Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

The incline was the same down which d'Urberville had driven her so wildly on that day in June.  Tess went up the remainder of its length without stopping, and on reaching the edge of the escarpment gazed over the familiar green world beyond, now half-veiled in mist.  It was always beautiful from here; it was terrible beautiful to Tess to-day, for since her eyes last fell upon it she had learnt that the serpent hisses where the sweet birds sing, and her views of life had been totally changed for her by the lesson.  Verily another girl than the simple one she had been at home was she who, bowed by thought, stood still here, and turned to look behind her.

John Durbeyfield, town drunk, happens to discover one day that he is actually the descendant of a once-great family, the d'Urbervilles, of whom a few still-genteel relations remain.  Hoping for monetary advancement, Durbeyfield sends his young daughter Tess to make the acquaintance of their cousin, Alec d'Urberville.  Alec's interest in Tess is not entirely that of a friendly relative, and Tess must repeatedly deflect his crass come-ons.  Then, one evening, while she is captive in his carriage, he rapes her.  Hardy, with his usual circuitousness, never quite says this--but the second chapter is called "Maiden No More." 

Tess of the d'Urbervilles is the story of the consequences of rape.  It would be nice to think that it's a record from the foreign nation of the past, and that Tess' experience would be different today, and maybe it would, but in degree and not in kind.  Like many rape victims today, Tess is thrown together again and again with her violator, unable to break free. Like many rape victims today, she is blamed--explicitly and otherwise--for her rape, including by the love of her life, Angel Clare, whose rigid humanist morals are unable to tolerate what he perceives as Tess' indiscretion.  Tortured by male attention, she mutilates her own face:

As soon as she got out of the village she entered a thicket and took from her basket one of the oldest field-gowns, which she had never put on even at the dairy... She also, by a felicitous thought, took a handkerchief from her bundle and tied it round her face under her bonnet, covering her chin and half her cheeks and temples, as if she were suffering from toothache.  Then with her little scissors, by the aid of a pocket looking-glass, she mercilessly nipped her eyebrows off, and thus insured against aggressive admiration she went on her uneven way.

D'Urberville is one of the slimiest villains I think I've ever read about.  His constant wheedling of Tess, his feigned care, contrasted with his claims to be so inflamed with passion that he can't resist himself, are both reprehensible and recognizable.  True, Hardy leaves some space for the reader to interpret Alec's actions as a seduction, but it seems to me that Hardy's structuring of the power differential between the two figures--he is wealthy and powerful, she neither, and of course if she resists he may abandon her in the woods.  But Angel, the good man whose moral code is so inflexible, is more frustrating and maybe more repulsive.  Angel takes a voyage to South America to get rid of the sticky moral situation that is Tess, only belatedly realizing his error:

During this time of absence he had mentally aged a dozen years.  What arrested him now as of value in life was less its beauty than its pathos.  Having long discredited the old systems of mysticism, he now began to discredit the old appraisements of morality.  He thought they wanted readjusting.  Who was the moral man?  Still more pertinently, who was the moral woman?  The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Moral realizations in Hardy's novels are always a step too late, sometimes comically so--it seems like lovers are always a moment too late or early to reunite with each other--but I guess we should take Angel at his word and judge him by this intentions and not his achievements.  But his obtuseness is pretty angering.

What about Tess?  She's not as interesting as the male principals--smart, pretty, humble, etc.--but much of her identity is tragically consumed by her victimhood.  She's a sister in spirit to Jude the Obscure: neither can seem to catch a break, and both are so dogged by systemic unfairness and outright cruelty that they begin to internalize it. Hardy clearly loves her, sometimes to a fault, and subtitles the novel "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented."  Like Angel Clare, he's more arrested by pathos--pity--than beauty, and Tess is certainly a figure of pity.  There's no place for Tess, partly because of the backward moral climate of her surroundings.  But the pathos comes not only from the cruelty of a rotten society but from a cosmic unfairness:

Care had been harsh toward her; there is no doubt of it.  Men are too often harsh with women they love or have loved; women with men.  And yet these harshnesses are tenderness itself when compared with the universal harshness out of which they grow; the harshness of the posititon towards the temperament, the means toward the aims, of to-day towards yesterday, of hereafter towards to-day.

Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson

The next thing I saw was the telephone. I stood in the middle of a drunken crowd and I called 911 because I needed help. All those visits from Officer Friendly in the second grade paid off. A lady answered the phone, "Police, state your emergency," and I saw my face in the window over the kitchen sink and no words came out of my mouth. Who was that girl? I had never seen her before. Tears oozed down my face, over my bruised lips, pooling on the handset. "It's OK," said the nice lady on the phone. "We have your location. Officers are on the way. Are you hurt? Are you being threatened?" Someone grabbed the phone from my hands and listened. A scream--the cops were coming! Blue and cherry lights flashing in the kitchen-sink window. Rachel's face--so angry-- in mine. Someone slapped me. I crawled out of the room through a forest of legs. Outside, the moon smiled goodbye and slipped away.

I walked home to an empty house. Without a word.

(Spoiler alert: This book is difficult to talk about without revealing certain things.) There is a canon of literature that belongs solely to middle and high schools that I didn't even know about until I became a teacher, at least here in New York. Some texts, like Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird overlap with that other canon, the canon of American universities; others, like The Giver and other YA books are relatively popular and well-known otherwise. But there are some books--like Sandra Cisneros' House on Mango Street--that, for whatever reason, seem to exist only in schools, or at the very least, have a popularity as educable texts that vastly outweigh their presence in bookshops.

Speak is one of those books. I had never heard of it until I started teaching; now, it seems to be everywhere. Part of this, I imagine, is because it is a narrative that takes place mainly in a high school, covering the freshman year of a girl named Melinda Sordino. Sordino is an Italian world that means "mute" or "dumb," and appropriately so, as Melinda has problems with communication in general--unable to talk in class, unable to make friends, unable to communicate with her parents. She enters high school viciously unpopular. All of this can be traced back to an incident that happened at the end of the previous school year, when Melinda went to a party where she became intoxicated and was sexually assaulted by an older boy, a boy who happens to go to her new high school and winks at her whenever she walks by. Her former friends, some of whom got into trouble when the cops arrived at the party, have turned her into a pariah.

This is heady stuff. I liked this book a great deal because it does away with one of the most insidious misconceptions about youth: that childhood is a simpler time, an idyll where real problems don't exist. Middle and high school, in case you have forgotten, can be devastating, and to go through an issue like Melinda's is certainly crippling. Anderson deserves all the credit in the world for writing a book for young adults in which an issue like rape is seriously discussed. No wonder that the book is frequently challenged, as if the rush to insulate our children from evil does anything but teach them they have nowhere to turn in times of real crisis.

I read this book in about an hour and a half, but as brief as it was, I felt it was very powerful. I am considering teaching it next year, depending on the grade to which I am assigned.

Memories of Ice by Steven Erikson

Outside the city's west wall, close to the shoreline's broken, jagged edge, a lazy swirl of dust rose from the ground, took form. Tool slowly settled the flint sword into its shoulder hook, his depthless gaze ignoring the abandoned shacks to either side and fixing on the massive stone barrier before him.

Dust on the wind could rise and sweep high over this wall. Dust could run in the streams through the rubble fill beneath the foundation stones. The T'lan Imass could make his arrival unknown.

But the Pannion Seer had taken Aral Fayle. Toc the Younger. A mortal man... who had called Tool friend. He strode forward, hide-wrapped feet kicking through scattered bones.

The time had come for the First Sword of the T'lan Imass to announce himself.

Holy crap, this book was awesome. One of the most exciting, action packed stories I've ever come across. This is the third tale of the Malazan Book of the Fallen and each story has been better than the last. It hasn't yet knocked "A Song of Ice and Fire" off its perch as my favorite series, but with 7 stories left, it's got a chance.

A bare-bones summary: A Malazan army, commanded by Dujek Onearm (guess how many arms he has), has been outlawed by the Empress herself for sedition. Finding themselves outside the imperial embrace, Onearm's host joins forces with former foes to face a new evil, the Pannion Domin. The Pannion Domin is a newly formed regime rebelling against the Malazan's imperial yoke. Ruled by a man known simply as the Seer, the Domin is essentially a band of religious zealots. Each citizen of the Domin worships the Seer above all else and would give their life to exercise his will. The Seer has an elite army comprised of professional soldiers and skilled mages, much like any other army in the Malazan universe. However, the Seer holds an ace up his sleeve... the Tenescowri.

Let me say now that I think the story of the Tenescowri is one of the most novel and horrific I've ever read. Novel because I've never before seen its like, horrific because of its cold practicality. The Tenescowri is a huge, unarmed peasant army. The Seer and his forces are a swarm, sieging one city after the next. At each city, all inhabitants are forced to convert to the Pannion faith or be executed. Men, women, or children... it makes no matter. From this tactic, the Tenescowri ranks have swollen to the hundreds of thousands. The Seer uses this huge force in the initial attacks on his targets, throwing wave after wave of Tenescowri to break the ranks of defending armies. Such a huge, peasant army is a great asset, but it should also be a great burden to supply. Therein lies the genius of the Tenescowri. The Seer doesn't supply his peasant forces. They receive no rations whatsover, besides the flesh of all those they conquer. The Seer has produced a seemingly endless supply of soldiers who fight ravenously at every turn... to feed themselves.

Oh yeah, did I mention the Tenescowri are led by a small band of elites known as Children of the Dead Seed? These "children" come to be when the female Pannions rape those defending soldiers they find dying or dead on the battlefield.

I love this book.

Okay, so aside from the unbelievable badassery that is the Tenescowri, just about everything in this book was well executed. The role of the Gods and the turmoil in their pantheon reaches a fever pitch, further complicating events of the mortal realm. The new characters are masterfully developed, sometimes heartbreakingly so. In fact, Memories of Ice, managed to form a bond between its characters and the reader that Gardens of the Moon and Deadhouse Gates did not. This was my main criticism about the first two books. I really enjoyed what I was reading... But I never really cared about any of the players as I do about the principals of "A Song of Ice and Fire," for example. This book changed that. There are 2-3 deaths in Memories that really struck home with me, as I'd finally come to feel a connection with Erikson's characters.

I could write about 10 more pages on how much I love this book, but I'll leave it at that. This series is god-damned excellent and I think if you like this genre in the slightest you need to check it out. Memories of Ice was enthralling, ensuring that I will be finishing the journey and the remaining seven books.

Oh yeah! - I've completely forgotten to mention a character from Memories of Ice and Gardens of the Moon who needs to be noted. Anomander Rake, aside from a laughable name, is one bad mother &*%$er. He's a couple thousand years old, essentially immortal, can shapeshift into a huge dragon, and he carries a sword called Dragnipur. Not only does this sword kill you so dead, but it then traps your soul inside itself, where you spend the rest of eternity in chains, dragging an inconceivably huge wagon burdened with Chaos itself. So yeah, that sucks.

Highlights: The Tenescowri, Toc the Younger, The Mortal Swords, The Sword Anvil, Quick Ben, the Crippled God.
Lowlights: Overuse of the following words: Countenance, preternatural, bells. Also this book used the tiniest typeface I've ever seen. Miniscule.

Taming the Beast by Emily Maguire

"He said that I had proved to him that resistance was pointless. He said that there was nothing left to protect us from each other anymore. We've crossed the line.'"

I had heard too much about this book--both good and bad--not to pick it up at Barnes and Noble when I saw it, especially after it had been dubbed the new Lolita. The title, of course, is a nod to Shakespeare and his reference to sex as being the beast with two backs. Literary allusions are an important part of the novel, as our young and twisted protagonist Sarah is seduced by her 38-year-old English teacher who baits her with the likes of Donne, Carew, and Dante. Not long after their violent and terrifying affair starts, Mr. Carr's wife finds out about it and gives him an ultimatum that takes him far away from Sarah so that his reputation as a teacher, man of God, husband, and father is not shattered by knowledge of his pedophilia. Before he leaves Sarah, however, he takes her out and attacks her so violently and for so long that when he drops her back off at her house she's nearly half dead.

After being abandoned my Carr at 14, a long cycle of promiscuity and recklessness starts for Sarah that leads to things she had never seen coming--such as being raped by two of the few people she said no to and being both emotionally and physically scarred for life in the process. The incident becomes the talk of her town in Australia and her parents more or less force her out of her house before she's even finished throughout high school, leaving her to fend for herself and pay both rent and college tuition with a seedy waitressing job and occasional prostitution. Throughout the novel, her relatively normal best friend Jamie tries to save her--offering her the possibility of a normal relationship until he accidentally impregnates his girlfriend leading him down the aisle and away from Sarah. After her support system has been completely and utterly altered, Carr appears again. With his return, Sarah moves in, cuts ties with everyone she knows, drops out of university halfway through her senior year, and loses her job. Her days are spent in his apartment, memorizing entire books of Ted Hugh's poetry because he demands it, taking breaks only to call him about fifty times a day. She stops eating until eventually she looks like the young girl that she was when Carr found her. Sarah's life is taken over entirely by the man that had destroyed it eight years before.

While I do think this book has several important things to say and has a great deal of literary worth it was difficult to read. Some of the passages were nauseating and cringe-inducing in ways that I had never come across in reading before, mostly due to Sarah's lack of self respect which as a fellow female I find hard to tolerate. Obviously, the scenes between Carr and Sarah were also uncomfortable. The only remotely likable character in the novel was Jamie, who was still capable of doing terrible things. After being Sarah's sole confidant and friend, when she goes to him for help after nearly kiling Carr for trying to leave her to resume a normal life, Jamie is so tired of her and her constant cycle of self destructive behavior and immediate cries for help that like everyone else, he too victimizes her. In the end, it's ultimately Jamie that dies because upon realizing what he has done, he has a heart attack leaving the wife he was desperate to leave for Sarah a widow.

Basically, I still don't know what I think about this book and it's a bit too disturbing to think about any more than I already have.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

"I had taken this time to fall in love instead–in love with the sort of helplessness I had not felt in death–the helplessness of being alive, the dark bright pity of being human–feeling as you went, groping in corners and opening your arms to light–all of it part of navigating the unknown."

One of my friends does not read unless it’s required for something. Insane, I know. When she recommended a book that she’d read on her own time I figured that the author must really be amazing. After finishing The Lovely Bones, I’d have to say that I was right and that Sebold does indeed meet Amazing Author criteria.

The novel opens with our naive fourteen-year-old main character Susie Salmon being raped and murdered by a neighbor, a strange man who builds doll houses for a living. From the grave, we follow Susie up to Heaven. In the novel, Heaven is of the What Dreams May Come variety, where you create your own surroundings. People who desire similar things share your Heaven with you, and this is how you make friends in the afterlife. (There was also not a single mention of God anywhere, which bothered me a bit, even though this Heaven is obviously not Biblically based.) Heaven also offers intake counselors to help you get situated and a view of Earth so that you can check in on your loved ones. The majority of the book, Susie is watching what’s happening to her family and friends while their lives move on without her.

Back on Earth there is the lonely Ruth, the girl Susie’s soul brushed past after dying, who takes up an interest in the paranormal. Ray, the boy who gave Susie her first kiss and left her love notes. Susie’s sister. The escapist mother, the devoted father, the brother too young to understand. It’s hard not to get attached to the characters and root for them or argue with them the same way Susie does from her perch up above. During certain parts of the book, Susie wills herself down to Earth to comfort or help the people that she loves which sometimes only does the opposite and hurts them. The most haunting thing about the book (no pun intended) is that Susie is also watching her killer in his attempts to cover his tracks and trying to understand what made him who he is. While this is more a book about the human experience and coping than it is any kind of thriller, some of the passages about Mr. Harvey gave me chills.

The Lovely Bones is beautiful and simple and emotionally charged. I’m interested to read Sebold’s memoir Lucky. As Sebold is a survivor of rape, it was interesting to me that she chose to write about a young girl who did not survive and still allowed that character a voice.

Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee

Disgrace is about David Lurie, a professor at Cape Technical University who is forced to resign his post because he has an affair with one of his students. For the first half of the book, it seems like the "disgrace" of the title is describing chiefly Lurie's disgrace as he deals with being jobless and being sent to live with his daughter, a lesbian rustic who lives on the East Cape and owns a dog kennel, but the book is split in half by a moment of unspeakable violence when a trio of Africans break into their house and rape Lucy and assault David. In a way, it reminds me of the film In the Bedroom, in which what you believe the movie to be about is replaced by something much darker and more difficult in one fell swoop.

But that's really what tragic moments like that are like, I suppose: one moment your life is one way and then before you can blink it's something completely different.

This book doesn't seem like it's really meant for me; there's too much about aging. It reads like a book written for those who have to deal with the same things as Lurie: the loss of virility, the acceptance of senescence, the abandonment of previously held ambitions. Still, Coetzee's style is so plain that it's easy to connect with his characters, even ones as unlikeable as Lurie.