The Best Dinner Guest: Jane Austen

When I was a kid, I never went anywhere without a book.  I was actually that kid who took a book to the playground, on field trips out of town, to the movie theater (just in case), to the bathroom, you name it.  I repeatedly got in trouble in third grade for hiding a book under my desk and reading it when I should have been learning fractions.  (This is probably why I still have trouble with fractions, even using a calculator).  Luckily, I had the kind of parents who applauded my love of books.  They were happy to give me an allowance, knowing it would be spent on books, and bought books that they thought I would like or read books out loud to my sister and me.  As I got older, I obviously learned there was a time and a place for reading, but books were never far out of reach.  My sister and I even took to reading over some meals, which my parents still refer to as "dinner reading."

Since high school, however, my reading frenzies have gone in phases.  When I was suffering from my first heartbreak in college, I stopped reading for a period of close to eight months.  My grades weren't that great at this time, either, but my parents were most concerned by my sudden disinterest in reading.  My father even, on driving me back for the winter quarter, bought me three books at the Bakersfield Borders as a special treat, in hopes of helping me get back to normal.  When I studied abroad a few months later and didn't have internet, I finally went back to reading anything and everything.

I haven't gone through another eight month break like that, but there have definitely been times when I haven't found myself absorbed by a book.  (Coincidentally, these seem to be times when I am either feeling down or overwhelmed, like this past fall, as I struggle to adjust to a full-time job and trying to keep our home afloat while my husband worked and studied full-time).

Today, however, I experienced a few moments of reading pleasure that took me back to my childhood.  I reached the climactic moment in my book on the bus coming home, right before my stop.  I contemplated staying on the bus until I finished the book, but the prospect of possibly getting lost when it was -6 Celsius (about 20 Fahrenheit) didn't seem too appealing.  Agonizing over what to do, I finally got off the bus, put my gloves on, opened my book back up, and walked home reading.  Having to keep an eye out for ice slowed me down a little, but I made it home and got to the end just as I stepped into the elevator.

Even Bluegrass seems intrigued

The book that held me so enthralled was Jane Austen's Persuasion.  It was the only book of hers I hadn't read.  I'm not sure why.  I read Sense and Sensibility when I was 11, Emma one summer vacation spent in Poland, Pride and Prejudice for a class, and Northanger Abbey and Mansfield Park the summer before I started college.  Persuasion was the only one I never read. And to be honest, I had little interest in reading it.  My sister and I had once watched the film version, and all I remembered was that the main character was "old" and not that pretty and the story was sad.  I was also put off by how short it was in comparison to her other novels.  I worried that maybe Austen just hadn't cared enough about her own heroine to write her a full-length novel.  The other day, though, while I was wondering what to read after my Prus, I thought, why not give it a try?

And it proved to be another book I could hardly put down.  Now that I am myself no longer in the bloom of youth (at least not by Austen's standards), Anne Elliot's mature age of 27 doesn't bother me.  Although Austen was supposedly unable to edit Persuasion to the extent she did her other novels, in many ways it's a more tightly constructed narrative.  While there are secondary plots, each of them is, directly or indirectly, connected to the story of Anne and Wentworth.  And while Austen's digressions are always charming and entertaining, I didn't feel I missed the multiple secondary narratives.  The social commentary is also sharper than usual.  There is no complicated syntax that allows for multiple interpretations.  Whereas the ending of Northanger Abbey can be read as chastising either the parents or the flighty children, in Persuasion, the shallow characters like Elizabeth and Sir Walter are soundly and definitely punished.  Often in Austen's other works, only the truly villainous characters are not redeemed, while the comically vapid ones are made to look foolish but then let off the hook.  Not so in this last novel.  And in many ways, this is more satisfying.

As I was reading this book, I found myself wondering what it is about Jane Austen that makes her so appealing.  She is beloved by all kinds of readers, from those who generally avoid classic works, to those who live and die by dense postmodernist poetry.  She's basically the closest thing Regency England has to a bestseller.  She has her detractors, like all popular artists, but she remains adored by millions of readers.  Why?

I can't offer any new opinions about her enduring popularity.  But I have some thoughts on why I've loved her for fourteen years--unreservedly, unashamedly.  To begin with, all of her heroines, from Elizabeth Bennet to Fanny Price, are intelligent.  I was (as has probably been made clear) a huge nerd all throughout school, and I still think of myself as a nerdy bookworm.  To find so many smart girls the object of affection for dashing men like Mr. Darcy and and Captain Wentworth and even Mr. Willoughby was kind of a consolation for someone like me.  The mean girls are always punished and the social climbers are ridiculed.  But aside from these fairly trivial, personal reactions, Austen has written some of the funniest books ever published.  Her wry wit practically sparkles from page to page.  It's almost impossible to find a sentence that doesn't contain a laugh.  About how many other books can that be said?  Her language is precise and her complex syntax often sounds as though she's speaking to you directly from the page.  It's hard not to feel, after you've read one of her books, like you've somehow befriended Jane Austen.  There are hundreds of other authors I admire and books I've loved.  But if I could choose one person from history to invite over for dinner, I am pretty sure it would be Jane Austen.

Prus, The Doll, and the Internet

Studies have shown that regular internet access and usage have decreased our ability to concentrate for long periods of time.  Over the past few years, this inability to focus has become painfully clear.  If I sit down to watch a movie, I will inevitably get up to make myself some tea, check my e-mail, send a text message, play with my cats, or paint my nails.  It's not that I don't enjoy the movie--it's just there are so many other things I could also be doing.  Even better, there are things I can do while I'm watching a movie.  Multi-tasking!  That's what women are supposed to be good at, right?

However, there are more disturbing implications of this reliance on the internet.  I have students (young and older alike) who refuse to part with their phones.  Yesterday, an adult student openly checked his Facebook in front of me.  When I told him to put his phone away, he protested that he'd finished the exercise.  What did people do before smartphones?  They'd have looked through the book to review vocabulary or brush up on essay structure.  Not this student.  He was finished, and he wanted Facebook.

What has been even worse for me than the occasional distracted student has been my tendency to read shorter books because I know they won't take up as much time.  I read more than a dozen books over the fall, and while some were light fare (such as Mindy Kaling's entertaining book "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?"), others were legitimate literature, like Graham Greene's "The Human Factor."  One thing all the books had in common, however, was that they were comparatively short, i.e., under 350 pages.  There's certainly nothing wrong with reading short books, of course.  What I do think is a problem, however, is refusing to read longer books because they take up too much time.  And this was the trap into which I almost fell.  I almost missed reading one of the most incredible books I've ever come across, all because it was 705 pages.

Last year I tried to read Boleslaw Prus's The Doll on my mother's recommendation.  I got about 70 pages in and then decided I did not like it enough to lug it back and forth from the MLA conference.  This year, when I mentioned to my mom that I was considering trying to do a PhD in Comparative Literature/Slavic Literature, instead of English Literature, she told me I would need to be much better-read in Eastern European literature, and she again recommended The Doll.  Dutifully, I picked the book up again.  I started back at the beginning, and again found myself uninterested, and, moreover, working very hard to follow the chronology.  One day, I decided I would read for an hour more and if I still wasn't interested, I'd give the book up once and for all.  I didn't think I was ready for a 700-page commitment.

That day, after another chapter or two of exposition, I suddenly found myself thrust into the middle of Wokulski's tragic preoccupation with the icy Izabela.  And I couldn't stop reading.

Boleslaw Prus is considered (by many people better-versed than I) to be the master of Polish realism, and his style has been compared to Balzac's, while his all-encompassing view of Warsaw society in the 1870s is considered as skillful as Tolstoy's in Anna Karenina.  High praise for a book that too few readers have heard of.  Part of what I find fascinating about Prus's novel is that he presents characters that manage to be interesting without being idealized.  While I loved Anna Karenina, I didn't particularly care for Anna Karenina herself.  I knew I should admire her for her refusal to be conventional and her desperate unwillingness to give up on love, but I despised her for abandoning her son, and I thought Vronsky seemed hardly likely to inspire such passion.  (Lest my facetious tone be misunderstood, I did love the novel, and absolutely consider it one of the four or five greatest works ever written). In The Doll, Wokulski falls in love with the beautiful Izabela without even knowing her.  She, in turn, is shallow and selfish.  And yet I continually found myself hoping that each of them would somehow have a happy ending.  What makes both Wokulski and Izabela--neither of them particularly prototypical protagonists--so fascinating is how painfully a product of their sociohistorical context they are.  Wokulski has worked his way up the social ladder by making millions in trade with Russian merchants (and, according to several characters in the book, has betrayed his country by not trying to trade within it), but he never quite becomes a part of the highest circles.  In one impassioned speech, he tells the useless Prince:  "Mr Starski, who never did anything and got his money Heaven knows where, stood ten storeys higher than I in your estimation.  What am I saying?  Any foreign vagabond could get into your drawing-rooms, which I had to conquer with fifteen per cent interest on the capital entrusted to me.  It is these people, not I who had your respect.  Bah!  They even had far wider-reaching privileges...Although each of these respected men is worth less than the doorman in my store, for he does something, and at least doesn't infect the community" (624).  Izabela may be unkind and selfish, but likewise, she was born into an inescapable ideology, which, in her case, values beautiful women with sizable dowries.  Her father's bankruptcy leaves her few choices, as most of her suitors abandon her.  Even Wokulski, who is willing to do almost anything for her, falls in love with her at a distance because of her beauty, and then is disappointed to discover the angelic face masks a contemptuous soul.  In a conversation with the spirited widow Mrs. Wasowska, Wokulski agrees that women like Izabela "were brought up in a certain sphere of society and in a given epoch, and amidst certain notions.  They're like a rash, which isn't a disease, but is a symptom of sickness in society" (634).  What makes The Doll even bleaker than Anna Karenina is that in the end, neither of the two principal characters uses suicide as a means of escaping an unjust world.  Instead, they remain constrained and unhappy.

Even more wonderful than the tragic story of Wokulski and Izabela, however, is the portrait of Warsaw society as a whole.  Each of the minor characters is beautifully detailed, and no character is left without a personality.  There is the old clerk, Rzecki, who worships Napoleon (all the Napoleons), and is fascinated with politics, or P, as he surreptitiously refers to the subject in his journal.  The Baroness Krzeszowska is the closest thing to a villain the novel has, and she manages to be realistically horrible while also being buffoonish.  Her battles with the socialist students who repeatedly drop herring on her head when she pokes it out the window are endlessly riotous, and her persecution of the poor Mrs. Stawksa causes some genuinely anxious moments.  The Baron's ridiculous duel with Wokulski and the increasing economic success of Szlangbaum also provide clear pictures of this world in which Wokulski and Izabela find themselves trapped.

After I finished the book, I realized how silly it would have been not to read this book just because it was long.  When I was younger, it seemed perfectly normal for a book to spend some time providing background.  But nowadays, we all want instant gratification.  If a book isn't captivating by the end of the first page, it's not worth our time.  No wonder so many young authors find themselves drawn to writing memoirs about drug addiction or outlandish murder stories.  They know they have only seconds to get their reader's attention and keep it.  After I read the first paragraph of Gillian Flynn's Dark Places, in which she manages to drop the words "blood," "murders," and "dead sisters," I couldn't imagine putting the book down.  And it was an entertaining read, all right.  But it was no Prus.  And yet I almost gave up on this classic, because it took a few chapters to get to the real meat of the story.

Are we destined, eventually, to stop reading the greatest works of literature, all because they're long and slow and meandering?  I hope not.

New Year's Resolutions: Eating

One of my resolutions for 2014 was to eat more healthily.  It's involved a little more planning, but aside from yesterday--where after four hours of sleep and freezing temperatures, fish sticks and fries were all I wanted--I've actually managed pretty well, and have even tried out some new recipes.

Homemade burgers with avocado and simple salad

Chicken paillards with roast squash, sauteed spinach, and caramelized onions, plus rice on the side

Very simple chicken salad--chicken, avocado, feta, cucumber, and lettuce

Salmon, potato salad, and tzatziki sauce

Dzialki and Smoked Fish

When I visited my mother's aunt and uncle, my Ciocia Jagoda and Wujek Zenek, they took me to their dzialka.  A dzialka is commonly translated into English as an allotment garden.  For people who live in city apartments, dzialki are small gardens with tiny houses attached, which allow city-dwellers the freedom to garden and relax.  Ciocia and Wujek's dzialka was just a few minutes away from their small apartment near the center of Olsztyn, but it felt as though we were far out in the countryside.  Each dzialka that we passed was different.  Some had tiny garden sheds and big vegetable patches, while others had actual houses and barbecue pits and even fish ponds.

Ciocia and Wujek's dzialka was utterly captivating.  When they purchased this patch of land, there had been a very small shed.  Over time, however, they had expanded it into a very small kind of a house.  There was a foldout couch, and a small stove, and even a keg of beer on tap.  The highlight was a porch they'd added onto the main part of the house, with two comfy couches and a square part cleared away that they told me was for dancing.  There was a beautiful garden with a big apple tree and bushes with raspberries, red currants, and wild strawberries (all fruits I associate with my childhood and Poland.  My mother loved walking through Mazurian forests and picking berries, and whenever we visited Poland she would reminisce about those times.  As a result, berries make me think of Poland and of taking walks with my mother).  They had built a small greenhouse for growing vegetables in the back, and Wujek had even assembled a makeshift smokehouse, where he proudly showed me rows of sausage and fish hanging from the ceiling.

The dzialka

                                                                     

Ciocia and Wujek dancing

 For some reason, visiting the dzialka seemed especially emblematic of Polish culture, for reasons I can't quite articulate (although I will try). I loved the idea of living in a city, in an apartment, but not having to give up the idea of a garden.  And I loved the idea of smoking your own fish and growing your own vegetables.  My paternal grandfather in Mississippi had always grown his own vegetables, too, but it had been years since I'd visited his garden, and as a child it seemed more like a strange habit my eccentric grandfather had than like a possible, sustainable lifestyle choice.

In 2011, Gordon and I went back to Olsztyn for my cousin Olgierd's baby's christening.  This was Gordon's first time meeting anybody in my family (besides my mother), so it was a big deal.  I knew Gordon would love Ciocia and Wujek, because they are warm and kind and quirky (and Ciocia even plays the accordion).  What I had not expected (this shows how little I actually knew him at that point!) was for him to be as charmed by their dzialka as I was.  As we walked through the dzialka community, Gordon commented on how nice everything was, but I imagined he was simply currying favor.  Then, we walked into Ciocia and Wujek's dzialka, and his jaw dropped.  Although Wujek speaks no English, and Gordon's Polish is a bit limited, they managed--somehow--to become lifelong friends in the course of Gordon's tour.  Wujek was thrilled to have someone genuinely interested in seeing how the beer keg was installed and hearing how to tell if the cucumbers are ready for pickling.

Gordon and Wujek discuss grilling techniques

                                             

Gordon and the greenhouse

                                                       

Now Gordon and I frequently daydream about buying some land in Poland and building a little house.  Although at first I thought of these plans as only dreams and nothing more, I've gradually come around to hoping desperately that one day we do indeed have a little homestead somewhere in Poland.  This past summer, as we got ready to move into our first little apartment together as a married couple, we built a lot of the things we needed.  I discovered that Gordon is excellent at making all kinds of things, from guitar rack to tables to bookshelves, and I am a pretty good assistant and a decent painter.  It seems possible to build a house.  It seems possible to grow our own vegetables and maybe even smoke our own fish.

Relaxing with my niece Julia