Recent reading
Dec. 29th, 2021 07:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
troisoiseauxRead Return to Night by Mary Renault, mostly with a strong sense of second-hand embarrassment. Romance between a doctor in her mid-30s and an aspiring actor a decade her junior, set in England in the months before WWII. I quite liked the protagonist, Dr. Hilary Mansell, which made me feel all the more girl, RUN, you do not need these vibes in your life about the whole situation with Julian and his mother.
For most of the novel, my theory on why Julian's mother is Like That was that she's pretty sure he's gay, but (this being the 1930s) thinks it would be horribly gauche to acknowledge this out loud in any way and is instead trying to passive-aggressively stiff-upper-lip it out of him. The actual Watsonian explanation, eventually revealed, is that Julian's biological father was a "cad of an actor" rather than the dearly departed war hero Mr. Fleming— though, to be fair, this doesn't necessarily preclude my own theory. The Doylist explanation is, of course, Renault's Oedipus complex kink.
If I had a nickel for every Mary Renault book I've read that ends with the love interest almost committing suicide, I'd only have ten cents, but it's weird it happened twice.
Read Strange Weather In Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, which oddly enough is also about a woman in her 30s in a friendship-turned-romance with a significant age gap, although in this case, her love interest is thirty years her senior and (it's not as sordid as it sounds, I promise) had been her high school teacher. Reminded me of Tove Jansson's Fair Play, both in its structure of a novel in vignettes and in that it deals with similar themes of solitude and intimacy, albeit in different ways.
Read Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly, a warm and laugh-out-loud-funny contemporary fiction novel about a pair of siblings living in Auckland, New Zealand, navigating life in their mid-to-late 20s (Greta is a graduate student in comparative literature; Valdin spent eight years studying physics, had a breakdown, and became a comedian) and love (both of them end up living out their own gay rom-coms!) and their chaotic Russian-Maori-Catalonian family. Absolute 10/10.
For most of the novel, my theory on why Julian's mother is Like That was that she's pretty sure he's gay, but (this being the 1930s) thinks it would be horribly gauche to acknowledge this out loud in any way and is instead trying to passive-aggressively stiff-upper-lip it out of him. The actual Watsonian explanation, eventually revealed, is that Julian's biological father was a "cad of an actor" rather than the dearly departed war hero Mr. Fleming— though, to be fair, this doesn't necessarily preclude my own theory. The Doylist explanation is, of course, Renault's Oedipus complex kink.
If I had a nickel for every Mary Renault book I've read that ends with the love interest almost committing suicide, I'd only have ten cents, but it's weird it happened twice.
Read Strange Weather In Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami, which oddly enough is also about a woman in her 30s in a friendship-turned-romance with a significant age gap, although in this case, her love interest is thirty years her senior and (it's not as sordid as it sounds, I promise) had been her high school teacher. Reminded me of Tove Jansson's Fair Play, both in its structure of a novel in vignettes and in that it deals with similar themes of solitude and intimacy, albeit in different ways.
Read Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K. Reilly, a warm and laugh-out-loud-funny contemporary fiction novel about a pair of siblings living in Auckland, New Zealand, navigating life in their mid-to-late 20s (Greta is a graduate student in comparative literature; Valdin spent eight years studying physics, had a breakdown, and became a comedian) and love (both of them end up living out their own gay rom-coms!) and their chaotic Russian-Maori-Catalonian family. Absolute 10/10.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 06:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 06:55 pm (UTC)I got it from a friend whose friend transcribed it from the first edition. It's such useful information about both Julian and Hilary, I think it was idiotic to cut it, but it never seems to have been restored. The Charioteer underwent edits throughout.
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Date: 2021-12-29 06:57 pm (UTC)In terms of things that were cut, or put back in later??
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Date: 2021-12-29 07:01 pm (UTC)Things that were cut, again after the first edition. Lines throughout and the occasional scene as I recall. I am sure someone has analyzed how it changes the novel, but I don't happen to remember off the top of my head.
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Date: 2021-12-29 07:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 10:10 pm (UTC)I have no ready links on The Charioteer as yet, but here's someone who did a side-by-side on the different editions of Purposes of Love (1939).
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Date: 2021-12-29 07:50 pm (UTC)No wonder it didn't survive into the second edition.
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Date: 2021-12-29 09:22 pm (UTC)I think it would be a public service to restore it.
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Date: 2021-12-29 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 10:06 pm (UTC)I am not willing to swear it's not in the edition I own (small paperback, pulp-style cover, mentions the MGM prize, can't find an image on the internet and have honestly never seen another copy), but the edition I own has been in storage for a demoralizing number of years, so I can't check for myself. I was sent the scene in question in the interim. I had no idea about the text of The Charioteer until it was mentioned to me. I glimpsed a British first edition once in a used book store in Vancouver, but I did not have the surplus limbs to mortgage for it.
I wrote a massive long fanfic in which Sam was a major character and people must have been reading it and going, "Who is this bizarre OMC?"
On the bright side, I'll go read that.
no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 10:08 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2021-12-29 10:21 pm (UTC)