Sunday Salon: Atonement, Tess, and Sundry

The afternoon started rather bookishly as my brother and I repaired to Chapters after church to buy some books. He goes every week generally and buys one book, as a means to grow his library; I accompanied him this week as I had a gift card to the order of $20.

Twenty dollars! It seems so little once you actually get into the bookstore. As usual, J. went straight to the Terry Pratchett books, while I wandered from section to section in an ecstasy of indecision. Fantasy? Mystery? Chick-lit? Classic? History? I have a mental list of dozens of books I would like to get at some point in time, but it is very hard to choose between them when the money is actually in hand.

Maybe someday somebody will give me $1,000 or so and tell me to spend it only on books. Can do!

At any rate, I eventually decided. I bought two books: Tess of the D’Urbervilles, by Thomas Hardy, and Atonement, by Ian McEwan. I read a borrowed copy of Tess last month and it is so beautiful that I know I will re-read it often. I’m glad to have it on my shelf now.

As to Atonement, this book has been flickering on and off my radar for a while. I think a film version just came out? I’m not sure. The book itself, though, comes highly recommended by a number of people I know, and so I thought I’d give it a go. I’m only about 40 pages in, and so I have no idea where it’s going, but I like it so far.

I don’t, however, have much time to read it this afternoon. With three exams this week, I’m trying to spend my time either reviewing what I’ve read this term, or reading what I haven’t read this term, but should have. Right now I’m reading Cymbeline, and then I’ll do a review of all of the plays we’ve read this term. Then, I think, a quick look over the list of all the Canadian Fiction from this term, and maybe to finish the last hundred pages or so of Middlemarch if there’s time. After that I should continue my essay on Wuthering Heights and Lady Audley’s Secret — but I somehow think that I’ll end up diving into Atonement instead.

I must get back to my reading. But here is a passage for yours:

The simplest way to have impressed Leon would have been to write him a story and put it into his hands herself, and watch as he read it. The title lettering, the illustrated cover, the pages bound–in that word alone she felt the attraction of the neat, limited and controllable form she had left behind when she decided to write a play. A story was direct and simple, allowing nothing to come between herself and her reader–no intermediaries with their private ambitions or incompetence, no pressures of time, no limits on resources. In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world; in a play you had to make do with what was available: no horses, no village streets, no seaside. No curtain. It seemed so obvious now that it was too late: a story was a form of telepathy. By means of inking symbols onto a page, she was able to send thoughts and feelings from her mind to her reader’s. It was a magical process, so commonplace that no one stopped to wonder at it. Reading a sentence and understanding it were the same thing; as with the crooking of a finger, nothing lay between them. There was no gap during which the symbols were unravelled. You saw the word castle, and it was there, seen from some distance with woods in high summer spread before it, the air bluish and soft with smoke rising from the blacksmith’s forge, and a cobbled road twisting away into the green shade . . .
- Ian McEwan, Atonement, pp. 46-7.

Happy Sunday reading.