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Way back in January, I signed up for the Back to the Classics challenge, hosted by Karen @ Books and Chocolate!
It's a fab challenge in which you read twelve (or six, or nine) classics from different categories and review them, and then you can enter a draw to win $30 for The Book Depository!
I really missed picking Sherlock gifs for blog posts. It's the little things, guys. |
Fear not: this isn't a post reviewing all the classics I read in Kenya! (There were quite a few.) Just picking a few faves for now.
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A romance classic // Romeo and Juliet
“Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night,
That rumour's eyes may wink, and Romeo
Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen."
(3.2.5-7)
What else would I pick for a classic romance? I took this to Kenya as “research" for LesMisBook (/I just wanted it to be my friend in a strange new place. I read it on our first day and it definitely helped with my uncertainty and worry!), because in her drama school auditions, Nina gives Juliet's speech from Act 3, Scene 2. I was delighted to spot some thematic similarities between my lil novel and this play -- they are, after all, both about first love and prejudice. A LesMisBook snippet:
“[Juliet's] not actually twittery, is she?” he said.
“Nah, she’s cool! She’s very pragmatic, like, the opposite of Romeo. I think the play’s about her.”
“Is that the feminist reading?”
“Pipe down.”
“It’s interesting, the bit … here, let me see.”
I threw him the book and he caught it in one hand. “This bit.” He found the place. “Spread thy close curtain, love-performing night, / That rumour’s eyes may wink, and Romeo / Leap to these arms untalked of and unseen.”
“I love those lines.”
“It shows she really loves him, doesn’t it? I’ve never wanted anyone to” – his mouth twitched in a smile – “leap to my arms untalked of unseen. Like, what’s the point?” He smiled at my face. “Is that an awful thing to say?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Because relationships shouldn’t be manufactured for the onlookers!”
Jonathan stretched. “I guess that’s true. I’ve just, you know, never had that kind. The non-manufactured.” He tilted his head. “Or any kind, in fact. Forever alone and all that …”
I rolled my eyes. “Poor you.”
“What about you?
“We are absolutely not having this conversation.”
He grinned – it struck me he rarely stops smiling – and raised his hands. “Have I reached a Do Not Enter sign?”
“A big one.”
~***~
I have zero time for people who think Romeo and Juliet don't really love each other. That it's just a stupid teenage thing that blows out of proportion and leads to horribly misguided suicide. Their love is absolutely beautiful. Sure, it's doomed, but that's fate. Their deaths are fated. It's in the prologue, fam.
“Give me my Romeo; and, when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun."
(3.2.21-5)
You see, death is always there, with them. Even here, Juliet knows that Romeo “shall die". In the same way, he describes her as having “beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear". She is already almost a heavenly being to him -- “bright angel", he calls her in 2.2.
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This play perfectly captures the heady, star-spattered rush of first love. The setting of Italy is perfect, too, for that feeling of hot-blooded passion. No wonder the blood feud forms the other key pillar of the play, the antithesis to Romeo and Juliet's love. On this second reading, the great sadness of the feud struck me; the way in which love is in some ways a dream, because though Romeo and Juliet dream of rising above their families' prejudices, they cannot.
“I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the air
And more inconstant than the wind, who woos
Even now the frozen bosom of the north,
And, being angered, puffs away from thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south."
(1.4.97-104)
I completely fell in love with this play when I studied it aged fifteen, and I loved it no less this time. It will always be the play that introduced me to Shakespeare; my first love of this man. Fitting, isn't it? Writing about it in LesMisBook was such a joy.
“Here's much to do with hate, but more with love." (1.1.169)
Could anything be more wonderfully Nina? I think not.
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A classic in translation // Letters to a Young Poet
I've been wanting to read this for years, and was so glad finally to pick it up. Rainer Maria Rilke was a Czech-born poet (1875-1926). Young poet Franz Kappus wrote to him to ask for advice about his writing, and the correspondence that ensued spanned several years and delved into life, love and art. It was encouraging to me:
“Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future." (p17)
Rilke's basic philosophy was that art is unstoppable, and will endure, so that in spite of loneliness and heartbreak, we can take comfort in its immortality. I loved these lines:
“To be an artist means: not to calculate and count; to grow and ripen like a tree which does not hurry the flow of its sap and stands at ease in the spring gales without fearing that no summer may follow. It will come." (p13)
Don't stress. “It will come." Trees grow, and so do novels.
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His advice, therefore, is to “live the questions":
“We must accept our existence in as wide a sense as can be; everything, even the unheard-of, must be possible within it. ... the courage for the oddest, most unexpected, the most inexplicable things we may encounter." (p43)
I love this. That's what writing is, right? Accepting everything as possible. Taking twenty-six letters and a pen, and making anything at all.
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A Russian classic // The Idiot
You'd have to bepretty dim new around here not to know how much I love The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt, and Boris from that book loves The Idiot by Dostoevsky, so how could I stay away?!
Prince Leo Myshkin has spent several years being treated for “idiocy" in a Swiss clinic. When his money runs out, he returns to Russia to start a new life. The society into which he is plunged -- one of social conventions, intrigue and beautiful women -- is bewildering, but Leo soon gains the love of those around him. He gained my love, too, very easily; his naivety and good nature make him an endearing hero. The Idiot was often funny, always compelling: a look at how society works, the people it creates, and what it does with them.
“It is not easy to achieve heaven on earth, and you do seem to count on it a little: heaven is a difficult matter, Prince, much more difficult than it seems to your excellent heart." (p376-7)
You'd have to be
Prince Leo Myshkin has spent several years being treated for “idiocy" in a Swiss clinic. When his money runs out, he returns to Russia to start a new life. The society into which he is plunged -- one of social conventions, intrigue and beautiful women -- is bewildering, but Leo soon gains the love of those around him. He gained my love, too, very easily; his naivety and good nature make him an endearing hero. The Idiot was often funny, always compelling: a look at how society works, the people it creates, and what it does with them.
“It is not easy to achieve heaven on earth, and you do seem to count on it a little: heaven is a difficult matter, Prince, much more difficult than it seems to your excellent heart." (p376-7)
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All in all, this was a wonderful book. It had all the grandeur of the Russian epic, with its diverse cast of characters, and it captured my heart from the beginning. Thoroughly recommend.
~***~
What were you reading, while I was reading these in Kenya? What's the best thing you've read this year?
~***~
What were you reading, while I was reading these in Kenya? What's the best thing you've read this year?
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