RussellinVT’s Comments (group member since Apr 11, 2024)

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Robert wrote: "David Niven was a paratrooper on D-Day...."

A new light on David Niven. Anyone who landed on D-Day goes up in my estimation.

Robert wrote: ".... I note Junger's reference to the sound of birds during lulls...."

My grandfather was in the trenches and used to tell of the same thing - specifically of the sky larks singing high above them in the lulls. The family lived on the edge of Sheffield and could walk straight out onto the high moors, so that sound must have been poignant for him. I think I've read that larks are much rarer nowadays.

La Loi by Roger Vailland (1957) was a really excellent read. Anyone with any spirit longs to escape this forgotten town at the foot of Italy, to leave the heat and hopelessness far behind, to run away and make a new life in the North. But, once posted here, no one in the administration or law enforcement has ever succeeded in obtaining a transfer out, and in any event the constraints of southern society are too binding. Trapped in their dead-end lives, men and women of all classes, even the most secure of the notables, seek relief in sexual adventure. It promises to end badly for every one of them.

In the end, as the dying Don reviews his life, his prowess as a hunter, his womanizing, his assiduous writings on the ancient Greek settlement nearby, it becomes a portrayal of a society through the generations, and the delicate gradations of status. Critics at the time were not wrong to call it sociological.

La Loi, one learns, is not just the name of a sinister game played with cards or dice, but also, in this backward place where everyone spies on others, a mode of thought: a man asserts his will over a woman, whom he then discards, and he tells himself he has given her the law. Unless, that is, the woman is smart enough to impose the law herself and to humiliate him.

The plot, a mix of crime and sex and intrigue, is engrossing. On a purely literary level the book is resonant and satisfying, full of nuance and implied meaning. One stylistic feature that could be annoying is the repetition of facts and phrases. Here that constant circling back adroitly expresses the inescapable bonds of southern life. The personalities of the actors are distinct and memorable.

And, as a French novel set in Italy, it is fitting that for one pair of lovers it is their thoughts on Charterhouse of Parma that open their eyes to their own feelings towards each other. Their first clandestine meeting has another loud Stendhalian echo, from the final pages of Scarlet and Black.

The English translations brought out in 1958 and 2004 both seem to be long out of print, which is a pity. I’d say it would be a good one for NYRB to revive – so I’m suggesting it to them.

Welcome to the new thread.

My reading in the last week - when not displaced by momentous events in the world - was largely taken up with La Loi (see my following post).

Otherwise I continue with Junger’s brilliant Journals, Amis’s sharp reviews, and Holmes’s The Age of Wonder - after the cross-Channel balloonists and the intrepid Mungo Park in Africa we're now on Humphry Davy, the boy wonder from poorest Cornwall.

I’ve returned Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to the library and am getting my own copy. I think it is a project for the fall, not the blistering heat of summer.

I’m now looking about for my next piece of fiction, though I often find that after finishing one gripping novel I need to leave it a while before starting another.

I'll start a new thread in an hour or so.

AB76 wrote: "The TLS and now the FT weekend have confounded me with "summer reads" pap this week, what a boret..."

What puts me off about the “Best Summer Reads” is that they always seem to be new publications you’ve never heard of, which you feel are being pushed by the publishers, whereas the best bets are not those but the well-known ones from years gone by – crime, romcom, classic, it doesn’t matter - that you haven’t got to yet. I mean, if you haven’t read The Godfather or The Camomile Lawn or Vanity Fair yet, what a great choice for the beach or the villa or the back garden. It’s why I like the December round-up done by the WSJ. They get about 50 people from all kinds of occupations, only some of them writers, to say what they’ve enjoyed most in the year, which can be anything at all, and the enthusiasm is infectious.

Tam wrote: "I don't think so, as for a person of 5,000 years ..."

That all makes sense.

P.S. Could that vase represent a comet, rather than waves? (Attuned to comets, having just read all about Caroline Herschel.)

Tam wrote: "... I saw a Samuel Palmer on a visit to the Ashmolean, in their print library..."

Thanks for those lovely pictures, Tam. I had a postcard of that very Palmer on my mantlepiece for years! Amazing that a 5000 year old vase can survive.

AB76 wrote: "i hadnt spotted any negative reviews by Hofmann until the one you mentioned and the Platanov novels...."

I’ve been trying to track down the previous Hofmann review that was so negative. It might have been on Eckermann’s Conversations with Goethe but the small part available online, while dismissive of Eckermann himself, is not especially heavy with invective.

Martin Amis (The War Against Cliché, not The Moronic Inferno) continues to amuse, this time a longish piece from 1986 on Don Quixote, as translated by Smollett, which he calls an impregnable masterpiece with one fairly serious flaw – “outright unreadability.” Pity he didn’t have the superb John Rutherford 1990s version available to him.

AB76 wrote: " The Longest War by Jacobo Timmerman (1982)

I have finished this and what a read, i read it alongside the 250 odd pages Robert Fisk wrote about the Lebanon War..."

There are times when you feel lost for words on what is happening between Israel and its neighbours.

We are promised 35C heat, plus horrible humidity, for the start of next week.

Tam wrote: "I set out this morning to go to my 'Figurative to Abstract Art' talk in Oxford this morning...."

Sounds like a talk I would have enjoyed too. I hope the lorry didn’t plough into the back of the cars. You occasionally see appalling video clips of that happening.

I do like The Ashmolean – a small but choice selection - though the last time I was there they seemed to have put away all their Samuel Palmers.

AB76 wrote: "actually, he wrote a scathing piece on Andriy Platanov in the last edition of the NYRB! Reviewing some NYRB editions of Platanov's prose, he finds nothing in the writing..."

Well then I hand it to them, to print a piece that is scathing about their own publication.

Last night I picked up Martin Amis’s collection of reviews The Moronic Inferno and found there were four on novels of Iris Murdoch. They made me laugh out loud. He pays tribute to her “prodigious talent” but is mercilessly funny as he tracks how her work zigzags between “excellent” and “footling”, and amid the laughter you feel he puts his finger on exactly what is not quite right.

It also made me realize what is missing with Hoffman. He is humorless. He serves up straight vitriol. Somehow you think you wouldn't mind being eviscerated by Amis when he is so funny doing it.

I was also reminded how unmissable The Observer was back in the 1980s, when it had Amis doing the book reviews and Clive James the TV round-up.

Talking about literary mags, a friend gave me a half dozen copies of the LRB he had finished with. I just read a review by Michael Hofmann on one of NYRB’s latest publications, Monsieur Teste by Paul Valéry, which I read recently (in French) and heartily disliked. I’ve thought before that Hofmann is in a class of his own when it comes expressing hatred, ridicule and contempt of a book he doesn’t like, and he excels himself here, fully capturing the absolute nothingness of this piece of modernist posturing. I doubt we shall be seeing Hofmann in the pages of the NYRB any time soon.

Iris Murdoch as a novelist I never warmed to and yet am still interested to explore her. Elegy for Iris by John Bayley (1999) is his memoir of their early days together, their honeymoon, their long married life, his observations of her as a writer, and her decline into Alzheimer’s, all of which he recounts in a low-key, engaging, and self-effacing style. Typical of his manner is his description of an Italian officer’s face as taking on “that withdrawn, dignified air which portraits and faces possess in Quttrocento painting.”

There are many happy moments – swimming in rivers whenever they could, naked if possible, looking at great art (The Resurrection by Piero della Francesca is a touchstone of perfection), times with close literary friends such as Elizabeth Bowen and Lord David Cecil, contentment in their large, crumbling house outside Steeple Aston, no television, no radio, eventually a gramophone, the garden run wild, he working in a vast Victorian bed, she writing in an attic room, avoiding the drips.

The first qualm is when he notices her, uncharacteristically, looking out of a window with vacant eyes. Disquiet sets in when she is invited to participate in a Q&A discussion at a university in Israel, the kind of forum in which she excelled. This time the words didn’t come, to the embarrassment of other speakers and the audience. She is wholly unaware. Afterwards Amos Oz comes up and introduces himself. It seems he recognized immediately what the problem was, and could not have been kinder.

Now her memory has entirely gone and she is dependent on him for everything. If he says he needs a bit of time to get on with some work she will quietly leave, but in two minutes she forgets and is back, because she cannot be on her own. He believes her illness has made them, if anything, closer than ever, despite the awful trials that it brings.

There’s a sequel, Iris and Her Friends (2000), which I look forward to.

Footnote: They particularly admired a 1925 essay on the Piero painting by Aldous Huxley, who called it the greatest picture in the world. It’s a fresco in the council room of a small Tuscan commune. We can see it today because in WWII a South African artillery officer defied orders to shell the village. He hadn’t ever seen the painting but had read the essay.

AB76 wrote: "About a decade i subscribed to the Haaretz weekend edition ..."

it looks as though the G have let you comment on Israeli issues this times, perhaps because you're explicit about not commenting on the situation today. I never read Haaretz myself. I did read the Jerusalem Post when I was there, back in the early 1970s, and remember thinking the quality was pretty high.

La Loi by Roger Vailland, winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1957, is set in a small town on the malarial coast of southern Italy, where people still recall Frederick II of Swabia and his son Manfred who ruled the region until defeated by the Angevins, and where today there is poverty and decay and summer winds that bring no rain. In the heat of the day, at siesta, at passeggiata, the air is filled with an unmissable and potent sense of desire.

Meanwhile, in the police headquarters on the town square, the commissario and the investigating magistrate are conferring, because they are under pressure from Rome to solve the theft of a quarter million lira in cash from a Swiss financier camping with his family in the dunes. The estate of the local Don is suspiciously close, but he is shielding his people. Where did one of his soldiers get the money to buy a Lambretta?

This well-written mix of history, crime, money and sex was made into a movie (“Where the Hot Wind Blows”) by Jules Dassin, with Gina Lollobrigida, Melina Mercouri, Yves Montand, Marcello Mastroianni, Pierre Brasseur. What a cast. I’m fifty pages in and already I’m thinking I shall have to track it down.

La loi is not what you might think. It’s a game of cards or dice with sinister consequences.

AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "I finished La Rôtisserie de la reine Pedauque, and it continued entertaining, or at least stimulating, to the end - except for some passages where Anatole France went on too long..."

sounds like a very unusual read, i have AF's novel about the french revolution on my pile somewhere...

It certainly is unusual. I’ve now read the longish introduction, which was correct in underscoring how memorable is the creation of the abbé Coignard, so generous with his classic learning and so unabashed in his liking for wine and women and occasional thieving, but was no help at all in explaining what Anatole France was about with the pages of stuff on Rosicrucian occultism, except to say (at length) that it was a preoccupation of the late 19th century and to suggest that an interest in the subject of satanism was a facet of AF’s own personality. The editor does not even consider why AF, a Dreyfusard second only to Zola, would give fresh currency to the ancient slanders against the Jewish race. With all that, it’s a tale that can properly be placed in the tradition of Manon Lescaut and Gil Blas. However, I’m not sure there’s any recent translation.

AB76 wrote: "Edmund Wilson, is for me, a rare example of an american anglo-heritage thinker and intellectual who was interested in many different facets of life and keen to express these interests...."

I think the chief pleasure of reading Edmund Wilson is the easy style combined with a formidable knowledge of the literary sources. You feel yourself in the hands of a master. Not that I've read very much beyond To the Finland Station. It sounds as though you've been working through those two fat volumes by Library of America assembling his essays and reviews, and you've prompted me to look out for them second-hand. They're distinctly expensive new.

He uses a comment someone made to him, about canadians not having "melted" as a factor in this.

Interesting and perceptive comment for the 1950s. I wonder how true it still is. My not very informed impression is that the differences between those older social groups have largely gone, in parallel with the decline in religious observance. Even the Québecois seem to be less strident nowadays.

AB76 wrote: "Re "Bomber", what year in the war does it cover Russ? I know it encompasses one night raid, was it around the time of Hamburg or earlier?..."

It's set in 1943, and the events take place on 31st June, so just before Hamburg. While there’s plenty of good period and geographic detail, the characters and the airbase and the town that is flattened are all, like the date, fictional.