Southwards

On the floor next to me is a half-packed suitcase filled with suncreme, swimsuits and my Italian textbook.

I myself am filled with excitement, because despite the fact that it's just a short trip and I will be back Sunday evening, I will still be on the road again and travelling always amazes me.

My mama, my little brother and I are spending the long weekend in Grado, Italy, to take a short break from our lives which have been more than busy recently. Grado is a little town situated on a peninsula of the Adriatic Sea and famous for its beautiful historic centre. It's in the north-east of Italy and only about three hours' drive away from here which is a reason to worry because the weather here is not too fine at the moment. Hopefully it will be better once we're there! Anyway, even if we probably won't get to swim much it will still be fabulous to relax on the beach and enjoy the Mediterranean lifestyle.

For my packing (of which a great part still has to be done I'm afraid): I am taking E.M. Forster's A Room with a View with me, because what could be more appropriate than reading the story of a girl touring Italy while you're in Italy? It's my first Forster and I have great expectations, so I hope I won't be disappointed.

Another book I'm bringing I will be basically taking home, for it is The Divine Comedy, Italy's most successful work of literature ever. Contratry to A Room with a View I have already started Dante's magnum opus, in fact I am almost through with Inferno, and it has sparked a desire in me to improve my very, very poor Italian in order to be able to read the original. I am usually not a great fan of poetry, but Dante's language has something to it that makes me turn pages as anxiously as if I were reading a cheap romance. 

Nonetheless, reading about a travel through hell in the sun on the beach surrounded by happy tourists will be an experience all of its own and so I am not sure how much I truly will progress with this one.

I wanted to take Les Misérables with me since I completely neglected it after my disappointment with it in April, but then I decided that it was decidedly too heavy to be carried in my handbag. Instead I have chosen a book which definitely belongs to the "guilty pleasure" category: it's Blood of the Fold by Terry Goodkind and part of his Sword of Truth series. As you may have guessed from the title it is high fantasy, and a very good example of that too. I think after travelling through medieval poetry about the underworld and Forster's social critisism I can afford to delve into a novel full of swordfights, epic magic and forbidden romance.

My open suitcase is starting to alarm me, so I am going to finish packing now. I'll be back Sunday afternoon, hopefully with lots of beautiful memories. How about you? Any holiday plans coming up? Did you read A Room with a View or The Divine Comedy? If yes, did you like it? 

I am wishing you all a nice weekend, whether you're staying a home or not!

The right Book

I am sitting here surrounded by piles of books. There are at least thirty books I haven't read yet stacked on my desk, on my cupboards and even on the floor; they range from Oliver Twist to The Catcher in the Rye and I have bought all of them because I knew I would enjoy reading them. How come then that during the last few days I picked up every single book, started reading it and found not one that appealed to me?
Yesterday I ventured out at my parents' shelves, almost desperate to find a book I would want to read and came across The Divine Comedy there, which instantly fascinated me, so my dilemma is already sorted out, but it left me wondering why some books sometimes just don't feel right.

I think everyone has already experienced that a book which seemed boring or even bad at a certain point in your life turned out to be absolutely amazing and intriguing when you gave it another try some years later, or the other way round. Human beings tend to be only interested in things they can at least remotely relate to and usually we like a book the better the more we can identify with its characters and their situation. A very good example of that is my experience with Jane Eyre, which came just at the right time: for most parts of it Jane is a young woman, strong-willed but socially unskilled and unversed in interpreting her own feelings and those of others. I doubt I would have loved this book so much if I had not been able to relate so completely to her position.
We do not stop to develop and mature until we die, in fact at fifty years we are not even the same persons we were when we were twenty and so it is obvious that one and the same book affects us differently at different stages throughout our lives.

There is more to it, though. A good book creates a certain atmosphere, it evokes a special feeling within us. It has a distinctive ambiance which makes us feel like coming home whenever we turn its pages after having read it once. These feelings are hard to put into words, but I am convinced that every passionate reader understands what I mean. Sometimes a novel fails to captivate us simply because it is not in line with our current mood.
Even the season makes a difference at times, in summer I am usually drawn to other books than in winter.
Another important factor is the amount of concentration we are prepared to spend on a book: now and then we want a light read because we only want to drift with the flow of a story without anylysing too much, but at other times we need something demanding that fully absorbs our concentration.

Not all is lost if we surprisingly dislike a book we expected to love, sometimes it is just that the time is wrong. For now I am content with The Divine Comedy and I know that soon I will again be in the mood to pick up a book I dismissed as boring only yesterday.

Norwegian Wood and the Poetry of Life

Ideally the years you spend at university are the best part of your life: you have survived the teenage troubles, you are free from school, you are living on your own for the first time, you are young, life is exciting and the world is only waiting to be conquered by you.

Unfortunately reality tends to differ from the ideal; the lives of young people aren't amazing and carefree, they are imperfect, some less, some more. Toru Watanabe's life certainly belongs to the latter category and Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood is a book about learning to live not only with imperfection, but also with seemingly unbearable tragedy.

The German title of Norwegian Wood is Naokos Lächeln, which means "Naoko's Smile" and the subtitle is "Just a love story". I am really mad at the publisher, because nothing could be less true than reducing this book to a mere love story. Yes, a big part of the novel is devoted to describing the development of Toru's relationships with Naoko and Midori, but the focus lies on another relationship: his relationship with life.

At the beginning of the story in 1969 he is eighteen, he has just moved to Tokyo, but he has no ambitions at all; he is studying, working, moving forward, but he avoids thinking of the future. Toru is barely starting his life and yet he has no dreams left: dreaming has proven too dangerous in a life that can turn against you as quickly as a game of billiards. 

The whole book is drenched with bitter-sweet melancholy, but the journey of Toru's growing-up is also very powerful: he is experiencing so much loss for someone so young, not only the loss of beloved persons but also of his convictions and ideals. He has to accept that sometimes there is no explanation why horrible things happen and that he cannot save anyone, because his love alone is simply not enough.

I devoured all 400 pages on the weekend and loved it. What amazed me most was that although it is a sad book dealing with what is perhaps the most tragic subject ever -suicide- there are a lot of very funny parts. Maybe it should not have surprised me so because after all the great challenge Toru faces throughout the book is mastering the art of staying alive and humour plays an essential role in that.

I was also enchanted by Murakami's style of writing, reading it reminded me a little of dreaming. There is a lot of subtext and much weight on little gestures and symboles. It is hard to explain, but every now and then we have dreams during which we know that we're dreaming, but somehow that doesn't make the dream feel less absorbing or less real. Whenever I opened Norwegian Wood I had a similar feeling.

I was intrigued by all characters, but I found the opposites of Naoko and Midori especially fascinating. At first I thought that Midori was simply a lively and a carefree young girl, whereas Naoko had already lived through great pain, making sadness an unescapable part of her life, but that is not true. Midori has had more than her share in pain too; the difference between the girls lies in their characters and in their decisions.

Midori is able to go on despite all tragedy, she has understood that "the dead will always be dead, but we have to go on living", but Naoko is not. She ultimately chooses death to follow the two people she loved most.

And Toru? Toru chooses Midori even before he hears of Naoko's death. With her he chooses life and the moment he chooses it is the moment he decides to grow-up, because "only the dead stay seventeen forever". Of course that does mean that they live happily ever after, but:

"All of us (by which I mean all of us, both normal and not-so-normal) are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. We don’t live with the mechanical precision of a bank account or by measuring all our lines and angles with rulers and protractors.”

Without imperfections and irregularities, however painful they may be, there would be no art, no music and no such wonderful books as Norwegian Wood. We all have to come to terms with the fact that the poetry of life sometimes consists of melancholy. Thank God that its other part, like Haruki Murakami's novel, is made up of laughter.

Summer is coming

Sitting as I am sitting here, in a light summer dress on the balcony and looking into the blazing sun nobody would believe me that April is usually a cold and rainy month in Austria. This week the weather here has been like in midsummer and I have spent every minute I could anyhow spare outdoors: studying, reading, eating, all on the balcony or in the garden.

This is the way I'm normally spending my summer holidays, from sun-up to sundown in the garden. Graz has 250,000 inhabitants and I am living close to the city centre, but within the fences of my garden it seems as if the whole city was a million miles away.

Today I had the irresistable impulse to take some photographs of this garden which is as familiar to me as my own soul. I suddenly had the strange feeling that looking at the flowers and the soft green grass I was looking at something that did not exist anymore, looking into the past. It was a very sad and frightening feeling, as if the moment I watched the little garden it already faded into a memory. Even now, looking down from the balcony I cannot resist the sensation that everything I'm looking at is drifting away from me a little more with every passing minute. Soon it will be gone, because this garden where I took my first steps and learned how to ride a bicycle is the living picture of my childhood.

While I am typing these words I almost expect the trees to dissolve in front of my eyes because the little girl who used to climb them is gone too. All the bugs and butterflies ought to disappear, because there is no laughing child left to run after them with flying hair.
Only the dandelion clock seems to belong here, because its white threads are carried away by the wind to unknown directions, much like the girl who isn't little in the least anymore.

I am not satisfied with the pictures I took, they are pretty, but they appear to me like images of a place I am only superficially acquainted with, not like my home.
For me, the warm half of the year is always the time to dream, to make plans of the future and to wonder what surprises and adventures life is going to hold for me. I have found that when the sun blazes down unto the earth, when every breeze seems to whisper of the sea or the deserts of the Orient and the air is so hot it seems almost touchable, the spirit is lighter than ever. The reason why I don't like the photographs is that all the dreams and hopes I have had first while playing in this garden and later wandering it are not visible on them. Such things cannot be captured by a camera.

 It is getting warmer and warmer and soon it will really be summer, not only a very hot April pretending to be July. This is not only literally true, but, something I have realised for the first time today, also metaphorically: I am no child anymore. The spring of my life is drawing to an end and summer is coming. I know that summer will have its own places and images, but looking at the garden again, at my garden, I am a little sad, because spring was a lovely time. No photograph in the world could capture its beauty.

The Woman in White Part II&III

First off: I didn't post last Monday because I did not read the part of the book we were required to read. Yes, shame on me. The only excuse I can produce for not following the schedule of the in all likelihood most hilarious Readathon ever is that I was so busy I hardly had time to breathe.
But if I had know how thrilling this book would become I might have neglected that horrendously overestimated activity in order to read.
Anyway, since I didn't do that this post is going to consist of my thoughts for both parts, wildly mingled of course.

Remember how I said that I couldn't quite warm towards Marian? Delete that without replacement.
Marian is awesome! I am probably the last person in the world to have this revelation, but I have to announce it  nonetheless: Whenever she is moaning about how weak and useless women in general are, she isn't talking about real women at all but about the Victorian ideal of women, which is weak and useless.
There is no obstacle for my belated Marian-Love anymore!

On the whole I am amazed how the characters have changed for the better. I even (shock ahead...please don't faint!) missed Walter Hartright when he was not the narrator anymore and now that he's back I find him neither naive nor annoying anymore. As usual a good, old, potentially deadly expedition to Central America works miracles for the character.
I am also amazed at Laura's amount of own, free thinking and in the (priceless) scene where she refused to sign Sir Percival's secret document she even proved to have a backbone.
To sum it up, Marian is no sexist monster, Walter Hartright no harmless pet and Laura no puppet anymore.
So far so good, but does anyone else miss Professor Pesca?

My favourite scenes were those which sent a shiver down my spine: reading the last entry in Marian's diary, written in Fosco's hand and discovering, in Mrs. Michelson's narrative that Marian had never left Blackwater Park and Laura had been trapped. Wilkie certainly has a talent for creepy writing, even if Laura's "death" was not so impressive for me. There had already been so much delusion and the death of a very important character was described so unemotional that I didn't believe her to be dead for one second.
Thank God I was right, I would have felt endlessly stupid otherwise!

I am rather sad that Anne Catherick has died, I had so many hopes of getting better acquainted with her. I won't admit say that I would have prefered Laura's death, but I am certainly disappointed that we will see no more of The Woman in White. She was so interesting! And completely sane. I will stick to that unless someone can prove me otherwise.

Don't look so innocent, I saw through you all the time!

Oh, and Count Fosco is a matter all of its own. While I found him highly amusing in the beginning, I am now thoroughly afraid of him. Seriously. He is unpredictable and therefore terrifies me.
Good, I only have Marian's feelings to guide me, so perhaps it is natural that he is scaring me, but the extent to which this goes is rather extraordinary:
I had a nightmare in which he hunted me down with his birds and wanted to kill me, all the time praising his cockatoo for being such a 'sweety-sweety-sweet, clever little thing!'.

Busy Times

It is downright ridiculous how busy I am at the moment. I'm sorry I didn't post anything lately, but I had to decide between blogging and sleeping, and after three sleepless nights my tiredness won over.
I have not quite survived the worst yet, but I thought I'd do a quick update just to let you know that I'm still alive.

The reason for most of the stress is that my piano class at the conservatoire is organising our annual concert on monday which means endless hours of practise, especially because I was a little lazy during the last months.
As if playing part of a huge concert were not reason enough to freak me out, I also have to host the whole evening, because the girl who should have done this originally is moving away: so the last two weeeks were filled with writing speeches, practising like a madwoman and worrying about what I should wear... I'll thank God when this whole thing is over!

As you might expect I didn't do to well with my reading, I didn't even post about The Woman in White last Monday because I wasn't able to keep up with the Readalong schedule, but I am catching up again. And I have many thoughts about this book! I am pretty sure I'll have to read The Moonstone too.

Les Misérables has turned itself into a source of frustration again, but that's not Hugo's fault this time. As you know I went through hell trying to find an unabridged German copy and finally succeeded by borrowing one from a friend of a friend of my mother. So far so good, but seemingly this woman decided suddenly that she needed her book back immediately, despite the fact that it had rested untouched on her shelves for twenty years. I had to give it back when I was only about one third through, and now I have finally given in and ordered an English copy because it is obviously impossible to read this book in German.
But of course it hasn't arrived yet, so there goes my resolution of finishing Les Misérables in April...

Nonetheless I have been reading a lot recently, even if it was not what I had planned: I have to hand in a paper in two weeks and the subject I chose is The Influence of the French Revolution on 19th century literature, so I have been a steady guest in the university library, trying to dig out the few books they have on English literature. So far I am loving my work, it is exciting and I get to write about Dickens, but it is also pretty exhausting.

I hope you are all having a less busy April and for those of you who are taking part in Dewey's 24-hour Readathon (oh, how I wish I could!): Good luck and have fun!

The Knight/Baronet Dilemma: Woman in White Part I

I know we have already analysed poor Wilkie's giant forehead to death, but obviously we are not the only ones who consider it a fact of utmost importance. I am literally quoting from the introduction to my Dover Giant Thrift Edition copy: Collin's father was deeply religious and seems to have been disappointed by his son -a small, sickly child with a peculiarly bulging forehead. There it is! It is officially written down, so we are no perverts anymore for taking so much notice. Okay, I have finished, nevermore shall I speak of Wilkie's anatomical anomalities. From now on I am only going to talk about his writing.


This is the first Readalong I have ever joined and I am more than a little surprised how easy it is to keep up with the schedule. I had actually completed reading last week's part by Wednesday and have been anxious to go on since. I think I don't have to mention how much I'm enjoying The Woman in White so far. For one thing Wilkie Collins is the first Victorian I have ever read who doesn't devote entire pages to descriptions of almost everything in the novel, his book is pretty fast paced and we learn something new every few pages, which is something I always appreciate.

Walter Hartright is a nice guy and not much else and of course he is not original enough to fall for someone else than the fair, sweet, innocent and absolutely boring Laura. I had hoped he was going to fall in love with the ominous woman in white (who is by far my favourite character), but no, he chooses the most predictable path ever.

Of course I have to join into everyone's praise of Marian Halcombe now because she is simply a badass, but I have to admit that her complete looking down on all women makes me like her a lot less than I could otherwise. I know that I have to expect sexism in a victorian novel, but I didn't expect it to come from a woman. Perhaps the damnation of everything feminine is her survival strategy because she is ugly in contrast to her much-admired halfsister, but her abasing of all women still annoys me.

Something else which upsets me is that my brain is obviously not able to understand the difference between a knight and a baronet, and whether it is important or not. But I guess everyone will agree with me that Baronet Sir Percival Glyde has to hide some devilry behind his shiny name.I just hope Laura is smart enough to follow Anne Catherick's advise because this woman is clearly not insane one little bit. It's a mystery to me how she could have been locked up in an asylum for madwomen when she is obviously only a little eccentric. Nowadays she would get her own talkshow!
The only thing I can think of is that she knows some nasty secret she is not supposed to tell anyone. How about this: Mr Fairlie cheated on Laura and Marian's mother with Ms Catherick and is Anne's father, which would explain why she resembles Laura so much. Mr Fairlie of course doesn't want anyone to discover his secret affair but Anne somehow finds out who her father is, so Mr Fairlie asks his good old friend Sir Percival Glyde to institutionalise her and in return he promises to let him marry his beautiful daughter and heiress.

And? What do you think? It's not very good but the only theory I have at the moment, and I can't keep from making theories. I am anxious to find out if I have come somewhere close to the truth. Oh, and I do hope Professor Pesca appears again! He is hilarious!