(no subject)

[skygiants]

Booklogging: also an excellent procrastination tool! (However, the due date of my biggest paper got pushed back from Monday to Wednesday, giving me three full days to work on it instead of one, so I am no longer PANICKING. This is very much a good.)

The book in question is I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith, which I made a note to read about five years back when the film came out, and then promptly forgot about until this year. I am now really sad I did, because I have been missing out - I loved this book. The narrator, Cassandra Mortmain, is a 1930s teenager and would-be-writer living in a half-ruined castle with a beautiful and extremely pragmatic elder sister, a surprisingly intelligent younger brother, a determinedly bohemian artist's model stepmother who enjoys communing with nature wearing nothing but workboots, a live-in sort-of-servant who keeps giving her love poems (usually in large part written by other people), and a father who wrote one exceedingly famous work of literary genius years back and has done nothing but read trashy detective novels since. Due to this last, the family has been in declining financial straights over the past several years, and at the time the book starts they have been living off the sale of their last piece of nice furniture for the past several months. When a couple of rich young Americans move into the manor nearby, the sister decides that the only solution to their family's problems is for her to marry the American heir.

Smith is playing a lot with intertextuality and metanarrative, which is part of why I found this book so cool. Both sisters have their heads much more in books of the past than in the contemporary world (contemporary for them, anyways) and Rose, the oldest, is in a very real way trying to rewrite her life as an Austen novel. The central mystery of the book is not the question of whether and who Rose will marry, but why the father has not written in so long. Meanwhile, the entire book is Cassandra's experiment in chronicling the events that occur in her family as part of her own training to be a writer, which is fascinating in its own right. It's her narrative voice that makes the book so addicting. I have been trying to find a sample passage to get it down, but I keep looking through the book and then I just start reading it over, so you lot will just have to discover for yourselves. I will just say that she's the sort of narrator that manages to get down all those kind of idle wriggly thoughts that go through your mind, which makes her incredibly easy to identify with - at least for me. (Though my favorite is the stepmother Topaz. I love the relationship between her and Cassandra; it is terribly sweet and not at all cliche.)

Overall, highly recommended, and now I want to go find the movie and rewatch it. (Apparently Marc Blucas was in it as one of the Americans! I had forgotten this.)

Comments

[winding_path]

I loved that book! I read it in grad school, when I should have been reading Other Things, but it was not the sort of book you could walk away from. (And, yes, I found the movie first, and I think I watched it because Marc Blucas was in it, and I was curious to see if he could play someone other than Riley. I vaguely remember the answer being that his character was very Rileyesque, on screen.)

Now I'm going to have to both reread and rewatch I Capture the Castle . Which is not, necessarily, a bad thing. Even with the changes, I do love both the book and the movie.

*hugs*

[skygiants]

Ha, yes. That was so me this weekend - "finals? What finals? It's perfect reading weather outside and I'm only halfway through!"

(When I IMDBed the movie again and found out Marc Blucas was in it, I had a moment of befuddled goggling, and then realized how very Rileyish Neil was. He's the CALIFORNIA RANCHER American! Who wants to hear about how the castle can BLOW STUFF UP! *giggling*)

It is not at all a bad thing! *firm* And me, I am absolutely going to have to find some time to watch the movie over the next week. Especially now, because I can't remember what the changes are! *hugsback*

[rushin-doll.livejournal.com]

I want it on record that you are a big meanie for taunting me with promises of metatextuality. I have an intense weakness for the stuff, and I've got far too much on my plate. (I'm two chapters into Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and I'm about ready to write a book of my own in response.)

You are a cruel and mean person. I love you for it.

Sighing and adding to the reading list,
Ana

[skygiants]

I am GIFTING you with knowledge of wonderful books to read! *beams* (Seriously, there is so much literary and textual discussion in this book that I had a hard time finding a passage that didn't reference some other book, whether a real one or one that exists only in the universe.)

Here Comes Everybody I have not read, but it looks kind of fascinating! You should definitely write a book in response. Or at least, you know, an LJ post.