Chapter 8: Sometimes I love what I do

Like this week. I must admit I have not been my most enthusiastic self since October, when I started my MPhil in Classics at the University of Cambridge. I was very disappointed and upset because I had been looking forward to moving to Cambridge and starting all over again, only to realise that leaving Oxford and starting all over again was pretty much excruciating. It didn’t help to know that I could still be in Oxford, if I’d chosen to. Yet, “two roads diverged in a wood ...” etc. etc.

In short, I was miserable: I missed Oxford more than I had ever missed my home in Italy, I felt more out of place in Cambridge than I have felt anywhere since leaving high school. But on Monday we had a handling session at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which means I got to put on some stylish purple plastic gloves and hold a 4000 years old jar and other seriously old stuff (you can tell my very expensive education is paying off from my use of highly specialised jargon). I had handled such objects before, in the Ashmolean Museum, in Oxford, but I felt the same rush of emotion as I held them in my hands. A jewellery box, a drinking pot - everyday objects that someone picked up, some day long long ago, to choose a pair of earrings, to cheer to their pal at a party ... Something clicked. I remembered why I love what I do; all of the reasons why I had chosen to come here made sense again. Suddenly, I felt blessed and happy to be in Cambridge, and I feel so still.

Apart from this surge of new-found bliss in my academic work, I was also happy to finish reading “The Rules of Magic” by Alice Hoffmann. I was happy to finish it both because I liked it, and I hadn’t had much time to read last week, and because I didn’t, and I wanted to start reading something else (which I did, but that is another story). It is the prequel to “Practical Magic”, also by Alice Hoffman, which I had read and loved around this time last year. Perhaps it was unfair of me to expect more similarities between the two instalments, but I guess that when you write a sequel or a prequel you must be open to the possibility that your readers may feel disappointed by the comparison. There were things that I liked about ”The Rules of Magic”: it’s set in New York between the 60s and the 70s, which of course was such an interesting period for the city, and Hoffman deals well enough with the historical setting. I particularly liked the bits about the Stonewell Inn, but I thought there should be more of that, since she had started going down that road. I also liked some of the magic, in as far as it was the same kind as the one practiced in the previous novel, i.e. witchcraft rather than magic proper, with much left open and the rest rendered in a beautiful hue of magical realism. In “The Rules of Magic”, however, not nearly enough is left open, and the magical realism is often dulled by contrast with “real” magic, an indecisive approach which spoils the effect of both. I was often left with the feeling of having just witnessed an unsuccessful trick by a cheap magician. Which brings me to the characters. I found I largely did not care for any of the Owenses in the novel, which is particularly sad considering that Franny and Jet Owens were supposed to evolve into the aunties, by far my favourite characters from “Practical Magic”. Not only did they not evolve into my beloved version of themselves, or indeed evolve at all, but they and Vincent and April were basically the same character.

I won’t even mention the “curse” or all the nonsense about love. One could argue I knew what was signing down for; yet, I didn’t. I didn’t, because “Practical Magic” dealt with pretty much the same issues - family, love, magic - without being sentimental. On the contrary, it did so with a chilling darkness that sent delightful shivers all down one‘s spine. Was it too much to ask the same from “The Rules of Magic”? Apparently it was, because I did not get it.