43) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 44) Des Aveugles

A couple of people have asked if I managed to read fifty books by the end of December. Just to let you guys know, I'm still doing this blog- I started it in June, not last January, so I've still got six months left! I read the books that I'm blogging about now back in December, so I should be putting up another post soon to get me up to date.

43) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

 This is another book for my course The Girl in the Book. It's a strange book. The Brodie set are children, children who are part of an adult world that they don't understand, led by the intriguing Miss  Brodie. It reminds me of The Go-Between by L.P. Hartley in that the girls, like Leo, are very naive, but are gradually forced to leave that naivety behind by the mature situations in which they find themselves. Unlike some of the other books on the course, where sexuality is quite implicit (eg Alice in Wonderland, Frost in May), this book contains several sexual relationships/ experiences, both concerning the girls and Miss Brodie herself. Mr Lowther and Mr Loyd are the two main male figures among a sea of girls, and they spark a lot of interest (pun completely unintended) in pupils and teacher alike. The strict censure of society is contrasted with Miss Brodie's casual lessons spent lounging outside in the shade of an elm tree, and Miss Jean Brodie seems to be depending on her pupils to keep her young, to keep her in her "prime". She begins living vicariously through them, the question is, is she helping them to live their lives, or forcing them to live her own?


44) Des Aveugles by Hervé Guibert 

I am studying this book for my module Blindness and Vision in French Culture and find it very interesting. I didn't like the first few pages, as I found them very confusing, (I later found this out to be deliberate on Guibert's part; we as readers are supposed to experience disorientation from trying to visually understand the world of blind people), but after that I got into it. There were quite a few words that I didn't know, but these tended not to interfere with my understanding too much. Notably, this is the first book on the course that doesn't make blindness into a big issue; it's not about blindness, it's about Josette, Robert and Taillegueur, and their complicated relationships. Effectively, because all of the characters are blind, none of them are blind; none of them are "different" because of their blindness, and this allows us to focus on their personalities and behaviour, without ocularcentric bias.