Tips, links and suggestions: what are you reading this week?
Your space to discuss the books you are reading and what you think of them
Welcome to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from last week, where we talk about discovering the sublime poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, revisiting Edna O’Brien’s Country Girls and getting over our Shakespeare/Cervantes anniversary hangover.
Magrat123 finished Helen Garner’s collection of essays Everywhere I Look:
... and I am still getting my breath back. It is no wonder that she has just got the Windham, she is one of our greatest living writers. She can be likened to Clive James, reflecting on her experience of life, the universe and everything, but the resemblance is more apparent than real. James is often too clever by half, and smugly aware of it; his attempts at self-effacement are an often unconvincing attempt to mollify the reader. Garner’s humility is genuine, but so is the self-esteem which she has spent a lifetime painfully building. Everything she writes about – books, films, criminal trials, toddlers, furniture – is considered through her personal experience, and yet there is no sense of overweening ego.
Garner is not a poet, but often her use of language is quite beautiful.
... an author I’ve never read and whose books I rarely see. I expected something solemn, full of gravitas and grandeur. Wow, was I wrong! Tagore’s writing absolutely sparkles, underpinned with a gently mocking, satirical tone. “Amit’s father was a barrister of formidable repute. The fortune he had amassed was sufficient to ensure the moral downfall of the next three generations.” And the translation by Radha Chakravarty is sublime. Where has Tagore been all my life?
Tagore has simply been waiting patiently for you to arrive. No frowning nor watch-tapping. It’s very good stuff. Read it all.
Try The Postmaster, his short stories and combine with a trip to Kolkata or west Bengal.
Last week I was helping a very elderly aunt to move into a (very nice) old folks home and while packing her favourite books, I found a Penguin edition of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls from 1963 – that’s before ISBNs were invented. And I started reading but unlike so many years before when I would follow the story about girls and convents and moving to Dublin etc. I noticed how beautifully Edna O’Brien described the country side. In the end I spent most of the night rereading the book from a completely different angle.
The sun was not yet up, and the lawn was speckled with daisies that were fast asleep. There was dew everywhere. The grass below my window, the hedge around it, the rusty paling wire beyond that, and the big outer field were each touched with a delicate, wandering mist. And the leaves and the trees were bathed in the mist, and the trees looked unreal, like trees in a dream. Around the forget-me-knots that sprouted out of the side of the hedge were haloes of water. Water that glistened like silver. It was quiet, it was perfectly still. There was smoke rising from the blue mountains in the distance. It would be a hot day.
Six English-speaking and six Spanish-speaking authors take their inspiration from the great writers. Greatly enjoying Deborah Levy’s short story based on the true tale of a princess who believes she has swallowed a tiny glass piano, which takes as its starting point Cervantes’s story of the glass student.
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