Dear classics reader,
In this week’s box of delights you will find:
An announcement of our forthcoming October read-along;
Stanisław Lem celebrating his birthday;
A selection of new classics, all published yesterday;
A discussion of this month’s instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop, featuring Mrs Jarley’s Wax-Works;
And our first discussion of Kafka’s The Trial – with a note on Fräulein B.
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October’s read-along – Beloved
I’m delighted to announce our read-along for October. Please join me to read Toni Morrison’s devastating ghost story Beloved, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
What is it?
Sethe is living in Cincinnati, miles away from Sweet Home, the Kentucky farm where she was kept as a slave. Unable to forget the unspeakable horrors that took place there, she is haunted by the violent spectre of her dead child, the daughter who died nameless and whose tombstone is etched with a single word, ‘Beloved’. A tale of brutality, horror and love at any cost.
Why are we reading it?
Beloved is Toni Morrison’s masterpiece. As the Nobel Prize committee said in 1993, she is an author who, ‘in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.’ Beloved is powerful and dark, beautiful and deeply rewarding.
The New York Times hailed Morrison as ‘the nearest thing America has to a national novelist’ and, writing in the Guardian, Lucy Mangan takes an even wider view. ‘Toni Morrison makes me believe in God,’ Mangan writes. ‘She makes me believe in a divine being, because luck and genetics don’t seem to come close to explaining her.’
Which edition should I read?
In the UK, you have a choice between two paperback editions, both published by Vintage Classics. This is the one I’ll be reading:
Vintage has also released a beautiful quarterbound hardback edition:
In the US, the Vintage paperback looks like this:
And Knopf publish a special edition hardback edition, with a similar cover design.
How will we read it?
Beloved is about 300 pages long with three numbered sections comprising a total of 28 unnumbered chapters.
I suggest we read it over four weeks:
We’ll start reading on Friday 3rd October.
On Friday 10th October we’ll discuss the first half of Part 1, Chapters 1-8, up to the line ‘That’s pretty. Denver. Real pretty.’ (p. 100 in my edition);
On Friday 17th October we’ll discuss the second half of Part 1, Chapters 9-18, from ‘It was time to lay it all down . . .’ to ‘. . . “So long,” she murmured from the far side of the trees.’ (p. 195);
On Friday 24th October we’ll discuss Part 2, Chapters 1-5, from ‘124 was loud. Stamp Paid could hear it even from the road . . .’ to ‘. . . You are mine You are mine You are mine’ (p. 256);
And on Halloween, Friday 31 October, we’ll discuss the last section of the book, Part 2, Chapters 6-7 & Part 3, Chapters 1-3, from ‘It was a tiny church no bigger than a rich man’s parlor . . .’ to the end of the novel.
Then, if you’re near London, you’re very welcome to book a ticket for our discussion of Beloved at the Hatchards Classics Book Club on Thursday 6th November.
We meet downstairs at Hatchards (187 Piccadilly) on the first Thursday of every month at 6.30pm – tickets cost £5 with a free Hatchards Reward Card and include a glass (or two) of wine. These book club events are not live-streamed, but afterwards I post a report of our discussion here on Substack.
If you buy a copy of Beloved through Bookshop.org (UK) or Bookshop.org (US), Read the Classics will earn a commission from your purchase. Thank you in advance for your support!
Happy Birthday to Stanisław Lem
In other news, today, 12 September, would have been Stanisław Lem’s 104th birthday.
Lem worked as a car mechanic during the Second World War, smuggling munitions to the Polish Resistance under Soviet, Nazi and then again Soviet occupation. Then in 1945, when eastern Poland was annexed by the Soviet Union, Lem and his family were forcibly relocated west and settled in Kraków, where he studied medicine and began writing. After 1956, once communist censorship became less stringent, he made his name as a writer of science fiction. His works have since been translated into dozens of languages and sold more than 45 million copies. His best-known novel, Solaris, has been filmed three times.
The New York Times called Lem ‘a Jorge Luis Borges for the Space Age, who plays in earnest with every concept of philosophy and physics, from free will to probability theory’.
Solaris by Stanisław Lem (1961)
When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others suffer from the same affliction and speculation rises among scientists that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates incarnate memories, but its purpose in doing so remains a mystery . . .
[UK] Faber | 224 pages | translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox
[US] Harper Voyager | 224 pages | translated by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox
What’s new this week?
Several new classics titles were published yesterday, including new translations of 12th-century Chinese poetry, 13th-century Sufi wisdom, an early 20th-century novel about a Parisian music hall artiste and a late 20th-century elegy for an Italian marriage.
Empire Antarctica by Gavin Francis (2012)
Gavin Francis spent fourteen months in one of the remotest places in the world: Halley, a research station in Antarctica. Storm-locked and frozen, it is said to be easier to evacuate a casualty from the International Space Station than it is to bring someone out of Halley in winter. In the icy emptiness of Antarctica, where one misstep outdoors can mean death but the confined corridors of Halley can drive you mad, Gavin challenges himself to thrive at the ends of the earth. In the penguin colonies, a species utterly adapted to the harsh environment, he finds community, inspiration and joy.
[UK / US] Canongate Canons | 288 pages | introduced by Sara Wheeler
The Magpie at Night by Li Qingzhao (1084-1151)
Li Qingzhao is justly celebrated for her place in Chinese literary history. She was a poet with a wry, unsentimental style and a rich sense of melody. Her ci – lyrics that were originally set to music – are glorious in their depth and genius, spare and arresting on the line. They evoke with rare immediacy the haunting beauty of country life during the Song dynasty; the unseen, restive labour of the poet; and Li Qingzhao’s bracing take on what it means to create art as a woman in the shadow of exile, war, imprisonment, and an unwelcoming literary establishment.
[UK] Penguin Classics | 160 pages | translated by Wendy Chen
[US] Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 160 pages | translated by Wendy Chen
The Vagabond by Colette (1910)
Colette’s semi-autobiographical novel follows thirty-three-year-old Renée Néré as she embarks on a stage career after a divorce from philandering ex-husband, painter Adolphe Taillandy. Unlike the earlier Claudine series, which began as a collaboration between Colette and her first husband, Colette worked alone on The Vagabond to create a leading lady navigating the Parisian working world on her own terms. The music hall performers are Renée’s familiars and confidants, her fellow vagabonds; for the first time, the reader is offered a look behind the scenes from a woman’s perspective, a view enabled by Colette’s own simultaneous experience as writer and dancer. Unambiguously feminist and unabashedly sensual, The Vagabond established Colette as a serious novelist, showcasing her talent as an observer of the natural world and a painter of the beauty of the human form.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 224 pages | translated by Frances Egan
The Masnavi, Book Six by Rumi (c. 1273)
Rumi is the greatest mystic poet to have written in Persian, and The Masnavi is his masterpiece. Divided into six books and consisting of some 26,000 verses, the poem was designed to convey teachings about divine love and unity to the disciples of the Sufi order that he founded, best known today as the Whirling Dervishes. Like the earlier books, Book Six interweaves amusing stories with homilies and lyrical flights. The longest of all the six volumes at nearly 5,000 verses, its themes focus on self-annihilation in God and the oneness experienced at the end of the Sufi path by the realized mystic. This is the first ever verse translation into English of the entirety of Book Six of Rumi’s Masnavi.
[UK / US] Oxford World’s Classics | 352 pages | translated by Jawid Mojaddedi
(The previous five volumes of the Masnavi are available here.)
In Farthest Seas by Lalla Romano (1987)
Upon the death of her husband, Innocenzo Monti, Lalla Romano sought to distil the essence of their long life together. The result was In Farthest Seas: a piercingly intimate retelling of the first four years and final four months of their relationship, built from shard-like moments of connection and revelation. With precise artistry, Romano braids together seemingly minor details – the expressiveness of Innocenzo’s hands, the beauty of his face in sleep, a fleeting instance of pallor – that come to reveal the barest truths of life and death. Unsparing yet tender, minimal yet monumental, In Farthest Seas is a startlingly moving elegy for a great love by a vital Italian writer.
[UK / US] Pushkin Press Classics | 192 pages | translated by Brian Robert Moore
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
The Old Curiosity Shop (12 of 18)
This month we’ve read another four issues of Dickens’s Master Humphrey’s Clock – the next instalment of The Old Curiosity Shop.
Here are my thoughts on Mrs Jarley and her wax-works:
If you’re a paid subscriber, do let me know your thoughts in a comment!
In four weeks’ time, on 10 October, we’ll discuss Chapters 33-39.
These chapters were published in weekly issues of Master Humphrey’s Clock as follows:
No.24 (12 September) Chapters 33-34
No.25 (19 September) Chapters 35-36
No.26 (26 September) Chapter 37
No.27 (3 October) Chapters 38-39
‘JARLEY’S WAX-WORK.’
‘Read it again,’ said the lady, complacently.
‘Jarley’s Wax-Work,’ repeated Nell.
‘That’s me,’ said the lady. ‘I am Mrs Jarley.’
Giving the child an encouraging look, intended to reassure her and let her know, that, although she stood in the presence of the original Jarley, she must not allow herself to be utterly overwhelmed and borne down, the lady of the caravan unfolded another scroll, whereon was the inscription, ‘One hundred figures the full size of life,’ and then another scroll, on which was written, ‘The only stupendous collection of real wax-work in the world,’ and then several smaller scrolls with such inscriptions as ‘Now exhibiting within’—‘The genuine and only Jarley’—‘Jarley’s unrivalled collection’—‘Jarley is the delight of the Nobility and Gentry’—‘The Royal Family are the patrons of Jarley.’
Mrs Jarley is modelled on Marie Tussaud, who famously made her name by making death masks of those who died on the guillotine during the French Revolution, including King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and Robespierre.
Tussaud learned her trade from the Swiss physician Philippe Curtius, who had a sideline in anatomical wax models and wax portraits of living people. Marie’s mother was Curtius’s housekeeper and he taught young Marie his skills: by the age of seventeen she had made a life-size effigy of Voltaire, and when Curtius died, Marie inherited his waxwork collection.
In 1802, after the revolution, Tussaud moved to Britain and established a travelling wax exhibition, which toured the country for the next thirty years, much like Jarley’s Wax-Work.
Eventually, in 1835 – just five years before Dickens began writing The Old Curiosity Shop – Madame Tussaud found a permanent home for her collection: a museum on Baker Street in London, which is still the site of Madame Tussaud’s today.
At Baker Street, Tussaud established her famous Chamber of Horrors, which played up the inherently ghoulish aspect of waxwork models – those uncanny qualities that so terrify poor Nell:
There were so many of them with their great glassy eyes—and, as they stood one behind the other all about her bed, they looked so like living creatures, and yet so unlike in their grim stillness and silence, that she had a kind of terror of them for their own sakes, and would often lie watching their dusky figures until she was obliged to rise and light a candle, or go and sit at the open window and feel a companionship in the bright stars.
There has always been something morbid about waxworks. They originated in the Middle Ages as effigies of dead noblemen and women, carried on top of coffins during funerals and displayed afterwards as popular attractions.
This is certainly the aspect that has proven most enduring in the 20th century – in films such as Waxworks (1924), Mystery of the Wax Museum (1933), House of Wax (1953), Terror in the Wax Museum (1973), Waxwork (1988) and House of Wax (2005) starring Paris Hilton.
I look forward to reading the next seven chapters of The Old Curiosity Shop and discussing them in a month’s time, on Friday 10 October!
Here are links to our previous Old Curiosity Shop posts:
The Schedule (14 March 2025)
Charles Dickens (28 March)
0. Forster’s Life of Dickens (4 April)
1. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.1 – and Gog and Magog (11 April)
2. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.2 – and G. K. Chesterton (18 April)
3. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.3 – and Edgar Allan Poe (25 April)
4. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.4 – and the Old Curiosity Shop (2 May)
6. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.6 – and St. Dunstan-in-the-West (16 May)
7. Master Humphrey’s Clock No.7 – and Jack Bamber’s tale (23 May)
9. Chapters 6-8 – and Master Humphrey, from His Clock-Side in the Chimney Corner (20 June)
10. Chapters 9-16 – and Punch and Judy (18 July)
11. Chapters 17-24 – and Old Giants and Dwarfs (15 August)
