I can tell you that The Romance of the Forest has stood up to criticism for almost two centuries now. Critics have ripped this book and its genre to shreds, and have found layers upon layers of intention and meaning and issues that I simply don't have time or room to go into in full.

You could make a living off of the portrayal of women in Radcliffe's novels (including the fact that Radcliffe clearly knew that most women hate women they feel threatened by in some way, which explains why Adeline's foster-mother hates her because Adeline is prettier than she is, but Adeline can easily make friends with Theodore's pretty sister). Radcliffe was also aware of the tension between the supernatural and the rational, which she dramatizes by using seemingly supernatural events to create suspense and interest, but also ultimately explaining them away with rational (though pretty contrived) conclusions. This novel is a representation of the battle between pre- and post-Enlightenment thought, in which Enlightenment is the victor.

It also shows a continuing British nationalism, in that Radcliffe set the story in France, a crazy place where crazy things will happen that could never occur in Britain. The importance of social order is another major theme -- it's shown later that the Marquis gained his title through murdering the rightful heir, an act for which later he is severely punished, and everyone is eventually returned to their rightful social standings and marry people of the correct class. The few working-class characters are mostly evil, and mostly die.

But what can you say about Twilight or other books of its ilk?

Well, teenagers yearn for love/sex but may be scared of it, hence the fact that Bella does not have a single romantic choice that involves her not falling in love with a potentially dangerous supernatural being. Teenagers are still children enough to love the fantastic, but adult enough to be interested in more mature themes. And the covers are nice, if nothing else.

On a more personal note, Stephanie Meyer seems to believe that women should fear men, or she is at least is at least informed by one conservative Christian view that men are raging sex beasts who lose rationality in the hunt for someone to mate with. Bella's choices seem to be a wolf-man and a blood-sucker, not rational beings by any means, and certainly connected with images of violence and consumption. Not exactly a positive view -- and take a look at one of the creepiest movie posters I've seen, with Mr. Dashing Vampire hovering over Miss Helpless and Submissive Female like a barely modified incubus. The Nightmare, anyone?

Okay, so maybe that's a little extreme. The thing is, besides the obvious allure of the Dark Side, there isn't a broader scope to this novel, so far as I can see. Bella never has a real choice -- her choices range from not so good to worse, from marrying a vampire and becoming one of the undead to hooking up with a werewolf and possibly being destroyed by vampires. Maybe it's a statement about how love conquers death. Or maybe we're all dead. Or something.

Really, though, I think Stephanie Meyer just wanted to tell a good story. There's nothing wrong with that, so long as we recognize that for what it is. I mean, Nora Roberts can tell a pretty good story. But it takes something more than a good plot to make something a good book. And while The Romance of the Forest and other novels of that type make statements about real and relevant issues, and thus take their place in the canon, books like Twilight really don't seem to have a point -- beyond giving girls an excuse to fantasize about sleeping with the sparkling undead.

'Beginner's Greek' Proves Cinematically Wonderful

Author's Note:Because I feel rather like all the books I write about are slightly stodgy nonfiction books, I give you a review I wrote for my school paper last year on a much more people-friendly book called Beginner's Greek.

One of the many complimentary things I can say about Beginner's Greek by James Collins is that it is undoubtedly the most cinematic book I have ever read. Never before have I been struck within the first few pages so forcefully that the book I was holding in my hands should undoubtedly be a movie. It was like love at first sight, appropriately enough, except it was movie at first sight.

Beginner's Greek is, at its gushy heart, a romance novel. Before utterly turning you off with that statement, let me say it is a romance novel in the same way that Pride and Prejudice is a romance novel. Beginner's Greek is the story of a man, Peter, who has been idealistically waiting all his life to fall in love at first sight. He decides that this will happen most easily on a long airplane flight since there is plenty of time for the first spark, a friendly conversation, some flirting and the creation of a genuine bond between two people. The book begins when his adorable, though unrealistic, view of falling in love actually occurs. Peter falls in love with Holly and then, in a cruel twist of fate - one of many scattered painfully throughout the novel - he inexplicably loses her number. The rest of the book takes us on an almost painful journey as Peter and Holly try to recover their lost love through a series of increasingly unbelievable and unfortunate events.

It sounds sappy, but it really is quite good. It is a quick, light read that I thoroughly enjoyed over spring break. The only downfall of an otherwise happy book is that author James Collins goes a little too far. There are just one too many unfortunate events to keep our lovers apart. The whole book is comprised of various events that keep them apart, open up opportunities for them to be together and then create something else to keep them apart. It's all very frustrating since almost none of the events are the characters' fault. At least in any good Austen novel you can hope for some personal growth that will allow the characters to finally be together. Collins' novel is not that kind of book.

Beginner's Greek is a book about Fate, and the reader, like the characters themselves, must keep believing in Fate and that it ultimately will do good in the end. Repeating to myself, "My gosh, there simply must be a happy ending to this," was really what got me through it at the end of the day, especially towards the end, when Collins apparently couldn't keep himself from throwing in that one last "keep them apart" event. A reader's incredulity and frustration can only be suppressed so long, Mr. Collins.

Presumably, Beginner's Greek will soon be coming to a cinema near you - for how could it not with such writing and positive belief in Fate? - but I recommend reading the book first. It's optimistic and touching; it lets you get into the heads of the characters and really feel for them as movies cannot do, no matter how many voice-overs the filmmaker helpfully provides. And if there are things every Smithie needs at this time of the semester, if not always, they are friendly happy endings and a good dose of optimism.

Books About Books

I recently completed The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee and it reminded me of one of my favorite sub-genres, most commonly found in used bookstores but now making a pleasant resurgence in other bookstores: books about books.

Books about books may sound like an annoyingly redundant form of literature, but I assure you it is a beautiful thing. In a pretentious frame of mind, I suppose I would compare it to a great cathedral. Books about books are created solely for the glorification of something else or, in their case, some other book or books. Cathedrals, similarly, are built solely for the glorification of, depending on who you ask, God, the town or Art. In any event, not for the sake of the cathedral itself. I would also argue that books about books and cathedrals also share a grand beauty, cathedrals with flying buttresses and stained glass and books about books with the perfect words. Indeed, books about books, being written by those who love books possibly best of all readers (to such an extent that they felt compelled to write a whole book about how much they love books), are often some of the most eloquent books you'll find.

Suffice to say, I generally love the form even if it can go horribly awry as is the case with Rereadings, a book of essays collected by the great Anne Fadiman. The essays all center around the idea of rereading a favorite book and each of the essays is, tragically, written by a different author. All attempt the high art of writing a book about books (or in this case an essay about books) and most, frankly, fail. There is always the opportunity in a book about books to be too self-centered and most of the essayists in Rereadings seize this opportunity with zeal. The essays range from wholly pretentious to literary criticism (a thing quite different from books about books) to simply egotistical. In my opinion, the book about books is ideally two parts intelligence, one part biography and one part adoration mixed with some good old fashioned good writing. Of the authors in this collection, only Ms. Fadiman succeeds at this.

In fact, the greatest of all books about books for me will always be Ex Libris by Ms. Fadiman. I often try to articulate just what is so wonderful about this book, but it is well nigh impossible. Suffice to say that the writing borders on divine and whenever I read (and reread and reread) it, I am simultaneously struck with awe, jealousy and admiration that such writing still exists in this digital world. At the risk of veering into fangirl territory, I will leave off and simply recommend vigorously that you read it.


Hugh Walpole (above with his dachshund), perhaps more well-known as a novelist, wrote a lovely little piece of bibliomania called Reading: An Essay. I stumbled across it in a used book store, and I have never been quite so pleased with an impulse buy. It is delightful, relatable, eloquent, amusing and intelligent. In addition, the book is rather autobiographical but, despite coming from a gay man living in the 1920s, is still perfectly applicable to today. I guess reading and readers haven't changed much in the ensuing decades, which is rather as comforting as this book is.

Mr. Buzbee's The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop enters this realm of extremely good books about books with aplomb. His book is described as "a memoir, a history" and it is wonderfully both. Unlike Ms. Fadiman's collection of unconnected essays in Ex Libris, Mr. Buzbee's book has a narrative that follows his life in books and bookstores with a cleverly parallel account of the history of the book and bookstore as an institution. Both sides of the story are fascinating and the book only falls slightly short in the latter chapters when Mr. Buzbee feels compelled to take a stance on the "literacy is dead!" debate that has risen with the Internet as well as toss in his two cents on what his favorite bookstores are and why. The history of the book parallel has died out by this point, which is a shame, as it might have enlivened the later chapters. That aside, the book is a genuine joy and I heartily recommend it as I head out the door to find other books by Mr. Buzbee.

Next Up: Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott. At last! A return to fiction!

"A Curious History"? More like a winding history

Nothing would have made me happier than to be able to come to you after reading Footnote: A Curious History and say it was amazing. That it approached levels of humor, interest and impressive research that are laudable in such a specific and unusual text. That I was charmed by the idea of such a topic and that the book's actual content kept me equally excited and inspired throughout.

However, the truth is actually much duller. "Dull" is, in fact, the word of choice for this "curious" history of the footnote. In the book, Anthony Grafton admirably attempts to create a history of citations in the field of history. Where did the footnote begin? To whom do we owe this great, academic debt? I say he attempts to do this because his text is so utterly winding that one often finds one's mind wandering away down some more interesting mental path only to be jarred back into the book before you by (in my case) a literal jolt from the subway.

On the outset, Grafton asked some interesting questions about where the footnote came from and perhaps with a stronger editor, this book would have flourished. As it is, the reader often loses sight of Grafton's interesting questions and, even worse, his argument towards answering them. Almost every chapter wound through interesting historical VIPs and era-specific savage academic debate only to have an argument tacked on the end by Grafton as if to remind us that he is, in fact, building up one. Remember? Unfortunately, the reader does not and there is absolutely no overall sense of a budding argument. Rather, it just seems like your basic nonfiction book filled with little stories, but with nothing coherent to tie them all together. Were the book done correctly, the footnote would very obviously be that something.

Happily, I can say that the research is quite impressive. Grafton clearly went through his paces, not just in terms of English sources, but German, French and Latin ones. (Indeed, Grafton's sheer linguistic prowess alone makes the book rather impressive.) Also, Grafton rather charmingly makes good and full use of the footnote, filling up half-pages with notes on his sources. On the downside, his footnotes are nothing like those of Gibbon (which he hails as "witty" and generally seems to think quite highly of). Instead, his footnotes are merely notes, comprised of the quoted text in its entirety and with few comments, which I think might have improved the readability of the text greatly.

This book seemed to promise so much to a bibliophile and ended up being just so impossibly dull that I couldn't even top off the epilogue. (Although Grafton did seem on the verge of perhaps "tying up" his poorly defined argument.) The highlight of the book is undeniably the people you meet in it. While the narrative flags and the argument is almost invisible, the people are really wonderful. Most notably, Leopold van Ranke, best-known as one of the founders of modern citation but also an ardent lover of archives and historian extraordinaire, Gibbon (see above) and Pierre Bayle, a Huguenot and author of what many consider to be the first encyclopedia (complete with extensive notes, of course).

The people and research are undeniably great and it is just a shame that Grafton's narrative and argument couldn't rise to the levels of his other parts.

Next up: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

Corruption of an adult by a minor

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

Would you believe I didn't know the origins, or indeed, the true meaning of the term "Lolita" until a few weeks ago?

Being an English graduate student living with another English graduate student, naturally the topic of favorite books comes up. After I blabbed for about half an hour about and The Catcher in the Rye and Great Expectations, my apartment-mate mentioned that her favorite book was Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov.

"It's so beautiful," she told me, telling me stories about how Nabokov was so obsessed with finding the perfect word order that he wrote the words of every sentence on index cards and moved the cards around until the flow was just right. On top of it, English is not Nabokov's first language, which leads to both a self-consciousness about language and a compulsion to get everything exact.

She was right, to an extent. The first paragraph was jewel-like, incredible, amazing; other parts scattered throughout were heart-breakingly beautiful. Still, the plot and the language was not sufficient to make me forget that this was a 40-year-old man having an affair with a 12-year-old girl (however nymph-like she may be). Beautiful though it may be, I couldn't move beyond the gross-out factor.

I wasn't quite getting it. I had read too fast, the plot was a little boring, and I was confused by the ending because I had missed a key clue earlier in the book. Thankfully one of my other friends has a passion for Lolita and an excellent DVD collection, which contained Adrian Lyne's version of the story.

This version, made in 1997, stars a striking Jeremy Irons and a self-conciously sexual Dominique Swain. It's so very clear in this version that Lolita knows what she is doing to Humbert, that Humbert loves her rather than just lusts after her, and the complete and utter Freudian nightmare that is their relationship is painted in much clearer terms (this portrayal just helped clarify their relationship, not take away from the book's portrayal of it at all).

I cried at the end (which is nothing new to regular readers of this blog, but this time it was justified). I even forgot somehow that this older man was technically the criminal, and this manipulative, cheating shrew was ostensibily some sort of victim. All I saw was a man so in love he would do anything to keep his lover his, and at the same time a man desperate to protect his 'daughter' from the clutches of dirty old men.

Please, do read Lolita. There are some beautiful scenes that the movie doesn't bother to go into, and if nothing else, it's worth reading just to marvel at how brilliant Nabokov must be to be able to write like this in what is not his first language.

But if you find that the novel falls a little short for you, go rent the Adrian Lyne version of the film and spend two hours or so watching Dominique Swain drive Jeremy Irons out of his mind. I promise, it will bring your appreciation of the story to a whole other level.