Bonsoir!
To everyone who is doing their taxes right now, commiserations etc. I’ve done mine after being harassed day and night by HMRC and I feel like I’ve sustained a significant injury to my head but I have survived. You will too!
What I’ve been reading and what I think about it
I haven’t been reading a huge amount this week for various reasons, but I did start Joyce Carol Oates’ Blonde (1999) and am about 150 pages in. Blonde is a fictionalisation of Marilyn Monroe’s life, mainly told in the third person but sometimes slipping into the first. Despite its hefty size (just over 700 pages) with the smallest font known to man, I am racing through it — if I was reading a normal amount I would be more than half way through I think. The writing flows extremely well so it doesn’t feel like a dense book, which I do think slows the reading of longer texts down. If you know you have hundreds of pages to go and the writing isn’t extremely well crafted, it can be a slog, but this is the opposite.
This is the first novel I’ve read by Oates. Usually when I read something I really like by an established author I’m like ‘why am I only now picking something up by them???’ but in this specific case I know exactly why I haven’t read anything by her before. She is so strange on Twitter. Remember the picture of her injured foot? If you’re not aware of the picture of her injured foot, don’t google it if you’ve recently eaten.
Anyway, I felt compelled to pick up Blonde because I love reading about classic cinema and the people involved in it, and also because I will probably watch the film adaption at some point. There was a lot of talk surrounding it during its release and it was largely received negatively, but I’m always interested in book-to-screen adaptions of novels that don’t seem like they’d work on the big screen. From what I knew about Blonde is that it takes some liberties with Marilyn Monroe’s life story, and is quite artistic in its interpretation. From what I’ve read about it, the film also goes in this direction. That would normally be fine if there wasn’t a real person’s life at the centre of it, especially someone who is so beloved and who faced a lot of hardship, abuse and hurt. Artistic interpretations of artistic texts have a different slant on them when biography is involved.
Film controversy aside, I’m having a great time with the book. Despite its inventiveness, you can tell that Oates did an almost mind-bending amount of research into Monroe’s life. Something I find interesting is her dissection of the over-sexualisation and the voyeurism that Monroe was a victim of since her childhood, despite this being an implicitly voyeuristic text. It assumes feelings, as any fictionalisation does, but this is alongside a heavy-handed criticism of everybody else’s interpretations of Norma Jean. This is probably an unavoidable aspect of any discussion of Marilyn Monroe that first and foremost considers her as a person and not a cultural entity, really.
Aside from Blonde I’ve been dipping in and out of Richard B. Jewell’s The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood 1929 - 1945 (2007), courtesy of my university library. It’s a really great guide to the early years of American cinema, as well Hollywood’s culture and the wider context that these films were being received in. Something I found really surprising was how the American public mostly had an isolationist mentality before the bombing of Pearl Harbour. Before this direct attack, it was unpopular to think that the US should get involved in foreign wars, and films that were either overtly pro-war or anti-fascist weren’t received well. After Pearl Harbour, however, this all changed, with Hollywood becoming an arm of the war effort. It’s strange to think how America’s joining of the allied forces has probably shaped a lot its twentieth-century mentality towards world events, and how that could have been different if they weren’t bombed. A lot of the stuff in Jewell’s book has been helpful for Blonde, as Monroe was a teenager at the onset of America’s involvement in WWII, so her relationships with boys and men had the shadow of military service over them.
Lmao it’s so true tho. She is like really strange on Twitter!!