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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

Robert wrote: "...Have you read Kipling's Mary Glouster? Rather a novelette in verse."

Novelette is just the word for it - sentiments that might be mawkish become sincere and direct from Sir Anthony.

Harrer an' Trinity College! I ought to ha' sent you to sea........

We dropped her - I think I told you - and I pricked it off where she sank.

Great stuff.

Berkley wrote: "Earlier tonight I finished Eckermann's Conversations with Goethe, a book I started last month..."

Very interesting, thanks. The retired professor of German philosophy who lives upstairs from my wife’s bookshop said we ought to get it in. I was dipping into it in the shop just last week and your description exactly fits my impression. So I shall be buying it for myself. (I don’t get a break on the price – I have to pay full price.)

There's a very fine book by John Armstrong called "Love, Life, Goethe: How to be happy in an imperfect world" which we also have in the shop. Armstrong, I think, makes extensive use of Eckerman's work, which he describes as delightful.

Tam wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "AB76 wrote: "As an adult, i have found a lot to admire in the prose of Rudyard Kipling,..."

I think he changed a bit after his only son died in WWI, and became less patriotically minded. Kipling senior used his influence..."

Thanks, Tam. I knew about his son, and his change of attitude, but not about Kipling using his influence to get his son accepted. What a recipe for guilt and misery.

AB76 wrote: "As an adult, i have found a lot to admire in the prose of Rudyard Kipling,..."

I’m glad you’ve found Kipling satisfying. I came to him mainly as an adult too and loved his poems – Mandalay, Recessional, If – and especially his longer ones, a discovery - McAndrew’s Hymn, Tommy, The Mary Gloster.

His colonialist/imperialist reputation of course still hangs about him. In our bookshop (open nearly two years now) we sell a surprising amount of poetry, especially in the neat little Everyman pocket series, but so far not a single one of his.

Gpfr wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Gpfr wrote: "back in Barsetshire with Barchester Towers"

my grandfather loved Trollope, as yet i have only read the brilliant The Warden ..."

I've read all the Barsetshire novels and the Palliser, + some others. I felt it was time to re-read."

I first read The Warden years ago, after seeing the wonderfully slimey Alan Rickman as Slope on TV, and have been slowly re-reading that and the other Chronicles in more recent years. All excellent so far. Next up is The Small House at Arlington.

I quite enjoyed the early Palliser novels but got stuck on one (Phineas Redux?) and didn’t finish it.

I inherited fine sets of both from my English teacher father, so there's an extra pleasure when I pick them up.

Quite pleasant here in the mountains of the northeast, until this last week, when it turned steamy, with temps in the mid 90s (35C). Then thunderstorms came along to break that spell, and threaten to become more or less continuous themselves (predicted from 4am till midnight tomorrow Sunday). Generally, where we are, no one has or needs A/C in their houses, except for a few days late July/early Aug when you wish you did. Maybe heatwaves from June on are our new reality. It's also very noticeable that storms have got more severe year-round in the last 20 years.

Thanks for the new thread, GP. I don't have anything to contribute at the moment but hope to soon.

In the end I enjoyed The Broken Road, the unfinished third volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s narrative of his foot journey across Europe. After an uncertain start, in which it feels as though he is trying to find his rhythm, and many parts are overlong, he settles into strong passages on his time in Bulgaria, portrayed as rather backward and peasant-like, still showing the scars of Ottoman cruelty, and Rumania, by contrast cosmopolitan and civilized, where the first language of the upper classes in the 1930s was French.

Letters from his long-separated parents are the stimulus for interesting thoughts on his Anglo-Indian background, his lively and theatrical mother, who had learnt to speak perfect Urdu and Hindi, and his distant geologist father, a semi-stranger, in whose company he spent perhaps six months of his life in total.

He stops in isolated communities of Greeks, Turks, and every other ethnicity, many of them stranded the wrong side of a new Balkan border. In his rich style he describes the landscape, the history, the characters he meets, the folk songs, the food – e.g. pastourma, a sort of pemmican, with a rather startling recipe: first take a whole camel and put it in an olive press and squeeze it until you have removed every drop of moisture, every drop, then salt the skin and hang it on a tree branch to cure in the wind, in a cage, so the crows don’t get at it – and so on.

It breaks off fifty miles short of Constantinople. He is becoming prey to loneliness and dejection. After New Year on the Bosphorus he takes a tramp steamer to Mount Athos, where the story of his time in the monasteries, some twenty of them, is taken up in a contemporary journal, which I eventually leafed through as it is more description than reflection. He reads Don Juan, Childe Harold, Marino Faliero.

While it is lacks the magic of the first two volumes, the executors were right to publish.

AB76 wrote: "...I must look into all the writers of her rough generation including Burney and Edgeworth. I was underwhelmed reading a Burney novel a few years back..."

I think you would not be disappointed by Castle Rackrent, a comically sardonic take on the Anglo-Irish gentry at its worthless worst.

Bill wrote: "...but the dénouement of Persuasion did not quite, well, persuade me; I can easily believe that the author was still in the process of working it out when she died."

Oh dear! I hope you don’t mean Captain Wentworth’s letter – “not soon to be recovered from” – which must be in the running for the most passionate letter in all of English literature. The novel is one of my favourites, for its melancholy tone, and Anne’s fortitude. But I agree that Austen might have decided to revise it had she lived. The plot hinges too much on the gossip in Westgate Buildings.

Northanger Abbey, pleasurable as it is, for the writing, seems to me flawed in one important respect. It is implausible that innocent, good-hearted Catherine can see at once the merits of Henry and Eleanor Tilney but takes so long to see through the bloviating John Thorpe and the simpering, affected, deceitful Isabella.

I also would probably go for Mansfield Park, whenever I get to another Austen, as I think it is likely to be much better than I remember it.

The trouble with good TV and movie versions of the classics, especially if you watch them several times over, is that they tend to displace your own memory of the text. I very much like the 2007 version of Northanger Abbey with Felicity Jones, but reading now the first dozen or so chapters I am reminded how wonderfully various and pointed is her writing – such a wealth of amusing observation that can be indicated only generally in a screen adaptation. Even a second-rank Austen is a superior performance.

As far as I remember it, I was nonplussed by The Magic Mountain. I quite enjoyed the writing despite the desperately tedious passages but ended up not knowing what I was supposed to think.

The Thomas Mann I thought was utterly brilliant was Lotte in Weimar, the reimagining of a love affair from Goethe’s youth.

Robert wrote: "I've been burrowing in the court's charge to the jury..."

Interesting, Robert. It was always bothering that the second crime could not be specifically articulated. You would think they could have done a proper job at least on NY state tax. Perhaps they did and the judge just didn’t go into that degree of detail.

AB76 wrote: "... interesting you ask Logger, indeed i do. In 1930 there were 46,431 Jews in Bulgaria, 89% of which spoke Ladino,..."

Thanks, AB. It looks as PLF got it broadly right.

AB76 wrote: "I have done some very interesting delving into the small but diverse Jewish community in Greece (roughly 75,000 strong) before the Holocaust, where 80% were killed

The majority were Sephardic Jews..."

AB - Not to put you to any trouble, but do you have anything similar on Jews in Bulgaria? I’m reading The Broken Road, the third volume of Patrick Leigh Fermor’s trilogy, following the discussion 3-4 weeks ago, and at the moment he’s in Bulgaria, where there seems to be an unbelievable mix of different ethnic communities. In a passage on the town of Plevdiv he talks of the lively (Sephardic) Jewish community that existed, at least in the early 1930s, and how they got there, via North Africa and Andalusia under the Moors, then Tuscany under the Medici, and then the eastern Balkans, especially trading ports like Salonika, under the Ottomans.

I wasn’t sure this volume had the same wonderful spirit as the first two, but it is livening up.

AB76 wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "L’Argent – Emile Zola ..."

i read this a long time ago and realised that Theodore Dreiser wrote an american novel on the same topic, i think it was The Financier

Not sure I’m that tempted! I struggled to get through Sister Carrie.

FrustratedArtist wrote: "Logger24 wrote: "L’Argent – Emile Zola

What a great read this was, one of the best in the cycle ..."

It's years since I read it, so I don't remember all the details, but I seem to remember the man at the centre of the bank scam is Aristide Saccard, who was behind the property scam in an earlier novel, La Cureé (the Kill). ..."

Exactly so. I also agree the Trollope is tremendous, one of his best. I don’t know the Timothy West reading, though I do remember a TV version with a gripping central performance by David Suchet as Melmotte.

L’Argent – Emile Zola

What a great read this was, one of the best in the cycle, full of incident, full of human emotion, full of knowledge of how a piece of financial chicanery begins and builds, draws in investors, becomes a mania, and then collapses in scandal and calamity. Anticipating La Débâcle, he uses the language of a military campaign to describe operations on the Bourse – attack, defence, reinforcements, flanking movement, massacre, déroute. He bases the story on the later, real case of Union Générale, which foundered in 1882, and invites us to think of it as a metaphorical trajectory for the Second Empire itself. And amid a slew of grasping, money-driven characters on the one hand, and ineffectual types on the other, there is one capable lady who despite all her trials can never remain sorrowful and always emerges with a smiling love of life - and who, said Zola (as Flaubert of Emma), was “moi.”

I don’t think we should expect too much from politicians. They are the people we pay to deal with contentious issues on our behalf, because we want to do other things with our lives and don’t want to spend too much time on this stuff ourselves. I vote at every opportunity, and I communicate from time to time with our local legislator (the most decent of people). I’ve never run for office, or even joined a party, and do not wish to, but anyone who strongly dislikes the present system and the leaders it throws up does have that further option. (Just as Trump could have ignored the advice of his lawyers and taken the opportunity the system afforded him to give evidence in his own defence, a major protection for a defendant – which used not be allowed! - instead of complaining about the system afterwards.)

giveusaclue wrote: "Norman/Medieval/Plantagenet/Wars of the Roses in particular, though I am happy to stray backwards too! ..."

If you can go one step forward from the Wars of the Roses, a book I enjoyed recently (on audio) was Winter King: Henry VII and the Dawn of Tudor England by Thomas Penn. The reviews you can see on Amazon are not exaggerated.

FrustratedArtist wrote: "...I was reading a chapter in Melvyn Bragg's the Adventure of English today, and came across this quote from Jane Austin (Northanger Abbey)..."

Thanks for that very good quote, which I remember from long-gone A Level days, and for the reminder of The Adventure of English, which I read with pleasure years ago. Time, I think, to read both of them again.