Movie Review: Pride and Prejudice (2005)

So, I believe I have officially decided to watch Austen-based movies for the rest of the Everything Austen Challenge. I have waaaaay too many books in queue that I just don't know if I'll get around to reading anything else, and with my handy new Netflix subscription, it makes the movie-viewing so much easier. Technically, this is my 5th item in the challenge; I watched Emma Thompson's Sense & Sensibility while drugged on Theraflu, and wow, I don't think I have ever been so groggy. I say that I remember it all, but really I probably just pieced together the segments I did see in between dozing off with the story I know from recently reading the book. Needless to say, I will not be writing a review of it unless I try watching it again.

Anyway...normally I don't really like to compare things [ie: an author's books, versions of a movie], because I feel that any work should be able to stand on its own. However, I viewed 2005's Pride & Prejudice mostly to compare to the 1995 BBC version I watched a couple of months ago. At this point I am very familiar with the storyline, so I was able to make some observations and comparisons outside of the basic plot.

• I thought this movie was cast very well. The ages of the characters made more sense to me. Keira Knightley was 19 when she made this movie, the age Elizabeth is in the book (I believe). Plus, Knightley is my age, so it just made sense to me and seemed more like a peer in the role. While Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth were both excellent in the BBC version, the fact that they are a generation older than me just automatically put their characters as older in my mind. Also in terms of age, I liked this version of Mr. Collins. Because he seemed closer to the Bennett girls in age, his personality was the biggest turn-off about it.
• The first half seemed rushed. I understand that was necessary to make it a studio movie rather than a miniseries, but I thought it took away from the full effect of story's development. I never got the same feeling of disdain that Lizzy had for Darcy.
• One of my favorite characters in the BBC version was Mr. Bennett. He was fantastic with his subtle, sarcastic remarks. I don't think Donald Sutherland as Mr. Bennett had as large of a role and he was nowhere near as funny with his sarcastic, under the breath remarks. Not his fault...the production just cut back on that character. I did like him in the end as he showed fatherly emotion.
• I thought Keira Knightley did an excellent job. She created (to me) a more realistic Elizabeth. Her emotion and cadence seem more believable and relatable, instead of trying to be 19th century proper.
• The ending! Completely different! No wedding was shown, but I enjoyed the brief scene of Elizabeth and Darcy post-wedding. Nice little romantic bow to tie up that two hour-long package.

While I thought this was an excellent movie, I think I prefer the BBC version for the sole reason that because it was longer, I was more involved and engrossed in the story. Plus, Colin Firth.

The Impending Showdown of Kari vs. the eReader

My approach to books has always been one traditional in nature. I've never listened to an audiobook. I've never read an eBook. I relish in the crinkle of pages, the physicality of paper, the smell that lingers in the creases of old library books. I swore I would never go digital, because I love books too much, slightly worn, accumulating on my shelves.

Well eReader, your time has come.

Recently, Trish @ Hey Lady! Whatcha Readin'? hosted a contest for a Sony Reader Pocket Edition. Part of Sony's marketing campaign for the eReader centers around a project called words move me. As heavy readers, we probably get more out of books than the average individual, and this project is about connecting readers to the emotions felt while reading a certain book. On the words move me website, you can search a term and see what comes up, perhaps giving you the next book on your list should you want to feel 'inspired' or 'optimistic' or 'humorous'. Bottom line of the story: I won Trish's contest, and a Sony Reader is on its way to me.

Now is the challenge. Having never anticipated owning an eReader, nor having ever planned on doing so, I'm a bit curious and anxious to see how I actually react to this thing. I don't plan on replacing my beloved printed page, but surely there is some purpose this can serve me. My boyfriend works at a literary agency, for example, and was given a Kindle to hold the hundreds of scripts he has to read. This makes sense to me; it saves paper.

I am excited to try this out this whole digital thing, but it will never catch on with me if I think of it only as a replacement to my physical bookshelf; it's going to need to serve some other purpose, and that is where I could use your help.

In what situation will an eReader be beneficial, and what do you think the eReader can do for me?

Again, many thanks to Trish for hosting this great contest!

Review: A Victorian soap opera

For some reason, while reading Middlemarch I felt like I was reading a pastoral version of Shakespeare's Othello - although of course something much less villainous and without a creature like Iago who stumbles on things to ruin his master and his wife's love. I say this only because both works are like watching what happens just past 'and they lived happily ever after'. Before Othello commences, there's a wedding. Not too far into George Eliot's sprawling masterpiece, there's the first of many weddings. And then we're invited to watch such marriages fall from perfection, fall from idealism, into something much more realistic, unfortunate, and amusing.

Dorothea Brooke perhaps is a proto-feminist. She doesn't necessarily want to be locked down by the typical fetters that womanhood suggests. Instead of playing house for her husband - making sure that the hired help is doing what they need to do, dressing up the salons so that everyone will comment when they come for tea - she wants to dive headfirst into her husband's work and become the muse whose inspiration will set his work apart from everyone else's and put him in the limelight. Instead of marrying James Chettam, her equal in age, she decides to marry the 'academic' Edward Casaubon who is much older, perhaps almost double her age. On their honeymoon, they bump into a cousin of Casaubon's - Will Ladislaw - a struggling artist who is intrigued by this woman.

Meanwhile Dr Tertius Lydgate has newly arrived in Middlemarch and is interested in revamping and -vitalising the medicinal practice in town. It involves a lot of volunteer work, proto-socialised healthcare (?). He decides to marry the mayor's daughter, Rosamond Vincy, who also happens to be a relative of Mr Bulstrode, a man with a shady past but also a man with money to spend. Here, between Lydgate and Rosamond, is another failing marriage as the wife wants to be bathed all the time in aristocracy, whereas Lydgate is much more interested in his work and not his personal life.

Rosamond's brother Fred also falls in love with a childhood sweetheart. But Mary Garth won't marry him unless he abandons the church and settles in a different, more suitable career. Fred also has a bit of a gambling problem that causes him to go into debt and makes him an unsuitable 'gentleman' for the Garths.

These stories create something of a soap opera, as we watch people unravel, as we hear subtle arguments, as we watch disappointments and plots against one another unfold. The only thing that's missing is the supernatural. George Eliot's style in this book is certainly to have a narrator speak as a god or a Greek chorus, from afar and with tons of sententious and axiomatic remarks, like: 'For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.' Or: 'We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions.'

Or: 'The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay: but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.'

It's almost as if this book is a compendium in competition with Bartlett's Quotations. That's not to say that it's not amusing or touching at times; the language and these huge brushstroke generalisations usually bog down the drama of the novel. But in that regard it makes one feel as if Eliot's narrator had precisely plotted and executed everything he/she decided to do beforehand, unlike Iago against his Othello.

NEW BOOK! Review: Try your worst

Lauren Grodstein's A Friend of the Family is attempting to do a lot in one novel. It's about crime, medicine, getting older, and relationships between a lot of different people: parent/child, husband/wife, doctor/patient, neighbors, friends, couples. It even feels somewhat like a mystery in parts. It may sound like a lot on one plate, but I think Grodstein succeeds in creating a very multifaceted novel. This is a pretty complex story, so I apologize the length in setting it up for you.

A Friend of the Family centers around Pete Dizinoff, a middle-aged internist that is so close to having the successful life towards which he has spent years working. He's been married to his wife Elaine for 27 years, is well-respected as a doctor, and lives in upper-middle class New Jersey suburbs near his closest friends, Joe and Iris Stern. The only thing standing in the way of Pete's picture-perfect future is his son Alec, who is 21-year-old college dropout with a drug-history and criminal record. Alec is currently living in the studio over the garage where he paints.

Move down the street to the Stern residence and we have Joe and Iris, Pete and Elaine's best friends from college. The Sterns are very well-off with Iris bringing in $1mil+ a year (though I still have no idea what she does). Controversy surrounded the Stern household years ago as their eldest daughter Lauren got pregnant when she was 17, had the baby premature in a library bathroom, and (supposedly) killed the premie and threw it in the dumpster. Following a lawsuit from the state of New Jersey, Laura spent some time institutionalized and then traveled all over the world, moving from one random gig to the next. Now, she's back in Jersey and has struck up a romance with Alec, who is 10 years her junior, and Pete is not happy about it. At all.

The structure of the book is what really grabs the reader. With the story narrated by Pete, the reader knows from the beginning that he did something horrible that completely ostracizes him from his friends and family. It takes the entire novel for this to play out as we learn more about the characters and their histories, both individually and together. Grodstein jumps around in time a lot using Pete's reminisces to give the reader a piece of the puzzle by bringing you into the past, as well as giving you a sense of both dread and urgency as you approach the conclusion.

Thematically, Grodstein gives the reader a lot to deal with. She illustrates how one event of the past has affected so many people and so many relationships. Pete still struggles with the history of Laura and the Sterns, his oldest and dearest friends, and it's been thirteen years. When his son, for whom he has the highest hopes and highest expectations, is thrown into the mix, Pete's rationale kind of goes out the window and his emotional instinct takes over. Moreover, Pete wants what's best for Alec and justifies illogical actions he takes to keep Alec and Laura apart.

This book reads kinda like Roth and kinda like Russo, minus some of Roth's suicide-inducing negativity and minus some of Russo's optimism. I was a little disappointed in the ending, but only since it had been built up so much, I expected something sensational. Grodstein, however, opted for realism instead of over-the-top, which probably made the novel more relatable but left me wanting more.

For those of you in New York, Lauren will be appearing at KGB Bar (85 E. 4th St), this Sunday the 22nd at 7:00 pm.

A Friend of the Family was just released last week by Algonquin Press.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Review: And the tree was happy

I assume everyone has read The Giving Tree. Or at least read a poem from Where the Sidewalk Ends. Everyone from my generation likely knows Shel Silverstein, but what most of us don’t know is the eccentric life he led before becoming one of the most well known children’s story writers of all time.

Marv Gold’s biography Silverstein and Me follows Shel from his rambunctious childhood, through his years at the Playboy Mansion(!), and his ultimate decision to write children’s books. The piece is subtitled “a memoir,” but Mr. Gold makes few appearances—the title of the entire work should really be “My Understanding of the trials and tribulations of Shel Silverstein,” but why split hairs when the subject is so interesting?

Mr. Gold grew up with Shel (then Sheldon) around Logan Square, Chicago around WWII. Both Gold and Shel spent their days getting into trouble and sneaking in movies; each loved to read comics. Gold remembers Shel being a talented and intelligent youth with absolutely no ambition and many lofty dreams. Shel and school never clicked and by his third stint in a college of some sort, he wanted nothing to do with higher education.

Answering an advertisement in the paper, Shel met with Hugh Hefner and agreed to draw cartoons for Mr. Hefner’s burgeoning gentlemen’s magazine. Being part of Playboy since its inception granted Shel a few rights—he was able to secure for himself a private apartment in the Playboy Mansion while he drew his cartoons. But ever restless, Shel grew tired of Playboy and asked Hugh for the opportunity to travel. Whilst spanning the globe Shel got into some trouble smuggling hash from Marrakech—two years in jail was his punishment.

That's one of numerous stories Gold tells about Shel. There’s simply too much information about Shel Silverstein to fit into one review or one biography. There isn’t a lot about Marv Gold in his memoir, but it’s still a worthwhile read if you are interested in Shel. Gold’s anecdotes tell various pieces of Shel’s life, but don’t tell the whole story.

Shel was a favorite of mine growing up. My mother frequently read the poems from Where the Sidewalk Ends to me and I loved the bombastic humor (and I assume my mother appreciated the sardonic undertones). At some point later in my teens I learned that not only was Shel a jetsetting world traveler—I assumed all children’s writers stayed home and tended to children—but also that he frequented the Playboy mansion. Looking at all I know about Shel--much of which I learned through this biography--it seems apropos that my childhood hero was there at the inception of the world's largest pornographic empire. Nothing is what it seems; perhaps that's the lesson Shel Silverstein had been proffering through all of those zany poems.

And if you didn’t already know Shel Silverstein wrote the lyrics to “Boy Named Sue.” He did everything!

What’s your favorite Shel Silverstein poem?

Review copy provided by Author Marketing Experts, Inc.

Review: The English Patience

It was time for a quiet, contemplative read, and after reading Divisidero earlier this year, I was looking forward to settling into another one of Michael Ondaatje's novels. The English Patient (I'm sure you've heard of the movie) won the Booker Prize (whose novels I tend to love), which made it even more appealing.

I wasn't disappointed. Ondaatje's style of writing is perhaps the most unhurried that I've found that still compels me to keep reading. While many novels are driven by a plot that includes high climaxes and low troughs, his novels remain on an even keel, and unfold almost at the ordinary pace of life. In describing this, I automatically begin to feel like it sounds boring, but the book teems with observations about the interactions between real, fallible humans that we nevertheless fall in love with and believe in, and wish the best for.

In this novel, Ondaatje expertly weaves together past and present stories of the four characters that have come to live together in a half-destroyed abandoned house in Italy that was serving as a hospital while World War II raged around it. We learn bits and pieces about each character from stories in their past that help us understand their interaction. As in Divisadero, Ondaatje isn't out to write a fairy tale - of all the writers I've read, he perhaps is best at aptly representing reality in a way that captures how beautiful and yet desperately lonely it can be.

Review: In the Epping Forest

I had Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze imported shortly after it was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize this year. Foulds's book is the only one that hasn't found an American publisher yet (to my knowledge). Perhaps because it deals with characters that are more a part and solely known by the British conscious.

It tells the story of Dr Matthew Allen and his family who run High Beach Private Asylum, in the woods outside of London. The time is around 1840 and two poets happen to be there simultaneously, though never crossing paths: John Clare, the nature and rural poet, and Alfred Tennyson, a man whose poetry will later be known to represent the Victorian age. Tennyson is there with his brother, accompanying him at first under the guise that he doesn't want to leave him alone. Later he admits that he wants to be admitted for cure of melancholia. (One of his great friends, Arthur Hallam, just died abroad and he has yet to recover. Arthur Hallam is later the subject of Tennyson's 'In Memoriam', which is begun to be penned in the confines of this asylum and this novel.)

Clare is there because he has a genuine multiple personalities disorder, one day thinking he's a boxer, the next thinking he's Lord Byron - although I'm sure boxing and Byron go hand in hand. Clare is already feeling that the public has no interest in his poetry any more, which is later quasi confirmed when his submissions to magazines come out fruitless. The spectre that seems to surround him and the novel though is the Romantic critic and great essayist William Hazlitt, wherein Clare uses a tavern from 'The Fight' as a stage name for his boxing career. Hazlitt's clarity of description may be what Foulds himself is trying to summon in his own pages.

The novel has been pitched as a representation of these two great poets; but rather it is truly about the Allen family and how one daughter tries to seduce Tennyson to no avail, how the son is learning the ways of the asylum so that one day he can take it over, and - at its core - how Dr Allen himself is trying to develop a machine that will reproduce master technician's furniture so that he may not need to work ever again. It's an interesting comment on the Industrial Revolution and its effects on the mind - both creatively and in business.

However, the prose felt limp and the ideas behind this novel seemed weak. It's almost summed up when Allen's daughter Hannah enters Tennyson's room for the first time: 'She entered looking hungrily at everything for signs of the remarkable life that was lived there, but found an ordinary vestibule - wallpaper, a table, a mirror. There on the antlers of the coatstand, however, hung his coats and that wide black hat. He twirled the cape from his shoulders and added it. With proper care, with gentle fingers that seem unafraid as he touched her shoulders, he took her coat from her and drape it beside his own.'

Foulds, who is also an award-winning poet, seems to be interested in the flatness of language in this novel. Although every now and again you get a gem like this: 'Possibly it was a though he could understand, but what she could not begin to try and explain to him was that in Heaven to see and to eat are the same thing. Looking is absorption, is union, without destruction. There is nothing broken. Light flows into light endlessly, in harmony, and is perfectly still.'