Book Reviews on a Swedish Mystery and the Fame of Jane Austen

The blogging is going to be light over the next few days, since we are going to be traveling, so I thought I’d do a couple book reviews.

Stieg Larsson. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
One star out of five

(Warning: some spoilers are in here) This book is wildly popular these days, but I generally didn’t like it and don’t recommend it. To begin with, I hate mysteries where the main character refuses to tell the police, or at least a friend, about the clues they are uncovering. Think about it. You are tracking down a murderer. That person is dangerous, for they have already killed once. They may kill you, too. Wouldn’t that make you take some precautions? But no. In too many mysteries, the main character does something incredibly stupid. For example, the main character is a woman, and she’s been receiving death threats, but she decides to go out jogging in a park at midnight, without her dog to protect her. (All she needs is to be wearing high heels to make the resultant encounter with the bad guys really challenging.)

This novel shows the main character being stupid. He is a journalist who has been asked by an old man to find out who killed his grand-niece thirty years ago. He starts investigating and begins picking up some clues, but doesn’t share them with the old man or anyone else. (I should have stopped reading right then.) Then someone starts shooting at him. If someone were to shoot at me, I’d go to the police, but not our hero. He doesn’t even think of this, with the result, of course, that a dreadful scene of torture ensues. Fortunately, he has left enough clues for his sidekick to figure out where he is in order to rescue him.

Mostly, though, the reason I didn’t like this book is political. The original Swedish title of this book is Men Who Hate Women. Anyone reading this blog is probably aware of which men in contemporary Sweden hate women. Just read Bruce Bawer. Granted, he is talking about Norway, but the situation is the same. However, the author refuses to use these men in his plot. Instead, he puts in some Nazis. Is this believable? Are there any Nazis still around in Sweden these days? Perhaps as a sop to critics like me, he also includes a man who isn’t a Nazi and who is actually rather progressive and who has no track record of being sadistic. But this just brings up another problem of believability. Is it believable that such a person would be sadistic?

So, why is this book so popular? Many people get sucked in by the English title. A girl with a dragon tattoo? Many people will respond, “All riiiiight!” She has this tattoo, she rides a motorcycle, she’s a social misfit and hangs around with other social misfits, she doesn’t trust authority, and she is afflicted with Asperger’s syndrome. In addition, she has invaded what I take to be the man’s world of computer hacking and is better at it than anyone. And of course, she helps the main character fight some Nazis. For lots of people today, this pushes many of the right buttons, and the only disturbing note would be the progressive mentioned above who turns out to be a sadist. If none of this appeals to you, then don’t bother with this book. But even if it does, think about why the author used Nazis rather than those men in Sweden today who genuinely hate women.


Claire Harman. Jane’s Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
Four stars out of five

Jane Austen presents a paradox for the scholarly world. The scholarly world gives the biggest rewards to people who publish early and often. The trouble is that Jane herself didn’t get published early and suffered through years of not getting published. Accordingly, the hotshot scholar of Jane Austen is someone who never experienced first-hand what she experienced, namely lots of rejection. How did this affect her? The hotshot will never know.

Austen finished the first draft of Pride and Prejudice in 1797. Her father was impressed enough with it to send a query letter to a publisher in London, but they weren’t interested in looking at the manuscript. In 1803, a publisher accepted one of her manuscripts, but then mysteriously refused to publish it. (Go figure.) It wasn’t until October of 1811 that she got her first novel published (Sense and Sensibility). And even that was a bit of luck because, as Claire Harman observes, the period of wild sensibility that it criticized had passed. Had it been published when it was first written (about 1796), it might have made a much bigger splash. Anyway, the point is that Austen spent fourteen years trying and failing to get published.

That is a long time. I myself spent eleven years trying and failing to get published. A long period like that brings changes, and maybe even big changes. For me it brought a huge political transformation, and I have long wondered if Austen went through something similar. Harman, like everyone else who writes on Austen, does not think about such things. She is wise enough to figure out that Austen was frustrated with not being published, but that is as far as she goes. What’s more, she suggests (p. 25) that had the London publisher seen her manuscript in 1797, they likely would have published it. In my experience, this is completely wrong. There is absolutely no way to predict what publishers will like and what they won’t like. (Accordingly to Wikipedia, the first Harry Potter book was submitted to a bunch of publishers, all of which declined it, and it finally got published only because the eight-year-old daughter of an editor liked it.) And that is one reason I have for giving this book only four stars.

The other is that although she charts Austen’s fame down through the years, she actually does a better job of charting her fame in the nineteenth century than today. For example, she mentions the 1999 film version of Mansfield Park without mentioning that it was a flop. Obviously, the Janeites of today just aren’t interested in a lot of postmodern nonsense. But mostly she ignores how Jane was received in the Sixties. I was never required to read any of her books when I was in school, and during the time I was in college and grad school (1969-1984), I can’t remember a single person mentioning her. In other words, the Sixties were a bad time for Jane Austen, but Harman doesn’t mention this.

The Sixties were a bad time for Jane Austen’s fame because she seemed utterly irrelevant, and maybe even hostile, to the concerns of the day. The slogan of my generation was “Don’t trust anyone over 30,” and poor Jane was almost two hundred years old when I got to college. What could she possibly say that was relevant to our era? Although during the Sixties people were slowly shifting the focus away from the workers to blacks, women, and homosexuals, that transformation was not far enough along that we had lost sight of the workers, and so for us Jane’s utter lack of interest in the plight of the workers would have counted against her. And the ending of Emma – in which the poor Harriet Smith doesn’t get the hero, but rich Emma does – would have bothered us greatly. It still bothers me, in fact. If you were concerned about the workers, you were going to read Charles Dickens, not Jane Austen.

In addition, although Jane Austen, as a woman who had a career, obviously fit into the Sixties’ rise of feminism, the sad fact is that none of her novels were about women having careers. Instead, they were about women getting married, and for many feminists back then, marriage was seen as something horrible, a patriarchal trap. So, there just wasn’t much interest in her, even among feminists. I can just imagine some of the acid comments my feminist friends would have made back then if they had been subjected to the films of the last fifteen years: about the dress, about the manners, about the dancing, but mostly about how the female characters think about nothing but men.

Also, there was the beginning of the multicultural movement. For me English literature was something that had been rammed down my throat in English classes, and I was now interested in escaping it and finding out what other cultures had to say. I read Herman Hesse, but mostly I read Russian literature. Nor was I the only one doing this, for I recall that Charles Schulz had Snoopy reading War and Peace (at the absurd rate of one word per day) in some of the Peanuts strips back in the early 1970s. In 1972 the BBC serialized War and Peace, and I recall that the local PBS station showed the 1965 Russian version at this time, too. In other words, why bother with English literature when there were other cultures with their own exciting literature?

Harman just never talks about how the Sixties were a low point for Jane, and how it all changed. Today, concern for the workers has almost vanished, except when the Democrats face an election. Feminism has softened, and marriage (with a suitable partner) is permissible, even desirable. Plus, it’s understood that today’s women will be thinking about things other than men, so watching women indulge in this can be fun. We’ve also had multiculturalism for awhile now, so there is nothing wrong with going back to English literature, especially if the stories are good.

Finally, the current mania for all things Jane may be a result of people being tired of the Sixties. The exquisite manners one sees in the film adaptations of her books, even in the rogues, is enchanting. Elizabeth Bennet despises Mr. Darcy at first because of his bad manners, but he’s pretty mild compared with many of the Sixties-inspired people one finds nowadays: people who play loud music constantly,  who never say “thank you” or “I’m sorry,” and who always want to shock everyone in sight by doing, or at least saying, something outrageous. Going back to a time when all that was absent is refreshing. I’m suggesting this simply because the 1999 version of Mansfield Park was a flop. Yes, Fanny Price is a creepmouse, but that’s how Jane portrayed her, not as some rebel against the Establishment, so that is what we want to see.

I realize that my two reviews may seem to contradict each other on this point, but not really because I suspect that these are different groups of people. It’s hard for me to imagine the average Janeite of today enduring the brutality of Larsson’s book. Likewise, those who like Larsson’s book will probably find Jane Austen too tame for their tastes.

Now I’ve given Harman’s book four stars for the simple reason that she does do a very good job of dealing with Jane in her own family and with her fame in the rest of the nineteenth century. I never knew that Jane had a cousin who published some sermons and that those sermons outsold her own books. I never knew that her oldest brother James wrote a poem for her when she finally got published. I didn’t realize the extent to which her brother Henry suffered after his career in banking went kaput. And I am used to people castigating her sister Cassandra for having burned some of Jane’s letters, but Harman observers that the other relatives burned all of Jane’s letters. It’s the huge wealth of details she provides about this era that makes this book an enjoyable read, if you are a Jane Austen fan. And if you’re not, don’t bother because the author assumes you already know a great deal about her.

Comments

[Vic]

Let's just say I grew up in the 60s and was not only encouraged to read Jane Austen in high school and college, but an entire group of us read and reread her novels before she became "famous" and still read her.

She was always in the top lists of recommended books, at least in schools in Baltimore. Oh, and Janeites are as diverse as any other population. Not only did I enjoy The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, but I loved reading the Russian authors as well. Turgenev's Fathers and Sons was high on my list of favorites.

What IS new is that an entire group of so-called Janeites have never bothered to read her books. They read the sequels and prequels to the movies. Now that's a phenomenon worth commenting about.

[John Pepple]

Yikes, are there such Janeites? I wish I could comment on them, but I don't know any or know of any. I suppose it's easy enough to give up on some of her complicated sentences, which are so unlike the way we write today.

More common are the women who see themselves as Elizabeth Bennet, but who don't seem to understand what a rare person she was. Not many people would react the way she did to being handed Darcy's letter. Lots of people would refuse to take it, or rip it to shreds in front of his eyes, or burn it without reading it, etc. To read through it the way she did and revise all her strongly-held opinions was obviously a painful experience that most just will refuse to go through.