6 Degrees of Separation – August 2017

Well, how could I resist when the link this month starts with Pride and Prejudice? This is a lovely bookish idea of free-associating books based upon one common initial link, as featured here by Kate. She even has board games based on Jane Austen characters – I am SO envious!

 

1. I’m a huge Jane Austen fan, and in my 20s used to reread all of her novels every year. My favourite, however, is Persuasion, which I reread recently and which did not disappoint me
2. Rupert Penry Jones played Captain Wentworth in the TV adaptation of Persuasion (which I haven’t watched), but I have watched him playing Richard Hannay in a new TV film version of The 39 Steps by John Buchan. This is the only book by Buchan that I have read, although apparently he was a very popular spy thriller writer back in the 1920s/30s, as well as a politician. So I can’t help wondering how much of his intimate knowledge of political manoeuvring found its way into his books!

 

 

 

 

1. Another politician turned writer was Benjamin Disraeli. He was that unusual combination, a Conservative who actually cared about the poor, and in his most famous novel Sybil or The Two Nations, he shows the plight of the working classes being exploited by greedy industrialists.
2. A little later, in the States, John Dos Passos also worried about the direction that US economy and politics were taking in the 1930s. In the last volume of his USA trilogy, The Big Money, he shows how both the American Dream and the Communist ideal are false, that only the unscrupulous succeed, while most are destroyed and crushed by wild capitalism.
3. Boris Pasternak also initially believed in the Communist ideals, but soon grew disenchanted. Although his poetry and translations were initially very popular under the new regime, he became a persona non grata and only narrowly escaped the Stalinist purges. His best-known work Doctor Zhivago was not published in Russia until after his death and he was forced to turn down the Nobel Literature Prize. The novel is first and foremost a love story against the backdrop of the October revolution and the ensuing civil war, so it is surprising to me that it was banned at all. But the depiction of the civil war did not follow the official party line, I suppose.
4. A big skip in time and geography for my last book, which was also initially banned in the author’s own country (not for political reasons, but for its explicit sexual content). It’s The Country Girls by Edna O’Brien, about two convent-educated girls learning to make their way in life in the repressive 1950s Irish society.

 

My journey has taken me throughout England in the early and mid 19th century, as well as the early 20th century, to the United States, Ireland and Russia. Apologies, but somehow the light-hearted Pride and Prejudice took me to some very dark places and associations. I will try to be more light-hearted next time I take part!

 

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