Voices: Grappling with Jane Austen

I had never read a Jane Austen book until the summer before my freshman year of college. For years I had neglected to pick up this chick lit favorite, with no good excuse. I had nothing against Jane Austen. I even liked the Pride and Prejudice movie that had come out two years earlier. Yet I had some strange, unexplainable wariness towards her books.

At my good friend’s insistence, I finally gave Austen a go. I wanted a story I didn’t know, so I chose Sense and Sensibility. I had just torn through Chuck Klosterman's Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs and Kurt Vonnegut's Timequake, and expected a quick turnover rate here, too.

Talk about a quagmire.

I suffered through Sense and Sensibility for weeks. I knew ahead of time to expect predictable, simple plots, but I didn’t expect such verbose and boring lag time between the actual moments of drama. There were maybe three or four major plot twists, and they came a mile away. In between, I was left with an uninteresting story that dropped endless hints to the same twists I knew from the start. What of Austen’s wit I had heard so much about? She had her moments, but there was no steady beacon of humor guiding me through this tortuous reading experience.

Since that first Austen encounter, I’ve also read Emma and Persuasion. I enjoyed those more, but still don’t get the hype. I think my problem with Austen comes down to this: she has good stories but isn’t a spectacular writer. Getting to the ending where they all rise the social ladder and live happily ever after is far more tiresome than it needs to be. It also explains why Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility is the only movie adaptation I've liked more than the original book. Details and description are great, but they have to engage the reader. For me Austen, fails in that regard.

Maybe I'm being unfair. I have yet to tackle Austen's masterpiece, Pride and Prejudice, after all. But based on what I've read so far, I think I'll stick with Seth Grahame-Smith's brilliant mash-up Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.


Photo: Saucy Salad

Lifestyle Gumbo: Five Fantastic Book References in Movies

We all know the great debt movies owe to literature – they borrow archetypes, plot devices and sometimes even the entire story. So it’s always nice to see films give shout-outs to authors and books. Join us in saluting the following five movies with awesome literary references.


Pleasantville
Teen siblings David and Jennifer have a lot to adjust to when they’re transported to ‘50s Pleasantville. There’s a ton of repression and censorship in the seemingly perfect town, which extends to the local library. David helps liberate the other high schoolers by reading them two of the most widely banned books, J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.


Little Miss Sunshine
In what is arguably one of the movie’s funniest scenes, Frank asks Dwayne why he doesn’t talk. Dwayne simply points to a drawing on his wall. “Who is that? Nietzsche? So you stopped talking because of Friedrich Nietzsche?” We never get an answer. Frank, meanwhile, prides himself on being the highest regarded Proust scholar in the U.S.


Stranger Than Fiction
When Harold Crick seeks answers from Dr. Jules Hilbert on the mysterious female voice narrating his life, he gets some unexpected questions. Are you the king of anything? On a scale of one to ten, what would you consider the likelihood you might be assassinated? Just as Harold gets fed up, his mentor reveals that he has determined Harold is not “King Hamlet, Scout Finch, Frankenstein’s Monster or a golem.” What a relief.


(500) Days of Summer
Soon after meeting Summer, Tom gushes to his sister that they talked about Bananafish – presumably J.D. Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” – for 20 minutes. (Fun fact: Zooey Deschanel, who plays Summer, was named after another Salinger character, Zooey Glass.) But the mentions don’t stop there. Summer later tells Tom that she was reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray in a deli when SPOILER she met her husband.


Almost Famous
This 2000 ode to ‘70s rock n roll boasts a surprising amount of book shout-outs. Our trepid journalist William Miller wants to be Atticus Finch (of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird) when he’s younger. Rock star Russell Hammond, while high, warns his fellow partygoers that “in eleven years, it’s going to be 1984, man.” Finally, William’s Rolling Stone editor tells him to quit partying, as they’ve already got “one Hunter Thompson!”


Honorable Mentions:

The Savages
“We don’t have to go after him, Wendy. We’re not in a Sam Shepard play,” Jon Savage tell his sister.

Brick
“You read Tolkien?” drug dealer The Pin asks would-be detective Brendan. “You know, the Hobbit books?” Brendan looks at him quizzically before saying yes. “His descriptions of things are really good. He makes you wanna be there,” The Pin says. End (absurd) conversation.