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

RussellinVT’s comments from the Ersatz TLS group.

La Légende de Mélusine turned out to be surprisingly long, at 250+ pages. It was written by a clerk, Jean d’Arras, in the employ of the Duc de Berry. Completing it in 1393, he seems to have used certain ancient sources that are now unidentifiable. Some elements may be drawn from Herodotus and Horace.

It tells the story of how in the land of Poitou the young knight Raimondin meets the mysterious and beautiful lady Mélusine, coming upon her at the Fountain of Thirst. He immediately asks her to marry him, and she agrees after he gives his solemn promise never seek to observe her on a Saturday. This promise observed, he will rise to the heights of riches and honour.

She then counsels him to travel to Brittany to recover a lost inheritance, and in the meantime she builds for him the splendid fortress of Lusignan. Raimondin for his part succeeds in every venture. So for a time things go swimmingly, with much jousting and feasting and the occasional punitive raid or a battle with a giant.

But then Raimondin is provoked by a malicious rumour that Mélusine spends her Saturdays fornicating. He peeps into the bath-house and discovers that on this day of the week her lower body is transformed into that of a serpent “as fat as a barrel of herrings”. From that moment all is lost.

This colourful tale, which pre-dates Le Mprte d’Arthur by 70 years, is recounted in the grand style of courtly romance. The clarity of the story-telling reminds one of the classic fairy tales. Nor does it lack the brutality that is so startling in Perrault. The copy from the library had a lot of lovely original 15th century woodcuts (if not quite as charming as the ones Tam posted). What a pleasure to read, and how strange that it is not better known in the anglo-saxon world.

Proust, prix Goncourt by Thierry Laget continued journalistic and entertaining, though by the end you feel you’ve read more than enough of the newspaper coverage. From the day of the announcement that the prize had gone to Proust, instead of Dorgelès’ humane, heroic war story Les Croix de bois, a torrent of abuse and ridicule cascaded over the jury and Proust himself. The most ruminative chapter was one taking each of the criticisms in turn and smoothly assembling what was said, pro and con. Not all the abuse was crude. (Some of it was reasoned and very witty!) One can imagine something similar if, today, the Booker Prize were awarded not to a well-written, heart-felt novel by a survivor of a third-world famine but given instead to a novel of sensibility written by a billionaire from West Palm Beach wondering which pair of loafers to wear to a cocktail party. The most telling comment from Laget was that what the critics seemed to object to most was that Proust’s work was from an outsider, in a style they didn’t recognise. Reading Dorgelès - who volunteered at the outbreak of the war and served throughout, first in the infantry, then in the air force, winning the Croix de guerre - the journalists found the tone and rhythm of their own articles, a poignant account mixing tragedy, adventure, movement, emotion, gaiety, truth, sincerity and humanity, everything one liked to find in a novel (and just the sort of WWI story for which Pierre Lemaitre won the prize in 2017). In Proust they experienced nothing but a mortal ennui. But a century of passionate readers has vindicated the jury.

Tam wrote: "I have posted it on to the blog. Should be fine now..."

It all looks fine, and the space for posting a comment is obvious, which it wasn't before.

AB76 wrote: "i never got into Ferrante. Modern italian novels can be hit and miss for me,.."

I’m in no position to judge myself, as Ferrante is the only really modern Italian writer I have read, outside crime. The novels were all relatively enjoyable, giving a great idea of life in the low-class quarters of Naples, and the ebbs and flows of a relationship between two young women. They were not especially remarkable for the style. The pace was often very unhurried. At times I kept reading only because I wanted to find out what happened. Even if they were written by a man I don’t think it means they are necessarily any the less authentic as a record of female experience. You can imagine them as a wife-husband collaboration, the wife inventing and relating the story and the husband writing it (in the mould of Pevear and Volokhonsky).

Tam wrote: "Hi Russel, can you send me your amended version of your PFA experience again..."

No problem. I just re-sent it.

Welcome to the new thread.

Literary mags again - Working through some back numbers I came upon a short article by Tim Parks in the TLS suggesting that the mysterious Elena Ferrante might in fact be a man. Some years ago we all read that an unsporting Italian journalist had unmasked the author as a well-known female translator, to whom the publisher of The Neapolitan Quartet had been sending very large cheques, She denied it. Now a deep computer analysis of stylistic attributes in 150 published novels has pointed to someone quite different, and one person only – her novelist husband. He denies it too. Does it matter, asks TP. All artists ventriloquize, himself included. A reviewer of one of his early novels, written in the first person as a female, convinced herself that Tim Parks must be the pseudonym for a woman.

Reading Clive James’ lengthy essay on Aldous Huxley in The Meaning of Recognition makes you want to read Huxley’s own essays, which CJ says are so brilliant it is “like being enrolled in the college of your dreams.” The collected edition runs to six volumes. I find I have one small set published as On the Margin which happily has the one I was hoping for. “When he talks about Chaucer,” says CJ, “he beats even Chesterton, and sends you running for the nearest copy of The Canterbury Tales.” Literary essays with thoughtful insights are great to read, but the ones I value the most are those that also get you enthused to read, or re-read, the original works.

AB76 wrote: "Volcano by Shusako Endo (1959) is almost a perfectly paced novel, while thoroughly Japanese, like Mishima, it seems to have quite strong elements of western storytelling..."


There’s an idea I hadn’t fastened on before – that Japanese society has no concept of guilt (as distinct from shame) – and coming from a Japanese writer it sounds to me, with negligible first-hand exposure to Japanese culture, quite plausible.

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I’ll start a new thread in an hour or so.

AB76 wrote: "i'm impressed there is as much on Italian Libya as i have found..."

Thanks for those recommendations, AB.

Tam wrote: "...You could perhaps leave your comment at the end of the blog?..."

Happy to. PFAs are more widespread than anyone would imagine. I’ll aim for a post that underscores your theme while leaving out our personal details.

Tam wrote: "...And for anyone curious enough to wonder how you get from ancient Chinese Vases to modern 'water quality' problems here is the bloghttps://jediperson.wordpress.com/2025..."

Tam– Nice reflective piece, as ever. Also, quite close to home for us. On Wednesday, a team of environmental scientists from the State is coming to test our well water for PFAS. About 5 miles away there used to be a factory that manufactured heavy-duty water-impermeable fabrics, for which PFOAS was essential. (It is their product that covers the Millennium Dome – now the O2 Arena?) A neighbour who worked there described how they used to pour any drums of excess PFOA right into the rainwater drains out in yard. He finally decided it was time to quit when the internal fog in the factory building got so bad that the only reasonably clear air was from your thighs down. To get from one end of the factory to the other without gasping for air you had to crawl on your hands and knees. No more factory work for him! He started a successful business as a travelling farrier. Anyway, about 20 years ago it was discovered that ground water in the vicinity of the factory was badly contaminated with PFOAs. Public meetings, water testing, cancer diagnoses, angry articles in the local paper, law suits. By this time the factory had closed down. It was the great good fortune of the town and the State that shortly before the closure and the discovery of the contamination the business had been bought by St Gobain (from the individual who had developed it, who then retired to Tennessee and died soon after). Now there was an entity worth suing. After years and years of court hearings and proposals for fixing the issue there was a settlement under which St Gobain paid hundreds of millions of dollars for everyone who got their water from a well – about half the town – to get connected instead to the town’s network of water pipes. During this time I met with the Chair of the water board about eight or ten times – over breakfast in a favorite diner, which is how business gets done in the sticks - because we happened to own a small property inside the watershed for the reservoir that supplied those pipes with clean water (a separate and even longer story). He assured me then that we ourselves didn’t need to be concerned, since we were a safe distance uphill and upstream. Then a year or so ago the State did additional testing at homes in our direction because of some disturbing reports of contaminated water. Most of these results were negative for PFOA. Some were positive. More public meetings, etc. Now they have extended the test area again, and we asked to be included. There is no way, back in the woods, we could be connected to the town system. But – another piece of good fortune – there is now available, for properties that have to continue to draw water from a well, a high-end filtration device that successfully removes PFOAs, and the State will supply one of these super-expensive devices for free for you in to install – and in the meantime give you bottled water. So for us Wednesday is a much anticipated event.

AB76 wrote: "As a teenager in the early 1990s Clive James and Melvyn Bragg were two thinking, talking heads on tv i saw and heard a lot of. James was my favourite...."

I’ve read a fair bit of Clive James over the years. Apart from the wonderful memoirs of his childhood, and the collected TV reviews, I’ve got two sets of cultural essays - The Meaning of Recognition, a collection from 2001-2005, and the amazing Cultural Amnesia, a hundred-plus pieces which he seems just to have written for his private satisfaction, covering everyone under the sun (including Junger), and which came out en bloc in 2007. I can’t pretend to have read either of them right through, but they’re marvellous for dipping in to. It sounds as though I need to get the earlier ones too.

Back in the 1970s, CJ was effectively the convener of the riotous Friday lunches attended by various young blades on the literary scene, among them Amis, Fenton, McEwan, Barnes and Hitchens. If you don’t know it, there’s a scurrilous account of one of them that’s worth looking up in Hitch 22, pages 168-172.

AB76 wrote: "The best example of a good Italian was Colonel Diodece...."

Interesting, AB, thanks. Apart from the “seven acres of men and two acres of officers”, one tends to forget the Italian colonial presence in North Africa. (Abyssinia monopolises attention.) There seems to be a certain amount of Italian-Libyan literature but not a lot compared with the French in Algeria, who of course were there much longer.
...

We're back in the house, but still with every fan going full time.

AB76 wrote: "The best example of a good Italian was Colonel Diodece....."

Thanks, AB. Will look at this properly in a day or two.

Tam wrote: "I am currently surrounded by tools and dust as my brother is down to help us patch up some tumble down bits of our house. He has also informed me that our chimney needs doing. It never rains but it..."

We’re in turmoil here too. Can’t do anything in the house because of building work – the foam insulation they spray is toxic until it completely dries, and the “off-gassing” can take 1/2/3 days. In the meantime, sleeping over the garage.

Proust, Prix Goncourt – Une émeute littéraire by Thierry Laget (2022) is so far an entertaining read. It begins with the story of how the prize was instituted, by the will of Edmond de Goncourt, from the proceeds of sale of their lifelong collection of objets d’art. There was to be a jury of ten that specifically excluded grands seigneurs and hommes politiques, in a conscious contrast with the Académie, which, comprising men who were either “cretins or dishonest”, had managed regularly to choose nonentities and pass over Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, and Zola.

It was still going to be difficult for Proust in 1913, because the prize was supposed to go to writers who were not just original but young, under 35, and poor (he was 42 and well-off); there was stiff competition from other books that year, among them Le Grand Meaulnes; and Du côté de chez Swann came out on 14 November and the prize was to be discussed and awarded at a dinner on 3 December. Who was going to read its dense 523 pages in that time? His publishers and his champions, undaunted, set to work and lobbied hard. It sounds like the history of literary prizes ever since.

The jury duly discussed and dined (we savour the menu). In the ninth and tenth rounds of voting they were still split, between Alain-Fournier and Léon Werth. Then in the eleventh round, out of nowhere, they awarded the prize to … Le Peuple de la Mer by Marc Elder, who previously had received a single vote, in the third round - a book that does not seem to be regarded by anyone as a classic but is still in print. Though receiving not even one vote, Proust himself was not discontented. Confident of his genius, he would wait his turn.

So on to 1919, and A l'Ombre des jeunes filles en fleur. Now Laget spreads himself, reviewing the leanings and accomplishments of each one of the ten men of letters. Several still are among those nominated by Edmond before he died. One of them, Descaves, has become misanthropic in his agedness. He dines alone on the ground floor and has a waiter take up his ballot on a silver tray.

A strong front runner for the prize was Les Croix de Bois by Roland Dorgelès, whose name I vaguely knew, a powerfully realist account of life in the trenches. It seems that, at the time, it was regarded by the mass of those who had fought as a far more authentic account of the War than the book that has since become famous, Le Feu by Henri Barbusse (translated as Under Fire), another book I haven’t read, which is said to have been much less appreciated by the ordinary poilu because of its very evident Marxist angle.

Laget’s account reads mainly like a piece of forensic journalism, full of anecdotes and scraps of evidence meticulously considered, but there is enough perspective up to this point, 100 pages in, to indicate it will become a decent survey of the literary landscape.

** Autocorrect changed that to A l"Ombre de jeans filled in flour.

AB76 wrote: "...I also recommend his series of memoirs, the language and style makes one think he could have been a great prose writer too...."

Thanks for that recommendation. Yet another for the TBR list.

AB76 wrote: "Knud Holmboe is now reaching the final stage of his travels accross Italian Libya in 1930..."

That's a very interesting picture of Graziani. I knew his name of course but not much of the part he played.

giveusaclue wrote: "Glad I never bought that one."

Well done, The Observer. I never read the book but like a million others was very interested in their story. I'll be amazed if there isn't a clause in their contract with Penguin - probably the film-makers too - in which they warrant the truthfulness of their account. So they may have to repay most of what they received.

Over the holiday weekend I read three dark plays by Sean O’Casey – The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924) and The Plough and the Stars (1926). Unlike Yeats and Synge, with their college education and European travel, he grew up poor, was almost wholly uneducated, and earned his living as a manual labourer until he was over 40. Yet all these plays are impressive - confident, direct, flowing, well-constructed, even-handed dramas, each in its own way giving a grim portrayal of life and death in the tenements of Dublin, two during the time of the Black & Tans and the Civil War, the other during the Easter Rebellion. There are lighter passages, and one very authentic-feeling feature is the way a character may be moved to sing a few verses of an Irish ballad or a soldier’s song, lifting the atmosphere for a moment before the general air of fatefulness sets in again.

Much different in mood and setting but still impressive was a fourth play, Cock-a-doodle Dandy (1949), which starts as a comedy about a peasant farmer making good money out of his turf bog. At the drop of a hat everyone falls into metaphors, similes and poetic turns of phrase. It must have been very funny on stage. While the women of the household are all sane and sympathetic, the men become semi-deranged because of the antics of a shape-shifting Cock. The comedy stops abruptly when a domineering priest, the villain of the piece, strikes one man brutally and then leads the other men to turn accusations of sorcery onto a young woman who happens to read banned books - Voltaire and Ulysses. Now it is bitter against the Church. The play premiered in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It is difficult to imagine it could ever have been performed in the Ireland of that time.

Thank you to AB for the prompt to look at O’Casey.

Tam wrote: "I have picked up 'The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon, based in old Barcelona, from Tesco's charity bookshelf today. Has anyone here read it, and can recommend, or not...."

I see that Michael Dirda in The Washington Post is enthusiastic – “scary, erotic, touching, tragic and thrilling” – and says you should rush out to buy it. Many book reviews you can discount, but that is a heavyweight literary endorsement.