Five Thoughts On A First Ever Reading of Jane Eyre

(This post originally appeared on Book Riot.)

This old Bantam Classic is the edition I read.

A few years ago, I wrote a silly post about literary confessions — one of which was that I frequently confused Jane Eyre and Jane Austen. It was mostly a joke, but also when I told people that in real life, they’d always look at me with that particular sympathy consistent only with a self-deprecating joke falling flat on its face (i.e., too stupid to be funny).

For penance, I decided I should probably read them both — so I knocked out Pride and Prejudice last year, and then just a few weeks ago, Jane Eyre. While of course it’s tough to come up with anything original to say about Charlotte Bronte’s tale of woe and redemption, I can certainly come up with five things I thought about the novel. So here you go (and normally, I’d say “caution, spoilers,” but this book’s 167 years old, and so well past the statute of limitations to require a spoiler disclaimer):

5. Jane Throws Shade — On page 33, not even 7 percent of the way into the novel, Jane tells her adopted guardian Mrs. Reed she hates her more than anyone else in the world except her idiot son. “I am not deceitful,” she says. “If I were, I should say I loved you.” This was the first indication that many of my long-held preconceptions (read as: misconceptions) about this story were pretty wrong. I thought, maybe this isn’t just a long-winded, ooey-gooey love story. And plus, that made me laugh, and I decided right then I was going to like this book.

4. Jane’s Friend Helen Imparts Life Lessons, Dies — Jane’s friend at the boarding school basically explains that you shouldn’t let shit bother you because we ain’t gonna be here long, and God awaits. “Why then should we sink overwhelmed with distress, when life is so soon over…?” That’s solid advice. So next time my boss forgets the attachment on an email or the dogs pee on the floor or the lady in front of me at the grocery store pays with a check, I’ll think of Helen. Hey, life’s short, and then you die. So just relax. It’s gonna be okay. Except, though, Helen proves the wisdom of her advice by dying young. That was sad.

3. Jane Weathers the Worst Guilt Trips — I was pretty sure I liked Jane quite a bit (see No. 5 above), but I knew I liked her after Mr. Rochester is caught in his web of deceit, (Dude’s married! And to a crazy lady! And she lives in his attic!), and his attempts to guilt her into running away with him anyway fall upon deaf ears. But I DOUBLE KNEW I liked her towards the end when Mr. St. John uses the most unintentionally comic (to a modern audience) guilt trip to get her marry him; paraphrased: Marry me, or God’ll be pissed at you. Strangely, this one almost comes closer to working than Mr. Rochester’s, but it doesn’t.

2. Speaking of Mr. St. John… — What a tool! I loved laughing at this chucklehead. And it’s too bad he’s so clueless, because his sisters seem nice. And that poor rich lady who is (improbably) in love with him seems nice, too. Good on you, Jane — even if took a touch of the supernatural to somehow hear Mr. Rochester calling to you in your head, and withstand St. John’s “unimpeachable” logic, wily advances, and a free trip to mid-19th century India!

1. Happy Endings Are Happy — It was rather an improbable happy ending, transcending time, space, and all known medical reality (Dude just starts seeing again? Now I see where Downton Abbey got the idea to have Matthew just magically start walking again), but how could you begrudge Jane her “happily ever after”? I certainly can’t. And I’m really happy I finally read this. Now onto Wuthering Heights. What? That’s Emily Bronte. Ah, crap.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: Starter Murakami

If you've never read Haruki Murakami and always wanted to, his bafflingly titled new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a great way to wade into his work. That's because, it's a pretty straightforward story on the surface — a 36-year-old engineer living in Tokyo named Tsukuru Tazaki is trying to find out why, when he was in high school, his four best friends suddenly broke off all contact with him, refusing to even give him an explanation for why they'd never talk to him again.

But the novel also includes some of the weird, wild hallmarks of Murakami-ism — there are some strange, often sexually-tinged dreams, a long tangent (or is it?) about a dying guy who sees people's "colors" and only people of one color (nothing to do with race) can save him, and constant questioning of the line between what's real and what's imagined and what's part of this world and what's not.

Tsukuru Tazaki, for all his self-perceived colorlessness, is still a fascinating character. But he doesn't think so — he has a small-minded view of himself, thinking of himself as boring and plain (he's the only one of the group of five friends who doesn't have a name evoking a color), and he's constantly telling people how boring he thinks he is, including his new ladyfriend Sara. But it's Sara who convinces him he needs to dredge up his past and go on his mini-vision quest to find out why his tightly knit group of high school friends suddenly stopped talking to him — an event which sent poor Tsukuru Tazaki into a near death-spiral of depression.

So Tsukuru goes back to his hometown Nagoya and then to Helsinki, Finland, to find the truth. Unlike some other Murakami novels, there is an actual, specific answer to his question about why he was suddenly treated as persona non grata. And it's shocking and sad, and brings up even more questions for poor Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.

Whenever I'm reading Murakami, I'm always in awe of how his prose alternates between sentences that are so clunky and mundane and passages that are amazingly profound and insightful — my favorite of which is this, and which is kind of the main theme of the novel:

In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood. One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony."

Not exactly a sunny outlook life, is it? Still, when I'm reading Murakami, I'm convinced he employs some weird sorcery (like something in his novels) to make the pages just fly by. I don't know how he does it. This isn't my favorite Murakami of all time (that's a distinction Kafka On The Shore holds), it's still a really interesting, thought-provoking, entertaining read—a great starting point for Murakami novices, but with Murakami-ness enough to keep his long-time rabid fans happy as well. 

Broken Monsters & The Children Act: Two New Releases, Two Mini-Reviews

Let's start with what is officially my favorite read of the year so far — that would be Lauren Beukes's Broken Monsters, which is out today. Set in Detroit not long after the Great Recession set in, this moody, terrifying, mind-blowing, atmospheric story is as difficult to put down as any book I've read in recent memory.

Ostensibly, it's a murder mystery — in the opening pages, our hero, Detective Gabriella Versado, is charged with tracking down a lunatic who has murdered a kid, cut him in half, and glued the top half of his body onto a deer torso. Sick stuff.

But the novel is far from a typical mystery — a wide cast of characters really adds depth and realism to this story about the shattered American dream. We follow Gabi's daughter — a witty, Internet-addicted teen right out of a John Green YA story — and her friend Cas as they concoct schemes, which, tragically, wind up intersecting with Gabi's murder investigation. Then there's the douchey new media journalist named Jonno (even his name is douchey!) whose crusade to reveal all he believes the Detroit PD is hiding from the public is really just a crusade to edify his own ego. And finally, there's the creepy, mysterious truck driver and artist named Clayton who is overtaken by what he thinks of as "the dream." Crazy stuff.

All this comes together in a last-100-pages conclusion that is not just glued-to-the-page riveting, but also profound and smart in a way straight genre murder mysteries never are. I can't recommend this more highly — I loved it.

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Next, let's talk about a return to form for one of my heretofore favorite writers, Ian McEwan, whose last two novels, Solar and Sweet Tooth,  I've not been a fan of at all. However, his new novel The Children Act is a short, entertaining piece of totally typical McEwanness. It's told his signature droll, dryly humorous, ultra-logical prose — which is a bit of an acquired taste, frankly, but works really well for this story.

It's about a London judge named Fiona who has arrived at a small measure of fame for deciding really tough family law cases, like the case of twins who had to separated for one to survive, but whose religious parents wouldn't abide that solution, because only God can decide between life and death. So they'd rather let both die. We learn about this case early in the novel — which foreshadows the two main components of the rest of the story.

First, Fiona's husband of many years decides he wants an open marriage — he accuses Fiona of losing her passion, and he wants to reclaim that (read as: sex!) with another (younger) woman. She still loves him, and at first, struggles with whether she should agree to his indecent proposal. (Should she kill a main tenet of a marriage - faithfulness - to save the big picture?) Secondly, a case comes before her court of a 17-year-old kid named Adam being treated for leukemia. He and his parents are Jehovah's Witnesses, and one of the pillars of their faith is that blood is sacred, and therefore a transfusion of someone else's blood — which is required for him to live — is profane.

With the stress of her now-irreparably broken marriage weighing on her, what will she decide? Are Adam's beliefs his own, and even if so, isn't requiring the treatment (since he's a minor) in his best interest? What's cool about this story is that judgment is handed down halfway through the novel, and the rest is about how the decision changes all the characters involved. I really enjoyed this, and I think if you've liked McEwan's more lauded novels, like Atonement and Saturday, you'll really dig this one too.