The Trial (3 of 3), Anna Karenina (9 of 14) & Toni Morrison
Monks, monkeys and mothers-in-law
Dear classics reader,
In this week’s court of law you will find:
Cyprian Ekwensi celebrating his birthday;
A selection of new classics, published this week;
A short biography of Toni Morrison;
A discussion of this month’s instalment of Anna Karenina – with a note on the Patti sisters;
And our last discussion of Kafka’s The Trial – with a splash of Derrida and German TV.
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Happy Birthday to Cyprian Ekwensi
Today, 26 September, would have been Cyprian Ekwensi’s 104th birthday.
Here’s a link to our post from last September about Ekwensi and his wonderful novel Jagua Nana.
What’s new this week?
For those of us reading Anna Karenina this year, the most exciting classics reissue this week is the tenth addition to the Fitzcarraldo Editions Classics series: Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev, a first-hand, idiosyncratic portrait of Tolstoy by Maxim Gorky, that conflicted Russian author, who became friends with both Lenin and Stalin before falling out with one and being poisoned by the other.
And if you are looking for more Kafkaesque material after finishing The Trial, it sounds like The Viaduct by David Wheldon is worth exploring.
Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev by Maxim Gorky (1920-28)
In 1920, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy and it was recognized almost immediately as one of the few masterpieces of modern biography. ‘It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written,’ writes Leonard Woolf in his autobiography. ‘It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room – his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour.’ In 1934, the book was expanded to include Gorky’s memoirs of two other great Russian literary figures, Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreyev.
[UK] Fitzcarraldo Editions Classics #10 | 208 pages | translated by Bryan Karetnyk
You’ll Like My Mother by Naomi A. Hintze (1969)
Francesca is eight months pregnant when her husband’s death in Vietnam makes her a widow at age 21. With no one else to turn to, she remembers her husband’s often-repeated promise, ‘You’ll like my mother.’ Although her mother-in-law, Mrs. Kinsolving, has not answered her telegram or letters, a desperate Francesca sets off to her home in Ohio, hoping the woman will take her in. When she arrives at the huge, dark, ivy-covered mansion, she feels a twinge of fear, a foreboding that is only increased by the ominous presence of the tall, ivory-haired woman who answers the door. Her eyes are pale gray, almost colorless, her greeting is cold and unfriendly. And when Francesca steps inside, little does she know the terror that awaits her within . . .
[UK] Valancourt Books | 152 pages
The Devil’s Elixirs by E. T. A. Hoffmann (1815)
The son of a heinous sinner, Medardus is brought up in a monastery to atone for his father’s wicked ways. However, after succumbing to temptation, Medardus himself is lured into a life of sin. A labyrinthine plot sees him embarking on a fantastical journey into the world, meeting his doppelgänger, involving himself in a game of double impersonation, and becoming embroiled in murderous intrigues at the Vatican, before the mysterious curse hanging over him and his family is finally explained.
[UK] Alma Classics | 288 pages | translated by Ronald Taylor
Home to Harlem by Claude McKay (1928)
McKay portrays Harlem post-WWI, through Jake, an African American longshoreman who deserts the U.S. army and returns to his home in Harlem, and Ray, a Haitian intellectual expatriate. With his use of dialect, McKay portrays these men and other working-class characters who try to stay afloat in a complex world of isolation, racial discrimination, and excitement drawn from Harlem’s jazz nightlife. Home to Harlem sparked controversy among Black middle-class critics, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who considered it reductive and stereotypical, while other critics such as Langston Hughes embraced it for its frankness and for the relevance of McKay’s reflections on the Black working-class experience and the social and racial inequalities of the day. This debate within the Harlem Renaissance literary world and curiosity about Harlem from white readers drove Home to Harlem to become the first commercial bestseller by an African American novelist.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 336 pages | introduced by Belinda Edmondson
Fantastic Tales by Fitz-James O’Brien (1855-9)
In the field of supernatural and fantastic literature, certain names come readily to mind – E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft – but the name of Fitz-James O’Brien has been unjustly overlooked and nearly forgotten since his premature death in 1862 during the American Civil War. ‘The Diamond Lens’, O’Brien’s most famous short story, can be regarded as a forerunner of the science-fiction genre; ‘What Was It?’ is alleged to have served as a model for H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man; and ‘The Wondersmith’ is a marvellous tale of Hoffmannesque invention. Taken together, O’Brien’s few surviving stories give him an important place in the development of American fiction and remain as fresh today as when they first written more than a hundred and fifty years ago.
[UK] Alma Classics | 152 pages | introduced by Michael Hayes
The Viaduct by David Wheldon (1983)
A political prisoner, A., has just been released from a long term of imprisonment for writing a seditious book. Fearing re-arrest, he leaves town, setting off on foot along a disused railway track running over a huge viaduct that looms over the city. As his journey progresses through a surreal and nightmarish landscape, he passes through strange towns and villages and meets other travelers following the same path for reasons of their own, with his pursuers always at his heels. A. does not know what awaits him at the terminus of the railroad line, and the ultimate horrific revelation of what lies at the end of his journey will linger with the reader long after finishing the book.
[UK / US] Valancourt Books | 136 pages | introduced by Aiden O’Reilly
Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en (16th century)
One of China’s Four Great Classical Novels, Monkey King was written anonymously during the Ming dynasty and is most commonly attributed to Wu Cheng’en, the son of a silk-shop clerk from east China. It recounts a Tang-dynasty monk’s quest for Buddhist scriptures, accompanied by an omni-talented kung-fu Monkey King called Sun Wukong; a rice-loving divine pig; and a depressive man-eating river-sand monster. Comparable to The Canterbury Tales or Don Quixote, the tale is at once a comic adventure story, a humorous satire of Chinese bureaucracy, a spring of spiritual insight and an extended allegory in which the group of pilgrims journeys towards enlightenment.
[UK / US] Penguin Classics | 384 pages | translated by Julia Lovell | foreword by Gene Luen Yang
The book descriptions above are taken from the publishers’ online blurbs.
Toni Morrison (1931-2019)
I’m looking forward to reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved together in October. We’ll start reading next week, on Friday 3rd October. All the details are here.
First, though, here is a little about Morrison’s life.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children in a working class family. She read voraciously and enjoyed listening to her parents telling African-American folk tales and ghost stories.
In 1949 she enrolled at Howard University to study Drama and then English Literature. At Howard she became known as Toni, a shortening of her baptismal name, Anthony, because it was easier to pronounce than Chloe.
After graduating from Howard in 1953 she took a masters degree in American Literature from Cornell University and then returned to Howard to teach English.
While teaching there she met her husband, Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect; they married in 1958 – and Toni was pregnant with their second son when they divorced in 1964.
In the late 1960s she began working as a senior fiction editor at Random House in New York, the first black woman to do so. As an editor she championed the writing of Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, Toni Cade Bambara, Henry Dumas and Muhammad Ali, among many others.
While working as an editor – and raising two boys on her own – Morrison also began to write herself, waking up at 4am to do so. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970.
It was her third novel, however, Song of Solomon (1977), which brought her national acclaim. It won the prestigious National Book Critics Circle Award and was chosen for the Book of the Month Club.
In 1983 she resigned from Random House to focus on her writing and in 1987 she published her masterpiece, Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize. When Beloved didn’t win the National Book Award, forty-eight black critics and writers, including Maya Angelou, wrote to protest.
In 1993, Morrison became the first black woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
In the 21st century, Morrison continued to write novels, as well as songs, poetry, children’s books and an opera libretto. In 2012, President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
When she died in 2019 at the age of 88, eulogies were given at her memorial by – among others – Oprah Winfrey, Angela Davis, Michael Ondaatje, David Remnick and Fran Lebowitz.
‘She revealed the sins of her nation, while profoundly elevating its canon,’ said Afua Hirsch. ‘She suffused the telling of blackness with beauty, whilst steering us away from the perils of the white gaze. That’s why she told her stories. And why we will never, ever stop reading them.’
I look forward to reading Beloved with you, starting next Friday.
Anna Karenina (9 of 14)
We’ve finished the ninth instalment of the novel – a short one this month – but excellent I thought! Here are my comments:
I’d love to hear yours.
As I say in the video above, the irony of that climactic scene at the opera house is that all the drama is happening off the stage in the auditorium. Along with Tolstoy (and the audience, it seems) we ignore the opera and focus on the tragic drama taking place between Anna and Madame Kartasova. As Vronsky’s mother says, ‘She is causing a sensation. People are forgetting Patti because of her.’
I thought I’d take a moment to dwell on this ‘Patti’ and the ignored performance on-stage. We don’t learn the name of the opera, but it is ‘Patti’s subscription performance’. Rosamund Bartlett explains that this is a reference to the Italian soprano Carlotta Patti, who ‘sang in Russia between 1872 and 1875 and was very popular’. This aligns with R. F. Christian’s chronology of the novel, which places this scene in 1875.
The fact that Tolstoy uses the singular surname, however, is likely to have reminded his readers of Carlotta’s younger sister, the soprano Adelina Patti, who was even more celebrated. Bartlett notes that Adelina ‘sang in Russia in 1874’.
A few months after this instalment of Anna Karenina was published, Giuseppe Verdi declared that Adelina Patti was the finest singer who had ever lived. She toured Europe to adoring crowds and remains one of the most famous sopranos in history.
One mark of her fame is that Adelina is mentioned in a number of works of literature, including The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, Nana by Émile Zola, Boroña by Leopoldo Alas and the Sherlock Holmes adventure of ‘The Bruce-Partington Plans’ by Arthur Conan Doyle.
For the 2012 film adaptation of Anna Karenina, the Australian soprano Allegra Glagu performed as Patti. Here is Glagu’s performance, over a montage of clips from the film:
I hope you enjoy the next monthly instalment of Anna Karenina. On 31st October we will discuss Part Six, Chapters 1-15. These chapters formed the tenth instalment of the novel, first published in the Russian Messenger in January 1877.
Here are links to our previous Anna Karenina posts:
The Schedule (18 December 2024)
Leo Tolstoy (3 January 2025)
0. Introductions (10 January)
1. Part One, Chapters 1-23 – and Nabokov on Time (31 January)
2. Part One, Chapters 24-34, Part Two, Chapters 1-11 – and John Sutherland on Anna’s English novel (28 February)
3. Part Two, Chapters 12-29 – and Sergei Eisenstein at the races (28 March)
4. Part Two, Chapters 30-35, Part Three, Chapters 1-12 – and the Mowing Scene (25 April)
5. Part Three, Chapters 13-32 – and the Mirror of the Revolution (30 May)
6. Part Four, Chapters 1-17 – and Nabokov’s double nightmare (27 June)
7. Part Four, Chapters 18-23, Part Five, Chapters 1-6 – and the Mystery of Crowning (25 July)
8. Part Five, Chapters 7-20 – and Aleksandr Voronsky on Art (29 August)
