Book Report


Wherein Our Heroine is Just a Little LitCrit Snot Queen.
Hello, Dear Readers. Welcome to the den of plague. Grab a Kleenex - you're going to need one.

Yep, still sick. And the dog barfed last night, which is always fun. Three o'clock in the morning seems to be barf-time in canine land. Who knew?

Enough charming chitchat. On to the real textual basis of today's prose masterpiece! Heh. I would like to announce to the world that I have completed my first reading of Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. All 800 pages and a few bazillion footnotes. On my way back from my trip to the nation's heartland, I was seated next to an actor coming to DC to do "The Price" at Center Stage who actually did a double-take at the size of the volume. I'm not sure he believed me when I told him I was finished when we landed. Suffice it to say, it is a tome which could double for a Yoga brick if one really needed it to.

The book itself? Fascinating. The type of exquisite literary tailoring which manages to stitch an entirely fictional world into real history without having the seams show. The bazillion footnotes I mentioned are primarily "historical notes" on the legends and "history" of English magic and its various practitioners, though the notes occasionally also reveal real facts about real historical figures such as the Duke of Wellington and poor, mad George III. Dryly satirical observations made in a period tone in passages like the following one skewer the hubris of early-Empire Britain without ever breaking the "fourth wall" of the book's self-contained world:

"...the sad decay, which buildings, bridges and church all displayed, seemed to charm them even more. They were Englishmen and, to them, the decline of other nations was the most natural thing in the world. They belonged to a race blessed with so sensitive an appreciation of its own talents (and so doubtful an opinion of any body else's) that they would not have been at all surprized to learn that the Venetians themselves had been entirely ignorant of the merits of their own city - until Englishmen had come to tell them it was delightful."

So why do I say this is my "first" reading? I am pretty sure that after a few months have gone by I will want to read it again. When that happens, I am sure to get far more out of it. This first reading simply introduced the book's world to me. After some time I will need to return in order to explore its city streets and country fields more completely.
Posted: Tuesday - October 12, 2004 at 08:22 AM         | |

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