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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

AB76 wrote: "...i found France much more sexually liberally and direct as late as 1987, on a french exchange aged 11..."

Talk about direct. On a French exchange at age 14, in 1963, I was asked by my Parisian counterpart if I was still a virgin.

FrancesBurgundy wrote: "Bill wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "There was certainly tacit censorship by publishers ."

But there's a difference between Victorian erotica and realism in novels that aim to depict life as it is. Zola was published in France and afaik people didn't complain about the references to sexual functions etc. I think erotica, not that I'm an expert, would be a bit different from Zola's descriptions of what I mentioned yesterday....

I don't think for a moment that Dickens would have wished to be more explicit than he was. It just wasn't talked about, let alone written about in those days."

I very much agree with your summation. I can’t think of any English author of that time who showed an inclination to write about physical desire in Zola’s frank and natural manner. To add one more example to your earlier list, the sex-and-shopping sequences in Pot-Bouille are unimaginable in a Victorian British novel.

Bill – Henry and June! Clean forgot about that. I do remember Quiet Days in Clichy, indeed who could forget it – no plot that I remember, just unadulterated sex in bohemia.

Scarlet – Forgot about Mona too. She does sound like a Nin stand-in.

GP – But at least you read them in the right place. The Parisian locale does give some colour to the Journal – and was one of the reasons for my youthful enthusiasm for Miller.

AB76 wrote: "re translations of french classics

my zola novel is beckoning me but i have Heath and then Boll to read beforehand

my question is, was there an equivalent of Constance Garnett in french translations, as there was for the Russian classics. My Zola is a 2018 translation by Andrew Rothwell but i was thinking more of a translator of french classics in the 1880-1940 period"

The early translations make for quite a story. I think you would find most of them very unsatisfactory. The following is from The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (2000):

The first English versions were made in America; from the mid-1870s numerous translations (many under the pseudonym John Stirling) were published, often shortly after the originals. Their popularity and perceived inadequacy led the publisher Henry Vizetelly to launch a large-scale translation in London. Subtitling all the books ’a realistic novel’, he issued between 1884 and 1888 a total of 18 titles, 15 of them from Zola’s great Rougon-Macquart series, an epic of French life under the Second Empire. These texts, rapidly translated by unnamed authors, billed as complete, but lightly expurgated, sold extremely well. Too well, so that a National Vigilance Association, outraged by The Soil (1888), a translation of Zola’s shocking novel of peasant life, La Terre (1887), took Vizetelly to court. He gave an undertaking not to sell objectionable works, but was again prosecuted (and ruined) after he had reissued his Zola titles, incompletely bowdlerized by his son Ernest (who tells the story at length in his Emile Zola, 1904).

Ernest went on to “edit” many of the earlier translations, bowdlerizing as he went, and to translate others for the first time; his translations are if anything less adequate than their not very brilliant predecessors. His brother Edward also translated Zola, producing in 1901 a remarkably unexpurgated version of Zola’s Jack the Ripper novel, La Bête Humaine (1890), as The Monomaniac. Meanwhile, by a nice irony, the Lutetian Society had produced in 1894-5 an unexpurgated, but limited, edition of six very popular novels. The translators include such illustrious names as Ernest Dowson, Havelock Ellis, and Arthur Symons. Ellis’s Germinal and Symons’s The Drunkard (from L’Assommoir) have stayed in print, in revised versions; Symons’s in particular is a fine eloquent rendering, though its dialogue inevitably seems outdated now.

The Guide goes on to consider more modern versions. Taking L’Assommoir as an example, Leonard Tancock (who did several in Penguin Classics) is said to be lively and natural; Peter Collier over-translates; Gerard Hopkins is fluent and elegant; and Margaret Mauldon is said to be much more scrupulous but still very readable.

Berkley wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "I’ve now read half the first long volume of the Journal of Anaïs Nin..."

Did she intend these journals to be published - did she try to write them and form them into a shape that would be suitable for publication?...

I think the answer is yes, eventually, because having written a journal since childhood she published several volumes from her adult years while she was still alive and edited them herself (e.g. cutting out any reference to her then husband), which suggests that the later volumes at least must have been written with an eye to publication.

I too enjoyed reading some of Miller years ago. Tropic of Cancer was the best. I remember thinking Tropic of Capricorn was already a bit weaker. and less interesting. What mostly I remember, and liked, was the intense zest for life. I had never read anything like it.

I wouldn’t discourage anyone from trying Nin. I’m pleased to know a bit more about her.

I’ve now read half the first long volume of the Journal of Anaïs Nin, and I’m going to leave it there. It was interesting to learn why this dense work drew attention and some admiration. She has a fine sensibility and good insight into emotions and character.

But, at the end of the day, it is a journal, not a novel. It has no overall structure, and it promises no progression or resolution. We are in 1931-32, at the height of the Depression, and yet nothing exists outside an endless round of conversations and cafés and drinking, as Henry Miller and his wife June tear each other to pieces, and Nin acts as a super-sensitive mediator and confidante to both - after which she goes off to see her analyst to review the effect of it all on her own inner life.

Those sessions on the analyst’s couch reveal her fragile sense of self, or rather her several selves, as she feels like a broken mirror, lacking all assurance, despite her outward attractiveness and style. There are piercing recollections of her parents and the lives they lived.

Then it’s back to the Millers, where Nin disagrees with him over the value of intensity in literature – it is an error, she protests, to leave out dullness and boredom – life cannot be a succession of scenes out of Dostoyevsky.

At one point Nin wonders if Miller’s writing will suffer the same weakness as Joyce and Lawrence and Proust, and become a monstrous over-development of the self. She might have posed the same question of her own Journal.

A glance through the second half indicates a more varied cast, but it’s not enough to tempt me to read on. A glance at Wikipedia, and also a long article in The G from 2015, suggests an extraordinary talent for mendacity, which I hadn't picked up, and other matters such as adult incest and bigamy.

FrancesBurgundy wrote: "AB76 wrote: "I find the midlands variety interesting, ..."

Well I'm from Derby and love accents. I'm amazed that to me someone from Lincolnshire as far eastwards as the Wash speaks just the way I do (or used to) ..."

Being from NE Lincs I’m from the short-vowel side of the divide, but in the space of a term at university I modified my accent to long-vowel – somewhat to the surprise of my family when I came home - as it was suddenly obvious that if I wanted to get anywhere in the legal profession in London, that was the accent I needed to have. It wouldn’t matter now, but 55 years ago it did. The forgery was more or less successful. However, there’s no complete escape from your origins. Occasionally a “bath” or “path” slips through, instead of “barth” or “parth”, and I wonder, where did that come from?

Bill wrote: "...I know not all reviews are tainted like this, but I don't know any of these people or the circles they move in, so prefer not to risk it."

I’m certainly very dubious of the enthusiastic endorsements you see printed on the cover of a new book. You know for a certainty the author has sent a pre-publication copy to his/her friends who feel they have to say something positive.

On subscriptions, I should have included The G, to whom I pay the annual fee for total access. I have to confess the page I go to most often is not the books page but the football. Then WWR at the beginning of the month.

I’m well into Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook (handsome Everyman edition). Hard to put your finger on why his tales are so satisfying. Human stories told simply with great craft, and nothing modern or metropolitan. Peasants going about their lives. Descriptions of the woods and marshes, the dawn, the wind.

A belated thank you to gpfr for renewing the page again.

I didn’t know about The Queen’s Reading Room. On a quick look at her selections, I’m quite impressed by her willingness to go beyond the safe and obvious.

For anyone who doesn’t know it, Alan Bennett’s The Uncommon Reader is a delight. It imagines how the old Queen became an avid reader of Genet and Proust. Short too.

That list of bestsellers – like Bill I’ve read 10 out of the 100, but a different 10:

The Virginian
All Quiet on the Western Front
The Grapes of Wrath
Doctor Zhivago
Exodus
The Spy Who Came in From The Cold
Portnoy’s Complaint
Ragtime
The Bridges of Madison County
The Partner

Most of them good or extremely good in their own way. There was only one I heartily disliked, Doctor Z. Even The Bridges of MC was better. To my mind the movie of Doctor Z is a leading example of a film adaptation being easily superior to the book.

The only literary review I read is the NYRB. A standard three page article enjoyably fills the 15-20 minutes I'm riding the exercise bike. I do also like the review section of the weekend WSJ and over the years have bought several books I've been introduced to there.

Gpfr wrote: "...Interestingly & surprisingly, he was number 1 in 1911 and in 1961 with the same book."

Ooh, I didn't notice that. Often a sign of a movie or a TV adaptation, but I don't see any reference to that. But, I do see it is Number 24 in Barbara Cartland's Library of Love. Perhaps that was the catalyst.

AB76 wrote: "finished The Pursued by CS Forester, brilliant, a true british noir-esque classic"

On order from the library.

Sunday Times best seller list of the last 50 years – Not being a subscriber, I couldn’t access it, so I looked around on line and found several lists on a similar theme, including an ABE UK list of the best sellers of each year of the 20th century.

https://www.abebooks.co.uk/docs/Commu...

It was pretty interesting – a load of authors I had never heard of, Winston Churchill topping the list 5 times 1901-1913, and John Grisham top six years in a row in the 1990s with six different titles. It seems to start off English and then turn heavily American.

Jeffrey Farnol was top in 1911, not a name I knew until I found a reference to him in some writing by my father. As a boy he liked to look at the books his mother got from the library, and Farnol was one of them. So I might try him to see what appealed in the family.

“Byron! Thou should’st be living at this hour.” So says Auden in his Letter to Lord Byron. I think it would appeal to anyone looking for some light entertainment with a strong literary flavour. It is full of quotable lines and amusing wordplay and crisp assessments of other writers and critics, alive and dead, rating several like stocks (“Joyces are firm… Eliots have hardened just a point or two … There’s been some weakening in Prousts.”) “Literature” itself is made to rhyme with “sewer” (the cloacal kind), like Architecture in Monty Python.

He openly invites comparison with Don Juan. There are similarly sober passages. Writing in mid-1936, but it could as well be today, he talks of ogres and dragons who promise to set up law and order. An ogre will not fail “In every age to rear up to defend / Each dying force of history to the end.”

The last section is interestingly biographical, describing his boyhood without a father, gone during the War, then his time in college, and afterwards his travelling and teaching.

As a poem, it’s not completely successful. Byron, with all his jesting, remained fluent. Auden feels choppy, and his decision to go with seven-line stanzas rhyming ABABBCC, instead of ottava rima, means that there are always two concluding couplets which, to my sense, often clash. Still, it must be the only poem ever to use the word “logomachy”. This is in reference to I.A. Richards (who is rhymed with “Pritchard’s”). Per SOED, logomachy is a contention over words.

Queneau - And, I should have said, funny too, once you get his distorted angle.

Bill wrote: "Do all of Queneau's novels follow OuLiPo restraints?..."

Well, I managed to read and enjoy Queneau before ever hearing of OuLiPo. Ones I can recommend beyond Zazie dans le métro are Le chiendent and Pierrot mon ami. None of them seemed to me restrained, rather free in fact, completely off beat. Plus for dipping into, because not a story, Exercices de style which may be more what you're thinking of. I can’t say what the translations are like.

scarletnoir wrote: "...Madame kindly went to dig out her UK-based Modianos, and returned with two - as well as 'Zazie', which sounds like great fun..."

Zazie is a treat, and it led me to read some others by Queneau. There he was, at the peak of the French literary establishment, ushering classic texts through the press, and his private pleasure was to write slangy dingbat stories.

Modiano was certainly not to my taste. I read his Occupation Trilogy with great expectations and found it a struggle throughout.

AB76 wrote: " The Pursued By CS Forester(1935) is a deadly noir thriller set in Suburbia but with a unique british flavour...."

I like the sound of this one, AB. Thanks also for the reminder of A Fortnight in September, which has drawn a lot of comment in recent years and, as far as I recall, not a single negative.

"Tam wrote: "Since yesterday I have come down with shivering, painful stomach, almost a failed desire to vomit, lots of phlegm, headache a bit. I feel like crap!..."

Sounds grim, Tam. Hope you're better soon.

Gpfr wrote: "It's available as e-book, POD, and paper book.."

Thanks, GP. I found a distributor in NYC, so have ordered the paperback.

Gpfr wrote: "scarletnoir wrote: "Les chemins intimes: I'd be intrigued to read it but unfortunately clicking on the link brought a '404 error - page not found' response!..."

Here's a new link..."

So this is a POD? Looks as though I shall be making an exception to my usual no-pod policy.