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.”

   Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 nearly sixty years ago, but it is as eerily relevant today as the day it came off the press. The dystopian America of Bradbury’s breakthrough novel is a place where floor-to-ceiling televisions blare fake reality shows, where the minimum speed limit is 55 mph, and teenagers get their kicks killing each other. This America is a police state that is forever at war or on the brink of war, including nuclear conflict. It is also, famously, a society in which books have been outlawed, and the job of firemen is to burn not only books but also the houses that conceal them and, sometimes, the inhabitants.
   The plot is well known: a fireman, Guy Montag, is shocked by his wife’s attempted suicide into wondering why a society so preoccupied with instant gratification produces so many murderous, suicidal, and lonely people. He begins to read the few books he has been secretly collecting, stolen from the scenes of the fires he’s started during his ten-year career. He finds an old professor of English, who tries to explain why books are both valuable and dangerous. “Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget,” says Professor Faber. “There is nothing magical in them at all. The magic is only in what books say, how they stitched the patches of the universe together into one garment for us.”
   In a wonderful bit of thematic juxtaposition, the professor tells Montag the same thing his commanding officer, Captain Beatty, tells him: the effort to ban the printed word didn’t originate with a repressive government; it was bottom up, stemming from the public’s desire to ignore difficult information. “Remember, the firemen are rarely necessary. The public stopped reading of its own accord,” explains Faber. “I remember the newspapers dying like huge moths. No one wanted them back. No one missed them. And then the Government, seeing how advantageous it was to have people reading only about passionate lips and the fist in the stomach, circled the situation with your fire-eaters.”

   Have you ever wanted to disappear; to just walk away from work, family and financial obligations, without a word to anybody, without leaving a hint as to where you might  be going? Disappearance, or escape, is a common enough fantasy, perhaps tempting middle-aged men more frequently than anybody else. Such a man succumbs to that temptation in Monsieur Monde Vanishes, a short novel by the prolific Belgian author Georges Simenon (1903-1989).
   Monde’s escape is a simple matter of boarding a train, leaving behind his orderly life in Paris, to push through a long, dark night to the seedy, dangerous port of Marseilles. I’ve long been a fan of Simenon’s sparse but vivid prose. He’s known for his ability to set a scene, to create an atmosphere, and to draw credible characters with a minimum of  exposition. His descriptive skills are impressive. “The rhythm of the train took possession of him. It was like some music with a regular beat, the words for which were provided by scraps of phrases, memories, the passing images that met his eyes, a lonely cottage in the countryside where a stout woman was washing clothes, a stationmaster waving his red flag in a toy station, people passing ceaselessly by him on their way to the toilet, a child crying in the next compartment and one of the soldiers asleep in his corner, his mouth wide open in a ray of sunlight.”
   Simenon is best known for the 70-some-odd mysteries in the Inspector Maigret series, which are entertaining, certainly, but also formulaic. More significant are his noir crime stories, which he called “hard novels.” Monsieur Monde is one of these, full of foreboding, set in a nocturnal Riviera that tourists only see in nightmares, peopled with whores, thieves and junkies. Monde learns to navigate this world, in which nobody can be trusted, as adeptly as he navigated the Paris of a wealthy executive, husband and father. He becomes first the protector and then the companion of Julie, a loose woman with a shady past, and he settles comfortably into a job as assistant manager of the seedy nightclub where she works as a hostess.

    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.