Tag Archives: The Classics Club

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

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East of Eden cover

East of Eden by John Steinbeck was first published in 1952 and it was high time that I got around to reading it. I suspect that everybody who is a keen reader already got there long before I did, it’s probably a set book in many schools. I’ve read a lot of Steinbeck’s books and have never been disappointed and sometimes I absolutely love them, East of Eden comes into that category. It’s 714 pages and I read it in three days as I could hardly put it down.

The setting is the Salinas Valley in Northern California and Steinbeck said about East of Eden: “It has everything in it I have been able to learn about my craft or profession in all these years.” He further claimed: “I think everything else I have written has been, in a sense, practice for this.”

I must admit that the title East of Eden didn’t mean anything to me but it is of course from the Bible, Genesis – where Cain was told to go East of Eden after he killed his brother Abel and a version of that story is repeated throughout the book. The main story takes place from the beginning of the 20th century until just after World War 1 but does dip back to the 1880s at times. Mainly it’s about good and evil and how some people are just bad right through to the core whilst others are aware of their weaknesses and fight against their instincts. Many of the characters are from Steinbeck’s own family or neighbours.

As ever Steinbeck’s descriptions of the surroundings and his insight into the human condition, good and evil are a treat to read and I’ve always been slightly puzzled that he apparently didn’t have any Scottish blood in him as those are traits that are particularly prominent in Scottish literature – think Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and many others.

Steinbeck’s maternal family – the Hamiltons – feature in the book and much is made of them coming originally from Ireland and their fierce Presbyterianism, so that solved my problem of how Steinbeck could seem so Scottish – because he was obviously of Scottish descent although somewhere along the way they forgot about going to Ireland from Scotland. Maybe when people migrate more than once it’s easiest to only recall the most recent past. As the Hamiltons were Protestants then it’s likely that they were amongst the Scots who were encouraged by the British government to settle in northern Ireland in an attempt to keep those Roman Catholic Irish people down.

Anyway, all the Scottish elements of writing are in his books, but wherever his talent sprang from he was a great writer and after reading Travels with Charley I came to the conclusion he was a great human being too. If by any unlikely chance you haven’t read any of his books – you should definitely give him a go.

I read this one for The Classics Club.

The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola

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The Ladies' Paradise cover

The Ladies’ Paradise by Emile Zola was first published in 1883, but it’s set in the 1860s when Paris was undergoing a huge rebuilding. It’s part of the Rougon-Macquart series and features Octave Mouret as one of the main characters. The Mourets are an illegitimate branch of the family.

Octave Mouret is an ambitious young widower who sets about building up the biggest department store in Paris, The Ladies’ Paradise, at a time when shoppers were served by hundreds of small independent shops. He employs the sort of marketing devices which we see today, and they have the same effects now as they had then. The small shop owners are unable to keep up with the cheaper prices which The Ladies’ Paradise can market the goods at and eventually they all go out of business. Silk fabric is used as a loss leader to entice the ladies into the department store. Mouret manages to sell it so cheaply only because he drives such a hard bargain with the silk manufacturer that they end up going out of business.

As you would expect from Zola the descriptions of the merchandise on sale are seductive, the lace department is a favourite with the ladies, some of whom are completely intoxicated by it and end up shoplifting.

The main character is Denise, a young woman who has travelled to Paris with her two young brothers after the death of their parents. It’s a shock to the youngsters who are used to rural life and they are having to stay with an uncle and his wife temporarily, under sufferance. The uncle’s business is already being damaged by the setting up of the department store across the road from his shop. But Denise is fascinated by the new store and is on the side of Mouret as she thinks anything which means that the public can get cheap goods is a step in the right direction.

The book details how Mouret’s business ideas developed and how his shop rapidly became a place where the women of Paris could go on their own, the only other place which they could do that was church and his store became a cathedral to commercialism. The smell of such a mass of women in the store was at times overwhelming (the mind boggles).

Store managers are still employing exactly the same principles when setting up departments in stores, with goods being changed around constantly, meaning that the shopper has to trail all over the place to find what they want, obviously the owners hope that you will pick up other things on the way to find whatever it is you wanted to buy in the first place. Zola was writing a history of French life through his fiction and he undertook a huge amount of research.

I thought of the farmers in the UK who have been put in the position of having to sell their milk at below cost price because they have been bullied by the supermarket to do so, many of them having been put out of business because of it, nothing much seems to have changed in our capitalist world.

I wasn’t at all sure about this book to begin with because the subject matter wasn’t too exciting to me, but after about 100 pages I really got into it. I believe that the BBC serialised the book last year as The Paradise but I didn’t watch it so I have no idea how well it was done.

I read this book for The Classics Club, another one ticked off, but in fact I didn’t have this book on my list, it was a random choice from the library.

Mr Harrison’s Confessions by Elizabeth Gaskell

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I’ve read a lot of Gaskell’s novels including Cranford – way back when… but I don’t remember ever seeing Mr Harrison’s Confessions which is a prequel to Cranford. As soon as I started reading it I realised that when the BBC did their fairly recent dramatisation of Cranford they sensibly used this book too.

It’s an amusing tale of what happens when a young doctor moves to the rural village of Duncombe. He is given a very warm welcome by all but especially those who have daughters to marry off, and in no time he finds himself in a tricky situation – or three, and all because he heeded Mr Morgan, his medical mentor’s advice.

It’s a very quick read at just 106 pages and I’ll be counting it on my Classics Club reading list.

Love by Elizabeth von Arnim

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Love cover

Love by Elizabeth von Arnim is the book which I got in this month’s Classics Club Spin. I’m quite late in getting around to writing about it, but you know what it’s like, sometimes life just gets in the way of what you really want to be doing!

I really enjoyed this book although it is quite a sad read because Elizabeth von Arnim was writing about her own experience of having a relationship with a much younger man, which ended badly. This book was first published in 1925.

Catherine was obsessed with a play called The Immortal Hour which has been playing at King’s Cross. She had seen it umpteen times and eventually she strikes up a friendship with Christopher who shares her obsession. Christopher had noticed Catherine long before she was aware of him. He was drawn to her petite figure and beauty and took her to be a young woman who didn’t have much money as she always wore the same clothes. He wasn’t to know that Catherine had a married daughter and she was only hard up because her late husband had been so afraid that if he died she would attract fortune hunters that he decided to leave everything to his daughter, and left his wife to struggle along on a very small annual allowance. It didn’t seem to occur to him that his daughter would eventually become heir to his large fortune and in turn would be the target of fortune hunters, particularly one local vicar!

By the time Christopher saw Catherine in the cruel light of day he was already in love with her and was just shocked at how tired she was looking. As you would expect Catherine is charmed when she realises that he thinks she is much younger than she is and her happiness means that people see only laughter lines, not the age wrinkles which are really there.

So begins a battle with gravity and time and Catherine ends up spending time and money on the artistry of a marvellous make-up woman to try to be worthy of her younger man.

When Catherine’s son-in-law, who is a clergyman, finds out about her friendship with Christopher he is absolutely appalled, but Catherine points out to him that her daughter is actually over 30 years younger than he is. Surely he should be the last person to complain about an age gap between a couple, but he doesn’t see it that way.

This novel is all about hypocrisy, what is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander, but somehow often isn’t. The relationship between Catherine’s daughter Virginia and her husband Stephen is really much worse as Stephen had dodged marriage over the years, much to his mother’s chagrin, but she wasn’t to know that her son had been eyeing up young Virginia since she was in short socks! Nowadays we would say he had been grooming her and he married her as soon as she turned 18, Catherine could have been bloody minded and made him wait until her daughter turned 21, hoping that by that time she had seen sense and wasn’t so enamoured by what she obviously saw as a father figure, something which she lacked due to her own father’s early death.

Well, I don’t know about you but I feel that when the age gap between a couple is so large that one of them is old enough to be the parent of the other, then it is distinctly weird, and the few such relationships which I’ve had experience of viewing from a distance have definitely been paternalistic/maternalistic. But I suppose if that’s what makes them happy then who am I to complain.

Mind you, although I never had a daughter I must admit that if I had had one then if a man old enough to be her father had come sniffing around after her – I would have beaten him off with a brush!

Another great read from Elizabeth von Arnim.

The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene

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This book features in my Classics Club list of 55 books to read – before bucket time I suppose. It’s one of the many books by Graham Greene which we inherited from Jack’s beloved Grandad and I’ve read one or two of the others but somehow Greene and I just don’t get on. I was particularly disenchanted by the setting of The Power and the Glory as it’s Mexico in the 1930s, during one of their many revolutions. Not my idea of a good subject. The Power and the Glory seems to have been published with the title The Labyrinthine Ways in the US.

Anyway, to the book. The powers that be in the Tabasco area have decreed that the Roman Catholic Church is to be no more and the priests have all left that part of the country one way or another, been shot or have chosen to marry with a government pension rather than die.

At the beginning of the book a man who turns out to be a priest is trying to escape on a boat but he ends up missing his chance of freedom as he is asked to help a peasant in a nearby village. The man turns out to be what the peasants call a whisky priest, a poor specimen of priesthood as not only is he an alcoholic but he has also fathered a child by a villager.

Well aware of his weaknesses the priest continues to minister to villagers, trying to make up for his sins I suppose, whilst also dodging the authorities.

There’s a Judas type character and I suspect that Greene was writing an updated version of sinners and martyrs with the message that no matter what happens the Church will always survive.

Graham Greene did convert to Catholicism but he seems to been one of those people who did that because they were attracted by the thought that they could do whatever they wanted in life and then enjoy confessing it all to some poor priest and have the slate wiped clean ready for them to do it all over again. Tony Blair is another one of that ilk.

Although I must admit that I haven’t heard of Blair having it off in Catholic churches all over the world which apparently was what Greene did. It takes all sorts I suppose. Just as well that our Rev D. didn’t hear about that!

The Da Vinci Code and Meanderings

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A couple of days ago and not for the first time we drove past a road sign which said Rosslyn Chapel – 2 miles thataway. And as usual I said to myself, we must go there, but it always seems to be the way of things that we go far afield to visit tourist destinations but ignore the ones practically on our doorstep.

Anyway, last night that Da Vinci Code film was on and as I’d never seen it or read the book I deliberately avoided them both) I decided to watch the film this time around so that I could at least get a glimpse of Rosslyn Chapel on TV.

So just about three hours later we got there, and it was a brief glimpse, not at all what I expected from all the hoo ha at the time they were making the film, and I regard it as a feat of endurance that I managed to stay the course. For one thing I didn’t even realise that it starred Tom Hanks – not one of my favourites, but apart from that it was just a waste of three hours of my life that I can’t get back again, I am grateful though that I didn’t actually pay to see it in the cinema.

It dawned on me that in the time it took to watch the film we could have driven to Rosslyn Chapel, had a good snoop around it and the whole area and driven back, and it would all have taken us less time that it took us to watch the film!

I’m wondering how many more times we’ll drive past that roadsign pointing the way before we actually turn in that direction to visit Rosslyn. We were on our way somewhere else as usual, heading south of the border – no not down Mexico way but to Flodden field and a couple of antiques/bric a brac centres via the Scottish Border town of Kelso.

It was a good day out but I didn’t bring much back in the way of loot, just one old book by Rex Stout called The Broken Vase, and a couple of bits of fabric, one length with Indian elephants on it amongst other motifs and some Union Jack material, just in case it is on its way out. I must admit I’m finding it difficult to imagine the design sans the St Andrew’s flag (Saltire).
Greenlaw chip shop
On the way back home we stopped off at a chippy in Greenlaw for a fish supper – see above. The Chip Shop was run by a Frenchman and although I don’t really want to admit this, the chips were possibly the best ones I’ve ever had as they were beautifully crisp on the outside but soft in the middle without being at all soggy. We shared this as we usually find that a large fish supper is enough for two. Another thing which I like about this chippy is the lack of a polystyrene/styrofoam box. I don’t see the need for them and they litter the country and can’t be recycled. What’s wrong with plain greaseproof paper covered with wrapping paper, just like this? Actually there was so much fish that you can hardly see the chips underneath it all.

a fish supper

I’ve just realised that The Classics Spin this month is number 4 so for me that means The Lady of the Camellias by Dumas (fils).
Not as scary as Moby Dick I hope.

I’ll be posting photos of Flodden soon.