Catching Up....

I have been reading decidedly un-classic literature the last few months -- some hilarious memoirs by femmes d'un age certain (I See You Made an Effort, Guts, How to Be a Woman, Attempting Normal (OK, by a man), Let's Pretend this Never Happened), Canadian murder writer Louise Penny, Reza Aslan's Zealot, The Elegance of the Hedgehog and work-related non-fiction.  But I have enjoyed a few titles from my classics list -- FINALLY!

1. The Red and the Black, Stendhal
37-39. The Deptford Trilogy (Fifth Business, The Manticore, World of Wonders) Robertson Davies

Enjoyed these four books though all had young white men as protagonists, a change from my middle-aged women writer binge.

I was assigned Le Rouge et Le Noir in the late 1970s in a French lit class and if memory serves, I dropped it before we got to Stendhal and because I found Sartre's La Nausee too hard and no fun whatsoever to 19-year-old me.  But I recall a lot of talk about Stendhal having written the first modern novel because the characters were driven by psychology -- this was the 1830s I think? So I put it -- in English -- first on my Classics Club list to set the tone and provide a benchmark -- my list is about evenly split between pre- and post- Stendhal. 

Now, about the novel:  I recommend it more as a marker in the history of fiction writing innovation than as a moving work. It's the story of Julian, a socially ambitious young man, his social rise and fall, and migration from the provincial Jura region of his low birth to noble class Paris and back. It helps to have a grasp of post-Napoleon French society and politics but not necessary.  "Red" indicates a military career, "Black" a scholar/religious vocation -- those are Julian's career choices.  His choice of black sets him on a path to social success though his secret passion for the age of Napoleon carries him away a few times.  It's his choices in love, not red or black, that drive the plot. 
I re-read Davies classic trilogy because they are such odd stories with odd characters.  If magic realism had first emerged in Canada, it would look like this.  Much colder, distant, polite but still magic. 

This week I started

 13. The Reivers, William Faulkner (more outrageous and funnier than I remember...but I was 15 when I first read it)

 and

49. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (was outrageous and wry if not funny then and now)

And bought a used copy of

10. Germinal, Emil Zola