Where Figaro Does It Again

The Barber of Seville / The Marriage of Figaro / A Mother's Guilt by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

[This review is focusing on the third of the plays--I couldn't find an entry for just the one play.]

So--it's fine.

In context, in its time and milieu, this is probably pretty entertaining. I'm guessing, cuz i dunno. But the conventions seem odd now. French theatre of the time (based on nothing more than these three Beaumarchais plays and a few Moliere plays) seems mostly like angry people storming back and forth across the stage, arguing and/or crying, with whispering and eavesdropping interspersed randomly. The servants, notably Figaro here, conspire to make a happy ending (while promoting themselves, generally) though it feels like Figaro is given credit for being more brilliant than he ever proves to be. He's a schemer and a manipulator, and he does succeed in figuring out everyone's secrets so he can prevent a (worse) schemer from hurting his family, so I'll give him that credit. But he's no Sherlock or anything.

(I'm trying to think of a modern equivalent of the Figaro character, someone who discovers secrets and uses tricks and persuasion and lies to make it all turn out for the good and I've got nothing. I can only come up with villains, plotters, and backstabbers. Maybe the Long John Silver character on "Black Sails"? I dunno.)

The ending of this is pretty good, though the difficulties are all overcome in quick succession without a lot of drama. People shout at each other a lot in these plays, but then forgive each other and fall back in love very easily. I guess Shakespeare used the same trope, so it's got a history...

Having read all three, I guess my takeaway is that the prevailing mood in these comedies is anger, with the happy bit coming about a page or a minute from the end. I don't love that.

YMMV

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Where Tom Loves the Ladies

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling by Henry Fielding
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I liked this a lot more than I did when I was 20 and reading it in a study room at college with a thousand other people working on every side. Though I actually liked it *okay* then, I know I didn't understand a lot of the context, so it didn't work as well for me.

Also, this time I thought it was funny. The narrator is hilarious, in fact. I don't think I got that at all 40 years ago.

Tom Jones is usually called a romp or a bawdy tale, and it's that, for sure. But I love how it treats this young man, who sleeps with a number of ladies in not that many pages, as still a good guy who maybe just needs to do a bit less. A generation later, my beloved Jane Austen would call him a blackguard or an unrepentant rake at best and have him end up in a loveless marriage or something. Fielding doesn't see him that way; he sees kindness (Tom helps a ton of people) and exuberance (like a golden retriever). Nor does he judge the ladies who break the same rules, like Mrs. Waters or Mrs. Fitzpatrick or Lady Bellaston. They might be judged for some other stuff, but he doesn't care and doesn't think we should care about their affairs.

That's refreshing.

He's also very explicitly critical of the unfair marriage dynamic which prevailed at that time, where women had so few choices and so little power; the unfortunate Mrs. Fitzpatrick is an exemplar of the powerless woman being hurt by her own husband, while Lady Bellaston represents the somewhat liberated widow who can do almost as she pleases as long as she doesn't remarry. Allworthy, a slightly enlightened man, argues with his neighbor Mr. Western to not press is daughter, to not force her to accept his choice of a marriage partner. Throughout, we get a glimpse of a fairer society and less-restricted love, less-judged, and I only wish that movement toward greater equality and less coercion had caught on a lot sooner.

There are a lot of characters to enjoy here, like Tom and Sophia, some that are fun to laugh at, like Partridge, and a good assortment to hate, like Blifil and Thwackum and Square. That's pretty fun right there. With the ironic narrator and the low-key tension of the conflicts (not quite cozy, but not too far off), I found this a lot of fun this time around.

Recommended. Get a cheap hardcover off the interwebs. That's how to read it.

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Where I Accidentally Read This a Second Time

Celebrated Cases Of Judge Dee by Robert van Gulik
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Did you ever get well into a book and think "This is more than a little familiar..."

Funny story.

I don't think I ever did that before this, but it's crazy that I did it with this book. It's super unique, an actual Chinese detective novel from the 1700s translated into English, and I liked it at the time. Somehow I forgot entirely. I still wasn't sure until I checked my goodreads history to see.

I think I read it more carefully this time, kept more of the minor characters straight in my head. It's surprising to me how modern this book feels, how familiar, even to a western reader like me.

So now I have read it twice, although I seldom reread books. And I liked it both times. Judge Dee is a cool character--despite his use of torture, which was expected at the time--and is very Sherlockian in his detective work. And there's a bit of wuxia in the action scenes featuring his investigators. It's no wonder they made movies and tv shows with him as a character.

If you have an interest in the history of detective stories or want to look at Chinese history from a different angle, you might enjoy this. I did.

Here's my original two sentence review from 8 years ago:

This is a very accessible novel, with useful notes and preface by the translator. It's a pleasure to read on its own, as a mystery novel with intertwined stories, but even more interesting when read with an eye toward Chinese manners and history.

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A Frontier Story That Made Me Think

The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

There's a lot to like in this novel, and some people like it a bunch--more than I did--but there is a lot that disappoints, too. I enjoyed it well enough, and I admired some things about it, but most readers (IMO) would find it pretty unreadable.

I like the action and the connections to nature; I like the moments when the narrative supports a progressive, liberal attitude toward Native Americans; I like getting a feel for a particular time and place in our history; and I like encountering characters who are admirable and who behave according to their conscience. All of that is found here.

But I don't like it when the plot doesn't just stall, but stops; I don't like it when the narrative aligns with prejudice and racism; and I don't like it when the author repeats himself for the thousandth time. Not awesome.

As to the text's position on race, that deserves a little more attention. It feels like the author was caught between his head and his heart, and I think he should get a little more praise than blame for that, especially writing in the 1820's, 1830's, and 1840's. The reader can't help but see how he admires various tribes and Native Americans in general. You see how wrong-thinking characters (Hurry Harry and Tom Hutter) see Native Americans as wholly unlike them, as beings without value or rights, and consider their murder as praiseworthy, while right-thinking characters (the protagonist as well as Hetty in this novel) oppose hatred and unprovoked violence toward Native Americans and support the idea of considering them the same as anyone else. The author does make his Huron and Delaware characters prone to violence, even cruel--or at least, too comfortable with violence--but in almost every other way paints them in a positive light: courageous, inventive, capable, honest, and noble. And many of Deerslayer's best qualities come from his Delaware upbringing. I think these examples show us where his heart was.

He still put arguments in Deerslayer's mouth against white people marrying Native Americans and has him talk interminably about the different "gifts" of the two peoples as if they might be fundamentally different, maybe even going to a different afterlife. These parts, along with the vocabulary of "red man" and "savage" and the like, are very jarring. Such negative attitudes almost always emerge in dialogue, not in action, which is why it feels like faulty received wisdom or "common sense" is being repeated. That's why I believe he let his head overrule his heart at times, allowing the language of prejudice to remain in a story even though it clashes with ideals deeply embedded in the text.

Anyway, that's how I choose to see the matter, because in places, this novel is a strong argument (almost 2 centuries old) against racism and an argument in favor of protecting and preserving Native American communities as a moral imperative.

For an adventure novel, the pacing is slow, and Deerslayer preaches waaaaaay too often on the same handful of topics. He loves to philosophize about how men should behave, what women are like, what Native Americans are like, how white people are different, what is right behavior in this person as opposed to that person, and so on. Someone asks him a question, and then he goes off on the category of thought that the question proceeds from. Ugh. And Hetty, who is not as smart as her sister, is referred to as half-witted so many times, even by herself, that I wanted to shake the author. We know! We get it! Stop saying it!

Anyway, I counsel myself to be patient with these infelicities. I enjoy exploring the world he creates, and there are moments of genuine excitement and emotion that pay off the long waits. It's not as rich a meal as you get with other novelists, perhaps, but it's satisfying in some other ways. I won't lie, the death of an important character choked me up, so he did his job there.

In sum--it's flawed, but I kinda liked it. I'll read more, but I don't think I'd recommend it most people.

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