Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Slouching Towards Bethlehem
by Joan Didion
★★★★

 

Didion’s famous collection of nonfiction essays gives readers a glimpse into the rapidly changing world of California in the 1960s. From hippies in San Francisco to a piece on Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence, Didion traces the paths of a new generation of Americans across the state.

Her prose takes your breath away with it’s descriptive beauty. Regardless of the subject matter, it's so easy to get lost in her words. She tells each person's story without condemning or praising their belief system.




"She does try, perhaps unconsciously, to hang on to the innocence and turbulence and capacity for wonder, however ersatz or shallow, of her own or of anyone's adolescence."

I felt like the essays on Didion's personal life and experiences were a little stronger than the rest. There was also a story that opens the book, "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," that really stayed with me. It's about a woman convicted on murdering her husband in a burning car. It was a haunting tale, as so many things are in Didion's hands. Even a trip to the tropical isles of Hawaii becomes a morose reflection for her.

"Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in its venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification."

One of my favorite pieces in the book is about how we change when we return to our childhood homes. Our personalities revert back to the roles we took on within our family dynamic. Our spouses often can’t understand the strained relationships or odd attachments that we have with the place and the people there.

“I had by all objective accounts a ‘normal’ and a ‘happy’ family situation, and yet I was almost thirty years old before I could talk to my family on the telephone without crying after I had hung up. We did not fight. Nothing was wrong. And yet some nameless anxiety colored the emotional charges between me and the place I came from.”

BOTTOM LINE: As with most short story collections, not every single piece was my favorite, but with a writer like Didion you’re sure to find some gems. Didion conveys moods and feelings with such incredible talent and this collection is one of her best.

“I have said that the trip back is difficult, and it is – difficult in a way that magnifies the ordinary ambiguities of sentimental journeys.”

"Innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself."

Classics Club Meme Question

 

Here’s the question for Classics Club members this month: What is your favorite “classic” literary period and why?

 

I am a sucker for Victorian England. The Victorian era is usually defined as the lifespan of Queen Victoria, who reigned from 1837-1901. Books published during these particular years and authors who lived during this time usually fall in the Victorian category. Coming-of-age stories, mysteries, romance, tragedy, there are some wonderful tales told during this time.

 

I’ve found dozens of classics that I love from that time period. I don’t know what it was about that time that led authors to write so many rich stories, but here’s a list of a few of my favorites.

 

1) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850)

2) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (1847)

3) The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)

4) Middlemarch by George Eliot (1874)

5) Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy (1895)

6) Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886)

7) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

8) The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (1881)

9) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins (1859)

10) Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell (1851)

11) The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905)

12) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)

13) The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas (1844)

14) The Yellow Wall-Paper and Other Writings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892)

15) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
★★

This book is lauded as one of the greatest of the 20th Century. It’s been on my TBR shelf for years and now that I’ve finally read it I feel like I’m still in the dark.

 

The plot, and I use that term loosely, follows the Buendía clan. Patriarch José Arcadio Buendía founds the fictional town of Macondo. Beginning with his life, the book chronicles seven generations in the family’s history. There are so many overlapping names within the family tree that things can seem a bit muddled at times. Up and down and in and out of the characters’ lives, we see romances blossom, an insomnia plague, military occupation and more.

 
The Buendía family is a pretty incestuous bunch. One man marries his adopted sister, another has an affair with his aunt, another marries his first cousin, etc. There is a serious focus on beauty, lust and how it almost inevitably leads to destruction or unhappiness. From the very first generations, the Buendía chose immediate infatuation over long term consequences.

As many others have said before me, the writing really is beautiful. Márquez can paints a lovely picture, but I always felt like I was just outside of the room where the action was happening if that makes sense. I never felt connected to the story in any real way. I know magical realism isn’t for everyone, but I’m not sure if that was the issue or if it was just the lack of a clear storyline. I feel like I had an open mind and no specific expectations going into the book, but it was still hard for me to feel compelled by the characters.

The aspect of the book that was actually the most interesting to me was its inspiration. Márquez said he decided to write the novel after his Grandmother told him stories about her childhood that wove unbelievable supernatural elements into her everyday life. He said she told the stories as though there was nothing magical in them and so he never doubted them. He wanted to create a world within his novel where the same was true.

BOTTOM LINE: Confusing and strange, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a classic but it's not for everyone. I'm glad I read it and I think I understand magical realism a bit more. I may try to re-read it in the future and see if the style clicks for me.

“It's enough for me to be sure that you and I exist at this moment.”

“Thus they went on living in a reality that was slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which would escape irremediably when they forgot the values of the written letters.”