Reading Update

[jaggedwolf]

The Portrait of a Lady | Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny | Mother of Souls

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

Continuing my adventures in the classics where a woman makes very bad romantic choices. Alas, this time she goes so far as to marry the bad choice. I knew nothing about this book other than the title and its author until February of this year, when I came across a reference to “Isabel Archer sitting in her chair” in Researcher’s First Murder.

She sure sits in that chair, huh.

I shall be reductive and compare my feelings on Isabel Archer to the women of my previous explorations of this category — Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Eustacia Vye. I think I’ve said previously that Eustacia was my favorite of them, for the way that the men are avenues to something further than the romance they can offer. Isabel’s the slippiest customer by far. We spend so much time with her thoughts and yet even by the end I felt like I hardly knew her. To be fair, it seems she hardly knows herself. Also, unlike any of those other women, she survives her novel! Thank goodness.

I did not anticipate the reveal of Pansy being Merle’s daughter. I didn’t even anticipate there being a plot twist or reveal of that kind, my naive mind only went so far as the affair between Merle and Osmond and whether it was an old one. The reveal makes sense. I wonder at Osmond’s sister not revealing this to Isabel before the marriage. Did she assume Isabel knew, did she have sufficient loyalty to her family to not reveal it to someone who was not yet family, some other motivation?

It’s not even that secret that makes Isabel and Osmond’s marriage feel so rotten. In the leadup to their marriage I found myself perplexed by what kind of bad husband he was going to be, because I truly could not tell. His quiet contempt and the way it seeps into everything and everyone he touches was sufficiently worthy of my loathing. Isabel was offput by Warburton’s position and the certainty she would be stuck in the orbit of his Personage, and she found something oppressive and forcing in Goodwood’s personality, but Osmond has her trap herself by her absorption of his judgements and her duties. It is convincing, though I remain thrown by the timeskip past the dead kid of their marriage.

I was entirely charmed by Henrietta and the Touchetts. The book never explicitly contrasts Henrietta and her beau’s long long courtship with Isabel and Osmond’s quick marriage, but the contrast is there, and in general I am going to like the talkative female reporter from America. The Touchetts...I think James intends us to see their failures to connect with each other, the distance between them during their lives, but I don’t know, I found their oddness rather sweet instead. You could do a lot worse as a family.

Ralph Touchett might be my favorite character of the book. An “apostle of freedom”, as the book describes him, so much so that he sees his cousin who he only just met, sees her independence, and aware of his own pointless affections for her, gets his father to reduce his inheritance drastically in her favor, so that independence may be preserved, so that she never feels the constraint of money.

And in doing so he dooms her.

Again, reductive of me. She could have done many other things with that money other than marry Gilbert Osmond, but that is how Ralph sees it at the end of his life, and you very much understand, because how else can he see it? I was glad that he and Isabel had that final deathbed conversation.

Once I got into the rhythm of it, I enjoyed the longwinded prose and the humor. Actually, I liked the humor from the start, with lines like “Mrs Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased.” The help is so invisible in this book that their few mentions — Ralph’s entourage as he travels to continental Europe and then back to England, Isabel’s servant as she disembarks the final train — were very jarring, made me go I am drastically undercounting the number of people involved here huh.

Apparently some dude wrote a sequel novel in 2017 and it wasn’t the worst thing?? I am intrigued, and would like to see Isabel truly escape.

Side note: Read a decent chunk of this while sitting in a park and a random fellow remarked “I finished that book two months ago, it’s very psychological” and I was like yeah, you’re not wrong.

Anna Chronistic and the Scarab of Destiny by Anakaret Wells

Time-travel novel that made me wonder if I’m a dummy or if the plot in the last third of the book was poorly explained. Of course, those are not mutually exclusive options.

Additionally, I think it rude to offer several intriguing times and locations and then spend the bulk of your time travel novel in an upper-class home in 18th/19th century England. (No, I cannot recall which century it was and I may even be mistaken in this broad range.)

Future sci-fi city! Eternal 1978! Old Egypt time travel committee! Would’ve taken more of any of those, over an old-timey English household. I’m not even anti-that as a setting, I’ve consumed plenty of other works with that setting with no objections, but you can’t tempt me with those other options and not deliver.

I don’t mean to overstate my dismay. This was more of a two star (it was ok) leaning three star (I liked it) read, not a one star (disliked it). I was fond of Anna’s independence, affections, loyalties, and queerness, and enjoyed her shenanigans in the first half of the book. Her interactions with her brother, Uncle Sheng, the manservant guy, and Polly were delightful. There was sufficient ground laid that the moment Sheng offers Polly a job to travel with him to the US and Anna thinks she should take it did hit me. I am weak to that trope. The commentary on highly commercial highly dangerous consumer time travel devices cracked me up, especially the one with the animal hologram who would not shut up. The footnotes shtick mostly worked for me.

The narrative voice got too twee for me in the second half of the book, and more importantly, I could not for the life of me understand who had the scarab for what purposes or how our heroes got it back or how Anna throwing it at the end solved everything. Again, perhaps I am a dummy in which case I would love for someone to explain that to me because at one point I had to admit I was not going to understand and simply had to press forward. Oh god, or how the English country-house visitor family whose daughter was getting erased by time was connected to our earlier botanist English lady?? All of it went over my head.

My other issue felt like a nitpick. For Portrait of A Lady above, I mentioned that it had a reveal/exploration of something that I never expected to come up, but made total sense to come up once it happened. I felt like the reverse happened here. There were sufficient mentions of Anna’s father’s inventing of time travel and of her unknown betrayal of manservant guy that I thought for sure we’d dig into both by the end of the novel in resolving the missing scarab problem, and the lack of either felt less than satisfying.

Mother of Souls by Heather Rose Jones

Third book in the Alpennia series. The new romance here was my least favorite of the three couples, perhaps because it itself is least certain of being a settled Romance at all. Yet I did enjoy the imagery of their particular pairing. Also, just plain fun to hang out with the gang again.

...I may have gained a het ship I support in this series, despite the impossibility of the class and religious differences???? C’mon, I know this setting is too grounded for it but I think the hets should have this.

Person who can see magic but cannot do it x Person who can do magic but cannot see it? Baller idea, gotta respect it. I as a person who knows nothing of music will happily sit through Serafina and Luzie throwing around all that music terminology, much as I sat through Margerit and Barbara throwing around all that legal terminology. (Then again, I must admit abstruse legality is of more interest to me than abstruse musicality.)

But uhhh if Serafina/Luzie was meant to be sold as hard as a romance as the previous two couples I needed to see more of their PoVs after the Terribly-Timed kiss and I also needed their ending to Not Be Like That Y’Know. Perhaps they weren’t meant to be a romance and just a fling though? Who knows! For Serafina’s sake I also would have liked a stronger motivation for going back to Alpennia. The vision while crossing the Alps felt way too vague to hit, as did the general amorphous threat seeping in to restricting the mysteries. Serafina’s loneliness and feeling of distance did very much work for me. I was less into Luzie.

I forgot if I ever did a post about the second book and if I did, if I mentioned how much I enjoy Antuniet and Barbara being the most tsundere of cousins to each other. If so it bears repeating. These two cannot be normal and straightforwardly admit they care about each other, it’s all I Have Detected Your Pregnancy With My L33T Armin Skills You Should Know Better and Let Me Try My Homunculus Scam Explanation On You. Love’em. Though despite said fondness, those two’s PoVs did feel the most extraneous for this novel? Jeanne’s throughline — helping Anna gain confidence and social acumen — could have too, but Jeanne is so embedded in the social networks that she matters to everyone, so seeing her perspective never feels like we’re straying too far from the main plot. Also, Antuniet is wild for her baby plot. And for the way she reveals it to poor Jeanne, like give your partner a heads-up before you announce your whole-ass plan, maybe do some soft lead-up. No, none of that for Antuniet, which I guess I should’ve expected from how she handled her trial in the previous book.

When I read the previous book I did not predict Tavit being trans, and I’m so here for it — enjoyed that confrontation at the ball where the reader realizes much faster than Barbara and his prior conversation with her on whether she wishes she were a man.

Margerit starting a whole-ass university is so...Margerit, I enjoyed those shenanigans deeply and could’ve read about those forever TBH. Happy she arranged a way for her cousin to stick around.