I suspect you have been going through my parents' bookshelves recently - your choices are all things I didn't read as a teenager (except the Egg & I which I read as a child)... but I find myself wondering about men's capacity to write about women's "sexual awakening" (Grand Days); as a writer I wouldn't dare to write about a young man's sexual awakening... oh hell, that's not entirely true - perhaps I am being unreasonable... I suppose men can imagine that, it's a big argument, and it's too late to enter it tonight.
As far as the choice of titles is concerned, I was recently back in the UK for a fortnight and the local second-hand bookshop had a few boxes of old Penguins on display and I just grabbed a handful, almost at random.
The Frank Moorhouse book is interesting: I haven't read anything else by him, and I really enjoyed it. I don't feel that the occasionally-valid argument that a man can't write about important stages in a woman's development (or vice-versa) really applies here: it's much more a novel about an institution, and the use of a female main character is designed to give us a protagonist who doesn't have a sense of privilege and who needs to be active in a male-dominated world in order to make her mark. What I mean is, a novel about a male under-secretary in the League of Nations would describe someone with a much easier, and smoother, career path, which would be less dramatically interesting. I'm certainly going to look for the sequel.
By Peter De Vries (1910-1993). More about him here.
2 comments:
I suspect you have been going through my parents' bookshelves recently - your choices are all things I didn't read as a teenager (except the Egg & I which I read as a child)... but I find myself wondering about men's capacity to write about women's "sexual awakening" (Grand Days); as a writer I wouldn't dare to write about a young man's sexual awakening... oh hell, that's not entirely true - perhaps I am being unreasonable... I suppose men can imagine that, it's a big argument, and it's too late to enter it tonight.
As far as the choice of titles is concerned, I was recently back in the UK for a fortnight and the local second-hand bookshop had a few boxes of old Penguins on display and I just grabbed a handful, almost at random.
The Frank Moorhouse book is interesting: I haven't read anything else by him, and I really enjoyed it. I don't feel that the occasionally-valid argument that a man can't write about important stages in a woman's development (or vice-versa) really applies here: it's much more a novel about an institution, and the use of a female main character is designed to give us a protagonist who doesn't have a sense of privilege and who needs to be active in a male-dominated world in order to make her mark. What I mean is, a novel about a male under-secretary in the League of Nations would describe someone with a much easier, and smoother, career path, which would be less dramatically interesting. I'm certainly going to look for the sequel.
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