1. I finished Bleak House today. I started the book fifteen days ago.
The novel has me thinking about a lot of things and I've started reading a little bit of the vast amount of scholarship written about it.
Right now, I'm pondering the way the story of Bleak House was told. The novel features two different narrators. The first narrator tells the story omniscently. The second narrator, Esther Summerson, tells her part of the story in the first person, looking back. The Esther chapters read like a memoir. Esther's narration is limited to telling what she experienced over the years this story occurs, but the other narrator is unlimited by time and space or involvement in the story's action. This narrator tells us stories Esther is unaware of and this narrator is much more of a social critic, a commentator, on the world of London and the broader world of England.
The omniscient narrator is wary, world worn, weary, and both knowledgeable about and soured by the social and economic conditions of London and England, especially the legal system and the poverty and filth of Tom-All-Alone, a grim, crowded, decrepit London neighborhood.
Esther journeys into Tom-All-Alone and bears witness in personal ways to different characters who live there and to the violence, illness, and squalor in their lives. Likewise, through several characters she knows, Esther also experiences the corruption of the legal system.
But, Dickens explores more than the gross injustices, meanness, and depravity of the world of Bleak House. He dives deep into the kindness, generosity, compassion, love, and decency that is alive and at work in this novel's world. Without even a hint of self-congratulation, as Esther narrates her parts of the novel, she emerges as a touchstone of goodness, as does her guardian, Tom Jarndyce, and others in the Jarndyce sphere.
I expected Bleak House to be a darker and grimmer novel than it actually is. Yes, Dickens plunges his reader deep into this novel's world of disease and poverty and into its cynical and labyrinthtine legal system. He also plunges deep into the human capacity to feel and comfort the suffering in others, to minister to others and nurture physical and spiritual/emotional healing, and to experience love, love between family members, love for one's neighbor, and romantic love, too.
Dr. Samuel Johnson's 18th century biographer, James Boswell, recorded Johnson to have said, "By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show."
Dr. Johnson's nugget is tasty bit of hyperbole, but I felt much the same after reading Bleak House.
It was as if as much life as the world can show, its most grim and its most generous dimensions, are set out before us in this one novel.
2. Debbie and I have been limiting our visits to the grocery store to about one every 7-10 days and, today, we are very close to needing to replenish our pantry, especially our produce.
But even with our limited supply, today Debbie made a chopped salad of celery, carrots, cabbage, cashews, and garlic. She made a dressing of olive oil, rice vinegar, soy sauce, tahini, sesame seeds, and sugar. Debbie also prepared quinoa. So we each fixed ourselves a dinner bowl, combining the chopped salad, dressing, and the grain. It was perfect.
3. I've seen the movie about 150 times, but never read the book. So, this evening, I started reading All the President's Men. Woodward and Bernstein write in a prose style that is like Charles Dickens' style in one way: it's in English! It will be fun to do some easier reading before I return to 19th century England and read Wilkie Collins' novel The Woman in White once it arrives from Better World Books.
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