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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Scarlet – Zazie - Thanks for reminding me so well of the feel of that book. I read it in French and pretty much managed the linguistic gymnastics. I don’t actually recall experiencing a dip in pleasure in the second half. Hippo-ish Uncle Gabriel is inseparable in my mind from the Dance of the Hours in Fantasia.

Back from a wonderful two weeks in Sicily – perfect weather, just one day of rain (though not so good for the orange groves and vineyards seriously damaged by drought). We’re already planning a return trip.

My holiday reading was August Heat, one of the Inspector Montalbano stories by Camilleri. It was entertaining and atmospheric. Thank you to @scarletnoir for the link to places featuring in the TV adaptations. On the day we were passing through the Ragusa area I’m afraid we didn’t have enough time to explore them properly. Next visit.

The other book I read was Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club. I think I’ve seen it condemned as a piece of worthless formulaic rubbish. I have to say I enjoyed it - a very decent mystery story, competently told, with a much better than average number of funny moments. I tried controlling my laughter but the bed was shaking so much my wife complained she couldn’t get to sleep.

We had an interesting chat with the owner of a Mondadori bookshop. I was looking for a suitable book to help me start reading Italian and had picked out a Camilleri from a series in a handsome dark blue format. She advised against, saying he writes in a style peculiar to himself, neither classic Italian nor normal contemporary. So, having really enjoyed and admired The Tartar Steppe I asked if instead she had something by Dino Buzzati, which of course she did. She suggested Sessanta Racconti (Sixty Short Stories), a collection dating from 1958, which looks just the ticket.

This and another nice Mondadori store both had unusually large philosophy sections. The same owner introduced me to books by a psychiatrist named Irvin Yalom which looked interesting – e.g. When Nietzsche Wept, The Schopenhauer Cure, The Spinoza Problem – but which I now see listed as “fiction”. She also enthused about quite another author, of whom I was vaguely aware and should probably know more– Kent Haruf. She had them all in Italian translation.

Those two stores both had a fair number of books in French, and I settled on a couple of slim volumes by Annie Ernaux, which will be the first of hers for me. Plus Proust, prix Goncourt – Une émeute littérraire by Thierry Laget, not to be resisted, and a novel-in-fragments by Philippe Claudel set in WWII, Fantaisie allemande, which was likewise too intriguing to pass up.

On a shelf in one of the places we stayed there was the first volume of La Force des choses by Simone De Beauvoir, not one of hers I knew about, and the first 40-50 pages, starting on the very day of Liberation, were an immediately interesting account of the post-war literary scene, so interesting I now have to get my own copy.

On the way back through Milan airport there was a Feltrinelli store with a surprisingly strong selection of books in English. I was very happy to pick up A Literary Tour of Italy, a collection of essays by Tim Parks mainly on twenty or so classic Italian authors. Most had been published in NYRB. One was his intro to the Penguin translation of The Tartar Steppe, very good to read afterwards, but not before, because it tells the story.

If this all sounds as if I had my head in a book the whole time, I really didn’t. I was far more occupied with good meals, good company, easy strolls (not too old to hold hands), wonderful churches and temples, great music in streets and squares, and merivigliose vistas of mountain and sea.

Before I go, a while back there were some lovely images from gpfr of items in a small museum in Paris, including a Chinese dragon. This made me think of a Chinese dragon my mother had inherited. It sat on the mantlepiece and was an object of curiosity to us children growing up, because the tube on the end of his nose clearly had a function but no one knew what. Recently I learned that incense can come in a rolled-up form, like a stick of cinnamon, and I now believe the cheerful chap in the link below might have been used as an incense burner. Polished up he is quite sparkly. (Thanks also to gpfr for helping on how to post an image.)

https://i.postimg.cc/RFQ9Gsgs/temp-Im...

I won’t be posting for a couple of weeks. We’re off to explore the south and east of Sicily. I’m taking an Inspector Montalbano - August Heat. Buona lettura, everyone.

Gpfr wrote: "

Yesterday, with a visitor to Paris, I went on a boat trip down the Canal St. Martin. Although I know the surroundings of the canal well, I've never been on it before...."

Looks lovely. From the opening sentences of Bouvard et Pécuchet, where Flaubert with perfect economy evokes the punishing heat on Boulevard Bourdon, and the inky water of Canal Saint-Martin that runs beside it, I had imagined there were no trees. Are they recent additions, or should I have understood “boulevard” as indicating the presence of trees?

AB76 wrote: "FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "the Evening Standard, a good read in my commuting days..."

It's online only now, isn't it?"

No, but just gone three days a week, Tuesday to Thursday, since so many peopl..."

i think its going online only at end of Sept...all print papers are shrinking, i love the FT weekend, especially the Arts section but its losing page numbers fast"

The weekend print version of the WSJ has had an outstanding Review section for about the last decade, which starts with a two-page essay on some current issue, often extracted from a forthcoming book, and then several other essays and shorter features, plus always six pages of book reviews (with no advertising blocks), and a full page of good puzzles, if no sudoku. No signs yet of shrinkage. I don’t suppose it’s available in the UK. I like to read it while enjoying a Saturday morning latte. There’s never a single other person in the café reading a print newspaper.

The daily print version of the FT, btw, is strangely available upstate, at the food cooperative in Middlebury, and out of the way country stores.

FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "the Evening Standard, a good read in my commuting days..."

It's online only now, isn't it?"

No, but just gone three days a week..."

It’s a shame. I picked one up when I was in London a few weeks ago and it seemed to be going the way of other frees – so much blander than when people like Simon Jenkins, Brian Sewell and AN Wilson were weekly contributors. You might not agree with them, but their columns made for a zesty read on the way home.

Still, if they do a killer sudoku, I shall take one from the pile when I’m next there.

scarletnoir wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "Anyone here read the Robert Harris Cicero Trilogy? ."

I posted this in 2021:

"I tried Imperium: A Novel of Ancient Rome, about Cicero... and was put off by the clunky style. I finished it, just about, but won't read another."

Oh dear. And since we agree that the two by Graves are superb, I expect I’ll find Imperium exactly as you say, clunky. (I faintly recalled Harris being discussed here.)

Robert Harris - Thanks for the tips, everyone. I think I'll ask the library to find the first of the Ciceros and I'll see how it goes.

Anyone here read the Robert Harris Cicero Trilogy? Comments I’ve seen range from “one of the great triumphs of contemporary historical literature” to “good enough for some holiday reading”. The question is prompted by a very favourable review in the G of Harris’s latest, on Asquith and Venetia Stanley. I started Fatherland once but, unusually for me, gave up after a bit, put off by all the invention.

Robert wrote: "Of the Hornblower series, one I particularly remember liking was Hornblower and the Atropos."

Had to look up Atropos. She is one of the three fates in Greek mythology, the one who renders the decisions of the other two (Clotho and Lachesis) unalterable. She is also the one who cuts the thread of life. Charming!

I’ve got back to Wilson’s To the Finland Station. In thirty incisive pages he deals with Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Fourier and Owen, four remarkable and selfless individuals, each an example of a failed idealism. It’s fascinating. After a dozen pages on American Socialists we will arrive with Marx.

Gpfr wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "CS Forester’s The Pursued..."
Apparently it'd never been published before Penguin did so in 2011...."

Hornblower - Yes, after Aubrey-Maturin you think nothing could be as good. Now that I see what a neat writer Forester is, maybe some day I’ll try one out.

The interesting notes at the back of The Pursued explain that it was accepted for publication but with the first Hornblower out and another one planned they thought it wouldn’t fit between the two, and then it just got lost.

Tam wrote: "...The Bar was called 'The Woolf and whistle', after Virginia Woolf. I've tried to find out what the whistle bit referred to...."

I think it's the Woolf bit, not the whistle bit. I’m guessing it’s a reference to the nursery rhyme about the three little pigs and the wolf who said he would blow their house down. A lot of pubs are called The Pig and Whistle. Still seems a bit contrived.

AB76 wrote: "Has anyone else here read any Heinrich Boll?..."

I've read The Clown and Billiards at Half Past Nine and The End of a Mission, but that was all 50+ years ago and I don’t remember anything about any one of them, save for a general impression that they were lively and satisfying and often funny. The short stories sound good value.

I’ve just finished CS Forester’s The Pursued, a neatly done crime-of-passion story. Thanks for your recommendation, and credit to Penguin for reviving it. I liked the uncluttered prose, the sort of good writing that must have been standard in the 1930s, and the clever handling of the plot. It was also in one way a first for me – I’ve managed somehow to come this far in life without ever reading a Hornblower.

scarletnoir wrote: "Robert wrote: "Saw a headline in the G about capitalism saving the NHS. (The author didn't think it likely.)

I think of it while stirring my hospital morning egg. "Is this capitalism," I ask."

The NHS desperately needs saving after the last 14 years...

I injured my knee on 12 August, and was seen in A&E not by a doctor - or even a nurse - but by a barely trained 'assistant'...

My retired GP friend tells me that the NHS was never better financed than during the last Labour government... it's on life support by now, and who knows how long it'll take to get back to that state, if it can ever be managed?"

I read somewhere that the one thing the Blair/Brown government did without fail was to ensure each year that NHS funding was increased by at least the rate of inflation.

Sorry to hear of your poor care. When last year I had a mysterious and rather painful swelling in both my lower legs, the Express Care department of our rural hospital here in Vermont examined me and then had a paramedic take me off immediately in a wheel chair to the Ultrasound department. I was back in 15 minutes with the results. They were worried it might be blood clots (risk of heart attack) but it was just burst cysts in the back of my knee. Treatment: ice packs, leg elevation, compression socks. They had all this functioning on a quiet Sunday afternoon. The standard of care was impressive.

With the UK out of the EU, do the reciprocal arrangements for health care still exist?

Robert – Hope you’re not in hospital for the long weekend.

Gpfr wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "The Comfort of Strangers – Jacqueline Winspear (2024)

...I'm not keen on the somewhat mystic/spiritual aspects of the heroine's approach to investigations, but they're not too intrusive :)"

I didn’t see any of that in this last book, except in the sense that she wasn’t satisfied in herself if things didn’t fit. It was more a case of an intelligent person asking ordinary questions. There was a slip at the back the library asks you to fill in. The two previous readers rated it 5/5 on the library scale (“Unmissable”), which suggested to me they were hard-core fans. Not to be too dismal, I gave it 3/5 (“Definitely worth reading”), which felt a bit generous.

P.S. One thing JW touches on, among other period details, is how the school-leaving age in 1945 was 14. This reminded me of the controversy in the mid-1960s over raising the age from 15 to 16. Even at the (all boys) grammar school that I went to, there was huge discontent among boys saying they didn’t want to waste another year in school. Only a small minority were going on to technical college or university. In the event the decision was put off, and the change didn’t happen until 1972.

The Comfort of Strangers – Jacqueline Winspear (2024)

Saw this at the library, the concluding volume in the Maisie Dobbs series. It was pretty good. I’ve only read one other, which I quite liked. Set in post-war 1945, the mystery story felt a bit contrived. The family story, which comes to fore in the second half, was stronger. An incident at a war memorial was handled with beautiful sensitivity.

The much-borrowed title is apposite here.

Robert wrote: "... Hospital reading continues. I returned Sherlock Holmes to the center's little library, and have started on Robert Massie's Dreadnought...."

Dreadnought – Quite impressive that they have such a tome in a small library. I remember being actually a bit dissatisfied with it, years ago, as there didn’t seem to be all that much about the Dreadnoughts themselves. On the other hand it was very good on the European situation generally, and as you say it has many well-narrated individual episodes. One of them has stuck in my mind all these years, because it made me think very differently about AJ Balfour, who, I had always understood, was less than successful as PM. In 1908, when of course he was no longer in office, he gave evidence to the Committee of Imperial Defence on the question of Britain’s vulnerability to invasion, having been asked to analyse the materials. He spoke for an hour. His audience (Asquith, Grey, Haldane, Lloyd George, Lord Roberts) were dumbfounded by his “luminous” exposition, and could not think of a single question to ask.

GP – Thanks as ever for the new thread.