Angle of Repose: "Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. (...) Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.”

A few good quotes from a book that could have easily given me more substance, a story to match the quotes' virtuosity: 

"What begins as safety-valve binges and gestures toward social ease ends as habit. I have no reason to be surprised if I have by now picked up a physiological craving that has nothing to do with pain, boredom, reticence, tension, lack of friends, or anything else." 474

“Somewhere, sometime, somebody taught her to question everything- though it might have been a good thing if he’d also taught her to question the act of questioning.” 513

“You can't retire to weakness -- you've got to learn to control strength.” 519 

“As for gentleness and love, I think they’re harder to come by than this sheet suggests. I think they can become as coercive a conformity as anything Mr. Hershey or Mr. Hoover ever thought up.” 519 

“Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations. The rebels and the revolutionaries are only eddies, they keep the stream from getting stagnant but they get swept down and absorbed, they're a side issue. Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition. If revolutionaries would learn that they can't remodel society by day after tomorrow -- haven't the wisdom to and shouldn't be permitted to -- I'd have more respect for them (...) Civilizations grow and change and decline -- they aren't remade.” 519

Auteur's library

Wallace Stegner

Angle of Repose

1971

This is the kind of book you'd feel a little proud to claim you love. It has everything a reader hopes for: a large-scale historical subject, themes of life, dramatic characters devoid of pathos, a good "plume", strong quotation material, references to famous authors,... and a Pulitzer Prize.
But to me, all of this was not enough.
It's as if readers and author were contemplating the same painting and seeing very different pictures. You can't help developing a strong resistance to the main character, Susan Ward. The narrator spends so much time including negative turns of luck in her life that he forgets to make her likeable; her best traits are too tamed by the constant return to her flaws. I'm not even sure he still likes her by the end of the book_ perhaps that was Stegner's point. Yet, we are sold that character time and again, and the more we are, the less we buy her. She's snob, elitist, uninteresting, incapable of changing and learning (contrarily to what the narrator claims), incapable of mesuring her efforts to the mesure of her vain ambitions, and constantly nagging her husband for not doing so. How to appreciate her?
Easier to like the 19th-century Agnes and Oliver, and the credibly naïve and silly Shelly, who, ironically, makes the 1970s bits the only moments really worth it.
Past the middle of the book, I started to understand nothing more was ever going to come out of this. That was the book's worst weakness: its incapacity to bring out the potential it constantly claimed to have. As the two stories set a century apart slowly went on, their dramatic peaks came too late to feel dramatic. The wife bits at the end felt like a hair in the soup. You sense these were parts of what the writer was driving at all along, but it's too late now to get to it, you're long past that; too many hundreds of pages have passed to make them actually matter.
Yes, at times, the writing is superb; but, let's face it: the book is boring.

Tags: "saga" familiale, fate, 19th-century hopes and restraints, wild dusty west, human vs. social quest, marriage of souls vs. marital success, vague mention of lesbian love thrown like a bone at the reader, the know-it-all not-so-young white man, slight, easy, unsatisfactory questions of gender, the weight of family, difficult wanderings, critique of hippie society, east vs. west or on being worldly in a wild world   

Wild dusty west

Literature in popular culture

Perfect movie, though too short! It's just so good, you want more of it.

Helena Bonham Carter & Julian Sands
dir. James Ivory

1985

 
 

Well worth checking the tv serial! You'll get hooked.

Richard Armitage & Daniela Denby-Ashe

dir. Brian Percival

the BBC DVD cover

2005

Disney's 1954 more easily agreeable adaptation of Barrie's work. As colourful. Less rich.








  

Interesting camera-angles and editing. Good acting though sometimes overplayed (the secondary characters, mainly). As in the book, be prepared to be pissed off by the heroine before the end.

Sally Hawkins & Rupert Penry-Jones

dir. Adrian Shergold

the BBC dvd cover

2007

One of the funniest Austen adaptation ever!
Felicity Jones & J. J. Field
dir. Jon Jones
the ITV dvd cover
2007

Auteur's library

J. M. Barrie

Peter Pan

1911

A surprising read for I had in mind the image of Peter Disney had stuck in there. And while it is safe to say that now I like Peter less, I can also say that after the very first chapter I started wishing the book itself would end up as one of my favourites. It didn’t. 

You get a pleasure in the humorous telling, the writing, that you never really get from what it tells you. The adventures are more sad than adventurous and the Darling bits too precious to really appreciate their antagonist, Neverland. The writing style lost its shine as soon as we landed on Neverland; it got in the way of the adventures, like an annoying veil you just wanted to push aside; or else, Neverland got in the way of our falling enthralled with that style.

It is as if the author knew he had something good here, and dangerous, hidden within the treasure box of Neverland, but could not bring himself to uncover it. He let down the critique for the sake of the irony. You get that close to caring for the characters and their stories, but you’re too busy flying above them all to ever do so. Because Barrie never gets seriously into the adventures, it’s well easy_ too easy_ for the reader to get out.
A fine book to read, but not perhaps one that leaves a lasting impression. All its best themes ((never) growing up; the unkindness of childhood) are worth much more going into, and you turn that last page with a slight regret. You wanted to know so much more about Mrs Darling's kiss! But then, that would not have pleased Peter...

P.S. positive and less positive racial stereotypes.

Tags: arrogant cocky Peter, utopia. vs dystopia, ironic and cheeky narrator, superego vs. the id, evil or the selfishness of childhood, games and adventures, the everlasting world of children's imagination, unattainable everlasting bliss or Mrs Darling's kiss, growing up into a woman, society made of Darlings, magic dust, stuck at home, stuck on an island, allusions to a whole world beyond the book, nasty but mitigated stereotypes, of crocodiles, pirates and a useless ship, Peter Pan at the crossroads of boundaries

Fairies & Féerie

All books have a sosy somewhere...

When children rule the world (...or an island)

Right: Naughty childhood tries hard to enjoy naughtiness without turning nasty. Finds security on an island, but in the process loses more and more its capacity for human feelings. The "real world" has been outed from the island.

Left: Children try to act sensibly and turn nasty. Locked on a maddening island from which they can't get out. The "real world" invades the island and turns it sour.

Pervasive threat rules these two. But, where Golding shows you scary, maddening, childhood “dreams”, Barrie easily indulges in them. You’re left with a sense that this threat felt in Peter Pan may not have been felt by its author, and that, above all, is the scariest aspect of the book.