I’ve been reading a great deal lately. Carrying my Kindle with me wherever I go and reading, reading, reading a wild assortment of books from a detailed biography of the Jim Jones (yes, the Jim Jones of The Peoples Temple infamy), a charming and dated mystery by Ngaio Marsh, a brilliant new work of historical fiction with Edgar Allan Poe as a central character, a silly cozy, a popular mystery, a terrible mystery, a vintage Agatha Christie, and ‘The Signature of All Things’ by Elizabeth Gilbert.
That last one is an extraordinary book and it reminded me that reading—simply sitting down and reading—is a pleasure. The story starts slowly, and I wasn’t sure where it was going or why. As the narrative continued it went off in both unexpected and predictable plot twists as the character at the center of the story becomes more and more fully realized. What’s is about? Everything and nothing. At its heart it is a portrait of an unusual, brilliant, confounding, and sometimes ridiculous character and how she fails and succeeds in her interactions with other people and the natural world.
It felt like a story not just about another time, but of another time and that is the book’s secret achievement. I felt like I was reading Dickens or Austen or Mark Twain and not a contemporary writer’s imagined version of a historical setting. The key ingredient is the central character and her peculiar view of the world. It is an authentic & eccentric point-of-view.
Reading it in the context of old and new books, set in what is (or was) a contemporary world and new books set in the past, the achievement of the sense of NOW was remarkable. The dated, and yet still charming, Ngaio Marsh took place/was written during my lifetime. It’s set in the early 1970s and the story revolves around the strange dance between Britain and its former colonies, racism, and the cultural & social revolutions of the late 1960s/70s.
The excellent historical setting Lynn Cullen’s ‘Mrs. Poe’ —a brand new book set in Poe’s New York City—revolves around limits placed on women and the central character is a poet/abandoned wife of a portrait painter. No spoilers here, so I’ll just say that the characters are based on real people and real stories of Poe in the wake of ‘The Raven.’ Many of the most privileged characters push against the rules of life for women at that time, and yet I never entirely lost the feeling that the book was written today. Perhaps because the protagonist keeps longing for another way to live while still maintaining her status. It’s interesting. I recommend the book. My own experiments in historical settings have had the same failings, and the Elizabeth Gilbert book is inspiring me to try to set the bar higher next time.
History is often present in the pleasure of reading a good book.
I’m not that fond of historical novels. If I want to read about Dickens’ England, I’ll read Dickens or another writer of the same era. Writers can’t help injecting at least some of their own worldview into whatever they write, thus a modern writer writing about an earlier period will be writing about a world they see through their own lens. 🙁
I’ve been doing a lot of reading as well, and lately none of it has been scifi! Something like six books in a row. Yes, I know, shock horror. 😀
I am returning to my roots though. Just downloaded the 5th book in a military scifi series written by an Aussie author.
My default is to mystery fiction, but variety spices things up!
Yes, there is a significant difference between a book written in a given historical period and historical fiction. We can’t help by summon anachronistic ideas into the heads of our characters. That’s why the Elizabeth Gilbert book was extraordinary. It was a pleasure to read, too. During some of my long walks, I pretend I’m narrating a story in the future and describing New York as it is right now to a person of the future. Keeps me alert to my surroundings, but it’s also a fun game. Try it sometime. Talking about what’s important to people right now with the knowledge that it may be trivial or dated in a fundamental way in the future.