The excellent new film Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska in the title role, is one of more than a dozen cinematic versions of the classic novel by Charlotte Bronte. That’s a lot of visual interpretation, and the great Gothic romance has been the subject of much more literary criticism. But perhaps no treatment of the old story has shone as much light on its origins as has another novel, Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre.
     The joy of reading Becoming Jane Eyre runs much deeper than the simple game of discovering to what degree the novel’s events and characters are thinly disguised recreations from Charlotte’s brief life. Rather, Kohler’s genius lies in the illuminating way in which she imagines Charlotte using her considerable skills to make art out of her many disappointments. Tim O’Brien has written that stories come from the place where memory and imagination converge. Kohler vividly depicts Charlotte discovering that place, and in so doing she puts the creative process at the center of the action.
     Charlotte herself states the central theme of Kohler’s book, late in the story, when Jane Eyre has become an instant bestseller and its author the toast of London literary society. “People want to find out who she really is,” thinks Charlotte. “What they really want to know is whether she has written her own story into her novel; how much of it is true? How could she answer such a question? She doesn’t know the answer herself.”

    While on Christmas vacation I read The Stone Raft, my first encounter with the unusual style of Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. The stone raft of the title refers to the Iberian peninsula, which is set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean after the Pyrenees mountains split down the middle. The novel focuses on a journey across Iberia taken by five people, all of whom have had experiences that, like the sudden crackup of the Pyrenees, defy the laws of the physical universe.
    More intriguing to me, however, than this fantastic plot is the style in which Saramago writes. He pays little heed to the conventions of usage and punctuation, and the run-on sentence structure he employs takes some getting used to. But his ideas, imagery, and affection for his characters were all very attractive to me. Here's just one example of his style, a sentence I particularly like ("Deux Chevaux" is the Citroen car in which the characters travel):
   "And what I'd like to know is what moves inside us and where does it go, no, I'm not talking about worms, microbes, bacteria, those living creatures that inhabit us, I'm referring to something else, something that moves and perhaps moves us at the same time, just as constellation, galaxy, solar system, sun, earth, sea, peninsula, and Deux Chevaux move and move us with them, what is the name, finally, of the thing that moves all the rest, from one end of the chain to the other, or perhaps there is no chain and the universe is a ring at once so thin that apparently only we and what is inside us fit into it and so thick that it can accommodate the maximum dimension of the universe, which is the ring itself, what is the name of what follows after us."
   Wow.