Sunday, May 28, 2006

Book shows and readings on the radio and Teev (and relative links):


Book Readings
(Mon-Fri 2pm, repeated 11pm, on ABC Radio National)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookreading/default.htm

The Book Show
(Weekdays 10am, Sun 7.10pm on ABC Radio National)
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bookshow/

Book Lust
(ABC TV, 10pm Tuesday)
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/guide/netw/200605/programs/AC0518V002D30052006T220000.htm
(This seems to be a one-off special. I read somewhere that there is an new TV show on soon on the ABC about books, but not sure when it starts or what it will be called).

Saturday, May 27, 2006

Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys

Um, hi. This is my first post. Nice to be here.

I kind of wagged work the other afternoon and did a bit of second-hand-bookshop-browsing and came away with quite an armful. One of which was Wide Sargasso Sea, which is one of those books I've vaguely heard of but were never really sure what it was about. Hint: there is no sea in it. It's an imagined pre-history of the first Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre, aka the mad woman in the attic. In Jane Eyre, she is a gothic beast, unfeminine, mad, tropical, sensual, a perfect foil to Jane's purity and rationality.

Jean Rhys imagines her rather differently. Antoinette's a bit lost, a bit unloved, and very scared, living in Jamaica when the recent emancipation of the slaves has made white people unwelcome. The first part of the book covers part of her childhood, which is quite tragic and results in her mother going mad. The second part is written from the view of Mr Rochester, and if about his marriage, which he kind of falls into because he's greedy for money and Antoinette has plenty. During their honeymoon, things begin to go wrong. Rochester finds out he is a figure of fun for having married a woman with a family history of mental problems (probably from inbreeding), who also has black blood. Antoinette is desperate to make him love her, and resorts to voodoo, which doesn't work and leaves her angry, impotent and trapped.

The third part is set in England, and this is where the story crosses Jane Eyre. It's a strange book, because you already know the ending - mad woman, burning house - she can't escape her fate. But she knows she can't, and this makes her real, instead of the animal other that Charlotte Bronte imagined.

The writing creates a sense of dread and doom all the way through to the end. Reading it late at night gave me a bad case of the creeps. It's only 150 pages long, but packs a lot in.