The Woman In White / by Wilkie Collins

Wilkie Collins was never quite as widely respected as his contemporaries in Victorian England. Despite the fact that his numerous novels and story collections sold exceptionally well and his fan base always held him in high regard, his work never carried the same intellectual distinction as, say, a George Eliot or Charles Dickens. He may have been ahead of his time. Suspense, as a genre, wasn't really en vogue in the 19th century and despite the fact that the Gothic and Romanticist movements paved the way for more intrigue and mystery in fiction, literature remained a relatively more even-paced medium with stories involving more sensational themes relegated to second tier status. The fact that Collins' books outsold many of those same authors wasn't altogether missed by the reading public though critics seemed to diminish the effect that public affection for his work garnered. Nevertheless, in real life, Collins got on well with his peers, Dickens in particular co-authored and edited several serial literary publications with him, and it never seemed to bother him in the slightest that his writing achieved more mainstream success than critical acclaim. Among his two most famous works are The Moonstone (1868), about a mysterious diamond brought from India to England, and The Woman in White (1860), a story of intrigue surrounding a mysterious lady of the night. Of the two, The Woman in White was undeniably Collins favorite.

On his travels one night, young drawing master Walter Hartright meets a mysterious woman dressed all in white, disheveled and apparently in deep distress, whom he helps find the road to London only to discover later that she's escaped from an asylum, not for the first time evidently. Thinking little of it, Hartright sets out for a job he's undertaken at Limmeridge House, an estate in the northern part of the country where he's been commissioned to teach two young wards of a Mr. Frederick Fairlie, an elderly, ailing man who seldom leaves his room. Laura Fairlie, Mr. Fairlie's niece, and Marian Holcombe, Laura's half-sister, are nothing like their reclusive uncle and Mr. Hartright takes great pleasure in their company, discovering them to be fond of art and amiable. And in what initially seems to be an alarming coincidence, Mr. Hartright finds that Laura bears an astonishing resemblance to the woman in white, so much so that he engages the topic in conversation only to find that the woman he met that night on the road is known by his pupil.

The mentally disadvantaged lady is called Anne Catherick and had lived for a time as a child at Limmeridge. She'd been devoted to Laura's mother, a lady who'd also dressed in all white, and had been taken away from the family under somewhat mysterious circumstances after the matron's death. Walter meanwhile has fallen in love with Laura despite the fact that she's already betrothed to a bullish member of the nobility named Sir Percival Glyde, whose engagement to Laura is more a matter of course owing to an agreement between Laura and her uncle. Upon meeting Glyde, Hartright becomes convinced through a series of conversations and correspondences that he was responsible for shutting up Anne Catherick, "the woman in white," inside the asylum, unjustly as it were, to keep her from revealing secrets concerning Glyde's own dubious past and ill-conceived plans for marrying Laura and inheriting Limmeridge House.

With as many plot twists as mysteries involved in the story, Collins weaves one of the more spellbinding novels of the 19th century. It's not all that easy to follow in places and characters like Marian Holcombe and the conniving Count Fosco (appearing later on in the narrative), both of whom can seem marginalized at first, can't be discounted as they end up holding key elements to the plot's development. Keeping track of the various settings--Limmeridge House, Glyde's own estate, Hartright's travels in Honduras, Italy, London and the English countryside--can get confusing as well. But the overall intrigue of the opening sequences, the dramatic conflict escalating with each chapter, the serious undertones of tragedy and impending doom as well as the climactic conclusion are rewarding enough to supersede any of the book's many plotboilers and accommodate its complex structure. (FIC COLLINS)

Ulysses / by James Joyce

Born to a middle class family in Dublin in 1882, James Joyce was the eldest of ten (surviving) children had by his father John, a city rate

collector, and a mother who'd originally come from one of Dublin's wealthier families. Always a good student with an early astuteness in writing, Joyce's education was predominately concentrated within the surrounding Jesuit Catholic institutions, especially after his father's drinking and mismanagement of family funds deteriorated the family's situation. Upon graduating from University College Dublin in 1903, Joyce emigrated to continental Europe where he would spend most of the rest of his life. Dropping out of medical school in Paris, he lived periodically in other parts of the continent, namely France and Switzerland, where he made several unsuccessful stabs at publishing his writings. It wasn't until 1914 that his first major success, Dubliners, a short story collection chronicling citizens of Dublin, was released to great acclaim and speculation, sentiments echoed upon the publication of his first major novel, Portrait of An Artist As A Young Man, in 1916. His crowning achievement, Ulysses (1922), a serialised novel chronicling a day in the life of a Dublin man named Leopold Bloom whose story mirrors that of Ulysses (Latin for Odysseus) from Homer's Odyssey was and is seen as one of the pinnacle works modernist literature, its "stream of consciousness", intricate structure, allusory style and experimental prose considered a groundbreaking dénouement of the time. With its success came boatloads of controversy including several obscenity trials on the then explicit content, bannishments of the text in the US and elsewhere, harsh criticism of the book's theoretical innacuracies and charges of misrepresentation of Ireland's Catholic majority. Still, Modern Library has consistently named it the #1 English-language novel of the 20th century and the the date of June 16th, the day the novel takes place, is celebrated in Ireland and worldwide in various literary circles as Bloomsday, something not a lot of works of literature can claim.

"Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."

June 16, 1904 is a normal day in Dublin. For Leopold Bloom, it may as well be any one on the calendar. Even though he knows his wife Molly is having an affair with a colleague, he has neither the initiative nor the inclination to do much about it and his job as an advertising agent, though decent, isn't getting him anywhere. Ever since the death of his young son Rudy some years back, his life has been one of quiet soul searching and dissillusionment. His actions mirror his thoughts as depressive, largely escapist manners and habits including long breaks from work, strolls along the nearby waterfront, drinking, daydreaming and occasionally lusting after women in view. Meanwhile a younger man named Stephen Daedalus is fledgling writer and part-time school teacher whose struggling to find his place in the world. He lives in a house with two other boarders and has family in town though his mother has recently died. A connoisseur of many things cultural and someone who can be opinionated, Stephen shares much of the same quiet longing as Leopold and lives with the same paradoxical sensitivity, "[fearing] those big words which make us so unhappy". As the day passes and characters mix and mingle, both Leopold and Stephen (only vague acquaintances) interconnect and interact with the life of Dublin, a city in the early twentieth century on the verge of so much yet held down by maddeningly inauspicious circumstances.

Even for a masterpiece, Ulysses is not an easy book to digest. Especially when you consider the multiple implications each section--three parts subdivided into eighteen individual episodes correlating to portions of each of The Odyssey's adventures--carefully and intricately contributes to the novel's larger whole. Add to that the connection between the novel and the epic poem not to mention the reflection of the work on Joyce's own life, Stephen Daedalus viewed as Joyce's literary alter ego, and it's not hard to see why the book's many merits still come under scrutiny. The fact stands though that as a novel, Ulysses is a seminal work of English-language fiction, not only groundbreaking as a novel in both format and focus but as a conjunctive artform at a time--post-WWI, post-Easter Rebellion, rise of avant-gardism, introduction of self-consciousness in art, etc.--which would prove most pivotal in the cultural evolution of the 20th century. The day of the novel's plot can even be seen as a crucial player in this interwoven tapestry, the date itself being ample evidence of literary self-consciousness--June 16, 1904 was the day of Joyce's first "stepped out" with his future wife, Nora Barnacle--and therein a tip-off to the abstraction within the work. Perhaps of foremost importance, and therefore the element of the book of which can be attributed with the most critical precedence, is Joyce's use of the "stream of consciousness" narrative. Prominently featured throughout the book and highly concentrated in the final section Penelope, in which Bloom's wife Molly contemplates the previous day, is this soliloquy-styled inner voice privatized in the mind of each individual character. Among the first English-language novelists to use such a device in fiction--Shakespeare's soliloquized bits in such plays as "Hamlet", "Romeo and Juliet", "Othello", "Julius Caesar", etc. as well as Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu's first installment Swann's Way had utilized it previous--Joyce showcased his talent by indwelling his world with the loosely connected interior monologues of his characters, their public and private lives very much isolated through their internalizded meanderings and yet equally bonded together by such a 'stream' of waking conciousness. It can be said the nothing in the novel makes much sense upon a first reading of the considerably lengthy (nearly 800 pages in the Modern Library's small-print edition) work. There's a lot of it which seems disjointed and confusing, anecdotal passages associated with vaguely identifiable characters compounded by multiple run-on sentences with no clear direction. But to the reader who invests the time and energy to extract from the novel what the author is really saying, it is indeed one of the greatest novels of all time. (FIC JOYCE)

Twitterature: The World's Greatest Books in Twenty Tweets or Less / by Alexander Aciman

Is there anything that can't be done faster and with more abruptness? Apparently not. Even the greatest of the classic works of literature are never safe from the fast food mode of information dissemination we live with nowadays. Instant messaging, texting and Twitter have seemingly revolutionized communication to a point of no return. And so it's kind of an inevitability when you think about it that all "knowledge" will be streamlined before we know it. With this in mind, a couple of kids (both of them 19 at the time of writing) have taken it upon themselves to redo some of the world's best books (and plays and poems) ever. From the point of view of the major characters involved with a bit of of side-noting, each book is translated in Tweet-form, summarizing the gist of the story. For example, All Quiet on the Western Front / by Erich Maria Remarque, quite a "@Remarquable Tale" we're told, things start off with a nod to the now regrettable decision by the main character Paul to enlist in the German Army during World War I. "I've always heard 'Paul. Listen to adults, and teachers.' You too? We could be in Hamburg cracking open a Holsten instead."

On the cover of this book is a definition for the title--Twitterature: \'twi-te-re-,chur\n: an amalgamation of "twitter" and "literature"; humorous reworkings of literary classics for the twenty-first-century intellect, in digestive portions of 20 tweets or less. And that's just what it is. Some of the tweets are very funny; others are just plain silly and far more than just a few are really raunchy. Swiftness is key. Most tweeted book reports aren't but a page (a small page) or two at most. Along with the often quite sublime (and college-level crude) comments, things can get to the point in a hurry (i.e., from Fitzgerald's best known book: "Two bad drives met. :O," "Gatsby is so emo. Who cries about his girlfriend while eating breakfast... IN THE POOL?"). A brainchild of college students, Aciman and his roommate Emmett Rensin, at the University of Chicago, Twitterature is really irreverent. But it's also something which, as with everything else in the digital age, can't help but providing your literary knowledge with burst of quirky ingenuity. It might not be Cliffs Notes, but it's definitely a trip. Readers should be warned that this book is definitely *adult* in its humor. (818.607 ACIMAN)

Bram Stoker's Dracula (DVD) 1992 / a Francis Ford Coppola film; starring Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves and Sadie Frost

Following the dismal reaction and perceived failure of the his third Godfather movie, Francis Ford Coppola, the executive visionary behind numerous print-to-screen masterpieces in addition to Puzo's "Godfather" saga--namely S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders and Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (Apocalypse Now)--decided to embark on a more personally endearing project. The veteran director felt it was time to make the movie about the classic novel he once "felt was his", Bram Stoker's 1897 horror classic Dracula. It was a book which both captivated and enthralled a young Coppola, reading it first as a boy, becoming enchanted by the legendary figure of the count and subsequently re-reading it numerous times over.

Coppola's painstakingly cultivated film adaptation, a labor of love largely budgeted with his own money and orchestrated through his personal production company, was never considered a financial or cinematic success. Critics complained the film was visually excessive, too operatic, that the narrative lacked continuity and the "highly eroticised" content deprived the story of dramatic authenticity. Yet the film was and remains deeply compelling in its own alluring, unique, and eerily provocative way. The production quality makes the movie. With every scene done the old fashioned way, inside a studio with savvy retro-mode production techniques and highly innovative set detail enhancing the aesthetic element, the film was able to extrapolate on Coppola's meticulously conceived ideas (The backgrounds, wardrobe, visuals and sound all exquisitely illumined the story and ultimately won it 3 Oscars for best effects, makeup and costumes).

A captivatingly haunting score combined with the perceptively original take on the protagonist instantly entrance the viewer, the beginning of the film tracing the origin and well-known legend of the real Count Dracula, an actual 15th century Romanian Prince known as Vlad Dracul II, or Vlad the Impaler, during a Turkish invasion. The proceeding account of epic erases many pre-existing notions associated with both the story and the vampire figure--no Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee or any of the more traditional-looking Draculas come to mind. Nor do any contemporary vampire associations erect themselves in what was clearly the original intent of Coppola who wished to remain faithful to the story but broaden the horizons of both the interpretation and adaptation of the tale. True to the novel, the count is at once creepy and sinister, a multi-dimensional entity able to morph into various odd, shapeshifting forms: young and old human, wolf, mist, predatory beast, vermin, etc. But while every bit as monstrous as his silver screen predecessors, the villain's circumstances warrant a further assessment of his situation. Here Dracula's seen as a doomed figure, almost a tragic hero cruelly deprived of a true existence. The essence of the horror he emanates has as much to do with the irreversible eternality of his status as the menacing, physically terrifying creature he evokes.

While narratively the the film strives to magnify the passionate emotional union between the count and Mina Harker (in an admittedly very sensual manner), the real object seems to be to enhance the ambience of the story's gothic aura. It works. Aesthetically, the picture really is a visual feast; it's impossible to remain unmoved by its creative substance, imaginative designs and surrealist approach. And while the acting is nothing spectacular (outside of Tom Waits notable supporting role as Renfield), it's serviceable enough to establish the project as a complete and thoroughly fascinating production, convincing and original on more than one level. (DVD DRACULA)