Reading under the Heat Dome: Sigrid Undset’s “Kristin Lavransdatter” Trilogy

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“You’ve got to read this!” I told a fellow burnt-out T.A.

Volume 2 of Kristin Lavransdatter

I had retired to the coffeehouse to read Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter before I graded 100 papers on Mircea Eliade’s Myth and Reality. You will understand my procrastination if you’ve ever had to grade undergraduate gibberish about a book they could not, and perhaps should not be expected to understand.  In my own long-ago undergrad Classical Mythology class, the professor assigned an excellent book on the influence of Greek and Roman myth on Western culture. And even the popularizer Edith Hamilton’s Mythology would have been a prelude to Eliade.

These students were not graduates of Choate or Exeter. They were intelligent, but still a bit raw.. There was a frat boy from Terre Haute, Indiana, a business major from Dubuque, Iowa, an English major from Omaha, Nebraska, and a pre-med major from Detroit.  (The pre-med student did more or less understand it.  There is a pre-med success gene.)

Can you blame me for losing myself in Kristin Lavrandstter?

Can you blame me now for losing myself in Kristin Lavransdatter under the heat dome?

Recommended reading under the heat dome.

Sigrid Undset, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1928, is best-known for the Kristin Lavrandatter trilogy. Set in medieval Norway, these spellbinding novels are elegantly-written and historically fascinating. Undset interweaves the threads of Kristin’s happy childhood, difficult marriage, near-death from numerous pregnancies, and nursing of victims of the Plague. We follow Kristin’s emotional, physical, and psychological experiences from childhood to death. She is a fascinating heroine, who learns from the mistakes that determine her fate.

That’s just the outline, of course: the language is elegant, the details religion resonate, and we are utterly transported to medieval Norway.

Charles Archer’s translation.

There are two translations of Kristin Lavransdatter, both excellent. Charles Archer’s 1920s translation holds up very well: the style is formal, and the word choices suggest the Middle Ages. Archer’s translation is available in paperback in three volumes: The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby, and The Cross.

Tina Nunnally’s prize-winning 1990s translation (Penguin) is also stunning. It is available in a one-volume Penguin Deluxe edition, or as three individual Penguin paperbacks, The Wreath, The Wife, and The Cross.

Which translator do I prefer? I love both of them.

What Should We Do?  Working vs. Retirement

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After my mother’s death, I stopped visiting my hometown. I thought we would retire there someday, but it seems that we never will retire.

There are so many factors to consider. We will lose our insurance if we retire and have to sign up for Medicare.

Some doctors accept Medicare – it’s almost pro bono for them – but Medicare is reputed to be a slow payer, and not all doctors accept it.  My theory: you will never see a gynecologist again.  No, I’m exaggerating, but instead of a free annual physical, complete with gyn exam, for only a small co-pay, Medicare covers a gyn exam only every two years, with a 20% co-pay. No, I’m not keen on pelvic exams, or mammograms, but come on!  You don’t stop being a woman because you’re retired. 

My advice is, don’t ever get sick. Touch your toes! Run! Bicycle! So long as you don’t brood over the racing form, and go to the track to bet on the horses, you might break even.   Remember: you might win, show, or place today, and lose your savings tomorrow.

Why are the schools failing? Well, the teachers burn out. They are grossly underpaid, and teaching five hours a day five days a week is exhausting. The good thing:  many public schools offer teachers an early retirement package at age 52 so they can replace them with cheaper, young, inexperienced teachers. This is good for the older teachers, but it might explain the decline of our schools.

One exhausted, newly-retired teacher friend said, “I’d rather be a bodyguard than a teacher.” I could only think she had watched the Spanish Netflix film, Close, with action star Noomi Rapace as a bodyguard. My friend took martial arts classes and practiced archery every day, but nobody wanted a bodyguard whose choice of weapon was a bow and arrow.

Okay, I work at home. A home office? More like a messy desk and a computer. However,  it involves special computer skills, like attending Zoom conferences. Once, I had to look at the top of the boss’s bald head for an hour on Zoom. (Was it my camera, or his?) Another time, I forgot to hit the mute button while I was gossiping with a friend about a person we both agreed was “crazy.” Oops!  Thank God someone gently reminded me to mute before I revealed the details of her acrimonious divorce.

Part-time work would be ideal, and employers would save money, but they seem to have the notion that full-time people will be more efficient.  

But Hail, Corporate America!  I don’t run the world.  And thank God for leisure, retirement, and Medicare, and may we all have affordable health care!

Gothic Novels of Different Centuries: Mary Stewart to J. Sheridan Le Fanu

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I am a fan of Gothic novels.

It began with the so-called “Gothic novels” of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. There was romance, there was travel, and a heroine’s investigation of a crime in an exotic location. She usually has two suitors,  one a charmer, the other more rugged. N.B. The charmer is usually the criminal.

Among the most popular Gothic writers were Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, Victoria Holt, and Dorthy Eden. You could recognize the genre by the cover illustration. Above, a woman in an evening gown or negligee is running from something or someone. Below, a woman dressed for lunch, or the office, descends a steep trail to the beach under a full moon. Her dress looks stylish, though it might not do for a dolphin rescue.

The best of these Gothic novelists is Mary Stewart, a charming, intelligent writer who is also an unwitting travel writer, setting each of her books in a different country. In This Rough Magic, the heroine, Lucy, an actress, is visiting her sister in Corfu. During her stay, she saves a beached dolphin, quotes Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and uncovers a smuggling racket. (The crime in Mary Stewart’s novels is quite often smuggling.)

But of course these 20th-century Gothics do not resemble the original Gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries. I am not a fan of Ann Radcliffe or Horace Walpole, but I love Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,  Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, a satire of Gothic novels.

J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas, one of my favorite Victorian novels, is superb and suspenseful, and stands out from the rest of the Gothics. Le Fanu, a prolific Irish writer of short stories, historical novels, mysteries, and Gothic novels, is remembered for Uncle Silas and his ghost stories. 

Let me just say, Uncle Silas is one of the most sinister characters in English literature. Silas, once accused of murdering a guest in his house, though the crime was never proved, is shunned by society, and has a reputation as a gambler and flim flam man. Now that he is old, he presents himself as a religious man, but that is a humbug. He is an impecunious opium addict who also drinks a lot.

And then there is an uproar. Silas is named the guardian of his niece Maud, a 17-year-old heiress, in a codicil to his brother’s will. Maud’s father never believed the charges against Uncle Silas, and Maud is prepared to think well of him..  Unfortunately, as Maud will learn, her father’s confidence in Silas was misplaced.

The structure of Uncle Silas is a clever double narrative. There are  two first-person narrators, both of them named Maud Ruthyn, who are one and the same person, at different ages. On the first page, after describing Maud as “slight and rather tall, with a great deal of golden hair, dark grey-eyed, and with a countenance rather sensitive and melancholy,” the adult Maud adds, “I was that girl.”

The adult Maud recounts the details of her dangerous sojourn with Uncle Silas. .Although we see most of the action through the heiress’s eyes, the adult Maud’s occasional remarks deepen our understanding..

One by one, Silas banishes Maud’s friends, including his own daughter, Milly, whom he sends to school in France. He forbids Maud to visit her middle-aged Cousin Monica, who is very concerned about her living with Silas, and then she is not allowed to leave the estate. Maud realizes she is a prisoner, and becomes terrified. Fortunately, a few of the employees are her friends, and try to help her, though this is almost impossible. There are spies everywhere.

 At one point, a wicked French governess – one who, ironically, had been fired by Maud’s father –  has locked Maud in a room with barred windows in a disused wing of the house. Le Fanu’s spare prose is curiously theatrical and effective as he describes her despair. Even with the cliches, it is a brilliant piece of writing.

Le Fanu writes, “I did not lie down; but I despaired.  I walked round and round the room, wringing my hands in utter distraction.  I threw myself at the bed-side on my knees. I could not pray. I could only shiver and moan, with hands clasped, and eyes of horror turned up to heaven….”

This elegant, exciting book can be devoured in a few days, if you have a few days off – or in a month – who cares?  It’s fabulous!

By the way, the heroine of Le Fanu’s novel The Rose and the Key is also named Maud. Perhaps it’s significant? In fact, all the women’s names in Uncle Silas being with “M.” Clever, though I don’t quite know the meaning of this alliteration.

The New Woman: George Gissing’s “In the Year of Jubilee”

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It used to be a Herculean task to find George Gissing’s books.  After reading Gail Godwin’s brilliant novel, The Odd Woman, with its many allusions to George Gissing, I tracked down a paperback copy of his novel The Odd Women at a literary hub of a bookshop that had almost anything you could want.

My favorite of his books is New Grub Street, but I recently reread Gissing’s quasi-feminist novel, In the Year of Jubilee, an uneven but delightful book that is in part an exposé of women’s education. Gissing focuses on on the consequences of the inadequate education of Victorian women.

The four main characters are “New Women,” who want to break out of the mold of Victorian womanhood. None of them are well-educated, though all have gone to girls’ schools.

At the center is 23-year-old Nancy Lord, the wealthiest and best-educated of the lot. Nancy is complacent about her education but struggles when she attempts to read books about the sciences. And then she meets attractive, sardonic Lionel Tarrant, a clever young man educated at Oxford.  (Too clever? Kind of a swine, I thought!) Whether consciously or not, she sees a relationship with him as a way to escape the trap of Victorian womanhood. And yet, because Tarrant does not regard her as an equal, this mutual attraction proves disastrous.

Nancy wants to enjoy the same freedom her brother has, and near the beginning of the book, the Jubilee – the celebration of the 50th year of Queen Victoria’s reign – gives her an excuse to go out at night. Nancy is exhilarated by the crowd, and slips away from her chaperone (a business associate of her father’s) for an illicit meeting with a male friend who takes her out for a drink. Nancy would love to live freely like a man.

Her friends are also New Women, to a greater or lesser extent.  Some achieve their goals, some do not. Beatrice French is the most successful. She brilliantly founds a women’s club that sells cheaply-made, ostensibly fashionable clothing to lower-middle-class women. Her younger sister, Fanny, is too flighty for business, and actively pursues free love. (Hippie or slut? Well, everyone thinks she is a slut!)

And then there’s Jessica, who is determined to take the baccalaureate exams at the University of London. Jessica is a fascinating character, a true bluestocking who at first strikes this reader as an intellectual.  She and Nancy knew each other at school, and often have tea together. Jessica works part-time as a governess, but devotes the rest of her time to studying. She cannot understand the math and science. It isn’t a matter of intelligence: she simply does not have the background. (Jessica the Obscure?)

As the time draws nearer to her exams, she becomes fearful and convinced she will fail. And tragically she does fail, and has a nervous breakdown from which she never recovers.  If she had attended a good school, rather than a finishing school, would she have passed the exams? I think so! But of course her parents did their best: they thought they were sending their daughter to a good school. But Jessica’s fall is tragic. She had so much potential, and was such a kind young woman, and now she is permanently befuddled, spiteful, and jealous.

Class matters  The characters are all more or less middle-class, ranging from lower-middle-class (Jessica) to more prosperous middle-class (Beatrice and Fanny French) to a sort of wealthy business class that is not considered quite top-notch (Nancy). Oddly, It is the middle-middle-class women, Beatrice and Fanny, who have the most freedom. Beatrice is a successful businesswoman, and Fanny happily pursues her sexual relationships with men.

This novel does veer toward the melodramatic: there is a secret marriage, a mysterious rich aunt, and even a Tess of the D’Urbervilles vibe. In my opinion, Gissing makes a wrong turn near the end of the novel. He believes in free love, but apparently not for women.

Honorary Ph.D.s: Ovid, Reference Books, & Me

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One day in April, I began to chant, “Ph.D., Ph.D.” (The chant sounds like a cheer at a sporting event:  “Pee Aitch Dee, Pee Aitch Dee!”)  It was cuter than it was annoying, I think, but you’d have to ask Captain Nemo.  

In our sleepy town, where nothing much happens, it is the height of excitement to reread Ovid’s two elegies about abortion (one is pro-Choice, the other anti-Choice), Horace’s Ars Poetica (“The Art of Poetry”), and Seneca’s charming Letters on stoicism. (N.B. You can read my essay on “Ovid on His Mistress’s Abortion” here.)

And then I thought: Why not get a Ph.D.? I have a master’s in classics, have taught Latin at the college and high-school levels, and have avidly read classical literature for decades.  The problem is location. The nearest classics program is 200 miles away. And the one I want to attend is 500 miles away.

Captain Nemo got practical. “Graduate school was not what I’d call fun.” he said dryly.

Indeed, I remember not sleeping for two years. (I mean, not sleeping much.)

And so I’ve shelved the Ph.D. fantasy. And now the captain carries my Latin “library” (a shopping bag full of Latin reference books) when we want to get out of the house and work. The reference books are heavy, and held together with duct tape.

You’re not a serious Latinist if your books aren’t held together with duct tape!

By the way, did you know that super-talented celebrities get honorary Ph.D.’s? I wasn’t aware of this, and I’m sure they deserve it, but they don’t have to carry a Latin library in their Barnes and Noble shopping bags! 🙂

The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford

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The Collected Stories of Jean Stafford won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970.  This neglected classic, which I have read and reread over the years, is one of my favorite books.  I prefer Stafford’s novels but the short stories are also elegant and dazzling.  Every sentence is so exquisite that one must sometimes pause to admire.  And she is very witty:  I especially love the comical stories.  The stories are mostly set in Colorado, where she grew up, and Boston and Manhattan, where she lived as an adult.

 Stafford’s most famous short story, “The Interior Castle,” is autobiographical.  Stafford and/or the heroine, Pansy, record the intensity of pain after her nose is smashed in a car accident.  (Stafford’s own face was smashed in a car accident caused by the drunk driving of poet Robert Lowell, and she  needed six facial surgeries to reconstruct it.) In “The Interior Castle,” Pansy horrifically describes the painful reconstruction of her nose in surgery, the pain soothed somewhat by cocaine, but there are moments of hell. Although this is far from Stafford’s best story, it is a realistic record of what it’s like to be helpless and in pain in a hospital.

Stafford’s stories about married couples are especially striking. In the comical story, “Polite Conversation,” Margaret Heath, a writer, makes desperate excuses not to go to tea with her neighbor, Mrs. Wainright-Lee, who expects her to come to tea every day.  Margaret’s husband, also a writer, refuses to go point-blank, but Margaret doesn’t want to alienate the neighbors.

And the name, Wainright-Lee, tells us what we need to know.  Mrs. Wainright-Lee is a terrible snob, but doesn’t have good taste.  She may not like Margaret much, but she wants to have a writer at her tea parties. 

Here is an example of Stafford’s humor.  The story opens hilariously with Mrs. Wainright-Lee’s ambiguous greeting.

“It is so good in you to  come to tea,” said Mrs. Wainright-Lee as she plucked one last weed beside a petunia that grew out of the flagstoned terrace.  “I have seen so little of you lately.”

“I know,” said Mrs. Heath, casting about for a new excuse for her unneighborliness, but the effort, on this New England summer afternoon, was too great…

I am also a fan of her brilliant story about loneliness, “The Bleeding Hearts.” Rose Fabrizio, a college-educated Mexican girl, is the secretary to the headmistress of an Eastern girls’ school, and hopes to be “adopted as an Easterner.” But she has no friends, and is extremely lonely, so she  makes  up stories about her neighbors, whom she never sees.

She also spends hours reading at the public library, where she is drawn to a handsome white-haired man in a yellow ascot and scholarly Oxford glasses. She also makes up stories about him.  But when she discovers he is her neighbor, who takes care of his sick mother full-time, and is desperate for a friend – any friend – she scampers away. He is more desperate even than she.

In “A Country Love Story,” we meet another lonely woman.  Her husband has been ill with TB, and absurdly believes she is having an affair with another man. Eventually she is so lonely and persecuted by her husband that she makes up an imaginary lover.

The last story in the collection, “The End of a Career,” is very different from the others; it is reminiscent of  Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.  A beautiful woman, who is not particularly bright, spends all her time maintaining her beauty, and in her forties regularly has plastic surgery.  But she goes to pieces when her hands show her age, because the plastic surgeon cannot do plastic surgery on her hands. In these days, when even “common people” have plastic surgery, this kind of thing may be a serious problem.

This is a delightfully intense collection of stories, but I do recommend skipping  the first part, “The Innocents Abroad.” The stories in the later sections are much more brilliant, and you can always go back to “The Innocents Abroad” later.

A Rerun: Jean Stafford’s “The Catherine Wheel”

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I published this review of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Jean Stafford’s neglected novel, The Catherine Wheel, at Thornfield Hall on July 30, 2022. This is a rerun.

Jean Stafford’s The Catherine Wheel is a sophisticated, if chilly little book, told from the perspectives of two troubled characters.  

Tranquil Katharine Congreve, a middle-aged spinster, believes in “the pleasure principle” but dislikes change. Now she faces a sexual crisis.  In her youth, she was in love with John Shipley, an architect who fell for her bland cousin, Maeve.  Weirdly, John and Maeve invited Katharine to accompany them on their honeymoon, claiming that she had made the match.  (She had not.)

In the present, she is having an affair with John, who wants to divorce Maeve, and insists Katharine must marry him to “save” him.  This salvation is not what Katharine had in mind.

The Shipley children spend summers with Katharine in Maine while Maeve and John go to Europe.  The teenage twins, Honor and Harriet, are excited about having new dresses made and meeting new boys at tea; but 12-year-od Andrew, who is bullied at prep school and friendless in the city, is crestfallen because his local friend Victor has dropped him.  

Victor’s neglect of Andrew seems pathological. Victor is nursing his older brother, Charles, a sailor who has malaria.  Victor does not speak to Andrew when he passes the house.  He refuses to allow Andrew into the house to visit him and Charles.

And so  Andrew lies in a hammock all day, fantasizing about killing Charles. 

In this small town in Maine, everyone meddles in everyone’s business.  People  gossip when Katharine’s lights are on all night, and speculate that she is ill, or that she is up reading Gone with the Wind.  Katharine feigns calm and pretends she has been making a list for a grand outdoor party, which will end with her favorite firework, the Catherine Wheel, named after the martyr St. Catherine of Alexandria.

Needless to say, Katharine is no saint, and it is a difficult summer for her, despite her aristocratic manners and dependence on tradition.  Stafford, who was raised in Colorado and graduated from the University of Colorado, learned the manners not from childhood from her husband, Robert Lowell, who grew up in a wealthy Boston family. 

A brilliant novel!

Walking, Running, Bicycling, & Camping:  What to Do in the Summer

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You won’t believe this – how could you, after all? – but Captain Nemo and I once bicycled from Conneautville, PA, to Geneseo, New York, and back. 

I trained for the ride for months. Well, perhaps one month. We were young, and we were fit;  we were both runners. He ran marathons, I ran 10Ks.  I ran a half marathon once, and promptly threw up.  My favorite race was The Don’t Fall Run.  No one seemed to know about the race, and hardly anyone signed up. We got lost, because there were no signs, so we all chased the leader, who was lost, too.  If our times were slow, it’s because we ran much farther than intended.  A half marathon?  No, not that far, because I didn’t throw up.

Anyway, I wish I still had the Don’t Fall Run T-shirt. 

Bicycling is much easier than running. We didn’t buy special gear for our bike trip. We wore gym shorts, t-shirts, and sneakers.  And, since of course there were no vans to carry our gear, we stowed it in panniers or tied it to the rack on the back of the bikes.

Before we left, I took my old Schwinn 10-speed in for a tune-up.  The shop employee said the Schwinn wouldn’t make it and tried to sell me a Japanese bike.

“No, thank you!!” I  had no trouble with the Schwinn.  (N.B. The company is no longer based in the U.S., and the quality of Schwinns has gone down, I hear.) We traveled up the green hills of Pennsylvania (miles and miles uphill, and where was the downhill?), then up more hills in New York (the worst was from Jamestown, NY, to a campground at at the top of a hill peak: I was assured it wasn’t a mountain peak.)

After all those miles, I lost – one pound!  Pathetic.  Biking isn’t for weight loss.

WALKING IS CHALLENGING, TOO,

 It is my goal to take long, long walks with Captain Nemo. We love the  challenge of a four-mile trail around a beautiful lake in a park in the midwest. The gorgeous, hilly woods are shady and cool, the rhythm of walking calms us, and we had glimpses of the blue lake as we walked.  I felt like a character in Conrad Richter’s The Trees,  or perhaps Louise Dickinson Rich’s We Took to the Woods.

There were few walkers.  Most people were fishing. And most of them were overweight: no body shaming, thank goodness!  There were people fishing in kayaks, people fishing on the shore, and a very thin cool guy fishing in a boat with a hushed electric motor.

Motorboats are banned in the park, says Captain Nemo, but some of the electric motors make almost no noise.  This man seemed to have no oars.  He turned the boat with what looked like a TV remote.

The hilarious thing is that no one caught any fish.  The cool guy caught no fish, the fishermen and fisherwomen on the shore caught no fish, and the Kayakers had no room for fish.

“Where’s the fish?”  we kept asking.

I was doing fairly well on the walk until we reached the campground about two miles from the beginning. 

 The campground was a giant parking lot.  No trees, just hot sun and concrete.  One couple huddled under an inadequate RV awning, but everyone else was indoors. 

It was dismal.

I should be used to RVs by now, but it’s such a waste of gas.  Why go camping if you’re not outdoors?  Do you have to replicate all the comforts of home?  If you need the amenities, most parks have restrooms and there are often showers.: And if the mosquitos are terrible, you crawl into the tent at 7 and read a book by flashlight.   It’s just sad to go camping in an RV. 

And yet some camping trips are more fun than others  Once, in northern Wisconsin, a storm knocked over our tent, and I had to lie down and splay my arms and legs to the corners to make sure the tent didn’t blow away. After we put the tent back up, we sat in the lodge till the rain was over.

The walking trails at this park were beautiful, in the deep woods, but it is very buggy in the summer.  The best time to camp in northern Wisconsin is in the spring or fall.

We had a mellow camping experience near Thunder Bay, Canada. We camped next to a pebbled beach (well, perhaps they were rocks; it was in the ’90s so I don’t recall exactly), and there were birds everywhere, and placards about the birds.  It was silent except for the birds  It was the most silent place I’ve ever been.

On some camping trips in state parks  noise has almost defeated us. The people in the next tent at one park were drinking and playing loud, bad music all night. We politely asked if they would turn the music down so we could sleep.  They said Yes, but of course they did not. We had to lie there sleepless all night.

 The next day, I sat bleary-eyed by the lake reading the latest Oprah Club selection, and by the time I finished it, I was ready to hike again.

Lawrence Durrell & The Doll People

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Some of us like dolls, some of us do not.  My mother loved dolls.  We had Suzy Smart (she came with her own desk and blackboard), and Tammy and Pepper, my favorites, who seemed to be just about my own age, so I could  imagine stories about them, and act them out with the dolls. Tammy had her own soda fountain in her cardboard Tammy house!  Pepper had a plastic treehouse!

Tammy and Pepper

Of course we had Barbie, but Barbie never had adventures, because we didn’t have the faintest idea who this adult doll was. She didn’t have a soda fountain in her cardboard Dream House; she had a vanity table (that says it all). We preferred Barbie’s freckled best friend, Midge, Barbie’s sister, Skipper, and Skipper’s best friend, Scooter. Again, it was not much fun to play with any of them. It defied our imagination.

Barbie’s Little Theater drove a friend of mine mad.  My crazy-funny best friend laughingly lynched Skipper from the proscenium arch,  which was shocking at the time and, in retrospect, disturbing. But it never happened again. That was the end of Barbies for all of us. 

Lawrence Durrell seems to have been as disturbed by dolls as my friend was.  When I was writing about Lawrence Durrell’s Monsieur, the first novel in The Avignon Quintet,  I forgot to mention the doll scene. It is violent and disturbing.

One of the main characters in Monsieur, Rob Sutcliffe, a sardonic novelist, is obsessed with a box his wife Pia takes with her everywhere, even when they travel.  Rob has promised Pia not to look in the box, but one day he sneaks back early, hoping to open the lid and find the secret. In the hotel room he  finds Pia happily having a tea party with dozens of dolls in international costumes.

For some reason, the dolls drive him insane.  He screams, he pulls off their limbs, he throws them in the fire.  Poor Pia!  Why didn’t she protect her dolls?  And so how can we be surprised that this sad soul  runs away with a “negress” named Trash.  Pia had issues, and so did violent Rob. 

P.S.   When I was middle-aged, a well-traveled relative gave me an “international”  doll who wore a Japanese kimono and carried an umbrella. Not knowing what else to do with it, I stuck the doll on a shelf in the closet.  Every time I reach up to that high shelf, the doll falls on my head.   

Lawrence Durrell’s “The Avignon Quintet”

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No one reads Lawrence Durrell anymore. 

And yet his sultry postmodern masterpiece, The Alexandria Quartet, is still read by angel-headed hipsters.  Set in Alexandria, Egypt,  these four novels, written in a lush, lyrical style, describe life in the late 1930s and early 1940s in Alexandria through the eyes of an English writer, Darley.

Durrell’s The Avignon Quintet, a later, darker series of novels, is completely unlike The Alexandria Quartet.  The first volume,  Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness, won the James Tait Black award in 1974, but even the Durrell fan may wonder why. The novel seems dated, the style is awkward, and though there are many comic scenes, it is wildly incoherent and pretentious, veering from dreamy descriptions of Avignon to repulsive meditations on death, suicide, and gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D. that those of us who read about it in The Alexandria Quartet hoped never to hear about again.

 The novel Monsieur begins with a violent death. The narrator (or apparent narrator: we’re in postmodern territory) is Bruce, a doctor who returns to Avignon when he learns of his best friend Piers’ death. Bruce is a nice chap: he organizes the funeral. He and Piers were not only close, they were in an incestuous ménage à trois with Bruce’s mad wife, Piers’ sister.

Bruce believed that Piers committed suicide, until during the funeral he learns that the corpse is headless.   Bruce and Toby, a shaggy history professor, believe that the  cause of death was rooted in gnosticism, a religious philosophy of the 2nd century A.D.  PIers joined a gnostic cult after attending a lecture in Alexandria, then eating mummia (bits of mummies) and hallucinating about snakes.

Anyway, headless corpses, snakes, incest. And then there’s Rob Sutcliffe, a character who wrote a satiric novel about the ménage à trois, who is also haunted by sex and death.  He was obsessed with his wife, Pia, Bruce’s sister, who left him to have a lesbian relationship with a Negress named,,, Trash.  Eventually, he commits suicide.

That said, this novel is not only incoherent but is actually disgusting.

I do love Durrell and recommend his other books, espeically The Complete Antrobus, a Wodehouse-ian collection of satiric stories about a diplomat.