This book was not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected. I was sure going into it that it would be different from the Disney portrayal of the character. I had heard that it was darker than the Disney or modern portrayals, but even with that in view, this book was different than I was able to anticipate. I loved this book, plainly and taking into account the full view of history that surrounds it. I wept at the end. I have cried often at the end of books.
Books That Have Moved Me Deeply
Frankenstein – I could not stop thinking about for days afterward. I loved that book deeply and truly in a way that I have not loved often in my life.
Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – this book got to me. I hated it, really did not enjoy quite a lot of this book, but ultimately it got to me. The scene with his mother in the end just hit me right in the heart.
W. Somerset Maugham – Of Human Bondage – Not even at the end of the novel, but elements of this book resonate with me still. Early on, a young woman who becomes obsessed with Philip Carey commits suicide and he doesn’t react very much to her or her death or when her brother comes to Paris to find her. It is one of the strangest scenes in fiction I think.
Andrew Sean Greer – Less – I got misty-eyed at a moment near the middle end of that text where the main character and the wife of his former partner reunite in a way that is very well orchestrated. I got to tell Greer this over a tweet and I am glad that I was able to do that.
Marilynne Robinson – Housekeeping – There are several moments that I reflect on over the course of this project from this book.
The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyong – The scene near the end of the book that deals directly with Prince Sado’s death is one of the most disturbing and visceral scenes I have ever read it. It is remarkable that this is not a more well known story in the West. It was so vivid, real, and truly affecting.
Willa Cather – My Antonia – I wept, like audibly sobbed, just before the very end of this book. I had to put the book down and finish the last 10 pages later. I just had a good solid cry after finishing that book.
Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace – I don’t think I cried during this text but there were several times that I had to press pause on the audio book to really consider what was going on. The poker scene between Dolokhov and Nicholai was one, and obviously the scene where Andrei is dying and Natasha comes to his aid was very affecting.
Aldous Huxley – Brave New World – the scene where the Savage has to recount his life with his mother as a stranger in a strange land and his being a part of the strange land and not understanding why his mother was so foreign even to himself was a very difficult scene to process.
Ki No Tsurayuki – Tosa Diary and Poetry – There is a moment in the Tosa Diary that stopped me in my tracks. Tsurayuki finds out that his daughter has already died before he gets back to her on his voyage. It is very sad. There are some of his poems that really got to me as well especially those about losing a loved one, there is one about the scent of a tree that a friend planted and then passed away.
The whole “Initiate’s Book” of The Tale of the Heike was a deeply affecting tale of Queen Keiremon-in’s last days. I read her retelling of the death of her son, the emperor, and Lady Nii to my mom and my wife. It is very beautiful and very sad.
Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons – While I didn’t cry during this reading, I was deeply moved to the point of anger or wistfulness at moments that I was surprised by.
I wept at the end of Peter Pan in a way that I was sort of concerned for myself because of. I had to finish the last 10 or so pages like a person possessed. I finished them in a sort of feverish way, and then put the book down and sobbed. I sort of collected myself after a moment, and then I had to go to the store for some things for dinner and then started sobbing again in the car. This book moved me in a profound way, and a certain point I felt like an old fool weeping over the deeply sad ending a presumably children’s book.
It’s not a children’s book I don’t think. I am not sure what the critical reception to this book is was or is. I don’t do a ton of research on these texts. I want to speak for themselves. I want to confront them on their own terms, and to interact with the mind that produced them in a way that is an honest appraisal. Are they really classic works that any old reader can just walk up to and read and enjoy?
Apparently, this book is not as old as I thought it was. I thought that this book would be from the middle of the 19thcentury, but it is from the early 1910’s. Nevertheless, the setting seems to favor an older time though it is not clear when the top story is set. I am not sure how terribly different the life of a Londoner would be from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s but I could be mistaken here.
The beginning of this book sets a very strange tone for the rest of the book that I think is maintained. The whole business with the dog being the nanny was very confusing to me as I listened to it because it is not clear how satirical this tone is. If it is satirical then do they actually have a nurse that is not the dog, or if it is meant to be taken literally (in the story) then how connected to reality is the top world that Neverland would be so far away from it. It is unclear.
The whole thing strikes me as analog or a way to talk about the English boarding school system where the younger boys would have been shuffled off to a boarding school near the age they reach at the start of the novel. I am not as familiar with what Wendy’s life would have been like at this time, but she would have functioned as something of a little mother to the younger boys in their mother’s stead. I am more familiar with what might have happened to Michael and John because I read Tom Brown’s Schooldays earlier this year.
Here is how I see this formula playing out, to the English upper class parent during this period, the children do sort of go away young children and return to you as adults. They spent a great deal of time away from their parents from Kindergarten aged kids to 18 year olds. They would come home for Christmas and long breaks but the day to day parentage of the children was left to these boarding schools for children of a certain class. You sort of blink and then they are full grown adults. For the children though as well, these experiences are all sort awash together that you enter this system just after being too young to know any better and then you are encapsulated in this liminal sort of space where everyone is a child and the only adults are ruthless task masters (like Pirates here) and then you blink and you are an adult and sort of back thrown to the wolves of the ‘real world’.
This may be a terrible misreading of this way of life and as I am not an expect in this field, I apologize if I have mischaracterized this experience, but it strikes me that the book is a tale told about childhood and its transitions to adolescence and eventually adulthood but for a certain class of which it seems at the beginning of the novel that Wendy and her brothers do not have access to, the upper class boarding school tradition. Because they don’t have access to it, there is this fictional, fairy like experience that in essence does the same thing. The kids disappear from the parents for a prolonged period of time and return all grown up, or that is how it should be and Peter Pan returns to Wendy at the end of the book and never grows up and there is something deeply sad and sort of unnerving about that.
This ending, my friends, let me tell you something about this ending. I may be the biggest sucker in the world, maybe, but I was deeply unsettled by the ending of that book. I was not familiar with this ending for some reason. Maybe I have never watched Peter Pan all the way through or this ending isn’t in the Disney movie, but I did not see this coming and I wept like a fool at the end of this book and almost cannot force myself to go on in the project because this ending feels like a giant boulder in the middle of the road that I can’t quite get around. It just sits in my mind like a stone, and I reflect on it often. There is some work I have to do here, but I don’t think this project’s front pages are the best place for it.
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