Memorial Day will bring on the real summer beach season. I was at the beach this past weekend and it was beautiful, and misty, and nearly empty. It’s also still quite chilly, the air anyway, and the only people in the ocean were the surfers. But it sure was pretty. I love the beach in all weathers and there’s nothing better than swimming in the ocean, but there’s something about the beach in the off-season … Maybe because I grew up in Rhode Island, the Ocean State. So the beach is not a novelty or a vacation spot. It’s my home. I’ve seen it with snow fallen on the sand, I’ve seen it in hurricane weather, I’ve seen it in mid-July. I’m starting a full-time job after Memorial Day, so I figured I should try to grab a mini-vacation for myself before all that starts. I sat on the boardwalk, drinking coffee, reading The Good Soldier
Wow. That looks like the poster for a movie.
And congratulations on the new job! Enjoy your leisure while you can.
//And the voice is so compelling, so chatty, so tortured, so … like, get to the POINT, man …//
I read TGS decades ago (after a conversation with Julian Barnes – I was so fancy in those days) and read Parade’s End earlier this year. Of TGS I just remember it driving me a little crazy and thinking all the people in it were crazy – I hadn’t quite fathomed the destabilizing effect of the unreliable narrator, and a second read would be very rewarding. Parade’s End struck me a bit as Henry James Does The Trenches, and many a time I muttered JESUS WILL YOU GET TO THE POINT MAN, and put the book down out of frustration but kept picking it back up (alas, the fourth volume just defeated me, I’m afraid.) I loved Maleficent aka Sylvia Tietjens (she’d work in fashion or more likely PR these days, I think, as she’s mistress of the Hint that Can Ruin A Man). I loved Ford’s boldness in plunging into sex and sexuality, at the same time I writhed under his technique of describing the same event super-obliquely through at least three different characters’ POV.
I’m now going to re-read Angela Carter because of this article and because it reminded me she is a goddess.
// after a conversation with Julian Barnes – I was so fancy in those days //
Ooh! Very fancy!!
// thinking all the people in it were crazy //
hahaha I know!! I just started Part Two and he’s describing how he came to marry Florence and I’m thinking, “Dude. This does not sound right. None of it sounds right.”
It’s so great!
What you say intrigues me about Parade’s End although the length is daunting (Henry James, hahaha). I’m interested in reading Ford’s Tudor series as well as some of his art books. What an interesting man.
But The Good Soldier is like a fever dream of subjectivity!!
And Angela Carter is another one I haven’t read. She sounds fantastic.
Ooh, Sheila, Fordie and a deserted becach, better than that it does not get! so glad you are ensnared by that evasive, cant-talk-about-what’-s-Really-going-on-behind-the-curtain voiceover. I am going to a beach this weekend, I will take along GS. Its been too long since I read it. Good luck with your new job, please take care of You.
Gina –
// that evasive, cant-talk-about-what’-s-Really-going-on-behind-the-curtain voiceover. //
Yes!! Your comments also inspired me to finally pick it up.
It’s incredible so far. He’s writing in the aftermath of this terrible event … that he can’t seem to name … but keeps hinting at … and I’m starting to piece it all together. As of now, it feels very much like a “tempest in a ridiculous teapot” – but again, there’s the feeling that I am not at all getting the full story from this guy.
I love the voice of the narrator and I love how paragraphs trail off into ellipses … Like sometimes he basically just gives up and says, “I don’t know …..”
And I’m like, “Dude, you’re the narrator of this novel! Get it together.”
It’s fabulous.
Thanks for the push I needed to finally read it.
Of course, the title of this post immediately made me think of Warren Zevon’s “Splendid Isolation.”
Don’t know it. But I do know how empty and beautiful the beach was this weekend.
Here ya go, Sheila. Gotta love the opening lines:
“I want to live all alone in the desert
I want to be like Georgia O’Keefe”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awhGI0_o90s