Alright. I broke down and read a "picaresque" from the list. But it was more for nostalgia than a commitment to this evasive genre. I read the short, originally serialized, A Rogue's Life by Wilkie Collins. Know I read The Moonstone in college and think maybe The Woman in White. Basically picked up Moonstone to supplement my planned thesis on Dickens and found Collins a pleasant diversion, falling as he did into my preference for murder mysteries.
And once again, despite the name, this novella is not picaresque. Frank Softly, the would-be rogue, is the black sheep of a minor noble family in England, who cannot find his professional niche in life. The book reminds me of Theophilus North, but Softly is not as self-determining as North is. Softly is lured into careers that are criminal: forging masterpieces and eventually becoming a counterfeiter or "coiner." This last occupation is the result of prowling around the house of his "beloved" Alicia and being caught by her rogue father.
Stacked up against my characteristic elements of the genre, A Rogue's Life fails: Softly has no side-kick; does not innocently pursue an ideal (his ardor for Alicia does not qualify as a quest for an eternal love); he has no enlightenment at the book's conclusion; his "near-escape" is limited to walking away from detectives after Dr Dulcifer drops through the trap door, a much more colorful evasion. Besides all that, the ending is too contrived -- becoming a wealthy landowner in Australia where he had been banished to in lieu of the gallows.
Written in 1855, the book predates Wilkie's descent into opium, but the most quotable sentence from the story hints at the author's own proclivities to antisocial behaviors: "... it takes so little, after all, to represent the abstract principle of propriety in the short-sighted eye of the world."
The best thing I got out of the book was a wonderful list of other famous authors' books published by Hesperus Press. Sort of like the year when I read nothing but minor works of major French authors. Here are some I'm going to track down:
The School of Whoredom and The Secret Life of Nuns both by Pietro Aretino
Love and Friendship by Jane Austen
On Wine and Hashish by Charles Baudelaire
The Fatal Eggs and Heart of a Dog both by Mikhail Bulgakov -- (HoaD) August 15, 2010 and (TFE) August 19, 2010
The Story of Nobody by Anton Chekhov
The Book of Virgins by Gabriele D'Annunzio
A House to Let by Charles Dickens (come on, at this point I never heard of any of these titles) -- August 4, 2010
One Thousand and One Ghosts by Alexandre Dumas -- August 20, 2010
The Popular Girl by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Memoirs of a Madman by Gustave Flaubert
The Last Day of a Condemned Man by Victor Hugo -- August 30, 2010
Words are Stones by Carlo Levi
A Journey Around My Room by Xavier de Maistre
The Way of Kings by Andre Malraux
My Secret Book by Francis Petrarch
Loveless Love by Luigi Pirandello -- August 3, 2010
Gargantua by Francois Rabelais
Memoirs of an Egotist by Stendhal
The Diary of Adam and Eve by Mark Twain
Monday or Tuesday by Virginia Woolf
For a Night of Love by Emile Zola -- August 3, 2010
OK Slackers: anyone read any of these?
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