mandarine

The context

I have been doing a lot of slate-sorting in preparation of roof works on my third roof. Traditional slates around here are fish-scale-shaped shale (schist?) slabs one inch thick and eight inches to three feet long. The long ones are used near the gutter, and the size decreases as we get nearer the top. This means they have to be sorted according to size.

I have a three planks with small cells of gradual sizes, which I use as a riddle. And one by one, I pick slates from the heap, find the smallest cell in which it fits, and make tidy stacks of matching sizes. This is extremely tedious. The ideal job for listening to audiobooks.

The first audiobook I had been listening to when I started the sorting in January was Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. The second book was Mark Twain’s The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, again a solo work from LibriVox.

The audiobook

The recording was quite unusual, as the voice was particularly monotone and slow, as close to machine-read as a human can imitate. The tone was gramatically perfect, but there was hardly any warmth and emotion anywhere. This was disturbing at first, but then I discovered that I got used to it very easily.

In fact, I found out that this kind of neutral, unobtrusive tone was what came nearest to actually reading the book with my own eyes: what I was hearing was the equivalent of printed text, and I got to put the warmth and the emotion in there myself. This confirmed what I had suspected: for all I know, an audiobook could be read by a machine (if the tone is gramatically correct) or chanted like monks used to read from the Bible, and I would not be put off. This kind of neutral reading is not ‘being read to’: it is reading with one’s ears. The closest image of this process is me reading a book with my ear to the pages.

However, whenever there was dialogue, then the narrator turned from a machine to an actor. The voices, the southern accent, the inimitable negro expressions were so vivid that it proved without a doubt that the narrator’s dull tone for the rest of the text was absolutely intentional.

The story

The story is built around a ‘Prince and Pauper’ frame, with the son of rich Missouri townspeople being switched in his infancy with the snow-white slave son of their snow-white negro servant Roxy. To save her kid from the doom of ‘being sold down the river’, Roxy switches the clothes, and nobody notices the switch. Valet de Chambers (the name of the slave son) becomes Thomas Driscoll and vice-versa. The problem is that the newly promoted Thomas grows to be a complete brat.

The story has many other characters, among which is “Pudd’nhead” Wilson, a passionate collector of fingerprints (guess who’s going to find out about the switched boys?), with a law career completely thwarted by an unfortunate joke he made on the day he arrived in town. Apparently, XIXth-century Missouri townspeople have this sort of zeroth-degree humour that we French and British credit all Americans with (no offense meant). The funny thing about Wilson is that his actual part in the story is almost completely accessory, but Twain managed to make his presence ubiquitous by starting all chapters with a quote from Wilson’s ‘calendar’, a collection of witty aphorisms and such like:

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.

As to the Adjective: when in doubt, strike it out.

The true Southern watermelon is a boon apart, and not to be mentioned with commoner things. It is chief of this world’s luxuries,
king by the grace of God over all the fruits of the earth. When one has tasted it, he knows what the angels eat. It was not a
Southern watermelon that Eve took: we know it because she repented.

It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

The story also has a pair of enigmatic Italian twins, which I could not quite ‘locate’. In fact, I understood in Twain’s afterword that they formed part of an initial plot, and were later refactored into secondary characters when the author understood there was not room enough for two stories. This afterword is very interesting: it feels just like a DVD’s ‘deleted scenes’ bonus section. Mark Twain explains his struggles with the manuscript, the story, the characters, and how he untangled the mess by severing the story of the twins off the main story. A great lesson for aspiring writers, I guess.

The author

After Huck Finn, this was my second encounter with Mark Twain, and I must admit I am in total awe. The story is good enough, but the language and the witty criticism of society is so sharp that I cannot help comparing him with Voltaire (and acknowledging Twain’s superiority in the comparison).

I’ll go download some more from LibriVox, to keep me company for the rest of the sorting.

This entry is filed under books, construction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.