6.12.12: Dog-Eared: The Perfect Summer Read? Jane Austen, of Course!

The Perfect Summer Read? Jane Austen, of Course!

By Darcie Hart Riedner

          Living in Oregon it may not be as apparent as other areas of the country but if summer  begins for you with the end of the school year then the season is just around the corner. Even if you are a purist and wait for the official Solstice it is only weeks away. Summer is the best time of year to revisit classics and nothing is better than a visit to Lyme with Anne Elliot in Persuasion or a picnic at Delaford with Marianne and Elinor in Sense and Sensibility.

Jane Austen’s novels make a great choice for summer reading because they are not too long, provide an escape to another place and time and of course test the bounds of heartbreak and romance. The ending of an Austen novel is always satisfying in its predictability. The heroine wins the heart of her beloved and those who would be seen as villainous do not have a happy ending. Austen’s novels depict the class consciousness and social rituals of courtship and marriage of her time and she became a leading writer on socials manners and the distinctions between city and country life.

Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility and Emma stand as Austen’s best known works. If these are too familiar, seek out Mansfield Park or Northanger Abbey. Northanger Abbey was her first work accepted for publication in 1803 but then not published until fourteen years later. Persuasion was the last novel Austen completed before her death in 1817.

Three of Austen’s incomplete and less familiar works, Lady Susan, The Watsons and Sanditon can be found bound together in a Penguin Classic edition. The explanation of the three stories from Penguin explains: “These three short works show Austen experimenting with a variety of different literary styles, from melodrama to satire, and exploring a range of social classes and settings. The early epistolary novel “Lady Susan” depicts an unscrupulous coquette, toying with the affections of several men. In contrast, “The Watsons” is a delightful fragment, whose spirited heroine – Emma – finds her marriage opportunities limited by poverty and pride. Meanwhile “Sanditon”, set in a seaside resort, offers a glorious cast of hypochondriacs and spectators, treated by Austen with both amusement and skepticism.”

For those especially damp and dreary Summer days, Austen’s most familiar works have been adapted into movies and television shows since 1938. Blu-Ray and DVD’s are available of  many of the productions of Austen’s books including the popular 1996 A&E television mini-series production of Pride and Prejudice starring Colin Firth. If you are lucky you can also find a rental of the 1940’s Pride and Prejudice starring Greer Garson and Laurence Olivier.

Jane Austen’s books and Summer are the perfect combination. They go together like a cold glass of ice tea on a hot sunny day― they are refreshing and familiar, welcome and satisfying―which is the best thing about a book in June.

 

5.2.12: Dog-Eared; Oregon’s Native Son – Raymond Carver

Oregon’s Native Son – Raymond Carver

By Darcie Hart Riedner

           Poet and author Raymond Carver was born May 25, 1938 in tiny Clatskanie, Oregon. When he died only a short fifty years later in 1988 he was on his way to earning international acclaim.

Carver is best known for his collections of short stories and has often been compared with the literary great Anton Chekov.  The voice in his work is that of an everyman telling tales so real about things which could happen every day. Carver himself wrote in a 1981 essay On Writing: “It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace, precise language and to endow those things―a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring―with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine―the source of artistic delight…. “That’s the kind of writing that most interests me.”

To experience the quintessential Carver, the short story collection Cathedral is an excellent place to start. Published in 1983, it includes some of his best work including “Where I’m Calling From” which was included in the anthology Best American Short Stories of the Century in 2000.

Raymond Carver died in June 1988 after a second bout of lung cancer due to years of heavy smoking. On his tombstone in Port Angeles, Washington his poem Late Fragment is inscribed:

 And did you get what

you wanted from this life, even so?

I did.

And what did you want?

To call myself beloved, to feel myself

beloved on the earth.

It’s a spare and beautiful sentiment, a fitting memorial reflecting the voice of his work.

4.7.12: Dog-Eared: Springtime in Paris

Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast

By Darcie Hart Riedner

A perfect way to celebrate Spring is a quick visit to Paris via Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, the legendary author’s memoir of living in the City Of Lights in the 1920’s.

The book was published in 1964, after Hemingway’s death in 1961, by his fourth Mary Hemingway.  Ernest Hemingway began to write A Moveable Feast after he discovered a trunk containing notebooks filled with recollections or sketches of his years spent in Paris.

Hemingway’s circle of friends in Paris would come to include notable literati of the day such as Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein. For all of the glitz and glamour associated with this so-called Lost Generation of writers living in Paris, Hemingway also captures some very down-to- earth emotions including his feelings over the end of his first marriage to wife Hadley Richardson. Although his marriage ended over an affair, and Hemingway would marry three other women, he wrote of Hadley in A Moveable Feast; “I wish I had died before I ever loved anyone but her.”

The name for the novel was suggested by longtime Hemingway friend and biographer A.E. Hotchner. On Hotchner’s first visit to Paris, Hemingway told him; “If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you for Paris is a moveable feast.”

Be sure when read A Moveable Feast, you have the original work with a 1964 copyright. A restored edition of the book was released in 2009 by Hemingway grandson Seán Hemingway, but this version drew criticism from several arenas for liberal editing changes.

One of the most notable challenges to the restored edition came from friend and biographer Hotchner in an op-ed piece written for the New York Times in July of 2009. Hotchner was with Hemingway in 1956 when the trunk containing the lost notebooks was returned to him. It had been sitting in storage in the basement of the Ritz in Paris since 1930, something which Hemingway had forgotten. The trunk was brought up and while going through it, Hochner recalled Hemingway’s reaction to finding his lost writing; “ on the bottom, something that elicited a joyful reaction from Ernest: “The notebooks! So that’s where they were! Enfin!”

Hotchner continued to explain in the NY Times piece; “There were two stacks of lined notebooks like the ones used by schoolchildren in Paris when he lived there in the ’20s. Ernest had filled them with his careful handwriting while sitting in his favorite café, nursing a café crème. The notebooks described the places, the people, the events of his penurious life.”  Hotchner maintains Ernest Hemingway’s involvement and intent for the work is reflected in the 1964 book not the 2009 edition which Hotchner wrote was “significantly reworked.”

A Moveable Feast is part travelogue, part love story, part history lesson and all Hemingway at his bold, brash best. Buy or borrow carefully, to insure you are indeed getting the 209 page original published in 1964. It can be found in paperback ranging from $5 to $11, depending on whether it is new or used. Hard-bound, it runs about $22.

 

3.5.12: Dog-Eared: The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Dog-eared by Darcie Hart Riedner

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Poetry and art are the breath of life to her

 

Edith Wharton can be celebrated as the first woman author to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1920 novel The Age of Innocence. Wharton’s novel takes place in 1870’s New York and exposes the less than exemplary aspects of upper crust society. A synopsis on Amazon.com explains:

            “Newland Archer, Wharton’s protagonist, charming, tactful, enlightened, is a thorough product of this engagement to the impeccable May Welland assures    him of a safe and conventional future, until the arrival of May’s cousin Ellen Olenska. Independent, free-thinking, scandalously separated from her husband, Ellen forces Archer to question the values and assumptions of his narrow world. As their love for each other grows, Archer has to decide where his ultimate loyalty lies.”

Wharton herself was no stranger to elite society, and the novel would have caused a bit of a scandal since it was thought to have autobiographical undertones. Wharton was the author’s married name. She was in fact born Edith Newbold Jones, the daughter of a wealthy banking family. In fact, one explanation of the colloquial phrase “keeping up with the Joneses” originates from other wealthy families of the day trying to maintain a lifestyle similar to Edith’s family.

By the time she won the Pulitzer Prize for The Age of Innocence, Wharton had already produced an astonishing volume of work including eleven novels, eight short story collection, seven nonfiction books on gardening, travel and home decorating and two books of poetry.  Two of her best known works, prior to The Age of Innocence, were published during this time period. The House of Mirth was published in 1905 and Ethan Frome  in 1911.

Wharton’s House of Mirth is also set in New York society and the author again exposes its duplicitous nature. House of Mirth tells the tale of Lily Bart, a naïve young socialite whose poor choices lead to her being completely ostracized by friends and family resulting in her ruin personally and financially. Bart’s choices are unwise but the outcomes are often compounded by the treachery of those around her, whom she unknowingly trusts.

            Ethan Frome is one of a few of Wharton’s novels with a rural, rather than urban, setting. Its plot maintains the same tone, however, of the expectations of society and the limits those expectations place on choices for happiness and fulfillment.  Ethan Frome is trapped in a loveless marriage to Zeena unable to break free and be with the woman he truly loves; Zeena’s cousin Mattie. A rash decision by Ethan and Mattie changes the course of all of their lives, a decision which might not have been necessary if the couple were not faced with the constraints of society.

Wharton’s novels are unflinching examinations of the best and worst in all of us-especially when outside influences dictate our decisions and thwart our desires. The Age of Innocence, House of Mirth and Ethan Frome are available for free download at Project Gutenberg.com or as a free audio book at LibriVox.com.

2.27.12: Shakespeare

 

Dog-Eared Shakespeare

Darcie Hart Reidner

There can be no more classic author than William Shakespeare and no more suitable work for the month of February than his remarkable collection of  Sonnets.

 

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,

So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

 

Sonnet 18

 

In his 154 sonnets, Shakespeare wrote of  jealousy, heartbreak, doubt, betrayal and true love. In adddition to voice and content, which has only grown stronger with the passage of time, what makes these works so appealing is the astonishingly varied forms in which they can be found.

A beautifully bound new copy, suitable for gift-giving, can be found for $20 while a used paperback edition is available for as little as $2.00. Project Gutenberg makes free downloads available in a variety of formats for e-reader or computer. Electronic versions are also sold for about $2.00. If you would like to have your favorite sonnet read to you, they are available through free download  at LibriVox, the audio equivalent of Project Gutenberg.  For less than a dollar, downloads for an individual sonnet can be purchased for an MP-3 player, read or sung by a variety of Elizabethan peformance groups. A scattered few can be found performed by such noted actors at Sir John Geilgud and Dame Judi Dench.  Or, as the majority of laptops come with built-in microphones, with a copy from the public library, anyone can become an Elizabethan and record a favorite sonnet or two as a gift for someone this month.

 

The mystery surrounding Shakespeare’s sonnets  provides complimentary reading, as well. Centuries of speculation shroud these beautiful works, as Shakespeare provided  little if any background information on his folios or manuscripts and his dedications seem cryptic, at best. Shakespeare’s Son and His Sonnets by Hank Whittemore ( Martin and Lawrence, 208 pages),  So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Clinton Heylin (De Capo Press, 304 pages), The Secret Love Story in Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Helen Heightsman Gordon (Xlibris, 172 pages) and The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Helen Vendler (Harvard University Press, 696 pages) all make for compelling reading by providing potential back story and interpretation of these romantic works.

 

If reading or hearing these magnificent odes sparks an interest to learn more about William Shakespeare, an excellent biography, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton, 448 pages) was written in 2005 by prize winning author Stephen Greenblatt. This biography provides insight into the time Shakespeare lived, the events and circumstances which shaped him, and lends credibility to the theory Shakespeare was indeed author of all his works, rather than some other figure of the time.

 

Scholarly anthologies on Shakespeare can also be mini treasure troves for interpretation and background when reading the sonnets. Used book super sleuthing could find earlier editions which would sell for much less than ones with a more current copyright.  If you are not yet in a romantic frame of mind, the fluid, musical flow of Shakespeare’s sonnets will hopefully set you to rights and you will find a line or sonnet  you want to return too again and again, worthy of a dog-eared page. 

With hundreds of new releases vying for reader’s attention, Dog-Eared encourages a look  at  Classic works or authors, not to be forgotten and always treasured.