Reading Habits: Spring Cleaning Means Books
Elizabeth and Michelle read two very different novels and two very different slices of the past, encountering spring cleaning and social etiquette anxieties along the way.
Spring, Surrender and a Grubby Street: Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum
by Elizabeth Anderson
As exams come to an end and the weather becomes increasingly sunny and promising, the yearly spring clean is both inevitable and an inviting opportunity to peruse the depths of my bookshelf. In filing away piles of revision notes and course readings, I found Jenna Blum’s novel Those Who Save Us, a Christmas present that has been knocking about for some time now. This story of two German women and their experiences of WWII is a worthwhile read.
Related through alternating narratives of a young mother in Weimer, Germany in the early 1940s and her university professor daughter living in Minneapolis, Minnesota fifty-five years later, the novel is an insightful look at the historical, emotional and economic ramifications of the Second World War. The range of characters included in the story account for the variety of viewpoints surrounding the war, documented from start to surrender. The work’s accuracy is credible given the author’s background with Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, where she spent four years interviewing Holocaust survivors.
The author Jenna Blum lives in Boston and gives master novel workshops with the Grub Street Writers, a non-profit creative writing centre supporting authors’ development in the Boston area. Intrigued by the interesting name of the group, a quick search revealed that Grub Street was originally the name of a street in London that hosted a bohemian society of low-rent writers and poets alongside cheap boarding houses, brothels and coffeehouses. Samuel Johnson, of dictionary fame, spent time on Grub Street at the beginning of his career. Cool.
Those Who Save Us is a captivating, reliable novel that delves beyond its historical setting into themes of family and sacrifice. Though at odds with the optimistic weather and, given the nature of the material, sometimes so consistently depressing it is best to read as much as possible in one sitting, the New York Times and Boston Globe bestseller and winner of the 2005 Ribalow Prize is well worth inspection.
Meanings in Books and Books in Meaning: Good Morning, Midnight by Jean Rhys
by Michelle McCracken
The double edged sword for the literary scholar is the ingrained and unyeilding quest for meaning. So when a friend passes on a book, you can’t help but wonder if they are really handing you a secret message wrapped up in the words of an author.
Instead of asking what Jean Rhys was conveying to her reader in Good Morning, Midnight, I was wondering exactly what my friend was trying to tell me through the words of the narrator, Sophia Jansen.
Rather quickly the wonder grew to worry.
There is no spandex here, no archetypal hero, and no easy escapism – only the uncomfortable yet compelling voyeuristic position of watching self-destruction.
Sophia wanders through hotel rooms and bars, clothing shops and hat boutiques; she is always looking in mirrors and obsessing over her looks and I am always wondering how pretty she is. Rhys, always ahead of her time, has brought out in me the exact reaction that women in the 1930s were facing and women today still face. Judgement. Yet society still hasn’t caught up with Sophia’s solitary absinthe binges – how many women do you see enjoying a drink alone in a bar late at night?
I don’t want to admit that at times I relate to Sophia (unlike the way I readily wanted to be like Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s ) yet Sophia is so artlessly frank about herself and feelings towards her life, I feel a little ashamed at my sometimes affected positivity and avoidance of the negative.
When Sophia admires a new dress, or searches for a change of hotel room; the fact she adopts a new name, buys a new hat, dyes her hair blonde conveys her attempts to adopt a new persona, to inject freshness from the tangible. These are vain attempts to change the unhappy to the happy with immediate results; attempts we are all guilty of.
Good Morning, Midnight is a compelling read and Rhys’ style is a gripping force of rhythm, flashback, paranoia and dark humour. The novel acts as mirror reflecting the nature of woman and renders me simultaneously proud and ashamed.
As for hidden meaning, the day I find my friend alone in a dark, quiet bar drinking an absinthe and welling at the eye, I’ll ponder awhile at the question of art reflecting life or life reflecting art, then impose myself on her story and save her from herself.
Posted by Elizabeth on May 20, 2010.