Bleak House - Finished!! (Spoiler Alert!)

Well, it took me long enough, but I finally finished "Bleak House" last night.  Whew!  What a big, sprawling novel!  And after all the bitching and moaning I did at the beginning about how I just couldn't get into it, and damn it was so huge, and how would I ever be able to keep track of all the characters, etc., well, I actually was sad to end it.  I was in this world for so long, and got so used to the characters, that I was sorry to leave them.  Looking back, I now think this is the first book I've read in quite a long time that I really want to read again...not immediately, but not years from now either.  I think by reading it again I will be better able to get a grasp of things in the early parts of the book, where I felt confused by the characters, and I think that confusion made me miss a lot of things that I would get on a second read.

And what a wild ride this book turned out to be!  Did the book have a happy ending, or a sad ending?  Answer:  All of the above!  Did it have a first person narrator, or a third person narrator?  Answer:  All of the above!  Was the book a comedy, a tragedy, social satire, a detective novel?  Answer:  All of the above!  I mean, this book was all over the place, and yet, was also a fit coherent whole.  In the end, all the craziness, and all the oddball characters, and all the narrator shifts, and all the various moods and themes, they all fit together.  It all made sense.  This to me is proof of Dicken's genius.  Very few authors could pull this off.  Bravo, Charles!

I have several comments and thoughts about the book.  First, I liked the contrast between the tragic part of the novel's conclusion (the death of Esther's mother, the Lady Dedlock, who ran away from her husband, Sir Leicester Dedlock, because she knew he had found out about her having born a child before they were married.  She feared he would throw her out and heap scorn upon her, when really he loved her so much that he didn't care.  But she didn't know this, and ran off and died in the snow) with the happy part of the novel's conclusion (Esther's finding out that the man she loves still loves her, despite her smallpox scarred-face, and so they get married).  There's something for everyone!  But isn't this how life is?  Some things turn out well, and others end up tragically.  Then you grow old and die, unless you're part of the tragedy, in which case you just die.

Second, I love how the Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit, which has gone on for years and years, ends.  It ends when the lawyers figure out the estates involved no longer have any money to pay for the suit to continue any further, and so they drop it immediately.  No thought of justice, or the law...the money's gone so that's the end of it.  And ironically, this happens just as a new will is discovered that would have put the suit to a satisfactory end, had it been found in time.  And the court breaks out in laughter at this conclusion.  Ha, ha, ha!!  Man, Dickens did not respect lawyers.  Fortunately times change, and no one ever makes fun of lawyers anymore.

Third, I loved how Richard, one of the "wards of Jarndyce", the cousin and wife of Ada, Esther's "darling", never really could figure out what he wanted to do with his life, and finally gets sucked into the lawsuit...studying it and going to court everyday with the hope (wrong!) that it would be resolved soon and he'd come into some money and could live a life of leisure.  Instead, he falls in with a crooked lawyer, loses all his money, and becomes unhealthily obsessed with the case.  He dies just after the case's conclusion.  Wow, this rings a bell.  I've known several people who were promising in their youth, but then became obsessed with something, or fell into really bad habits, and their lives just went off the rails.  Moral:  don't let this happen to you!

Fourth, what was with Mr. Jarndyce's marriage proposal to Esther?  He was her guardian, her father figure.  And then he proposes marriage, although once he makes the proposal, he doesn't do much to follow through until nudged by Esther, and then when he realizes Esther and Allan Woodcourt still love one another, he quickly arranges them to get together, and he drops the proposal, tells the two of them to get married, and fixes them up with a house.  Jarndyce is a very good man, but what's with this proposal.  It seems, well, icky to me.  Would this proposal have seemed this way to a Victorian audience?  Have times changed?  Or would the reaction 150 years ago have been the same as mine?

Finally, I like how the two houses named "Bleak House" are really the two happiest places in the novel.  Oh, the irony of it all!

Bleakly Falling Apart

One of the joys of entering middle age is that one becomes more and more reminded of one's mortality.  In my 20s and 30s my mind and body were supercharged machines...not that I was some superman athlete and scholar like Ben Franklin and Jesse Owens combined, but I was lean and healthy and could go out dancing and boozing until 3 a.m. and it was all good.  Then, in my 40s, the wheels started to come off the well-oiled machine.  Slowly I found myself getting tired at night...at NIGHT, when the fun and exciting stuff is supposed to be happening!  The Saturday night out until 3am became the Saturday night in watching a video and falling asleep by midnight (which, while late for some, is early for me, a notorious late person).  And the body started its inevitable decay...I gained a few pounds, my muscles complain more after exercising, and just two days ago I had to get gum surgery.  Gum surgery is actually not as bad as it sounds, but I don't really recommend it unless necessary.  So what does all this self-indulgent whining have to do with "Bleak House"?  Well, the one thing I was looking forward to about having gum surgery was that I would take a day off of work, and as a result I could get some serious reading done.  Like maybe even finish "Bleak House"!  So what happened...well, I got home, the novocaine wore off, and I had to take Vicodin for the pain.  As I soon learned, Vicodin and literature do not mix so well.  Appropriately enough for "Bleak House", I found my mind getting foggy, and I could not focus on reading.  And it made me fall asleep at the ungodly hour of 8pm.  So much for the good side of gum surgery.  Fortunately, I'm much better today, and I'm getting by on Advil alone, so the mind is clear again and ready to go, but then of course I had to go back to work today.  So I've still got about 100 pages of "Bleak House" left to go.

I find myself enjoying the book quite a bit now.  The various story lines of all the different characters are starting to come together, and indeed the characters have all become like friends...I shall miss all their quirks and follies when I'm done with the book.  Plus, there's been a murder, which always makes a book interesting.  One of the characters, Mr. Bucket, is a detective who has now come to the forefront to solve the murder.  He's quite an interesting character, and I like the fact that he was a very minor character for the first 650 pages or so, and then suddenly he becomes almost the main character, and the novel totally changes tone and becomes a detective mystery story...at least for a bit.  This book is such a giant sprawling mishmash of characters and moods and styles...kind of like life itself!  Without the gum surgery, that is.

Two for the Price of One

There are few things more enjoyable than coming home from a long day in the lab, propping my feet up, and imbibing from a book while sipping a cold drink.  And it's all the more enjoyable when the book and beverage are paired appropriately.  For Mark Twain, whiskey seems like the suitable drink, particularly an American whiskey like bourbon or rye.  A cosmopolitan seems appropriate for Oscar Wilde, cognac for Stendhal, and a vodka martini for Tolstoy.  So when I sat down for an hour with "Bleak House" this evening, I naturally fixed myself...a margarita!  Now, I know, Dickens is not a Mexican author, and frankly I doubt he ever made it to Mexico.  Who knows if he could have even pointed out Mexico on a map.  Yet, the margarita seemed so appropriate to me.  You see, the margarita is a unique and wonderful drink.  It's tangy with lime, sweet with triple sec, and yet has that salty rim that's such a delightful contrast.  And this reminds me so of "Bleak House".  This is a novel that's quite funny, with an oddball collection of the most, well, oddball characters around.  And yet, it's not just a barrel of comedy jokes.  It's also biting political satire, a poignant tale of human frailties and failures, full of the sorrows of dashed hopes and dreams, and an affirmation that today's often biting and cynical views of lawyers were also prevalent 150 years ago.  Like the margarita it offers up a colorful cornucopia of flavorful delights:  the sweetness of love and family, the sour bitterness of failed dreams, and the salty, tumultuous seas of human foibles.  Or maybe I just felt like having a margarita and now I'm trying desperately to justify it all.  Whatever.  My head's a bit woozy with tequila.

I have one further note on "Bleak House", brought up in the comments to the previous post.  There are two narrators in this book.  One is your typical omniscient, third person narrator.  The other is Esther Summerson.  The novel's chapters jump back and forth between the two narrators, which is pretty cool.  But I've been pondering why Dickens does this.  When I think about it with my rational, scientific mind, I realize that the omniscient narrator is essential to the story.   There are so many characters, with so many hidden secrets, that a first person narrator like Esther just could not have told the story.  The converse is not true...I don't see that Esther being a narrator is essential to the story.  The story could have been told entirely in the third person.  So why does Dickens use Esther as a narrator for parts of the story?  I think there are two reasons.  Well, at least there are two reasons that I can come up with.  The first is that Esther helps obfuscate the story.  This is a confusing tale, with lots of mystery and unknowns and fog and lawsuits that drag on so long that no one seems to remember what they're about.  And Esther adds to all of this.  She's clearly an unreliable narrator, and she also clearly covers things up sometimes.  I can't remember the exact passages now, but there are a couple of times that she starts to describe something and then stops and says something to the effect of "oh well, never mind, it's not important", when truly we can tell it is indeed important to her.  She also lies about her feelings, but not well enough so that we can't guess as to what they are.  In short, a recurrent theme of the novel is murkiness and confusion, and she helps add to that.  The second reason for having Esther narrate is to add a human element to the story.  Despite her unreliability, the reader bonds with her and feels for her, especially over her obvious despair at being hideously scarred by smallpox.  She makes the story more poignant.  Without her, the story's eccentric characters would be more to the foreground, and the reader might not have anyone to identify with.  There wouldn't be an anchor, and the story would lose some of its effectiveness, I think.  Or is that just the tequila talking?  Sigh...it's late, and I just can't tell anymore.  Sometimes I think that...oh, never mind, it's not important.  

Bleakly Reader

For a book blogger, I'm starting to get an inferiority complex.  It's been a month now since I started "Bleak House", and I've still got 300 pages to go (out of 850 or so).  I've been looking at some other book blogs and folks seem to either (a) read a heck of a lot faster than I do or (b) have a lot more time to read than I do.  I do find that "Bleak House" is a slower read than some of the other recent books I've read.  There are sections where I'll read a page and then realize that I have no idea what's going on.  Part of it is the language...there's something about the way Dickens writes that makes it hard for me to follow.  In other Victorian literature that I've read, and I'm thinking in particular of the George Eliot I've read lately, I haven't had this problem.  In addition to the language, there's just so many characters in this book that it can be hard to keep track of them all, especially when the book is spread out over the course of a month (and counting).  If I knew I was going to have this problem I would have made a list as I went along.

It would be hard to summarize the book so far, so I won't even try.  But here are a few random thoughts I have at the moment:

1.  This book is really funny in parts.  Some of the characters are quite amusing.  There's Mr. Turveydrop, a dance instructor of little means, but who impresses everyone by his deportment.  There's the old man Mr. Smallweed, who slumps down into his chair and must be shaken and fluffed up like a pillow by his daughter, especially after he's thrown a pillow at his wife, who's prone to ramble on in a senile manner.  And of course, the names of the characters themselves are great.  In addition to the ones I just mentioned, there's Mr. Guppy, a somewhat slimy legal aid, Mr. Vohles (a definitely slimy lawyer), and Mrs. Jellyby (a woman so involved with charity that she neglects her family, and thus fails to see that charity begins at home).

2.  Dickens definitely has a beef with the law.  The centerpiece of the story is a lawsuit that's gone on for years, and still has no end in sight.  It probably will never end, because the lawyers don't want it to...when it ends they'll stop making money off of it.  There hasn't been one sympathetic portrait of a lawyer or the legal system, at least so far.  It would be interesting to know more about the British legal system at the time, and if it's changed at all.  I think I'll look into that.

3.  The book can be very moving as well.  The main character, Esther Summerson, gets smallpox, and her face is disfigured from it. She says it doesn't bother her, with the typical British stiff upper lip, I suppose, but you can tell it does.  And who wouldn't it bother!?

What a Difference a Day (Or Two) Makes

I find this interesting:  when I read the first chapter or two of "Bleak House" I loved it.  Then, as my reading got sporadic due to my London trip, reading it became somewhat of an effort, as I alluded to in my last blog post.  The numerous characters got all jumbled up in my head, and as colorful as those characters were, I felt they were somewhat cartoonish, which made them hard for me to relate to.  Now that I am back at home, and getting settled into my routine schedule where I can read a bit every day, I find I am again greatly enjoying "Bleak House" again.  The characters are all settled in my mind, and the humor is really jumping out at me.  I'm finding the book to be quite delightful, and I'm laughing out loud rather frequently as I crawl through the pages.  So why the change in attitude?  I'm not sure.  I suspect the stress of travel, and the large and event-filled breaks between reading sessions made it difficult to climb into the world that Dickens builds in this novel.  And it is indeed a separate world that Dickens creates here, even more so than in most novels, I think.  This novel works much better, at least for me, now that there's time to let myself walk into that world, and forget about this one.  This discovery makes me wonder:  how many books have I read that I disliked, or did not get much out of, but which I could have enjoyed if my mind had been in a more receptive state?  Are some books more suited to a particular frame of mind than others?  Louis Pasteur famously said "Chance favors the prepared mind".  Is this true for literature as well?

Back from London, Back to Bleak House

My trip to London is over, and I have returned to home, work, and jet-lag.  Fortunately, the jet-lag is now gone, and I can get back to reading "Bleak House".  London was exciting and fun and everything I hoped it would be, but it wasn't the kind of vacation where I had time for a bunch of reading.  I had hoped to do a lot of reading on the plane (it's a 10 hour flight each way) but alas, this didn't quite work out for me.  I would read a bit, but then doze off, then wake up enough to watch the movie, then try to read some more, only to fall asleep again.  Not the best "power reading" environment.  So I find myself having first cracked open "Bleak House" over two weeks ago, and I'm only about 1/3 of the way into the novel.

I have to admit that I'm not quite enjoying this novel as much as I'd hoped, at least so far.  However, I suspect that this might be due to the sporadic reading time I've had to devote to it so far.  The biggest problem I've had is that Dickens keeps introducing character after character, and it's been hard for me to keep track of them all.  Plus, Dickens keep shifting the story from one character to another, and their stories are rather unrelated.  In the past couple of chapters, this has started to change, and we see some interrelationships between the story lines of the various characters, but for the first 200 pages or so it was difficult to see where any of this was going.

As for the characters themselves, well, no one does characters like Dickens.  I don't mean he does it better than others, just different.  His characters, at least many of them, are almost caricatures.  Many have some weird and/or strange and/or comical trait, that Dickens magnifies and exaggerates.  This makes his characters memorable, which is helpful when there's so many of them...the reader can come across a character (s)he hasn't encountered in 50 pages and then remember who they are because of their particular quirk.  The characters are fun and amusing in their foibles.  Indeed, I've found myself laughing out loud several times.  And yet, this caricaturization (is that a word?) also makes them seem less human, and indeed more like caricatures (I'm in deperate need of a synonym here...is there one for caricature?).  I can't relate to any of them in the way I could relate to Maggie Tulliver from "Mill on the Floss".  I read "David Copperfield" in high school, and I'm trying to recall if the characters in that novel were like those in Bleak House.  I think not, since my recollection of Copperfield is that there are some characters who may be somewhat caricature-like (Mr. Micawber), while others were more realistic (for lack of a better word).

Another interesting point about "Bleak House" is the narrator.  The main narrator is Esther Summerson, who occasionally seems to cover up her own feelings or thoughts, making her not so reliable.  But then other chapters are told from the perspective of an omniscient, third person narrator.  I actually rather enjoy this technique...it gives the book some variety switching back and forth, and it allows Dickens to follow story lines that Esther is unaware of.

Anyway, I'm back on track, and hopefully my more regular reading schedule will allow me to get into this novel more than I have so far.  I'm optimistic!!

Book #12 - Bleak House (Charles Dickens)

I didn't plan it this way, but when I started reading Charles Dickens' "Bleak House", I realized that like "The Mill on the Floss" it was also about a lawsuit.  I have no doubt that this lawsuit will also lead to big consequences, although as "Bleak House" opens, the legal case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce has been going on for years and years, and shows no signs of coming near a resolution.  In fact, people seem to hardly remember what the case is actually about.  Which is quite an amusing concept, actually.

The story opens with some wonderfully descriptive language about London shrouded in fog.  Which is no doubt a metaphor for the court case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  We learn about the case almost immediately, and meet one of the affected parties, a Lady Dedlock, but Dickens does not enlighten us as to what the case is about or why it has lingered so long in the courts.  Indeed, it's shrouded in fog.  Then, in the third chapter, Dickens really throws us a switcheroo, when suddenly there's a new narrator (previously third person omniscient), a Miss Esther Summerson, who begins by telling her story (after informing us that she's not very clever and might not make so great a narrator...thanks, Charles).  She was raised by a Godmother, who we later learn was her aunt.  We don't know what happened to her parents, except that her godmother/aunt tells her one birthday that her mother had disgraced the family, presumably by Esther's birth.  We learn nothing else.  When the aunt/godmother dies, Esther learns she has a benefactor, who is connected with the Jarndyce case, who sends her off to boarding school, where she's quite happy for a few years.  Then she is suddenly called to London, where she will fill the position of companion to Ada Clare, a cousin of one of the Jarndyce's.  Ada and her cousin Richard are going to live with one of the Jarndyce's at an estate called Bleak House.  It's not clear why, except that this was somehow one of the outcomes of the lawsuit.  Dickens is being coy and mysterious, and everything is still quite shrouded in fog as to what exactly is going on.  Which, naturally, makes one want to keep reading.

Dickens is fun...his writing is great, but in a different way than George Eliot.  I'm not sure how to put that difference into words except maybe to say it's less flowery and more immediately descriptive, than reflective.  And Dickens' characters are awesome...even the minor characters are really fleshed out with their own peculiarities.  The book is (so far) like a menagerie of colorful characters.

I've read some Dickens before:  "David Copperfield" in high school (loved it, and ended up reading it twice...I can still vividly remember some scenes after 25-30 years or so, such as the storm scene), "Great Expectations" (8th or 9th grade, probably, and I have little memory of it), and "A Tale of Two Cities" (read it maybe 10 years ago).  If "Bleak House" comes anywhere close to bringing me the enjoyment that "David Copperfield" did, then I will be a very happy man.

One final note:  I'm traveling to London this week!  I haven't been there before (or anywhere else in Europe for that matter), so I'm looking forward to it immensely.  Dickens should be appropriate reading for the trip, I should think.  Although London of 2008 is, presumably, a vastly different place from the one of the 1850s.