Brideshead Revisited: Test Your Word Power!

Soon after starting Brideshead Revisited I decided to keep track of the number of words I encountered within it that I didn’t know. This throwback exercise was inspired firstly by the dismay of finding that within the first two pages of the book I had come across two words I wasn’t quite sure of, and secondly by my first attempt at playing Free Rice where I stagnated at level 46 and got tooth-gnashingly annoyed.

I was embarrassed to realize in the course of this exercise that although I had encountered some words a number of times before, I still didn’t quite know what they meant, perhaps because the context they had been used in at the time had been enough for me to follow what was written, or I simply didn’t bother to look them up. Funnily enough, having learned this bunch of words from Brideshead Revisited, I played Free Rice again today and easily got to level 49. I guess our primary school teachers really did know what they were talking about!

Just for fun, I’ll start by listing the words on their own so you can check how many of them you know off the bat. After the list, continue reading for a little more context to the words and links to dictionary definitions.

  1. verismilitude
  2. panegyric
  3. jejune
  4. sacerdotal
  5. lapidary
  6. muniment
  7. suborn
  8. glaucous
  9. manumission
  10. crapulous

Read More “Brideshead Revisited: Test Your Word Power!”

Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh)

Alec recently enjoyed Brideshead Revisited so I read it too in a fit of foppery. Waugh’s prose was masterful but I thought the book’s comic moments were far more successfully realized than its theme (described by Waugh in his foreword as “the operation of divine grace” on the book’s main characters).

The Catholics in this book struggle with the outward moral strictures of being Catholic but are indifferent to the internal. We aren’t privy to any thoughtful exploration of their faiths, just an inexplicable attachment to following some rules (eg. not divorcing your husband even though you have a loveless marriage and have fallen in love with someone else) but not others (eg. not cheating on your husband in the first place). I honestly don’t understand why they continue to feel any residual attachment to Catholicism when they have long ceased to practise it; it feels more like an explanation of the power of superstition rather than divine grace. I guess Graham Greene has just spoiled me in this regard, because I really think Waugh’s attempts here don’t hold a candle to anything Greene has accomplished in a similar vein.

But in case anyone reading the previous paragraph has immediately decided that Brideshead Revisited doesn’t sound like their kind of book, let me discourage you from that – it has many inimitably funny moments and it always feels wonderfully luxurious after I overdose on modern fiction to plunge into the vintage elan of a writer like Waugh. Here’s a passage I enjoyed – Anthony Blanche, my favourite character in the book because he’s just totally fabulous, describes the fumbling attempts of some fellow students at Oxford to dunk him in a fountain (due to his excessive fabulousness):

About six of them came into my room, the rest stood mouthing outside. My dear, they looked too extraordinary. They had been having one of their ridiculous club dinners, and they were all wearing coloured tail-coats – a sort of livery. “My dears,” I said to them, “you look like a lot of most disorderly footmen.” Then one of them, rather a juicy little piece, accused me of unnatural vices. “My dear,” I said, “I may be inverted but I am not insatiable. Come back when you are alone.” Then they began to blaspheme in a very shocking manner, and suddenly I, too, began to be annoyed. “Really,” I thought, “when I think of all the hullabaloo there was when I was seventeen, and the Duc de Vincennes (old Armand, of course, not Philippe) challenged me to a duel for an affair of the heart, and very much more than the heart, I assure you, with the duchess (Stefanie, of course, not old Poppy) – now, to submit to impertinence from these pimply, tipsy virgins…” Well, I gave up the light, bantering tone and let myself be just a little offensive.

Then they began saying, “Get hold of him. Put him in Mercury.” Now as you know I have two sculptures by Brancusi and several pretty things and I did not want them to start getting rough, so I said, pacifically, “Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasure than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstacy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me. If, on the other hand, you simply wish to satisfy some obscure and less easily classified libido and see me bath, come with me quietly, dear louts, to the fountain.

Do you know, they all looked a little foolish at that? I walked down with them and no one came within a yard of me. Then I got into the fountain and, you know, it was really most refreshing, so I sported there a little and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home, and I heard Boy Mulcaster saying, “Anyway, we did put him in Mercury.” You know, Charles, that is just what they’ll be saying in thirty years’ time. When they’re all married to scraggy little women like hens and have cretinous porcine sons like themselves getting drunk at the same club dinner in the same coloured coats, they’ll still say, when my name is mentioned, “We put him in Mercury one night,” and their barnyard daughters will snigger and think their father was quite a dog in his day, and what a pity he’s grown so dull. Oh, la fatigue du Nord!

Bigging Up The Borribles

While randomly surfing Facebook groups after first joining, I found and immediately joined “The Borribles would kick Harry Potter’s bourgeois arse“, a view which I heartily subscribe to and have hinted at here before too.

From that group I discovered the author’s official site and this article by Peter Lyle for TANK magazine which captures much of what I really love about these books, as well as my usual experiences in trying to tell people about them.

“They’re called the Borribles.”

(Blank look)

“It’s this children’s book from the ’70s.”

(Blank look)

“They’re these oiky kids with pointy ears who live in all the shitty bits of London and fight the grown-ups and the Wombles and…”

“Do you mean the Borrowers?”

Except that for me, no one brings up the Borrowers either. (Which is fair enough really, they were pretty lame.)

Anyway, I just wanted to encourage anyone who’s done with the latest Harry Potter and feels a sense of loss or whatever to give the Borribles a try. They are some of the most memorable and gripping children’s books I have ever read, and I really don’t understand why no one seems to know about them.

Reading the books again as a grown-up living in London gave me new insights into what made them so great (Lyle likens the presence of London in the books to its presence in the writing of Dickens, and to the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses) and the rest of the article continues to open my eyes to things I hadn’t thought about before: that the areas in which London’s Borribles choose to make their home – Battersea, Tooting, Wandsworth, Stepney, Whitechapel, Neasden and Hoxton – are today an “index of then down-and-out, since gentrified, bits of the city,” and that “in an era when children’s books about chosen ones, picturesque and ethnically-cleansed boarding schools, timeless English architecture and the universal use of received pronunciation dominate the entire fiction market, The Borribles is a celebration of everything that doesn’t fit with that vision.”

You can read the first chapter of each Borrible book at the site, though if you’ve never read any of them then I recommend (in case of spoilers) that you only read from the first book.

Virginia Tech Tangent And Talking About Kevin

I won’t bore you with more of the banality already permeating the blogosphere’s attempts at gun control discussions in the wake of the Virginia Tech massacre, neither will I bother with some empty words about my heart going out to the bereaved families. Words like “sympathy” and “empathy” get misused all over the place when stuff like this happens, but frankly I’ve always felt what the English language actually needs is a word where you acknowledge your complete inability to imagine or fathom what a suddenly bereaved family is going through, because you simply haven’t experienced anything even remotely analogous. I think it’s more respectful.

But anyway, the reason I mentioned this at all was just to highly recommend We Need To Talk About Kevin (Lionel Shriver) to anyone who hasn’t already read it. I don’t think I managed to write about it here at the time I read it – strange that I did write about Vernon God Little since I don’t think that’s anywhere as good on the same topic – but it was one of the best books I read last year. Call me a philistine but good prose alone is never quite enough to secure my allegiance to a book if its plot or ideas don’t impress me. This one has everything – good writing and characterization (you might feel a bit irritated by the snottiness of the narrator at the start, but press on), ideas about motherhood that I’d never read much about before, and as for plot let me just ask you to do yourself a favour, trust me that this book is worth reading, and don’t read the Amazon reviews in case they’ve got spoilers.

Is it ridiculous of me to suggest you read a work of fiction at a time when more than enough horrifying details about a real crime are flooding the newswires? Perhaps, but if the topic does interest you, this book allows you a more contemplative take on things than finding yourself riveted, despite yourself and more out of rubbernecking curiosity than any higher motive, to online videos of Cho’s demented ramblings. Which is why I have closed those Firefox tabs and decided to reread the book instead. Your mileage may vary.

Nancy Drew (Ron Koertge)

Today’s Writer’s Almanac poem made me smile, though I hate that I can’t remember whether the poem’s referencing an actual case-file from one of the books or not.

Nancy Drew (Ron Koertge)

Merely pretty, she made up for it with vim.
And she got to say things like, “But, gosh,
what if these plans should fall into the wrong
hands?” and it was pretty clear she didn’t mean
plans for a party or a trip to the museum, but
something involving espionage and a Nazi or two.

In fact, the handsome exchange student turns
out to be a Fascist sympathizer. When he snatches
Nancy along with some blueprints, she knows he
has something more sinister in mind than kissing
her with his mouth open

Read the rest

The Accidental (Ali Smith)

I’m quite enjoying The Accidental so far, although it appears some Amazon reviewers would strongly beg to differ. (“This book won the Whitbread Novel Award. According to another website, the Whitbread Award lost its sponsor and ceased to exist the same year.”) Here’s a passage from where one of the characters, a professor of English, finds himself suddenly and overwhelmingly enthralled by the family’s houseguest. The rather convenient entry of a large moth into the room, and its doomed flight into a candle flame, sets us up for the following:

Moths and candlelight! Like a moth to a flame! Dr Michael Smart had been reduced to cliché!

Deeply exciting, though, cliché was, as a concept. It was truth misted by overexpression, wasn’t it, like a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen. Something dainty fumbled at through thick gloves. Cliché was true, obviously, which was why it had become cliché in the first place; so true that cliché actually protected you from its own truth by being what it was, nothing but cliché. Advertising, for example, loved cliché because it was a kind of pure mob truth. There was a lecture in this, maybe for the Ways To Read course. Source? clearly French, he would look it up. Larkin, for instance, the Sid James of English lyric poetry (now that was quite a good observation, Dr Michael Smart firing on all cylinders) knew the power of cliché. What will survive of us is love. His old racehorses in that horse poem didn’t ‘gallop for joy’ but for what must be joy. Larkin, an excellent example. Comic old sexist living all those years in the nether librarian circles of Hull, no wonder he was such a curmudgeon, but he could crack a cliché wide open with a couple of properly pitched words. Or when Hemingway, for example, wrote it before anyone else had even known how to think to express it, didst thou feel the earth move (or however it was he faux-peasantly put it in the not-very-good For Whom The Bell Tolls, 1941 Michael believed), could he have had any idea how his phrase would enter the language? Enter! The language! Cliché was earth-moving, when you understood it, when you felt it, for the first time. Earth and movement, an earthquake, a high-pitched shattering shift in the platelets far down in the heat, below the belt, beneath the feet. Moth plus flame.

Iran Don’t Walk

A little heads-up for any Singaporean readers who’re into graphic novels: if you borrow 4 books from the Orchard library, you can use your loan receipt to enter their contest to win a collector’s edition box set of Persepolis 1 and 2. Just look for the box in front of the main counter. (I don’t remember how much longer the contest is on though, so if you’re keen, drop by soon.) And if you win, please email me so I can curse at you.

Ten Book Meme

Yish tagged me to do this. In other news, go buy Yish’s book, y’all! If you can get your hands on a copy, that is – I understand the bookstores carrying it are sold out.

1. One book you have read more than once
Which one to choose, anyone who loves reading and procrastination has read multiple books multiple times. I guess I’d single out Jane Eyre, which I first read at 8 and reread at 23. On second reading I suddenly realized that the first reading seemed to have moulded so much of my attitudes and personality, without me even knowing it.

2. One book you would want on a desert island
The Bible. Sorry, not the coolest of choices but it’s hella thick so I’d have lots to read, and if I can think of one good time to reconnect with my faith, being stuck on a desert island would be it.

3. One book that made you laugh
Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn is funny most of the way through, but there’s a scene near the beginning which is just spectacular. The enjoyment’s all in the reading so I won’t bother summarizing it, but for those of you who have read the book I’m talking about the scene in the ER when Lionel’s Tourette’s syndrome is making him erupt with fragments of the lame joke he was telling his dying mentor in the car.

4. One book that made you cry
No book has ever made me cry, but Dan Rhodes’ Timoleon Vieta Come Home once came close. If I’d been reading it in a different context I’d probably have been fine, but I was in a train on the way to see a friend whose mother had suddenly passed away, so I guess I was feeling emotional to begin with.

5. One book you wish you had written
The Power and the Glory (Graham Greene). It showcases everything I love about Graham Greene, who showcases everything I love in a writer. If I could only write with such frugal elegance, such precise insight, and such deep compassion, I might come a little closer to displaying those traits as a human being. Oh, and it actually has a plot. I’d never write a book with no freaking plot.

6. One book you wish had never been written
Can I have a series, please? All ten million volumes of Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time saga (I quit around volume 6 and am stupefied as to why I stuck around that long). Ye gods, there are more likable characters in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich than in these books.

7. One book you are currently reading
Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves is probably the one most worth mentioning since Kafka On The Beach is an utter pile of poo so far. It’s a damn hard book to explain though – go read the Amazon synopses.

8. One book you have been meaning to read
A hilarious cab ride with Olive, Erik and their incompatible reading tastes reminded me that despite meaning to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest for the past eight years and borrowing it from my local library about five separate times, I’ve never started on it. Olive’s view: Lucky escape, hon. Erik’s view: READ IT! IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE! Which brings us neatly to…

9. One book that changed your life
I’m sorry but in all honesty I can’t come up with one. I mean, it’s like asking me to name one food that changed my life. No one food changes my life but obviously I can’t imagine life without food. (Man, I’m deep this evening.)

10. Now tag five people:
Remarkable Things [done!]
Shoopscoop [done!]
Solitary Fish [done!]
Atarashi [done!]
London Calling [done!]

“Unless” I’m Missing Something

The book I’m reading now is Carol Shields’ Unless, which I grabbed hurriedly while charging around a closing library. She’s quite a celebrated writer, and the book was nominated for prizes and shit.

Here is an excerpt from the book:

“Tom has asked me once or twice what it is we talk about on Tuesday mornings, but I just shake my head. It’s too rich to describe, and too uneven. Chit-chat, some people call it. We talk about our bodies, our vanities, our dearest desires. Of course the three of them know all about Norah being on the street; they comfort me and offer concern. A phase, Annette believes. A breakdown, thinks Sally. Lynn is certain the cause is physiological, glandular, hormonal. They all tell me that I must not take Norah’s dereliction as a sign of my own failure as a mother, and this, though I haven’t acknowledged it before, is a profound and always lurking fear. More than a fear – I believe it.”

I think my extreme boredom with this book must be a sign of my failure as a woman. What do you think, should I keep trudging through the hormonal mire or just run for the hills?