troisoiseaux | Recent reading

Finished A Tale of Two Cities, which I was relieved to discover I still love— I'd spent so long considering it my favorite Dickens novel that it was genuinely disorienting to try to re-read it last summer and feel absolutely nothing. I'm sure someone, somewhere, has written a paper on the depiction of now-recognized mental health conditions in A Tale of Two Cities - Doctor Manette's PTSD, Sydney Carton's depression - which I'd be interested to read. I was also struck by the anonymity (?) of Dickens' depiction of the French Revolution, as compared to, say, Baroness Emma Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel books or Victor Hugo's Ninety-Three, which include Robespierre et al. in at least cameo roles— the only actual historical figure he references (besides the "king with a large jaw and queen with a fair face") is the executioner Sanson. In the tragedy of its closing scene I'd forgotten how absolutely bananas the last act is. Sydney Carton is one of my all-time favorite fictional characters; probably even in my top five.

Read To the Chapel Perilous by Naomi Mitchison, which is SOOOOO good. Arthurian legend retold through the charmingly anachronistic lens of two reporters at rival papers— Merlin's Camelot Chronicle ("intimately connected with the Court and scarcely less so with the Church") and the pro-Orkney Northern Pict, run by (I confess, I snickered every time I read the name) Lord Horny (Satan, possibly??). This review by

skygiants has better commentary on the Arthurian-retelling aspect than I am able to give, but I can say that my favorite knight-centric chapter was the one about Sir Bors, in the same way that when I read the Odyssey I was charmed by how normal Menelaus and Helen were.

I really enjoyed Lienors (reporter for the Chronicle) and Dalyn (for the Pict), both individually and together! Their dynamic reminded me of the line from Good Omens about how field agents often found they had more in common with their opposite numbers than their minders back at headquarters. Mitchison's depiction of a partisan press was utterly unsurprising to read in 2022; what is surprising is that no one seems to have written an op-ed about revisiting To the Chapel Perilous in these days of "alternative facts."

I've been dipping in and out of Stalin's Daughter: The Extraordinary and Tumultuous Life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, by Rosemary Sullivan, for a couple of months now— it's not that long, or particularly difficult, but I've found it taken best in small doses, because hoo boy did she go through it. I just got to the point where Svetlana, who defected to the U.S. in the 1960s, joined Frank Lloyd Wright's widow's cult, which is not a sentence I could have predicted writing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

osprey_archer

I've been on the fence about whether I should read Naomi Mitchison, but this review has tipped me over the edge. Who does NOT wish to read a book about two reporters of rival papers reporting on the situation in Camelot?

I knew that Svetlana's life was A Lot but I had NOT realized that she ended up joining Frank Lloyd Wright's widow's cult (I also did not realize that Frank Lloyd Wright's widow had a cult! Wright himself yes; the widow, no) so perhaps I need to read that book too.

From:

skygiants

oh please read To The Chapel Perilous, it is so weird and I love it so much (I keep meaning to read more Mitchison and at some point I will but I am also very aware that I have probably begun with the MOST targeted one and everything else will be to some extent probably a bit of a disappointment.)

From:

troisoiseaux

oh please read To The Chapel Perilous, it is so weird and I love it so much

+1

My library has her book Travel Light, which has been described to me as "a feminist response to Tolkien's Bilbo," so I'm planning to read that next.

From:

regshoe

I love Travel Light, and I think it combines a feminist awareness with a fairytale/Hobbit-ish style really well. I hope you enjoy it :D

From:

osprey_archer

I will have to get it through interlibrary loan (and I have to finish my current ILL, The Corner that Held Them, before I can request another), but it is On the List!

From:

luzula

I keep meaning to read more Mitchison and at some point I will but I am also very aware that I have probably begun with the MOST targeted one and everything else will be to some extent probably a bit of a disappointment.

I love Mitchison and have read a lot of her books, and this one is the sole book of hers that I didn't even finish! I felt like it was making allusions all the time that I didn't get--not the Arthurian ones, but the newspaper ones. Anyway, do read more Mitchison. : )

From:

skygiants

I think it was your write-up that first put it on my list! I was like "I can see why this was not a book for

luzula but I feel quite sure that it will be a book for me >:D" and indeed I was correct (and I still think about that sometimes, too, when I'm waffling about whether or not to post a not-entirely-positive review -- to every book its reader, and my 'this didn't work for me' could still be exactly the thing that signals to someone else that it is the book for them, which is quite a pleasing thing to think about.)

From:

luzula

That's very true, and I'm glad my review was helpful to you! : )

From:

troisoiseaux

I also did not realize that Frank Lloyd Wright's widow had a cult! Wright himself yes; the widow, no

I did not know that Frank Lloyd Wright had a cult, either! (His widow's cult was FLW's cult, I think, she just took it over after he died?) I also did not know that Frank Lloyd Wright had a mistress who was murdered in a way straight out of a horror film, so I've been learning a bizarre amount of stuff about Frank Lloyd Wright from, again, this biography of the daughter of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. The "six degrees of Kevin Bacon" of this is bananas.

From:

copperfyre

I had never even heard of Frank Lloyd Wright’s widow’s cult (which I did initially parse as a cult FLW had composed only of widows, but then I worked out where the apostrophes were) so this is a wild revelation to me.

I do also regularly mix up Frank Lloyd Wright and Andrew Lloyd Webber, however, so my knowledge of FLW is minimal, shall we say, at best. For years I did genuinely think that this one very busy person was a successful architect and playwright, because I’d managed to miss the generational difference!

From:

troisoiseaux

Honestly, the artistic parallels you could draw between Frank Lloyd "why must a building be structurally stable? is it not enough to be aesthetic?" Wright and Andrew Lloyd "wrote Cats and Starlight Express" Webber.............

So, from what I've learned from this book/recent googling, Frank Lloyd Wright (and, after his death, his widow) ran a "Taliesin Fellowship" out of Wisconsin and Arizona (everyone relocated between the two annually) which was ostensibly an architectural school but really more of a commune with super culty vibes, especially when his widow took over, because she was into some weird mysticism stuff.

From:

copperfyre

That's BIZARRE.

I look forward to someone well versed in both of these people writing that essay!

From:

osprey_archer

My childhood best friend's mother was/is heavily involved with the Frank Lloyd Wright house in my hometown, so I've picked up quite a lot of Wright trivia over time, culminating in a visit to Taliesin. He managed to get people to pay HIM to be his architectural assistants, which is quite a feat!

From:

troisoiseaux

My library has a book called The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright and the Taliesin Fellowship... welp, looks like I found my next nonfiction read!

From:

kore

Frank Lloyd Wright had a mistress who was murdered in a way straight out of a horror film

Someone wrote AN OPERA about it which kind of squicks me a little bit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shining_Brow

From:

troisoiseaux

Well, that............. is certainly a choice.

From:

sovay

Someone wrote AN OPERA about it which kind of squicks me a little bit

I guess you can't say that ninety years later is too soon for opera, especially when I don't feel the same way about John Adams' Nixon in China (1987) or Doctor Atomic (2005), but I understand why you feel weird about it. (Any discussion of the opera of John Adams and too soon must take into account The Death of Klinghoffer (1991), where aside from the conversation about the success of its portrayal of Israel/Palestine, six years later when the family is still devastated seems rather too soon to rip from the headlines and not change the names at all.)

From:

skygiants

The Bors scene was so charming! Sometimes a famous knight is just a guy!

From:

troisoiseaux

Sir Bors' son might be the unexpected winner of my favorite character in this book? I mean, Lienors is my favorite - I really loved the dynamic/aspect of her working for the Church-backed Chronicle while, it was implied, holding to her own pagan (?) faith - but, in terms of non-protagonist characters who are going to be living rent-free in my head, the scene where Sir Bors' son is like, crushing on a girl at the harvest festival and feeling torn between his father's whole "knightly purity" thing and being, you know, a teenage boy, and then his duty as the grandson of the king calls... *chef's kiss*

I've been wanting to read this book since you posted about it a few years ago, and I'm so glad I finally got the chance to! Thank you so much for the recommendation!!

From:

copperfyre

I am very into this Arthurian take, it sounds delightful! *adds to my very long to read list*

From:

troisoiseaux

I am not super well-versed in Arthuriana - most of my knowledge is by way of The Once & Future King - but I really enjoyed this one.

From:

oursin

'The Horny' - appears as a name for (at least in the historical context of the time) the Devil, in Mitchison's The Bull Calves, in Kirstie's ?hallucinations of being part of a witches' coven. OED gives 'Auld Hornie' as Scottish dialect (sourced to Burns) for the Devil, which fits.

From:

troisoiseaux

Oh, yeah, I understood the reference! (If not exactly its historical roots.) I just found "Lord Horny" amusing in the context of its modern slang connotations— especially since the Pict's news photographers were some sort of imp (?) called "chads" (apparently in reference to a kind of WWII-era graffiti meme, but of course my first thought was of the internet slang).

From:

oursin

Those connotations date back at least to late C19th, according to OED!

From:

kore

Chapel Perilous sounds really good! I have Stalin's Daughter here somewhere in this apartment....

From:

troisoiseaux

I would definitely recommend both! To the Chapel Perilous had been on my list for a few years but it was impossible to find, until there was a reprint in 2021.

From:

regshoe

Oh, good that you enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities!

To The Chapel Perilous sounds amazing and weird in a brilliant way—I think my library has a copy, I must bump it up the list of Naomi Mitchison novels to get to next.

From:

troisoiseaux

Oh, good that you enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities!

It may just have earned its #1 spot back, although that feels slightly unfair to Great Expectations, which is significantly more re-readable.

I hope you get the chance to read To the Chapel Perilous! It's great, 10/10 would recommend.

From:

sovay

Sydney Carton is one of my all-time favorite fictional characters; probably even in my top five.

That was the conclusion of one of the first memes I ever did on LJ, seventeen years ago.

Mitchison's depiction of a partisan press was utterly unsurprising to read in 2022; what is surprising is that no one seems to have written an op-ed about revisiting To the Chapel Perilous in these days of "alternative facts".

Write and pitch it to Uncanny or Strange Horizons! Worth it!

From:

troisoiseaux

That was the conclusion of one of the first memes I ever did on LJ, seventeen years ago.

Off the top of my head and in no particular order, I would say my top five are Pierre Bezukhov (War and Peace), Jo March (Little Women), Stephen Maturin (Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin books), Sydney Carton, and Hamlet. (This feels like an extremely psychologically revealing list.) Runners-up include Athos (The Three Musketeers) - in terms of quantity as much as quality; I've never seen an adaption where I didn't fall in love with Athos immediately - and T.H. White's Lancelot, as much for White's character notes as his actual depiction in The Once & Future King. I will almost certainly think of seven more as soon as I press "post."

Write and pitch it to Uncanny or Strange Horizons! Worth it!

Oh, goodness, I don't think I know enough about journalism, or history, or the history of journalism, or Naomi Mitchison to do the topic justice.

From:

sovay

in terms of quantity as much as quality; I've never seen an adaption where I didn't fall in love with Athos immediately

That speaks well for the various adaptations. (The first version I ever encountered of The Three Musketeers was the 1948 MGM in Technicolor, so Athos always looks to me like Van Heflin, actually. It is almost certainly where I first saw him.)

I will almost certainly think of seven more as soon as I press "post."

These are the workings of the human brain.

Oh, goodness, I don't think I know enough about journalism, or history, or the history of journalism, or Naomi Mitchison to do the topic justice.

I don't know that you need to. You're talking about writing about an experience. You just need to have had the experience and be able to articulate it! If you need to contextualize with research, it's not the bulk of the article.

From:

troisoiseaux

That speaks well for the various adaptations

I have to confess, my favorite adaption is the gleefully ridiculous 2011 movie, with such very much not book-accurate elements as dueling airships and a Mission: Impossible-style heist sequence for Milady's theft of the queen's jewels.

You just need to have had the experience and be able to articulate it!

HmmmmMMMMM.