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Open Letters Monthly Archive Feature: Novel Readings by Rohan Maitzen
Pejorative generalizations about the ‘traditional novel,’ like debates over the ‘death of the novel,’ often seem to me unduly preoccupied with form, as if broadening the range of human possibilities expressed through fiction isn’t also an innovation or revision. The Fountain Overflows is a good reminder that just because a novel is linear, has characters, and tells [...]
Read MoreIn remembrance, from the Novel Readings archive. This volume is subtitled “The First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends: Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow.” The editors, Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, explain in their ‘Note to the Text’ that they have abridged the letters, sometimes significantly, in order to “lay [...]
Read MoreI’ve been rereading The Daughter of Time for decades, so it’s odd that until now I had never read another novel by Josephine Tey. Mind you, in some respects The Daughter of Time is sui generis. And indeed all Brat Farrar has in common with it is Tey’s refreshing prose and keen eye for character. If I were writing one [...]
Read MoreWe seem to have passed that tipping point past which we hurtle towards the end of term. I feel as if it was only just the weekend, and tomorrow it will be Friday again! Happily, it will also be the Friday before a long weekend, which will give us all time to catch up, or rest [...]
Read MoreI have little to say about Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins. I enjoyed it very much — but it didn’t provoke me to critical thought. A symptom: not once, while reading it, did I reach for a pencil to jot down a note or a page number, which I almost always do — partly because I anticipate [...]
Read MoreIt’s the third dark, rainy day in a row, just the kind of weather to inspire gloom and brooding! Even David Copperfield isn’t entirely working its magic, not only because I don’t feel as if my class sessions on it have been going very well (in response to which I opted to not even try to elicit [...]
Read MoreMy local book club met Monday night to discuss The Talented Mr. Ripley. We were all newcomers to Highsmith, and though not everyone exactly enjoyed reading the novel (I definitely did), I think we were all intrigued and impressed by it — or perhaps I should say by her, and the quietly insidious way she got us [...]
Read MoreWe had our last class on Jane Eyre in 19th-Century Fiction on Monday. Reflecting on my own diminishing enthusiasm for the novel, I’ve been thinking that one of my problems is not only over-familiarity but also difficulty seeing the novel anymore — it just doesn’t rise fresh from the page anymore but comes trailing clouds of interpretation. Why [...]
Read MoreI can’t take any credit for interpreting Elizabeth Taylor’s strange, gloomily elegant Palladian as a pastiche of Austen and Brontë. Not only does the back cover of my Virago edition baldly state that the novel “examines the realities of life for a latter-day Jane Eyre” and explicitly compare Taylor’s method here to Austen’s in Northanger Abbey, but [...]
Read MoreAh, the holiday weekend, with its leisure reading! It’s just a fond memory right now … Well, I exaggerate slightly, as I’ve certainly had more hectic terms than this one (this time last year, just for instance, I was teaching three courses, including one entirely new one), but I have been pretty busy with class [...]
Read MoreHappy Canadian Thanksgiving! It is a beautifully crisp sunny fall weekend here: I treated myself to an amble through the Public Gardens on Saturday, where the gold-tinged foliage provided a lovely backdrop for the remaining bright flowers. The Gardens are my favourite spot in the city, a perfect place for “a green thought in a [...]
Read MoreI finally picked up P. D. James’s Talking About Detective Fiction, which I’ve been mildly interested in reading ever since it came out in 2009. I say ‘mildly’ because I’ve read all of James’s novels (some of them multiple times) as well as her autobiography and numerous interviews with her, not to mention essays, critical articles, [...]
Read MoreWhat if Jonathan Franzen opened a bookstore, called it “The Good Novel” and refused to carry any of Jennifer Wiener’s books — not to mention Dan Brown’s, Tom Clancy’s, Jodi Picoult’s, or E. L. James’s? It’s only too easy to imagine the brouhaha that would ensue, with cries of “excellence!” on one side and “elitism!” [...]
Read MoreOnce again, a new month has brought with it a sparkling new issue of Open Letters Monthly. If you haven’t already, I hope you’ll go check it out. As always, there’s a wide range of coverage and styles. We’re spotlighting Steve Danziger’s review of Jonathan Franzen’s new translation of Karl Kraus (you know, the one in [...]
Read MoreMy sincere thanks to everyone who weighed in, here or on Twitter, with advice about handling the classroom slump brought on by Waverley. Here’s an update on what I decided to do. First of all, I did decide to do something different, rather than just pressing on with my usual strategies. I had to admit to myself [...]
Read MoreIn class this week one of my students asked me when I last taught Waverley. “2006-7,” I promptly replied — I knew this because I had gone back to my old files to see what notes and handouts I had in reserve.* It used to be a fixture on my syllabus for The 19thC Novel from Austen [...]
Read MoreWhen I’d finished puzzling over A Far Cry From Kensington, I decided I’d had enough Muriel Spark for now. There are just so many other books I really want to read, after all. But then I remembered that I’d picked up a copy of her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae, from the public library’s discard sale (it’s shocking, really, what [...]
Read MoreThe second full week of term has gone by already: it’s amazing how time seems to accelerate when things get busier. In both my classes we have moved from throat-clearing and context-setting to richer discussions about our readings: in The 19th-Century Novel from Austen to Dickens, we’ve wrapped up our work on Persuasion, and in Mystery and Detective Fiction [...]
Read MoreMy local book club met last night to discuss Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry From Kensington. We always try to follow some kind of thread from one book to the next; after reading two novels by Elizabeth Taylor we were thinking about other mid-20th century women novelists and while Muriel Spark seemed like an obvious choice, The Prime [...]
Read MoreI began writing posts about my teaching plans and experiences because I thought it might contribute to demystifying our profession — and perhaps counteract, just a little bit, the way it is sometimes demonized (or ridiculed). I discovered after that first year that there were real benefits in this for me, and, not incidentally (if [...]
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