Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Reading Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre makes me yearn for a time when people spoke to each other with such grace and elegance coupled with an intensity of passion that is intermittently laced with the words they speak. It doesn't matter whether they are being cruel or nice or loving. Their utterance between one another never fail to express a potent emotion. Romantic passages like this:

"I sometimes have a queer

feeling with regard to you

- especially when you are near

me, as now: it is as if I

had a string somewhere under

my left ribs, tightly and

inextricably knotted to a

similar string situated in the

corresponding quarter of your

little frame. And if that

boisterous channel, and two

hundred miles or so of land

come broad between us, I am

afraid that cord of communion

will be snapt and then I've

a nervous notion I should take

to bleeding inwardly."

SWOONGASM.

I really like how it's in equal parts violent, romantic and dark. The entire novel feels like this with its gothic, romantic mood. It was perfectly balanced. Less gothic and dark and it would have been too sickly sweet to me.

The other thing I love most about this novel is the central heart, brain, soul and lung of this story: Jane Eyre herself, of course. Right after I finished the book, I posted this on my Tumblr:

"Just finished this last night, or rather, early morning at 4am.

I am in love with Jane Eyre. Not just the book itself but also the character. She is fiercely independent, burning with passion, highly intelligent, unpretentiously artistic and utters some of the sharpest, wittiest lines in literary history. 

The final half of the book gave me multiple heart aches from pure excitement, heartbreak and overwhelming happiness. 

This goes on my list of books I would recommend to anyone.

There are multiple film adaptations of this book. Please don’t use those as excuses to not read this. The book will always be better. Always."

I'll just leave it at that. 

I write on the books I read and I revisit those notes to write these posts. But for this one, every single time I open the book, as if by magic, I find myself re-reading parts of the novel. And I end up getting nothing done. That really shows how powerful Ms. Bronte's novel is. How it can just draw you in, and ask you to bring its story and its characters back to life. This is the kind of book when it is inappropriate to put the words 'The End' at the end because it just doesn't. Its traces will linger with you long after that final page is read and the book shut.

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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Murakami's masterpiece (I seem to always say this about every Murakami I read) is about a young married man named Toru. Toru loses a number of things. First his cat, then his wife and then slowly his sense of reality. In search of these things he encounters characters both bizarre and amusing ranging from war veterans, a politician, an introspective sixteen-year-old girl and even mind prostitutes. Yes, prostitutes who pleasure you in your dreams. 

To describe the plot of the novel is near impossible. At more than 600 pages this is an epic that crosses various time periods, various character viewpoints while managing to weave in and out (and sometimes in between) the real and the imagined. It sounds confusing and complex but it's actually deceptively simple. The way Murakami writes allows the surreal nature of the narrative as well as the layered plot to be as digestible as a children's fairytale. There are so many things going on but somehow Murakami never leaves you behind. This is probably because he never embellishes his sentences more than he needs to. At one point there is even a story within a story within another story. As one character tells Toru one of her stories Toru observes:

"Without explanation, she would

reverse chronological order or suddenly

introduces as a major character

someone she had never mentioned 

to me before...

She would narrate events she had

witnessed with her own eyes, as 

well as events that she had never

witnessed."

 Upon reading this I realised Murakami was describing how he tells his own stories.

I would read this before I go to bed and I remember how strange my own dreams end up becoming. It was as if Murakami's prose somehow rearranged my brain to allow it to gaze at the world in a distorted, convoluted and even a perverse kind of way.

I tend to read fast and usually whizz through books but this one made me slow down and cherish every sentence, every moment and every chapter. I gave it time and it deserved it without question.

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Bonjour Tristesse by Francoise Sagan

Hurray for the first book I completed for the 2012 Fifty Books Challenge! It wasn't that difficult since Bonjour Tristesse is only over a hundred pages long.

I'm thankful that it was very brief because I found the main character, Cecile, extremely irritating, selfish and arrogant. If I wanted to witness the lives of privileged people living colourless lives then I would have turned on an episode of a Kardashian TV show.

This was written by an eighteen-year old about a seventeen-year old and you can pretty much sniff out the teenage angst and boredom right from the very first page.

Although she does provide small glimpses of introspection and an occasional acute observance of a character's behaviour, most of the time her words aren't very penetrating and lacks a bit of depth.

This was set in the South of France, arguably the country's most glamourous area, during the most elegant of all decades but Sagan never really took me there. Again, I had brief glimpses of it but the language is so restrained I felt like I was witnessing the story with a cloak thrown over me. I was reading a Murakami and Bronte novel at the same time I was reading this and every lacklustre sentence I read in Bonjour Tristesse made me long for the rich, vibrant and complex storytelling from those accomplished writers.

However, I don't really regret reading this. It was a quick and easy read and I actually had fun mocking and despising the characters in the novel.

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