Let’s get into the Jacob’s room!

 “I hate to hear you talk about all women as if they were fine ladies instead of rational creatures. None of us want to be in calm waters all our lives.”
― Jane Austen

This quote of Jane Austen is relevant here. The women in this novel never wanted to remain in calm waters. They are so many. And the poor fellow is just one. But this fellow, Jacob, remained calm and serene. Did he remain calm because life foisted on him such complexity of human relations one after other? Or did he remain calm just from outside, because from inside, there was seething a volcano of emotions in him? By the time I wanted this fact to reveal itself to me, the novel was already finished!

Women play an important role in the life of a lonely man. Lonely not in the worldly sense, but rather in the cognitive sense. A disconcerting young man, who is cognitively alone and keep wandering from one place to another when he grew to adulthood, and he is interested in atavistic and ancients. The Greeks, Museums, antiques, travel, and complex relations are the part of his life; He is serene both at the center and at the peripheral.

What will happen if, he is liked by so many women, they wish to take things further, yet this disinclined fellow, slumbers every time and gets his head down to all of them. What can be more than this to this poor fellow that after turning-down so many women, he gets his emotional comfort with a woman who is already married, but due to her marital status he again succumbs to an undesired affliction of a failed relationship?

Jacob Flanders is his full name and we are talking about his room. What is in the room? How big is the room and who else can adjust with him in his room?

“The worn voices of the clocks repeated the fact of the hour all night long. Jacob, too, heard them, and raked out the fire. He rose. He stretched himself. He went to bed.”

JACOB’S ROOM

He was unique, even in his childhood, once his mother Betty Flanders who was a widow, with her little boys, found him sleeping with a skull of a dead animal. He was good in studies and grew up studying in Cambridge and made friends there. And the story completely hovers around Jacob and his relationships, in many parts of the world, in fact, a story that neither started nor ended. He travels from London to Greece, and so on.

“ Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old greek men were sitting across the stations, sipping sweet wine. And though Jacob remained gloomy he never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone; out of England; on one’s own, cut off from the whole thing.”

JACOB’S ROOM

Now I will try to channelize my thought after reading the novel.

In the beginning, a lady named Betty Flanders is writing a letter with teary eyes to some Captain Barfoot who is seven hundred miles away from her place. Her small boys Archer and Jacob are playing in the sand at a bay, the entire bay is quivering and the lighthouse is wobbling in the background, the light is simmering. The natural portrayal and emotional pitch of the prose hooked me at once. The line of the plot systematically develops and it was only the third chapter that I was already getting mesmerized with the prose of Virginia; She is too much poetic, sometimes elegiac, sometimes sanguine!

But I lost interest in the plot, and for many next chapters, I read it half-heartedly and found nothing happening,  It was prose and its complexity and its poetic metaphors, I was trying to comprehend, at times I was only praising this woman writer in my head and subtlety of the behavior of characters. But then entered the traveling phase of Jacob, and I also got back to the plot in an exhilarating mode, and from there onwards, I thoroughly enjoyed both prose and plot.

I will remember the book for the magical writing of Virginia, It was only her third book. I could see again the depth of her narrative. Kudos to her non-literal and figurative style of presenting her case! Last year I was reading her short stories and I can see how amazing is her range in the plane of perception and psychics.

I noticed that I began this review with a thought from a woman writer, talked about so many women in a book which is written by another woman writer, so I should finish the review with a quote from one more woman writer.

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath

Now the most beguiling coincidence that I wish to declare in the end is that the next book I am reading has the title WOMEN!

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