The Collector

"I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch." 

With the onslaught of formulaic TV crime procedurals these days, I had to read this book with a different frame of mind. I even had to expel a bit of what I remember about the (excellent) 1965 William Wyler-directed film, starring Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar, because as much as the film is chilling and influenced future twisted thrillers (here's looking at you, Silence of the Lambs and Misery...) it only peeled back just a few of the layers John Fowles' cleverly constructed in the pages of his debut novel. 

The Collector is a psychological suspense thriller, and depending on your opinion, the first of its kind. It involves a butterfly collecting sociopath who after winning the football pools decides to put his winnings into remodeling a countryside manor so he can kidnap and 'collect' a young woman he's been obsessed with. Since such a storyline is blurred between fiction and fact these days, The Collector by summary feels a tad less compelling, but even when I knew every turn I still managed to feel unsettled, engaged, and even conflicted while reading. There was something so stirringly captivating about Fowles pitting these two characters in this disturbing power struggle, becoming audience to how they both perceive their situation, and how complex it all was.

For the first part, you go inside the warped mind of Fredrick Clegg as he stalks and then prepares to kidnap the object of his obsession, a young art student named Miranda Grey. From Fredrick's perspective, you view Miranda as a difficulty, and you oddly start to victim blame, because well, Fredrick comes off being oh so "nice". He's fixing fancy meals, he's bought Miranda everything her heart's desire, and he's made a nice comfortable spot for her in a cellar surrounded by books and painting tools. He even states he only wants her as his "guest". The internal dialogue has you almost sympathizing with Fredrick (yeah, gross I know), as he comes off as this lonely and socially awkward guy who is looking for a friend, and just goes about it in the most ineptest way imaginable.

But the record scratch of reality comes in the middle as the narrative switches gears and we become privy of Miranda's thoughts through a secret diary she keeps between the mattress. At first this transition was jarring, and since she recounts most of everything you have read for the last 100 pages it all seems like a bad literary decision, but it's not, in fact it's a brilliant turn of character building. Miranda is now not bound and gagged by her captor, she is 'free' to speak her mind in her secret diary and we begin to understand the claustrophobic nightmare she is desperately trying to claw out of. From these pages, we learn that Miranda is quite intelligent and resourceful as she tries to figure out ways to best Fredrick, submitting to and resisting him all for the sake of survival. It's devastating to read how she slowly realizes just how insane Fredrick is and how day-by-day she becomes less of a human in his eyes, but more of an inanimate object that is only to be admired, likened to his framed butterflies. 

"I’m meant to be dead, pinned, always the same, always beautiful. He knows that part of my beauty is being alive, but it’s the dead me he wants. He wants me living-but-dead."  

March On

I couldn't help but roll my eyes when I saw the trailer. Another Little Women adaptation? Groundbreaking.

From operas to television miniseries, there are a lot of Little Women adaptations, seven film treatments alone --- this including two lost silent films and anime adaptations. Lousia May Alcott with one book penned an ode to sisterhood that can be crowned the OG of reboots, predating the reboot craze of today. A craze that far too often in its eagerness to cash in on nostalgic comfort, disappoints at renovating its source anew for richer thought.

Little Women, in all of its 151 years of shelf life, has endured as a classic text as it's not just a product of its era, but can be read as a timeless portrait of family dynamics and coming of age during uncertain times. Is it a universal tale? Somewhat. Verdict is out on that as one could argue that for all the times that Little Women has been adapted for a new generation a tale of girlhood from a diverse voice isn't given the chance to speak, but the question of relevancy rises more so when it's brought to life on screen. When each generation gets a re-introduction to the March sisters I do tend to wonder: Do we really need another film about four sisters who are growing up in the midst of the Civil War, this in 2020, this when there has been so much social upheaval for women's rights, and this when there are other stories and novels worthy to be told about the turmoil and wonder of growing up girl?

Be Kind Rewind --- one of my favorite YouTube channels --- answered my question, and then some as it not only nudged me into giving the 2019 Greta Gerwig-directed version a shot after being indifferent about it initially, but to see Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy come alive for the umpteenth time isn't as stale or redundant at first glance.

BKR focuses on the 1939, 1949 and 1994 versions (skipping the 2018 Hallmark-y modernized one --- yeah, there's a modernized Little Women), giving ample discussion on how each film is approached by its prospective release era, and what it meant for the social climate of the time. Being raised on, and showing some bias with the 1994 Winona Ryder-led version, it was interesting to understand that the tone of the film, though being set in the 1860s, echoed the '90s being in the throes of the 2nd wave of women's movements, as it emphasized more on the March sisters career choices and desires to be seen equal to men much more than previous adaptations.

Whatever the opinion on reboots and refashions (please...STOP!), it is fascinating how one story --- written over two centuries ago --- can be told with such variance, and yet never once lose its message and its literary achievement.

I Capture The Blue Castle

L.M. Montgomery does something refreshing with The Blue Castle: she writes the anti-romance story.

Um, let me dial down that sweeping statement just a bit...

This is a romance story, straight up. There is passion, flushes of cheeks, silent stares, dinners that look out on a enchanting lakeside landscape, the archetypal brooding, enigmatic mountain man that can blow a back out and chop a tree with ease (and who in my mind looked liked a rugged Henry Cavill...rowr). It's riddled with all the romance book clichés that conjure up wistful, windswept cover women, promises of a love affair to end all love affairs, and "heaving bosoms". Still, even sainted with these hallmarks, The Blue Castle is the type of romance story that doesn't fuss in the proverbial as it not only deals with matters of the heart, but also concerns itself with how the heroine finds love within.

For a book written in 1926, set in a time before World War I, it was a pretty bold choice to have a heroine who is 29 years old, unmarried, and loathing it. Women aren't supposed to show this on their face, no, they're supposed to grin and bear the spinsterhood, be the subservient shut-in. Valancy Stirling is a archetype character that doesn't want to accept such complacency, and I already love her for this.

Blue Castle was Montgomery's first novel written for adults, and its obvious that Valancy Stirling is no Anne Shirley, L.M. Montgomery's most iconic literary creation. She's jaded and cynical, bereft of hope and just plain miserable, relegated to being the spinster of her family and seeing no prospects for her future. She lives with an overbearing mother, and whiny elder cousin who hover over her like an infantile invalid, and dictate her daily existence. tl;dr: they are insufferable. Her other family members are equally insufferable, with one creepy uncle (isn't always there always that one creepy uncle?) who makes her the butt of his sexist and lame jokes, all while holding the rest of the Stirlings hostage with his ample will if they dare so challenge his opinions. Oh, and to add to the #firstworldproblems, Valancy is often compared to her beautiful (but dingbat) cousin, Olive whose simple existence frustrates Valancy because why is always about Marsha, Marsha, Marsha?!?

For this, Valancy is truly living in a private, socially claustrophobic hell, as she has resigned herself to never living for herself and living out her days unloved and untouched by a man, even though she desires such. Her only escapes are the nature books of a John Foster whose prose Valancy knows by heart --- this to the chagrin of her mother who finds them "racy reads" (cause oak trees make one horny?) --- and in dreams of a "blue castle", a fictitious place where she can be free to be the woman she wishes to be.

"They never knew that Valancy had two homes–the ugly red brick box of a home, on Elm Street, and the Blue Castle in Spain. Valancy had lived spiritually in the Blue Castle ever since she could remember. She had been a very tiny child when she found herself possessed of it. Always, when she shut her eyes, she could see it plainly, with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its faint, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle. Jewels that queens might have worn; robes of moonlight and fire; couches of roses and gold; long flights of shallow marble steps, with great, white urns, and with slender, mist-clad maidens going up and down them; courts, marble-pillared, where shimmering fountains fell and nightingales sang among the myrtles; halls of mirrors that reflected only handsome knights and lovely women–herself the loveliest of all, for whose glance men died. All that supported her through the boredom of her days was the hope of going on a dream spree at night. Most, if not all, of the Stirlings would have died of horror if they had known half the things Valancy did in her Blue Castle."

These escapes to this imagined "blue castle" bring some ease to Valancy in her lonely hours, but once departed from them Valancy begins to feel chest pains and becomes worrisome to their cause. Not wanting to involve her family, she take matters into her own hands to visit in secret Dr. Trent, a noted heart specialist, who lives in the same (fictional) Ontario town of Deerwood as the Stirlings, and who has been denounced by her family as a no-nothing "quack". Seeing Dr. Trent only provides a devastating blow of news for Valancy, but such news allows her to shed her conventional constraints and truly live life for herself, and well, "do crazy shit".

O Pioneers!

"The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman"

O Pioneers! is a love letter to Willa Cather's memories of her native Nebraska homestead and the immigrant Swedes, Bohemians, and French who settled on that vast and blustery land of mystique and melancholy during the 1880s. True to Cather's nature, she christens the novel with an independent and iron-willed heroine by the name of Alexandra Bergson, who after her father's death takes over the family farm, this much to the chagrin and jealousy of her disagreeable older brothers. For approximately 30 years we follow Alexandra and other occupants of the Divide, all of whom are hoping not to 'blow away' on this wild and unpredictable land they call home.

What drives this tale is Cather's picturesque prose. She is by far one of America's greatest minimal wordsmiths. She doesn't need to bleed purple to capture a feeling. Even at its barest, her prose snaps crisp and clean, getting right to the root of emotion. As this is her second book, written in 1913, Cather is still maturing into her style. She doesn't quite handle character development well as she has moments where she tells more than shows, and the characters aren’t as vividly explored as one would want. Timelines are also often skipped because we hear of Alexandra making a success of her farm by sheer gumption and keen, almost scientific planning, but we don't get to experience the toil or the complications she ran into as we're just simply told of it all. It was rare for women in Alexandra's era to accomplish a task of this caliber, and it would've made for great reading and a deeper sense of Alexandra’s character if this wasn't so lightly glossed over.

Still the word magic Cather casts make up for the lightweight action. As stated, Cather's prose is just so damn exquisite and it touches all the senses in the simplest of ways. It leads you by the hand through the yellow fields, points skyward to admire the purple and reds of dusk, turns your attention to the elegance of a duck in motion --- an intimate guided tour it is.

"She had never known before how much the country meant to her. The chirping of the insects down in the long grass had been like the sweetest music. She had felt as if her heart were hiding down there, somewhere, with the quail and the plover and all the little wild things that crooned or buzzed in the sun. Under the long shaggy ridges, she felt the future stirring." 

They Shoot Horses, Don't They?

"Maybe it's just the whole damn world is like Central Casting. They got it all rigged before you ever show up." 

Numerous books were released during the Great Depression, but no book struck more of a cultural chord or contained a decade's worth of human resilience during economic and social disparity better than John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Even if you haven't read it (*coughs and looks away*), you know something about it, as the title alone has almost become synonymous for the era of hardship it represents within its pages. Just Google "The Great Depression", and its at the top of the results. A teacher you once had probably assigned it in class. It no doubt resides on a bunch of required read-before-you're-casket-ready reading lists. It's a book that is just impossible to ignore.

Now, no disrespect to Steinbeck, but Grapes wasn't the only book to explore one of America's most harrowing hours. Okay, maybe these books weren't out there winning Pulitzer Prizes, but they did exist. Coming up blank? Let me steer you over to a neglected corner, where you'll see cussing and fussing for attention Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, the anti-Grapes...the anti-everything, really.

Horses was released in 1935, in the thick of the Great Depression, and it's with no surprise that it ended up faring better with French existentialists such as Simone de Beauvoir (who dubbed it the first "American existentialist novel"), and Albert Camus (who'd seven years later would pen a similar sketch of human doom with The Stranger). Americans wanted hope and relief and sympathetic characters they could relate to --- not someone extolling pessimism and framing them as farm animals being led to the slaughter. They Shoot Horses, Don't They? doesn't offer a mustard seed of faith, or even a 'this too shall pass' reassuring pat on the shoulder. This lean, mean novella instead sneers at the migrant farming sojourn of the Joad brood as it ensnares its disparate youths Robert Syverton and Gloria Beatty in a thorny fate, all while lifting a soiled middle finger towards the sweet apple pie of Americana optimism and prosperity.

Novella November: Plague Of Hollywood Locusts

"I'm going to be a star some day," she announced as though daring him to contradict her. "It's my life. It's the only thing in the whole world that I want. If I'm not, I'll commit suicide.”

At one point in my life I wanted to be an actress.

Yeah, when have you not heard that line? But seriously, I wanted to be one because of what I naively thought it represented --- you know --- fame, wealth, glamour, prestige, insta-acceptance, the chance to act with Benicio Del Toro (sorry, I love me some Benicio Del Toro). I even did theater for three years in high school just to see if I had what it takes to become a true thespian. Within a few years of being an understudy-turned-sound-director-turned-make-up-artist, I realized that just because my mother calls me a "drama queen" doesn’t make me an actress cause the fact stands that I'm a terrible actress. Truly terrible. Trust me, I'm someone who thrives better behind the scenes, not front and center.

For this, to some extent, I envied the stage kids, the kids who could cry on cue and who sung show tunes with colorful gusto at the drop of a fedora. These kids, my classmates, were going to be ACTORS, maybe not famous ones, but they were excelling at my girlhood fantasy to be a bronze Meryl Streep. Still, I think I admired them more for how they had the same teeth-grinding spirit I now have about writing. No matter what happened, they were never going to stop acting, never going to extinguish their dreams no matter how many bit parts, failed auditions, and false hopes they encountered. They held out hope that one day all the struggle and sweat would be worth it.

But what happens when reality sets in? When those bit parts never transpire? When your dream is deferred and denied over and over again into a webbed net of jaded insanity?

You get The Day of the Locust.

Novella November: The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie

"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life"

Dead Poets Society. To Sir with Love. Lean On Me. Stand & Deliver. Mona Lisa Smile --- Miss Jean Brodie tosses a floral scarf across her shoulders and scoffs at those narratives about teachers who inspire and want their students to succeed. Inspire students? Pish posh. Urge students to succeed? Sure you jest!

Jean Brodie uses the classroom as her own stage. She is the star of a show called "Miss Jean Brodie in Her Prime" and she wants everybody to understand that being in one’s prime is the "crème de la crème".

Miss Brodie is a teacher at a Scottish girls' school during the 1930s. She is charming, self-assured, well-read, well-traveled, and an arresting storyteller with a swell of opinions on just about, well, everything.

She's also full of shit. So full of it.

Sure, she's got wit and sass. Sure, she's a raconteur of an unconventional sort, but she's also manipulative and a narcissist. She's also a Fascist. Truly. She stans for Mussolini and Francisco Franco. If she was around today she’d follow them on Twitter, write annoying think pieces on her Tumblr, and set up a GoFundMe in order to gather donations to help Mussolini 'improve' Italy. Aside from her love of Fascist dictators, her self-absorbed foolishness makes her quite dangerous, unfit to even be an orator of any kind, but there she is, her Roman nose held high in the air, teaching at a girls' school, "putting old heads on young shoulders".

It's also a shame that she has her admirers. Six impressionable students named Sandy, Mary, Eunice, Rose, Monica, and Jenny who are dubbed "the Brodie set". The girls hang onto Brodie's every word, idolizing her to points of extreme influence. They eat, sleep, and live Brodie. Two of them even write fan fiction about Miss Brodie (and as a bonus Spark provides every cringing word of it!).

In the book we follow the girls as they age and Miss Brodie being ever present in their lives and never wavering in encouraging a cult of personality between her 'set'. Brodie is so invested in these girls that she goes so far as to spin fantasy lives for them, "predicting" how they will end up (one girl is to be known for her "sex", though at 13 she’s giggling about sex) Yet, Miss Brodie doesn't realize that her idea to put "old heads on young shoulders" is soon to backfire, because as the girls mature and become more fully-formed individuals, the glow around Brodie begins to dull, with one member of the Brodie brood falling into disdain for her once beloved mentor, betraying her in the end.

Novella November: Breakfast Of Fancy Fakery With Holly Golighty

"Never love a wild thing, Mr. Bell", Holly advised him. "You can't give your heart to a wild thing: the more you do, the stronger they get."

I must be in the minority, but as much as I adore me some Audrey Hepburn, I never warmed to her role as Holly Golightly in Blake Edwards' 1961 cinema classic, Breakfast at Tiffany's. I truly disliked the movie when I first saw it, and when I tried watching it again about a year ago, I still felt cold towards it. The iconic and stylish fashions Audrey sported throughout was the only thing that kept my eyes on it, and can we just say that Mickey Rooney in "yellow face" is about the most offensive on-screen performance next to well… Flex Alexander slapping chalk and wet baby powder on his face to portray Michael Jackson? (Yes, that was an actual thing that some people spent money on, recorded, and foisted upon human eyes…welcome to your future nightmares...)

So why read the source material for a film I have such an aversion too? Because books are always often better than the movie (duh) and Truman Capote is one hell of a writer (double duh). He is. He's a natural born storyteller who during his reign possessed the sassiest tongue from the South, and if he was alive today would have the shadiest Twitter log ever. His prose is so delightful and dagger-sharp, and tinged with just the right balance of purple. It's more so lavender and plum --- the relatives of purple --- to where you're whisked into word wonderment while reading, but never do you feel like you're suffocating on adjectives the whole time. He’s also a master at autopsying his characters right down to the atom. Holly Golightly would just be some insufferable white girl in someone’s inexperienced hands, but in Capote's she’s a "wild thing", untamable and feral, with dimensions that rival the facets on the diamonds she longs for from Tiffany's window displays.

Most consider In Cold Blood as Capote's masterpiece, but I don't know, as much as it is the godfather of true crime novels, I enjoyed reading Breakfast At Tiffany's a lot more and found it lingering in my mind longer. Of course, these two tales are incomparable. One is written as fiction, the other as fact; one is set in the rural Midwest, the other in the bustle of New York City. Night and day these stories are, but both books are about desperate, lost people who make poor choices over and over, because they don’t know another way and don’t care to find the exit sign, even when its glowing red in their face.

Vagabond Heart

 "A female I was, and a female I find myself again; to suffer from it and to rejoice in it."

Renée Néré is my kind of heroine. She's damaged, but still tenacious in the fight; smart, but human enough to second guess such intellect when her heart wants to run free.

She's a 30-something Parisian vaudeville performer whose reveling in a crucible of change and newfound freedom after divorcing a controlling philanderer. Emotionally beaten and bruised by the marriage, Renée is suspicious of romance and isn't keen on surrendering the singular life she has so meticulously assembled for herself. When a handsome and wealthy admirer named Maxime makes his intentions known, Renée is thrust into a tailspin of doubt and temptation, where she wonders if she should allow herself to love again, or remain in a hardened shell of independence.

Colette is my kind of writer. A writer who isn't afraid to prick at human emotion and write about the battle scars. A writer whose works feel so human, so 'lived in'.

Usually I'm not much of a fan of stream-of-consciousness narratives, but Colette's approach at the technique in The Vagabond is exquisite and engaging. Never does Renée's voice wander or sound contrive, and even when it feels frantic it still romantically swings as we experience every doubt, every act of resistance, every passionate surrendering, and every anguished decision. At times while reading a section of prose, I would find myself nodding in agreement, thinking --- is this me? --- even though last I checked I occupy a different skin, a different world than Renée. It's this intimacy towards a character that Colette has achieved best of all in the pages of The Vagabond.

There are claims that this is the most auto-biographical of Colette's works, and that's quite the truth as Renée is in a lot of aspects a vivid rendering of Colette. Like her, Colette was a young woman whose much-older first husband, author and publisher, Henry Gauthier-Villars, was a notorious libertine and an imposing figure in her life. Gauthier-Villars was the one who steered her into a writing career, this at the cost of her own voice, as her classic Claudine series was first published and promoted under her husband's nom-de-plume "Willy".

Most writers often write from experience, and then lie about it later (ha!), but after learning this bit of information I got the sense that Colette, in a way, regained her suppressed voice within the pages of The Vagabond, being one of the first books she wrote that was correctly attributed to her. It's why Renée is written to have such determination for autonomy, and why it's so potent whenever she declares it for herself:

 "You want me to behave like everyone? To make up my mind? Him or somebody else, what does it matter? You want to disturb the peace that I’ve won back, you want to direct my life toward some other concern than the rugged, bracing and natural one of earning my own living? Or are you prescribing a lover for my health, like a purge? What for? I’m feeling well, and thank God, I’m not in love, I’m not in love, I’ll never love anyone, anyone, anyone!"