A Work in Progress

The Good Soldier - A Novel in Cubist Form?

Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier is a masterpiece of modernism.  The opening line "This is the saddest story I ever heard" is very apt.  From that line onwards, there is really very little to feel good about in this story.  While I hate to ever give plot away in any of my posts, there may be possible spoilers here--I will try not to give too much away (better to save any details for discussion). 

The "good soldier" is Edward Ashburnam.  By all appearances he leads a distinguished life--he's a country gentleman and a good soldier.  Of course appearances can be deceiving.  The story is narrated by John Dowell, an American.  Dowell and his wife, Florence, meet the Ashburnams (Edward and his wife Leonora) in 1904 in the spa town of Bad Nauheim where both Edward and Florence are taking cures for bad hearts.  The couple's lives will intermingle over the next nine years.  We get to see into the private lives of four people--lives filled with lies, deceptions, even hatred. 

I have read a few essays about this novel, and one author likened this story to a hall of mirrors--you can't believe what you see, or in this case hear.  I really liked that description.  The more I read, the more I became uncertain and at times confused as to the events being narrated.  We only ever hear the story as it is being told by John Dowell, and we only hear the voices of other characters via Dowell's narration as well.  After a while I wasn't sure I believed everything he was saying.  Dowell doesn't narrate the story in a linear manner either.  "The traditional English novel depended on the convention of the linear plot."  Ford was writing in what is known as "literary impressionism".  I came across this definition of literary impressionism in eNotes:

"Literary impressionism, Ford says, is a revolt against the commonplace nineteenth century novel, or 'nuvvle' as he calls it.  The impressionist novel should not be a narration or report, but a rendering of impressions.  Rather than following a linear plot, giving one event after another as they occur, the impressionist novel enters the mind of the storyteller and follows his associated ideas in a tangled stream of consciousness, so that vivid image becomes juxtaposed to vivid image, skipping across space and time in a collage of memory and imagination.  The impressionist novel takes as its subject an affair, some shocking event which has already happened, and proceeds in concentric rings of growing complication as the storyteller cogitates.  The focus of the novel is internal rather than external.  The reader must focus on the storyteller's mental processes rather than on the events themselves.  The impressionist novel is limited to the mind of the storyteller, and so is finally solipsistic."

Another critic has taken Ford's style a step further and compared The Good Soldier to a Cubist painting.  I rather like this idea.  I wish I could link to the article as it was very interesting reading; however, I found it in one of the library's databases.  If you are very curious you can find the article, written by Frank G. Nigro, and published in the Winter 1992 issue of "Studies in the Novel".  There was so much to think about in the article I can't even begin to paraphrase, but I can share a few quotes.

"Ford's The Good Soldier effectively mirrors what was happening in contemporary art: Ford created a pictorial, even cubist novel.  'Cubism' implies a profoundly radical, intellectual approach to art."

Nigro goes on to discuss the Cubist movement as defined by Picasso and Braque and its various phases (if you click on the link above, you can read more about Cubism).  It is what they accomplished that interests me:

"...Cubist artists transformed painting into something other than painting: it became like the mythological Minotaur, half one thing and half another--the perfect mix of apples and oranges.  Painting ceased being simply linear or two-dimensional and became actually three-dimensional."

"Drawing on the varying perspectives of Leonora, Florence and Edward, The Good Soldier also achieves a three-dimensionality, arising from the scattered shards of personal history, laid one on top of another.  Dowell's narration represents a synthesis of different pieces of information on a tableau, yet it is not a synthesis that necessarily leads to a unity of meaning or interpretation.  Like Cubism, The Good Soldier is a highly intellectualized project which has pretensions to objectivity but attempts to reach this objectivity--this new objectivity--through subjectivity.  And like Cubism, Ford's novel would evoke a shrill reaction."

One more (well maybe two more), then I promise to stop quoting:

"Ford's method (the layering of events in a non-chronological manner) gives us a picture of broken images, of single shards of perspective, which if connected together like a child's dot-to-dot picture would form a Cubist painting.  Ford uses this unstructured structure at first to disorient us, then to impress us, and finally to invoke our suspicion."

And this is what I felt reading the novel. Particularly the disorientation.  I thought this was going to be a fairly simple tale, but it was anything but that.  If you believe Dowell, perhaps it is all simple.  However, even he continually tells us he doesn't quite know how to tell this tale, and is he telling us in the right way?  After finishing the book and trying to digest it, I am still not certain what I think of any of the characters.  I'm not sure if I feel sympathy or outright dislike.  I still don't know what to make of Dowell.  What sort of shocked me in my supplementary reading was this:

"It could be seriously argued that Edward, Leonora, and Florence have no external 'reality' at all, that they are simply the imaginings of the sickly Dowell as he tells or dreams his story.  The approach may shock readers of conventional fiction, who are accustomed to reading a novel as if the characters in every fiction are simply the projections of the author's creative imagination."

Talk about unreliable narrator!  I can see why this book is discussed and studied.  It definitely calls for another reading some time in the future.  Although the characters perplex me, I am fascinated by Ford's style of writing.  How amazing to do with paper and ink what visual artists were doing with paint!

You can read more posts at The Slaves of Golconda blog, and feel free to join in or follow the discussion at The Metaxu Cafe.

The painting above right is by Braque called "Woman with a Guitar", 1913.

Doesn't anyone read anymore?

I think I already know the answer to that one sadly.

They're obviously watching lots of TV.

Read this article!

The Penelopiad

I've finished my second book for Carl's Once Upon a Time Challenge.  A little late, but I'm getting there.  I may not finish on time (the challenge goes through June 21), but I hope to at least finish reading my planned books (two left and then Shakespeare)!  The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood is a modern-day, rather irreverent, retelling of the myth of Penelope, Odysseus's very faithful wife, and her maids. 

Canongate (along with other publishing houses) is getting contemporary authors to retell myths in whatever way they want.  I like how Margaret Atwood begins The Penelopiad:

"Now that I'm dead I know everything.  This is what I wished would happen, but like so many of my wishes it failed to come true.  I know only a few factoids that I didn't know before.  Death is much too high a price to pay for the satisfaction of curiosity, needless to say."

(Possible spoilers if you are not familiar with the story).  Penelope tells her version of the tale straight from the fires of Hades, occasionally enjoying a bit of asphodel, and running into other personages that we know and love from The Odyssey.  It has been a long time since I read any Homer, but the story came back to me more or less.  Penelope is left behind in Ithaca when Odysseus goes off to fight in the Trojan War (thanks to Helen running off with Paris).  He is gone for twenty years.  While Odysseus is away, Penelope must fend off a multitude of suitors with the help of her maids.  In the end, no kindness goes unpunished (or however the saying goes), not only are the suitors murdered, but the maids are hanged in the end, too.

I really like the idea of this series and will have to look for more of the books at the bookstore.  I wanted to participate in Carl's challenge as these are the types of books I rarely pick up and read on my own.  I think myth and folklore especially are important, even though I don't do much reading in this area.  Karen Armstrong has written, "Myth is about the unknown; it is about that for which we have no words.  Myth therefore looks into the heart of a great silence."

It seems as though Margaret Atwood really did her research when she wrote this.  I think there is a lot of word play and symbolism that I didn't really pick up on (I read a few reviews after the fact, though, which helped me get an idea of what I missed).  To be very honest, though, while I liked this book, I sort of didn't as well--or didn't like aspects of it.  I liked the quirkiness of the retelling, and I liked the bawdiness of the maid's interjections between chapters.  But I never really warmed to Penelope or any of the other characters (and you get very little sense of what the maids are like--they move in one big group).  Maybe you are not meant to get too close?  I always just felt like I was on the outside looking in.  It all felt sort of mechanical.  I would be curious to hear what others thought of the book?  Still, I am happy to have read it--there were elements of the story I really enjoyed--and there were some great lines in the story.  I wouldn't mind reading more myths--both in this series or on their own.

The Penelopiad was my "mythology" read, and Stardust by Neil Gaiman was my "fairy tale" read.  Now I am working on Susan Cooper's Over Sea, Under Stone for my "fantasy" book.  It is a YA novel, set in Cornwall.  This is the first book in a series about three siblings who discover a map that might lead them to the Holy Grail.  It has started out as a fun read, so I have high expectations that it will be a good adventure/fantasy story.

More on Katherine Mansfield

It's been a few days since I have read more from Katherine Mansfield's Journal, but there were some interesting things I have been reading in the introduction to Mansfield's Collected Stories that I wanted to share.  I am planning on starting her short story 'Prelude' as soon as I finish the rather lengthy introduction (I tend to like to read intros after I have read the work, but in this case I want to know as much about Mansfield as I can).  I mentioned earlier that Mansfield's brother was killed in WWI in 1915--apparently accidentally while training soldiers how to use grenades.

"From this point on something sobered in Mansfield.  She settled to her first real work, a long story called 'The Aloe', based in the New Zealand of their childhood and dedicated to Leslie.  It would become 'Prelude'; the Woolfs would publish it as their third Hogarth title in 1918, and it would take some time for readers and critics to appreciate the strangeness in its form, its poetic distillation, its surprising open-endedness, its characters seen in their immediacy, as if historyless, and its tacit inference that story can be differently seen and understood.  These are just some of the  reverberations of this deceptively simple-seeming, hugely innovative story."

Although she lived a very short life, she accomplished much in terms of her fiction.  I'm always curious about what or how an author has changed the way see see/read/think about literature. 

"Katherine Mansfield's fiction, for all its innovation, reads surprisingly easily.  Though her concern with consciousness and psychological relativity, her projection of the notion of self as both fragmented and fluid, the fixation with displacement in her stories and her vision of aesthetic shape itself as negotiable, are all clearly identifiable as modernist concerns, she's what you might call an unassuming modernist, a sly, laughing kind of modernist.  It's almost as if she'd never want to be caught being pompous, or in any way too present in her stories (or as if to us now nearly a hundred years later, unwilling to be caught taking any single literary fashion or 'ism' too much to heart.)"

"Beside the other great modernist fiction writers, her work seems to go out of its way not to demand of its reader.  It isn't marked with any of the self-conscious experimenta of, for instance, contemporaneous work by Joyce, alongside which it appears quite conventional; and alongside the meditative, spare and rich, mono-voice and poetics of much of Woolf's fiction after Night and Day, Mansfield's work seems almost theatrical, like a transcription of social performance.  She often used the verb 'perform' when referring to the act of her own writing.  'Now I must play my part,' she tells herself, steeling herself to write 'The Aloe' after her brother's death."

As I have been (very slowly) reading some of Virginia Woolf's work as well, I am very interested in both authors in relation to each other.  They appeared to have a love-hate relationship.  I have read, however, that Woolf was bereft on the death of Mansfield. 

"Virginia Woolf, in her more rivalrous moments, dismissed Mansfield herself for her 'cheap' realism, the ABC tea-shop, waitress-peopled, downmarket settings of her stories.  But Mansfield's aesthetic question was the same as Woolf's own.  What was reality?  Who were the judges of it?  As early as 1909 she was pondering structure, and the ways in which meaning is expressed in fiction.  'Realism, flesh covered bones...'  But then - 'supposing ones bones were not bone but liquid light'.  Mansfield senses, in the very structure of things, a different kind of realism."

Sorry to quote so much from the introduction of Mansfield's Collected Stories (written by Ali Smith by the way), but there is so much great information there.  I wonder if Virginia Woolf wrote much about Mansfield in her diaries?  I really need to start reading them as well, I think.  I am almost ready (I need to get through some of my piles of already started books first) to start reading Woolf's Jacob's Room, the first of her experimental writings.  First, however, I will be finishing reading Mansfield's Journal and finally getting to her short stories.  I really like reading about authors working at the same time and seeing how their writing plays off each other or at least compares.  I hadn't planned on doing so, but I am enjoying reading both Woolf's and Mansfield's work!     

Help with podcasts?

I have recently discovered the joys of podcasts.  I don't listen to the radio very often, so I miss out on all sorts of good programs.  If I can figure out the technology, however, it may not matter if I can't listen when something good airs--I can listen later with a podcast.  Now it is a matter of figuring out what's what. Can all podcasts be both listened to on the computer and on an iPod or other device (I'm thinking of the BBC--can their podcasts be downloaded and listened to on a iPod?)?  It seems like different sites have different ways of listening.  There always seem to be so many variables--if anyone knows of a good website that explains this, or can offer advice, it would be greatly appreciated.  And any good bookish podcast sources?

Sunday Miscellanea

Look what I got in the mail!  Joanne Harris's new book, The Lollipop Shoes.  I want to set everything aside and ignore all housework and just read this all afternoon long, but alas, I will be shampooing carpets as soon as I post this (everyone else is being industrious in my house today, so I will feel guilty just being a layabout).  That's okay--I still have two more days of vacation!  I loved Chocolat, so I am a little apprehensive this won't live up to it.  I have decided not to read any reviews at all--just jump into the story.  If the first line of the book is anything to go by, I think it might be a good read in any case:

"It is a relatively little-known fact that, over the course of a single year, about twenty million letters are delivered to the dead."

I wonder if the cover photo is Pere Lachaise Cemetary by the way?  Interesting way to begin the story.  You can listen to a podcast with Joanne Harris here--also very interesting--she talks about the "sequel" and reads from the book. 

I am completely behind in blog reading this weekend.  I always appreciate comments left on my posts, and I am also behind in answering those, which I try to do in a timely manner.  Please don't think I am ignoring you! 

I decided to start a book for the Summer Reading Challenge.  I am starting with a Virago, and since I am also reading a biography of Daphne Du Maurier, I picked up Castle D'Or.  It was actually started by Arthur Quiller-Couch and finished by Daphne Du Maurier after his death.  It is a retelling of the Tristan and Iseult legend, but set in 1840s Cornwall.  Already being familiar with the legend, I fear it will not end happily, but I think it will be good nontheless.

I have been reading The Sleeping Beauty by Elizabeth Taylor.  I have wanted to read her work for a while now, and I am glad I finally picked up one of her books.  "The Sleeping Beauty is a love story of middle age by a writer whom Arthur Mizener called 'the modern man's Jane Austen'."  And yes, so far it is very good.  It is set in a seaside town called Seething!  Another seaside setting.  I will definitely be reading more by her as I like her writing style!

One last note (and hopefully tomorrow I will be back with a more coherent post).  Last night I watched The Ladies in Lavender.  What a wonderful film.  Aside from loving the setting--Cornwall, the acting was excellent as well as the story.  Judi Dench and Maggie Smith are such good actresses.  Dench and Smith are aging sisters living in a seaside village.  Actually their home overlooks the shore.  After a particularly violent storm they find washed up on their beach a young man.  It turns out he is a foreigner.  I hate to give anymore of the story away.  It is a bittersweet tale.  It makes you wonder a bit about the choices you made or experiences you might have missed when you were young.  I do recommend it!

A Little Meme

Adrienne tagged me for a little meme--the perfect thing for one those kinds of days!

Grab the book that is nearest to you (no cheating), turn to page 161, post the text of the fifth full sentence on the page, post the rules and tag three people.

"And in the meantime, and so that something may be made of you, it is agreed I shall withhold your pay until that time is complete."

That sounds awfully snarky, doesn it?!  I stopped by the library after work yesterday.  The Nature of Monsters by Clare Clark was waiting for me.  I couldn't resist starting it, though I have barely read the first few pages.  It is the closest at hand. 

"From the highly acclaimed author of The Great Stink comes a consuming, passionate, darkly humorous tale set amid the clamor and chaos of eighteenth-century London."

It wasn't really in my weekend reading plans, but I flxxible when it comes to picking up a good book to read!

I can never decide who to tag for these memes, so if you want to play along, please consider yourself tagged.  Let me know, so I can go read your quote, too!

Weekend Reading Plans

Although I am not quite so close to finishing as many books as Stefanie, I have been contemplating how I am going to spend my extra free time this weekend.  I decided it was time to use a few more vacation hours from work, and I am taking an additional day off on Tuesday and extending the holiday just a bit longer.  Four lovely days to read or relax or do whatever comes to mind (maybe shampoo the carpet, but I hope to avoid that...at least this weekend).  After finishing the Tasha Alexander mystery last weekend, I haven't really felt like blasting through any other books at the moment.  Sometimes it is nice to just read a little slower.

That said, however, I did finish Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier today.  At the moment I am struggling with ambivalent feelings about the book.  Maybe not so much the writing but with the characters.  I am glad to finish a little ahead of our end of the month discussion so I can have some time to think about the book.  I also have photocopied a few essays that I would like to read before posting anything about the novel.  I have wanted to read this for so long, and I am glad I finally have.  I'm not really sure what I was expecting, but it was still different than I thought it would be. 

If I am very industrious, I could read ahead in Don Quixote this weekend.  I hit the 200 page mark yesterday!  I have just been reading my chapter a day, shaking my head occasionally at what DQ and Sancho Panza manage to get themselves into.  I know this is all going to come together in book two (from what I have heard anyway), so until then I am just enjoying the antics.  I have not been reading my DQ companion that has plot summaries and critical discussion.  Perhaps I should pick that up this weekend, as I need to be thinking about it a bit deeper than I have been.  I need to catch up on the new posts on the Tilting blog.  It helps immensely just to hear others thoughts about the book!  I wonder how far along everyone else is?

I might be able to finish reading Margaret Atwood's The Penelopiad.  Odysseus has just left Penelope to try and get that troublemaker Helen back, who has run off with Paris.  As faithful as Penelope is, and as swiftly as she manages all those suitors while Odysseus is away, I would hate to have her life.  Dragged from Sparta, having to live in her husband's house where she is not allowed to do much of anything, well...that's not particularly tempting.  I will have to read Homer sometime soon.  This is one of my challenge books (number two).  I think I am going to jump ahead and begin reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.  I'm not sure I will get my other two books read for the challenge (though I am still going to try), but I definitely want to read Shakespeare.  I have already started reading the Marjorie Garber essay.  I hadn't planned on reading this play next (I somehow thought I might manage to sneak in another play between the last one and this one...silly me), but in the end I think it is working out well this way.  Garber says that A Midsummer Night's Dream was written in the same years as Romeo and Juliet (which you might remember was my first crack at Shakespeare).  As a matter of fact is is sort of R&J turned inside out--tragedy turned into comedy.  Apparently the plays have a lot in common.  I plan on doing the same as I did with R&J.  Watch-read-watch--It seemed to work out well for me last time.  It would have been fun to coincide reading/watching this with the actual Midsummer holiday, but sometimes I am so slow reading that it may actually take me until then to get though all my reading and watching!

This should keep me busy, right?  I may choose a book (if I finish one other book first) for the Summer Reading Challenge and start a few days early.  And thank you to whoever left the comment about the book by Geraldine Brooks--where she goes looking for her former penpals--Foreign Correspondent.  I have read a couple of her other books and I am sure I saw this one at some point.  One of the things I shared in a meme about myself was that I used to have penpals when I was young, but I lost contact with them.  I sometimes wonder what they are up to these days.  Brooks actually tried to find out.  My library had the book, so I had to check it out.  It is only about 200 pages.  It looks like a quick fun read, so I might try and squeeze that in, because my reading pile is just too short these days.  Just kidding.

What will you be reading this weekend?

Daphne Du Maurier

If you are a fan of Daphne Du Maurier you probably know that this year is the centenary anniversary of her  birth.  The actual date was May 13th, so while I have missed many of the festivities (including a BBC Radio serialization of My Cousin Rachel), I can still focus some of my reading on Daphne and her work.  I have been slowly reading Margaret Forster's biography of her.  It is excellent reading.  The only reason it is going slowly is my copy happens to be a used hardcover, and it is somewhat hefty to carry around.  As Don Quixote goes to work with me every morning, I can't carry another heavy book in my bookbag.  I usually read a bit each night--having a hard time setting it down.  (Yes, both Katherine Mansfield and Daphne Du Maurier compete for attention each night.  On a good night I get to read a little of both.)

There are also a few new books out that I have splurged and ordered from The Book Depository.  One arrived today--The Daphne Du Maurier Companion edited by Helen Taylor.  At first glance I was afraid I was going to be disappointed.  It appeared to contain quite a few essays.  It turns out, however, that these are the same essays which appear in the Virago editions (I own many of these editions already).  After looking through it a bit more closely, though, I think it is still a worthwhile book to add to my Du Maurier collection.  It contains interviews, letters, a complete bibliography and list of works about her as well as a filmography as well as an unpublished short story.  No photos, but I am hoping Vanishing Cornwall will more than make up for that.  I also decided I need an updated version of Rebecca.  The Virago edition is much prettier than the old American edition, don't you think (the cover seems a little too bland)?  I am waiting for both to arrive in the mail.

I know several people have told me that they read Daphne when they were young adults.  In some cases she was the first adult writer they read when they were younger.  I discovered her much later.  My first book, not surprisingly, was Rebecca, which I read when I was in college.  At various times I have read different books by her, including Jamaica Inn and My Cousin Rachel.  Most recently I read Frenchman's Creek (earlier this year).  Already I am narrowing down the other books I have by her (and I have been collecting them for a while) to choose one to read for the summer reading challenge (Virago in the UK publishes many of her books--only a few are published here in the US, however).  I think part of my draw for Daphne's work is the setting.  Many of her books are set in Cornwall--a place I know only in my imagination.  One of my biggest fixations is to live near a coast, and I get the feel that the Cornish coast would be a sort of paradise for me.

In the introduction of the companion, written by Sir Christopher Frayling, he writes:

"I don't know why, maybe because I grew up in a house full of popular fiction, but I have always felt queasy about the critical reflex which tends to patronise a writer just because she/he is popular.  It is as if, in the eyes if some parts of academe and the literary establishment , a wide readership automatically confers pulp status.  At least that was the orthodoxy then.  In case of Daphne Du Maurier, the verdict was particularly unjust--as I discovered when I began seriously to read her books in the 1970s, starting with Rebecca (who doesn't?), then most of her other novels, then writings on the Cornish landscape, the biographies and autobiographies.  This coincided with my researches into Gothic literature, another genre of fiction that was despised in those days.  Since then, there has been an ever increasing critical focus on both categories - 'romantic fiction' and 'Gothic fiction' - what they mean and what they don't mean, as well as deep reappraisals of their most substantive authors.  In the United States, the most dramatic reappraisal has been the work of Mary Shelley.  In Britain, of Daphne Du Maurier.  It has been a spectacular transformation scene."

I am happy if there has indeed been a resurgence of Daphne's work.  I like what he says about popular fiction not necessarily being pulp.  I have really enjoyed the books I have read by her so far and plan on reading more (would like to read them all eventually).  From what I have been learning in her biography, she was an intriguing woman. 

Katherine Mansfield's Journal

I have been reading Katherine Mansfield's Journal (the lovely Persephone Books edition).  I had only wanted to read a little bit every now and then as it is the perfect sort of book to pick up and put down and not feel you are neglecting it (it is in diary format).  I am finding, however, that I want to pick it up every day and I want to keep reading it.  There is something very poignant about her journal.  Perhaps it is because she died at such a young age--only 34--yet she accomplished so much.  I am reading entries for 1916 at the moment.  She died in 1922, so there were only six short years left in her life. 

In July of 1915 Katherine's brother came to stay with her before he was sent to the front.  He was killed almost immediately. 

"November, Brandol, France.  Brother.  I think I have known for a long time that life was over for me, but I have never realized it or acknowledged it until my brother died.  Yes, though he is lying in the middle of a little wood in France and I am still walking upright and feeling the sun and the wind from the sea, I am just as much dead as he is.  The present and the future mean nothing to me.  I am no longer 'curious' about people; I do not wish to go anywhere; and the only possible value that anything can have for me is that it should put me in mind of something that happened or was when he was alive."

You can tell she was a writer.  Many of her journal entries were so descriptive, I feel like I am reading parts of her short stories.  Not being a writer myself, or a journal keeper, perhaps these were experiments or practice--not just the usual hum drum dealings of life (though in the right hands even hum drum can be exciting!).

"This afternoon I did not go for a walk.  There is a long stone embankment that goes out into the sea.  Huge stones on either side and a little rough goat path in the in the centre.  When I came to the end the sun was going down.  So, feeling extremely solitary and romantic, I sat me down on a stone and watched the red sun, which looked horribly like a morsel of tinned apricot, sink into a sea like a huge junket.  I began, feebly but certainly perceptibly, to harp: 'Alone between sea and sky etc.'  But suddenly I saw a minute speck on the bar coming towards me.  It grew, it turned into a young officer in dark blue, slim, with an olive skin, fine eyebrows, long black eyes, a fine silky moustache.

'You are alone, Madame?'

'Alone, Monsieur.'

'You are living at the hotel, Madame?'

'At the hotel, Monsieur.'

'Ah, I have noticed you walking alone several times, Madame.'

'It is possible, Monsieur.'

He blushed and put his hand to his cap.

'I am very indiscreet, Madame.'

'Very indiscreet, Monsieur.'"

Shortly after she wrote this in her journal, Katherine Mansfield wrote the first version of Prelude.  So my next logical step is to begin reading Prelude.  I believe Mansfield wrote something like 100 short stories.  I'm not sure how many are included in The Collected Stories, though I think it is nearly all of them, starting with Prelude.  I hadn't really intended to start all this now, but reading about her is so compelling that I want to read her work as well as about her life.  I am reading the introduction to the Collected Stories at the moment.  I have more to share about what I am reading, but I will save that for a second post as I am getting a bit long here.  I do plan on reading Caire Tomalin's biography as well this summer sometime. It would be nice to read the stories somewhat in conjunction with reading about Mansfield herself.

By the way, isn't that lovely about the sun setting and looking like a morsel of tinned apricot?