Book Review: Her Fearful Symmetry

2 Generations of Twins, a Family Secret, and a Soul Unable to Rest in Peace
Review from The New York Times Book Review

Time and the supernatural are at the center of Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, an entertaining but not terribly resonant ghost story about two generations of twins.

Audrey Niffenegger’s wildly successful first novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife” (recently turned into a movie), used an old sci-fi device as a springboard for a high-flying meditation on the uncertainties and dislocations of life. In recounting the story of Henry, an involuntary time traveler, and his wife, Clare — who patiently waits for him to return home from his Odysseus-like wanderings through the calendar — Ms. Niffenegger not only conjured two memorable characters, but also created an affecting story about the magical ability of love to transcend time.

Time and the supernatural are also at the center of her new novel, “Her Fearful Symmetry,” an entertaining but not terribly resonant ghost story about two generations of twins, which like all ghost stories, addresses the hold that time past exerts over time present.

Whereas “The Time Traveler’s Wife” simply used the premise of time travel as a device to look at a couple’s efforts to sustain their love through all sorts of trials and tribulations, “Symmetry” buys into the literary and cinematic ghost story genre whole hog, embracing all of its best-known traditions, no matter how hokey or contrived. The novel’s got a haunted house (well, a haunted apartment), a creepy cemetery, a family with a bizarre secret in its past and two naïve young women at the mercy of unearthly forces. True to form, the familiar daylight world of contemporary life is penetrated by a spirit from the great beyond, while the obvious Freudian implications of haunting and being haunted are dutifully explicated and explored.

With “Symmetry,” Ms. Niffenegger has streamlined her storytelling to the point of slickness. This novel charges ahead in a much more straightforward manner than “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” creating suspense through its formulaic adherence to old genre conventions. Although the reader is pleasantly carried along by the author’s ability to create credible characters and her instinctive narrative gifts, the novel lacks the emotional depth of its predecessor; none of the relationships in this novel have the intensity or poignancy of Clare and Henry’s liaison in “The Time Traveler’s Wife.” What’s more, the psychological underpinnings of a crucial decision made by one of this novel’s heroines are fuzzy and unpersuasive — a fundamental flaw that undermines the cogency of the overall story.

continue reading...

Geoffrey Crayon: "The Art of Bookmaking"

You've read the three most renowned stories from Irving's Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819). If you ever wondered about some of the other stories, here's a preview of one in which Irving satirizes the fledgling bookmaking industry and the fears of plagiarizing dead authors:

In one sketch, "The Art of Book Making," Geoffrey Crayon's musings on the "extreme fecundity of the press, and how it comes to pass that so many heads, on which nature seemed to have inflicted the curse of barrenness, should teem with voluminous productions" lead him to conjure a phantasmagoric scene of dispossession and revenge. Having wandered into the reading room of the British Museum library, he discovers "many pale, studious personages, poring intently over dusty volumes, rummaging among mouldy manuscripts, and taking copious notes of their contents." These, he gradually discovers, "were principally authors and in the very act of manufacturing books." But after musing on the ethics of literary borrowing, he falls asleep and dreams that these authors are "a ragged, thread bare throng" of untutored bumpkins, borrowing the "garments" of classic writers in a ridiculous display of "vulgar elegance" (fig. 4). The victims of this literary rapine, a cadre of long-dead authors arrayed in dour portraits on the library walls, then come to life and rise up in a fierce counterrevolution "to claim their rifled property" and chase the plunderers out of the library.

From The Other Panic of 1819

Irivng Tests + Data Sheets

The Irving essay exam is graded. Out of 14 tests, ranging from 53%-104%, the mean score was 84.5%, which is a middling A in the Honors grading scale used in this course.

I've prepared a sample answer key to the Irving essay exam. The answers on this sample key are taken from answers supplied by you, the students, on the test you took Wednesday. All of these are exemplary or near-exemplary responses to the questions posed. Each received the full 10 points. Again, you would do well to study these answers in order to understand the "how" of taking this type of test and what is expected of you.

Available in PDF here: Washington Irving Essay Test - KEY.

Your tests and data sheets will be returned to you Friday morning.

Pertinacious Pedagogue's Capacious Vocabulary Gambol

Yes, this is a vocabulary challenge!

The prize: Five extra-credit points on Tuesday's vocabulary test.

The object: To use as many of this week's Washington Irving vocabulary words in a single sentence. Semicolons not allowed!

The rules:
1. You may use any words in the English language in order to compose your sentence, but only the Irving vocabulary words are counted for the purpose of the competition.

2. The sentence, however silly it may be, must be grammatically sound.

3. The sentence has to make some sense: It cannot be complete nonsense. Silly and likely never to be used in the normal course of human conversation is okay. Here is an example of an "unlikely" and "silly" (and grammatically correct) sentence that avoids being classified as complete nonsense:

"Hold the bilious termagant's arms akimbo, urchin, or the shad virago will addle my galligaskins."

That sentence counts for 8 vocabulary words. I'm sure you can beat that.

4. Sentences should be written here in the comments box for this post!

5. Contest entries should be posted BEFORE Monday, September 28, at 9:00 p.m. Enter as many sentences as you like.

Word of the Day: Hardscrabble

Hardscrabble: (adj.) Earning a bare subsistence, as on the land; yielding little by great labor, marginal: the sharecropper's hardscrabble life; meager, meagerly, meagre, scrimpy, stingy

Hardscrabble is formed from hard (from Old English heard) + scrabble (from Dutch schrabbelen, "to scratch").

I remember it being green and humid, nothing like this hardscrabble land.

-- Elmore Leonard, Cuba Libre

Most inhabitants scratched out a living from hardscrabble farming, yet these newcomers were hopeful and enterprising.

-- Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.

A scenic town fed by rich snowbirds who reside a few months a year in gated communities, High Balsam also is home to the hardscrabble residents who frequent Margaret's food-pantry giveaways.

-- Deirdre Donahue, "A sweet 'Evensong", USA Today, December 2, 1999

Related adjectives: amain, elaborate, energetic, epitonic, faffle, hard at work, hardscrabble, industrious, insudate, laboriferous, laboring, laborious, laboristic, moliminous, on the stretch, operose, painstaking, palestric, panurgic, strained, strenuous, toilsome, trusatile, uphill, wearisome, womanfully

Snapshot: My Ántonia by Willa Cather

H.L. Mencken once wrote, "No romantic novel ever written in America, by man or woman, is one half so beautiful as My Ántonia." Later in the year we will read Willa Cather's excellent short story "Neighbour Rosicky," which is also about Bohemian immigrants to the Nebraska plains . My Ántonia is as close as one can get to a classic American romance that rivals English counterparts the Brontes or Austen. The following is from a review by Melanie Rehak:

First published in 1918, and set in Nebraska in the late 19th century, this tale of the spirited daughter of a Bohemian immigrant family planning to farm on the untamed land comes to us through the romantic eyes of Jim Burden. He is, at the time of their meeting, newly orphaned and arriving at his grandparents' neighboring farm on the same night her family strikes out to make good in their new country. Jim chooses the opening words of his recollections deliberately: "I first heard of Ántonia on what seemed to be an interminable journey across the great midland plain of North America," and it seems almost certain that readers of Cather's masterpiece will just as easily pinpoint the first time they heard of Ántonia and her world. It seems equally certain that they, too, will remember that moment as one of great light in an otherwise unremarkable trip through the world.

Ántonia, who, even as a grown woman somewhat downtrodden by circumstance and hard work, "had not lost the fire of life," lies at the center of almost every human condition that Cather's novel effortlessly untangles. She represents immigrant struggles with a foreign land and tongue, the restraints on women of the time (with which Cather was very much concerned), the more general desires for love, family, and companionship, and the great capacity for forbearance that marked the earliest settlers on the frontier.

"Optima dies ... prima fugit" that Cather uses as the novel's epigraph. "The best days are the first to flee"--this could be said equally of childhood and the earliest hours of this country in which the open land, much like My Ántonia, was nothing short of a rhapsody in prairie sky blue.

Usage Tip: Alternate vs. Alternative

An article said a utility "plans to freeze its electric rates for five years, and by 2003 will allow all its customers to buy power from alternate sources." The writer almost certainly wanted "alternative," meaning providing a choice among options. "Alternate" means by turns, or every other, as in "alternate Sundays."

If you want to book a particular room in a hotel and you find that the room is already booked, the hotel could offer you alternative accommodation.

If a shop is not open every day but say on Monday/Wednesday/Friday, you would say it was open alternate days in the week.

Word of the Day: Agitprop

Soviet agitprop poster circa World War II

agitprop [AH-jit-prop] n. -- a political message, particularly one that is declared in drama, literature, music or other art forms. The creator may intend the agitprop to educate and inform, but the audience may feel an attempt is being made to indoctrinate them. As a result, this word typically has a negative connotation.

The word agitprop is Russian, an abbreviation of the conjunction of agitatsiya (agitation) and propaganda. These strategies for revolution were first twinned by Marxist Georgy Plekhanov. His ideas were later elaborated upon by Lenin in the 1902 pamphlet "What is to be Done?" These ideas prompted Communist leadership in the early 1920's to form an Agitation and Propaganda Section of the Central Committee. The shorthand term for this department was the agitprop bureau. Even today, every unit of a Communist party will have an agitprop section.

The Spectre Bridegroom in Gothic Literature

Did you know that the "spectre bridegroom" motif is quite common in Gothic literature?

Adapted from folklore and folk ballad, the motif ususally runs something like this: a young man, on the verge of being married to his true love, dies suddenly, but returns from the grave to claim his bride, who typically has "betrayed" him by marrying another man. There are lots of variations on this basic idea, including the betrayal of the woman by the man, among others. A number of Gothic-tradition writers have turned their hand to this theme. It carries the dramatic power of a romance tale, of course — love beyond the grave, love gone bad, all that sort of thing — but also has the capacity to engage issues of gender dynamics, of the balance of cultural power between men and women.

Here's a list of "spectre bride/groom" works:

William Harrison Ainsworth (attributed), "The Spectre Bride"
Göttfried Bürger, "Lenore"
F. Marion Crawford, Man Overboard!
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Wedding Knell"
William Hunt, "The Spectre Bridegroom"

See the note to "The Suffolk Miracle" ballad, below.

Washington Irving, "The Spectre Bridegroom"
Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, "Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter"
Jack London, "Even Unto Death" and "Flush of Gold"

The latter is an expanded version of the former.

Matthew Lewis, "Alonso the Brave and the Fair Imogene"

One of the poems from Lewis' famed Gothic novel The Monk.

Charles Maturin, "Leixlip Castle"
E. Nesbit, "John Charrington's Wedding"
Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, "That Never Was on Sea or Land"
Edith Wharton, "Bewitched"
Sarah Wilkinson, "The Midnight Embrace"

Odenwald & "The Spectre Bridegroom"

In reading through "The Spectre Bridegroom" did you wonder exactly what Odenwald means and what it is? Did you look it up? Here are some clues:

First, oden means odes (as in sagas) and wald means forest; thus odenwald means forest of sagas. That's significant because the Odenwald is a place filled with many traditional German legends, particularly ghost stories. Irving's choice of setting is not incidental.

The Odenwald is located in southwestern Germany.The northern and western Odenwald belong to southern Hesse, with the south stretching into Baden. In the northeast, a small part lies in Lower Franconia in Bavaria. People from Hesse, of course, are called Hessians. The Hessians rented out mercenaries to the English to fight the American rebels in the American Revolutionary War. You will recall that the Headless Horseman of legend was a Hessian soldier.