Saturday, 2 April 2011

Martha Cooley

Martha Cooley, The Archivist

OK, so I can't tell whether I am getting smarter or the opposite, but when I read this a very very very long time ago, I was like, WOW THIS BOOK IS REALLY DEEP (and yet somehow I completely failed to pick up on the parallel between the life of the main character, a librarian in charge of a stash of T.S. Eliot's letters to a long-lost love, and the life of T.S. Eliot himself (both kept their crazy wives locked up in psychiatric facilities for long periods of time until the respective wives committed suicide)). And when I re-read it this week, I thought, WOW THIS BOOK IS CLONKING ME OVER THE HEAD WITH ITS OVERLY OBVIOUS PARALLEL BETWEEN T.S. ELIOT AND THE MAIN DUDE. Also I found her prose precious and stilted and overloaded with novelly details (people adjusting their scarves in between chunks of academic discourses, just to remind you that they are People rather than just Literary Points of View. And speaking of tedious academic discourse, I swear there are some passages that are indistinguishable from a junior high school paper on T.S. Eliot: a few too many biographical details copied directly from the Encyclopedia Britannica (I'm only saying that because I used to do it, so I recognize the style...). So, meh. Not my fave.
Currently working on John Mortimer's Rumpole and the Penge Bungalow Murders (whee! lowbrow(ish)!), and Matt Ridley, The Red Queen (having some trouble following a couple of his arguments, but I suspect it has to do with the fact that I am zombie-like from sleep deprivation these days. Perhaps I should be sleeping instead of reading. Hm.