Foreign Perspectives

I’m toying with the idea of doing a degree in english language & literature so I thought I’d have an initial look at some of the books for the first of the literature courses as I’ve already read all but one of the english language books for the degree.

The first of these is Jane Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea which I just finished the other day.

It was written in the 1940’s and it’s set in the Jamaica of 1830 ie just after slavery was abolished and consists essentially of a few incidents that happen to a family in that era from three different viewpoints.

The first thing that’s perhaps most striking to the modern reader is the sheer number of things that are deemed to require footnotes as explanation. Ordinarily that would say to me that this isn’t a book that can stand on its own and indeed it doesn’t because it takes characters from Jane Eyre and develops them more fully. But it isn’t that which hit me. It was that they felt that things such as “mango” needed an explanation yet today they are commonplace items in supermarkets.

It’s also written in quite an antiquated fashion with effectively three “chapters” to the book which itself is quite short (120 odd pages) compared to modern novels. I’m sure that it’s terribly presumptious of me, but I didn’t think that it was terribly well written.

Still, it wasn’t anything like the hard slog that I thought it might have been and I’m well into the next book, Pygmalion, which, so far, isn’t bad either.