Re-reading The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

 

Curiouser and curiouser! I will never again claim that I have read a book if I read it more than three months ago. I know for sure that I had a Muriel Spark period in my early twenties, meaning that I read as many of her books as I could get hold of. Looking at the Wikipedia entry, I recognise the titles The Ballad of Peckham Rye and The Abbess of Crewe, but couldn’t say what they are about, and I have a vague memory that The Mandelbaum Gate takes place in Jerusalem and the main character has doubts about her Jewish identity. I chose The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie for my re-reading challenge because I thought I remembered it well, and I didn’t. I didn’t remember it at all so, as with some other books on my list, I now wonder whether I had read it back then. Maybe yet another book I thought I had read because it is one of Spark’s best known. Sometimes I made a point of not reading an author’s most famous book that everybody else read.

Anyway, I read this novel as if for the first time or perhaps indeed for the first time, and I enjoyed it very much, certainly much more than I would have when I was young. If I did read it, it's unlikely I was familiar with the concept of flashforward, which is its most prominent narrative trait, alongside omission. I first got a bit concerned when the narrative was told predominantly through one schoolgirl’s point of view: I have read far too many girl school novels. But of course it is not a girl school novel; if anything, it is a parody on a girl school novel, and fifty years ago I wouldn’t have recognised it as such. The irony and sarcasm would have been lost on the young me.

So if you like stories elegantly told, with all characters equally horrible, but each in their own way, give this novel a chance. It has aged well.

Re-reading The Sound and the Fury

My re-reading project is getting more and more revealing. I chose The Sound and the Fury of all Faulkner novels we read fifty years ago because it is perhaps his most famous, and I have referred to it repeatedly in my research as an example of mission impossible: giving verbal expression to something that a character cannot express by words. Benjy as this impossible narrator features in every work on narratology, and I wonder whether I have done the unforgivable: cited someone else rather than going to the source. For I hadn’t re-read the source when I was referring to it, and now I wonder whether I have read it at all. Maybe it is one of those books you believe you have read, but actually haven’t. I cannot be sure, because this re-reading exercise has clearly demonstrated that I had no memory whatsoever of books I had definitely read. So maybe I did read The Sound and the Fury fifty years ago and not only pretended I understood it, but pretended I liked it and went on pretending, to the degree that I gave it five stars on Goodreads when I was building my shelf about twelve years ago (it was called Shelfari then). Maybe I did read it, but I am totally confident after re-reading it now, that I could not have understood much of it. Not just because of Benjy, since all other narrators are just as incoherent, and although this time I was reading slowly and carefully, I cannot claim that I was able to reconstruct the course of events. I didn’t enjoy the language enough to ignore the plot, and I wasn’t too engaged with the characters. If I hadn’t been reading for my challenge I think I would have given up, just as I have repeatedly given up on Ulysses.