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What are we reading? 29th March 2022
CCCubbon wrote: "During the very hot summer a few years ago, cropmarks in the field adjoining my garden revealed a line of bronze age circular barrows, one partly in my garden"Interesting... I take it you have been busy excavating ever since? ;-)
Robert wrote: "Re Parsifal: Wikipedia entry states that "the conductor of the premiere was Hermann Levi, the court conductor at the Munich Opera. Since King Ludwig was sponsoring the production, much of the orche..."Re. Wagner's comments - oh, dear! I knew of his anti-semitism, but don't recall reading specific examples such as this one (indeed, why would you want to, apart from historical accuracy?) Thanks for the information on Parsifal and Klingsor, too - just names to me, never looked into those stories.
Machenbach wrote: "I'm aware of the dig going on in Trellech (having been to the pub in the village a couple of times), but don't know much about it even though I'd be quite interested. I'm not sure how seriously the guy is taken."But more importantly - what's the pub like? ;-)
Elena Knows by Claudia Piñeiro (trans. Frances Riddle)Thanks to AB and others for this recommendation.
This is the second book I have read recently where the title is a recurring phrase in the text - 'Pereira Maintains' is the other. It is quite an effective means of punctuating a narrative.
Here, Elena's daughter has apparently committed suicide - but Elena doesn't believe it. She sets out to find a person who can help her disprove the police's conclusions... but she has Parkinson's, so her journey across the city of Buenos Aires becomes an epic journey full of difficulties. As she makes the trip we are presented with her recollections and musings, not only on her daughter's fate but on life, death and everything... It's a short and well-plotted book, and I'll definitely read more by Piñeiro.
The story is also very well written, and gives a clear and unflinching picture of the sufferings of Parkinson's patients - I had two close family members who died from Parkinson's, though probably not the same 'version' as Elena's. The only slight issue I take with the description is that at one point Elena can't swallow her pill because of her hunched-over posture - difficulty swallowing occurs regardless of posture in Parkinson's - it is a well-known symptom - though late in the book this appears to be recognised. Elena, too, is not (yet) suffering from dementia or hallucinations, though her memory is struggling. She could not have made the journey with those consequences of the illness.
Edit: I did like this comment from the Afterword: (Piñeiro) said 'crime fiction came into being to denounce injustice', and she claims that nowadays it is impossible to write a crime novel without also writing about the society in which the crime takes place. That certainly reflects my own preferences - murder mysteries which take place in some sort of vacuum with little reference to a real setting hold no interest for me. I'd rather do the Sudoku.
CCCubbon wrote: "Shadowlands 2I read the next chapter which is about a place called Trellech on the border between England and Wales. An amateur archaeologist named Wilson bought a field by the very small village ..."
I was looking at that in Waterstones. I feel it will be added to my digital tbr list very soon.
BTW was able to go into town as I finally tested negative today!!
Just finished reading this. It is written by three authors - Philippa Gregory on Jacquetta of Luxembourg, Elizabeth Woodville by David Baldwin and Margaret Beaufort by Michael Jones. Did I enjoy it? Yes, but comparing the three part I found the Gregory's contribution belied her usual writing of history novels, rather than history books. She was to my mind a little to subjective in her interpretation of events, whereas in particular the third part Michael Jones succeeded in being rather more objective and I liked the way he, warning us first, gave two possible interpretations of discussions which may have taken place between Margaret and her husband, Sir Henry Stafford, before the Battle of Barnet. They were definitely stuck between a rock and a hard place, and of course, it resulted in Henry being (ultimately) fatally wounded; the battle took place on 14th April 1471 but it wasn't until 4th of October that he died of his injuries. I wouldn't like to think of how much he suffered during those months.
My thoughts at the end - those women were three very tough cookies. In the case of Elizabeth and especially Margaret, they were also very pragmatic. It also helped to make sure you were on the side of those who won. Not easy during that period.
@clue…..you posted negative? Yaaay! And a trip into the town too. Waterstones. Bliss. Hope you managed a cup of coffee, and maybe a scone?
Tam wrote: "https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an...There may be a few on here (CC?) that might be interested in th..."
Thanks, I registered after I discovered that it would air at 10 a.m. my time. I've always wanted to make something using Penrose tiles - it's on that To Do list which soon will span the globe.
From a shiny sun in Jezersko looking out to the snowy Kamniško-Savinjske Alps (Slovenia), I just finished Woman, Eating by Claire Kohda
This clever and humorous novel goes some way to answering the many questions one might have about a vampire trying to survive in modern day London; how to exist without breaking the law, dealing with the disintegrating mental health of an elderly parent (also a vampire), and even dental problems. And the answer isn’t as simple as black pudding either.
Lydia is an art student new to the city, determined to live life and refusing to exist in the shadows as her forebears have done.
Her mother has filled with her self-loathing, teaching her daughter that unclean pig blood is all they deserve. Ironically though, with her job, it is food vlogs of sushi and hand-stretched noodles that fill Lydia’s day, a forlorn reminder both of her disappeared humanness and her Japanese heritage she barely knows.
It was time for something fresh in the vampire library, and this fits the bill well. Rather than bloodlust symbolically representing voracious hunger, this is an investigation into the very idea of restraint and denial.
But the reason it works so well, is Kohda’s readiness to find humour in the predicament of a woman not quite fitting in with the expectations of today’s society.
scarletnoir wrote: "Zoo Station by David DowningBerlin, 1938. Englishman John Russell has been living in the city for 11 years... he has a German ex-wife, a German son and a German girlfriend. He almost..."
I'm working my way through the Berlin Stations series and recently downloaded #4 - Potsdam Station.
Certainly a good listen while I try to spruce up the yard - lots of rosemary die off this year.
If there are any Alison Uttley fans here, check out the newest photo from Scarthin Books in Cromford (great shop!). Perhaps they will mail?If you are like me when traveling, you know about local book shops that you must visit. I'll hit Powells (of course) next week in Portland, and there's a used book shop in Battle Ground, WA, that I will zig to on my way home. Obsessive-Compulsive Syndrome anyone?
MK wrote: "Tam wrote: "https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an...There may be a few on here (CC?) that might be inte..."
I know the feeling, as a lapsed potter I have a fantasy where I go back to making clay objects again, and that I make my own kitchen floor based on Penrose tessellations. Needless to say I have a huge amount of these kind of projects 'backed up' into my fantasy never-neverland!...
Machenbach wrote: "I’ve just finished Gert Hofmann’s quirky and deceptively simple novel, Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, his son Michael’s translation of Die Kleine Stechardin. Lichtenberg..."
I might want to read this soon, as it fits a few of the categories I've been delving into lately: German culture, the 18th century, and 1990s fiction.
Does Herder make an appearance amongst the historical personages? Don't know if he and Lichtenberg interacted at all but it sometimes seems that everyone knew everyone back then and there, once they made it to a certain level of fame in the world of letters. I ask because I'm currently reading a Herder collection - although that reminds me, I haven't got round to adding it to my Goodreads list.
Lass wrote: "@clue…..you posted negative? Yaaay! And a trip into the town too. Waterstones. Bliss. Hope you managed a cup of coffee, and maybe a scone?"Haha, a coffee and a cherry and almond slice! I saw copies of Shadowlands while there so have it on reservation for the ebook at my library - only 239 days to wait. Might be tempted to buy the paper version instead before then.
While in town I got a new battery put in my watch. Wasn't wearing it stuck at home and when I came to pick it up it had stopped 4 days before. It reminded me a bit of those murder stories where someone is found dead with a smashed watch. Did it show the time of the murder or was it there as a red herring?
Hope you are keeping well yourself and getting out and about.
A few weeks back i looked at the three pre-ww2 british historians(Kynaston-Sandbrook-Hennessy)who have produced a body of work covering, or hoping to cover, the 1945-79 period. An era of the Great British decline where many good things were achieved and neo-liberalism was a fringe movement but buying itself time.I am starting out of the blue with Peter Hennessy and his recently published Winds of Change: Britain in the Early 60s. My interest in that era has been piqued by curiousity about Harold Macmillan, the british PM i know least about and the slow detachment of this nation from his imperial outposts.
As i have said before i am no fan of Sandbrooks right wing pop-culture muesli, i enjoyed Kynastons superb "Austerity Britain" and his work on WG Grace (a slim volume), though i was underwhelmed by the second volume of Kynastons series, if i remember i felt the era of the early 50s was a lot less interesting than that 1945-51 period, in my opinion.
AN Wilson was mentioned on here as another of these historians, a favourite of my late grandfather, but as he covered mostly pre WW2, he doesnt fall in that" post-war consensus historian" mould.
A few years back i ordered a dog eared second hand copy of Marxism Today from, 1979, which analysed the Conservative Party and its aims. A brilliant, very long article and a sad one,highlighted how unsettled by Thatcherism many of the older tories were, ones who had served in the governments of the 1960s and 1950s. I always feel that Chamberlain and Macmillan are almost members of a different party to Thatchers grasping rabble
giveGlad to hear you tested negative. I was quite poorly last week during a visit to my daughter in Cambridge. Did a test, negative, so couldn’t use that excuse - just generally overdid things. Shops!!!
Back to Shadowlands, I am enjoying it. The third chapter is on Old Winchelsea ( and New Winchelsea) the history of which I find fascinating, including a lot about old 14C sweet wines, pirates, new town grids, Edward III dining on dormice and much more.
MK wrote: "If there are any Alison Uttley fans here, check out the newest photo from Scarthin Books in Cromford (great shop!). ..."I'd no idea Alison Uttley wrote so much. I was brought up on LIttle Grey Rabbit but the only others I've read are The Country Child which I loved, and many years ago when I'd been to a Girl Guide camp at Dethick A Traveller in Time, which I also loved, especially as I knew the area.
Machenbach wrote: "Berkley wrote: "Does Herder make an appearance amongst the historical personages? ."Not to my recollection, no, 'though quite a few names - German and international - are casually dropped and I wouldn't recall all of them without a prompt. I'm also going to seek out his The Waste Books which have been admired by Nietzsche, WIttgenstein, Goethe, Karl Krauss, Tolstoy, Breton, Einstein and others - quite an impressive and eclectic mix.
The novel also reminded me in some ways - and not just because of a lazy conflation of famous C18th Germans and their fondness for young girls - of Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower. It has a similar playfulness, deceptive simplicity, and broadly analogous approach to the novelisation of history."
That's definitely on my list, after I read Novalis's Hymns to the Night and Henry von Ofterdingen. I have read, years ago, the Penguin Lichtenberg, Aphorisms, not sure if it's a complete translation of the Waste Books or just a selection. From memory, I was struck more than a few times by how forward-thinking some of them were.
There was one that I'll misquote, since I failed to find it just now after a quick search, that went something like, "Instead of saying, 'One thinks', we should say 'Thinking is being done'" - IOW a shifting of emphasis from the subject to the process (though not a denial of the subject as such, if I recall). I remember wondering if the postmodernists had come across this remark from a late 18th century German mathematics professor.
AB76 wrote: "Charco Press have really found some gems, am half way through The Rooftop by Fernanda Trias and its my second unsettling female latin american novel of the last month.With Schewblin's "Fever Dre..."
You’re spot on with Charco. Some fascinating stuff.
Rooftop was one of the best I read last year.
CCCubbon wrote: "Shadowlands by Matthew GreenSo far I have read the first chapter which is about the Neolithic settlement Skara Brae on Orkney. I am quite fascinated by this era.
I had not realized before that the..."
Looking forward to this CCC.
Particularly the Orkney pages. I was there last spring, enjoyed it a lot.
I see you’ve moved to Winchelsea… good luck… I think you’ll need it…
Paul wrote: "My most recent read was another cornerstone of Japanese literature, and it was a weird one. A sort of inverse Sisyphus, The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe. [bookcover:The Woman in the Dunes|4916074..."Must get to this soon. Had it on my tbr list for ages.
Mod
I'd no idea Alison Uttley wrote so much. I was brought up on LIt..."
I've only ever read the Little Grey Rabbit books. My daughter loved them too as a child & I've still got quite a collection from that time.
That bookshop looks fabulous.
CCCubbon wrote: "giveGlad to hear you tested negative. I was quite poorly last week during a visit to my daughter in Cambridge. Did a test, negative, so couldn’t use that excuse - just generally overdid things. Sh..."
So sorry you were poorly and hope that you have recovered. Take it easy CCC
@clue. Yes, jogging along, thanks. Getting out little more, great lunch at a fave restaurant, belated treat for’ im indoors b ‘day. I wore a frock, so a definite treat! Slightly less exciting visit to garden centre, but coffee out is always welcome, and the garden needs some colour. Local library now open, so legged it there. Currently reading Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God, which at first thought I’d read previously, but perhaps not. It had been serialised on R4, so maybe be echoes of that penetrated my brain. One way or another it’s doing the trick at the moment.
Excellent article by Bernard henri-levy in the New Statesman this week, as he observes the preperations in Odessa for a russian blitz of the cityHe talks with the governor and is informed that many agents of Putin are in the city, ready to leap into action when the Russians attack. This jewel of Tsarist Russia, the St Petersburg of the South, wont fall without a fight but i agree with Henri-Levy that they need anti-ship missiles to destroy the Russian fleet out at sea.
he also says there is a huge amount of ammonia stored in the Odesssa docks, if that was hit, it would be an explosion like the one that devastated downtown Beirut a few years ago
Another fruitful trip to my local Oxfam bookshop, the staff(all volunteers over 65) may be a bit curt for my liking, behaving like a minute of chat is beyond them but the books....oh the booksToday i purchased collections of short stories by Gwyn Jones and Martha Gellhorn and a 1960 english novel i had never heard of called "The Patriots" by James Barlow. (all for £5)
The wind was howling, the sun was tempered by the wind and it wasnt that warm...perfect
Blackwells is also becoming my go to for book ordering in last 2 weeks online
I finished I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman this morning. A rare (these days..) 5 star read for me.
Set at an undefined period in the near future, forty women are kept prisoners in a cage in an underground bunker, guarded by a group of armed men, and supplied with only the basic necessities for life; electricity, food, water and simple medication. The unnamed narrator was a child on the verge of puberty when first incarcerated. None of the women know why they are locked up, let alone with a child, and any recall of their former lives only returns after some years. Passing time is difficult to gauge underground. At first relationships are tense, and barely existent. After many years, fortune strikes, and the women manage to escape, only to find themselves roaming what seems to be an uninhabited, post-apocalyptic alien world.
Harpman’s novel was originally published in 1995, and has recently had a reissue, due to its supposed relevance to lockdown. But that’s a very tenuous one, set that aside.
The reissue and promotion is deserved, difficult to believe it went under the radar when it first was translated.
It’s a powerful piece of experimental fiction that grips within a few pages and won’t let go until the very end.
I was put in mind of Ansgar Allen’s short and brilliant novel Wretch, similarly experimental and bunker-set, with even more puzzles for the reader to figure out.
Translator Ros Schwartz needs huge credit also, not least for coming up with a much better title than its original, Mistress of Silence.
This is about basic human instinct, survival against the odds, captivity and womanhood.
There’s ambiguity here, some key questions that arise will remain unanswered, but that’s a part of the rich reward in it, the reader will need to decide for themselves. Harpman uses bleak imagery and occasional moments of horror that are all that more powerful because of their sparcity.
Unlike other dystopian fiction (Allen aside), this is a world without any sort of order or infrastructure, and with no reveal. It is the simplicity of the writing that provides the tension and a real sense of horror, eerie in what it doesn’t say as much as what it does.
Harpman, a psychoanalyst, was born in 1929 in Belgium. Her family escaped the Nazi invasion, coming back only after the war was over.
Whether it conjures images of the holocaust, gulags, or towns cut off and terrorised in the current war, its real theme is to serve as a reminder that men, women and children are still, at this moment, locked up and out of sight, their lives, and deaths, resting on decisions made by unscrupulous, illegitimate and usually absent authorities.
I have just discovered this author and this is the first book in his Tom Novak series. So far so very good. The prologue has Tom in the Middle East extracting two American undercover agents. Fast forward three years and he has left the military and joined to Met. Getting bored with a promotion to sergeant which sees him desk bound, he accepts an assignment to go undercover to infiltrate a gang of Serbian people traffickers and all round bad guys. But there is a traitor in the Met and he is soon on the run with his life in danger from the gang. It is time to call in a favour from the guy he helped to save back in the ME.
Really enjoying it so far.
Andy wrote: "...dystopian fiction...this is a world without any sort of order or infrastructure..."I admire your iron-clad stomach - for me, given the last few years of Trump, Johnson, Brexit, refugees drowning in the Channel and Med, lack of planning to hold back climate change, taxation for the average person but not the obscenely wealthy... and to top it all, Putin's genocidal war and the effect on energy prices etc. (trebles all round in the boardrooms - profits through the roof - no windfall tax)... we're already nearing the end of times without any need for fiction!
(And I know very well I've missed out a lot of other stuff such as famines and wars in those 'far away countries about which we know nothing'... which makes it worse.)
scarletnoir wrote: "Andy wrote: "...dystopian fiction...this is a world without any sort of order or infrastructure..."I admire your iron-clad stomach - for me, given the last few years of Trump, Johnson, Brexit, re..."
For me, that is the very same reason I need fiction.
There are times I need to get my mind away from all those things you quote.
Caught part of a very interesting BBC Radio 4 programme( which is still available) where Claire Balding was rambling with Shadowlands Matthew Green in Winchelsea East Sussex .
Just finished
Mr Love and Justice by Colin MacInnes (1960), the last of the three late 1950s London novels by the author.I thoroughly enjoyed reading this intelligent novel, that asked a lot of questions of love and justice in 1950s Britain. In some ways it was a classic "well told tale", the pacing, the style and the plot all seamlessly fit together, without any sections where authorly indulgence became a bore, or the last section lagging, or the middle section losing its intensity.
Macinnes is very "light touch" on descriptions of London but in small well crafted sections, i can visualise the dirtier,bombsite pocked London of those times. some of the slang and lingo seems dated or incorrect (a ponce is something very different in 2022 than in 1959), however, overall it felt like a sharp portrait of the times.
I recommend the author to the Ersatz TLS, in the london triology i place this novel first, "City of Spades" second and "Absolute Beginners" last.
Next classic novel is Wassermanns My Marriage (1934), translated by Hofmann.Found an interesting essay on Wassermann and his jewish identity, also covering Prague and the Prague Bar Kochba Association where Buber lectured with Kafka and Brod in the audience
https://k-larevue.com/en/jacob-wasser...
Good quote from Maurice Goldstein from the article on being german and jewish
“Our relationship to Germany is that of an unrequited love: we finally want to be manly enough to tear the beloved from our hearts with a strong resolve instead of endlessly pining after her – and even if a part of the heart were to remain attached,”
Machenbach wrote: "Yes, that's quite strikingly non-Cartesian and almost sounds Heideggerean: thinking as something that is not just done by us (an activity we initiate), but something that is demanded of us, or gifted to us, by Being, etc."I haven't read Heidegger but yes, non-Cartesian, to be sure, as can be seen in the actual quote, which I believe I have managed to find:
We should say it thinks, just as we say it lightens. To say cogito is already to say too much as soon as we translate it I think. To assume, to postulate the I is a practical requirement.
[Notebook K: 18]
The fear that I may have mis-represented the sense of Lichtenberg's words has been bothering me since I made that earlier post, and I did in fact have the wording all wrong, but I think I did at least remember accurately the impression it made on me - and I feel the same way reading it again now, all these years later. BTW, for anyone who feels Lichtenberg's last sentence above contradicts the rest of the passage, I think the idea is something like, 'to postulate the I is only a practical requirement that should not be permitted to mislead us', etc.
Andy wrote: "I need to get my mind away from all those things you quote..."... by reading more depressing stuff (apparently)! Each to his own - I would never dream of telling others what to read - it's just that, ATM, I need books with at least an element of the upbeat about them!
But maybe those dystopian books have 'happy endings'?
I had to stay up and finish
Some of the descriptions of electronic surveillance equipment was a bit too technical for me to understand but, as long as you are prepared to suspend a little disbelieve, this was an exciting book and I have moved straight on to the next in the series!
Machenbach wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Next classic novel is Wassermanns My Marriage (1934), translated by Hofmann.Found an interesting essay on Wassermann and his jewish identity, also covering Prague and the Prague Bar ..."
the two different titles of the Penguin Classics and NYRB Books editions made me just skim Hoffmann's afterword to deduce the provenance of the titles. you probably know this already mach but it seemed Wassermann was writing a much larger work and died before completion. so the book i am about to read and you almost read is a fragment of that with the german title "joseph kerkovens dritte exitenz"
i was interested to find,related to Wassermann article i linked in an earlier post, that the German speaking population in Prague, 1910 was only 4.5% , i always supposed it was higher, not a majority ofc but at least 30%
Machenbach wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Next classic novel is Wassermanns My Marriage (1934), translated by Hofmann.Found an interesting essay on Wassermann and his jewish identity, also covering Prague and the Prague Bar ..."
Same book/translator.
In the original it is "Alexander und Bettina. Ganna oder die Wahnwelt."
Only: a book of that title has never been published in German.
It is a novel-within-a-novel. It has been cut out from Joseph Kerkhoven's Third Existence, where it takes up about 50%. Written down by Alexander at the behest of his psychiatrist Kerkhoven.
I can understand why a publisher would want to do that. Why buy a cow if you're only interested in the prime cuts of beef.
But I have never heard of such a "butchering" before and would be really interested what Hofmann says about that in his afterword.
Staying with Hofmann the first GR review quotes:
Excerpt from the afterword.
"My first wife is the true account of Jakob Wesserman's first marriage to Julie Speyer of Vienna, with almost nothing omitted or changed."
Well, I might be a bit thick, but I always thought "novel" denotes "work of fiction" (?)
And that Alexander in this case would be the epitome of an unreliable narrator (?)
So I am a bit gobsmacked at that assertion. Which many readers will probably take at face value, going from the comments I read.
AB76 wrote: "Next classic novel is Wassermanns My Marriage (1934), translated by Hofmann.Found an interesting essay on Wassermann and his jewish identity, also covering Prague and the Prague Bar Kochba Assoc..."
Just looked at your link (#267) on Wassermann.
It starts with:
“Ashamedly Jewish” is how Barbara Honigmann’s latest book in German, Unverschämt Jüdisch (Hanser, 2021), could be translated, quite literally.
Quite literally: to translate "unverschämt" into "ashamedly" is egregious bollocks.
To translate it into "unashamedly" would be a bit closer to the mark, but still completely miss the meaning.
"Unverschämt Jüdisch" translates into "Brazenly (or "insolently") Jewish". No ifs or buts.
scarletnoir wrote: "Andy wrote: "I need to get my mind away from all those things you quote..."... by reading more depressing stuff (apparently)! Each to his own - I would never dream of telling others what to read ..."
Happy endings are some sort of fantasy generally I think.
Though this, the Harpman, has a semi-happy ending…
I was thinking about your post while out walking earlier, and in the case of the book I finished this morning, (review soon…) I have to admit you’re right. Probably not a great choice at the moment..
But good horror, I can take anytime.
Bolla by Pajtim Statovci translated from the Finnish by David Hackston.
As much as I respected this as a fine piece of writing, the enjoyment I got from reading it was not considerable. There’s no doubt that it’s a tough read. There is practically no light shed on the bleakness, but in adopting such a stance, Statovci does get across the homophobia of the day.
The author uses alternating narratives of Arsim, a closeted gay man and aspiring Albanian writer, and Miloš, a medical student. Arsim, who’s narrative is the major thread, is in emotional turmoil, entering a loveless marriage to hide his homosexuality and moving precariously to Pristina, Kosovo, where he’s an “Albanian in a world run by Serbs.” Their relationship is a brief one, ended by the Bosnian War in 1995. The large part of the novel is then given over to the two very damaged men, suffering from PTSD from the horrific war, as well as the break up, and struggling to cope in different ways.
Statovci is himself a former refugee, brought to Finland as a child by his Kosovan parents.
I read this in the campervan, just a few hundred metres from the former Yugoslav border between Slovenia and Austria, having hiked high up to an abandoned barracks earlier. Having spent much time travelling in the Balkans in the last few years, I had just about got my mind around how recent this harrowing war was, when another sparked. It will be years until tragic stories like this emerge from Ukraine, but very sadly, they will..
Just started John McGaherns mid 1980s collection of stories High ground and Other Stories and i was swept back into the world of his writing, another Irish master of the pen."Parachutes" opens the collection, first published in Encounter magazine in 1983 and i felt transported to Dublin in early autumn, Grafton Street, the pubs and bars. 25 pages of genius.
For any McGahern fans there are reviews in the LRB and NYRB about him in last month. I read "The Dark" so long ago i had forgotten how dark(no pun intended), it actually is from these articles.
John McGahern
Hello group, I' ve been missing due to a heavy cold - or a cold- related lurgy of some sort, covid tests were negative but it left me tired and unable to concentrate.The best thing that I have read recently was A Long Petal of the Sea, Isabel Allende. An excellent read about Victor, an exile from the Pinochet regime, like the author herself. He and his partner Rosa went to Chile on a ship called the Winnepeg which was chartered by Neruda to take refugees from the Spanish civil war.
I tried The Buried Giant but couldn't really engage with it. I just kept nodding off which probab.y didn't help
Now I am finding The Last Goddess by Katerina Tuckova, difficult to put down. It is about village wise women (witches if you must) from the White Carpathians, called Goddesses locally. Dora was brought up by her aunt who was a Goddess, she is writing a dissertation which also enables her to delve into her own family history.
Her aunt suffered greatly under the soviet regime and a lot of family secrets are unearthed.
We get a brief history of the witch hunts and persecution which took place.
I am of course against book burning, but the demented Malleus Maleficarum, which was one the causes of so much cruelty,suffering and persecution is a volume that I would have gleefully cast into the flames .
Georg wrote: "AB76 wrote: "Next classic novel is Wassermanns My Marriage (1934), translated by Hofmann.A different topic completely but, as you have sometimes written on the Wordle thread, I thought I’d ask you if you happen to do Wordle auf deutsch? I was a bit annoyed with today’s solution.
Yay!.. I have actually got to the end of ‘Fathers and Sons’, by Russian author Turgenev. Apart from a dislocation, about a third of the way through, when Russia invaded Ukraine, where I felt a bit less inclined to read it. However, I got there in the end. But I did find that my dream about Bazarov, (recounted here but much earlier on 28th Feb.) as a classic ‘scientific’ Russian nihilist of those times, where he was seemingly hell bent on dissecting any frog that he happened to come across, curiously apposite somehow, in terms of the ending of the book. I have found it weirdly prophetic, in that it seems that he brings about his own demise, by insisting, unwisely at the end, in dissecting a local chap who had typhus and hence caught it himself from the cadaver and a slip of the scalpel!... I enjoyed the read on the whole, but I still can’t work out what the authors actual relationship, and feeling was, about the local ‘serfs’. This was written a few years before the abolishment of serfdom in Russia. He seems mostly to portray them as ‘fools’ in a Shakespearian sort of way, as foils to the land-owners machinations, but he also seems to send them up in what I can only describe as a ‘Benny Hill’ (you might have to be English, and knocking on a bit to get that reference) sort of way.I have noted the use of some phrases to a few similarities in books of other classical and international, authors of those times, for instance “far from the madding crowds’ is used. Is he quoting Thomas Hardy, or Thomas Gray? I am positing the view that the average Russian author of those days was very keen on showing off how well read, and international, they were in their reading habits. I cannot see any other reason for such a high number of quotations in French. ‘Look at me, I am well educated, and can prove it!...’ Well good on him, he is a congenial storyteller, and not a predictable one. I was close to abandoning the book as I did not like the way that women were being portrayed in the earlier half of the book, but it comes right in the end somehow, and he lets us know that many of the problems lie with the projections of the men in the story, onto the women that surround them… Well ‘Fathers and sons’ is the title of the story. I was also convinced that he had read Jane Austen at some point, as Bazarov’s mother seemed to be portrayed as a ‘Russian version of a Mrs Bennet, but the whole family set up, and interactions between the younger members of the book seemed to run along very similar lines in the story. Perhaps it is a mixture of pride... and prejudice?
My lasting impression is that I don’t think I really got to understand the Bazarov character. His duel with Arkady’s uncle Pavel, and quite why he agreed to it, is beyond my understanding, though it was also the point in the book where I began to feel slightly sympathetic towards him. Somewhere in that intransigent stated ‘nihilism’ was a young chap who actually cared rather deeply about ‘stuff’… and the people around him. I would recommend it in the end, and perhaps some other reader might be able to enlighten me as to why Bazarov and Pavel actually bothered to have a duel in the first place?
Tam wrote: "Yay!.. I have actually got to the end of ‘Fathers and Sons’, by Russian author Turgenev."Thanks Tam - are you going to post this on the What We are Reading article? Some more people might see this there.
SydneyH wrote: "Tam wrote: "Yay!.. I have actually got to the end of ‘Fathers and Sons’, by Russian author Turgenev."Thanks Tam - are you going to post this on the What We are Reading article? Some more people m..."
oh can do, if you think it worth it...?
Tam wrote: "oh can do, if you think it worth it...?"Yes, I think so (I much prefer the Guardian to Goodreads when it's available). Not everyone will agree with you, but it's something that quite a few of us have read.
# 63 Lass wrote: "I see you’re reading Margaret Forster’s Keeping the World Away. One of my favourite Forsters. I believe @Mach has read it, too. ..."
Hi Lass. Sorry about the delay in replying. Yes, I liked the novel very much and chose it on the back of your recommendation (and MB's). I came to it for the subject rather than the writer, but I did check out Forster's backlist after I'd finished it. I'm most likely, I think, to read the novel which follows a woman though the 20th century in diary form - haven't a clue what it's called now - and the Barrett Browning novel and have added both to my list.
I hope all's well with the family.
Hi Lass. Sorry about the delay in replying. Yes, I liked the novel very much and chose it on the back of your recommendation (and MB's). I came to it for the subject rather than the writer, but I did check out Forster's backlist after I'd finished it. I'm most likely, I think, to read the novel which follows a woman though the 20th century in diary form - haven't a clue what it's called now - and the Barrett Browning novel and have added both to my list.
I hope all's well with the family.
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Ersatz TLS
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Snow, Dog, Foot (other topics)
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Berlin, 1938. Englishman John Russell has been living in the city for 11 years... he has a German ex-wife, a German son and a German girlfriend. He almost feels German himself, but... Hitler. His work as a freelance journalist justifies his travels around - and outside - the country, and his questioning of the local folk. For this reason, and his previous political views, Russian intelligence seek his help as a courier. He also wishes to help a Jewish family whose daughters he has been coaching in English. And so it begins...
Downing has written a very well researched story, which features many plausible events of the period - the persecution of Jews, the Kindertransport, the murder of a homosexual, the camps... indeed, it is by the standards of books in this genre exceptionally plausible - nothing feels absurdly unlikely. The quality of writing is good - we don't get the verbal flourishes and humour that Philip Kerr provided in his 'Bernie Gunther' series, but the sentences flow and the plot is clearly explained. Another contrast to Kerr's Gunther stories is that, whereas the former focuses each story on a small number of prominent Nazis and a specific historical event, Downing instead gives us the feel for life at ground level, with the bullying and brutality coming from minor players well down the Nazi food chain. Overall, I prefer the Gunther stories, but this is very good stuff and I'll read more of the series in due course.
Any reservations? One minor quibble is that Downing seems determined to include more research than is strictly necessary - for example, giving a good number of street names to describe Russell's journeys - but that's not a big deal. At times, less is more, though.
Some final comments triggered by Russell's observations on the opening ceremony of the new Reich Chancellery (designed by Albert Speer), where Hitler gives a brief speech. The building is, of course, OTT - with a hall of mirrors claimed to be twice as long as that of Versailles. When I checked the photographs in Wikipedia, though, what did I see tucked away in the back corner? A globe! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reich_C...
Yes, the globe that the 'Great Dictator' plays with. As Roger Ebert notes in his review: "Once the horrors of the Holocaust began to be known, Hitler was no longer funny, not at all." But Chaplin didn't know the full extent of what was going on when he made the film.
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/gr...
It came as quite a relief to find out that Hitler's Chancellery no longer exists - it was badly damaged in the final battle as described by Gromyko:
Doors, windows and chandeliers testified on them the big imprint of the battle, most of them being broken. The lowest floors of the Reich Chancellery represented chaos. Obviously, the garrison of the Citadel fiercely resisted here... All around lie heaps of crossbeams and overhead covers, both metal and wood and huge pieces of ferro-concrete. On both sides of a narrow corridor, there were certain disposed cells, all eroded by explosions… All this produced a grim and distressing impression. If photography of this underground citadel of Hitler existed, they would become a proper illustration to Dante's Hell; just select which circle.
The building was demolished by the Soviets after the end of the war.