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Middlemarch - CaB Book Club 1

Started by Smeraldina Rima, October 08, 2017, 09:42:59 PM

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Middlemarch by George Eliot has eight parts of around a hundred pages each. We can aim to read one part a week over eight weeks. Write about it as you go along - sharing your thoughts and questions - or wait until the end to write everything in a lump and respond to other posts then. Since it's a long book it might be best checking in after each week to keep spirits up. Maybe Astronaut Omens can take a lead having read the book before.

Try to read at this pace so that we all get to the end at about the same time without ruining the endings for each other:

9-15 October: Part 1

16-22 October: Part 2

23-29 October: Part 3

30 Oct - 5 Nov: Part 4

6-12 November: Part 5

13-19 November: Part 6

20-26 November: Part 7

27 Nov - 3 Dec: Part 8

4-10 December: Summing up


Here's a list of posters who have said they want to participate:

Barry Admin
Jerzy Bondov
selectivememory
DukeDeMondo
manticore
Genevieve
Monsieur Verdoux
Astronaut Omens
Petey Pate
Large Noise
Prez
Smeraldina Rima

Everyone else is free to join in.


'Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.'

Prez

I can't join in this week because I'm finishing my dissertation (deadline Oct 14th). I'll catch up with you guys on the second week.

Can't wait to start!

Genevieve

Excellent, we should finish in good time for Winterval so there'll be plenty of time for festive stories and poems and making things out of pipe cleaners and spray paint.

Janie Jones

Quote from: Smeraldina Rima on October 08, 2017, 09:42:59 PM

Here's a list of posters who have said they want to participate:

Barry Admin
Jerzy Bondov
selectivememory
DukeDeMondo
manticore
Genevieve
Monsieur Verdoux
Astronaut Omens
Petey Pate
Large Noise
Prez
Smeraldina Rima

Everyone else is free to join in.


Thanks, can I join please? I'm away and pretty much offline until 16 Oct but I should be able to get a copy then and catch up.

Talulah, really!

Well, probably should join in...



If anyone wants, could offer up some tips from my own approach to these type of seemingly huge doorstops of grand fiction.


small minded cretin

Middlemarch? Middle of December more like.

Dreadful start.

Twed

I'm going to join your club and you can't stop me.

Suggestion: Make a thread that only an organizer can post in, and that person only posts updates about when to read the books etc. so that people can subscribe to that thread and it works like a kind-of RSS feed.


Buelligan

I like it.  I can't find my Middlemarch though (and book-buying is for rich folks) so I'm just going to shout from the sidelines until we get to one I can find, alright?

Twed

Quote from: Buelligan on October 09, 2017, 07:16:12 PM
Middlemarch though (and book-buying is for rich folks)
I can see it being a bit too much of a burden for your lifestyle (that's not supposed to come across in a shitty way), but there's a beauty in finding used books for a penny or whatever on Amazon and eBay. You end up with the kind of editions that they just don't make anymore, and they're often personalised and unique. Sometimes the previous owner has written a message on the inside cover for the next owner.

marquis_de_sad

Quote from: Twed on October 09, 2017, 07:32:33 PM
Sometimes the previous owner has written a message on the inside cover for the next owner.

Other times the previous owner had a tropical skin disease that lives on in the pages, waiting.

Barry Admin

I have actually wanted to start a thread about stuff written in second-books! It's a love of mine, even though I'm very fussy about the condition of books. I bought a book of metaphysical poetry just because it was thoroughly annotated.

Anyway, until I can get to the second-hand book shop, Buelligan, I will be using this:

Quote from: Petey Pate on October 08, 2017, 11:25:13 AM
Here's a link to a free copy of Middlemarch by George Elliot on Gutenberg Press.  It's not a book I'm familiar with, so I'd be happy to participate in the CaB book club.

Genevieve

This thing about books for a penny on Amazon, don't you have to pay about £2.80 package and postage?  The local second hand bookshop remains unbeatable, also my local library has Middlemarch. 

I've got this great book about artists' colonies and inside it says "Dear Alfred, Merry Christmas from Alfred" and I just know it's the same person, I can tell by the writing. 

Buelligan

Quote from: Genevieve on October 09, 2017, 08:01:01 PM
This thing about books for a penny on Amazon, don't you have to pay about £2.80 package and postage?

This.  And if you want 'em in English, you'll be paying a hell of a lot more for international postage, especially off Ebay, those fucks selling on there are insane when it comes to posting to other parts of the EU, all Ukip arses or capitalists, the pack of fucks - George Eliot said that.

Edit to add; thanks for the link Barry!

Twed

Quote from: Genevieve on October 09, 2017, 08:01:01 PM
This thing about books for a penny on Amazon, don't you have to pay about £2.80 package and postage? 
Usually, yes! But if you harness good search-fu you can do a lot of tricksy stuff, like buying several from one vendor to get combined P&P, or win eBay auctions that had no shipping added for a few pennies. Penny books are still a rare-ish score, but it's quite doable!

Right, to start things off, here's my thoughts on the "Prelude" and the first three chapters.

The first thing I was struck by was how much the Prelude and Chapter 1 seemed to echo the things people say when talking about their dislike of this genre of "classic" 19th writing- that it's a load of boring, irrelevant middlebrow stuff about rich people in nice houses getting married (see some of the comments in the "English novelists" thread). George Eliot once wrote an essay called "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists", and I'm under the impression that to start with at least, the book is about that genre of writing and thinking. 

In the Prelude, the intense, (or fanatical) life of Theresa, a 16th century religious mystic and would-be martyr is contrasted with the trivial themes of too much fiction: "the social conquests of a brilliant girl". The Prelude and opening chapters seem to suggest, from a contemporary point of view, what might happen if such a serious and committed thinker found themselves living in the frothy, stupid, society ball world we recognise from BBC costume dramas.

The end of the Prelude seems pessimistic- that the modern-day Theresa this story will be about, Dorothea Brooke, will end up being a "foundress of nothing". In chapters 1-3 we are given a few different hints as to what might happen to her. In her conversation with her sister about the jewels, we can see her wasting her  life in pointless, and ultimately conceited displays of her own high seriousness. In her attraction to Casaubon, we see the possibility that she could become immersed-lost?- in esoteric intellectual pursuits in the way he has- talking only to the dead, as he puts it. But in her conversations with her Uncle and Sir James about building new cottages we see a different possibility, that her intelligence might be used in a way that contributes to society after all.

Thanks Astronaut Omens and thanks for joining in Janie Jones, Talulah, really!, Twed, mr. logic and Buelligan. What are your tips, Talulah?

pancreas

I'm in. I'm at the beginning of Ch IX so far.

We're supposed to cultivate some 'thoughts' right? Well here's a 'thought': I'm feeling we are indeed arse deep in one of these C19 books in the genre which is apparently self-effacingly referred to by Eliot as 'Silly Novels by Lady Novelists'; I guess we put Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronté in that stable too. As such, I have usually found the male characters as pieces of scenery amongst which the women bounce off or interact, but the men's behaviour is essentially rationally determined from some basic axioms about their characters. (And this seems no exception.) In other words, the men are depressingly consistent; in fact, they have almost no agency at all. Sure, they can be evil or good, and do many evil or good things, but they show no real free will; they are constrained by their characters. Compare Mrs Cadwaller with her husband: she's the one flying about all over the place, where he's all que sera sera. This gives an unfortunate divide to the characters, where le donne sono mobile like interweaving zephyrs and the men are stock still like boring fucking trees.

That's my 'thought' anyway.

I'm sort of enjoying the interjections on behalf of the author, btw. The language is quite pompous, but perhaps the essence of her meta-analysis of her characters is actually quite generous and forgiving.

Jerzy Bondov

QuoteIn short, woman was a problem which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.
One for the boxing day poo thread.

pancreas

Quote from: Jerzy Bondov on October 11, 2017, 10:44:38 AM
One for the boxing day poo thread.

Yes, it's also bollocks, because the revolutions of any solid is a finite subgroup of SO_3(R) and they were classified by Klein around 1900, but no doubt known to the Ancient Greeks, albeit without proof. Apart from cyclic and dihedral (which are extremely straightforward), the biggest you can get is the revolutions of an icosahedron/dodecahedron, and that's isomorphic to A_5, order 60 and hardly complicated at all.

Large Noise

I was wondering about Dorothea's preoccupation with building cottages for the tenants. As I understand it, one of the effects of the industrial revolution was that, for the first time, land became more valuable for what you could build on it rather than what you could grow on it. So is Dorothea being purely kind-hearted here, or is there an element long-term economic self-interest in her charity?

chocolate teapot

I was perceiving it as her version of gentrification but I'm probably looking at it from the wrong century.

EDIT: according to wiki, gentrification has been happening since the Romans so might not be far off the mark.

Though if dodo is giving her life to God then it might be a virtuous act. Doubt it. I don't trust these landowners at all. Never have.

Welcome pancreas and chocolate teapot, one more now would make twenty. I've had trouble getting to the bookshop on time but have just read the first chapter online.

Talulah, really!

Chapter One –

A little personal history, left a not particularly good school at 16 with very little to show for it, however was always a voracious reader and eventually through one chance encounter or two with an eye opening book began to learn of the greater glories of English Literature above and beyond The Secret Seven, Nancy Drew and Miss Marple to the point where began to understand why Wilkie Collins > Jackie Collins.

So by the time first approached Middlemarch, aged 23¾ was aware of George Eliot's formidable reputation as the high grand Mistress of Moral Seriousness in 19th century literature and that this was her masterpiece. Duly reverential and expecting hard work ahead, started to read.

And found out that it was light and funny. Not all the way through of course, yet wit and irony runs through the book and is an aspect that isn't always put to the fore when discussing George Eliot. So am going to start there.

This opening chapter is drenched in irony, throughout there is an amused detached distance between what the authorial voice is describing and how the characters perceive themselves.

A couple of examples of obviously comic intent.

"Mr. Brooke's conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying them out."

" Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it."

There not only skewering the hint of pretension behind Dorothea's piety and puritanism, it also seeds an idea that will be expanded on in the next chapter, deepening and enriching our understanding not only of Dorothea's character and evolving circumstances but those of people we encounter in real life through the parallel ways they also act.

Another example of Eliot's humour is the use of comic tone and varying registers. David Lodge commented on Martin Amis' use of this device in Money whereby the freshly minted street slang and informal English of the narrator are encased in the rhythmical poetic cadences of the writer, low and high art brushing against each other to create comic sparks. And Amis himself writes admiringly of Saul Bellow's ability to move back and forth between the patter of Chigaco wise guys and poetry of High Culture.

Similarly see the way language follows the movement up and down the class ranks in the opening.

"...  if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers—anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate."

The informal slang of 'yard-measuring' and 'parcel-tying' to denote working class, the short correctly bland labels 'admiral' and 'clergyman' for the middle then the more elevated, if not even, pompous tone of 'an ancestor discernible', 'Puritan' and 'proprietor' all given a more full background as if to acknowledge his elevated position in the way a proud family would to assert their social rank whilst at the very same time the narrator slyly insinuates the said 'Puritan gentleman' was rather on the make to undercut the pretension.

Speaking of which, another example here, this time of comic bathos.

"Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery."

"Drapery" is so perfect there, like Peter Cook's exquisite choice of 'Irving Moses, the fruiterer" in Bedazzled.

There is also a dark irony in the quotation that heads this chapter, for what is going to unfold is indeed, 'A Maid's Tragedy' and the quote hints at one of the background causes for it but yet how light and carefree this opening chapter seems but even in daylight shadows lurk.


pancreas

I'm very concerned that the moral of this story is going to be that women should all be like Celia, emotionally intelligent, artistic if they like, but leave all the scholarship and abstract intelligence to the men. If there's a tragedy to strike, it seems to be got into motion because #horror, a woman wants to know more things. Sure she may be struck through with naive patrician inclinations in addition, but then again she is only 18. We'll see, I guess.

Howj Begg

Blimey you couldn't be more wrong pancreas.

Howj Begg

I read Midlemarch last year. It's a shame as I would've like to do this readalong.

SPOILERS

Bulstrode is one of the immortal characters in all of fiction. The terror and grubbines she manages to wring form this pathetic, but oddly sympathetic, hypocrite is very forceful as well as being a touch sadistic. I think Eliot likes putting her characters through it. Her humour in this is very wicked, leavened of course by the flights of philosophical and quasi-religious fancy that she takes sometimes. The plot is a perfect clockwork machine, which is pulsing away all the time. 

selectivememory

Up to Chapter 11 at the moment, and so far have been enjoying it a lot. It is very funny - I'll have to go back and reread it, because I'm not sure if it was meant to be funny, but I found Casaubon's absurdly stiff and formal letter of proposal hilarious, and made even funnier by Dorothea's emotionally-overwhelmed reaction to it.

I am enjoying how Eliot is quite scathing of the characters a lot of the time, in a very subtle way. And maybe it's just fresh in my mind from having read it in the last half hour or so, but I found the parts in Chapter 10 about Casaubon's loneliness (both as a scholar and in his new relationship), and his disappointment that his engagement hasn't suddenly made him happy, quite insightful and perceptive stuff. This marriage is beginning to look like a very bad idea for both parties.

Quote from: Talulah, really! on October 12, 2017, 09:26:57 AM

"Drapery" is so perfect there, like Peter Cook's exquisite choice of 'Irving Moses, the fruiterer" in Bedazzled.


Thanks for that Talulah, I'm really enjoying hearing the narrator as Cook doing George Spiggot/E.L. Wisty now, especially the part about Ladislaw's disappointing opium experiences in Chapter X: "The universe had not yet beckoned".

Does anyone know to what extent the early readers would have believed the author to be a bloke called George?- I ask because I'm sure that some of the narrator's comments would have a slightly different meaning if you thought that there was a male author- for example this passage below from the Prelude. In either case, I think the tone is ironic and basically feminist in meaning, but it's a more bitter and more striking irony if you're hearing a woman saying it :

" if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine..."

Talulah, really!

Quote from: Astronaut Omens on October 13, 2017, 11:28:56 AM
Does anyone know to what extent the early readers would have believed the author to be a bloke called George?- I ask because I'm sure that some of the narrator's comments would have a slightly different meaning if you thought that there was a male author- for example this passage below from the Prelude.

At this point in Eliot's career, her identity was well known, whilst there had been speculation early on, it ceased to be a secret after the success of Adam Bede. The following link is to a contemporary review of Middlemarch from The Guardian which refers to the author as female throughout.

"All her novels may be read as delightful tales, as pictures of English character. They may be read by the more thoughtful as studies of the desires and wanderings of the human soul in its efforts to transcend the limits of its own nature and of circumstance."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/jun/01/fromthearchives.georgeeliot