This one is short but sweet and very quick to read. I understand that lots of American readers were 'forced' to read it at school and therefore groan when they hear the title, but I was in an English school and I do not remember a single American author being allowed onto our English literature syllabus at that time. I hope things have changed since.

So everything Edith Wharton is new to me and I like some, including Ethan Frome and Summer and am not so keen on others, including The Age of Innocence.

The author's greatest skill was her poetic writing which provides the reader with descriptions which make you feel the cold when it snows and suffer the hardships and longings of the characters. Ethan Frome's love affair with Mattie appears to be doomed from the start but it is beautifully portrayed. The ending is not exactly what is expected from the course of the story but I guess it is what we could expect from this clever author.

So another classic knocked off my lengthy list and I enjoyed it a lot!

In high school, I was in a literature class where small groups of three students chose from a list of books to discuss in a mini-seminar with the teacher. We almost always chose the shorter books, because lazy kids: Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, and so on. Ethan Frome mustn't have been on the list, or we'd surely have chosen it at some point. :D It wasn't until now that I read it.

Ethan Frome was most striking for me for its beautiful winter landscapes: a world of snow and sleet, where more accumulation is always around the corner, and spring is on its way... for nature. For Zeena and Ethan, warmth and bloom are something of the past, and spring is cut off entirely at the end of the book when Mattie is injured.

Elaine Showalter's introduction to the Oxford World Classics edition of this short novel was helpful in framing the story this way. She connects its writing and publication in time with other New England women's writing, and also with Gothic narratives and their underlying metaphors for feminine sexuality and fertility.

Unfortunately, despite her efforts, I didn't quite manage to squeeze out any sympathy for these characters, despite my typically being a tenderhearted reader. Mattie is pretty and energetic, Zeena is pinched and neurotic, and Ethan's kind of a creep, to be honest, and they don't go beyond that. They're mechanisms moving toward their own tragedy, and that mechanism is well-constructed, but as characters they aren't very engaging. The background they act against, the farmhouse and mill and even their horses, was much more absorbing than they were.

Maybe I'd have responded better to this in high school? Hard to say. In the end, the climactic tragedy felt mildly absurd (a sledding accident double suicide? really? considering that it never stops snowing around there, "exposure" would have been a perfectly viable option), and the unrelenting feeling of sterility and oppression made it tough to struggle through, even at its very short length.

I haven't given up on Wharton from this one story that didn't quite work for me. Maybe one of her "high society" books will be more to my liking?

spoilers?? what spoilers??

i have changed my stance on the cover. a) initially, i thought that it was showing an altogether different type of activity, and then b) when ariel called it a spoiler, i reinterpreted it to something else and was still wrong, and then c) everything that may potentially be spoiled is pretty much spelled out in the first ten pages. so is that a spoiler, or is that foreshadowing??

tomato, potato...

what is so excellent about this book is that it is not at all a depressing book while you are reading it - it is an intensely hopeful book. but then - gutpunch!! the depressing bits happen offscreen, after all the meat of the story has been ... digested?? this metaphor is escaping me... but in the lacuna between when the story ends and the nosy new kid-narrator in town comes on the scene. (such a fantastic new-england type character - "hi, i just moved in, tell me all your neighbor's secrets!!") the tragic bits are in imagining what these characters went through between point a and point b. so shivery-horrible! and that kind of story is right up my alley. great description, great pacing - simple story, but haunting and devastating longing. and aftermath. i love aftermath.

i liked this much more than summer, and i may read more wharton based on the strength of this one.

hmmm... who could i find to advise me....???

come to my blog!

Well, that was bleak...

Será um lugar comum dizer que este livro
— é uma obra-prima;
— é uma preciosidade;
— é um aglomerado de emoções;
— é de leitura imprescindível;
— que adorei;
— que li sofregamente;
— que me fez soluçar de tristeza;
— que é uma história de amor bela e trágica;
— que a solidão de alma, a gratidão extrema, o ciúme, o amor, o dever, podem condenar um ser humano à morte em vida.

Tudo o que eu possa dizer sobre Ethan Frome será sempre um lugar comum. Nada em Ethan Frome o é.

"Frome era, ainda nesse tempo, a figura mais imponente de Starkfield, embora não passasse de um destroço humano. Havia no seu rosto um não sei quê de deserto inacessível; ao vê-lo tão inteiriçado e grisalho pensei que já fosse velho, e espantou-me ouvir dizer que tinha só cinquenta e dois anos."

Kažkada mano santykis su klasika buvo labai bičiuliškas, visgi su metais jaučiu kad atskirtis gilėja. Pasiklystu sakinių struktūros labirintuose, pametant mintį ir sakinio grožį, bei erzina kūrinių herojų neveiksnumas, arba veiksnumas panaudojus kraštutinumo priemonės- kuo toliau, tuo labiau alergizuoja.
Džiaugiuosi tuomet įsileisdama trumpus, jaukius, skausmingus išgyvenimus, kurie atneša kitokios spalvos, bet tuo pačiu ir neužsibūna...

Ethan Frome aparenta una edad mucho mayor de la que tiene y mira alrededor con una tristeza infinita. Todo ello tiene una explicación en su pasado, cuando él y su mujer Zeena, delicada de salud, vivían circunstancialmente acogiendo en casa a la prima de ella, Mattie Silver.

Un libro que se despliega suave en torno al secreto del pasado del señor Frome. Al principio, sabemos del hombre casado que está hasta cierto punto harto del matrimonio con la exigente y quejumbrosa Zeena, y que la llegada de la prima Mattie parece cambiarlo todo para él, pero de una forma que también le afecta sentimentalmente. Sin grandes ambiciones, el relato se desarrolla deliciosamente entre gestos inconclusos y palabras que cuesta decir, hasta concluir en una sorpresa.

This book is a good one to read if you live with someone who has also read it. This way, any time there is a lull in the conversation you can talk about how depressing it is. Conversations between me and my roommate often go something like this:

"You know what I was just thinking about? Ethan Frome."
"GOD. That book is so depressing."
"I know, right."

The book is not only enjoyable, but also a great conversation piece. Do not read it if you cannot stand unhappy endings.

* Spoilers follow*
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This is a romantic tragedy that culminates in a sledding accident. I will just say a few brief words about that. First, there is probably a reason that sledding accidents don't figure more prominently in tragedies. Shakespeare wrote like 13 tragedies and to the best of my knowledge none featured a sledding accident (I have not read Titus Andronicus, so I can't be sure). If Shakespeare doesn't need to include a sled wreck, then neither do you.

I will also say that I found Ethan and Mattie's attempted double suicide by sledding a little hard to take seriously. I mean, there are probably dozens of reasons that serious people don't rank sled-tree collisions on their Top 5 List of preferred suicide methods, but certainly the fact that adult doubles sledding is inherently ridiculous is one. Another that springs to mind is the unreliability of trying to kill yourself by sledding into a tree. Ethan ends up breaking his legs and paralyzing Mattie, which is pretty much the best you can realistically hope to do if you sled into a tree.

Really, I find it remarkable that Edith Wharton's reputation survived Ethan Frome and his sled antics. It makes me want to read House of Mirth, because it must be REALLY REALLY good.

As a side note, this is *exactly* the kind of ridiculous melodramatic bullshit I always had to read in high school. Teachers getting all worked up about the symbolism of the New England winter and failing to understand why 16-year-olds don't respond to the tragedy of star-crossed lovers doubling each other into a tree on a sled. Please.

Tão infinitamente triste...

NOTA - 09/10

La vita è fatta di occasioni e opportunità che spesso giungono una volta sola e che, se non colte, difficilmente si ripresenteranno. Un amore appassionato, sbocciato per caso, squisitamente pervasivo è il protagonista di questa storia. Ma lo è anche il profondo contrasto interiore indotto dalle convenzioni sociali e dal timore di pregiudizi infondati. Un atto d'accusa assai profondo, che induce ognuno di noi a riflettere sulla necessità di scoprire ed essere davvero a se stesso per poter raggiungere quella felicità che altrimenti andrebbe perduta.

Se ci si ferma ad una prima analisi fredda e razionale, questo racconto lungo (o romanzo breve) non è esente da imperfezioni: il finale è parzialmente telefonato, alcuni dettagli della trama sono un po' ingenui e qualche scambio di battute tra i protagonisti risulta un po' goffo.

Ma se si fa un solo passo in più, impossibile non percepire il minuzioso lavoro di cesellatura svolto dall'autrice, impossibile non percepire la profondità emotiva della storia, altro che sturm und drang. Personalmente l'ho trovato superiore a Cime tempestose cui l'ho visto paragonato in più di una recensione: più diretto eppure più elegante. E' come un merletto di Burano: si può dire "non è il mio genere", si può dire "non sta bene nel mio salotto", ma non si può non riconoscerne il valore.

A ben vedere non è nemmeno una storia romantica: è la storia di una sorta di maleficio o maledizione, è quasi parente del poema sinfonico Una notte sul monte calvo, perché sotto i panni di una donna malata e precocemente invecchiata si cela la cattiveria fatta persona, una vera e propria strega. E sotto la maledizione e la stregoneria si cela una verità ancora più cupa e profonda: la persone sofferenti nel corpo o nello spirito (o in tutt'e due), inacidiscono e incattiviscono ed esigono vendetta al cospetto del mondo intero.

La grande quantità di neve, dal punto di vista razionale, ha una spiegazione assai semplice: l'azione principale si svolge in pieno inverno. Ma per quanto riguarda l'aspetto emozionale sommergerà il lettore ben più del necessario, al punto da farlo sentire coinvolto e avvolto dal freddo siderale anche se l'atto della lettura avviene, come nel mio caso, sotto il sole particolarmente brillante e tiepido dei primi di ottobre.

Classico gioiellino scoperto per caso, a ben vedere fa il paio anche con Casa d'altri di Silvio D'Arzo. Quattro stelle convinte.