Reading Women

It just occurred to me that March is Women's History Month and coincidentally I have been reading a lot of women writers. In fact this year it looks like my reading pile was filled mostly by women. Of course I am still working through Ulysses (have the final two chapters to go) and it has been very rewarding, but will come to that later when I am actually done. For now I wanted to share my thoughts on 4 books by 4 women writers.

Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton: After The Luminaries which made Catton the youngest Booker winner, the expectations for Birnam Wood were very high. Luminaries is one of my all-time favorite books in the last 15 years, so I have been waiting for Birnam Wood from the time the book was first announced many, many years back. I read this one in two days. It is an action and ideas packed novel and is a commentary on contemporary conflicts. At the heart of the novel is a cash-strapped guerilla gardening group called Birnam Wood whose path crosses with a billionaire setting up a survival bunker in New Zealand. The eco-idealists are led by Mira who is a modern Austen's heroine Emma-like character and the tech billionaire Lemoine is a Mission Impossible-villain + Peter Thiel type. Can eco-idealists and techno-capitalists forge a happy union for the betterment of the planet? Well, the title of the book is from Shakespeare's Macbeth and you know how that ends! But it is how the whole thing unravels that makes it a gripping thriller. Catton shows how even the most well-intentioned ideals can be ruined by petty fights, poor communication, and power struggles. The key message seems to be 1) We are all Macbeths 2) We are all complicit 3) We need to communicate better instead of just virtue signalling and blaming each other if we want to bring about changes to how the techno-capitalists treat the planet. 

My thoughts: I loved the writing and the plot. The dark comedy had the right tone to it. However, I felt disappointed in the end. We are all in collective despair and understand that we are complicit and the novel captures that beautifully while managing to be a great page-turner, but there are no deeper insights here. It seems to suggest that all the mix-ups could have been avoided if the misguided idealists just communicated better - seems too simplistic to me. The Luminaries is a novel that has many layers which lends itself to re-re-reading. Birnam Wood while a gripping thriller and a page-turner lacks those layers that I have come to expect from Catton.

Magnificent Rebels by Andrea Wulf: Andrea Wulf's previous work The Invention of Nature brought Alexander Humboldt to life and it was an amazing read that totally deserved the Royal Society's Prize for Science writing.  During the pandemic I read a biography of Wordsworth by Jonathan Bate and I learned how instrumental the German intellectuals from Jena were to the English Romantics. So when I heard that Wulf's book was going to be about the "Jena Set" I was very eager to read it. The Jena Set comprises of  Schiller, Schlegels (3 of them including Caroline), Schelling, Fichte and Novalis with a cameo appearance by the Humboldt brothers and Hegel at the very end. Goethe was the older, wiser mentor who connected all these young philosophers and worked hard to preserve unity among them. Jena is a small University town in the middle of Germany which saw an explosion of new philosophical ideas between 1794 to 1806 that led to the invention of the self. The rebels were mainly the women - especially Caroline Schlegel (later married to Schelling) who had a fiery intellect and can be credited with making Shakespeare cool again! They came up with a new way of communal thinking called "symphilosophising" and brought to the forefront the "I" - not in a selfish way but in a way of communing with nature. As Wulf says "At the heart of the Magnificent Rebels is the tension between the breath-taking possibilites of free will and the pitfalls of selfishness." Germany (not the country but referring to the region as a whole) was very fragmented in those days where there were many regional rulers and therefore rules which meant that a number of different ideas could develop without the fear of an outright ban across all regions. Germany also had more universities per capita unlike in England which had two main ones. All this led to Jena becoming a birthplace for many interesting ideas that are still relevant. 

My take: This book was a good read just not as great as her book on Humboldt. After a point it became a book about who slept with whom and who had an open marriage and who had kids out of wedlock - I guess it contributed to the chief characters becoming rebels, but I wanted to learn more about the philosophy. Goethe is my favorite character and I would love for Wulf to do a book just about him. 

The Sentence by Louise Erdrich: Louise Erdrich's previous works especially The Plague of Doves, The Roundhouse, The Painted Drum are all some of my favorite novels. The most recent one I read was The Nightwatchman which was also wonderful. The Sentence unfortunately did not work for me. The main character Tookie works in a bookstore not unlike Erdrich herself and so there are a lot of references to other books which I loved! The novel is highly contemporary and incorporates the pandemic, George Floyd, and the 2020 elections. Maybe because these things are so immediate and am still processing these incidents it probably felt a bit odd to read about it in an Erdrich novel. The writing was also not very lyrical to me. I appreciated the appendix of the book which lists all of "Tookie's" favorite books. I will use that list to discover more writers for sure.

A Tip for the Hangman by Alison Epstein: This is not a book I would have read on my own, but I participate in the Folger Shakespeare Library's online book club and this was their selection for last month. This was a great read for anyone interested in Tudor times and the life of Kit Marlowe. Was Marlowe a spy for Walsingham? Was he killed in a barroom brawl or was he assassinated by his political enemies? Epstein uses this as her background to give us a colorful portrait of Marlowe's life with Shakespeare playing a small cameo. Overall a good book but not as good as the choices for previous book clubs (Booth by Karen Joy Fowler or Shadowplay by Joseph O'Connor) or the one I am reading now for next month's book club - Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. 

So that's 4 of my reads for these past two months from 4 very talented writers who happen to be women. 3 of them were known to me and these are writers whose books I will pick up irrespective of their reviews. The fourth writer is very talented and I will keep an eye out for her other books. Now it's time for me to get back to Ulysses as he is returning to Ithaca finally.