The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

"Prime numbers are what is left when you have taken all the patterns away. I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them."
(p. 12)

Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

Notes On:

INTRO BY LEO BERSANI

I. Background

In 19th century novelistic convention, the protagonist is:

• a “perceptive vessel of experience”;
• distinctively superior – intellectually, or morally, or;
• a “hero of fiction” with extraordinary sensitivity to articulate the human experience – in other words, wiser than the rest.
• Flaubert’s contemporaries included Austen, Stendal, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky
• In literary history, MB was the 1st novel to defy this literary convention: his protagonist is not a hero we can champion.

II. On Theme

• This is a novel about the literary imagination;
• Flaubert is exploring:


• the link between art and reality, asking: “Can literature “represent” life?”
  Quality of Art compared to Quality of Life
• “…the distance between words and things” (pg. xviii)
• “the murder of meaning in language” (pg. xix)
• Not a mere morality story, not intended to raise social consciousness;
• Not criticizing Emma’s “cheap fantasies,” because “more interesting fantasies would not necessarily be more accurate representations of reality” (pg xvii)

III. On Style

• vision binoculaire – observe opposite poles of a subject
  Flaubert accomplishes this by juxtaposing different “worlds,” but he establishes no definitive “reality” (since both are real to its respective participants)

IV. On the Characters

• Emma is sensual, has a physical presence, a hunger for sensation. Her imagination is extravagant. She seeks to define, in real life, what her novels call “bliss” and “passion.” She comes to believe that “bliss” is immediate sensual gratification; her obsession is with consumption. Her plight is to “equate reality with art,” and her tragedy is that she “can’t connect…literary fantasies with her own experience.” (pg xiv)
  
  • “…she never finds her language in the world” (pg xxi)
  • Emma is also selfishly indifferent, and has no empathy for anyone else.
• Rodolphe displays Flaubert’s own mistrust of words. He hears words of passion from every mistress, therefore, Emma’s words are hollow, devoid of any meaning to him. (Flaubert’s philosophy is that writing breeds inspiration, leading to excess of imagination and betrayal of reality.)
• Homais. Flaubert identifies with him because what makes himself so different from “that detestable lover of clichés”?
  Simultaneously, though, Flaubert is critical of clichés because they pretend to “offer the possibility of enclosing life within beautifully inalterable formulas” (pg xviii)

Ash Wednesday: A Novel by Ethan Hawke

"'You're forgiven...but forgiveness is overrated. Actions have repercussions --like a science experiment, a chemical reaction.'"
(p. 52)

"'There are no secrets, just things people pretend they don't know.'"
(p. 53)

"It's easy to be gracious, tolerant, and accepting and say Everyone is equal and I wish everybody well when you get everything you want. But the real challenge is to still be this way when you don't get what you want."
(p. 96)

"'If you're not careful, ninety-eight percent of your life will be habit.'"
(p. 120)

"Oh, God, I wanted to remember every moment of my life. I didn't want to forget anything. If I could remember, then the passing seconds might have some meaning or be amassing into some definition or purpose."
(p. 147)

"It's funny. I had had this notion that when you were married you could put to rest all the insecurities and musings about whether you should really be together, but it didn't work that way. Marriage just seemed to have loaded the relationship with responsibility and fear of failure. I knew I had to stop caring whether it was a good marriage or a bad marriage, the right decision or the wrong one, and realize that it was gonna be all those things."
(p. 207)

"To believe that my life may be full of joy, laughter, and understanding fills me with so much fear of disappointment that I would prefer to smoke a cigarette and not believe at all. I either want everything to be magic and mythic or I want it to be dead. But I can't take the everyday living with small disappointments and fragile victories, the grayness of maybe-it'll-work-out and maybe-it-won't."
(p. 207)

Lucrezia Borgia: A Novel by John Faunce

"I weas aware of her crying, but with a child's selfishness I assume my own hurt worse than anyone else's in the world."
(p.14)

"Absence is only emptiness, from which the lucky recover. But presence, though filled with transgression and horrendous hurt, is also rife with moments of love and soul- and body-satisfying peace."
(p.14)

"Joy is only a moment, passing quickly as flash-paper."
(p.32)

The Secret Life of Bees: A Novel by Sue Monk Kidd

"People who think dying is the worst thing don't know a thing about life."
(p.2)

"The world will give you that once in a while, a brief timeout; the boxing bell rings and you go to your corner, where somebody dabs mercy on your beat-up life."
(p.82)

"I wanted to know what happened when two people felt it. Would it divide the hurt in two, make it lighter to bear, the way feeling someone's joy seemed to double it?"
(p.95)

"Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here."
(p.2)

The Jane Austen Book Club by Karen Joy Fowler

"Mr. Palmer didn't suffer fools and neither did Allegra, but it wasn't something she was proud of. It didn't spring, as Austen suggested, from the desire to appear superior, unless lack of patience was a superior quality."
(p.50)

"It wasn't Jane Austen's fault that love went bad. You couldn't even say she didn't warn you. Her heroines made out well enough, but there were always other characters in the book who didn't finish happily---Brandon's Eliza in Sense and Sensibility; in Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Lucas, Lydia Bennet; in Mansfield Park, Maria Bertram. These were the women to whom you should be paying attention, but you weren't."
(p.74)

"The great thing about books was the solidarity of the written word. You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been."
(p.82)

"Prudie found herself in sudden sympathy with Coach Blumberg. How wise was it, after all, to encourage these children to play at great love? To tell them that romance was worth dying for, that simple steadfastedness was stronger than any other force in the world? What Coach Blumberg believed--that there was something important about nine boys outpitching, ourhitting, and outrunning nine other boys--seemed, by contrast, a harmless fraud."
(p.107-8)

"Sylvia thought how all parents wanted an impossible life for their children--happy beginning, happy middle, happy ending. No plot of any kind. What uninteresting people would result if parents got their way."
(p.178-9)

"My husbands weren't any of them bad men. I was the problem. Marriage seemed like such a small space whenever I was in it. I like the getting married. Courtship has a plotline. But there's no plot to being married. Just the same things over and over again. Same fights, same friends, same things you do on a Saturday. The repetition would start to get to me.

"And then I couldnt' fit my whole self into a marriage, no matter who my husband was. There were parts of me that John liked, and different parts for the others, but no one could deal with all of me. So I'd lop some part off, but then I'd start missing it, wanting it back."
(p.193)

"Had there always been this level of interest in genealogy, she wondered, even in the sixties, when everything was to be made from scratch? What did it mean, all this personal looking backward? What were people hoping to find? What bearing, really, did their ancestry have on who they were now?"
(p.207-8)

"Sylvia was not a happy-ending sort of person herself. In books, yes, they were lovely. But in life everyone has the same ending, and the only question is who will get to it first...
"What if you had a happy ending and didn't notice? Sylvia made a mental note. Don't miss the happy ending."
(p.50)

White Oleander by Janet Fitch

"I knew we shouldn't have come. Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face in a parking lot on the Fourth of July."
(p.28)

"I'm enjoying my hatred so much more than I ever enjoyed love. Love is temperamental. Tiring. It makes demands. Love uses you. Changes its mind...But hatred, now. That's something you can use. Sculpt. Wield. It's hard or soft, however you need it. Love humiliates you, but hatred cradles you. It's so soothing."
(p.38)

"The question of good and the nature of evil will always be one of philosophy's most intriguing problems, up there with the problem of existence itself...If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look though our own eyes rather than mouth clichés lent us from the so-called Fathers. To dare is to steal fire from the Gods. This is mankind's destiny, the engine which fuels us as a race."
(p.74)

"I watched her for a long time, memorizing her shoulders, her long-legged gait. This is how girls left. They packed up. their suitcases and walked away in high heels. They pretended they weren't crying, that it wasn't the worst day of their lives. That they didn't want their mothers to come running after them, begging their forgiveness, that they wouldn't have gone down on their knees and thanked God if they could stay."
(p.104)

"Loneliness is the human condition. Cultivate it. The way it tunnels into you allows your soul room to grow. Never expect to outgrow loneliness. Never hope to find people who will understand you, someone to fill that space. An intelligent, sensitive person is the exception. If you expect to find people who will understand you, you will grow murderous with disappointment. The best you'll ever do is to understand yourself, know what it is that you want, and not let the cattle stand in your way."
(p.126-127)

"Prostitute. Whore. What did they really mean anyway? Only words...words trailing their streamers of judgment...What difference did it make if she was a whore. It sounded like ventriloquism to even say it. I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit into slots--prostitute, housewife, saint -- like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water."
(p.138)

"...I realized as I walked through the neighborhood how each house could contain a completely different reality. In a single block, there could be fifty separate worlds. Nobody ever really knew what was going on just next door."
(p.146)

"...how long can a person float, looking at an empty horizon? How long do you drift before you call it quits?"
(p.262)

"Just because a poet said something didn't mean it was true, only that it sounded good."
(p.349)

"You ask me about regret? Let me tell you a few things about regret, my darling. There is no end to it. You cannot find the beginning of the chain that brought us from there to here. Should you regret the whole chain, and the air in between, or each link separately, as if you could uncouple them? Do you regret the beginning which ended so badly, or just the ending itself?"
(p.430)