Thinking Aloud

Had another extremely restful night from a full day in the city. As far as today is concerned , this will depend on the weather. I might go and see my brother or visit Lewes again.

Posted via m.livejournal.com.

Book 23 - Christina Rossetti "Goblin Market"

Christina Rossetti "Goblin Market" (E.P. Dutton & C0.)






This poem was a ton of fun! I especially liked the part where the nubile young woman sucks nectar off her sister's neck.


It's a weird, wicked poem. The meter and rhyme scheme are schizophrenic,and the way it fractures, unravels, thaws into a dew, and then resolves and reforms and returns is just mesmerizing. Thirty two pages of exquisiteness. 

I tried to track it for a while, but you actually can't. Rossetti has no intention of being consistent. That adds to the creepy feel of the poem, as you're constantly off balance. I'm not sure what the goblin fruit represents. Addiction? Marriage? Lesbian incest? I think, like most of the best poems, it can mean whatever you like to think it means.

She's so dark and melancholy and yet there's something very innocent and even hopeful in her verses- it's beyond beautiful.

Book 24 - Jhumpa Lahiri "Interpreter of Maladies: Stories"

Jhumpa Lahiri "Interpreter of Maladies: Stories"  (Flamingo)




The general malady relentlessly presented in this short story collection is tension in relationships--particularly marital relationships, but others as well. The more specific malady is the existential and pragmatic shock of the Emergency--the 1947 partition of Pakistan--and the later secession of Bangladesh. These sociocultural and political ruptures form the nominally-explicit back story that informs the protagonists' emotional wariness and disillusion.

The best stories are about contemporary Indian-American families, either alone or interacting with Euro-Americans or other South Asians. The less-successful stories take place away from this context and are more forced and less interesting ("A Real Durwan" is an example ). At her best, Lahiri conveys a great deal of historical information (with which most U.S. readers are unlikely to be unfamiliar) with very little exposition and in a way that is relevant to the characters' conflicts.

Lahiri writes about these characters in various styles, first person and third person, but remains non-judgmental of them - allowing the reader to make of the characters whatever they may. She presents them to the reader at a particular point in time in the character's life, taking the innermost feelings of the person and laying them bare for the reader to explore. It is this honesty, and this baring of the soul of the characters, that makes the Interpreter of Maladies a collection of exceptional stories - ones that will move you, and affect you in a most profound way.

Read the collection in order as it hangs together well as a sequence.