Bleak House
March 10, 2006, 12:47 pm
Posted by Margaret O'Brien Steinfels
Here’s a second to Bob Imbelli’s Bleak House note.
Yes, see the Masterpiece Theatre production (which has a great pleasure to watch in the winter Sundays of January and February), and then: READ the book or reread the book. For one thing, the performances of Lady Dedlock and Lawyer Tulckinghorn give a whole new sense of the major protagonists in Bleak House.
And that Dickens could really write!
Some thirty-plus years ago, during the summer, the “Village Voice,” instead of reviewing recently published books, had various people review classics of literature as if they had just appeared. Someone chose “Bleak House,” and the entire review consisted of that almost stream-of-consciousness evocation of a foggy, muddy day in London with which the novel begins, followed by the reviewer’s comment: “If this is not enough to make you run out and buy this book, may God have mercy on your soul.”
I did that, read and loved the book, and from then on for several years read one of Dickens’ novels a summer.
Yes, there is the foggy, muddy dayS in London and environs–including, you will remember the fall-out from the spontaneous combustion of Mr. Krook–brother-in-law of Mr. Smallweed and landlord to “Nemo,” and at one point possessor of the Hawdon letters and the final will of Jarndyce. What a plot!
Recall as well, that the first paragraph of the book that describes a foggy, muddy day consists of “fragments” as “spell check” would say; there are no sentences. What a wrtier!
Ahhh…you’re making me wish the semester was over and I could do some reading for pleasure…er, not that Fr. Joe’s multivolume History of Vatican II–excerpts of which I am reading right now for class–is not pleasurable. But you know what I mean…:-)
For myself, though, the first book on the list will be Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, which I haven’t read since I was in 8th grade. There was a piece on NPR recently that featured Charlton Heston reading an excerpt. Hearing his Santiago invoke “the Great Dimaggio” brought back a flood of memories. Besides, it’s almost baseball season….