NORTH & SOUTH (BBC 2004)

LISTEN UP. Watch the 2004 BBC version of North & South RIGHT. NOW. It is incredible, and romantic, and political, and romantic, and EVERYTHING. 

North & South is based on the novel of the same name by Elizabeth Gaskell, an underappreciated, oft forgotten Victorian author. Charles Dickens published many of her works through his journal Household Words. Gaskell was well-known in her time, though her works were considered merely to be 'women's fiction' aka light, stupid, fun, and not at all serious, complex literature. Gaskell is, of course, an incredible author, and her works contain complex themes of class, tradition vs. modernity, and the role of women. Gaskell generally spends her time destroying stereotypes, and it's awesome. North & South is a pretty great encapsulation of those themes.

North & South is about Margaret Hale, a young woman from the countryside in South England, who is forced to move to the Milton, a fictional town in North England. Milton is an industrial town, in which many of its citizens live in poverty, and work in mills. Margaret meets John Thornton, a master of one of the mills. Margaret is compassionate and opinionated. Mr. Thornton is self-serious and brash. You might be able to guess just from the juxtaposition of those characteristics what happens next. [SPOILERS NOT REALLY] They fall in love, and their romance is so beautiful and moving to watch on-screen. Everything else in the show is pretty good, too, but I honestly cannot get over them as a couple. I've been rewatching clips of them together, and listening to this beautiful song on repeat which plays at the very end of the series:

I could say a million other things about this series, and its competency as an adaptation, but all I can say at the moment is that Margaret Hale and John Thornton are my new OTP, and they are beautiful, and you should watch this series. I have been bursting with emotion over these two for the past 24 hours since watching it. Also, I mean, this is Richard Armitage as Mr. Thornton:

COME ON. 

Quick Chat: SOMEONE AT A DISTANCE

You know when you go into a book really knowing nothing about the plot, or the tone, or have any idea about what kind of book it will be, and then as you begin reading the characters seem as if they're falling into certain roles, and if those roles are what you think they are, then the novel will be a particular kind of story, and you don't want it to be that particular kind of story, because then some of the characters whom you have an affection toward will not end up so well, and the one character that you feel might be the interloper, will actually unravel and smash everything good and pure in the world, and as the reader you'll end up feeling stressed and emotionally mashed up by the end of the book? Yeah that is Someone at a Distance by Dorothy Whipple. I mean that in the best way possible because it is a seriously fantastically written book, but as I began to read the novel there were so many small indicators that the novel would be much more than a beautifully written diversion, which I did not want to admit.

Please note that this is another beautiful edition from Persephone Books.

1/3 of the way through the novel, one of the main characters revealed herself to be evil, terrible, and ready to break up a marriage. That character is Louise Lanier. She is a from a small village in France called Amigny. Louise is desperate to get out. She thinks everyone and everything there is provincial and dull. One way in which she does this is by answering an ad placed by Old Mrs. North, a wealthy aging widowed matriarch looking for companionship. Louise goes to stay with Old Mrs. North in her estate in the country. While there, Louise meets Old Mrs. North's youngest son, Avery, his wife, Ellen, and their teenaged children Hugh and Anne. They make up the main cast of characters.

Louise believes the entire North family is foolish, because they are too rich and too happy. Now for the first part of the novel, she is mostly harmless, or at least I wanted her to be, but the she said something that is a guaranteed sign of her evil nature. In reference to the famous novel by Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, Louise notes,

It was a book she knew by heart. The only character in literature for whom she felt a profound sympathy, with whom she felt an affinity even, was Emma Bovary. No one, she said to herself, understands better than I do why she did as she did. It was the excruciating boredom of provincial life (132). 

Emma Bovary is a notorious character in literature. No doubt she is an amazing character, extremely well-written and fully-realized. I love her. I love the novel. But she is a terrible person. And the novel is basically her being a terrible person, and using things such as 'the boredom of provincial life' as an excuse to do bad things. So the fact that Louise seems to completely empathize with her is a serious warning sign. After reading that, I froze and said to myself, 'Nooooooooooooo.' From that point on, I was overwhelmed with a feeling of dread, of just waiting to see how exactly Louise would do her damage. And she does all right. The rest of the novel is watching the North family unravel in slow motion, in which Louise is the main catalyst. It is a beautifully written trainwreck, and I love this novel. I just won't have the emotional faculties to re-read it any time soon.

The Lack and Abundance of ONIONS AND CUCUMBERS AND PLUMS

Onions and Cucumbers and Plums is one of those books that is like a one-in-a-million book. One of those books that so few people have read - my review on Goodreads is one of two - that there is no real scholarship on, and you just think, why have I been chosen by the Book Fates to read this? I say that because I loved this book, but in many ways, I am not the target audience for this book, there is nothing I can contribute to its legacy or subject matter, because its experiences are not mine, though I can relate here and there, and can touch the beauty of the poems. In something as intimate and personal as poetry, I want to find myself in them more so than novels, though that is not the ultimate aim of reading poetry. It is an experience, then, to read a collection like this and be so far removed from its origins and heartaches and dreams. All of this is especially important to recognize with this book, because it is partly about the loss of meaning, the loss of culture, the loss of language. Can we get to a point where something in inscrutable?

This book is a collection of poems by Jewish poets that have been translated from the original Yiddish. All of the poems were written in the twentieth century, and were translated by Sara Zweig Betsky for her Masters thesis that she was getting during WWII. She did it in reaction to the war, because she felt she could do nothing else but try and preserve something that was being destroyed. The Yiddish language, once spoken all over Eastern Europe, is a language largely lost - few speak it and study it. Partly lost because so many Jews killed in the Holocaust spoke Yiddish, and partly lost because of assimilation in the aftermath. The poems in this collection reflect the language and experiences that are largely gone. When we have books in translation, we know there is something missing. Not everything can be translated and saved, there is always a gap in understanding, but my profound misunderstanding contributed to my loving this book. There is a comfort in being the other, when it means that I can hear the stories of those I would not necessarily have ever heard before.

An example of a poem that I appreciated more because of the distance I felt from it is 'In Soft Moss, Muted Steps' by David Einhorn:

In soft moss, muted steps,
a whole week of Sabbath rest. 

You light candles every night --
your face in rosy light. 

Between the green pine tree boughs
the blue of God's blue roof top shows. 

There too someone lights Sabbath tapers --
on your face blue shadows vapor. 

So we sit, keeping watch,
waiting for a wonder night. 

Through the forest a rustle goes,
the sky splits apart and glows. 

In soft moss, muted steps,
a whole week of Sabbath rest. 

You light candles every night --
your face in rosy light.

With this poem, we see Einhorn applying the ritual of lighting candles on the Sabbath to the love he has for a woman, to her lighting candles everyday. Her daily candle-lighting is as the Sabbath rest to him. There is an intimacy and holiness to this love that is mirrored in the meaning of the Sabbath. As I'm not Jewish, I don't have this kind of connection to the idea of 'rest,' but this lack of understanding helps me feel the desire for connection in the poem, because I too have this desire to understand and connect as I read the poem.

There are a lot of gems in this collection. Since this collection is a bit hard to find, I would suggest seeking out some of these poets from the collection that were some of my favorites: J. Glatstein, Kadie Molodowsky, and Itzik Manger.

August Books

Here we are again: another month, the summer rolls on, a heat wave is breaking over New York City, I am sweating all day, and my only solace is to gaze upon the beauty of books. And with that, here are the books I bought in the month of August.

All of the books.

Books by women of color.

Books by women.

Books by white dudes.