wednesday books would like fewer things to be on fire

[landofnowhere]

King Lear, Shakespeare. Read-aloud -- just the first half. I still don't particularly like any of the characters, but it is a well-plotted play and the language is very good. I like the fool's baffling prophecy that ends "This prophecy Merlin shall make, for I live before his time" and would like to see it used transformatively in fiction.

La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, George Sand. Sequel to Consuelo. I'm a bit over halfway through and OMG is this a trip! This starts a year after Consuelo, with Consuelo established as an opera singer in Berlin, which unfortunately she finds rather cold and depressing. The book starts with politics at Frederick the Great's court, where Consuelo quickly fits herself drawn in over her head. (It includes a couple cameos by Voltaire, and also George Sand wants us to know her opinion regarding Frederick the Great & Voltaire breakup. To rephrase her take in AITA terminology, she says that although biographers of her time consider Voltaire to be NTA, really ESH and in some ways Frederick acquitted himself better.) The result of all this intrigue is that Frederick the Great imprisons Consuelo in a tower and then forgets about her. Consuelo spends a few months of mostly-peaceful imprisonment (where she composes music, befriends a robin and the warden's neuroatypical teenage son -- this bit felt like it might have been an influence on Frances Hodgson Burnett), before her escape is arranged by a secret society of people who all wear masks.

At this point I had been getting disappointed that, despite George Sand's unconventional lifestyle, Consuelo is actually pretty conventional in morality -- her strength and purity is tied to her chastity. However! In the course of the daring escape, she wakes up to find herself snuggling with her masked rescuer, kisses him, and instantly falls in love despite never having heard him speak or seen him without his mask.

Since then she's been a guest of the mysterious secret society, trying to figure out WTF is going on while juggling her feelings for the stranger, her respect for her dead husband (to whom she was married for all of two hours before his apparent death), the possibility that he might not actually be dead (at the least he has a doppelganger running around), and her curiosity and desire to join the mysterious secret society (even as I'm going, "no, it's a cult, get out!"). And she may have escaped Frederick the Great, but she certainly hasn't escaped politics. I have no idea if this will stick the landing (so many loose threads) but it's wild!

Comments

[selenak]

Based on the sources available to her mid 19th century, I can totally see how she got to that conclusion (which btw is elegantly phrased), but I have to say, Frédéric ne connaissait ni l'envie ni la haine cracks me up. I mean, this is totally the image he worked for! (And also, she's absolutely right these "little passions" were very much part of Voltaire. More about V in the other comment.) But good lord, did Frederick ever know envy/jealousy and hate. Leaving aside all the complicated family relationships where this is demonstrated a plenty and sticking solely to a Voltairian context, he was ragingly jealous of Émilie du Chatelet for as long as she was alive, having identified her as his main competition for Voltaire, and could be incredibly petty about her because of that. Though decades later, after Voltaire's death, also repentant: Frederick's obituary speech about Voltaire contains a lovely Émilie passage, acknowledging her as a scientist and what she had meant to Voltaire as a person in a way his younger self had not been able to.)