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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

AB76 wrote: "sounds really good this Russ, i would imagine it will be translated soon ..."

Sadly, Carrère's book came out in 2000, so I doubt it's going to happen.

If I have time, I might have a go at translating what the sketch artist said and post it here, just to give a taste.

giveusaclue wrote: "So what did they do for money all time he was pretending?"

You wonder. His parents for years paid all his living expenses as a “student”. After he married the wife worked as a pharmacist and they lived modestly. He took care of all the finances. She never ever looked at a bank statement.

Then the property frauds began. He had an aura of success, had a high-flying job, had his own money in a bank in Geneva. So whenever someone in the family sold a house, or had pension money to invest, they gave it to him to put into the same bank. To make this cross-border stuff work, he explained, the account had to be in his name, but the money would be safe.

I didn’t mention his trusting parents-in-law. They gave him their retirement fund to take care of. One day a couple of years before the main events the man is visiting. He and the father-in-law are alone in the house. The father-in-law falls down the stairs and dies. Did he ask too many pressing questions? The man says he didn’t kill him and certainly would have confessed if he had - “What’s one death more or less?”

Even the mistress gave him her divorce money to invest (FF 900,000, quite a lot in the early 1990s). He gave her expensive jewellery, and entertained her at the best Parisian restaurants. She didn’t realise it was her own money. Then she started asking for it back….

Long post here for a gripping book.

I’m not sure that any of us here read real-crime books, but I had to put other books to the side so I could finish one that was recommended recently on WWR – L’Adversaire by Emmanuel Carrère (himself a novelist and the French biographer of Philip K Dick).

It concerns a man who for some eighteen years pretended to all his family and friends to be a doctor working for the WHO in Geneva, doing research on new medicines and attending conferences all over the world, when in reality he was completely unqualified and unemployed, and spent his days walking alone in the woods, or hanging around the WHO offices, or reading medical journals in a parking lot.

One weekend in 1993, at the point when all the frauds he has inflicted on friends and relatives to maintain his BMW lifestyle are about to come out, he returns home to Ferney-Voltaire after a family dinner out, puts their two young children to bed, kills the wife with a rolling-pin, next morning has breakfast with the children, kills the two of them, drives to his parents’ house, has lunch with them, kills his father, kills his mother, drives to Paris to pick up his mistress, tries to kill her, drives back home, sets the house on fire, tries to kill himself (or does he just want it to look that way?), is pulled out by the pompiers unconscious and burned, recovers after a week in a coma, and lives to stand trial.

Carrère’s interest is not in the facts of the crime, sensational as they are, but in the killer’s motivations. On this he does a decent job, as far as one can ever penetrate such a life.

The killer is sentenced to imprisonment in perpetuity. He writes later from his cell to say that life has never been more beautiful, now that he is liberated from his lie, and accepted for what he truly is, a murderer. “The truth shall set you free.”

Indeed, through some benevolent prison visitors, the man has found God. Carrère thinks it an open question whether it isn’t rather the Great Adversary who is speaking.

To my mind, the essence of the man’s madness is captured best by a courtroom sketch artist, an old hand, talking to Carrère at some length outside court. The Présidente has called an adjournment after the killer shocks everyone into silence with his jibbering collapse in the box, when asked by the defence attorney about his conversations with his only true confidant, the dog. The artist-observer says the man can hold himself together provided he can control everything, but once he loses control he goes utterly to pieces.

What a story. It’s a pity the book hasn’t been translated into English. The evidence and speeches at trial are intense. Analyses from psychiatrists. Long quotations from Camus. Love poem to his new girlfriend. Listening to one hopeless character witness for the defence, the prosecutor has “le sourire de chat qui digère.”

Sequel: the man did not serve life. He was released in 2019. After two years in a Benedictine monastery he lives quietly in a village, with no restrictions, on a pension.

AB76 wrote: "Robert wrote: "AB76 wrote: "RussellinVT wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Some more interesting information on the German-Polish relations in the Imperial German days 1890-1914..."

"...With the Masurians i need to find some detail on their fate, in terms of the choices offered. I would imagine the canny Masurians became "Poles" overnight..."

Thanks. I'm sure it's an inextricable tangle, many fleeing, many being expelled, many staying and assimilating, so that today there are very few left who are identifiably Masurian.

I've started on the Junger, and the main thing that strikes me so far is the sophistication of the writing. Also rather amazed to find he frequented the Brasserie Lorraine on Place des Ternes, which was my local brasserie when I was living in Paris.

On the "President" I wonder if it was the right-wing novelist Pierre Benoit, who like Junger was an habitué of Florence Gould's literary salon during the war, a detail I picked up from the very readable And The Show Went On: Cultural Life in Nazi-occupied Paris by Alan Riding. Though Benoit was a member of the Académie Française he was not its President, but some years earlier he had been President of the Société des Gens de Lettres.

Finished Zola’s Docteur Pascal. I confess I was a bit shocked by this tale of full-on incest, narrated with relish, and rejoiced in by the two main actors. I suppose something like it should have been expected when it is the culminating volume of a cycle whose theme – not all that prominent in quite a few volumes, but always around – is of an inherited defect (his expression) and family rottenness and degeneration. But even when there are two fully consenting adults, and even with an ending that expresses a glowing confidence in life, the usual masterly style did not in my opinion compensate for the disagreeable subject matter.

AB76 wrote: "Some more interesting information on the German-Polish relations in the Imperial German days 1890-1914..."

Sorry if you’ve covered this before, but what happened with the Polish (East Prussian) Protestants after 1939? If up to that point they were aligning themselves strongly with Germany, did they after the invasion align completely with the conquerors? (After WWII I assume they had no choice but to rally finally to the new Poland.)

On GR I didn't know it could be arranged any other way. New posts have always appeared here at the bottom, in number order. Having hunted around I can't actually see how that might be changed (no button, as on WWR), so I can't help, sorry.

AB76 wrote: "Attached map to photos of the Masurian areas of East prussia..."

Interesting, AB. Can you say what the hard green/white division corresponds to? The border is (I’m assuming) the line in red. The green/white line further south doesn’t look like a river.
...

I picked up the Junger this morning and immediately I wanted to sit down and read it in the sunshine (the girl in the shop in Avenue Wagram looking at him with deep hatred in her eyes), but I had things I had to get on with.

A while back I read Long Island by Colm Tóibín, the sequel to Brooklyn twenty years after. I thought the story itself was interesting enough but the style that made his earlier novels so wonderful was sadly absent. His spare language this time just didn’t seem to carry the same wealth of meaning. Looking today at a back number of NYRB I came across a piece (by Giles Harvey) that explained it: the conversations are so much more open, and “For a novelist who thrives on silence and evasion, this new forthrightness is clearly not ideal…When there’s nothing to conceal… the usual brilliant plainness of Tóibín’s writing can slacken into mere banality.” I think that assessment is exactly right.

AB76 wrote: "Am about to finish to Junger diaries this evening and there is one character the book fails to document

Junger refers at least a dozen times to chatting with "the president" in Paris...."

Thinking of other presidents Junger might have known, one who seems quite probable is President of the Académie Française. I haven't immediately been able to find out who that was. Is there a clue in the subjects they talked about? A brief look on line suggests that Académie itself had an ambiguous history during the war. Pétain retained his seat. They only expelled him in 1945.

You've given us a great account of the diaries. I shall enjoy looking at the library copy when it arrives.

AB76 wrote: "I meant to read Mass Observations day long accounts of King George VI's coronation at the same time as the coronation of King Charles but didnt get round to it...

Humphrey Jennings and Tom Harrisson had ambitions for far more Mass Obs work than they actually achieved..."

Just in case you're not familiar with it, Humphrey Jennings did something else which is like Mass Observations in a historical context - Pandæmonium: The Coming of the Machine as seen by contemporary observers. When he died in 1950 it was 12 volumes of materials he had collected of writings by people from all walks of life showing how they responded to the Industrial Revolution, and quite a few illustrations also. Years later this collection was edited down and came out as a book in 1985. I still like to look at it every now and then. I don't know of anything else quite like it, at least not for that period.

This weekend, in between baking bread and the library and the football, I went for something a bit lighter:

All He Ever Wanted by Anita Shreve (2003) is a novel set around events in 1900 and 1915. A prim and earnest English professor at a small New England college loves and desires an attractive and good-hearted woman who does not love or desire him. It is all related in his prim and earnest voice, with enough discussion of English studies to be convincing. The turning point is a horrible deception and injustice. Most of her novels are contemporary, and yet I can’t help thinking that she is more at home in pre-WWI America, because, of the ones I have read, this and Fortune’s Rocks were the most satisfying. It was a good read.

AB76 wrote: "Things are darkening for Ernst Junger ..."

It sounds as though he was very lucky to survive.

Still awaiting the copy from the library.

Robert wrote: "... On the other hand, we both laughed aloud at several scenes. She thought that Waugh had missed a trick by not having a scene between Charles Ryder's odd father and Bridey. "Jesuit versus Coot."

Great thought!

To my surprise, there’s more of a connection between Brideshead Revisited and Father Brown than I had imagined. Looking around on the internet to read more about the circumstances in which the novel was written, I was reminded that one section is entitled “A Twitch Upon the Thread”. These words are spoken by Cordelia to Charles, in both the book and in the TV version. Apparently they come from a Father Brown story. Chesterton’s words in full:

“I caught him, with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world, and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”

AB76 wrote: "i find much modern English literature is quite fiercely secular or anti-religion ..."

That's my thought too. On European writers, one older Catholic whose work is I think quite beautiful is François Mauriac. I don't know if he's still read much.

AB76 wrote: "russ, is the translation in prose or verse?i have noticed prose and verse translations of the greek and roman classics are quite common."

All the translations I’ve looked at, including one now by Robert Graves, are in prose. The original itself is, I believe, in prose, though Louis MacNeice in the Everyman introduction says that much of the prose could actually have been set out as verse, and also that some of the prose rhymes.

The Golden Ass, a novel by Apuleius dating from around 150-180 AD, is an appealing mix of adventure and fancy – unexpected, by me, in a Roman text – in which the young man narrator, as a result of magic gone wrong, is turned into an ass, without losing his nature as a human. He reflects on his predicament. He plots his escape. He tries to maintain standards, e.g. he wants to show he has good table manners when sitting down for dinner, and it all goes wrong, on account of his hooves.

But asses too have resource and personality, and this ass uses his luck and his ass-talents to survive a succession of close calls with death and mutilation. All this is mixed up with stories of Chaucerian bawdiness among the humans. Finally, with the aid of a goddess, he finds and munches the antidote. A sober epilogue sees him initiated into the rites of Isis, while making a name for himself as a successful trial attorney.

At the centre is a most beautiful telling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche, the earliest known written version, and the equal of any later fairy tale in the mysteriousness of its meaning. And it does not fail to feature two wicked older sisters. (The Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cupid_a... has an absorbing selection of 44 images in painting and sculpture, starting with the celebrated Gérard.)

I read it in a rich and fluent modern translation by PG Walsh (OWC). I also dipped into the original 1566 translation by William Adlington, which was a best-seller in its day and is still nicely readable. Another translation by Walter Pater was done quite well in a Victorian mock-medieval style. I liked the modern version the best.

The Everyman edition of the Adlington said the re-print was not just verbatim but also literatim – which I had to look up: letter for letter.

Thank you to Robert for a very good recommendation. I was happy to find such an enjoyable read so far outside my normal run.

AB76 wrote: "i loved reading Brideshead as an adult but havent watched the series, Graham Greene focused on a more conflicted, ambivalent idea of catholic faith in his novels i think"

Yes, Greene of course, how could I forget, though I was mainly thinking of more recent decades.

Robert wrote: "... By coincidence, before Pope Francis' death, I'd been reading books of Italian history by David Kertzer ..."

Interesting, Robert. I don’t know those books at all, and they sound fully worthy of an institution that Macaulay said would outlast us all (his indelible image of a traveller from New Zealand standing on a broken pier of London Bridge…).

…

Talking about Catholicism, and The Boys from the Black Stuff, last night we finished re-watching another famous series from the year before, 1981, and the opposite end of the social scale – Brideshead Revisited. The cast was uniformly strong and the production values still strike one as excellent. It might be another case of the dramatization being better than the book, which I read without retaining any separate memory. Allegiance to the Catholic church is assailed and demeaned throughout, and is the catalyst for personal tragedy - until the very end, when it is vindicated. The only other TV show I can think of in the decades since in which the Catholic church is shown in a positive light is altogether lighter, Father Brown. I can’t think of a single work of literary fiction.

giveusaclue wrote: "...They were/are certainly football rivals.
Founder members of the football league..."

Six from Lancs and the other six from the Midlands, all still going too. I had no idea. Doing British history in school I was told that historians thought there was a major societal shift around 1870 towards a recognizably more modern world, and the development of a strong urban working class culture in the industrial midlands and north was a prominent part of that shift. The emergence of the Football League is a perfect illustration. It must have been in those Asa Briggs books we all read, but I don't remember it.