Tender and funny tragi-comedy about a family of children, raised in Jamaica and sent back to England on a ship that gets waylaid by pirates. Hughes is one of my favorites for that unique bawdy British humor and he really hits on what creatures we all were as children as he describes all of their thoughts and reasonings and games with one another. I loved this little book.
After the kids have a laughing attack:
"...the group presently broke up. But they had all to avoid each other's eye for a long while, if they were not to risk another attack.
It was Laura who was cured the quickest. She suddenly discovered what a beautiful deep cave her arm-pit made, and decided to keep fairies in it in future. For some while she could think of nothing else." (289)
The kids are about to be banished from the pirate ship forever. Little Rachael cannot part with her "babies".
""My babies! My babies!" she shrieked, and began running all over the ship, routing out bits of rag, fuzzy rope-ends, paint-pots ... her arms were soon full.
"Here, you can't take all that junk!" dissuaded Otto.
"Oh but my darlings, I can't leave you behind!" cried Rachael piteously. Out rushed the cook, just in time to retrieve his ladle -- and a battle-royal began." (322)
:) (below)
"A shy little boy of about her own age, with brown eyes and a nice smile, his long hair brushed smooth as silk, his clothes neat and sweet-smelling, sidled up to Rachel.
"What's your name?" she asked him
"Harold."
She told him hers.
"How much do you weigh?" he asked her.
"I don't know."
"You look rather heavy. May I see if I can lift you?"
"Yes."
He clasped his arms round her stomach from behind, leant back, and staggered a few paces with her. Then he set her down, the friendship cemented." (327-328)
(New York: The Modern Library, 1932)
Friday, March 21, 2008
Monday, March 10, 2008
The Magus by John Fowles
This was unlike any book I've ever read... such a strange, convoluted tale. It demands the curiosity and doggedness of the reader as much as it does the eagerness of Nicholas to want to know and experience more. I loved the whole idea of this microcosmic, isolated journey of a man towards self-knowledge, how it was by turns hopeful and frustrating, graphic and sweet, so intellectually rewarding, and ooooh my goodness now I want to clamber all over an uninhabited Grecian island in all of its harsh and unforgiving beauty. Thanks Nolan!
"She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice." (30)
"It was not only the solitude -- it was Greece. It made conventional English notions of what was moral and immoral ridiculous; whether or not I did the socially unforgivable seemed in itself merely a matter of appetite, like smoking or not smoking a new brand of cigarette -- as trivial as that, from a moral point of view." (59)
"I had guessed, as she had talked, what was missing from her account of her abortive love affaire: the delicate balance in her of physical timidity and sensual imagination... the first must have made the man attractive to her initially, the second had condemned him when it came to the point -- all of which gave her a genuinely nymphlike quality; one her sister, despite her playing of the part that night, lacked. This girl did quite literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attemps to tame. She set little boundaries, almost like snares, to see if one understood -- behaved, advanced, withdrew, as she wanted. Yet behind it all I foresaw an eventual place without boundaries, where she would one day allow me anything..." (374-375)
"I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved. The dry trees in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical." (467)
"...that evening I went to an Italian restaurant we had once been fond of; Alison had been fond of. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers' staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occured to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless . . . speciesless." (584-585)
(1978 revised edition. New York: Dell, 1985)
"She stood there in her white dress, small, innocent-corrupt, coarse-fine, an expert novice." (30)
"It was not only the solitude -- it was Greece. It made conventional English notions of what was moral and immoral ridiculous; whether or not I did the socially unforgivable seemed in itself merely a matter of appetite, like smoking or not smoking a new brand of cigarette -- as trivial as that, from a moral point of view." (59)
"I had guessed, as she had talked, what was missing from her account of her abortive love affaire: the delicate balance in her of physical timidity and sensual imagination... the first must have made the man attractive to her initially, the second had condemned him when it came to the point -- all of which gave her a genuinely nymphlike quality; one her sister, despite her playing of the part that night, lacked. This girl did quite literally flee the satyr and invite him on. There was a wild animal in her, but a true wild animal, intensely suspicious of wrong moves, of too obvious attemps to tame. She set little boundaries, almost like snares, to see if one understood -- behaved, advanced, withdrew, as she wanted. Yet behind it all I foresaw an eventual place without boundaries, where she would one day allow me anything..." (374-375)
"I looked round the trees. Somewhere eyes were on me. But nothing moved. The dry trees in the sun, the scrub in the lifeless shadow. Once again fear, fear and mystery, swept over me. The thin net of reality, these trees, this sun. I was infinitely far from home. The profoundest distances are never geographical." (467)
"...that evening I went to an Italian restaurant we had once been fond of; Alison had been fond of. It was still the same, popular with the poorer academic and artistic population of Bloomsbury: research graduates, out-of-work actors, publishers' staff, mostly young, and my own kind. The clientele had not changed, but I had. I listened to the chatter around me; and was offput, and then alienated, by its insularity, its suddenly seen innocence. I looked round, to try to find someone I might hypothetically want to know better, become friendly with; and there was no one. It was the unneeded confirmation of my loss of Englishness; and it occured to me that I must be feeling as Alison had so often felt: a mixture, before the English, of irritation and bafflement, of having this same language, same past, so many same things, and yet not belonging to them any more. Being worse than rootless . . . speciesless." (584-585)
(1978 revised edition. New York: Dell, 1985)
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