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
Long time, no see, everyone! On this dreary bank holiday in the UK, it’s lovely to welcome everyone again to this week’s blog. Here’s a roundup of your comments and photos from the last two weeks, including chats about translation, tackling classics and funny books.
Vieuxtemps has embarked on a mammoth pile of classics: The Other House by Henry James, broken open a Primo Levi boxset, Tales of Mystery by Elizabeth Gaskell, and Heart of Darkness and Other Tales by Joseph Conrad, which they called “excellent and creepy”.
Its beautifully written, short, and leaves one feeling why one bothered to read it. That was my impression when I first read it at uni. But I was not new to Conrad. I had loved Lord Jim, and Victory. I went on to read some others, I can’t remember which, but they were all thoroughly entertaining. So, Heart of Darkness didn’t quite match up to what I’d read of him.
Whenever I watch grand slam tennis I think of the lives of the lower ranked players about which I learned much when reading this novel about life on the circuit. I also learned a lot from reading Andre Agassi’s autobiography. As I watch the French Open and see players slugging strange-coloured liquids from plastic bottles at end changes I think of the first chapter of OPEN.
I plumped for Lila by Marilynne Robinson and couldn’t have chosen better. Once again the author re-affirms my faith in humankind. A more decent and kind novel you couldn’t wish to read. Tears in my eyes on the bus to work.
As a young man, I felt obliged to finish books I started, even if I found them extremely boring - the best example being ‘War and peace’, which (at least in the translation I read) was extremely dull. (The recent TV adaptation was great fun, though.)
Tolstoy prided himself on his unpolished style- just as in later life he adopted peasant dress and a man of the people image. He often uses the same word twice or three times in a paragraph in a way that can read rather clumsily... Translators including the Maudes tend to tidy things up and polish his prose, and I believe there’s recently been a reaction against that tendency. There’s a good analysis of that here.
You read something in the source language and it has an effect upon you. Let’s call it effect A. You transliterate and it ends up producing effect B in English. That’s not much cop. Rewriting isn’t just permitted here, it’s required... I feel that you always know when you are going too far. Time for a little trust in one’s own integrity and discretion.
I keep meaning to contribute regularly to TLS, but like my intention to do yoga every day, it seems to be always starting next week. Too much real life, not enough books, what can I say? I just spent the last couple of weeks re-reading The Song of the Dodo. Somehow when I’m busy I find it easier to read non-fiction. I like to be able to live inside the novels I read without to much distraction.
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