Life gets in the way of reading, but I do it anyway

A lot has been going on to prevent me from practicing my favorite hobby, but I did manage to get two books read since the last book I wrote about.

Actually, there was one non-fiction book in the middle that really was a tome, and though it was super interesting, I never finished it. It eventually got to a point where it was just repeating the same statement over and over again using just different examples to prove the point. The message of A People's History of Science is simply this: science is something that only recently has become a subject linked to elite brains and geniuses, it actually was practiced by the illiterate working class, and some of the greatest discoveries of science do not belong to the likes of Galileo and Newton, but rather to the working class who Galileo and Newton gathered data from. There're only so many ways you can say that before it feels like you're beating a dead horse, so although I recommend this book by Clifford D. Conner if you're interested in this sort of thing, I think for someone like me who just wanted to get a brief peek into how science came about, it can be a little too much.

After my non-fiction stint I moved onto fiction, though there was a gap of a few weeks inbetween. I read two books. Here is what I have to say about both.

The Bad Girl, by Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa

I picked up a romance of sorts. It is a story that I will not soon forget for many reasons.

The Bad Girl, told from his own point of view, is the story of Ricardo Somocurcio, a Peruvian boy belonging to a middle class family, living in a middle class neighborhood. Actually, Ricardo is an orphan who lives with his aunt in a neighborhood of Lima, Miraflores, in the 1950s. He is a teenager when he meets the girl who will later fall into the role of the bad girl. And she's really a bad girl, this girl Ricardo falls in love with, because he loves her forever, though not even he knows why. He doesn't even know her real name until he's fifty years old.

Ricardo's goal in life is very simple: to live in Paris. That's all he wants aside from the bad girl, really. He makes his dream of living in Paris come true by being a translator for hire, mostly for the UNESCO, which also gives him the opportunity to travel all over the world. Ricardo leads a very interesting life in the sense that he lives in Paris, travels all over the world to translate in different cities, and keeps running into the girl who stole his heart back in Peru and disappeared until he was in his mid-twenties. Sounds interesting, doesn't it? Well, it is.

This bad girl who Ricardo's world seems to revolve around is pretty rotten to him. There are many times when you almost hate Ricardo for being so stupid as to allow this woman to treat him as bad as she does, but there is a boiling point that serves as a mini character arc halfway through the story. Ordinarily, a love story would make you root for the people who love each other to be together, and when they do get together, you are happy that they have. That's not always the case here, though something tells you it's the only way things can be for these two unique characters.

She treats him like someone who was put on earth as a cushion for her, to fall back on whenever things go wrong, and things really go wrong. She has many names in the book; Lili, Comrade Arlette, Madame Arnoux, Mrs. Richardson, Kuriko, Chilean Girl, Peruvian Girl, Otilita. Different names, different lives, different decades and cities are covered by Ricardo in his recitation of the love he spent his life suffering through. In the end, you find that no matter how ugly love can get, it is still love, and it is a beautiful thing.

I am sure there was a lot lost in translation, given that this was originally written in Spanish, but the beauty came through. There was world history woven in with personal history, a love story woven in with friendships; Llosa is an expert storyteller who can cover a million aspects of life in one story, one scene. The translation speaks of an originally flawless masterpiece set in places and times the author obviously knew enough to describe so well. Paris comes to life through the decades that Ricardo spends living there, as does the political climate of Peru. I learned a lot about Peru's history and a lot about the Paris of yesterday that still throbs with its neverending charm today. London is also described in such a way that I felt I was there, it was done so well.

My favorite thing about this book is my favorite thing about reading. It took me on a trip all around the world with two very interesting companions. I could not put it down, and whenever I had a chance to abandon my responsibilities to just curl up with it, I took that chance. It was hard to say goodbye to the characters finally, and I prolonged the process of reading the last chapter, reading it in little bursts, but the end eventually came and all I can say is that this is definitely a book I can see myself reading multiple times and will definitely make permanent room for on my bookshelf. I even hope that one day, when my Spanish is good enough, to read it the way it was written.

The next book I tackled was:

Lady Chatterley's Lover, by none other than D.H. Lawrence

I had actually tried to read this years ago, and even attempted to do so for my western civilization class in college, but never managed to get further than the first four or five chapters.

This time around I was able to read it rather smoothly. I would even venture to say that I was unable to put it down, it was so engrossing. This leads me to believe that there are books which require a certain level of maturity in order to be appreciated and understood the way they ought to be. Lawrence's final novel is one of those pieces.

More than trying to shock the reader, or introduce a new style of sexually frank writing, I believe that Lawrence was really trying to explain what would happen if the English classes came together and did something natural, indiscriminating.

That's really what happens between Connie and her lover, Oliver Mellors. Connie is married to a man who cannot give her the thing any woman would want in a marriage, the means to procreate. Connie's husband, Clifford, is paralyzed from the waist down, the result of an injury he got during the war. Somehow these two make their marriage work, though it's clear they come from different worlds intellectually. Lawrence makes it clear that Connie had already experienced sex before her marriage, while her husband was a virgin. We are told that they both don't place much importance on sex, preferring good conversation over the thing that ruins a good intellectual relationship in their eyes.

Connie seems resigned to her life the way it is, acting more like a mother or nurse than a wife. You know she's not happy, but you can't say she's unhappy either. That is, not until she becomes intrigued by Oliver Mellors, a free-spirited gamekeeper working on her husband's family estate. We see Connie's interest in Mellors grow and eventually turn into love, the very thing that awakens her to the reality that her life with Clifford Chatterley as it is is no life at all.

A series of encounters between Connie and her lover is what prevented this book from being published in the author's own country in 1928, though piracy took care of its distribution there. In fact, Lady Chatterley's Lover was not officially published in Britain until nearly thirty years later, and only after a trial that called for literary types to testify that although the book contains explicit material, it is there for a reason.

These controversial trysts are somewhat steamy, even by today's standards, but it is not so much what these two do with each other that makes this book so innovative, but rather what it all leads to.

Up until her affair with the gamekeeper, Connie had been living a dull existence. Her husband's friends discuss matters between the sexes in her presence as she sits quietly in the corner and does something women were expected to do back when they were considered unfeeling, without brains or intellect. Before we are presented with this scene that apparently occurs often in Connie's life as the wife of an upper-class man, we are told that although Connie is of lower birth than Clifford, she is intellectually at a higher level. She is a woman who has traveled and studied, and maintained relationships, intellectual as well as physical, with men prior to her marriage to Clifford. Clifford is nothing but a boring businessman, I thought. As Clifford and his friends talk, she listens silently, never letting on that she possesses the things the majority of British society believed women lacked at that time.

With the gamekeeper's presence in her life, Connie is able to examine her marriage from afar, and sees what a sham her marriage to Clifford has been. She is finally convinced of her needs and takes the necessary steps to get what she has come to crave in life: an all-encompassing love with a man, and a child.

Probably the most interesting part of this story is that although Mellors is presented as lower than Connie by class, he is closer to her intellectual level than Clifford is. He is well-read and able to speak properly, not with the vernacular he uses as an act of defiance. We realize it is his way of defying society through his confrontation with Connie's sister, who looks down on him and takes the attitude of the general population in separating the classes.

I'd have to say that although Connie is a complicated, interesting character who presented a side to women perhaps never seen so clearly before, Oliver Mellors is the character that interested me more. I loved the fact that he was educated, well-spoken, able to come off as a true gentleman, but chooses to tell the world "screw it," and sticks to who he really is. Like Connie's role toward women, Mellors's role is to present a side to the lower-class people toward society.

I am very glad that I finally got through this book, and I am happy to report that I thoroughly enjoyed it for its innovativeness, social commentary and eventually beautiful love story.

Next on my reading list:

Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates

I actually started it already, and so far so good. I usually read the book before watching the movie, but with this, I saw the movie first. It seems like the screenplay follows the book almost to perfection, but I haven't even read 100 pages yet, so my opinion might change.

And that's it for now. Until next time... .