Rumors of Delirium

In honor of my daughter and Mina’s daughter working and studying in India, the book club has decided to read Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann.

It helps that I’ve already read it*, so I can whole-heartedly recommend this vivid history of end of the British Raj and the founding the modern states of Pakistan and India. It’s a panoramic portrait of the tricky politics of religion, caste, anti-colonialism, and British attitudes toward imperialism.

Juiciest — and what sold my picky fellow readers — is the sex. Namely, the romantic triangle featuring the last Viceroy of India, Dickie Mountbattan, who presided over the partition and the British exit, his glamorous wife, Edwina, and her passionate love affair with the handsome, lonely, and brilliant Nehru, India’s first prime minister.

Gandhi and Jinnah, the fiery Muslim who insisted on a separate state, the conflicts and violence among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and the British incompetence and indifference that led to horrific violence as the British left are described with cinematic flair.

It’s a great read, and should produce lively discussion.

*I prepared the index

Some of us loved the book; some of us found it flat. But it triggered an interesting conversation, as have so many books about which we’ve disagreed.

Priscilla and Terry, who didn’t care for the novel, and Olga, who liked it, were serious musicians until injuries prevented each from continuing to play. In the context of these experiences, we discussed what Maryellen felt was the heart of the novel — dealing with losses that are the inevitable byproducts of life. Maryellen was an athlete in her youth, and she’s found it difficult as she gets older to deal with the loss of her ability. Olga put it well — learning to cope with our losses is the key to maturity. The Soloist illustrates the process as Rennie, a former cello prodigy, while serving on a murder trial jury, comes to terms with his loss of ability and ambition.

Barbara linked the book with Salzman’s later work, Lying Awake. Both books explore the continuum between religious experience and insanity, and the difficulty of determining a clear demarcation between the two.

1. Ann Patchett - Truth and Beauty - Nonfiction about friendship of two writers.
2. Marisha Pessi - Special Topics in Calamity Physics - Novel about travels with literary allusions and clever writing.
3. Sarah Waters - The Night Watch - Novel told backwards 1947-1941 covering WW II in Britain
4. Doris Lessing - Early work
5. Liam Callanan - novelist suggested by Maryellen
6. Edith Wharton bio - suggested by Barbara
7. Gertrude Bell - The Desert and the Sown - Travel writings of a “female Lawrence of Arabia”
8. Rubenstein - Stalin’s Children (I’m unable to find it on Amazon) - nonfiction / history

We’re thinking of selecting from among the above list. If you have any thoughts or suggestions, please comment!

Ah…The holidays! Thanksgiving was wonderful, with a special visit from my brother and nephew, but it put a dent in my blogging momentum. Soon to come — our verdict on The Ambassadors, a discussion on arranged marriages inspired by our film viewing of The Namesake, and the difficulties of choosing books.

We have the darnedest time selecting book club books. On the list of possibilities are:

• The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown
• The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
• House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende

Re: Henry James’s The Ambassadors — Lambert Strether?

One of our most successful choices was Kafka’s The Trial. Other books that everyone enjoyed reading and fostered lively discussion: Wild Swans, Bel Canto, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Known World. We also had great discussions about Embers, Lolita and Atonement. So I ask myself, what do these books have in common?

1. Well-written, with style and beauty.
2. Thought-provoking themes and characters.
3. Aside from the Kafka, not too densely written…and aside from Love in the Time of Cholera not terribly long.
4. Accessible, with enough narrative energy to keep us reading.

Needless to say, some great books don’t make good book club books. Example: Almost anything by Dickens–because of the length–or by Faulkner–because of the density of the prose. I wonder how many of us will finish the Henry James?

Our list is here. Someday soon, I’ll add grades and links to my reviews.

Juicy life; dry read. That was the club verdict on Vindication, the recent biography of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon.

Grade — B- (C readability; A- subject matter)

Barbara was taken with the historical and literary aspects, most particularly Mary Wollstonecraft’s friendship with John and Abigail Adams. To augment Gordon’s biography, she read Wollstonecrafts’s most famous work — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – as well as three other biographies. The one she’d recommend for general readers is The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin, which is shorter and more focused.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life was marked by obstacles and adventure — a violent father, financial strains, needy siblings who constantly beg for money, a love affair with a charming but faithless American spy (Gilbert Imlay), life in France during the Terror, travels with a baby in tow through Norway and Holland on the trail of stolen silver.

Despite these ills, she produced many influential works including the first declaration of women’s rights, a history of the French Revolution, and books on the education of daughters, child-rearing, and travel. Many of her ideas are still current after two centuries. She was one of the first advocates for mothers’ breast-feeding, for example.

Sadly, when she found and married a possible soul-mate*, William Godwin, she died in childbirth, leaving two daughters without a mother.

I felt the book went overboard describing the romantic and sexual aspects of Wollstonecraft’s life and shortchanged her intellectual contributions. We are too often reduced to our sexual and emotional selves.

Terry felt Gordon went off on a tangent at the end — connecting the lives of the daughters and a student Margaret King (who dressed as a man in order to study medicine) to Wollstonecraft’s ideas.

Others felt Gordon made poor transitions, went on and on about irrelevant details, and left out connecting information leaving the reader feeling lost or bewildered, scratching her head and saying: Where did this character come from?

That said, we found plenty to talk about — the horrors of childbirth in the 18th century, the shocking practice of the French aristocracy of sending their infants off to a wet nurse to be reared (where they often died), and the absolute legal rights of men over wives and children. It was wrenching to read about women being forced to give their very young children to the father upon separating, and about wives having no recourse if physically or psychologically abused by their husbands.

We touched on Rousseau (education, child-rearing), the fact that Wollstonecraft can be seen as a transitional figure between Enlightenment rationalism and the Romantic / Sentimentalist movement (Sorrows of Young Werther; poets Shelley and Byron), free love and its consequences in a world without contraception (free love is free only for men), and Wollstonecraft’s daughters (Fanny Imlay who commits suicide; Mary Godwin Shelley who writes Frankenstein and lives in a menage à trois with the poet Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire Clairmont).

Yes, great topics of discussion…if you can make it all the way through the book!

*Point of contention — was he indeed the right man, or a cold fish?

Update:

Barbara adds –

Vindication is truly fascinating. It is a feminist classic but its feminist concerns have more to do reforming marriage and motherhood than in winning political or sexual freedoms. In particular, Wollstonecraft wants mothers to become the nurturers and educators rather than turning their children over to hirelings. Here’s a money quotation: “To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands.”

By the way, Gilbert Imlay’s novel, The Emigrants, is still available in a Penguin classic edition.

At the end of Vindication, Gordon includes an aftermath concerning Mary Wollstonecraft’s heirs and followers — her two daughters, Fanny Imlay and Mary Godwin, their step-sister Claire Clairmont, and her early pupil Margaret King, Lady Mount Cashell. Wollstonecraft’s daughter Mary married the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and is best known as the author of Frankenstein. Read more about her and Frankenstein’s Shadow at Fickle Foe.

Claire Clairmont, perhaps jealous of Mary’s relationship with Shelley, seduced the poet Byron, who seems to have cared little for her. After she gave birth to his daughter, Byron took the child but refused to let Claire see her, even after he left young girl to be raised at a convent, where, tragically, she died.

Claire outlived them all, dying at the age of 81. In addition to being immortalized in several of Shelley’s poems, she appears as Juliana Bordereau, a central character in The Aspern Papers by Henry James. A good summary of Claire’s long and interesting life can be found here.

Naturally, curiosity aroused, I wanted our next book to be The Aspern Papers. I’ve always been drawn more to survivors and strivers than victims. The group decided to go with James’s more famous — and much longer — The Ambassadors. The first half is on deck for early November.

By the way, I’ve linked to Amazon for your convenience, since there are plot summaries and reviews there. But the full texts are available online at these links:

• The Ambassadors
• The Aspern Papers