Life in the Time of COVID-19: How to Stay Sane in Self-Quarantine

COVID-19. Even for an introvert like me this whole social distancing thing is getting old by now. I miss being around people. Who knew? Here's a few things to help relieve the tedium and to keep from obsessing over the news 24/7. 

Do some writing, maybe a story set in quarantine or involving an epidemic? A writer, much like Doctor Who, can travel in time and space so we're never really locked up. 

Writing not your thing? Luckily there are thousands of ready-made portals into strange lands around. Just jump in! This is the perfect time to read your favourite series, the longer the better. 

What about that classic you've been trying to plough through? I'm FINALLY going to finish In Search of Lost Time. I've been averaging about one book per year so I should be done by now. Why did it take me this long? Funny story, I lost the last volume. (Yeah, I'm aware of the irony.) But now I ordered a new copy so no more excuses, especially since the missing one turned up two weeks afterwards, grrr . . . 

Do some baking, something silly and time consuming. For ideas, check out Deceptive Desserts: A Lady's Guide to Baking Bad by Christine McConnell or the English Heritage site for Victorian recipes straight out of a Dickens novel (with instructional videos). 

Try a video game. Saving the world is quite therapeutic, and you get that sense of being abroad even though you're sitting at home. I've been enjoying the first Witcher game a lot. 

Bummed out about all the spring/summer events getting canceled? Sign up for a virtual sci-fi convention! Worldcon decided not to cancel and went virtual instead. https://conzealand.nz

If all else fails, alcohol. (Just kidding)

What are you doing to keep calm and carry on?

Reading the Classics: If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

Image from Wikipedia 

And now for something completely different! Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, published 1979, is just that, a gloriously, breathlessly bonkers book that makes you smile. You might groan at the term "postmodernist novel"and grumble when you hear that part of the book is written in second person and the novel has an experimental structure, but don't let that put you off; this is a page-turner.

The novel starts in second person, telling you the Reader to put your feet up and start reading. Just when you get comfortable, the book changes on you. Turns out that there's been a mistake at the printer's, and after the opening chapter of Winter's Night, the novel continues as something completely different. And so it goes, over and over, the chapters of book openings alternating with the frame story of the Reader meeting Ludmilla (the Female Reader, I read this in Finnish so I'm not sure how the English translators handled this, Other Reader?). They try to get to the bottom of the mystery, and most importantly, keep reading.

This is the first 2nd person narrative that I've actually enjoyed, but I did get jolted out of the book a few times because the second person narrative assumes that the reader is male. The female Reader is addressed in second person in a short segment, but I didn't really relate to her, either. So there is bit of that indignant "no, I'm not" feel that you get in second person narratives, but it didn't keep me from enjoying the novel. 

The opening chapters that make up half the book are fun in their own right: each one is written in a different style in a different genre, some done better than others. Many of them are so engaging that I actually felt the Reader's frustration. And I love the last Easter Egg revelation of what happens when you read all the chapter titles in one go. 

This is very much a book about reading and writing, and I very much enjoyed reading Calvino's insight on the writer's mind and on why we read. 

As a writer, I think it's important to experience different kinds of books, and this is inventive and unique without being only an intellectual exercise or impossible to read.

 I highly recommend this book if you can handle a bit of surrealism and experimental narratives. If you can get through the first few chapters, you won't have any trouble. And as Calvino points out, it's a short book. 

Reading the Classics: The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe

Hey, I'm back and I've got a new Reading the Classics post for you! At 672 pages The Mysteries of Udolpho by Ann Radcliffe isn't exactly a beach read, but summer's almost over anyway, right? If you've been reading the blog, you probably know I've got a soft spot for Gothic novels, and I've come across references to Udolpho many times in modern and period fiction (most notably Jane Austen's Gothic novel parody Northanger Abbey), so I finally decided to give it a go.

Udolpho tells the story of Emily St. Aubert, a young Frenchwoman who gets orphaned and placed in the care of her unfeeling aunt, Madame Cheron. Emily has fallen in love with Valancourt, who she met while traveling with her father, but her aunt forbids her to marry him. When Madame Cheron marries the unscrupulous Signor Montoni, Emily is forced to leave her home and the man she loves to accompany her aunt to Italy, where Montoni's true character is revealed and the two women are placed in mortal peril.     

Radcliffe's novels were hugely popular in their time, and Udolpho, published in 1794, is widely considered to be her defining work. I was expecting atmospheric passages of description, an intriguing plot, and some element of the supernatural, but most of all I was expecting to be entertained. Unfortunately that didn't happen: I found this book a chore to get through. 

The book is filed under speculative fiction at the library of Turku, but while Radcliffe teases the reader with supernatural happenings, they always get explained away. And the passages of description, while atmospheric, were just too numerous and tedious for the modern reader. The plot could have been intriguing, had the book been about 300 pages shorter, and I also disliked the way Radcliffe tries to create suspense by locking the reader out at key points of the story, like the bit where Emily looks behind the veil at Castle Udolpho and sees something horrible. The revelation comes at the end of the book, but at that point it's quite anticlimactic.

The structure of the book is also a bit weird. The main conflict gets resolved, but the story goes on for hundreds of pages after the fact fuelled by a revelation of Valancourt's misdeeds that make Emily reject his proposal again.  For me this felt a bit forced. I tried to figure out what bothered me about the structure, and I realised that it's the way the love story is handled: Valancourt is absent for most of the book, and as you need obstacles for the whole star-crossed lovers thing to work, something has to get in the way of their happy ending. The problem is that this didn't feel organic or natural to me, perhaps because of a lack of foreshadowing. The introduction of Blanche at the end of the book annoyed me, because at that point I was pretty frustrated with the book and just wanted to finally finish it, especially after Radcliffe tested my patience with that pointless bit where Emily is taken to a cottage and then back to the castle. And don't get me started on the bad poetry Emily writes.

Emily as a character didn't really resonate with me. Mostly it feels like (bad) things just happen to her and she doesn't really do much about it. And boy, does she faint a lot! While it's a good thing that Emily doesn't get rescued by Valancourt, she doesn't exactly get herself out of Castle Udolpho either. Most of the other character feel quite stereotypical, too, but is that because Radcliffe has been widely imitated later?

So, what did I learn as a writer? Radcliffe is great at atmospheric descriptions, and that's something to pay attention to, but too much of a good thing is really too much.

I can't actually recommend this novel to anybody, but if you're interested in the evolution of the novel form and Gothic literature, by all means pick up a copy from the library.

And if you're reading Udolpho as an assignment for class, I've got a little something to make it more bearable. I present to you:

The Castle of Udolpho Drinking Game

The rules: take a sip every time:

- Emily admires the landscape

- Something is described as "melancholy"

- Emily faints

- Montoni does something villainous

- Emily thinks she's going to get attacked by bandits and isn't

- Valancourt gets shot

  

Graveyard Cake for Halloween

Since we're doing some work on the house, I won't be having a Halloween party this year. I didn't want to miss the fun entirely so I made this graveyard cake for game night at a friend's house.

Not bad for a first attempt. It was downright tasteful before I added the pink monsters and the jelly bugs, but more is more, right? The tree, fence and cat I made myself by drizzling dark chocolate on parchment paper with a teaspoon, which was surprisingly easy. Mistakes don't matter too much, because once the chocolate hardens you can just snap off the extra bits. 

Happy Halloween, everybody!

The Carnival of Lights at Linnanmäki and the Amazing Amos Rex

It's that time of the year again when the trees shed their glorious autumn leaves and everything turns grey, dark, and dismal. Fortunately Linnanmäki amusement park had its annual Carnival of Light again this year. We didn't go on any rides this year (because of The Babe), but the cotton candy popcorn and hot chocolate and the gloriously creepy haunted carnival ambiance were enough for me.  Here are a few pics if you missed the festivities.

This was The Babe's favourite. She kept pointing and going "Ka" which is her word for "duck" (ankka in Finnish).

I love this old carousel!

The ferris wheel in the distance

Teacups!

We also visited Amos Rex, the new museum in Helsinki city center. The exhibition by TeamLab, a Tokyo-based interdisciplinary art collective, is just mind-blowing. My favourite was an installation that had a sort of tropical fantasy world that was constantly on the move, and it was interactive, so when you touched the wall, flowers blossomed, and you could create your own fantasy animal that then became part of the installation. The Babe had the best time chasing after them.  It's running until January 6 if anyone wants to check it out. 

Into the Woods

Autumn is my favourite time for enjoying nature: nice, cool weather and minimal bugs, not to mention all the leaves turning gorgeous colours. Here are a few snaps from last week's walk near Porvoo. (The trail leaves near Haikko manor and is only about 2.5 km long if anyone wants to give it a go.)

A beautiful lake

Here's a painting Albert Edelfelt did at the lake

Lingonberry leaves just turning

I'm not sure what this is called in English, but in Finnish it's karhunsammal, bear's moss, because it's a nice, soft place for a bear to take a nap on.

Are you looking at the trees or are they looking at you?

Ferns carpet the forest floor

Ant metropolis

Fairy tree

Do you dare venture off the beaten path?

Book Fair Time!

I made it to the book fair this year, yay!

There was all kinds of weird stuff for sale, like this beautiful book called The Witch Doll and a practical guide to telepathy.

I had a pretty good haul this year: I finally found Howl's Moving Castle in Finnish and a bunch of Roald Dahl books, all of which I'm collecting for when The Tot is old enough to read them. (I also got a mountain of Spot books, because I'm getting sick of reading the two we have, and some Christmas presents.)