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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

I finished A Woman of Substance. I doubt I’ll ever read anything else by Barbara Taylor Bradford but am glad to have learned something of her work and style. A book doesn’t have to be high literature to be enjoyable. She has the skill to move your emotions.
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Gold and Iron arrived today and I’ve been dipping in. Looks good.
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We’re travelling for a few days, so I’m unlikely to be posting until later next week.

AB76 wrote: "Sussex: Batemans(Kipling residence) and Seven Sisters

I have just got back from the Seven Sisters walk in Sussex, i visited Batemans yesterday in blazing sun, a bit more hazy and less sun today..."

That walk is spectacular, and Batemans on a sunny day is very fine. You can almost imagine Kipling at his desk.

The little church at Berwick near Alfriston is well worth a visit, for the Bloomsbury group wall paintings. Perhaps it's kept locked nowadays. Fifty years ago you could just walk in and have the place to yourself.

I’m now about half way through the monstrous 900 pages of A Woman of Substance by the Barbara Taylor Bradford.

As a piece of high-end popular fiction this family saga is not bad. We first meet the elegant and decisive Emma Harte in her late seventies on her corporate jet returning to her apartment in NYC from a board meeting of her Texan oil business where she has just sacked the company president. She must now deal with issues in her newspaper empire and her Harrods-like chain of stores. Then she discovers that her usually warring children are conspiring together to oust her.

At this point we break off and switch back to 1904 and her start in life as the skinny young daughter of a hand at Fairley Mill, speaking broad Yorkshire and working for pennies as a kitchen maid in the mill-owners’ ugly mansion out in t’moors. The middle 800 pages are the story of her climb to power and fortune. But at what cost? We worry for her personal happiness, amid the death and loss and discouragement. And why does she have such hatred for the Fairley family?

It’s the kind of tale where powerful emotions surge about on every page. If there’s hardly a noun without an emphatic adjective, and adverbs are all of the extreme kind - ferociously, frantically - the language is not without finesse (lambent, lucent, grisaille, dysphoria etc). There are epigraphs from Montaigne, Milton, Nietzsche and the Old Testament. But the story itself and the plotting are what really count, and this former journalist knew her trade. Only at the end will we learn how our Emma deals with her unworthy offspring.

AB76 wrote: "do you read them in broadsheet form on the bike or folded up? ..."

Folded back on itself, so the size of one full page. I can just hold it on the handlebars with my thumbs.

Also, on TLS, they have a livelier correspondence section, not just a couple of longer letters of the "[Displeased Author] responds to [Astringent Reviewer]" variety.

AB/ Robert - Kipling - You're encouraging me to pay a visit. My father too, an old-style English master, was always urging me to read K's short stories (and Conrad for that matter), and I have all my father's set in the blue and red Macmillan series. I do re-read the poetry. McAndrew's Hymn is a favourite.

Batemans is very atmospheric. We were there on a lovely summer afternoon, and the gravel paths made me think of broken dinner-knives.

AB76 wrote: "Feast and famine with the NYRB...Was it Robert or Russell who remarked that NYRB wasnt their kind of thing politically on the G, or am i wrong?..."

Not me. I actually think of them as fairly middle of the road, though it would be fair to say that the selection of books for review tends leftwards.

I have a large stack waiting to be read. As I may have mentioned, I like to read them while on my exercise bike, but it's just been too hot all summer to do any of that, even early morning. Today it's likely to break records, over 80 F (27 C). We're told the temps will drop by 20 F on Wednesday, and then we're into proper fall weather.

A while back we were comparing NYRB with LRB and TLS. I've had a few TLS to read. The big difference there is that they carry reviews of many more titles but half the length. I like the depth of NYRB, but equally I like being alerted to titles I might not otherwise have come across, so can't say I prefer one to the other.

Robert wrote: "There is an informative book about 19th century Prussia, Gold and Iron, about Bismarck and Bleichroeder, his trusted financial advisor..."

That looks very interesting, with some heavyweight endorsements. I've found a used copy at a decent price.

AB76 wrote: "Related to Junger, i am very interested in Prussia more than Germany right now and aim to read Christopher Clarks Iron Kingdom after the Titanic read..."

Iron Kingdom is another great read. Clark is such a good narrator I think you may find you don’t want to stop at 1848-49. How a state with a superb education system, an unmatched social welfare program, and religious toleration, could go so completely off the rails is a story that for me never fails to fascinate.

I think it’s Clark who makes the point that it was Humboldt (the other Humboldt) who, as one of the Prussian ministers responsible for reconstructing the country after its abject defeat by Napoleon, introduced for the first time anywhere three features of higher education that are omnipresent today – post-graduate research, the seminar, and the doctoral thesis.

Tam wrote: "I have been watching this, 'Berlin 1945' https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode.... There are three episodes on I-player..."

Tried it, but the BBC I-player is "not available" in our region. Pity.

Another interim comment on Ernst Jünger’s Paris Journals, which I continue to read slowly. I have reached the start of 1944. Through the summer of 1943 he reports seeing flights of bombers over the city, as many as 200 or 300 at a time, which gives him an astounding impression of the power of “the English”. It is plain that even at this stage, with the general retreat on the Eastern Front, the landings in Italy, and the bombing of German cities, he and others think the game is up. He writes with little restraint about Hitler’s crimes, which seems a fearful risk. There is news from home of the appalling destruction of Hamburg and Hannover. A friend returns from Münster telling of the dean of the cathedral who lost his beautiful library of 20,000 volumes in the fires there. He recounts individual atrocities with revulsion and horror. In October 1943 he gives a more or less accurate description, from information he has received, of the elimination of the Jews in concentration camps.

Yet there is pleasure to be found on every page. Always there is something memorable, which obliges one to pause and ponder. He clearly lived to carve exquisite forms out of words. I feel myself in contact with a very superior cultured mind.

Some examples (by way of note for myself, not for those already intimately familiar the book):

He hears from a lawyer friend in Berlin whose home has been destroyed by a bomb. All he could rescue were two paintings. “And that preference is appropriate, for works of art are magical furnishings, part of the most important possessions, equal to images of the lares and penates.”

He has a conversation with a reader of his who turns out to be a determined Communist. “That reminded me of the years when I too would try to use logic like scissors to cut life into paper forms. How much precious time we squander in these ways.”

He reads Aldous Huxley. On Point Counterpoint: “The prose resembles a net of finely spun glass filaments that occasionally catches a few lovely fish. These alone stick in our memory.” Which has the effect nonetheless of making me want to revisit that novel.

He turns from news of another terrible attack on Hannover to a long and felicitous description of a recently rediscovered painting by Douanier Rousseau.

On 29 September 1943 he writes: “Still aboard this slave ship for no reason.” It could serve as epigraph for the whole book.

I was going to start a new thread, having let this one run on, but I think we’re fine just carrying on, at least until we get to an unwieldy number of pages and it’s difficult to look back. Does anyone disagree?

We have had a magnificent late summer, an almost unbroken six weeks of blue skies and warm temperatures, to the point where it was declared that we were in a state-wide drought. Some unfortunate people have had their wells run dry. The forecasters say we will have another two weeks of the same. To take advantage, I’m starting on one last not-too-heavy summer read, sitting with a coffee in the sunshine next to the village fountain, before they close it up for the winter– A Woman of Substance, a saga of “indomitable women” by the late Barbara Taylor Bradford, prompted by a good mention in The Week, and per the NY Times one of the top ten best ever selling novels.

A Seaside Murder by Mary Grand was a quick and comfortable read with a very well-crafted plot and a constantly shifting cast of suspects. After 300 pages I still had no idea how she was going to tie it all up in the 30 remaining. I think she must not mind if her principal character becomes unsympathetic, because the amateur investigator who cracks it is an awful snoop, poking about in the private stuff of her friends.

AB76 wrote: "Robert wrote: "AB76 It suggests that a country with a large territory, diverse population, and several languages, might be better served by a Canadian or Australian-type federal system..."

exactly Robert, Mandela crucially realised he had a significant minority to work with and to understand

Thank you to Robert and AB for those synopses. Back in the days when the apartheid regime was still in power we had a couple of large cases acting for the G which educated me hugely on a country I have never been to. Today I am very out of touch and appreciate these thoughtful posts.

AB76 wrote: "The Dark Remains (2020)is the final novel in the Laidlaw series...However the books reads better than the classic Laidlaws and has never dipped in quality, Rankin, in his 60s now is a good writer. Most of this will be lost on non Laidlaw readers mind you"

Both Mcilvanney and Rankin seem to have a huge following. I have not read either. I did try a Rankin not so long ago and didn’t get along with it. Perhaps the lesson is to start at the end of the series and read them backwards.

Chris Hani – I ran into a friend who grew up in South Africa (his father was the editor of a liberal newspaper there) and asked him about Hani. My friend was no longer in SA at the time of the assassination, but he says it was a tragedy – he would almost certainly have succeeded Mandela, and if he had the country would be in a lot better position than it is today..

I’ve been spending time with a very thick book on the history of … soccer tactics. Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Hill (one of the G’s football correspondents) takes us from the earliest times of organized soccer in the 19th century, when the standard formation was for one player to get the ball and charge upfield with nine players around him and never pass or dribble (both considered a bit effeminate) in the hope of bundling it into the goal, through the decades of goalie plus 2-3-5 when everyone to the smallest schoolboy knew where to stand and the shirt number told the position (and dastardly foreign types would all swap shirts to confuse the English so that they couldn’t work out who they were supposed to be to marking) and now through the W-M and 4-2-4 to the inverted 5-3-2. It’s actually written at a pretty professional level, or for the intense fan, so I have learned to skip past some bits and kick a long ball over others. Quite interesting.

Decidedly not a social history, but quite a few anecdotes. Johan Cruyff was well known to be interested in the money side of his contract. One time, in the dressing room before the game, he complained his knee was hurting a bit. The coach got out his wallet, found a 100-guilder note, and rubbed the affected area. Cruyff said he felt better already.

For anyone who doesn't know it, there's a Monty Python sketch on YouTube of the Greek philosophers playing the German philosophers.

Robert wrote: "Political killings set me on the track of a book I browsed months ago-- The Plot to Save South Africa by Justice Malala. The author was a young journalist at his desk on a long Easter weekend in 1993..."

Interesting, Robert, I didn’t remember the Hani story at all. Totally agree with your comment on chatterers.

I suspect there are a lot of younger Americans today who would be hard put to it to say who Ali was, never mind Mandela and De Klerk.

AB76 wrote: "exactly what i think about that Judt book and many that were written in very different times,..."

That's a relief.

The Morselli novel sounds interesting.

AB76 wrote: "Really enjoyed Comrades and Christians: Religion and Political Struggle in Communist Italy, that title belies the specific Bolognese focus of the book mind you..."

Thanks for that summary, AB.

“…but the Eurocommunism of the 1970s is long gone”

In a similar vein I’ve thought from time to time of reading Tony Judt’s Post War, which I never got round to. Twenty years ago it seemed to have a strong contemporary relevance. But now I tend to think that, as with the vanished age of Eurocommunism, he will have been writing about a world that no longer exists. Should I be reading it anyway?

giveusaclue wrote: "See my edit to the earlier post. 🙄."

Happens to me too!

I think my post on the Bannalec gives the impression I didn't enjoy it much, but I did - ripped right through it (and then couldn't sleep).