A Work in Progress

Reading the New Theater Season

This is a reading project in the making!  And you can really take it in a few different directions, too.  A number of years ago I started subscribing to each new season of Broadway show offerings.  I would just purchase the whole package (usually five or so shows during theater season which seems to run September through June) and I would see the odd opera as well.  Then I decided it was worth subscribing to each new Opera Omaha season as well since the package price is always such a bargain.  Generally there are three operas here each season but next season there will be four (not counting The Met: Live in HD performances held at local cinemas which I have yet to try).  Now you know how it goes.  Once you subscribe to your local performing arts everyone wants you to join in.  I thoroughly enjoy supporting the arts (and in the current political climate I think it is as important as ever!) since there is really so much cross over between the arts and literature (as you will see below).  I have decided this year to add some Omaha Symphony performances to the line up as well.  They offer a whole range of choices but their Masterworks offerings were what tempted me in the end.  I suspect I will add a few dance performances into the mix as well.

Opera Omaha was first up to announce their season and I am really excited about the upcoming performances.  I will be season Tosca, Falstaff, Medea and Proving Up.  I was thinking I should really read along.  In the past I have tried to read something of each opera before I attend performances as I am very much an opera novice.  I know next to nothing about opera really (though whenever Opera Omaha does community outreach (and on a few occasions now I have been able to go back stage and see it all from the performer's perspectives), so seeing and reading more about each opera just broadens my horizons a tiny bit more.

Tosca is a Puccini opera is based on a French play by Victorien Sardou from 1887.  I know I can read the libretto that Puccini based his opera on and the Sardou play if I can find it.  Falstaff is an opera by Verdi based on a libretto which is adapted from Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Windsor and a few scenes from Henry IV.  Now I know I can have some fun with Medea and I am already thinking about that one!  Of course Medea is a myth from the Greeks, which I have read ages ago.  The opera is by Luigi Cherubini based on Euripdes' tragedy and Pierre Corneille's play Médée.  There are all kinds of retellings of this myth and I could make a whole project out it alone!  I think I will read a recent find, however, David Vann's recently published novel Bright Air Black.  I am thinking that maybe opera/Medea should be my summer reading project (I have been toying with a number of themes not quite settling on one--because of course they all sound tempting).  Proving Up is a modern opera based on a short story by Karen Russell (will be find that one for sure).  It is tied in with the One Festival coming to Omaha in 2018--which "spans two weeks that blend music, theater, visual art, dance, and film".  Proving Up is set in Post-Civil War Nebraska, so it has added ties locally.  It should be a really exciting opera season as Opera Omaha is celebrating their 60th Anniversary.  I suspect you'll be hearing much more from me about opera in the coming months.

As for Broadway the lineup is a fun one as well: Finding Neverland, Disney's Little Mermaid, Waitress, Rodgers & Hammerstein's The King and I and An American in Paris.  I am especially looking forward to the last two.  I can add on Wicked, too, but I have not yet decided.  Have you seen it?  Should I go?  I once tried to read the book, Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, but for some reason I didn't get on with it.  Of course that was literally years ago and I might give it another go if I decide to see the musical. 

So, if I did extracurricular reading, there would be Peter Pan by J.M. Barrie, Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale The Little Mermaid, Margaret Landon's Anna and the King of Siam, and L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz.  I'm sure if I dig around a little there are retellings and reimaginings of some of the stories as well. 

I think my biggest showgoing bargain was the symphony package I got, which is eight performances at a very economical price (and as I am an early subscriber my seat was half price).  I am going to do the MasterWorks series which includes Mahler's Ninth, Dvorak's 7th Symphony, Rachmaninoff & Tchaikovsky, Appalachian Spring & West Side Story, Beethoven & Mozart, Bernstein & Mahler's 4th Symphony, The Planets (Bach, Berg and Holst), and Beethoven's 9th Symphony.  I don't know a lot about opera, but I knew even less about classical music, so this will certainly be an education.  I'm not sure what I might choose for 'reading along' but I bet I can get creative.

So much culture!  It seems to go hand in hand with reading--for me anyway.  As always any reading suggestions are very welcome to enhance the experience.

Stay With Me by Ayobami Adebayo

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, Ayobami Adebayo's Stay With Me reads almost like a thriller with its twists and turns which is a little unexpected in a story of domestic drama and discord.  It works, though; it works really well.  This is the story of a marriage between two who on the surface seem eminently suited but the pressures of family and culture weigh heavily on them.  As they try and please those around them and live up to expectations the weight seems only drive a wedge deeper and widen the rift that promises to crack their marriage in half. 

Adebayo is a Nigerian writer who is the fiction editor for Saraba Magazine (new to me and a happy find since it showcases authors from Nigeria and other parts of Africa).  The story moves between the mid-1980s and 2008 and is set primarily in Ilesa, Nigeria and Lagos.  It's a fascinating portrait of a place and culture I am totally unfamiliar with.  But while locale may be exotic and foreign and the culture unlike my own, the problems Adebayo writes about are universal no matter how different the guise they seem to take.  That is the making of a really good read!

Yejide and Akin meet at university.  She's alone and he is with a date.  They sit near each other at a movie, but he has eyes only for her.  On that night he breaks up with his girlfriend and takes Yejide home, and that is pretty much that.  But it's only the very start of their story.  Yejide has a talent for braiding hair and opens a salon at Akin's urging.  Family is everything, it seems, in Nigeria.  There is a great respect for elders and children are wanted and expected and there is a pressure from all sides to have them.  Sons in particular.  So when Yejide and Akin do not start their family right away the pressure builds to a boiling point.  Of course it is the mother who bears the weight and Yejide feels it from all sides--she knows Akin wants to start a family, her mother-in-law does more than just drop hints.  Yejide is essentially an orphan and her own difficult childhood is a different kind of stress but no less so.

In Nigerian culture it is not unusual for a man to take a second wife.  Particularly if the first wife cannot produce a healthy child.  It's an insult to Yejide for her mother-in-law to urge Akin to take another wife.  Needless to say Yejide balks at even the idea.  Moomi does more than just urge, however, she brings young women almost as a parade of sorts to try and find one that will tempt him.  He does not want a second wife, but family pressures are too much to bear.  It's a little strange to look inside the intimate and private world of a marriage to see, and worse feel, the pressure Yejide must deal with.  She tries to comply in any way she can, going to 'witch doctors' to try and increase her fertility.  There comes a point where sometimes the mind takes over and the body tries and bend to those wishes and desires and so certain is Yejide that she is with child that her womb seems to be filled with a growing baby.

This story is set against the backdrop of the political and military machinations of a country in flux.  Protests and coups, marauders or pirates demanding money and walking away from homes with electronics and money given freely by the owners so fearful are they just to stay alive.  Adebayo has written a page turner that feels like pure entertainment but reads with literary smartness if you know what I mean.  For me, this story has it all.  This is a story that will surprise you and entertain and enlighten.  The narrative moves around in time and both Yejide and Akin tell the story from different vantage points.  You piece together all the secrets of their marriage, which is why I don't want to give too much of the story away.  It is best appreciated as it rolls out before the reader, and it does so in a very flowing natural way that you don't even notice all the time shifts.

I will happily press this book into your hands and if it wins the Baileys Prize I know I would be very pleased.  It has not yet been released in the US, but you can find it in paperback at the Book Depository.  The US release date is set for August.  I think this might be her first novel and I know will will certainly be watching for her next book.

Teaser Tuesday: The War

I'm coming at this a bit late (knowing how slowly I seem to be moving through books these days I won't finish by the end of the month), but I will still read along in spirit.  The War: A Memoir by Marguerite Duras is this month's choice for Caroline's Literature and War Readalong.  I have read a few books by Duras (her The Lover and The North China Lover, which I read at different times but would be curious to read them now side by side).  From what little I have read about Duras I think she was a really fascinating woman and her life story is really fascinating--she was born in what was then French Indochina and wrote extensively as well as was a film director.  I need to find a biography of her, but this short memoir written just at the end of WWII is probably a very good place to start.

So, just a very short teaser today from the opening pages of the book.  Here she has heard that Bergan-Belsen has been liberated (it is April of 1944) and she is tensely awaiting word of whether her husband, a French Resistance fighter has survived or not.  The writing (as you will see) is spare but very raw.  In this day and age of instant connection (even if we sit at home alone), it is almost inconceivable to think how agonizing it must have been not knowing if a love one has survived and in what condition they will return--if they return. 

"In the street I am like a sleepwalker.  My hands are thrust into my pockets, my legs move forward.  I must avoid the newsstands.  Avoid the transit centers.  The Allies are advancing on all fronts.  A few days ago that mattered.  Not it doesn't matter at all.  I've stopped reading the communiques.  There's not point--not they'll advance all the way.  Light, the light of day, flooding in on the mystery of Nazism.  April, it will happen in April.  The Allied armies are surging over Germany.  Berlin is burning.  The Red Army continues its victorious advance in the south, they're past Dresden.  They're advancing on all fronts.  Germany is driven back within its own borders.  The Rhine has been crossed, everyone knew it would be.  Remagen, that was the great day of the war.  It was after Remagen that it started.  In a ditch, face down, legs drawn up, arms outstretched, he's dying.  Dead.  Beyond the skeletons of Buchenwald, his.  It;s hot all over Europe.  The advancing Allied armies march past him.  He's been dead for three weeks.  Yes, that's what's happened.  I'm certain of it.  I walk faster.  His mouth is half open.  It's evening.  He thought of me before he died.  The pain is so great it can't breathe, it gasps for air.  Pain needs room.  There are far too many people in the streets; I wish I were on a great plain all alone.  Just before he died he must have spoken my name.  All along the roads of Germany there are men like him.  Thousands, tens of thousands of others and, just for me, completely separate and distinct from the thousands of others.  I know all one can know when one knows nothing."

It goes on much like this in the same stream of consciousness style, which is very effective in capturing her uncertainty and fears.  There is such a breathlessness to her anxiety.  Can't you feel it, too?  Although different in style (Duras is a memoir and the Wiazemsky a novel) it reminds me very much of My Berlin Child by Anne Wiazemsky, which I read a couple of years ago.  The latter novel is based on true events about a French Red Cross nurse in Berlin.  Such a harrowing time but such rich material came out of it.  I'll be chipping away at the Duras as it is easy to pick up and read a few entries daily.

Reading Notes: Can't Say No Edition

I bet you are not going to be surprised to hear that I am a total and complete pushover when it comes to books.  And I am very much an equal opportunity booklover--I don't discriminate when it comes to buying books, borrowing books or most importantly, starting new books!  Almost always I have a book in hand or close at hand.  The idea of being somewhere without a book nearby is a little unnerving to me (what would I do if I had to stand in line or wait for a bus or sit in a doctor's office . . .I could meditate, i guess).  I know you won't think that's strange, but I do wonder what most of the rest of the world must think of me when I cross their paths?  I mostly live (at least mentally) in my own little happy world enveloped in the coziness of stories--real or imagined or something in between. 

I do, however, constantly grapple with the idea of being too much of a book glutton.  I mean that in the sense of always searching for just the right story irregardless of the pile of books already in progress on my night table.  Surely there is such a thing as too many.  Too many books in progress at once, that is.  I've been thinking about it a lot lately (because if I am not reading I might well be thinking about books), particularly since this year seems to be all about starting lots of books but finishing them ever so slowly.

Here is my rationalization (as I reach for yet another new book this week).  Life is short and I own far more books than I will ever be able to realistically read.  I should stop buying and borrowing rightnow, and I still will have too many books (but sheesh, think of all those potentially marvelous stories that I might miss out on--unthinkable).  So, really, even though my night table is groaning under the weight of books at the moment (slight exaggeration, but you know what I mean), why limit myself.  Maybe it is better to 'taste' as many stories as I like (calorie-free, too) even if I am not finishing as many as I start (the bane of my reading habits).

My life is really untidy right now so why should my reading be any different?

Rationalization here, rationalization.

All this to say that I have started reading Susan Elia MacNeal's Mr. Churchill's Secretary a few days ago and am quite enjoying it.  Since starting Lissa Evans's Their Finest (Hour and a Half) I find that I want to immerse myself in the war years again, but WWII in particular.  Not that the Evans novel is 'not enough' but that I was thinking how a little espionage and suspense would put a nice spin on things.  Hence Maggie Hope.  A friend suggested, eons ago, that I try this series as she was sure I would enjoy it.  And she was right.   If one book is good, two must be better?

Sometimes it isn't necessarily a particular time in history (like the war years) or a particular sort of story (a spy story), but it is a place I wish I could visit or that I wish I was inhabiting right now.  So, there is Italy in the form of Natalia Ginzburg's Family Lexicon (which is SO good and you'll have to excuse me as I must finish here quickly so I can go and read a few more pages), and there is Japan in the form of Seicho Matsumoto's psychologically adept A Quiet Place.  I have been thinking of doing a mini-themed summer reading project and am torn between books set in or by authors from, first it was Italy and now it is Japan.  And how do I decide?

The Baileys list is really appealing to me this year and I like the idea of reading outside my comfort zone, which is why I am trying to read as many of the shortlisted books as I can (and will try and pick up more of the longlisted books over the coming months, too).  I will be writing about Ayobami Adebayo's Stay With Me next week, which was really good and what a great find.  Maybe this weekend C.E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings will be added to the mix and joining Linda Grant's The Dark Circle.

I've been trying to reading a chapter or so a day of Elizabeth von Arnim's Christopher and Columbus my current Virago.  She's pretty delightful generally and the two Anna's (Anna-Rose and her twin sister Anna-Felicitas) are pretty amusing.  The story has a feel of 1940s madcap humor to it. 

And I have once again picked up with Lata in A Suitable Boy!  I think a 'suitable boy' has been found by her mother, but I am not so sure Lata will agree, though the boy (young man really) is open to a potential arrangement.

And on the horizon?  I have started looking at books about women Surrealist artists and writers, mostly thanks to and in anticipation of a forthcoming book by Leonora Carrington (and one about her). Do you know her?  I have a couple of books on hand and maybe I will share something about her (and a few other women artists) soon.

So, yeah.  So many interesting places to spend my time and people to meet.  World events that have caught my attention.  It's so hard to look away and impossible to ignore them.  I do try, but in the end I seem to have just given in.  My only dilemma now is which books to tuck into my bookbag each morning. 

I am continent hopping right now.  Where is your reading taking you these days?

Am I Not Discerning Enough?

Just curious. 

Maybe I am not discerning enough.  I am probably not a very critical reader and am prone to like stories more than not.  I keep coming back to this question over and over in my uncertainty.  I know I just need to be an unapologetic reader (or viewer in the case of films). 

Do you ever have your heart set on reading something or watching something, and even before you get started you read a very critical review, maybe even a bad review of a work.  Does it diminish your enjoyment of the work when you do read it?  Do you even change your mind about reading something, or persevere irregardless. 

Even criticism by the 'experts' must be subjective, right?

Just curious what you think.

Teaser Tuesday: Their Finest Hour & a Half

I loved Lissa Evans's novel Crooked Hearts when I read it a couple of years ago.  And I have owned a copy of her earlier, Orange Prize longlisted novel Their Finest Hour and a Half (or, as the book has been retitled here in the US: Their Finest) for even longer.  I am not sure why I never got around to reading it since it is a story that is right up my alley, but then you now how it goes.  So many books to choose from and nowhere near enough time for them all.  But now I have a proper nudge as the film adaptation (you can see the trailer here), which is coming soon to my favorite indie theater.

Actually I have a little less than two weeks to read the book before the movie opens here.  I have had it sitting on my reading pile for weeks as I knew the film was coming, but I only discovered this weekend that the movie would indeed be playing locally.  Now my copy will be finding its way into my bookbag (so many books scrambling for a spot these days).  I have just started reading and I think it is going to be as good as I have been anticipating. 

I don't have  much to gauge the story by yet, but I can tell you it is 1940 and Catrin Cole, a Welsh woman who followed (and then married an artist from her small village to London) works for a small ad agency (where at the moment she is trying to sell Se-Bee-Fee gravy browning to women who can't even find it on the store shelves at the moment--and even if they could there is no meat with which to prepare it).  She gets her 'call-up' papers for an interview at the Ministry of Information where she is going to help script propaganda films.  And her path, I am guessing, is soon to cross with that of aging actor Ambrose Hilliard (who is going to star in said films). 

Just a random teaser today.  She is married to Ellis, an artist.  What do you think of their relationship . . .

"And he was an artist, a proper artist, fourteen years older than herself, and he's just come back, injured, from the civil war in Spain, and that evening he met her out of the café and kissed her in a doorway opposite the cinema and until that moment, she'd been hoping that a certificate in shorthand and typing from an evening course in Merthyr might be her ticket out of 12 Bertram Terrace and away from a recently acquired stepmother, who was making it unpleasantly clear that there was room for only one woman in the house.  She'd imagined a future in a place as far away as Swansea--a job in a typing pool, perhaps, a bed in a hostel for single girls--but when Ellis had left for London, ten days later, he'd said 'come with me if you want' and she'd done just that, she'd run off with him, and oh, the daring of it."

I do wonder about Ellis.  He seems very preoccupied and maybe a little self-absorbed, or at least absorbed in his work and not much attention left over for Catrin.  Well, we'll see.  I have an idea already formed in my mind now that I have seen the trailer, but I am trying not to assume too much since I know films are a different animal from books.  Not all adaptations are completely faithful.  In any case the movie looks quite charming and I think the book will be equally as good. 

First Love by Gwendoline Riley

Have you ever been with a married couple, maybe a sibling and their spouse or a pair of friends and things become tense, a disagreement or argument breaks out.  You feel like you should politely absent yourself, maybe go wash your hands or something, anything to get away and not be party to such unhappiness or animosity.  It's a really uncomfortable situation and you just want to escape from it.  Well, that is how it felt at times reading Gwendoline Riley's Baileys' shortlisted novel, First Love. 

I'm not quite sure what I think of it.  It's not exactly the sort of read you feel all warm and fuzzy about when you finish, though you certainly have gotten an interesting glimpse at something very flesh and blood and real.  Of the initial list of books I was excited to discover it and it was a 'must buy' book which I had to pick up and read as soon as it came in the mail.  It's a slender novel about a marriage primarily but also relationships that have helped mold Neve's life and world.  The product of parents whose own marriage ended badly, and a father who wasn't in the least nurturing to his daughter.  Her upbringing was a bit dire all around, and she hasn't had much success in other relationships either.  So it all seems to follow.

Then along comes Edwyn, whom she marries.  An older, perhaps more solid and even-tempered man.  Certainly at first it seems as though they have a happy marriage.  They seem loving and present for each other--all cuddling and cooing.  They literally look out for each other.  'Seems' is right.  Their relationship is not what it seems.  Maybe it is Edwyn's poor health.  And he does suffer in the story.  Maybe feeling physically rotten makes you ill-tempered even with those you love--maybe even more so with those you love. 

"There was a lot of shouting from him, back then.  Long nights when his agitation, his flinches and side glances, would coalesce into a stronger force.  Might you say we were coming to an accommodation, two people who's always expected, planned, to live their lives along?  I'd never lived with anyone before, I had no idea what it might bring out in me.  Certainly I remember feeling that it was his dream world, his symbol world, that we were dragged into during those first arguments, and it frightened me, being given--as I saw it--the part of a training dummy, outfitted in colors, slogans, that I could not see." 

By novels' end it was cringeworthy how he seemed to take great pleasure in lambasting Neve as if she is actively reliving her bad relationship with her father through her marriage to Edwyn.  At one point Edwyn accuses Neve: 

"'Your father.  You hated him, he was cruel to you, that's the only relationship you understand.  A man being horrible to you and you being vicious back.  So that's what you're recreating here.  I am not your father.  You don't have to go on being vicious'."

I couldn't quite bring myself to take that stance against Neve, but that is always the problem being on the outside of a relationship looking in.  And in any story narrated in first person there is always the question about how reliable the storytelling is.  One person's perspective is not quite the whole story.  Is it true or only imagined?  Riley lays it all out bare for the reader. 

While I am still not quite sure how I feel about the story, the reader is always very aware of Riley taking a razor-sharp scalpel to the relationship and carefully slicing it open and looking at it almost as through a microscope.  There is a real precision to Riley's writing and observations.  Maybe I read too fast or looked away too frequently.  If First Love takes the Baileys Prize I will have to give it a second and more thoughtful read.   Maybe I will in any case.

I am nearing the end of Ayobami Adebayo's fantastic Stay With Me (more painful relationships), working away on Madeleine Thien's most impressive Do Not Say We Have Nothing, and just at the start of Linda Grant's post-WWII, kind of quirky on first impression, The Dark Circle which is about two siblings, Jewish twins who have TB and are sent to a sanatarium.  I have Naomi Alderman's The Power at the ready (was sort of not all that excited to read this one, but I am keeping an open mind and ready to be wowed!) and after reading some very favorable reviews of C.E. Morgan's The Sport of Kings ready to pick it up sooner than later.  Definitely an interesting and admirable Baileys longlist.  (Can we go back to calling it the Orange Prize now that Baileys isn't going to be their sponsor any longer?).

April 14: Weekend Reading Notes

I don't know about you, but I am ready for the weekend!  (I bet you are, too).  It has been crazy busy for me at work and I am ready for a little mindlessness and time to wind down.  I have a few volunteer hours to work at my local art museum (I tear tickets at the exhibition entrance) and I hope to go see a movie, but otherwise my weekend is otherwise pretty empty, and I don't mind at all.  Between my volunteer time and the holiday on Sunday, I don't think I will even get to go to the gym, which sort of bothers me but sort of doesn't either (I feel better when I work out and I also get to read at the same time, but I think I need a break from the gym as well). So that means a few long walks instead provided the rain holds off. 

What I want and hope to do is get in a few long stretches of reading.  My reading pile is pretty tall and I need to try and finish something soon.  Perhaps Stay With Me or The Gustav Sonata?  I am past the halfway mark on both books.  I  hope to take Do Not Say We Have Nothing to the museum as I can read during lulls.  As it is a somewhat formidable hardcover copy I have not been taking it with me in my bookbag even though I have been enjoying reading it. 

I was feeling like maybe doing a little 'summer reading in Italy project' as I have in the past (my mini summer themed readings-sometimes they are more successful than other times), but I find I have been drawn to books set in Asia, primarily Japan and as it is a part of the world I am not often in literature-wise, I might hop a virtual plane and spend the summer there.  Aside from the Thien, which is partially set in China, I have also been reading the crime novel A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto.  A few days ago I stopped by the library to pick up a few holds and my eye was caught by a display of library staff recommendations.  I ended up taking Tracy Slater's The Good Shufu home with me and I am finding it quite absorbing.  She went to Japan to teach English to Japanese business students (salary-men) and ended up falling for one of her students (nothing strange there as they are about the same age).  I always find these intercultural romances/friendships really fascinating and for some reason Japan has seemed so very exotic and unknown to me. 

So now I am heading off on a path in that direction.  I know I want to read more by Haruki Murakami and was looking at the books by him I own, but I would love to start a list of recommendations--fiction and nonfiction (memoirs very welcome).  There is so much written about the country--recommendations are especially helpful to sort through all the reading possibilities.    

I think I also need something really light and airy and escape-worthy, too, so I am sure I will spend more time with The Secret Life of Violet Grant which I have been flying through!  I really like Beatriz Williams's writing and this is fun since it is set in part in 1960s NYC.  This is a novel with parallel storylines with a bit of a mystery at the center and I really like the 'voice' of Vivian (the 1960s character) she has lots of moxie and I can totally see her in those pages. 

After reading Teresa's comment about Ira Levin's A Kiss Before Dying it also sounds like a perfect weekend read, too.  And as she suggests not knowing too much about it going into the story, I think it will work nicely since I had not gotten around to looking too closely at my copy. 

Whatever your weekend plans I hope you have a good one, too.  And I hope there will be some books and reading time included!

Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin

Is it weird to admit that I really 'enjoyed' reading Ira Levin's 1967 novel Rosemary's Baby?  I mean it may well be one of my favorite reads of the year come next December.  It's not exactly the content/story but a combination of horror story--and the horror of the story (which is a genre I am not one to read generally) and the pitch perfect storytelling.  Levin does it really, really well and in a way that is not over the top graphic or gruesome.  There is no violence or blood (and if there is it is all off-stage and by suggestion only), but sheesh it is a freaky story.  He does it well and he does it in a subtle understated way.   A creeping dread as realization sets in just what is happening to poor Rosemary.

Even if you have never read the book or seen the movie (and I suspect if you have done one or the other there are probably more people who have seen the movie than read the book, but I might be wrong there).  Even if you have neither read nor seen I bet you still know what the story is essentially about--Rosemary's baby is, frightening thought, Satan's baby.  She doesn't know he is the father.  Her husband Guy has made a pact with a group of witches/Satanists for her to bear the baby in exchange for fame and fortune.  Very Faustian yes?  So, a classic tale retold in 1960s vernacular complete with all the accoutrements that came with the 60s--'Is God Dead' (proclaims Time Magazine that year), the Pope in Yankee Stadium (imagine all those robes and jewels--what he must spend on them).  A time when Society was morally bankrupt.  Enter the Devil himself.

Did you know that Ira Levin was a playwright?  He wrote just handful of books (some major bestsellers and classics now), won the Edgar Award and a Tony.  Maybe it was his work on and for Broadway that informed his novel writing (or maybe it is the reverse?).  Having seen the movie numerous times (and this month I hope to go see it on the big screen in a local indie movie theater) and then come to the book being intensely familiar with the dialogue, the novel reads almost like a fleshed out script.  Apparently Roman Polanski who directed the film worked with Levin (down to asking him what color dress Rosemary would have worn in a particular scene and the date of the New Yorker that Guy would have seen the ad for a shirt he bought) to get it right and indeed the movie is very faithful to the novel.  There were some interesting and surprising scenes and small details that were not included but it was pretty much spot on, which is also why I liked the book so much.

Rosemary Woodhouse is a Midwestern girl (from Omaha!) marries Baltimoran Guy Woodehouse, an actor some years her senior.  Her very Catholic family has more or less severed ties with her since her move to NYC.  She is introduced to the artistic, bohemian world only sometimes feeling a little out of her depth.  They had been on the waiting list to move into the Bramford, an old and illustrious building turned into apartments.  They were just preparing to move into new digs when their name comes up, what luck.  The Bramford, 'very popular with actors and artists', just what they have always wished for.  It isn't until they decide to  move in that a friend mentions the darker history of the Bramford, also know as "Black Bramford".  A string of very unhappy misfortunes seem to have taken place there including two sisters who should not have been left alone with very small children.

They move in and get to know their neighbors, an elderly couple (with poor dress sense but who are world travellers).  Roman Castevet's stories of his father, who was a theater producer, entice Guy who ends up becoming close to them. Guy is just on the cusp of making it.  He's done some theater, and TV work and lots of commercials, but he hasn't quite gotten his big break.  And Rosemary is hoping that when he does they can finally start a family as she has been wishing for a baby.  Well, you see what a perfect set up all this is, right?  Perfect timing with all the right ingredients? 

Levin's writing is pretty straightforward and not overly embellished but just right for the story.  And he does dialogue really well.  The story just flows and is quite literally a page turner.  It feels set in a particular time and place yet it does not feel dated.  And he achieves that sense of horror and foreboding by what is implied.  The reader just slowly pieces it all together until that last chapter or so, which is actually accomplished even better in the book than the movie.  It's creepy to think what is happening, what has happened but even worse what might be yet to come!

I like Ira Levin's style and already had a copy of A Kiss Before Dying on my shelves but have since also added his other classic (you don't need to have read the book or watched the movie to understand) The Stepford Wives.  The latter is quite slender and I would have started reading the moment I opened the mailer, but I am going to hold it in reserve for when my reading pile can accept a newcomer.  I think I will need also (what is called his best book) The Boys from Brazil, too.  Book and film both heartily recommended! 

A Poem for a Wednesday: Dover Beach

I can see where reading a poem or two can be a happy, calming experience and one where on a busy, hectic day makes a person feel like she has had a nice literary/bookish moment in amongst all the crazy tasks that otherwise need to be completed.  Yes, it is one of those weeks where I wish I had time to just lounge and read and sit in a sunny corner and escape into a story, but there is too much other stuff going on.  I know I am not the only one having that sort of a week.  This is what happens as the semester at a university nears its end (and where the library approaches it's fiscal year end). 

Do you know what really made me choose The 100 Best Poems of All Time, edited by Leslie Pockell?  Aside from the fact it looked so very 'dippable', when I flipped through looking to see whether I recognized any of the poems, or if they appealed to me . . . my eye was caught by Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach.  And in particular the first line: "The sea is calm tonight."  If you happen to stop by here frequently and over a longer period of time, you might know how much I love the idea of the seaside (living right in the middle of the US I am about as far away from the sea as a person can get, but I have visited a number of coastlines and love the sound of waves hitting a beach--happy sigh sort of memories and experiences). 

I don't know anything about Matthew Arnold, other than he was a Victorian poet, but I will certainly read up on him now.  I have read the poem a few times and may well read it a few more time today as I love the eloquence of it, the sound it makes in my mind (have not yet been able to read aloud as I wasn't alone when I read the poem).  It has a lovely sadness to it, as weird as that sounds.  But I like it.

Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

 

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

 

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

 

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

 

Isn't that lovely?  I can picture it in my mind, I can feel the spray and smell that sweet night air.  Oh and those pebbles, can't you just imagine them being pushed and pulled by the waves?  A mini escapism, is this poem!  Not only is the book dippable but it is tuckable, too, as in, I can tuck it into my bookbag and take it with me.  I think I need to do this more often!