Posted by Ross on June 30, 1998 at 01:55:44:
In Reply to: Re: Keep the Aspidistra Flying posted by potnes on June 27, 1998 at 11:14:05:
I have to admit not having gotten around to "C&P" yet. I read "Aspidistra" about four years ago. (How time flies!) I remember identifying closely with the central character -- to a point: low-paying in a second-hand bookshop; a few annoying customers who would interrupt the flow of verse in my head; abandoning a "respectable" position for the life of an artist; the rejection slips rolling in. Fortunately, I haven't yet experienced an afternoon as painful as that spent in the country by the protagonist and his girlfriend. Nor have I had such joyless . (Thank God!) Nor have I sold myself out to "respectability." I suppose things turned out alright, if a little on the "grey" side. Ultimately, though, I remember it being a bleaker book than "1984"! Any insights? (Maybe I should go back and re-read it so that it's fresh in my head.) I recall the penurous Scottish bookseller and the annoying landlady who wouldn't allow tea to be brewed in the rooms -- incidental characters, surely, but memorably etched. I recall the aspidistra itself as emblematic of middle cl complacency. I don't recall any reluctance on the protagonist's part to embrace this lifestyle and to "Keep the Aspidistra Flying." In the end, he just sort of lets go, I guess, after all the frustration and self-denial. He was a bit of a self-centered snot to begin with, though. And he smoked too much! If they made a movie, they could use computers to synthesize the images of John Hurt and Dmitri Shostakovich, digitally drop them a few years, and then they could send this walking liverspot from ad agency to bookshop to flophouse, back to ad agency -- idealism gradually stripped away until there's nothing left but to marry an adoring girlfriend and to get fat working at a successful career. It is only aspiration that mars one's enthusiasm for aspidistras!