Books: Misogynist Nitwits, Yemeni Deserts and Red Giants

In the U-Bahn I've been reading Le Rouge et le noir by Stendhal. Normally I love the introductions to the French classics from our bookshelves at home, because to neophytes like me their atmospheric pictures of the biographical and cultural environment of the literature are extremely useful. But I really groaned internally while reading the introduction for Le Rouge et le noir. It is by Henri Martineau and was I felt not amoral as much as directly nasty.

I didn't like his characterization of the roles of women in Stendhal's or in his protagonist's lives. Both important love interests of Stendhal's protagonist seem to have ruined their lives, which was quite praiseworthy apparently to Martineau, because it was convenient for Julien Sorel. (Well, I mean, he dies at the end of the book; but let's say 'convenient in the short term.') If women really existed merely as tools for men's advancement, maybe I'd be as rapturous as Martineau, but as it is I find myself not especially ecstatic. I felt that he was describing women as the material trappings of social status, and as enemies to men if they withhold their favours. The idea that they might have as deep grievances as men, that their rights to development and happiness as individuals are as real as that of the masculine labourer, never seems to have crossed Martineau's mind.

I wasn't certain, either, that the protagonist — who in Martineau's rendering seemed like he'd sell out his grandmother without thinking twice for ambition's sake, and was far too absorbed by ingratiating himself with the upper class to care about (the plight of) anyone in his own class — was a hero of the proletariat classes as Martineau alleges. The enemy of one's enemy may at times be a friend; but I hesitate to attribute Sorel's intrigues or even violence — merely because they are intrigues and violence — to any profound and voluntary preoccupation with the plight of the urban or rural poor.

On a more trivial note, Martineau also admires Rousseau and La Nouvelle Héloïse. I gave up on reading that book in short order, as expected, because the characters were so insufferable. (What's-his-face, the love interest, was a dire little emotionally blackmailing worm, in fact the epitome of the ethically invertebrate Frenchman that I thought existed only in the fevered imagination of an overpatriotic 19th-century Briton.) I expected to find it immoral, and instead found it sappy, disingenuous and, in a sense, stupid.

By contrast, a German translation of Ibn Battuta's 14th-century travelogue about Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Yemen — so far, has been pleasant. I don't care much about the extremely longwinded names of countless sheikhs and which saint's tomb is in which city, however, and was a bit amused at the detailed descriptions of betel leaves, coconuts, and other things that are extremely familiar nowadays.

I have also enjoyed reading The Structure and Evolution of the Stars, with its Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams and calculations of luminosity and temperature; because, surprisingly enough, it instills meditation and peace of mind.