the final step in my corruption
Dec. 22nd, 2006 01:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
schemingreader![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cruisedirector and I had a chat a few months ago, in which I asserted that even though I enjoyed fan fiction, I did not like romance novels. Oh no, of course not--just because most fan fic is almost transparently some genre related to romance, that didn't mean I could ever enjoy those awful novels that my mom and sister buy to read on airplanes. But now the nefarious yet utterly delicious
sscrewdriver has induced me with her feminine wiles (not to mention her artistic genius) to read Georgette Heyer. Knowing full well my weakness for historical novels--for Patrick O'Brian, more recently for David Liss, etc. --she told me of the guilty pleasures of Heyer's historical romance novels. Well! And so! Am I some kind of snob that I can read historical novels that are murder mysteries and historical novels that are sea stories but not historical novels that just happen to feature a plucky, innocent and intrepid heroine who is transformed into a beauty by fashionable clothing?
Of course I recognized full well the debt that Heyer owed to Fanny Burney's Evelina and Jane Austen's first book, Northanger Abbey. (Both of which were written at the turn of the 19th century.) Oh yes, all well and good, but I was still out in public snickering audibly into a library book with a little "romance" sticker on the spine--with little red hearts on it.
In all honesty, what is Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, perhaps my all-time favorite novel, but a historical romance? But Seth's book is layered, complex, and really long. Heyer gave me the sense of being in the hands of a master of a genre. There were going to be no slow bits to this, I could tell from the first page--and there weren't.
I'm totally going to read more.
ETA: I am so tired that I wrote "plunky" instead of "plucky", above.
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Date: 2006-12-22 07:05 am (UTC)I've tried reading other authors' Regency novels, but I didn't like them so much at all.
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Date: 2006-12-22 07:53 am (UTC)My favorite Heyer is The Black Sheep, btw.
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Date: 2006-12-22 08:13 am (UTC)But the important question is - did you fall in love with Kitty/Freddie? I so did!
Hmm. I can see the embarassment of reading books with a little 'romance' sticker on the cover. In my experience, it involves holding your thumb over the offending area and it makes the hand ache.
Looksee! I have a new smoochie icon!
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Date: 2006-12-22 08:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-23 03:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-23 10:32 pm (UTC)coals to Newcastlefree books?no subject
Date: 2006-12-23 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-29 09:08 am (UTC)It's not that easy!
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Date: 2006-12-22 08:47 am (UTC)If you're a snob then I'm a chav.
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Date: 2006-12-22 10:29 am (UTC)"These Old Shades" was the first one I read, and I think that would have to be close to my favourite. The sequel's good, too. I also loved "The Grand Sophy". There are so many to choose from!
I just found a link I bookmarked a while ago, all about Georgette Heyer's stories. There are a few links to fan fic there as well. Click here.
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Date: 2006-12-22 01:15 pm (UTC)Romance novels are my comfort reads. (A little too much so, actually - I've gone so far as to put most of my Stephanie Laurens and Nora Roberts in storage, because I was too often losing myself in rereading them. :-/)
And Jo Beverley's Devilish is an all-time favorite because both the hero and heroine are control freaks. My people! *g*
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Date: 2006-12-22 02:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-22 02:49 pm (UTC)The place and time came alive for me, even more so than in Midnight's Children, which is set in the same period. I had loved Midnight's Children, which is I think Salman Rushdie's best book. (No maybe not: Haroun and the Sea of Stories!) But I seem to have outgrown my passion for magical realism.
It might be also that I have a natural sympathy for Seth's metaphors. He's all about music, and so am I.
One of the minor (and most delightful) characters in the novel falls in love with a German diplomat. There are a lot of cute Bengali-meets-German-culture moments in the seventh chapter. I understand that one of Seth's memoirs, Two Lives, which I haven't read yet, is about his great-uncle's marriage to a German Jewish woman. So he was probably familiar with this cultural meeting!
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Date: 2006-12-22 04:13 pm (UTC)I must admit that I bought the book for rather shallow reasons. Vikram Seth is the brother of actor Roshan Seth, whom I like very much.
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Date: 2006-12-22 04:23 pm (UTC)Roshan Seth is wonderful, that's certainly true! I loved his face in Mississippi Masala, do you remember that old movie? When he goes back to Uganda? Wow.
Vikram Seth has written several books that are much shorter than A Suitable Boy. His first novel, The Golden Gate, was written entirely in verse. After A Suitable Boy he wrote a romance novel (!) about a musician, An Equal Music. He's an economist and he speaks Chinese! He's amazing.
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Date: 2006-12-22 04:41 pm (UTC)Yes, I know Mississippi Massala. It's a beautiful film. I first saw him in Gandhi. I liked him so much more as Nehru than I did Ben Kingsley as Gandhi. I also enjoyed My Beautiful Laundrette very much, although his role isn't exactly nice in that film.
I'll stick to A Suitable Boy first. If I like it, I can branch out and read others of Vikram Seth's novels.