Literary The Master by Colm Tóibín

[sun surfer]

This is the MR Literary Club selection for March 2015. Whether you've already read it or would like to, feel free to start or join in the conversation at any time! Guests are also always welcome.


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So, what are your thoughts on it?

[desertblues]

In reading this book I plan to resist the temptation to do a research on the life of Henry James before I open the book. I'll try to read it with an open mind if this is at all possible......

[desertblues]

It is always exciting to start a new book. I could have done without the long introduction though, as I want to read ' with an open mind' . That is, if this is at all possible.
A writer is about control; in a sense is a manipulator. What does the writer want me to believe of the main character of this book, Henry James? It starts like a fairytale, but on the very first page it soon is appearant that this is about a troubled isolated elderly man. In anticipation, in dread of the reception of his play, or is it making up an account of his life, a looking back on things not accomplished?
(I'm sitting in a train, travelling for free on the National Bookweek booklet......a Dutch custom of celebrating books, literature once a year. I think I do credit to this book of The Master. How apt )

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by desertblues

It is always exciting to start a new book. I could have done without the long introduction though, as I want to read ' with an open mind' . That is, if this is at all possible.
A writer is about control; in a sense is a manipulator. What does the writer want me to believe of the main character of this book, Henry James? It starts like a fairytale, but on the very first page it soon is appearant that this is about a troubled isolated elderly man. In anticipation, in dread of the reception of his play, or is it making up an account of his life, a looking back on things not accomplished?
(I'm sitting in a train, travelling for free on the National Bookweek booklet......a Dutch custom of celebrating books, literature once a year. I think I do credit to this book of The Master. How apt )

Is this link what you are referring to? Sounds very interesting! Hope you enjoyed your train travel.
http://goamsterdam.about.com/od/spri...-Book-Week.htm

I like your approach. I think I am going to dive right in and not do much research on this one. Then I will have no preformed expectations.

[Bookpossum]

Thanks for the link Bookworm_Girl. What a very civilised country Holland is, desertblues!

I agree - straight into the book and see how it goes. I am being slow to get going because we have a French film festival on at the moment, and we are scampering off to see various films, which rather eats into my reading time.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I found some time this afternoon to read. I've read about 15%. So far Tóibín has done well at making the reader seem inside James's mind and capturing the depths of loneliness and despair as well as his difficulty connecting in relationships. He seems to be an outside observer.

[ccowie]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

I found some time this afternoon to read. I've read about 15%. So far Tóibín has done well at making the reader seem inside James's mind and capturing the depths of loneliness and despair as well as his difficulty connecting in relationships. He seems to be an outside observer.

I agree. I'm about the same amount in and I noticed this as well. Interesting because capturing the actual interior musings of characters is something James himself is well known for.

[desertblues]

Thanks all. The National Bookweek is indeed a civilized and highly popular event......it seems that half the reading population of the Netherlands is on the train that particular day. I went to see the exhibition of the late works of our famous painter Rembrandt van Rijn in the newly restored Rijksmuseum . It was very crowded but I managed to see all I wanted.
https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/late-rembrandt

Back to the book: it seems to me that Colm Toibin has crept into the skin of Henry James. The style of writing is not at all contemporary but feels like that of another century. Beautifully written.

[sun surfer]

I'm about a third in and really enjoying it so far. I especially loved the opening paragraphs:

SOMETIMES IN THE NIGHT he dreamed about the dead – familiar faces and the others, half-forgotten ones, fleetingly summoned up. Now as he woke, it was, he imagined, an hour or more before the dawn; there would be no sound or movement for several hours. He touched the muscles on his neck which had become stiff; to his fingers they seemed unyielding and solid but not painful. As he moved his head, he could hear the muscles creaking. I am like an old door, he said to himself.

It was imperative, he knew, that he go back to sleep. He could not lie awake during these hours. He wanted to sleep, enter a lovely blackness, a dark, but not too dark, resting place, unhaunted, unpeopled, with no flickering presences.

When he woke again, he was agitated and unsure where he was. He often woke like this, disturbed, only half remembering the dream and desperate for the day to begin. Sometimes when he dozed, he would bask in the hazy, soft light of Bellosguardo in the early spring, the distances all misty, feeling the sheer pleasure of sunlight on his face, sitting in a chair, close to the wall of the old house with the smell of wisteria and early roses and jasmine. He would hope when he woke that the day would be like the dream, that traces of the ease and the colour and the light would linger at the edge of things until night fell again.”

So beautiful. I feel a little bit like I'm reading a novel about ghosts, as if they're all a little diaphanous. I don't know if that's exactly what he was going for per se, but I do think he was going for something close to that and I like it.

Originally Posted by ccowie

I agree. I'm about the same amount in and I noticed this as well. Interesting because capturing the actual interior musings of characters is something James himself is well known for.

I think I'd read somewhere that Tóibín was going for just that. I think he's doing an excellent job of reflecting James' style in this novel while still maintaining one of his own as well.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I'm about 30% in now. It's beautifully written. You can really feel the anxiety of James. There are a lot of ghosts in this novel. It ties in nicely with the theme of memory that has been prominent in our book selections so far this year.

[Bookpossum]

I'm about 20% in and loving it too - wonderful writing with a "feel" of James. I loved this take on the outsider's eye that he brought to his observations of English society:

For the first time in years, he felt the deep sadness of exile, knowing that he was alone here, an outsider, and too alert to the ironies, the niceties, the manners and, indeed, the morals to be able to participate. (Page 47)

Very envious of your seeing that Rembrandt exhibition, desertblues. One of my all-time favourite painters. And thanks for the link so that we can feel really jealous!

[desertblues]

Some thoughts while reading this book.
There are many ways of reading a book. Colm Tóibín presents me with an interesting view on Henry James, on his writing skills in particular. I believe this may be the strength of this book.
Once I have gotten the idea of 'manipulation of the reader' in my head, I continue to read with that particular notion in my mind. Rather than projecting and describing my own feelings on the story in this book, I find myself exploring the mind of the writer, his technique, his sense of reality and the relationship with the reader, his public.
What does Tóinbíms style of describing events say about the writer, of his own grip on reality? Manipulation of the readers mind, or an active role for the reader, in shaping an imaginary life and thinking all the while what the reader will think of it?

Spoiler:

194.195.'It was easy to put flesh on these bare bones, have a hearty, trusty housekeeper, make the little girl gentle and beautiful, make the boy both charming and mysterious, and make the house itself, the strange old house, into a great adventure for our heroine, the governess. He wanted her to have no skills at reflection or self-examination, he wanted the reader to know her by what she noticed, and what sights, indeed, she used her narrative to gloss over. Thus the reader would see the world through her eyes, but somehow see her too, despite her efforts at self-concealment and self-suppression, in ways she could not see herself.
The house was all emptiness and echoing sounds. The governess’s two charges made nothing of their abandonment, they paraded themselves to the governess and the kind housekeeper as brimming vessels in need of nothing more than what was provided for them. All sound, both within and without, was ominous sound matched by ominous echo. He set down as soon as he could the moment when, on retiring for the night, the governess heard the faint distant cry of a child and then in front of her door the sound of a light footstep. These, he determined as he moved up and down the room dictating the words, should seem like nothing at the time and would only become significant in the light, or in the gloom, of what was to come.'(...)'He had begun the story as a potboiler, a way of fulfilling a contract, a tale likely to appeal to a wide audience, and he worked accordingly to have it completed by the end of the year. He did not know why it disturbed his waking life in the months in which he prepared his move to Lamb House. He did not know why the voice he had so thoughtfully created, and so carefully controlled and manipulated, seemed to have worked on him so that he allowed his governess a power and a freedom which he had never intended for her. He allowed her to fool herself, something he had never allowed anyone before; he gave her permission to wallow in the danger, to want it to come towards her, to motion it close, signal to it. He relished frightening her. He made her loneliness and her isolation into a longing to meet someone, for a face at the window, a figure in the distance.'

I found an interesting quote on the subject of reading in the beginning of the book, where Tóibín has Henry James reflecting on the difference between a story in a play and one in a book."Reading was as silent and solitary and private as writing.'(page 24)
I cannot but agree with that. Perhaps that is why I find some books of the bookclub hard to discuss, especially those of the war.

[Bookpossum]

I see James as always standing apart, unable to get involved with anything more than polite conversation - always distant and an outsider. This is not only in closeness with his family and friends, but also in a difficult situation such as the one with his servants.

For so many years now he had had no country, no family, no establishment of his own, merely a flat in London where he worked. He did not have the necessary shell, and his exposure over the years had left him nervous and exhausted and fearful. It was as though he lived a life which lacked a façade, a stretch of frontage to protect him from the world. Lamb House would offer him beautiful old windows from which to view the outside; the outside, in turn, could peer in only at his invitation. (Pages 130-131)

A solitary soul, who could only communicate with people through his writing, and also manipulate them - which I suppose most writers do to a greater or lesser extent.

[caleb72]

I feel that he's a bit empty.

It's not just his distance, it's his reticence. Some of this would be related to his sexual disposition, but I don't think that's it. Neither is he self-contained. In fact, quite the opposite. He desperately needs and craves people around him because his life's work demands it. Each gesture, each scene, each secret, becomes part of a recipe for him - but he's not willing to give anything to the world in return other than his writing.

I'm not yet half-way at this stage. I listen to the audio-book as I walk to the train station in the morning which takes 20 minutes. The book has 12 hours of audio. So far, I'm loving it. I couldn't say whether I'd love reading the novel as the experience is possibly quite different.

I've only read one Henry James book, which was Turn of the Screw and I didn't really like it. However, I like how its creation, along with others, is woven through the story. It makes me like to novel more in retrospect although I doubt I would get a thrill from a re-read.

One thing I have noticed so far is that it's not a story that follows a particular path. It's a bit all over the place, like a collection of small stories about Henry James told in no particular order. That's probably the only criticism I can think of at the moment.

[Bookpossum]

Yes, he's an extreme introvert and finds it impossible to open himself to others. His homosexuality would only have added to his need to withhold himself from others, given the laws and attitudes of the times.