Saski’s Comments (group member since Nov 10, 2013)

Saski’s comments from the Foucault's Pendulum group.

We are all ears!

Horse? Weren't we reading something earlier about collecting from a mare? Eco is right, connections are everywhere!

Could the spelling problems (I noted a few myself) be due to translation decisions?

As for your first link, Traveller, I love the trivia bit at the end: The English expression "to curry Fauvel", (now to "curry favor") arose from a scene in the Roman de Fauvel which potentates descended so low as to brush down the donkey and clean him off.

Only 17,700 Google hits worth of connection, LOL

I've only looked up a few so far and, if I remember correctly, they all checked out. Now I am inspired to check a few more. I'll get back to you. :)

Traveller "Sigh. I really don't know how Eco could bear to write so much about all these sects. I was already tired of them a quarter-way through the book, and this is at least his second book about them..."

So glad to see I am not alone in this sentiment. I still don't know how I pushed through to the end, especially as the humor appeared less and less often. And yet, I think I can say I liked it.

OMG, They are here, today, in the very area in which I live (well, not exactly as Sweden has distanced herself somewhat from the EU).

I don't know if you saw at the very bottom of the article, but the authors are the very same that Dan Brown has credited with being his primary inspiration. Sigh!! Yes, Traveller, it does seems people are just as gullible today as in any time in the past.

I wish there were more of Lia as she is my favorite of all the characters in this book...and this 'magic numbers' section one of the best.

Joseph Campbell says something about the need of humans to find meaning in ordinary things, but of course now I can't find it.

The Bell Jar I read a year or so ago. Not terribly impressed so a reread with others might be in order to show me what I missed.

I will have to pass on these authors. We have Calvino in French and library has all three but only in Swedish. I am not good enough in either language to read this kind of book.

Thank you! I was just now rereading that bit and thinking once again...What is that?

I can agree with those statistics :) Makes me feel better anyway :)

Thanks for trying!

In chapter 23 there is the following quote:

“I gave up trying to establish where progress lay, and where revolution, or to see the plot -- as Amparo's [Brazilian] comrades expressed it -- of capitalism. How could I continue to think like a European once I learned that the hopes of the far left were kept alive by a Nordeste bishop suspected of having harbored Nazi sympathies in his youth but who now faithfully and fearlessly held high the torch of revolt, upsetting the wary Vatican and the barracudas of Wall Street, and joyfully inflaming the atheism of the proletarian mystics won over by the tender yet menacing banner of a Beautiful Lady who, pierced by seven sorrows, gazed down on the sufferings of her people?”

I'm missing it, who is this Nordeste Bishop? (I know I'll feel stupid as soon as someone tells me.)

Ahh, and now it all makes sense. :)

This 'job' was after Casaubon returned to Europe.

On the page before Gevurah, and the morning after Amparo's experience, she announces she is visiting a girlfriend in Petropolis. Two month later she did the 'I need time' letter. Casaubon left Brazil after another year.

Yeah, there are times I think I like her better than him, even if (or because?) she is a bit sharp.

Here's a job I always wanted to have: I would set up a cultural investigation agency, be a kind of private eye of learning.

I liked the 'definition' of Hermes, including "the creator of writing, which is the art of evasion an dissimulation."

I loved (and love) that last line!

I had always assumed a strong Africa presence in Brazil, but maybe that's because my Brazilian proudly claimed a strong Africa element in their lives.