Femina Studet
~ Corvus Chaos
Read books, drink coffee, fight evil.
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Femina Studet
Grazia Deledda is the third author in my “read lots of Nobel Prize winners” project. She was the second woman to win the prize for literature and the second winner from Italy. I read two of Deledda’s books: Reeds in the Wind, translated by Martha King, and The Church of Solitude, translated by E. Ann Matter.

Deledda was a prolific and popular writer in her day, but very few of her novels have English translations and except for Nobel lists she seems largely forgotten today. Born and raised in a traditional Sardinian town, Deledda’s family wasn’t thrilled with her ambition to become a writer. She married young and promptly moved to Rome with her new husband, where her writing career really took off. It seemed like she was itching to leave small-town Sardinia behind, but she often set her books there, describing that traditional life with humor and affection, but also realistic criticism of expectations and traditions that held people down.

In Reeds in the Wind, it really feels like Deledda is chronicling a dying way of life. The story centers around three proud sisters whose family used to be rich. Their home is crumbling around them, they can’t afford to pay the aging caretaker who runs their farm, they have no prospects for improving their situation; all they have is their pride in their noble heritage and their family’s past glory. Deledda shows us a world of dying glory, fate, ghosts and portents that is fascinating but quite sad. All the characters seem trapped in roles and beliefs that no longer serve them, and none of them come to a satisfying end.

The Church of Solitude has a more humorous and hopeful feel, which is ironic because Deledda wrote it while dying of breast cancer. Her main character, Maria Concezione, also has breast cancer. The story begins with a blunt and brutal recognition of this fact. Maria, it is clear, should now consider herself a dying woman. It might be a year, five, ten, but the cancer will come back and kill her. It’s also thought that she could pass the cancer to any children she might bear, and before she’s even home from the hospital Maria decides she should never marry. Unfortunately, it’s taboo to even mention the cancer to people, so she can’t properly explain this decision to anyone. Not to her suitor Aroldo, who’s devastated by her sudden loss of interest. Not to the family friend who wants her to marry one of his sons (pick one, he doesn’t care which) or the relative who wants Maria for her own son, not to anyone. A number of frustrating and darkly funny situations arise as passionate Maria tries to find peace and solitude to deal with her illness while still being tempted to just run off with Aroldo in spite of it all.

These were both fairly quick and easy books, but I didn’t love them. I’ve been putting off this review because I’m not actually sure why. I think Reeds in the Wind just didn’t mesh with my personal preferences. I like the challenge of reading characters much different from myself, but a lot of the characters in this one were mean-spirited and selfish without being very interesting about it. I found myself a bit glad that this crappy town full of awful people was crumbling into dust. I enjoyed The Church of Solitude more because the characters felt more vibrant and varied, but I still didn’t love it. Perhaps there’s something vital lost in translation here, either literally in the change from Italian to English or in trying to convey traditional Sardinian society to a 21st century American.

I think I expected too much because the first two winners I read were very impressive. The early 20th century was full of realist and naturalist writers and Italy was no exception. Deledda was one of several Italian realists of the period. The U.S. turned out a lot of great realist writers and they featured heavily in my education over the years; maybe that style just feels too familiar to enthrall me easily. The Church of Solitude was written long after Deledda received the Nobel but I suspect it’s the most daring, writing so candidly about intimate female concerns, and I’m glad she did it. I haven’t read anything so blunt and open in realism of that era and this book probably deserves to be studied more. If you’re up for a book by Deledda, I’d recommend that one.

Rabindranath Tagore was the first non-European winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was the only non-European winner until 1945. I chose to read him because I lived in India for a while so I felt a tiny personal connection, and also because I wanted to know what it took for a non-European to get the Nobel committee’s attention back then.

I guess it took a lot–Tagore was accomplished as a poet, song lyricist, short story writer, novelist, essayist, and playwright. He put Bengali art onto the world stage. More than that, as far as I can tell he did most of his own translation work, writing primarily in Bengali and then reworking many of his best poems and stories into English. He was also an educator and political activist. He seems pretty amazing.

Back in 1913 he was most famous in Europe for his poems. Gitanjali seems like his most famous work in English so I started my studies with that. It seems the English version is more a revision of his original Bengali collection combined with a ‘best of’ collection of poems from Tagore’s other Bengali works. I definitely don’t read Bengali but I figure reading Tagore’s own translation and arrangement is a fair way to engage with his work. Gitanjali is a long series of prose poems or verses with a very spiritual, celebratory element to it. Sort of an artist’s offering to his gods. A few quotes will give you a better feel for what the collection is like:

When the hour strikes for thy silent worship at the dark temple of midnight, command me, my master, to stand before thee to sing.

When in the morning air the golden harp is tuned, honour me, commanding my presence.

I have had my invitation to this world’s festival, and thus my life has been blessed. My eyes have seen and my ears have heard.

Gitanjali

He whom I enclose with my name is weeping in this dungeon. I am ever busy building this wall all around; and as this wall goes up into the sky day by day I lose sight of my true being in its dark shadow.

Gitanjali

The sea surges up with laughter and pale gleams the smile of the sea beach. Death-dealing waves sing meaningless ballads to the children, even like a mother while rocking her baby’s cradle. The sea plays with children, and pale gleams the smile of the sea beach.

Gitanjali

It’s all beautiful and evocative. Tagore has a real gift for sensory and emotional detail. If I were more emotional and better at surrendering to the sea of poetry I would love this. I’m not, though. Not that into poetry, I mean. I keep trying to appreciate it and I’ve made progress over the years, but the one hundred or so poetic sections of Gitanjali were a lot for me and by the end I was bored. Those more in touch with poetic feeling than I am can rest assure that there’s much more where this came from, but this was enough for me.

His short stories, though, were something I could really get into. These were lovely. The Essential Tagore I was reading out of had three sets of short stories and I read the one titled “The Hungry Stones and other Stories.” They were varied in topic and style–a couple lovely ghost stories, a few more realistic stories about family relationships and societal issues of Tagore’s day, and one fantasy story that seemed to be an allegory for aspects of the Indian caste system. All of them were written with the same gift for emotional resonance and sensory detail, and all of them had a certain warm and human quality that I loved. Tagore wrote a couple of the stories from a female point of view and though I don’t think he quite succeeded, I appreciated the effort. I didn’t expect a man from over 100 years ago to try to write women with any sense of realism of empathy, so even his partial success was a nice surprise.

After thoroughly enjoying Tagore’s short stories, I utterly failed to enjoy his essays. I’m not even sure I finished one. They’re well written, but the ones I tried were often addressing specific cultural and political topics that now, a century or so later, didn’t feel very compelling. I could see Tagore’s poetic sensibility showing through even in his political essays, but here it was less helpful, making it harder to follow the logic of his arguments and observations. But he did have some keen observations, and in one essay he made some sharp comparisons between the Indian caste system and segregation in the American south; those observations feel relevant for both countries even today. I wouldn’t say the essays aren’t worth a look, but unless you have a real historical interest you might find only the occasional nugget that speaks to you.

The last thing I read was part of My Reminiscences, a sort of autobiography Rabindranath wrote near the end of his life. It’s not really a structured autobiography; it’s more a series of memories or sketches of memorable moments throughout his life. I haven’t read them all but I probably will. They’re warm and human the way Tagore’s short stories are, and full of humor and affection for his younger self. I wonder if my dad read Tagore–he would have loved this autobiography.

Overall, I was delighted to study Rabindranath Tagore. Nobel winners have such a reputation for being sweeping, serious, weighty, and often pretty depressing. This might be true of more recent winners rather than older ones, but I was still pleasantly surprised to find Tagore’s writing so down to earth and full of sympathy and warmth for his fellow humans. My own preference is always for stories over poetry, so of course I enjoyed those most, but it seems Tagore has something for everyone and even after all these years probably deserves more international fame than he’s gotten. If I know anything about the Nobel Prize, which I don’t, he definitely deserved one.

This is kind of a dual review. A while ago I read a biography called Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life, and followed up by reading The Sundial, a sort of dark comedy about a family preparing for the end of the world. I enjoyed the novel and found the biography both interesting and painful.

I already knew a bit about Shirley Jackson. Like a lot of people, at some point I had to read The Lottery for school. It didn’t make me obsessed with Jackson but it was dark and thoughtful enough that my ears pricked up whenever I heard her mentioned after that. I knew she wrote a lot of dark haunted stuff and I’ve read a lot of it by now, and I knew she also wrote lighter more family-oriented stuff that I never read. After reading her biography I’m not sure I ever want to read her lighter stuff. Knowing her reality might ruin it for me.

Jackson’s home life often sounds like one of quiet desperation. Her mother sounds perpetually disappointed in Shirley and her husband sounds perpetually wrapped up in his own emotions, and neither seems to really appreciate Shirley or even see her clearly as a person. Shirley seems to love and appreciate her children deeply, but struggle constantly to fit in with other parents and meet society’s expectations of her as a wife and mother. Instead of confronting any of these people or problems, she transmutes them all into her art, producing story after beautiful story while in real life she mostly suffers in silence. It’s heartbreaking and frustrating to learn about.

Jackson was so talented and dedicated to her craft, but also so completely relatably normal with normal relatable problems. Sometimes, when an author writes great tragedy or horror, we play up the twisted and tragic parts of their personal life and say “ah, that explains it.” I think this approach downplays an author’s talent and hard work, making it seem like great horror is just a matter of having a horrific personal life. Ironically, this approach also ignores the much lighter work authors like Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe produced because light work doesn’t fit with a tragic backstory. This biography resists the temptation, trying to give equal weight to Jackson’s lighter and darker stories and being honest about Jackson’s personal struggles while emphasizing how normal most of them were for her time and circumscances. I really enjoyed this look in to the artist’s life, and even though I much prefer her darker fiction I appreciated the chance to see her as a whole person.

After I finished the biography, I read The Sundial. Like all her novels, this one is on the dark side. It’s kind of a portrait of the very rich, very dysfunctional Halloran family that becomes a tiny little doomsday cult centered around their Aunt Fanny’s visions. It felt like reading a Wes Anderson movie, though of course Jackson came first so it might be better to say that watching a Wes Anderson movie feels like seeing The Sundial come to life. All the humor and most of the darkness come from perfectly detailed renderings of the various family members, their relationships to each other, and the house they live in. The commentary, the humor and tragedy, is filled in by us as readers.

Of the four Jackson novels I’ve read, this is the coldest and least sympathetic to its characters. There are a few vulnerable peeks into the characters minds and motivations, but mostly the novel keeps its distance. I still liked it but I missed the intimate psychology that makes the others I’ve read so enthralling. There were haunting moments and funny moments but watching everything from outside like this, I didn’t really emotionally connect to the book the way I did with the other I’ve read. Ironically, this emotional disconnect is the exact same problem I have with Wes Anderson movies. Odd coincidence, that.

Overall, both the biography and the novel are best suited to people really interested in Shirley Jackson. The biography was excellent and The Sundial is worth reading for Jackson fans, but Hill House or We Have Always Lived in the Castle are the best introduction for curious or casual readers looking to see what all the fuss is about.

Apparently ‘read more’ is a common New Year’s Resolution. A whole lot of readers set goals and sign up for challenges these days. People see reading as virtuous; an hour spent reading makes your more deep and intellectual than an hour spent scrolling Instagram or rewatching The Office.

I suppose that could be true. Reading more might do you a world of good. I know a dozen or more people who read 50 or more books a year, though, and seen many more online, and most of what they read isn’t very deep or intellectual. Most of them seem out for sheer quantity, counting short stories and audiobooks they play on their commutes, and reading mainly light, quick books to pad out their numbers. I don’t want to knock anyone’s hobby–if turning books into a numbers game makes you happy you should definitely do that–but I’m not sure that kind of reading is really more deep and intellectual than rewatching The Office. In fact, I’m pretty sure The Office is more deep and intellectual than many fantasy and romance novels I’ve read over the years.

Even if (especially if?) you’re reading really classic, intellectually exciting material, reading for a goal can feel like a chore instead of a hobby or pleasant intellectual exercise. As much as I loved college, I don’t really miss the constant deadlines they set on my intellectual development. Too many lofty goals can suck the fun out of lifelong learning, making it just another way to force more productivity out of ourselves.

Of course, for some people the goal is not sheer numbers but something ambitious in a different way. For these people, there are dozens of challenges to undertake. Reading challenges can sometimes encourage you to expand your reading horizons and try new things, but a shocking number of them aim for a book per week. You could cover a lot of ground that way but I’m not sure how well you’d really process all that new stuff coming at you. I can read a book in a week easily, but I’d like the option to sit with it longer than that, especially when I’m aiming to expand my horizons and understand a new point of view. I’m all for reading projects–I thoroughly enjoyed working through the “gothic reading list” I set myself a while back, and I’m still working on my Nobel project–but I’m not sure I’d like them as much as an intense group challenge. Then again, I’m quite the DA recluse; more social readers might love the group dynamic.

That said, I don’t think goals and challenges, even really ambitious ones, are all bad. It’s easy for hobbies and self care to fall by the wayside as life gets busy and stressful, and for some of us reading and study are an important source of meaning and comfort. If setting a reading goal helps you make time for reading, or helps “give you permission” to read by making it feel productive, that’s a great thing. Even if you don’t reach that goal you can look back at the end of the year and remember the good times you had trying. Plus, if you’re someone who tracks their reading through Goodreads or the Storygraph or some such, it can be fun to look at your stats. The Storygraph gives you all sorts of graphs and pie charts–my pie charts say I like my books dark, slow, and classic.

Storygraph will probably ask me to make a reading goal around the New Year; it did when I joined over the summer. I more or less randomly told it I wanted to read 10 books for the year, and since the year was half over it promptly started telling me I was way behind in my goal. I’m terrible at recording what I read but I’ve managed to input 11 books now, so my app is no longer disappointed in me. I can’t decide whether I should set a new goal when it asks or fly solo the way I’ve traditionally done. What say ye? Are goals a great source of motivation or a millstone dragging me down? Should I find or create a Dark Academic reading challenge? What do you do?

Back in October I said I was starting a Nobel Prize reading project, sampling literature laureates from every decade. It’s been over a month, but I’ve finally finished a couple novels by the first female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (and the first female member of the Nobel-awarding Swedish Academy), Selma Lagerlöf. I found the novels both delightful and surprising.

I don’t read Swedish, so I read the novels in translation, from The Greatest Works of Selma Lagerlöf, which I got free for Kindle. Out of the greatest works, I read Jerusalem because it was mentioned often as a reason for her Nobel win and Miracles of Antichrist because it had a badass title.

I thoroughly enjoyed Lagerlöf’s writing style. I know nuances of word choice and shades of meaning get lost in translation, but her deceptively simple style is preserved. She writes in vignettes; each vignette is a turning point in a character’s life and teaches you something about that character’s personality or world view. She doesn’t spend much time explaining her characters’ deep thoughts and feelings over time, but once Lagerlöf has lined up all a character’s turning points, surprising depths are revealed. What feels on the surface like cute little fables turn out to be complex myths. Lagerlöf’s seamless mixing of the ordinary and the supernatural reinforces this mythic feeling and particularly appealed to me. Her characters live in a world where threats from trolls, visiting your ancestors in vision, and saintly miracles are ordinary and expected parts of life. I found this charming and deeply resonant.

Because of the vignette-based writing style, these novels are difficult to summarize. Thematically, they’re both about the conflicts between traditional Christianity, traditional ways of life, and the exciting new sects and philosophies that were spreading at close of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th. Jerusalem is inspired by a real event–in 1896, thirty-seven people in a small farming community sold their farms and possessions and followed their leader to join a religious commune in Jerusalem. Lagerlöf visited this colony and became fascinated by it and its inhabitants. Her fictionalized account begins in a traditional Swedish farming village; we get to know some of the inhabitants and watch their reactions as a man named Helgum arrives with some new religious ideas and gains his first converts. We see the little group’s struggles and triumphs, as well as their strained relations with the rest of the town, and the book ends as they board the train for an uncertain future in the Jerusalem colony.

(I should tell you here that Jerusalem has a sequel that describes the group’s life in the Jerusalem commune. Some online sources talk about both as one “book in two parts” but my Greatest Works only includes the first book and I can’t find an English version of the sequel online. It looks like I’d have to track down a paper copy in a used bookstore or on eBay. If I get to that I’ll let you know but for now I’ll just stick to the first book.)

It’s hard not to read Helgum and his followers as a creepy cult. Helgumists separate themselves from friends and family, give all their money to the group, rely heavily on Helgum and his charisma for direction in life, and are sometimes real dicks to neighbors who stick with their regular old church or, God forbid, still believe in fairies or trolls. I half expected the Helgumists to start stockpiling guns or commit mass suicide. This book was written before Jim Jones and the Branch Davidians and true crime podcasts, though, and Lagerlöf clearly doesn’t expect us to think this way. The story she’s telling is more complex than that. The Helgumists are flawed and human and moving to a Jerusalem commune might be a big mistake, but they’re also sincere and committed to each other and maybe they’re right to live in community and help each other so fully. She wants us to reserve judgement. Once you get past the knee-jerk “OMG they’re all joining a cult!” reaction, this book invites you to consider the large questions at play even in small personal decisions. The weight of tradition struggles against the romance of new ideas, and when you need to know what your duty is or how best to treat the person in front of you, it can be impossible to know what to do.

Even though my perspective and context are a century and a continent away from Lagerlöf’s, I enjoyed Jerusalem and wanted to try another of her novels. The Miracles of Antichrist is right after Jerusalem in Greatest Works and was also inspired by a true event (or at least a real legend) so I read that one. It gave me a whole new perspective on Jerusalem and its themes, as well as being interesting in its own right.

Miracles of Antichrist is inspired by Italian legends of false relics and the idea that the Antichrist would do the miracles of Christ but lead people away from God. The novel actually starts like a folktale–there’s a monastery with a statue of baby Jesus that’s very powerful and miraculous, and an Englishwoman wants it so badly that she has a copy made and manages to switch it with the original. Eventually the deception is revealed in a miraculous way and the false Jesus statue begins to make its way around the world spreading disaster and false miracles. It turns out the moral of this introductory tale is “socialism is bad.” I’m not exaggerating. Here’s the exact quote:

“But the man who had been taught during the fight by the image began to proclaim to the world a new doctrine, which is called Socialism, but which is an Antichristianity. And it loves, and renounces, and teaches, and suffers like Christianity, so that it has every resemblance to the latter, just as the false image . . . has every resemblance to the real Christ image.”

I was a little rattled by this blunt moral right at the beginning of the novel but I plowed ahead anyway. The rest of the novel follows the statue to the town of Diamante on the slopes of Mount Etna, where it miraculously helps the townspeople solve problems, build a railroad, save a local church, and eventually brings together the long-suffering Michaela and her true love Gaetano. This is apparently bad, because in the process everyone kind of becomes godless socialists, and we realize that all the time this town was asking for miracles they never asked the statue for forgiveness or entry into heaven. They were too concerned with surviving this life to worry for their souls.

It was actually a charming story with some pretty entertaining saintly miracles, but the big “don’t let Socialism turn your eyes from heaven” message felt pretty hamhanded and even a little reactionary in today’s world. At the very end there’s a short scene where a priest is lamenting the spread of Socialism and the mischief this false Christ has done, and the pope basically says that this is the next step toward the apocalypse and the church should probably not fight it too hard. This ending felt odd to me until I realized that perhaps this is what Lagerlöf feels like the Jerusalem colony is doing–communal living, sort of socialism, but with Jesus at the center of it. It makes a kind of sense. Weird, culty sense, but she’s not the first person to think this way. When you look at it this way, it’s entirely possible that she would love socialism if it weren’t so atheistic.

Selma Lagerlöf did not succeed in convincing me to join a cult or to fight the godless socialists. The overarching themes here felt quaint and irrelevant. Today they feel kind of reactionary, but I’m not sure they would have felt so to readers back then. In any case, Lagerlöf was involved in the women’s suffrage later in life, mostly at the urging of her secret girlfriend Valborg Olander, so she was never exactly the poster child for conservative politics. I’m willing to see her as a product of her time, ahead in some ways and behind in others.

In spite of the old-fashioned themes expressed, many of the individual vignettes were beautiful and surprisingly deep, with profound moments of forgiveness and compassion throughout both books. There were a few powerful moments when characters tried to balance personal authenticity against community and tradition, and there were several memorable and interesting characters. On the whole, they were pleasant and thoughtful reads. It was an auspicious start to my Nobel Project. I look forward to my next selection, Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore. I expect he could not be more different from Lagerlöf.

I still have one last summer book to review. Well, early fall maybe. I finished it Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations in late September. This is a really famous novel and there are dozens of good plot summaries of it so I won’t attempt my own. I’ll just share a few thoughts and impressions instead.

Is it weird that I never read Dickens in school? That seems weird, especially for someone who majored in English Lit, but I never did. Last Christmas (or maybe the one before?) we read A Christmas Carol as a family and I think I’ve read a couple short stories by Dickens but that’s it. This was my first full length Dickens experience. I still can’t decide if I want another such experience.

When I started the book I’d just finished a couple of obscure and rambling gothic novels, so Dickens’ vibrant and humorous writing was a refreshing change. For the first hundred pages or so I really enjoyed it. As the novel wore on, though, it lost some of its charm. “My God,” I’d think, “can he say nothing simply? Can’t a character just eat a biscuit or open a window without ten words of description? It’s like those word games where you’re not allowed to say what’s on the card and need to use fifteen different words until your partner guesses what you mean.” By the end I was tempted to just quit and read a summary on Wikipedia. I’m a twentieth century woman and I like my prose lean and mean. I’ve learned to appreciate the older, more flowery styles of writing but I guess I’m not quite ready to fall in love with Dickens.

I did enjoy the story, though. It was fairly complicated and wandered down several dead ends, but no more than a lot of popular Victorian novels. It was pretty heavyhanded with its moral lessons, but again no more than a lot of Victorian novels. It had a lot of vivid action and humor going for it, and I really enjoyed the fact that Pip was just a regular kid. He was selfish and short-sighted and made a lot of mistakes, and he was more relatable and realistic than a whole lot of characters from the time. In fact, even though Dickens exaggerates most of the characters for drama or comedy, many of them are relatable and have nice touches that make them feel like behind the dramatic storytelling they’re very real. And of course Dickens gets bonus points for making blacksmiths and shopkeepers into main characters instead of just sidelights to a ‘properly aristocratic’ main character.

Dickens also gets bonus points for moments of genuine fear and horror. The opening scenes where our hero Pip is threatened by an escaped prisoner are riveting, and Miss Havisham is perfectly creepy while thinking she’s perfectly sensible. Great Expectations is on many lists of gothic classics and Miss Havisham is why. I wouldn’t consider the novel on the whole really gothic or horrific, but she is a great character.

In terms of the plot, Great Expectations feels like a YA novel, actually. Broad and relatable characters, lots of action, a bit of emotional challenge, an attempt to show the reader a part of society not featured much in Dickens’ time, and fairly simple themes that wrap up nicely at the end. The actual word choice and writing style is guaranteed to confuse and bore the average modern kid, but the story fits. Now that I think of it, I feel about Great Expectations the way I do about much of the YA I’ve read. It’s fun and interesting for what it is, but ultimately feels a bit simple for my taste. I suppose, then, I’d recommend this book to people who are pretty much my opposites. If you love flowery phrasing and clever wordplay at every turn, but you like your characters likeable and your endings satisfying, you should totally read Dickens. If you’re my opposite, though, you probably already have.

I just finished rereading Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I was looking for something witchy befitting October, something familiar as a break from my Nobel project reading. On this second reading the witchy mindset of the main chracter, Merricat, really stood out to me. I’ve always been interested in the occult but I don’t think I’d seriously studied any pagan practices the first time I read this book, and back then the warped family dynamics and stormy relationship between Merricat’s family and the surrounding town were what fascinated me. This time around, Merricat’s sympathetic magic and her magical worldview were what spoke to me. This story, among other things, is Merricat’s maturation as a witch.

Last year sometime I watched the movie adaptation of We Have Always Lived in the Castle and though it was beautiful, I didn’t connect with it the way I expected to, and witchcraft might actually be the missing piece. I think perhaps the film version of Merricat wasn’t enough of a witch.

When I finished I surfed the net for opinions and reviews, and found out Shirley Jackson was herself, if not a practicing witch, at least an avid researcher of occult and pagan history. I’ve read little bio pages and author descriptions of Jackson over the years and I don’t remember even one mentioning this fact. I suspect it’s because she’s considered a more literary writer now, a dignified titan of literature, and titans of literature don’t do anything so silly as dabble in witchcraft. I guess now that paganism isn’t quite so fringe, this aspect of Jackson’s life and writing is getting more attention. I’m glad, because it adds a new dimension to many of her characters. Merricat, for example, is unbalanced and dangerous for sure, but she’s also connecting to a different way of claiming power and a different worldview and is tragically misunderstood by almost everyone. She’s a mad woman, but maybe also a wise woman, the way witches often are and have been.

I also found out I’d missed a well-regarded biography of Jackson that came out just a few years ago. I’m now beginning Shirley Jackson: a Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin. I also missed a recent movie inspired by Jackson’s life and writing. I watched Shirley on Hulu and quite liked it. It’s got a very DA vibe, set at Bennington college in the late 1940s or so, all about Jackson writing Hangsaman and moderately twisted and dramatic. It’s not in any way a biography of Jackson–instead it uses Jackson and her husband as characters in the kind of dark slightly horrific story Jackson herself would have written. A young couple moves in with Jackson and her husband Stanley. As Stanley shows the young professor-to-be the ways of Bennington (including all the young women eager to sleep with a popular teacher) the young wife becomes Shirley’s friend and muse as Shirley works on Hangsaman and researches the case of Paula Weldon, a girl who went missing in the area. The young wife breaks down and transforms thanks to Shirley and Stanley’s friendship and manipulation in the kind of off-kilter family drama Jackson wrote so well. It’s kind of billed as a horror movie but it’s not a horror movie. Dark Academia is actually a perfect descriptor, and Bennington is the same college Donna Tartt went to decades later.

It’s a clever idea and I enjoyed the movie. It was visually beautiful and a bit disturbing, and the acting drew me in. I especially liked the complicated love-hate relationship between Shirley and Stanley, one of the few aspects taken directly from Shirley’s life. If you’re looking for something artsy and dark this season you should try Shirley.

I’ll end this here, with my strongest recommendation of Jackson and her haunted novels. I’m sure I’ll be writing about her again when I finish the biography and I’m also planning to read The Sundial and The Bird’s Nest soon. It’s time I got to know Shirley Jackson better and I’m bringing you along for the ride.

They just awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature to Abdulrazak Gurnah. One of my friends from high school is a professor now and posts about the Prize every year as it approaches. He’s always rooting for Haruki Murakami, whose work I really enjoy. Murakami never wins, and most of the time I’ve never even heard of the winner. There’s a poll on the Nobel website asking one question–have you read anything by Abdulrazak Gurnah–and 95% of people so far have answered ‘no’ so I know I’m not alone here.

This year as the announcement approached and my friend started posting, I got really curious. The Nobel committee gives only a few brief sentences about the reasons for their choices, and since most of the authors are so obscure most of us can’t judge for ourselves whether the choice was good. And yet the Prize is quite prestigious, treated as a great honor for an author doing important work. Important work that, even with a Nobel Prize on their shelves, few people ever read, apparently.

The choosing process is pretty elite and subjective. Nobel’s own instructions were frustratingly vague, instructing the committe to chose the person who “in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction.” Somewhere I read that since World War II ‘idealistic’ came to be interpreted as ‘depressing and political‘ but since I haven’t read most of the Nobel winners I don’t know if this is a snarky exaggeration or not. The nominations are made by literature professors and national academies and former winners, a process that mostly results in a pretty academic-focused, elitist list of candidates. I wonder who slipped Bob Dylan in there? I remember a lot of people being annoyed by his win and saying it was a shameless ploy to make the Nobel Prize feel interesting to the masses; maybe it was, but maybe that’s a good thing. Why should the Nobel Prize only be for obscure elitist writers? Sure, Bob Dylan is rich and famous so he doesn’t need the money, but Gurnah is a retired professor with many awards under his belt, so I’m not sure he needs the money either.

I asked the internet whether the Nobel Laureates were worth reading, even though many are unheard of outside certain elite circles, and several people agreed that the laureates they’d read were indeed amazing writers. I’ve read maybe a dozen laureates’ work–mostly in college–and what I read was generally very well-crafted and beautiful. Maybe the rest deserve more attention. Maybe the Nobel Prize is elitist nonsense, but maybe it’s also a treasure trove of amazing writers I’ve never heard of.

Clearly this should be my next reading project. There are over a hundred winners since the prize was first given in 1901 and I’m not quite ready to read them all, but I can manage an author or two from every decade. Since the prize is international (though vastly European in the early years) and I only read English and some Spanish, I’ll have to read a lot of this in translation. For that reason I’m focusing more on novelists than poets, since poetry loses so much more in translation. I also skipped over the names I’ve already read, like Toni Morrison, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, George Bernard Shaw, etc. Other than that, I just went through the list of winners and chose people who caught my fancy.

Here are the 16 authors I’ve settled on:

Selma Lagerlöf, 1909, the first female winner

Rabindranath Tagore, 1913, who seems to be the first non-Western winner

Grazia Deledda, 1926

Sigrid Undset, 1928

Eugene O’neill, 1936

Gabriella Mistral, 1945 (a poet in Spanish, so I thought I’d try it in the original language)

Haldor Laxness, 1955

Yasunori Kawabata, 1968

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, 1970

Patrick White, 1973

Wole Soyinka, 1986

Jose Saramago, 1998

Elfriede Jelinek, 2004

Olga Tokarczuk, 2018

Abdulrazak Gurnah, 2021

Winning a Nobel seems like a guarantee that at least some of your work gets an English translation but I may have to tweak the list depending on what I find out there. I’ve already started Selma Lagerlöf. Turns out you can get The Greatest Works of Selma Lagerlöf on Kindle for one dollar. I finished Jerusalem and it was not what I expected; now I’m roughtly halfway through The Miracles of Antichrist. I’ll post what I think once I’ve actually thought enough about it but already this project is giving me interesting surprises.