Re: What Are You Reading?-#3
"Madame Bovary" by Flaubert. i'm back at uni now so back to the situation of reading some seriously heavyweight classic books in their original language (french) - it's nice if you want to feel smug but it's also kind of hard work!
i actually read this book in english many years ago and didn't like it much. i think that was probably because i had this preconception of it being "a romance" and y'know, i really don't do romance in any capacity* - but i'm hopeful that being able to read it with a somewhat more mature mindset (well, sometimes anyway) and also with a bit of the context and background as we study it will make me appreciate it more this time around - and so far it's working!
i'm also skim reading "les fleurs du mal" by baudelaire - we're studying it before we study "bovary" but i've studied it in some depth before so taking advantage of that to get ahead in reading the next one (because i just can't read as fast as i normally do in french). this is one of the few poetry books i can enjoy - i'm not a fan of poetry as a rule, i don't quite get it, i'd rather read prose. that said, 'fleurs' is a fantastic book, it's incredibly subversive and weird. when the teacher said last week that we'd be doing this one poem this week i mentioned that is my favourite of all of them, but later in class said i didn't like poetry. he said "but you said you love this one!" and i said "well yes, i do, but it being subversive and morbid and really really weird totally outdoes the fact that it's poetry
" - i don't think he understood.... anyway it's a poem which is written in the most archetypal romantic poetic language, like keats or wordsworth etc, but it's about a rotting corpse, it's like something grissom would enjoy, and at the end the writer says to his girlfriend "and one day you'll look like that too!" - it totally sticks two fingers up at just about everything that underpins traditional poetry. it's fantastic. i'm only saying that here because unfortunately i can't be that excited if i write an essay on it
i also just finished "the sound and the fury" which was great in the end but omg, hard work. i love modernism as a rule but stream of consciousness writing can be quite difficult. by about 3/4 of the way through i had finally worked out who was who and what was happening, and that really did make everything else in the book make sense and made it worthwhile, a bit of a lightbulb moment i guess. so yeah, if you like a challenge, read it, especially if you like your challenges depressing and morbid (i generally do!), but it is not easy.
* i just wanted to say i had the same "it's a romance" preconception about "gone with the wind" and read it very grudgingly. by a few pages in i loved it and it's still, 7 years later, one of my all time favourite books
so that should teach me to not prejudge.
