AN UNCONVENTIONALLY ROMANTIC READING LIST: SUDDENLY LOVE, A CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, ETHAN FROME AND ANNA KARENINA

While I was thinking about what to post today, I had an interesting idea. Why not post an unconventionally romantic reading list? After all, what we find romantic is quite relative, isn't it? I've never cared for romance novels as such, but I can think of a number of books whose love stories have moved me deeply. Today I'll share four classical reading recommendations with you: Suddenly Love, a Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Ethan Frome and Anna Karenina. 

Only one of these comes with a happy ending, two of them are quite tragic and when it comes to the Cat- I don't think we can tell for sure how that one is going to end.  I always felt that this play had an ambiguous ending. 

What do you think? The reason why I'm choosing these love stories with sad and sometimes quite tragic elements in them (apart from the fact that they are great literature) for this list is because they seem more genuine. Love is often idolized, but what does it really means? I love how all of these book made me think about different variations and definitions of love.  Scroll down to read my book reviews. 

“She pronounced the word married as if her voice caressed it. It seemed a rustling covert leading to enchanted glades.”

 Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

“A rich body of testimony has been written about the Holocaust, the testimony of the survivor, and it embodies their whole psychology: haste, inarticulateness, and the lack of all introspection. It is as if what had happened only happened outside them. Their spiritual reckoning, if there is such a thing, was principally concerned with conclusions about society, not with the realm of the soul...Such writing must be read with caution, so that one sees not only what is in it, but also, and essentially, what is lacking in it.”

 Aharon Appelfeld, Beyond Despair: Three Lectures and a Conversation With Philip Roth

LOVE ACTUALLY, A NOVEL BY AHARON APPELFELD, 5/5

Aharon Appelfelt was an Isreali writer and a Holocaust survivor. I actually read this novel while he was still alive and I was sad to read about his death in 2018. He didn't die young, but still I feel a sense of loss for he was such a beautiful soul. This novel of his in particular is very dear to me. It features a  strong protagonist Ernst who shares many characteristics with the author himself.

Ernst is a Red Army veteran, a former partisan and a communist who gave up his Jewish identity while fighting the Nazis. Ernst found meaning and a will to go on in the Red Army. For him the Soviet army must have been a way to fight back, but during the war he also turned into a devoted communist. This in turn meant turning his back on his religion and identity. 

It is perhaps not a well known facts that the post war communists were quite opposed to any religion including Judaism. Often they persecuted Jews, suppressed their culture and in some countries even demolished synagogues. Just because they had a common enemy, doesn't mean they were friends.

 This novel shows this through recollections of an old veteran whose health is falling. I think he is torn between his loyalty for the Red Army that achieved so much and there is much to be proud of and his identity. For Ernst personally somehow being a part of it all and becoming lost in it, he  lost his identity. 

The novel takes place in Israel, but it often travels back in time to Europe. When novel opens, Ernest is a seventy year old man living in Israel. He is haunted by his past and tries to make things right labouring on his writing. However, he is desperately lonely. 

Suddenly, a gentle thirty something woman comes into his life. Like himself, Irina lost everyone she loved. Ernst's wife and child were killed by the Nazis, Irina lost her parents. They were Holocaust survivors so there is a link she shares with Ernst. Slowly, these two fill the void in each other life. With her help, Ernest learns a great deal. Irina learns to voice her opinion.

I absolutely loved these two. Their love story is so delicate and precious. I'm not much of a romantic, but I fell for it. When I find the time, I might even write something more about it. One of the most beautiful love stories I have read for sure. 

Suddenly, Love was the second book I've read by this author, the first was autobiography, this one is a novel. Somehow these two merged in my mind. I think there are definitely some autobiographical parts in this book, the author must have drawn on his experiences and it makes the book seem even more real. I do recommend it.

Writing a book is a journey lasting many days. Like any journey, it will mean encounters, wonderings, thoughts of despair … The inner contact with yourself and the characters that will accompany you on your way are a mélange of people you knew closely and people who passed your way and slipped out of your life. And there are people from the root of your soul who, because of the confusion of the times, were not revealed to you properly and sank into oblivion but, not to worry, in this journey, with any luck, some of these losses will be found and your world will expand. CITED FROM Appelfeld, My Parents, 6.

https://library.osu.edu/projects/hebrew-lexicon/00150_files/00150224.pdf

CAT ON A HOT TIN ROOF, A PLAY BY TENNESSEE WILLIAMS 5/5

Maggie the cat is such a strong female protagonist, isn't she? Her husband is an emotionally detached alcoholic but she just won't give up. While her love story might not seem all that romantic, there is something about its realness that appeals to me. 

After all, love is not all happy ever after, is it? Sometimes we need to be strong for one another. Sometimes love means not giving up. Not that Maggie herself is perfect. In the play in the particular she has quite a negative side to her as well. In the film version, this 'secret' from their past never truly comes out, but why the play is quite shocking in ways. 

“In all these years, you never believed I loved you. And I did. I did so much. I did love you. I even loved your hate and your hardness.”

Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

Besides questioning the feelings of her husband, the reader must wonder about the nature of Maggie's feelings towards him. Is it true love or just a selfish obsession? It is obvious Maggie is willing to fight for her marriage and not for material reasons. However, is it truly real love?

 I'm a big fan of Tennessee Williams. While I love all of his plays, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is especially dear and meaningful to me. There were times in my life when I felt like a cat on a hot tin roof. Who hasn't? Williams was a master of characterization, especially of female characterization. He did an amazing job with bringing alive 'the cat' in the play. She as a character is one of my personal all time favourites.

“Oh, you weak, beautiful people who give up with such grace. What you need is someone to take hold of you--gently, with love, and hand your life back to you, like something gold you let go of--and I can! I'm determined to do it--and nothing's more determined than a cat on a tin roof--is there?”

As I think of this play, I think of a film version as well. It is not often that I can say this but, I love both the play and the film. Despite the fact that the film is different in many ways, I still liked it.

 Nevertheless, I have to say that the film failed the convey the ambiguity, suppleness and depth of the play. I guess that homosexuality wasn't something that Hollywood was ready to face at that time. I'm not saying that the protagonist is gay, but in the play they're allusions to it, and the film ignored them, not to mention that it makes some significant changes that pretty much take a lot from the story. 

Why do I like the film so much then? The acting. Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman played the roles of their lives. Enough said. This play is a masterpiece. It really is.

“Laws of silence don't work....
When something is festering in your memory or your imagination, laws of silence don't work, it's just like shutting a door and locking it on a house on fire in hope of forgetting that the house is burning. But not facing a fire doesn't put it out. Silence about a thing just magnifies it. It grows and festers in silence, becomes malignant....”

 Tennessee Williams, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

“He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.”

 Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

ETHAN FROME, A NOVEL BY EDITH WHARTON 4/5

I'll always remember the strange feeling I had reading this book, like I've suddenly found myself in an unknown and dark place, yet somehow familiar. A reverse fairy-tale of sorts, this novel tells a love story that doesn't end too well.

 The narrative is framed and told by an unnamed narrator who visits the fictional town this novel is set in and there sees Ethan Frome, the unfortunate hero of this novel. The narrator becomes interested in his fate. Ethan accepts the narrator in his home (during a storm) and so the first chapter starts and the narration switches to Ethan. 

As the first chapter one opens, Ethan is waiting for his wife's cousin Mattie to give her a ride home. At that point, Ethan is living with his difficult wife Zeena and her young and beautiful cousin Mattie. 

“But at sunset the clouds gathered again, bringing an earlier night, and the snow began to fall straight and steadily from a sky without wind, in a soft universal diffusion more confusing than the gusts and eddies of the morning. It seemed to be a part of the thickening darkness, to be the winter night itself descending on us layer by layer.”

.....

The novel takes us further back and we learned how Ethan married Zeena who came in to help with his sick mother (if I recalled well) and he only married her because he was terrified of facing the long winter alone in his home. This novel speaks volumes about loneliness and isolation. That's what think that stayed with me. Anyhow, soon it becomes apparent that Ethan and Mattie have feelings one for another.

“They had never before avowed their inclination so openly, and Ethan, for a moment, had the illusion that he was a free man, wooing the girl he meant to marry. He looked at her hair and longed to touch it again, and to tell her that is smelt of the woods; but he had never learned to say such things.”

 Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome

This novel is great literature, no doubt about that. The writing is very powerful and so is the imaginary. I absolutely loved the rich symbolism of it. However, this book was quite painful to read, and not because of the structure of the novel but rather for the strange quality of sadness it evoked. The writing is so good, perhaps even too good, because being caught in a world of such pain and depression as depicted in novel was heartbreaking. 

Perhaps it just echoed with some lonely part of my soul. The story is tragic and maybe due to that fact, extremely believable. This novel broke my heart, but I still remember it fondly after all these years. How can a sad story like this one be romantic? Well, it made my unconventionally romantic reading list because it feels so genuine. Perhaps it is true what they say- that the greatest love stories are often tragic. 

“The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging this new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: 'No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectations, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.”

 Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

ANNA KARENINA, A NOVEL  BY LEO TOLSTOY, 5/5

Anna Karenina is a masterpiece. That is what I thought when I first read it at the tender age of 15 and my opinion of it hasn't changed the slightest. I remember how moved I was by the story when I first read it. I remember how every description of her has lingered in my mind-up to this very day. I remember illustrations I used to make of Anna Karenina. 

I'm so mesmerized by this book. Every reading experience had been such an intense reading experience for me. I wasn't the only one. Most of my classmates were into Anna Karenina back then too- and many of them still are, just like myself.

“Count Vronsky: I love you!
Anna Karenina: Why?
Count Vronsky: You can't ask Why about love!”

What is the genius of Anna Karenina? This novel definitely has a lot of literary merit, from an excellent portrayal of both Russian society and individuals to its more philosophical parts and spiritual dilemmas. While it is true that on a second (and third and etc.) reading, I noticed some new details and with years one naturally develops more opinions and views on things, I perhaps prefer that first reading because that is when I felt the closest to the novel and to Anna herself.

“She put both her hands on his shoulders and gazed at him long, with a deep look of ecstasy and yet searchingly. She scrutinized his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She compared, as she did at every interview with him, the image her fancy painted of him (incomparably finer than, and impossible in actual existence) with his real self.....”

There is something very universal about this novel, sometimes very human at its core, something that touches us on a very emotional level. This is a great novel. Personally, I think that Tolstoy deserves even more attention and merit than he gets. It saddens me to see that some literary critics call this novel anti-feminist. If anything this is a novel that supports women.

 As the title would suggest, this is first and foremost a novel about a woman! In my view, it is not just Anna that Tolstoy's describes warmly and intimately, the other female characters are created with feeling and care as well. I once wrote an essay about the characterization of female characters in Anna Karenina a few years ago and I really enjoyed writing it.

Tolstoy admits in one of his letters that he has fallen in love with Anna while writing the novel. Perhaps Tolstoy didn't plan to take her side. However, he did and it made all the difference. It is ironical then that The Awakening (a novel that is basically a rip-off of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina- a good rip-off though- I'm quite fond of it) that has its own literal value but a rip-off nevertheless), should be considered a feminist novel and Tolstoy anti-feminist. But then again, I'm not sure I like what gets called feminism these days so I shouldn't be annoyed. Long story short, the portrayal of Anna Karenina, the protagonist of this novel, is beautifully done.

I lost time how much times I've reread Anna Karenina since that first reading. I have several copies of this book. I gifted some of them too. I make people read this book. While it is true that this novel tells a tale of a tragic love story, I still find it to be quite romantic. 

“ I didn’t know you were going. What are you coming for?" she said, letting fall the hand with which she had grasped the doorpost. And irrepressible delight and eagerness shone in her face.
  "What am I coming for?" he repeated, looking straight into her eyes. "You know that I have come to be where you are," he said, "I can’t help it.”

One can find faults in both Anna and Vronsky, accuse them of selfishness and what not, but at its core the love and the passion they felt for one another feels real enough. If love ends, it doesn't mean it wasn't true while it lasted. All things must come to an end, one way or another. Sad love stories can be quite inspiring and romantic in their own right. 

“But that had been grief--this was joy. Yet that grief and this joy were alike outside all the ordinary conditions of life; they were loopholes, as it were, in that ordinary life through which there came glimpses of something sublime. And in the contemplation of this sublime something the soul was exalted to inconceivable heights of which it had before had no conception, while reason lagged behind, unable to keep up with it.”

POST UPDATE: 

I WROTE ABOUT ANNA KARENINA AGAIN AND I BOUGHT YET ANOTHER COPY

https://modaodaradosti.blogspot.com/2024/05/inspired-by-vintage-edition-of-anna.html

As always, thank you for reading and commenting. Have a lovely day.