Dr. Zhivago, Pasternak

If there was a writing style I should like to emulate, it is Pasternak's. I don't know what it takes to be a writer like him - political strife, disillusion, poverty, sexual passion - but I admire his writing style exceedingly.

The intro by John Bayley of Oxford notes the unconventional form, and poetry, of Pasternak. The poetry refers to the material richness of the descriptions, the mesmerizing everyday details. "This is Pasternak's remarkable power of conveying the wonderful oddity of objects which is the life force of his poems..." The unconventional form is the somewhat chaotic rythmn of the novel, the fairy-tale abruptness with which events occur and people appear.

The lyricism of the prose, and the zeitgeist (the temporality but richness of life?) resonates with Michael Ondaatje's The Skin of a Lion.

When I read Lord of the Rings a week ago, I loved the epic form, the archaic turn of phrase, and how multiple characters and viewpoints are handled. It struck me how personal an epic can be - the greatest events are handled from the viewpoint of a bystander, recounted by someone, instead of being narrated directly. But sometimes Tolkien delved into the personal emotions of a hero, as well as of a more common (but nonetheless heroic) character.

All the same, in the grandeur of the world the narrative voice seems removed in an epic as such.

I read somewhere C. S. Lewis conceived of his stories in terms of plot, and the characters were mere pawns by means to achieve this end. I tend to generalize that to the fantasy genre in general. In a bildungsroman, however, I've often felt that the plot is only occasion for a character to breathe and have their being in; it's the character that matters.

I like the epic scale of Dr. Zhivago - it assumes "the dimensions of a national myth" , has that wonderful coincidential cast of characters- but it remains Zhivago's story.

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As for Zhivago himself - have I ever met anyone like him? Intelligent, introspective, with a circle of friendly acquaintances despite his ineptitude for common life - he is idealistic and perhaps he is so absorbed in his ideals that he deteriorates. What makes him attractive to Lara, to Marina? What makes him love Lara with no wholehearted contrition, or dimunition of love for Tonia? Women are attracted to that introspective type - perhaps with a maternal desire for someone to care for, perhaps their unkemptness is coloured with romance.

And is sexual passion essential to intelligentsia?

The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisnero

I found the novella in my mother's laundry room and fell to reading it, more shamelessly to fulfill my "read 52 books a year" quota than anything else. But I picked it up because I've heard the title long ago, and was intrigued.

It's a candid telling of childhood poverty, coming of age, tragic and comic characters, in the same era and social setting of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. (So much of it must resonate with my mom's childhood.) The chapters pages are brief as poems, each a tribute to a character or incident.

The author is of course hispanic, and falls into the category of "writing what we know." Will I, too, write what I know? Will my stories (which lately have been developing along the lines of character sketches, of tragic and the burden of parentage and immigraion) be a social product too?

Kilmeny of the Orchard, L. M. Montgomery

Upon re-reading (I love my LMM's so well, that most of her novels I have reread countless times) I find that Kilmeny is underrated. The characters are original: they vary from the LMM formula. Robert Williamson, the gossip of Lindsay, for example, is a man, a rare choice for Montgomery; and a defiance against stereotypes. His wife, on the contrary, holds her counsel. Thomas Gordon is reserved, stoic, but intellectual- he can be fired up by discussion. There's a very conventional but colourful flavour to teh way Eric's father talks. Eric is a good depiction of a charming young man. I know (or holds someone on a pedestal by fancy, esteems) people like that: genuine, truly charismatic.

The plot holds, and it's a story well-told.

Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

The flyleaf bookcover writes that Edgar Allan Poe is the father of short stories. The tales, though I have long known and thrilled to some of their very names - the Tell-Tale Heart, the Masque of the Red Death, the Cask of Amontillado - aren't as delightfully engaging as classics sometimes are. The turn of phrase sometimes chimes with my very soul in Dickens or Tolkien.

Poe's stories make me wonder if a short story isn't really an essay, illustrated with a fictional incident. There is a thesis on human psychology preambling every tale.

The prose - constant prose, verging towards stream of consciousness, little dialogue - gets very tedious at times.

I thought I would delight in a good volume of ghost stories, but I struggled to stay focused on them.