Footnotes to the week

It is time to face the book problem again. We had to clear a whole floor-to-ceiling bay of bookshelves so our plumber could drop new pipework down at the back of the bay (long boring story). And we forced ourselves to be selective about what to reshelve after the work was finished and the re-decoration was done. At least the living room floor isn’t now cluttered with books as it was before the cull. Instead there are piles in the hall, waiting to be collected by a charity bookshop.

But one of those piles isn’t quite so high today. I blame James Marriott’s always interesting Substack, Cultural Capital. In yesterday’s post, he extols Orlando Figes’s history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy. I confess I had put this massive book on the pile destined for the Amnesty shop (thinking, realistically if regretfully, that if I hadn’t read it yet, I probably wasn’t going to get round to it in my remaining allotment of days, much as though I had loved the same author’s Natasha’s Dance). But prompted by Marriott, I rescued the book, just temporarily I thought, and then found that half the afternoon had gone as I started reading. So it is back on a different pile, the must-read-soon. I had better rescue Figes’s The Whisperers too … Ah well.

I’ve another Russian book to finish first, though. Recently, I have for the sixth or seventh time been reading Anna Karenina, this time in the wonderful translation by Rosamund Bartlett — which I’d hugely recommend over e.g. Pevear/Volokhonsky, though I still warm to the old Penguin translation by Rosemary Edmonds (here’s a brief piece by Bartlett on the difficulties of translating Tolstoy).

It’s a banal thing to say, though none the less strikingly true — the Anna Karenina you read at twenty is not the book you encounter again at thirty, or forty, or again later. This time, I have in fact had to stop for the last few weeks, as I was finding it almost unbearably sad, much more so than I remembered. Too much so for bedtime reading. But stunning of course: I’ll return to it soon.

So what have I been reading instead this week? I finished Colm Tóibín’s Long Island, much admired by some critics, but which I found a disappointing sequel to Brooklyn. (Yes, Jim Farrell in particular is mixed up and confused — such is life — but to the point that he seems to have become a rather blank non-character we cannot care about, which makes it indeed hard to understand why Eilis and Nancy should care. ) For sheer enjoyment, I recommend instead what I’m reading now, Tracy Chevalier’s wonderfully vivid, time-skipping, The Glassmaker which is written with considerable imaginative verve (and you learn something about Venetian glass making over the centuries too).

I’ll return to logic next week. Meanwhile, the striking picture above? One of the Van Gogh paintings in the Zürich Kunsthaus, which we found ourselves returning to more than once. Astonishing.

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