(no subject)

[seekingferret]

The third major crash of a Chinatown bus this year. Obviously as a student on the Northeast seaboard I've been taking those buses for years. And obviously I always knew they were dangerous, that the drivers were underpaid and overworked, not English literate, probably not licensed properly, and possibly involved with organized crime or drug running. I've seen them illegally street-parking late nights in secluded areas of the Brooklyn waterfront as the driver probably tried frantically to grab a few minutes of sleep before they had to turn around and do another run.

Objectively speaking, taking the Chinatown bus to Boston is probably one of the more dangerous things I have done in my life.


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Having matched my 45 pages of On Beauty with 45 pages of Forster's Howards End, I'm feeling my sense of equilibrium restored. This might actually be the right way to read both books, in some kind of alternation, though I think reading the Forster passage before the mirrored passage in Smith is probably the better plan.

Comments

[zephyrprince]

Ah! I actually love On Beauty but I haven't gotten around to Howard's End despite it having been on my list since I read the Smith novel last summer. Does it really make it that much better? I'm excited.

[seekingferret]

Well, I'm now 125 pages into Howards End and only 45 pages into On Beauty. But the 45 pages of On Beauty were practically scene-by-scene borrowed and updated from Howards End, and the cleverness of the borrowing was very exciting to me.

But in a way the question of whether to read On Beauty alone or with Howards End is the fundamental question of Smith's literary career- whether self-conscious, style-centric writing is clever and glib or a powerful tool for probing deeper. (A question Forster's characters are also very much preoccupied with.) Smith seems to offer On Beauty both as a post-modern pastiche obsessed with its predecessors and as a traditional literary family novel.

Me being me, I prefer the former, so much so that I felt unmoored reading it as a traditional novel when I could sense it wanting to be more. I'm much more comfortable reading the two novels intertextually.