The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas père, 1844)

 

A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong. 

 --Edgar Allan Poe, "The Cask of Amontillado" 

Revenge is one of those things that shows up a lot in literature.  Character is wronged, character doesn't feel justice can be served without retribution, character exacts revenge.  It's a common plot, and what determines how worthy of a story it is comes down to the execution.  Thankfully, Alexandre Dumas père did an excellent job of building an incredible revenge plot in The Count of Monte Cristo, enough so that despite the sizable tome (Penguin's edition, without counting the introduction and cultural notes, is 1243 pages long), you would be hard-pressed to find a list of the best revenge novels that doesn't include it.

So, what is it that makes this particular classic stand out so effectively?  I would argue that its secret may be the level of mastery on display in the vengeance exacted by Edmond Dantés upon the men responsible for his life being ruined.  The Count of Monte Cristo is largely taken up with the description of an elaborately-planned plot, designed to force those men past a despair event horizon so that they might know what it's like to have their lives destroyed so utterly... and even beyond that, it's important to him that in the end, those who are destroyed by him are aware of who has brought about their downfalls.

Edmond Dantés is introduced to us as an innocent sailor, caught up in machinations that he is completely ignorant of.  He's on the verge of being made captain of the trading ship he serves on, and he's about to propose to the woman he loves.  However, he has been entrusted with a letter, which he intends to deliver as an honoring of the dead captain's final wishes, unaware that the captain was a devoted Bonapartist and that the message involves the impending return of Napoleon to France.  Unfortunately for Dantés, an attempt by one of his shipmates and a romantic rival to knock him down a peg combines with the intended recipient of that letter being the father of a crown prosecutor, and the end result is the hapless sailor being locked away in a dungeon, with his friends and loved ones unable to find out what has happened to him.

Dantés reaches his despair event horizon roughly four years into his imprisonment; on the verge of killing himself to end the monotonous suffering, he only stops when he hears the telltale sounds of a neighboring prisoner on the verge of tunneling into his cell.  This brings him into a long friendship with Abbé Faria, a well-learned priest who is thought to be mad because of his insistence on knowing the location of a hidden treasure of immense value.  Faria was trying to dig a tunnel out of the prison, but misjudged, instead finding another chamber in the dungeon.

Over the following ten years, teaches Dantés foreign languages, science, mathematics, history... essentially giving him a thorough education in all topics.  They plot an escape together, but this is halted by Faria suffering a stroke, which leaves him half-paralyzed and unable to participate in the escape.  Dantés uses the further tragedy of Faria's death from another stroke to escape from the island prison, switching places with Faria's body and, though surprised to discover that the Chateau d'If has no graveyard (the fate of the bodies of those who die instead being 'tie a cannonball to the feet and throw the body into the deep'), he manages to free himself from the situation and quickly gets himself well away from the island prison, pretending to be a shipwreck survivor and getting himself a position on a passing ship.

At the first chance he gets, Dantés manipulates things to get himself left alone on the volcanic island of Monte Cristo, off the coast of Tuscany.  While there, he searches for, and finds, the vast treasure that Faria told him about, which gives him all the resources he needs to remake himself, and to ensure that his friends, several of whom are in dire straits, are saved from the edge of disaster.  In doing so, he discovers the identities of those who caused the destruction of his old life, and determines that, having done the good he wished to do, it's time to shift toward destroying his enemies.

At this point, we're less than a quarter of the way into the book.  What then ensues over the remaining pages is a long-game revenge, in which Dantés, primarily in the guise of the Count of Monte Cristo but also in at least two other identities through the use of disguises and faked accents, works the kind of exquisite plot that one might expect from a Sherlock Holmes with no scruples, using the past sins of his foes against them, in order to destroy them as thoroughly as possible.  As the story progresses, it becomes clear that two of his targets have enough skeletons in their proverbial closets to utterly destroy them when those skeletons are revealed; the third requires rather more specific efforts, working to siphon off his wealth through market manipulations and carefully-manipulated news reports to bring him to make poor investments.  And in each case, the Count is able to be present at the moment of deepest despair, in order to make sure that they know exactly who was behind their downfalls.

This is a long book.  Part of that is an artifact of the way that Dumas was paid for it; when the work was originally serialized, he was paid by the line.  Of course in a situation like that, one wants to stretch it as far as possible.  But Dumas doesn't use the extra space offered by the length to simply pad things out; while certain parts of the narrative may seem out of place initially, the end result is an intricately woven tapestry of character interactions where very little is extraneous, always instead revealing some important facet of each character's past, personality, or motivations.  A long section in which several characters attend Carnivale in Rome, which initially seems like simply a long digression from the plot, ends up being referred back to later in the novel in a rather delightful way; characters who initially seem like they are simply involved due to random whims by the Count later end up being the linchpins of his plots.

That said, there is much to be said for the translation by Robin Buss.  The Penguin Classics edition of The Count of Monte Cristo is the only English translation available that is completely unabridged and unadulterated, but this doesn't mean that the added material in this edition makes it a harder read; rather, it serves to give a wonderfully-detailed portrait of the locales that the characters are in, and to show the education levels of the characters.  Aspects of character growth that might not be present in an edition that comes from eras where works were modified during translation to remove 'objectionable' content are quite evident here, so that even some of the minor characters are well-developed.

It's not a difficult read, it's just long.  The length may seem daunting, but with relatively short chapters (the average length of a chapter being about 11 pages), there are plenty of places to stop and take a break, and most of the allusions made in the text are noted in the back, in order to make sure that even someone who isn't familiar with 19th century European politics or French drama that might not have ever been translated into any language besides French can have some appreciation for what Dumas is doing.  And the ending is wonderful, with the one major character who the Count least wanted to hurt yet brought closest to the point of no return in his despair having all made right, before the Count makes his disappearance from the stage, going into an unknown future where he might find happiness himself, ending the narrative on a moment of hope and grace.  We don't know where the Count will go or what he will turn his attentions toward, but one can only hope that his open reclaiming of his original name on the final page means that his long turn toward darkness is at an end.

The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame, 1908) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 3/3)

 

And here we come to the third of Kenneth Grahame's major works, the one that he's perhaps best-known for now (and unfortunately the only one that Penguin currently publishes), The Wind in the Willows.  I was rather looking forward to reaching this, actually, I have a lot of vague memories of watching the 1980s television series, and of course Disney's take on the novel.  I know I attempted to read this once as a child, though I kind of bounced off of it.  Reading it now as an adult, I can see what went wrong at the time; I was looking for Mr. Toad's Wacky Adventures, and that's absolutely not what this is (mostly).

This is a decidedly different sort of work entirely from Grahame's two previous works, for a number of reasons, not the least of which is its departure from the realism, albeit wonder-tinged, of The Golden Age and Dream Days.  Instead, we're in a world where certain animals dress and act in the same manner as people do, where the size of those animals in relation to humans seems to be based purely on what the narrative requires at that moment, and where an amphibian in a rather poor disguise can be easily mistaken for a human.

The first place to look for differences is simply in the nature of the work.  During the ten-year gap between Dream Days and this work, Grahame became a father, which significantly changed the shape of his audience.  Rather than writing for an ostensibly adult audience, as his newspaper columns were, The Wind in the Willows began as a series of tales that he was telling to his son.  This doesn't change his diction or his writing voice, but it does make this work rather less introspective.  Instead, it allows a shifting of perspectives between the characters to match the tone of each story.

There are three primary characters here, who are used as 'narrators' (though the whole work is told in the third person), though a fourth is generally considered a main character and has been included as a major character in all of the various adaptations over the years.  The character we spend the most time in the mind of is Mole, a simple but determined fellow who follows through on anything he's set to doing and tends to be easily drawn into other folks' activities.  Mole feels a sudden urge at the start of the book to leave his underground home, digs up to the surface, and is immediately overwhelmed by everything that is Springtime.  We're in a similarly pastoral setting to what was seen in The Golden Age and Dream Days, though without any time spent interacting with the nearby village.  Instead, the world of the animals is the wilds, with meadows, a river, a nearby forest, and beyond, the world of humans, which the animals prefer to steer clear of.  Mole quickly discovers the River, which is mindboggling to him, given that he's never seen anything of the sort.  At the same time, he meets Water Rat, a relaxed sort of fellow with a love of everything that has to do with the river and a taste for poetry.  Mole quickly decides to move in with Water Rat after the two share a picnic; the two will rarely be apart for the rest of the book.

Toad appears as a minor character, just spoken of, in the first chapter; he doesn't become a primary character until the second chapter, where a visit to Toad Hall results in him dragging Mole and Rat into his latest fixation, a horse-drawn caravan which he intends to go traveling the countryside in.  The characters are hesitant to get too involved, because Toad has a tendency to fixate on one thing until it loses some degree of charm for him, before moving on to something else; his exuberance for the idea of life on the road is able to push through his friends' reticence so that they end up going on his journey with him.  This goes well until the two rodents force Toad to actually do some of the work involved in this sort of travels, which quickly sours him on the prospect, aided by the caravan being run off the road and wrecked by a motor-car driving by at speed.  This sets up Toad's overall plotline (and the only actual ongoing plotline for the book), as he becomes obsessed by cars instead, and by the following morning has placed an order for one of his own.

We next meet Badger, a gruff sort of country gentleman of the sort who doesn't particularly care for society but is most welcoming to those in distress, who lives in the middle of the Wild Wood.  Mole and Rat come to his home during a snowstorm that leaves them stranded in the forest, and he gladly lets them in to stay the night and warm up.  He's a kind but stern fellow, whose biggest desire seems to be for there to be a certain degree of civility and stability to the countryside.  He's the sort that nobody particularly wants to cross, as well; Mole and Rat were somewhat threatened by the weasels and stoats who also live in the forest when they were caught after dark, and Badger makes it clear that they'll not see any further issues once it's known that they're his friends; after all, a badger is rather larger than most other mustelids.  At the same time, we learn that the Wild Wood is in a place where humans used to have a village; Badger's home is built in what is apparently a former basement.  This doesn't mean humans are gone, just they're not in that particular spot right now.

The small plotlines that continue in the book are similar small pastoral adventures, with Rat and Mole encountering a forest god (implied to be Pan) in one chapter (though they promptly forget, a gift from the god stated as being a way to ensure that their lives won't be seen as never reaching that peak again), and another having Rat be tempted toward running off to sea, until Mole returns him to his sanity.

The largest plotline, though, is Toad's misadventures as his arrogance and lack of common sense gets him in trouble, repeatedly; this is what the Disney film dealt with, and what the youthful me was expecting.  His fixation with motor-cars refuses to be sated even after he has wrecked six of them, and landed in the hospital three times; when Rat, Mole, and Badger attempt a forced intervention, he flees out the window, runs halfway to the human village nearby, steals a car, gets himself arrested, and winds up thrown into jail.  The subsequent escape (thanks to the warden's daughter who takes some pity on him because he's an animal) involves cross-dressing, sneaking aboard a train under false pretenses, stealing a horse, hijacking the same car again and driving it into a lake, and finally being swept up in the River's currents and delivered to Rat's door, across several chapters.  This leads to the revelation that the weasels, stoats, and ferrets from the Wild Wood have taken over Toad Hall, and finally a nighttime raid by the four friends to retake the manor from the invaders, and Toad finally learning a little bit of humility in the process.

It's obvious just why Toad is so beloved; children are obviously going to be amused by a goofy character who gets into all manner of slapstick scrapes.  But while his plotline may be the lion's share of the novel (six of the novel's twelve chapters deal with the Motor-Car fixation and its results, from beginning to end), the overall feel of the piece is far more in line with the lifestyles of Mole, Rat, and Badger.  These three are content with their lots in life; Mole may get homesick for his burrow, but he knows where it is and can easily stop by, and in fact does, and a more dependable fellow simply can't be found.  Rat may be swayed easily by a bit of storytelling, but the small pleasures of riverside life are more than enough for him if he just spends a bit of time writing.  And Badger stands by his friends, even if he's a bit of a scary old codger at times.  They serve to ground things against the rampaging id that is Toad, and where Toad is apt to give up at a small setback and rarely seems to think beyond a few moments ahead, the three of them together are more than able to offset Toad's shortcomings.

The one thing that is perhaps the most perplexing about this piece as a whole is the question of just what an 'animal' is within this context.  There are a number of characters who are apparently of similar size to one another despite being far differently-sized in nature (particularly Badger alongside everyone else), and Toad in particular interacts with a number of clearly human artifacts, including his motor-cars and the washerwoman's outfit that he 'borrows' in order to escape from jail, and that's leaving aside the question of the manor-house that is Toad Hall, and, well, the success of the washerwoman disguise.  On the other hand, Rat's temptation toward the seas comes from encountering a Sea Rat on the road, who has apparently made a habit of sneaking aboard ships by climbing into rowboats or up ropes, and likes to bunk in the captain's cabin, which implies that he's, well... rat-sized.  Songbirds are kept in cages by both people and animals alike, but Rat is able to have conversations with migratory avians on the subject of why they go south for the Winter rather than sticking around closeby.  Toad's caravan is pulled by a horse, who clearly isn't the same kind of animal as the other folk; the horse he steals during his escape from the law is likewise little more than a pack beast.  And the warden's daughter apparently likes animals as pets, but knows better than to mention that to the captive Toad.

It's a strange dichotomy that is far from clearly-delineated, and serves to give a sort of dream-like quality to the work, that makes it a wonderful chaser for Grahame's other two major works.  It's the only one of the three that really felt like it had a fully-satisfying ending, though; where The Golden Age and Dream Days both ended with a sort of eulogy for childhood, The Wind in the Willows wraps up with the promise that while Toad may be a little less conceited and devoted to his impulses, the four of them are going to continue in their lives with the status quo re-established.  All has been brought back to the way it should be, and the pastoral life remains, a little slice of Arcady within the English countryside, complete with the god who mythologically lived in the Greek region.  It's a version of the world seen in Grahame's earlier works that can go on in adulthood, where there may be some strife between residents but existence is largely harmonious, and where the line between nature and 'civilized' life is blurred to the point of nonexistence.

Dream Days (Kenneth Grahame, 1898) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 2/3)

There's something to be said for sequels.  While they might be seen by some as derivative, and there's always the sideways glance and comment that "it's not as good as the first one", the best sequels build on the groundwork laid by their predecessors and use it as a springboard to explore different grounds.

Kenneth Grahame's first 'big hit' work, The Golden Age, was a meditation on his own childhood, raised by "The Olympians" who took him and his siblings in after his mother's death.  It explored the childhood mindsets and world that he had grown up in, giving anecdotes of how that childhood life of whimsy and indifference toward adult concerns manifested itself, though without any particular degree of sentimentality; the narrator is quite aware of the things he does that get him in trouble, he simply didn't understand at the time that they were going to be problems.

The second of the pieces collected in The Penguin Kenneth Grahame is the follow-up, Dream Days.  This work shares the setting and characters with its predecessor (though the oldest brother, sent off to boarding school at the end of the previous work, only appears from afar, mentioned in flashback and in the form of letters sent home from school), but takes an altogether different approach to the childhood events, for much of the piece.

This work has longer chapters than The Golden Age, allowing each flight of fancy to be given more room to breathe, and Grahame uses this space to engage in a rather focused way on the realm of daydreams.  This brings along with it an entirely different sense to the work, where each story, rather than being about the little encroachments of whimsy on the reality of a child's life, instead goes so far as to override everything about the world, and engage entirely in that fantasy world.  Several stories actively seek to ignore the world outside of this imaginary space entirely, building to a chapter featuring an entire original fairy-tale, not featuring any of the known characters at all, before coming back to harsh reality in the final story.

The largest theme, then, is the place of imaginary landscapes and settings in the child's world.  The second chapter, for example, begins within reality; the narrator explains how, on this particular day, everyone around him was in a bad mood and that put him in a bad mood as well, so he decided to just start walking outside and let his mind wander.  From there, it jumps into a series of brief fantasies, where the narrator is considering what he might run away and do to make those around him realize how much he means, through his absence.  These are all examples of the sort of adventure yarns that might be seen in children's adventure stories; he imagines running off to join the army and become a great general, or becoming a cabin boy and working his way up to be a pirate captain, or even going to a monastery and becoming a monk, just to spite them.  This obviously misses the deeper, more spiritual reasons behind someone taking up the monastic life, but much of the depth involved in these fantasy-minded escapes is missed in the childhood whims, shaped as they are by what books he has read and stories he has heard but little else besides.

From this establishment of the realms of imagination as a focus, Grahame begins to explore the various ways that the imagination can be shaped, used as both a way to bridge two minds together and to simply add to what one has at their disposal, and how it can serve as an escape when necessary.  The following chapter features the narrator discovering the dangers of inviting someone you don't know into your imaginary world without considering how their own imagination and desires might shape that world.  While some of the daydreamscapes explored in Dream Days are shared with the narrator's siblings, this one instance where an outsider is invited in is almost devastating, given just how different the thought processes of the girl in question are.

Each chapter, then, focuses on a new sort of exploration of this general theme.  One chapter features the thought of using artwork as a window into a whole imaginary world of what happens in the background, then leads from there into the narrator encountering an illuminated manuscript with new wonders on every page, allowing him to venture deeper and deeper into an imagined setting.  Another details an instance where, after offending a guest with his childish behavior, he is sent into the nursery to keep out of everyone's hair, and imagines an entire high-seas adventure for himself while sitting in a child's bath placed atop a towel-horse (thus able to emulate the sense of swaying on the seas as it wobbles).

The longest chapter, and perhaps the best-known piece out of these two books about this somewhat-idealized English childhood, is the aforementioned fairy tale, "The Reluctant Dragon," perhaps best-known now for the short-subject contained within the same-titled Disney 'behind the scenes' film from the 1940s.  This chapter starts out looking much like any other, firmly within reality; the children are playing in the garden, find what one of them is sure must be dragon tracks, and they follow the tracks until they end in a neighbor's garden.  Upon explaining their intrusion to the neighbor, he offers to walk them back home, and tells them the fairy tale during their walk.

And what a delightful fairy tale it is, too!  Written with the same combination of childish whimsy and erudite sensibility that is displayed elsewhere in this pair of books, the story turns everything that might be understood about the typical tale of an English dragon in the countryside, complete with St. George on hand to fight it, on its head.  The dragon has never been in a fight in his life, always letting the other dragons do that; he's rather more an aesthete, preferring to laze about and compose poetry and appreciate the countryside for what it is.  Of course, the nearby townsfolk, with the exception of one boy who befriends the dragon, don't want to have anything to do with it; after all, dragons are "a pestilential scourge" and don't belong near civilized towns at all, so they send for help to remove it, in the form of St. George himself.  It comes down to the boy to act as a negotiator and talk some sense into both sides of the impending fight, and reach an end result that makes everyone happy without any particular bloodshed.

All good things must eventually end, though, and the final story in the book, after the particular high point of the dragon's mock battle with the knight, seems almost more of a eulogy to childhood than anything else.  This story deals with the day where the youngest of the children is deemed by The Olympians to be 'too big for those kind of toys any longer', and the resultant nighttime mission by the two youngest, along with the narrator, to recover just a few particularly cherished keepsakes from the crate due to be shipped to a children's hospital in faraway London.

Even after the rescue goes without a hitch, though, the children have an altogether different intention than keeping the toys for themselves.  Rather than bringing the toys back to the house, where they would likely be quickly found and subjected to the same fate they were rescued from, the three children instead go to a spot they're particularly fond of escaping to when they need some time to just be children, and dig a grave to bury the toys, acknowledging that their days of being played with are over, but also feeling that it's better for their most cherished toys to have never ended up in the hands of children who wouldn't have the same built-up sense of value for them, and that their continued future play on the same spot would let those toys remain as part of the proceedings in spirit, if not as participants.

This ends up being the note on which we leave Grahame's childhood memories and meditations; after Dream Days, he didn't return to these characters, instead moving to other topics.  And so, we must also move on from these children being raised in their Arcadian surroundings, but even in this final act of solemnity, so different from the rest of these two books, there's something important being stated.  Even when we grow up, it's important to hang onto those fragments of innocence and fancy, lest we become as ill-humored and unable to engage with anything but the most serious and purely rational topics as The Olympians; we have to keep that little bit of childhood whimsy buried inside ourselves, always there to draw on, even into adulthood, to help us to take a step back from the real world when we need it.

The Golden Age (Kenneth Grahame, 1895) (The Penguin Kenneth Grahame, 1/3)

I'm sure everyone's seen or read something that makes use of the idyllic, semi-generic rural childhood setting.  You know the one, where everyone lives in either big manor houses or small cottages, and the children run around willy-nilly and get into all kinds of mischief and live in a half-fantasy world where their imaginations get them into all sorts of wild adventures with no real risk involved, and just across that hedge over there is a farmer's field and there's a little village down the way and the grown-ups are all serious and lack proper senses of humor because they just don't understand what's really important in life the way that the children do.

So, what happens if we take that setting, drop a few children into it to have the requisite low-stakes adventures, but then write it with an adult sensibility and sense of diction?

Well, we get some of Kenneth Grahame's works, for one.

Grahame got his start as a writer with pieces written for newspapers in the late Victorian era, a combination of short stories and meditations on life and the simple joys that one can find.  These were mostly collected in a volume called Pagan Papers, which is not at hand for me to read but I may be seeing if I can track it down later.  One particular one of these meditations, "The Olympians," focused on the difference between the priorities of the adults who raised him after his mother died, and those of he and his siblings who were in their care.  After one of his editors asked him to write more like that, he put out several of the 17 stories that made up The Golden Age, though most of the book was original at the time of its publication.  A sequel, Dream Days, followed; I'll be writing about that later.

So, what is it that we're actually looking at, here?  In large part, it's a very grounded set of tales about five siblings growing up in the English countryside and the little games they play with one another.  It's never fully laid-out, but I got the sense when reading that the oldest of the group was maybe nine or ten years old.  There's a sort of timeless sense about it all; the narrator (who seems positioned as a self-insert of the author, without any name ever given) seems to be the third of the five.  The stories seem to take place across about a year and a half of time, shifting lazily from season to season.  Some feature the narrator alone, others some or all of the group, but there's always a touch of ethereal quality to the events, as if the imaginations are layered atop reality in a way that makes them have a slight ability to actually be interacted with.

The central theme, though, is the disconnect between the children and adults.  Grahame's narrator is very in tune with nature, and knows that the most important parts of his world are the ones that he directly interacts with, whether that's the wind, guiding him through the countryside in the first story, or the small rivers that lead to several adventures directly into fantasy; sneaking under a fence in one case leads to a quiet Downton Abbey-like garden, which must clearly belong to a sleeping princess (who is, of course, on hand), while temporarily stealing a farmer's boat in order to play at Jason and the Argonauts leads to the discovery of a young Medea of sorts in the garden of another nearby manor.

There's a sense to the whole piece that Grahame is lamenting the loss of innocence that comes with growing up.  The children as a group get up to all kinds of mischief, but there are also moments where the reality of the world somewhat gets the best of them; one story features their governess leaving, and the children don't seem to quite understand why they feel so sad about it, and the final story deals with the looming departure to boarding school of the oldest of the siblings, with a conclusion that implies that the change from child to 'Olympian' adult comes with that separation from the childhood setting.

Not all adults fit into this 'Olympian' mode, however.  One chapter, which starts as a meditation on the old Roman roadways that still cross the British countryside, features a discussion between the narrator and an artist who seems clearly like-minded, regarding a fantastic 'perfect' city that's where all the spare suitors in fairy tales and minor knights in Arthurian legends end up after the stories; in another case, the 'sleeping beauty' garden's princess has already been 'awoken' by a suitor, but both of them are more than willing to play along with the young boy's surety that he's walked into a fairy tale.  Another time, it goes the opposite way; the children getting into mischief in the night convinces the new tutor that the house is haunted and sends him fleeing the next morning, to sell his story to a supernatural-themed tabloid.

It's clear from reading this that Grahame felt that there's something important in a child's experience of the world, and the sensibility that comes from a more innocent view of the world and what's really important.  Fairyland lies behind every hedge, around every corner, if one simply knows where to look.  The fact that this book was a particular favorite of both Theodore Roosevelt and Kaiser Wilhelm II (in the latter case, it was the only book, aside from the Bible, that he kept on his private yacht) perhaps speaks to something of the personalities of both leaders.  There's a lot to be said for keeping a bit of that sense of whimsy and wonder; every adult who comes across in a positive way over the course of this book is someone who retains some aspect of that, whether that's playing along with a child's fantasy or simply letting kids be kids.  And really, that seems to be the core message at work here: there's something special about a child's view of the world, and more of us might do well to let a bit of that view in.

The Pillow Book (Sei Shōnagon, ca.995-1010)

 

There's a reputation that particularly old literature starts to gain, to the effect of 'It wouldn't have staying power if it wasn't dry and serious and somewhat socially-conscious of its time.'  And it's true, many of the examples of ancient works that we have fit that to a certain extent.  There are, after all, rather a lot of histories and biographies that have come to us from Greece and Rome.  Shakespeare has some remarkably fun comedies, but with the classics, he's considered something of an outlier.  He's the Bard of Avon, of course he's something special.

So let's just push that thought aside, right now.  There's plenty of lighter fare available in literature, even if it's centuries old, and I found one example, right here.  The Pillow Book is witty, light-hearted, and... well, social consciousness doesn't seem quite the intention here, but it's an utterly delightful read.

Written by a member of the court of the Empress Taishi, the first consort of Emperor Ichijō, this is a somewhat rambling work, happy to change directions with little warning, relate humorous anecdotes in whatever order they happened to come to mind, and generally acts like, well...  sort of a Heian miscellany, really.  There are lists of things that Sei Shōnagon finds to be beautiful, things that she finds distasteful, names of places and flowers and birds that are of poetic significance, and numerous incidents within the tiny, insular world of the Empress's court, all of which are positive in some way.

From the very start, Sei intended this to be anything but a serious work.  The story related in the text is that Taishi received a gift of paper similar to that being used by the Emperor's court engaging in the copying of a Chinese manuscript, and while debating over what to write on such fine paper, Sei suggested, "a pillow," at which point the stack of paper was passed to her to do just that.  There's some lost-in-translation-and-time pun work going on here, but the translator suggests that because the specific work being copied in the Emperor's court was "Shiki" (The Records of the Grand Historian, Shiji in Chinese), and "shiki" also refers to the 'mattress' part of a futon setup, the obvious pairing with that would be a pillow.

There's a lot of this stuff in here, homophones and poetry making reference to other poetry and...  I genuinely wish I was in a position to be able to appreciate all of what's going on in the poetry, because there's a lot of context that is lost simply because English can't elegantly do some of the things that classical Japanese could.  There's just over 100 pages of notes and appendices in the back to help with cultural and lost-in-translation things; it's actually very helpful, given the sheer cultural distance between the author and myself, across 1000 years and an ocean.

All that said, the combination of what was provided as the appendices and the sheer skill in Meredith McKinney's translation brings the images forward marvelously.  Sei has a particular affinity in describing clothing, focusing on the colors, patterns, and combinations thereof in the outfits worn by everyone around her.  There's a whole appendix devoted to giving illustrations of what courtly wear looked like (which was very useful for me; the Heian era predates the ubiquitous kimono so often seen in depictions of Japanese culture, which would have led me to very different mental images) and what the various poetically-named combinations given in the text actually mean in terms of the colors involved.

There are also a number of frankly splendid passages written in the second person, translated in present-tense (the implication being that the original was doing the same thing), describing a particular event in great detail.  This has the effect of letting a suitably-receptive reader experience the setting mentally, and I found these sections to be one of the best uses of second-person narration that I've encountered outside of interactive fiction.

What stands out for me the most in having read this, though, isn't the lists, or the descriptions (as delightful as the anecdotes are), or even the intimate descriptions of Sei's life within the court and her time as one of Taishi's favorite companions, and the entertainments that they devise for themselves.  Rather, it's the way that literature, and waka poetry specifically, is the very lifeblood of interactions between members of the nobility in this time.  If a gentleman spends the night with a lady, when he returns home afterward, he immediately sends a messenger with a poem, and the expectation that she will send a poem in return.  Poetry competitions are a recurring aspect of courtly life, both in structured situations and simply as a way for members of the Palace bureaucracy to engage in small flirtations with the cloistered women of Taishi's court.  Received poetry is shared between friends, responses carefully considered... it's almost like poetry in the Heian period was a spectator sport.

It's directly suggested in the text that Sei's position in Taishi's court is directly related to this literary sport.  She came from a family of poets, and her quick wit is brought up repeatedly as a great asset, often able to craft responses to poetic challenges that are difficult for the gentlemen on the other side of the exchange to top.  She's well-read, and knows her way around the Chinese classics that were essential reading for gentlemen of the courts, but as that kind of knowledge was considered somewhat uncouth for a lady, she has to come up with ways to subtly allude to the stories in conversation without making it clear that she's referring to them specifically.

This doesn't mean she's perfect, however.  There are multiple times that she tells about her difficulties in writing in more structured ways, and several times she brings up times that she worded things poorly, and was suitably chastised as a result.  She's also very much a product of her specific culture; there are numerous times where she writes that she's not fond of commoners, for a variety of reasons, and several times where she does things that seem downright mean (in one particularly cold-hearted passage, she describes how, in response to a commoner who was audibly depressed that his house had burned down as part of a huge blaze that destroyed an Imperial grain storage house, she gave the illiterate man a poem, implied that it was a promissory note, and told him go off to find someone who could tell him what it said as she was just too busy at that moment and was being called by the Empress).  Several times, her wit results in friendships and relationships being destroyed, as well; it may not be a huge surprise that Sei's literary rival, Murasaki Shikibu (who served in the court of Empress Shōshi, Ichijō's second consort), wrote in a decidedly unflattering way about Sei in her own diaries, albeit while respecting her wit and writing skills.

All in all, I'm glad to have read this.  It made for a very cozy read during a power outage, and I find myself rather wishing that I knew of anything else quite like it for me to keep on hand for when I need a bit of a cooldown after other, decidedly heavier tomes.

The largest book on my shelf, and one that's very much impending on my 'The Longing' reading list, is The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas père.  I don't know how heavy of a read that one is going to be prose-wise, but it's over 1300 pages and I know I'm going to need some lighter, shorter fare after that.  I think I'm going to stay light-hearted for the moment and go read some children's literature first, though.