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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

AB76 wrote: "While i did like Rory Stewarts Politics on the Edge, the second half was weaker and more indulgent, less interesting..."

Thanks for that review, AB. The Stewart book does seem to be one of the better ones, at least the first half. Whether it ever gets to the top of my list is another question. An old friend from England asked me the other day what my coping mechanism was and I said it was to not watch TV and to go and read something from another century (preferably in a simpatico café or in front of a log fire).

Imagining some future history student in school, I’m sure the years following Brexit, and the rapid succession of PMs and ministries, will be every bit as confusing as the 1760s and 1850s=-60s used to be for me.

Something odd happened there! Great news, Robert.

Robert wrote: "giveusaclue wrote: "Robert wrote: "That Tom Gauld cartoon about the armed unread books feels less like satire and more like journalism every day.."

True.

Are you home now Robert?"

That's great, Robert.

I walked up th..."

Talking of Eastern Europe, there’s an excellent review by the polymathic Jenny Uglow in the latest NYRB of a book called Vienna: How the City of ideas Created the Modern World by Richard Crockett, about the “Red Vienna” of 1919-34, when it was an island of determined social democracy in a sea of conservative, Catholic, anti-semitic, post-imperial Austria. She describes a ferment of modernist ideas that dispersed across Europe and America after the advent of Hitlerism. The review is so comprehensive I don’t feel the need to get to the book immediately but it is on my TBR list, and I mention it as others may be interested.

AB76 wrote: "In Uncivil Society i am delighted that such a short book is so full of information, its is brilliantly written and analytical about the situation as the communist edifice collapsed in Eastern Europe..."

Thanks for the summary, AB. I kind of remember the suddenness of the collapse in Rumania. East Germany and of course Poland and Czechoslovakia had been building for a while.

I finished Colm Tóibín’s Long Island. The second half was in the same mode as the first. I should clarify what I said earlier. The book was a bit disappointing only by reference to the standard you expect from him. It was a perfectly good read, considered as a piece of high-end popular fiction of the kind written by, say, Anita Shreve, which is no disparagement, as I have read several of hers and enjoyed them. It just lacked the arresting literary style that was so impressive in his earlier novels. I wouldn't discourage anyone from reading it.

I never saw the movie version of Brooklyn. It was one of those instances where you don’t want any disturbance of the spell created by the book. That, and the lead role being played by Saoirse Ronan, who is just too intense for my liking.

I’m half-way through Colm Toíbín’s Long Island – Eilis Lacey twenty years on from Brooklyn. I can’t remember if anyone else here has read it. I have to say that so far it is a bit of a disappointment. The plot gets off to a cracking start with a domestic explosion on page 2, and develops nicely. But what has happened to the sparkling style that marked out earlier novels? Where the simple phrasing used to be sharp and insightful it now seems just serviceable. Hoping for better in the second half.

Thanks for the new thread, GP. The photo was there and then disappeared.

I’ve finished a couple more of Annie Ernaux:

La Place – A reminiscence of her father, commencing with his funeral. It is done as a long series of separate images, in crisp language, as if they were sharp black and white photos from a family album. The small café-grocery of Mémoire de fille is now in the foreground, and what she evokes is a petit-bourgeois existence where the dominant feeling is inferiority, and a fear of embarrassment. No one laughs or smiles. Her father’s sole source of pride is the daughter who escaped. You wouldn’t expect such a tale to be so readable, but it is.

Les Années – This draws on the same deep well of memories, and is written in the same style of discontinuous narrative. This time it is set in a wider perspective - a sort of social (and sexual) history over seven decades that is full of remembered detail, only everything is as if vibrant and illuminated. Her individual recollections serve to capture the general mood, from the POV of the left-of-centre educated middle class. She herself is placed at a distance, and considered objectively, in the third person. Thus a weightier book, but still very readable and absorbing, and deftly done, just a couple of words or a phrase sufficing to summon up a moment in time. The effect is epigrammatic. Not having grown up in a French culture, I was conscious of missing quite a few of the references (news items, TV shows, music, fashion, lingo).
…

I can’t believe I’ve been missing all the non-book discussions on eTLS. For years I’ve seen mentions here of pages for poetry and film, etc. I found my way to the photo gallery, but that was it. Today I clicked on something by mistake, and there they all were,

The Broad Highway – Jeffrey Farnol. This is the book that was the best-selling novel in the world in 1911 (and again in the US in 1961). Farnol was a British writer who published some forty romance novels, many like this one set in the Regency period, as a result of which he was regarded as the male counterpart of Georgette Heyer. Here Farnol tells an involved story centred around a young man of good family who despite being well-educated (a first in Classics) now finds himself almost penniless. He sets off to walk the length of southern England. In the event, the broad highway of life takes him no further than Kent, where he becomes a blacksmith. Every short chapter is filled with incident (robbery, pugilism, duelling, mysterious gentlemen, beautiful young ladies in distress, mistaken identity, country inns, tinkers, peddlers, steaming coach-horses, ghosts, etc). I have to say that, on the evidence of this book, the comparison with Georgette Heyer is most unfair to her. The wit and vivacity that delight the readers of her books are, alas, largely absent. While the young man does have certain admirable qualities – courage, honesty, honour - the only funny bit in 500 pages is when the dashing girl who is clearly in love with him says she wishes he were not so dreadfully precise and serious, and so very solemn and austere, and ponderous and egotistical and calm, so hatefully calm and placid, and a pedant. She’s right! Plus, people get killed, which I don’t think happens in any of GH’s Regency novels. Still, the story does develop a certain momentum, and it builds to a very good climax and an emotionally satisfying conclusion.

AB76 wrote: "Robert wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "...i think whoever led the USSR in 1941 would have defeated the Germans, Russia was too vast for Napoleon and the USSR was even vaster for Hitler...."

Robert, AB - Very interesting, thanks.

Whether the Senate will confirm Gaetz as AG will be a definitive test of the loyalty and submissiveness of the Republican majority there.

But wait… maybe he could do it as a recess appointment, which would avoid all the difficulty of a confirmation hearing, and that’s what Trump means when he says he doesn’t want any interference from the Senate on recess appointments. It seems he is contemplating that the new Senate majority leader should just call a recess when the Senate would otherwise be in regular session. Does calling a recess require a vote? Don’t know. Difficult to believe there would be 50 GOP Senators ready to vote away their constitutional role, and so transparently.

scarletnoir wrote: "Hollywood by Charles Bukowski

I read a couple of Bukowskis quite a few years ago - 'Post Office' and 'Ham on Rye' - and liked them well enough, without feeling like reading his whole back catalogue..."

I’ve never read any Bukowski. Sounds as though this might be one to try. I like the story of Great Legs Dunaway.

AB76 wrote: "...i think whoever led the USSR in 1941 would have defeated the Germans, Russia was too vast for Napoleon and the USSR was even vaster for Hitler. I would have imagined a longer war but i dont think the Germans would have got much past Stalingrad or Moscow and could they succeed if thye had to fight another huge urban battle for Samara, or Baku or Novogrod?."

I think you're right on the vastness of the USSR, but it's interesting to speculate, isn't it? I think the Germans, if they hadn't suffered the disaster of Stalingrad, would have had a real go at capturing distant Baku and its vital oilfields.

AB76 wrote: "...But both systems were extrmist, cruel and most foul, sadly Stalin had many many more years than Hitler to deal out his cruel methods...if only both had been wiped out in 1945."

Or if Lenin hadn’t suffered his incapacitating strokes in 1922, at the point when, finally onto Stalin, he was planning to recommend his removal as General Secretary. Stalin might have been just a footnote in accounts of the Revolution… But then, who else would have galvanized the Russian defence to the German invasion? The ifs of history.

Robert wrote: "...The original Day of the Jackal was itself a period piece; the filmmakers, in quick strokes, had to create the atmosphere of De Gaulle's time... It's held up well, and I'm not anxious to see it redone."

I rather agree. The original Edward Fox version takes me right back to early 60s Paris. But I expect I’ll end up watching the new version. (I’m betting they will lose their nerve and not have Eddie Redmayne wear a cravat.) I read the book itself a year or so ago. For a first attempt at writing a novel it was pretty impressive. I’ve never read anything else by Frederick Forsyth.

AB76 wrote: "my grandfather was a member of the Hardy Society and did talks and lectures, he got his love for Hardy via his mother, who was from Dorset...."

Your grandfather sounds a highly interesting chap. You were fortunate to have that closeness with him. I have found myself wishing I had my time over so that I could ask my grandparents all sorts of questions about their lives, the kind that just don’t occur to you when you’re young.

AB76 wrote: "Am faced with an ethical issue, the short but interesting account of arabic travel to India and CHina in the 9c ..."

I think I would look more to the author/translator than to the source of the funding. If as far as you can tell the author has not been lent on to express views favourable to the funding party then it’s OK to carry on reading, especially when you’re unlikely to find the material you’re after published elsewhere. To take another, now rather historical example, the articles in Encounter were still well worth reading even after the magazine was revealed to have been funded for years by the CIA. (Quite when that funding ceased seems to be a murky question.)

Gpfr wrote: "Hardy was one of the authors we studied at university. I had to read Jude the Obscure over a weekend... the because we are too menny bit "

That’s quite a moment, isn’t it?

My favorite Hardy, for entirely non-literary reasons, is Far from the Madding Crowd. You can’t read the book without your mind’s eye being full of the beautiful 1967 film realisation with Peter Finch, Terence Stamp and Alan Bates, all excellent, and outshining them all a dreamy Julie Christie as Bathsheba.

I always sympathised with friends doing English at university, who had to read so much under pressure of time and the weekly essay, and was glad I had opted for a non-literature course which left me free to explore books as I pleased.

Hard to give your mind completely to reading when political events make the next four years look seismic. I did finish one significant novel.

The reputation of Jude the Obscure as grim and depressing put me off for decades, but I have found it a rewarding read. A working stonemason since he was a boy, Jude Fawley has taught himself the classical languages and now aspires to the ministry. The famous rejection by Oxford/Christminster, and the advice from the Master of Biblioll College that he stick to his trade, is not quite the central event I had understood. Before long there is a rich tangle of husbands, wives, friends and lovers. If anything, the novel becomes more the drama of Jude’s young cousin Susan Bridehead, who is spirited, and pretty, and more widely read than he is.

Hardy’s characters show indifference to the sanctity of marriage, and yet all of them are constrained by the expectations of a society in which a man and a woman cannot just live as they choose. Rather than the rejection of Jude, or even the succession of hammer blows in the final chapters, it is this general attitude that seems to have got Hardy into trouble with critics and the reading public when the book came out in 1895.

Sue appears impetuous, changing course with little warning, to the point where some call her flighty. What she really wants, without always seeing it in this light, is her freedom. The words that Hardy puts in her mouth are forthright. I can’t think of another English writer of the time (a decade and a half before Ann Veronica) who would have his leading lady say this, and in a period setting which appears to be a generation earlier:

“I have never yielded myself to any lover… People say I must be cold-natured – sexless – on account of it. But I won’t have it! Some of the most passionately erotic poets have been the most self-contained in their daily lives.”

and

“Fewer women like marriage than you suppose, only they enter into it for the dignity it is assumed to confer…”

and much more in the same vein. Another character says:

“I don’t see why the woman and the children should not be the unit without the man.”

As always, Hardy tells a good story, and gets on with it. The intense emotions he portrays feel true to the characters, even if the plot itself is unnaturally symmetrical. I did notice something I don’t remember from the earlier novels, some preciousness in the language - for example, people have physiognomies rather than faces, and on one occasion, as Jude is listening to an organ playing in the cathedral, he sees Sue in another pew “ensphered by the same harmonies.”

Berkley wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "Marx makes the observation that Louis Napoleon, like a conjurer, was at the same time under the necessity of keeping the public gaze fixed on himself, by springing constant surprises."

And who does that remind us of?


Yes indeed. I keep finding parallels.