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Up at the Villa - W. Somerset Maugham

up-at-the-villaAfter finishing my first Proust, which was enriching and beautiful, but also heavy, this short novel of 120 pages seemed a perfect breaker before I embark on In the Shadow of Young Girls In Flower.

In the early years of World War II, English woman Mary Panton has settled into a picturesque villa in Florence, Italy. At 30, she is beautiful, full of quick-witted quips and, well, kind of sexy. At first, she seems intelligent of the wiles of the world: she is aware of her beauty, and the opportunities it offers her in life, but doesn’t associate this with her sense of self. Widowed by her alcoholic and abusive husband’s drink-driving accident, she now finds herself running away from desire and passion, being so burned by it during her marriage.

Up at the Villa transcends its time and place to explore life in all its messiness. Reason and stability is presented through the stiff-upper-lip, do-gooder Edgar Swift. More than twenty years older than Mary, he’s held a torch for her since she was fifteen. Creepy much? Apart from this, he’s really quite sweet, pining after her for years, and finally, offered a post of high income and prestige in India. His timely marriage proposal to Mary sets off the chain of events that turn upside down over the course of the next few days. In a testament to the boring, passionless demeanour of his character, Edgar applauds Mary’s decision to mull over his proposal while he attends business out of town for a few days.

It’s in his absence that Mary, thrown into a mix of company that includes the rowdy and dubious Rowley Flint, finds herself in a bit of a pickle. For those who haven’t read this book I won’t go into detail, as it really is ghastly and comical, this turn of events. In a clear juxtaposition, Mary finds in Rowley everything that Edgar isn’t. Who she actually prefers is unclear, but she starts to question the notion of entering voluntarily into a marriage that is openly and honestly lacking in love, a marriage that nonetheless offers protection from a broken heart.

Any woman who has had her heart broken can identify with Mary’s decision to effectively armour herself against further pain by marrying for status and comfort.

It’s a simple story that can be read in a couple of hours and with a reverberating effect once completed. But it doesn’t pretend to be more than what it is: a sultry examination of the perils and rewards of love. For enhanced reading pleasure, listen to Edith Piaf while reading this.

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July 11th, 2009ReviewsRead More >6 Comments


Musing Mondays

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Musing Mondays (BIG)Today’s MUSING MONDAYS post is about mid-year reading…

Now that we’ve come to the middle of the year, what do you think of your 2009 reading so far? Read anything interesting that you’d like to share? Any outstanding favourites?

I think I’m getting there with my books. I’ve noticed that this year especially, my tastes have become more narrow, which is unfortunate, but it means that I’ve read a lot of different books to get to this stage. I think.

I’ve reread a few books, including Jane Eyre recently, which, when you’re working through a list of books you want to read, can be seen as wasting time. But I could never, ever think that reading Jane Eyre is a waste of time.

Thanks to blog’s like Matt’s and Mae’s, I’ve found new books to read and love, and The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov definitely stands out here.

I’ve also started reading more about the Beats, which made Junky so much more rewarding, and I’ve started dabbling in comics and graphic novels, which I never thought I would.

Interestingly enough, when I first started this blog I would pretty much review every book I had written. Now I review only a small fraction of the books that I read, because, dabbling into new genres, and moving more towards literature and away from airport fiction, etc., I’m finding it more difficult to keep up with the original intentions of With Extra Pulp.

Now that I’ve begun reading Proust, I am not sure what the rest of the year will hold for me, reading-wise. Maybe Sydney will have a different effect on me as well.

What books have you read so far this year? Anything worth mentioning?

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June 29th, 2009Monday MusingRead More >12 Comments


The Perils of Reading Bronte

The Perils of Reading Bronte:

1. Other books really cower in the shadow of it. I haven’t found a book as captivating as this since finishing it yesterday.

2. Unlike Pride & Prejudice, which fills women with an unrealistic hope of the existence of “gentlemen”, this just crushes you, the reader, with the heavy truth that sometimes even the most perfect of loves is doomed. DOOMED.

3. The book itself is frustrating as hell: The actual story of Catherine and Heathcliff is teasingly short and we are left with the remnants of their offspring, barely a notch on their parents’ belt (in dislikeability as well as strength of character).

4. While reading Wuthering Heights, you, the reader, will become so absorbed in the smokey, romantic scenery of the moors, that upon finishing, you will return to reality to find it bland and harsh in comparison.

5. It inspires one to write, while dangling in front of them the essence of perfect writing - unattainable in all its glory.

6. Once completed, the experience of reading it for the first time is lost forever.

7. It makes the most stoic of us cry (not that I’m stoic by any means but you get the idea). People I know to be non-criers have cried from this. And when reading in public, it’s a terrible cause for embarrassment.

8. It’s a terribly depressing book. I love a good downer as much as the next person of melancholy humour, but not even P.G. Wodehouse could get me out of this funk. I growled at anybody who came near me while I had this book in my hand, and for the rest of the day afterwards.

9. I HATE Catherine. So much so that I sometimes forget that she is a character, not a real person. This is hardly the type of emotion one should walk around carrying inside them.

Thus ends my list of perils.

Rather than round it up to an even ten, I’m going to leave it at that. This definitely goes up on my pedestal of life-changing books, for all its perfect phrases and infuriating characters, and is currently headbutting against Jane Eyre for my favourite Bronte book. I’ll let you know the result after this round.

A few more tidbits…

I cannot possibly begin to review Wuthering Heights purely because I would not do it justice. The book deserves one of those literary criticisms usually written by Honours or PhD students.

I was warned by the friend who lent it to me that its exquisite literary fineness causes many other books to shrink in comparison. I laughed, maintaining that my mind isn’t usually changed that easily.

I finished the book in about 7 hours, and managed to cook dinner with one hand while my nose was still buried in the pages.

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June 10th, 2009Literary musings ReviewsRead More >5 Comments


Wicked - Gregory Maguire

wickedNo I have never seen the Broadway musical. Yes I feel cheated. I think it would be much better than the book.

Then again I had high expectations for this one.

For those who aren’t aware, Wicked by Gregory Maguire is the life story of Elphaba, better known as the Wicked Witch of the West, in the land of Oz. Born to a bored slut of a mother and pompous religious minister of a father, the green baby who bit the finger off one of her midwives is a frightful sight. Cursed herself, or a curse on her parents, she is tolerated, and somewhat loved, by Nanny. She’s horrific and charming, and grows up into a fierce political activist, overcomes great traumas (though these are somewhat skated over) and soon morphs into a Witch - although the Wicked part is subjective.

Through all the political jumble, unimportant characters and large to the point of almost confusing gaps, Elphaba is a palpable character: She confuses our notion of evil and is redeemable to the point that we sympathise greatly with her. She’s obsessed with conspiracy theories, and is shrewd but not without a sense of morality.

There are passages that are read frantically, and make for compulsive page-turning reading. In between these are long-winded descriptions of events that hardly seem important…Until the crossover to the original text. It’s interesting because the story is never Elphaba’s, rather it’s the story of the numerous people whose lives she touches along the way. The inherent gaps with such an account are teasingly large, and require a good, strong imagination. The respective relationships Elphaba has with her college friend, Glinda (wink wink) and her sister, the favourite, Nessarose, are developed well, and are wrought with tension and love.

As a book, I’m not sure it deserves all the hype that it received, however I’m not sorry I read it, and might read it again one day, if my tbr pile ever starts to dwindle.

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May 27th, 2009ReviewsRead More >No Comments


And The Hippos Were Boiled In Their Tanks - Jack Kerouac & William S. Burroughs

andthehipposSo your mate turns up at your house confessing that he killed his friend, the homosexual who has been cracking on to him just a bit too much, and you help him ditch his knife and see him off on his merry way. What else to do but write a novel about it?

The murder of David Kammerer by Lucien Carr, new friend of Burroughs and Kerouac, had been written about in other publications, such as Town and the City that Jack wrote. But according to Jack, this co-operative work by him and Burroughs hid under floorboards for years, unwanted by publishers, deemed a commercial risk.

The story behind the story is what makes it fascinating. The story itself is warped and addictive at the same time. Burroughs writes chapters as detective Will Dennison and Kerouac writes as Mike Ryko, seaman, desperately trying to jump on a ship to France with Phillip (Lucien Carr). It’s a fictitious telling of a true tale, and while it doesn’t have that droning feel of later beat books, it teeters on the edge of the mundane. Aside from the murder, it’s really an account of the morphine-injecting, alcohol-consuming, fornicating, wife-beating group of friends that moved like a blob from friend’s house to friend’s house, jumping on boats and then jumping off, you get the idea. It’s nowhere near as difficult to digest but the number of references to “seasoned Beat readers” in the afterword suggests that this is a prerequisite. I assure you it’s not. In any case it’s only about 200 pages long.

Hippos has its breakthrough moments of philosophy:

“So you want to wait. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow – waiting until you’re dead. Do you know what I think? I think this whole Phillip complex is like the Christian heaven, an illusion born of a need, floating around in some nebulous misty Platonic nowhere, always just around the corner like prosperity, but never here and now.” (p27)

But for the most part, it’s driven, lazy and rambling. A quote here would demonstrate too well the rambling aspect, so I will leave it out.

The title comes from a drunken conversation during which a radio newscast reports on a circus fire, finishing with “and the hippos were boiled in their tanks”. Even more amusing is the afterword by James Grauerholz, which explains all the possible circus fires that took place in those years which could have been the true source of the title. And there are a few. Definitely one to be read, if only for the rare glimpse into the actual darkness of the murder.

“I began to think about how I used to imagine what it would be like to kill someone and how I used to write thousands of words to create that pattern of emotions. Now here stood Phillip beside me, and he had actually done it.” (170)

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May 24th, 2009ReviewsRead More >No Comments


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