Paging All Bookworms! discussion
PAGE COUNT TRACKING - 2024
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JamesFoster 2024 Challenge
Jan. 31. Harold Bloom, ed., Jane Austen's Emma (Modern Critical Interpretations) [1987] 150 pages
I read Jane Austen's Emma together with many critical articles downloaded from the Internet this past summer, before going to see the musical version at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Since then, as I work on the endless task of unpacking boxes of books in my garage, I found I had this older collection of critical articles. It contains nine articles written in various journals or as chapters of books between 1973 and 1985, as well as a pretentious introduction by Bloom (as always) and a bibliography of books and articles about Jane Austen. The articles were very uneven; some were very insightful and others (mostly the latest in date) were just academic posturing and "theory".
Jan. 112. Supplemental Nights to the Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night with Notes Anthropological and Explanatory (Richard Burton ed.) v.6 366 pages
I began reading Burton's translation of the Thousand Nights and One Night two-and-a-half years ago, and have finally finished the sixteenth and last volume (ten volumes of the text and six "Supplemental" volumes). This volume contains eight stories from a manuscript called the "Chaviz MS", and some notes and an index, but is mainly devoted to invective (probably somewhat justified) against journalistic criticisms of his work.
Jan. 143. Jon Fosse, Plays One [Eng. tr. 2002] 291 pages
Four "minimalist" plays by the 2023 Nobel Prizewinner Jon Fosse, these plays are spare and stark, dealing with the tragedies of ordinary life.
Someone is Going to Come (Nokon kjem til à komme, written 1992-3, produced 1996, Eng. tr. 2002) presents a middle-aged couple who have rented an isolated house by the sea in order to finally be alone together, but even here they don't succeed in avoiding importunate others.
The Name (Namnet, 1995, Eng. tr. 2002) is about a pregnant girl who comes home to her parents with her boyfriend, the baby's father; she just wants someone to care about her, but it becomes obvious that neither her boyfriend, her parents, nor an ex-boyfriend who pays a visit really have any interest in her as a person.
The Child (Barnet, 1996, Eng. tr. 2002), the longest of the four at just over a hundred pages, is about two lonely people who meet at a bus stop, move in together, and are going to have a baby — but things don't work out that way.
The Guitar Man (Gitarmannen, 1997, Eng. tr. 2002) is a very short monologue; an old man comes into an empty bar (perhaps only empty because no one else matters to the play, in Fosse's minimalist style), has a beer, talks about his life and loneliness, and ends up in despair.
All four are written in short sentences and sentence fragments, often just breaking off in the middle, as if what they were going to say was just too unimportant to continue with.
Jan. 234. Ananda Devi, Le Voile de Draupadi [1993] 175 pages [in French]
Le Voile de Draupadi is the first work I have read by this year's Neustadt Prize winner, Ananda Devi; I believe it is her second novel, but it was the earliest of her works which was available on Amazon. She is an author from the former French colony of Mauritius, of Indian ancestry, and is considered one of the major "Indian" contemporary writers.
The book opens with the protagonist, Anjali, at the bedside of her seriously-ill young son Wynn. The novel is written in a sort of stream-of-consciousness of Anjali. We learn that she is becoming gradually alienated from her husband Dev, a commonplace and corrupt lawyer. As the novel progresses we also learn of her childhood and her relationships with her brother Shyam and their cousin and childhood friend Vasanti, whose story becomes increasingly important to the novel. Dev and his family are pressuring Anjali into participating in a sacrificial religious rite involving walking on fire, the Veil of Draupadi, in order to seek a miraculous cure for Wynn, who is beyond the help of the local doctors (apparently he has meningitis).
The book is a powerful description of the history, culture and religious superstitions of the Indian (Hindu) population of Mauritius, and particularly of the status of women in that culture.
Jan. 265. Naguib Mahfouz, The Time and the Place and Other Stories [1962-1989, tr. 1991] 174 pages
The Time and the Place and Other Stories collects translations of twenty of Mahfouz' short stories from the years between 1962 and 1989. For the most part, these are not great considered as stories, with many having no real plot, but the writing is so incredible it doesn't matter. To give an example, my favorite story of the collection, "The Ditch", is a description of the life of an old man who has never married or had a family and just lives a boring life; nothing actually happens in the "story" — but the language, and the subtle personification of the man's house, are incredible. Many of the stories which do have a plot are so surreal that the reader doesn't have any idea what is going on or what will happen after the abrupt and ambiguous ending. These are stories which will not appeal to those who read for "the story" but those who read for language and style will find them among Mahfouz' best writing. The translator, Denys Johnson-Davies, also deserves credit, because this is the kind of book that could have been ruined by a poor translation.
Jan. 316. Rosalia de Castro, Cantares gallegos [1863] 146 pages [Kindle, Open Library, in Galician]
Rosalia de Castro is considered the founder of modern Galician literature, and one of the most important poets of nineteenth-century Spain; Cantares gallegos is her best-known work. Galicia is a region of northwestern Spain, on the northern border of Portugal; the Galician language, or Gallego, is closer to Portuguese than to Spanish, although it can be understood with a knowledge of Spanish and a good dictionary (I read the book in Galician, which I had no previous knowledge of, and it was not too difficult after fifteen or twenty pages.) Written after two very short poetry collections in Spanish, and her earliest novels, Cantares gallegos was the first of her two poetry collections in Galician. Galician was an important literary language from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, but although it continued to be the spoken language of the region it had not been used for literature for five centuries when a group of nationalist writers, of whom she was the most important, attempted to revive it as a literary language in the early part of the nineteenth century.
The thirty-one poems in the collection range over many subjects: praise of the natural beauty of Galicia and protest against the Castilian prejudice against Galicians, descriptions of local festivals, the longing of Galicians in economic exile for their homeland, and requited, unrequited, lost and betrayed love; the tone varies from joy and humor to melancholy. One of my favorites depicts the various "foreign" groups who attend the festival of the Virxen do Barca, in their appearance, clothing, and behavior. There is a long poem about a folklore figure named Vidal who goes from extreme poverty to riches in one night. Another poem has a girl who is scared by an owl near the cemetery. The figure of the gaitera, or bagpipe girl, opens the collection and appears in many of the poems; there is also a humorous poem about a male piper who intends to use his playing to seduce the local girls. Castro uses a variety of forms of verse; though this is essentially Romantic poetry, the lines of mixed length make her a precursor of later styles. All in all, it was a book well worth reading.
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7. Ruth McCollum, The Presence and Progression of Saudade in the Poetry of Rosalia de Castro (MA Thesis, Schmidt College, 1997) 110 pages
In looking for more information about Rosalia de Castro, I found this Master's Thesis on the Internet, which had a good deal of background on her life and the influences on her poetry, as well as analyses of some of the poems, although due to the particular subject it focused more on her later works than the Cantares gallegos:
8. Jon Fosse, Plays Two [Eng. tr. 2004] 293 pages Three plays, A Summer's Day (Ein sommars dag, 1998), with two superimposed timelines, about a disappearance; Dream of Autumn (Draum om hausten, 1999), where a seemingly continuous action covers many years in the lives of a couple and the man's relatives; and Winter (Vinter, 2000) about a strange relationship.
Feb. 59. Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages [1948, Eng. tr. 1953] 718 pages
Almost the final book I read last year (2023) was John Herman Randall, Jr.'s The Making of the Modern Mind; the second book I began this year (although it has taken me over a month to finish a few chapters at a time) is Ernst Curtius' European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages. Both books were written to re-assert the unity of "Western civilization" or the "European tradition" in the face of the First World War, the rise of Hitler and the Second World War. Curtius is by far the more intense, writing in Germany under the Hitler regime, after the earlier catastrophes of World War I and the chaos of the Weimar Republic; he literally says that the European tradition entered a decline in the nineteenth century (the last major literary figure was Goethe) and has already collapsed. If this perhaps seems rather extreme, it is understandable given where and when it was written. While Randall's book was not particularly influential and has been largely forgotten today, Curtius' book has had a major influence and is still important for anyone interested in the history of European literature and intellectual culture in general.
What Curtius is interested in is the relation of continuity and transformation between Antiquity and the "Middle Ages", and the transmission and modification of ancient literary culture through the Middle Ages into modern literature. Although he uses the traditional term, even in his title, he is very critical of the Antiquity/Middle Ages/Modern periodization. His second chapter (the first chapter is more or less an introduction) surveys the positions of various historians on the dividing line between the Ancient and Mediaeval periods; the arbitrary date I had to learn in high school (and have since forgotten), the death of the last Emperor in the West, Romulus Augustus, isn't even mentioned, but Curtius considers the dates of 337 (the death of Constantine — Rostovtzeff), 395 (the death of the Emperor Theodosius, who enforced Christianity and deliberately tried to destroy pagan learning and culture — Moss, and the date Curtius considers most useful), around 567 (the death of Justinian and final loss of the Western Empire), 641 (end of the "Dominate" and beginning of the Byzantine Empire — Kornemann), about 675 (Arab conquest of the Mediterranean trade routes — Pirenne, Toynbee), or even the beginning of the Carolingian period (which marks the real beginning of Mediaeval culture, thus considering the two "dark" intervening centuries as belonging to the collapse of Antiquity rather than to the Middle Ages.) He also questions the end of the Middle Ages at the Italian Renaissance or the Reformation, considering that the "Modern" period really begins with the sixteenth-century rise of science or even the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. Whatever the dates, however, he considers the periodization essentially irrelevant, preferring to examine the details of the continuity and discontinuity of specific traits. This is what he describes in detail in the remainder of the book.
This is a book which is very dense in information; I learned things on literally every page of the more than 650 pages of text (there is a long index, although unfortunately no bibliography.) Curtius says that it is written for the "lover of literature" rather than for scholars, but he is obviously thinking of those with an early-twentieth-century upper-class German classical education — the book would be incomprehensible to anyone without a good reading knowledge of Latin (there are also untranslated passages from French, Spanish, and Italian) and at least some familiarity with the Roman (and early modern) classical writers. The Mediaeval authors on the other hand he is careful to identify and put into their historical and other contexts.
The book begins by outlining the late Roman educational system, based on what would later be called the trivium and quadrivium, and especially on the teaching of rhetoric. The development of rhetoric is outlined from the time of Aristotle through the end of antiquity, with rather detailed discussion of the different styles and levels and of the figures, and its influence on theories of literature is explained in depth; this is the basis of the Mediaeval theories (and practice) of poetics. He explains the importance of "topics" and gives examples of many of the more important topics for talking about people, landscape and so forth; he devotes an entire chapter to the topic of "invocation of the Muses" from Homer through Dante (and in fact all the way to William Blake.)
As an example of his procedure, I will summarize what to me was the most interesting chapter, on "Classicism". He begins by asking, with his friend T.S. Eliot, "What is a classic?" He derives the term for a model author from "classicus", which referred to the highest of the five tax-brackets based on property in the late Roman Empire (a sixth class was the proletarians, who had no taxable property.) The late writer Aulus Gellius in discussing the proper grammatical usage of words says that the way to decide is to look at how words are used by the older writers (antiquiores), but "the classics, not the proletarians" — in other words, the writers in the "top bracket". Curtius comments, "What a tidbit for a Marxist sociology of literature!" After this one sentence, the word was not used in this sense again for a millennium and a half, when it reappears in a French manual of poetics in 1548, obviously by someone who had read Gellius; the first use in English is not until Alexander Pope. As for the word and idea of "classicism", it first becomes popular in the debates over Romanticism in the 1820's. Curtius considers the opposition of Classicism and Romanticism to be an inadequate schema which only applies to France and which has been imposed as a straightjacket onto the literary history of other countries. For the contrary or complement of Classicism, he borrows the word "Mannerism" from art history, which is the title of the following chapter, devoted mainly to the Spanish siglo de oro (which is also the subject of several of the longest "Excurses" in the second part of the book).
The longest chapter of the work is on "The Symbolism of the Book", which treats of the use of books as metaphors and particularly of the metaphor of the "book of nature". This is followed by a chapter on Dante, and an epilogue, which finishes up the book as a continuous consecutive argument, on about page 400. There are then about 200 pages of "Excurses", short essays on a variety of subjects which shed light on the arguments of the book. The English edition follows these with a lecture, "The Mediaeval Bases of Western Thought", given at a Goethe conference in Colorado in 1949 and printed as an appendix, which could serve as a summary of the work for those who do not know Latin or other languages; and a 55 page epilogue by Peter Goodman about Curtius' life and the origins of the book. Goodman ends his discussion by contrasting the book with another work which I read many years ago, Erich Auerbach's Mimesis; where Curtius emphasizes the diachronic continuity of the tradition and denies the reality of stylistic periods and Zeitgeist, asserting the complete autonomy of literature, Auerbach on the contrary emphasizes the synchronic unity of the writers in the various periods and considers the historical and socio-economic influences upon literature. I think the two approaches should be taken as complementary rather than as an "either/or" dichotomy; each deals with aspects which the other ignores.
Taking the work as a whole, I would say that Curtius' detailed studies are very impressive, his interpretations always stimulating, and his value judgements — rather problematic. In any case, this is an important book which I would recommend to anyone with the now rather anachronistic education to understand it.
Feb. 910. Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading [1996] 372 pages
This is a popularly written, rather than a scholarly work (although it seems reliable enough, apart from some questionable generalizations), which combines much discussion of the author's own experiences of reading with many interesting historical and literary anecdotes. Manguel's own theories of the nature and experience of reading and of literature run through all the chapters, though never presented in a systematic way. The organization of the book is neither entirely chronological or in any logical order of subjects, but the twenty-two chapters jump from one aspect to another of reading in a somewhat random way, similar to a book like Carl Sagan's Cosmos only even more so.
Among the subjects treated are learning to read, being read to, silent reading and reading out loud, the invention of writing, the different forms of the book, libraries, stealing books, reading in private, public readings by authors, metaphors of reading, censorship, and translation; there are descriptions of dozens of readers from St. Augustine to Rilke and of course Manguel. Some of the material is well-known and some is obscure and wasn't anything I had come across before. Some interesting things I learned were that library catalogers in ancient Sumer were called "Ordainers of the Universe" (as a retired library cataloger, I thought that was a good description), and that cigar workers in nineteenth-century Cuba paid people to read to them while they worked, starting the day with the newspapers and then going on to fiction and nonfiction, until one of the dictators made it illegal, which gives some context to the famous quotation from Castro about making every factory in Cuba a branch of the University of Havana.
In all, an entertaining and informative book for reading geeks like me.
Feb. 1411. Dirk J. Struik, Yankee Science in the Making: Science and Engineering in New England from Colonial Times to the Civil War [1948, rev. 1962, Dover ed. 1991] 544 pages
As the subtitle added in the Dover edition indicates, this is a history of science and engineering in New England up to the time of the Civil War. In fact, there is very little description of the actual technology, and even less of the actual science; rather it is a sociological account of the growth of science and technology and the socio-economic conditions which led to the development of one or another field at various times.
It begins with the gradual assimilation of English science and technology in the colonial period (the first part, one chapter). The second part (the Federalist Period) deals with the early republic, the assimilation of European science, the development of mathematics and astronomy in connection with navigation in the Federalist period (much about Nathaniel Bowditch), the first beginnings of civil engineering in connection with highway and canal building, the origins of mass production initially in the arms industry, the beginnings of the textile industry, and the beginnings of geology, chemistry and botany in relation to the new industrialization.
The third part (the Jacksonian Period) chronicles the beginnings of original science in the geological and botanical surveys of the 1820's, the expansion of manufacturing and the building of the railroads and steamships, and the increasing amount of original scientific work in the 1830's, 40's, and 50's, especially in geology and chemistry.
There are short biographies of the major figures — Benjamin Silliman, Louis Agassiz, Asa Gray, Benjamin Pearce, among others — and of many people who did important but minor work. The origins of scientific and technological studies at the Universities and schools and the development of scientific institutions are emphasized. There is only one black and white illustration (of types of bridge trusses.)
I had hoped for more of the actual science, but given what the book was, it was interesting and informative, and I intend to read more about some of these figures, particularly Bowditch and Agassiz of whom I already have biographies on my shelves.
Feb. 2012. Maryse Condé, Traversée de la Mangrove [1989] 265 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in French]
Traversée de la Mangrove is Condé's seventh novel; I have read all seven in chronological order (as well as some of her shorter nonfiction), as I am slowly working my way through her works, although I may skip some of the later books (she is a very prolific writer). While the first six were set either in Africa or well in the past, in Traversée de la Mangrove she returns to her native Guadaloupe and to the present day; the frame story at least is set no more than three years before the novel was published.
The book opens with a retired school director, Léocadie Timothée, taking her usual evening walk in the woods near her house in the small village of Rivière au Sel, where she stumbles upon a cadaver, which she recognizes as the body of her enigmatic and somewhat reclusive neighbor Francis Sancher. We learn almost immediately that Sancher, a foreigner who had appeared mysteriously in the village some two decades earlier, is widely disliked in the community; there is speculation about who might have killed him and the reader may assume that the book is going to be a murder mystery, although an autopsy soon discloses that he died of natural causes. After his body is returned from the authorities, the villagers hold a wake at which nearly the entire community is present, from his few friends to his many enemies and some who are simply indifferent, coming only for the food and the rum. In fact the novel is on one level a sort of mystery: who was Francis Sancher (or Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez, as we find out later may have been his real name)?
The remainder of the book consists of twenty chapters, each devoted to one of nineteen people at the wake (one character is repeated), who are recalling their past lives and their contacts with Sancher; most are written in the first person, although some are in free indirect discourse instead. Some of the characters have had much contact with him, while others have only met him once or twice, but all have been somehow affected by his presence. Each person has a different understanding of who Sancher was, and we see him from all these different perspectives, occasionally learning some isolated fact about him which we try to piece together with the others. More importantly, however, we can piece together the story of the community, its history and personalities over several decades (the oldest of the characters are probably in their late seventies, the youngest at most in his teens.) There is one final chapter called "Le Devant-Jour", Caribbean French for "dawn", in which the people at the wake disperse home, leaving the identity of Sancher still enigmatic.
The novel is in a sense a socio-political study of the village itself, and by implication of contemporary rural Guadaloupe; the underlying politics of the novel (and all of Condés novels are political) are more subtle and less obvious than in most of her books. I am tempted to call the style "post-modernist", although Condé is not usually associated with that label. The device of the wake reminded me of the beginning of Olga Tokarczuk's Livre de Jacob, which is based on similar histories of the guests at a wedding, although Condé continues the device through the entire novel. This struck me as the best constructed and one of the best written of her novels I have read so far, and I would recommend it. It is also available in an English translation by her husband under the title Crossing the Mangrove.
Feb. 2113. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks [part I, 1975, part II, 1979, Eng. tr. 1982] 249 pages
Lévi-Strauss begins this book by describing three types of masks produced by the Salish and Kwakiutl peoples of the Pacific Northwest (Northern Washington State, British Columbia, and Vancouver Island), the Swaihwé of the Salish, the similar Xwéxwé of the Kwakiutl, and the opposite type of Dzonokwa, giving a structuralist analysis of both their plastic art and the origin myths connected with them. He goes on to discuss the relation of the myths connected with the masks to the myths about the origins of copper and sums up his conclusions. In the second part, mainly reworkings of articles he had already published in journals, he considers another type of mask, discusses the probable social structure of the Kwakiutl (which was controversial at the time) making analogies with the noble houses of Mediaeval France, and then enlarges his examination of related myths to the entire geographical/cultural area as far north as Alaska. The book is fairly technical and somewhat difficult, but very interesting.
Feb. 2414. Govert Schilling, Ripples in Spacetime: Einstein, Gravitational Waves, and the Future of Astronomy [2017] 339 pages
This is a popular account of gravitational waves written about two years after they were first discovered. It is aimed at an audience with little if any previous knowledge of science, at a very elementary level. Refreshingly for a book written at that level, there was not too much gosh-wow, although there was a lot of gossip about people's private lives and personalities.
The first third of the book is the usual inaccurate summary of the history of astronomy (I have never found a book by a non-specialist which gets Greek science right, and Galileo seldom fares much better, and doesn't here) and a superficial account of general relativity and Einstein's love interests. However, when he finally gets to the history of the search for gravitational waves the book is reasonably good, though I would still recommend Bartusiak's Einstein's Unfinished Symphony or Kennefic's Travelling at the Speed of Thought over this for anyone who is not a complete beginner.
Schilling does go farther chronologically than those, so his last few chapters are more interesting. As with any science book written more than two or three years ago, I was left wondering about what has been discovered since it was written.
Feb. 2415. Xosé Neira Vilas, Memoirs of a Peasant Boy [1961, Eng. tr. 2004] 118 pages [Kindle]
This novel in the form of a memoir by a young peasant boy is one of the major fictional works of contemporary Galicia. While I managed to read Rosalia de Castro's Cantares gallegos last month in Galician, with much use of a dictionary, I decided to read this prose work in the English translation. It was not frankly a very good translation, with many grammatical faults and unidiomatic expressions, and the fact that it was a cheap Kindle book with many typos didn't help, but the content was very much worthwhile. It only took a couple hours to read.
Ostensibly the book is the notebook of a boy named Balbino, over several years until he runs away from home in his early teens after fighting back against bullying by his landlord's son. It is about the struggle for dignity in the face of an oppressive social and economic order as seen by an intelligent child from a repressive religious and economically precarious family situation.
I enjoyed reading it and would recommend it despite the poor translation.
Mar. 6-816. Thomas Dekker, The Best Plays of the Old Dramatists: Thomas Dekker (ed. by Ernest Rhys) [1887] 473 pages
17. Thomas Dekker, The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker. . .in Four Volumes v.2 [1873] 392 pages
Two very old and falling-apart books from my garage, these were the next in my reading project of the seventeenth century. The Rhys edition contained the three plays I had previously read by Dekker (though decades ago, and I didn't remember them), The Shoemaker's Holiday, undoubtedly his best (which is in every Renaissance Drama anthology I have), and the two parts of The Honest Whore, also a good if somewhat uneven play and written in collaboration with Thomas Middleton. The two parts of The Honest Whore were also in the works volume two. In addition, each book had two other plays which I had never read; the Rhys edition contained one of his earliest plays, Old Fortunatus, and The Witch of Edmonton, a play about a witch and a murder written in collaboration with John Webster, while the second volume of his works contained what is probably his worst play, The Whore of Babylon, and Westward Hoe!, a collaboration with John Ford. The Rhys edition also had a forty-page biography of Dekker (there was undoubtedly an even longer biography in the works, but it would have been in the first volume).
I have read different accounts of whether his earliest surviving play is The Shoemaker's Holiday or Old Fortunatus; both were written about 1599. The Shoemaker's Holiday has two plots, a romance and a comedy, both concerning the Cordwainers Guild (the Shoemakers). Old Fortunatus is based on an old legend similar to the Faust story in which the goddess Fortune gives a poor man unlimited wealth which he and his sons misuse to their own damnation. It would probably have been another really good play, if it hadn't been chosen as a play to be presented at court; he ruined it in order to pay absurdly exaggerated compliments to Queen Elizabeth.
The Honest Whore was performed in two parts; the Rhys biography makes a big deal of there being written thirty years apart, and of how much more mature the writing of the second part is, but other things I have read say that part two was written the next year but just not published for thirty years. Each play has two interwoven plots, one about Hippolito and Rose (he is trying to marry her despite her father's opposition in the first part, trying to cheat on her in the second part) and one about his friend's mistress, Bellafront, whom Hipppolito converts to be "honest". In both parts, Hippolito is a rather unsympathetic prig, but he is not a hypocrite in the first part.
The Witch of Edmonton is probably his last play. It begins as another love against the father's opposition, but soon develops into a play of crime with a comic witchcraft plot (apparently inspired by a true event). The Whore of Babylon is a tedious allegory of Queen Elizabeth (Titania the Fairy Queen) and the Catholic Church (the Whore of Babylon); it might have been barely readable as a poem, but there is nothing dramatic in it. Westward Ho! is a play about jealous, miserly and unfaithful husbands and their flirting but ultimately chaste wives; it reminded me of a less humorous imitation of The Merry Wives of Windsor, but with much more scurrilous language and a bawd as a major protagonist. It managed to scandalize even the Renaissance audiences.
The next readings in this project will be by Ben Jonson, probably next month.
Mar. 1418. Claude Lévi Strauss, Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture [1977] 58 pages
I set aside the very long book I have been reading to pick up the last of my readings in Lévi-Strauss, Myth and Meaning. This was a series of five lectures in English which was broadcast on CBC Radio in December of 1977. They constitute a very simple popular introduction to his work and clear up some of the misconceptions which some people had about what structuralism was about. I found it very interesting, having read nine of his books over the past two years. I'm following up with five secondary sources on structuralism, not only in anthropology but also in literature and other fields, before I go back to finish reading my long book (Randall's 997-page The Career of Philosophy volume 1.)
Mar. 1719. Edward Sapir, Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech [1921] 200 pages
I said in my previous review of Lévi-Strauss' Myth and Meaning that I was going to read five secondary works on Structuralism next; I had hardly begun reading the introduction to the first book before I realized that I needed to read a few other books on structural linguistics, philosophy, psychology and literary theory first, as background. By a few, I mean about twenty. This is the kind of regress that keeps me from ever getting through my planned reading lists. To be sure, most of them were already on my extended TBR list; some, like Derrida and Lacan, were authors I have deliberately procrastinated on reading, others like Sapir were authors I actually wanted to read.
Sapir was one of the early pioneers of structural linguistics; Language, published in 1921, is one step beyond de Saussure, the founder, whom I read a few years ago, but well before my college linguistics textbook from the late sixties. Naturally, being just over a hundred years old, it is in some respects outdated, especially in the more technical parts, but the linguistic scientists who have superseded him all built on his foundations; that's how science works. For the most part, however, the book is fairly non-technical and is still a good general introduction to language for the general reader, and of course a must-read for any student of linguistics who is interested in the historical development of the discipline.
Sapir disclaims any attempt at dealing with the neurological bases of language; he goes a bit too far when he says that language merely uses abilities developed for other purposes in the same way as we use our brains to do math or our fingers for playing the piano — we certainly know today that areas of the brain as well as the vocal apparatus have evolved specifically to use language. However, what he was getting at is that languages need to be studied as abstract structures, which is true. In his discussion of phonetics (chapter 3), he approaches the idea of the phoneme, without using the term or defining it as clearly as contemporary linguistics books do. His discussion of the basic processes and concepts of grammar and how they are implemented in such diverse ways by different languages (chapters 4 and 5) is the heart of the book. The chapter on types of languages (chapter 6) is the most difficult, because he is trying to work out a new basis of classifying languages; the general reader may want to skip or skim through this section, although I found his discussion of agglutination vs. fusion very interesting.
Chapters 7 through 9 deal with diachronic linguistics (language change) and are the best thing I have ever read on the general principles involved, even though much has been learned since in detail. His example of the (lingering) disappearance of the "who"/"whom" distinction in English, and his other examples of the direction in which English is changing (e.g., "It's me" vs. "It is I") are very insightful and written in a lively, almost humorous style, and the history of the language over the last century has borne out many of his predictions. One phenomenon he did not predict, of course, was the contemporary usage of "they" and "their" as gender-indeterminate singulars in sentences such as "If someone has a toothache, they should see their dentist" — okay, I'm not great at thinking up examples — which I do not think is just an "incorrect" failure of agreement between singular antecedent and plural consequent as prescriptive English teachers claim, but an actual use of a former plural as a singular, completely analagous to the sixteenth-century use of the formerly plural "you" and "your" in place of the singular "thou", "thee" and "thy". Nevertheless, I think it fits well into his overall argument.
The blurb on the back of my edition (a Dover reprint) mentions the controversial "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", which claimed that at least some concepts are so tied to specific languages that they cannot be understood by speakers of other languages. There is nothing resembling this in the current book; he and Whorf developed that idea later, and in fact Sapir seems to say just the opposite in discussing the relationship of language to culture in chapter 10: "Nor can I believe that culture and language are in any true sense causally related. Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought. it is difficult to see what particular causal relations may be expected to subsist between a selected inventory of experience . . . and the particular manner in which the society expresses all experience." The final chapter does however make the much less questionable point that the structure of a particular language (e.g., whether it has a fixed word order or a more variable one, whether it has inflectional endings, whether it can freely form compounds, etc.) may determine what sort of literary styles can be successfully developed in that language.
Mar. 1920. Vladimir Propp, Morphology of the Folktale [1928, rev. tr. 1968] 158 pages
I'm continuing my study of structuralism. Propp attempts in this book to find the basic structures common to all (or at least Russian) fairy tales. I decided to read this after reading Lévi-Strauss' critique; both came independently to somewhat different kinds of structural analysis. Propp begins by identifying a small number of basic functions, such as an act of villainy or a perceived lack, leaving home, acquiring a magical object, fighting with the villain, pursuit and rescue, the return home, and the reward (usually a wedding) from which the tales are constructed, and the types of character such as the victim, the villain, the hero, the donor (of magical objects), the helper and so forth which occur in each function, then tries to show the way they are ordered to form the complete tales. The great diversity in fairy tales is not in the structures which are fairly universal but in the details by which the persons are described or the specific ways in which the structures are instantiated. In reading this, I found myself applying the analysis to the Thousand Nights and a Night, which I recently finished reading (not all the stories are fairy tales but a fair number are) and other things I have read. Propp's analysis seems to fit much of fantasy literature as well as the fairy tale as such.
Mar. 2721. Leonard Bloomfield, Language [1933] 566 pages
Bloomfield's Language is a classic of structural linguistics. It is a comprehensive study of language in all of its various aspects, both descriptive and historical, from first principles. To the extent I can remember my linguistics text from about 1972, there seems to be very little difference; the book is very modern-seeming in most respects. I did have a couple of reservations. Firstly, he makes his explanations somewhat too complex by trying to phrase them in accordance with a rather crude form of stimulus-response behaviorism, which dates the book somewhat. Secondly, and more importantly, is that in describing the ideas of lexical and grammatical forms in his early chapters, he takes nearly all his examples from English. Most modern textbooks of linguistics try to avoid too many English examples, to counteract the tendency of new students to take English as "normal" and other languages as "exceptions".
The book begins with a history of the development of linguistic science up to his own time, discusses the idea of a speech community (and shows that it is not as simple as it would seem), and gives a survey of the different languages of the world divided into families. He then turns to the various sounds which can be made by our vocal organs and classifies them (phonetics). Next, he discusses the patterns of sounds which are actually significant for different languages (phonology), introducing the concept of a phoneme. However, it differs from the way I learned it in that he doesn't discuss allophones or complementary distribution and he uses square brackets for both phonetic and phonemic transcription rather than slashes for phonemes. Then he introduces in a very abstract way the ideas of morphemes, lexemes, taxemes and tagmemes (as well as many other -emes that I never heard of and that he never mentions again). He then goes on to describe grammatical forms, syntax and morphology, form-classes and lexicon, and other elements of structure; the book is very complete.
The second half of the book deals with the history of language, with chapters on the comparative method, dialect geography, phonetic change, analogic levelling, semantic change, and borrowing. This half (chapters 17-27) has been published as a separate book called Language History, which I read a long time ago.
Anyone with an interest in language, and especially change in language, needs to read this to begin with, and then perhaps supplement it with more contemporary works.
Mar. 2822. Dulce Maria Cardoso, The Return [2011, tr. 2016] 272 pages
The Return is the stream-of-consciousness narration of a teenage boy, Rui, a white colonial Angolan who "returns" with his mother and sister to The Motherland (Portugal), where in fact he has never been, in the period leading up to the independence of the Portuguese colonies in Africa in 1975 (following a decade of guerilla war and the Portuguese coup of April 1974 which brought down the Salazarist dictatorship). Superficially, the novel seems fairly simple, but in reality the themes are very complex.
If we take Rui's views as the expression of the author, it appears to be a very conservative, even racist novel: for Rui, the whites are the innocent victims of ungrateful and savage Blacks, who were unwilling to live in peace in a multi-racial Angola, the idealistic dream of Rui's father who believed in that illusion and refused to leave until after nearly all his white neighbors had already gone; the victims as well of Portuguese "commies" and "traitors" who betrayed the settlers and "gave away" territories which were "part of Portugal". He constantly emphasizes that his father treated the Blacks well, got along with them, wasn't an exploiter, worked hard for everything he had. He does occasionally admit that there were other whites who mistreated and abused Blacks, but insists that his family at least were innocent victims, that as one of the returnees says "the innocent suffer for the sins of the guilty" and he refuses to accept that as just.
A significant element of the plot is the arbitrary arrest of Rui's father; there are other examples given of whites who were killed or "disappeared" during the transition to independence. On the other hand, there is little or no mention of the Portuguese brutality against the Angolan Black population in combating the nationalist movements, which as many reviewers who take the novel at face value as racist propaganda point out was far beyond anything the whites suffered. (This is the jist of most of the serious negative reviews on Goodreads(as opposed to those who simply don't understand modern literary style) — there are almost no reviews at all on Amazon.) The war is only alluded to occasionally, mainly in references to the Portuguese soldiers (including Rui's Uncle Zé, who nevertheless believes Portugal was right to end the "shame of 500 years of exploitation".) To listen only to Rui, one would believe that the problems only began with the coup, rather than with the beginning of the War of Liberation a decade earlier.
However, Rui's viewpoint is continually being undercut in the novel itself. Rui's own memories show that his father could be best described as a "paternalist" racist, "helping" his Black workers but also treating them essentially as children, less intelligent and lazier than the whites, lacking in discipline and ambition. (Rui never asks what would happen to a Black who was sufficiently disciplined and ambitious to come into competition with the whites.) Rui and his friends sexually exploit the Black girls, but have a certain respect for the white girls, although there is certainly an element of sexism throughout his internal monologue (but again this is often undercut if you read between the lines.) The elements which are missing in Rui's own rationalizations are supplied to a certain extent by the reported dialogue of other characters such as Uncle Zé. If we consider, as we ought to, Rui as an "unreliable" narrator whose understanding of the world is very limited and whose views are very much determined by his environment and what has happened to him and his family, the novel (insofar as it is about Angola) takes on a very different aspect: it is about how Rui and the others have come to their views, rather than endorsing those views.
In the last analysis, however, the novel isn't primarily about the role of the whites in Angola at all, but about the treatment of the "returnees" in The Motherland, and this is what makes it an important work. Despite the decade-long "handwriting on the wall", Portugal was completely unprepared for the influx of "returnees." They became in part the scapegoats for the failure of Portuguese colonialism, or for the colonialism itself, even though many of them were born in the colonies, often after several generations, and those like Rui's parents who were first generation colonists were essentially part of an "economic draft", unable to find sufficient work or living wages in The Motherland. There was an attitude of "you deserved it", you were the exploiters, etc. when in fact it was Portugal itself that was responsible for (and primarily benefited from) the colonies. (Somewhat like those who blamed returning soldiers for the war in Vietnam, rather than the people at home who sent them.) Of course, the fact that most of the "returnees" themselves justified colonialism and opposed the Revolution (such as it was) in Portugal made it easy to hold them responsible.
Another and possibly even more important reason for the hostility of people in The Motherland to the "returnees" was the same reason that applies to all immigrants: the fact that a large influx of immigrants into a capitalist country with major unemployment and underemployment and where wages are based on supply and demand for labor power creates a not-entirely-unfounded fear that the natives of the host country will be displaced from their jobs or reduced to lower wages. In any case, whatever the reasons, the treatment of the returnees was abominable and this is the major theme of the novel.
Naturally, all decent people support justice for oppressed nationalities and ethnic groups, but it is necessary to understand that even the most just restitution in the best case will inevitably create new injustices towards members of the former oppressor groups who are not personally responsible, especially in the case of children, and that is even more true when the oppressed group has a leadership that is based on a demagogic nationalist or ethnic or religious (or Stalinist) platform rather than on a genuine class-conscious revolutionary program. While that should not cause us to cease supporting the struggles of oppressed groups for justice and self-determination, we should also give thought to mitigating these inevitable results.
While reading this I thought for example of the similar case in Abdulrazak Gurnah's novels where the Moslem population of Tanzania suddenly went from being partly an elite of former slaveowners (although most weren't) to being victims of the Black majority's revenge after independence, and ended up as victims of the usual racism in England. I also thought (given that I read this book in March of 2024) about whether the United States or any country in the "West" would be prepared for the influx of Jewish Israelis if Hamas, Hezbollah, or even a moderate Palestinian group like the original al-Fatah were to win a major victory in Palestine. This is a novel that has many resonances.
Apr. 723. Italo Calvino, The Cloven Viscount [1952] 106 pages
This is a rare re-read, from February of 2015. It is the first book of the Our Ancestors trilogy; I read it again because I am reading the second and third books this time around.
Apr. 824. Italo Calvino, The Baron in the Trees [1957, tr. 1959] 217 pages
The Baron in the Trees is the second book in the Our Ancestors trilogy, although the three books can be read separately or in any order since they are only a series in the sense that they have a similar style; all three are "fables" set in the past but with nonrealistic premises. The basic plot of The Baron in the Trees is that Cosimo, the twelve-year-old son of the old-fashioned, genealogy-obsessed Baron Arminio Piovasco di Rondò, rebels at what he considers the unfair treatment he receives from his family and climbs up a tree, refusing to come down. He spends the rest of his life living in the treetops, having forbidden himself ever to touch the ground. He has many adventures traveling about in the trees, fighting pirates and foreign soldiers, meeting brigands, putting out forest fires, quarrelling with Jesuit spies, and falling in love with the equally eccentric Viola, who appears and disappears at various points in the story; at times he seems like an adult version of Peter Pan, although he definitely ages.
What is the point of the fable (because all Calvino's fables have a point)? One important theme at least is the necessity of perspective, of having a certain distance from society to be able to judge it correctly; the young baron in the trees sees things differently both literally and metaphorically from others. His readings in the Enlightenment authors (the book begins in 1767 and continues through the post-Napoleonic era) give him a different view of society than his Catholic relatives and neighbors, which would not have been possible for him living as a normal baron and participating in the social roles required by his aristocratic status. He meets with and learns from people of all classes and social groups, whom he would never have interacted with as a baron, while not being a part of any of these groups. The contrast with his younger brother, Biagio, who takes on the role Cosimo has rejected (and is the narrator of the fable) shows this clearly. The Wikipedia article on Calvino quotes him as saying that the book is about the role and obligations of the intellectual in society, who ideally should have a similar distance (though we know that is not necessarily the case).
This is one of Calvino's most famous books, and it is definitely one worth reading, especially since it can be read in a few hours.
Apr. 925. Italo Calvino, The Nonexistent Knight [1959, tr. 1962] 136 pages [Kindle]
The third book of the Our Ancestors trilogy, this parody of the romances of chivalry opens with Charlemagne reviewing the Paladins of France, Roland, Oliver and so forth as we know them from the chansons de geste (and from Ariosto, one of Calvino's favorite authors). Finally he comes to Agilulf Emo Bertrandin of the Guildivern and of the the Others of Cobentraz and Sura, Knight of Selimpia Citeriore and Fez, who is the perfect embodiment of chivalry, apart from one slight defect: he doesn't exist. There is no body in that shining white suit of armor. Shortly afterwards, we meet the strange character of Gurduloo (and many other names) who variously imagines himself as a sheep, a frog, a fish, a butterfly and whatever else is around him, in speaking to the king isn't sure whether he is Gurduloo talking to the king, or the king talking to Gurduloo, later is confused as to whether he is supposed to eat the soup or the soup is supposed to eat him . . . As a joke, Charlemagne assigns him to be Agilulf's squire.
In a parody of Existentialist philosophy, Agilulf is essence without existence, Gurduloo is existence without essence. Both are contrasted with the ineffective, inauthentic and rule-bound life of the other aging paladins. As one might expect, there are characters who mediate between the two extremes: Raimbaut de Rousillon and the female knight Bradamante. Over the course of the tale, we observe battles, quests, damsels in distress, the Knights of the Holy Grail, and other clichés of mediaeval romance. The story constantly confronts us with surprising turns, so that it is impossible to summarize the plot without spoilers.
As with the other two books, and as we would expect from one of the founders of postmodernist fiction, the fable can be read either as an amusing story or as a serious allegory; it is both.
Apr. 1026. Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo or The seasons in the city [1963, tr. 1983] 121 pages
In reading this collection of twenty short stories, most between four and eight pages, I felt as though I were watching an evening of Charlie Chaplin one-reelers. The protagonist of all the stories, Marcovaldo, is a poorly-paid unskilled factory worker, who is trying to provide for his large family in the basically hostile world of a North Italian industrial city. Like Chaplin's Tramp, he is good-hearted, naive and sort of clueless, and all his efforts end in comic misadventures. We laugh, but at the same time feel a certain compassion. The earlier stories are written, like Calvino's first novels, in a style reminiscent of neo-realist films, although with the exaggerations that come with comedy. In the last few stories (written a decade and a half after the earlier ones) the tone becomes less comic and more obviously satirical, and I didn't enjoy them as much.
Apr. 11-1527. Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics [1965, tr. 1968] 169 pages [Kindle]
28. Italo Calvino, t Zero also tr. as Time and the Hunter [1967, tr. 1969] 152 pages
29. Italo Calvino, New stories from World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories [1968] and Cosmicomics New and Old [1984] [tr. 2002] 101 pages [Kindle]
This is somewhat complex. I read these stories in The Complete Cosmicomics which contains all thirty one stories reprinted in the 1984 collection Cosmicomics New and Old, in addition to two stories from World Memory and Other Cosmicomic Stories which were not included in that collection and the revised version of one story published separately, for a total of thirty four. The original Cosmicomics contained twelve stories, and t zerocontained eleven; the remaining stories are not available in English except in this collection (or in periodicals.)
The Cosmicomics are a unique genre to themselves. Experimental fiction, certainly, speculative fiction in a sense, "fables" in a sense that applies only to Calvino, but no more specific genre. They are sometimes called science fiction, but although they are "inspired" by scientific theories the treatment has little resemblance to what is called science fiction; at most there is a very remote similarity to Lem's Cyberiad, which itself stretches the definition of science fiction. A few, especially the "moon" stories which start each of the three books, are "tall tales" which could be considered to fall under the label of fantasy, but these are not in my opinion the best stories in the collection.
The most imaginative stories are those which are told from the perspective of elementary particles, one-celled animals, and other beings we do not generally consider as having consciousness. All, however, are forms of the first-person protagonist Qfwfq. Who or what is Qfwfq, who appears to be all these different forms of being? The closest I could come to understanding his nature was to consider him (he is always definitely male) as a kind of chief organizing monad in each body, not in the "windowless" sense of Leibniz but perhaps more like Whitehead's "prehensions". My favorite story of this kind was the first of the "Priscilla" trilogy in t zero, "Mitosis", which is a love-story of a one-celled asexual animal with . . . what? t zero also has some very experimental stories where the simple plot is just the opportunity for an interior monologue about physics or metaphysics; my favorite of these was the title story "t zero", also titled "Time and the Hunter", where the entire interior monologue takes place between the time the hunter shoots his arrow at the lion and the time when it hits or misses the lion.
Hard to describe or review, these are definitely a great read.
Apr. 1630. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities [1972, tr. 1974] 165 pages
Not exactly a novel, not exactly a story collection, Invisible Cities is one of Calvino's most experimental and least classifiable works. Each of the nine chapters begins and ends with a dialogue between "Marco Polo" and "Kublai Khan". In between are several short (one to three page) descriptions of imaginary cities, all designated by women's names, which are supposedly being narrated by Polo to the Khan. The descriptions are classified into categories such as "Cities and Memory", "Cities and Desire", "Cities and Signs", "Cities and Eyes", "Cities and Names", "Cities and the Dead", "Continuous Cities", "Trading Cities" and a few more. "Cities and Signs" and "Cities and Names" make points about the nature of language and symbolism, in line with Calvino's interest at the time in semiology; other descriptions make points about the relativity of our perceptions, and so forth. For many of the descriptions, however, I could not see any clear intention; nevertheless, they were all interesting in various ways. All in all, this was a book which was both easy to read and difficult to interpret.
Apr. 17-2031. Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves [1949, Eng. tr.] 181 pages
32. Italo Calvino, Difficult Loves [1958, Eng. tr.] 303 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]
These are two different collections with the same title (and the Wikipedia article on Calvino lists yet a third one with different contents from both). The e-book I borrowed from the Library contains translations of the thirteen stories written in the 1940s and 1950s and collected in Italian in 1970 as Gli amori difficili, together with two novellas, The Argentine Ant (1952) and Smog (1965); the printed book, which I had, contains eight stories from Gli amori difficili and twenty other stories from the 1949 collection The Crow Comes Last (Ultimo viene il corvo). (For that I counted the pages only of the twenty stories, to avoid duplication.)
The stories are among Calvino's earlier work, from the period of The Path to the Spiders' Nests and Our Ancestors; they are written in his realist style rather than his later postmodern style, although some like "The Adventure of a Photographer" and "The Adventure of a Motorist" foreshadow his later concerns. I especially liked "The Adventure of a Reader." (The "Adventures of" stories are the ones from the original Gli amori difficili.)
The twenty from The Crow Comes Last are divided into three groups: "Riviera Stories" are largely nostalgic stories about adolescents in a simpler time, "War Stories" are about the Second World War and the partisan movement, and "Postwar Stories" tend to be more humorous in the "Chaplinesque" style of Marcovaldo ("The Theft in the Pastry Shop" reminded me of the scene of the robbers in the Department Store in Modern Times).
Apr. 2333. Italo Calvino, Mr. Palomar [1983, tr. 1985] 113 pages [Kindle Unlimited]
Another unclassifiable work by Calvino, Mr. Palomar is made up of short episodes, not really stories, which take place in the consciousness of a single protagonist, Mr. Palomar. There is an "index" at the end which suggests that there is an architecture to the work, moving from visual images through cultural observations to speculative meditations, which is sort of true. Many of the episodes seem to be just Calvino playing with ideas, using Mr. Palomar as a device for expressing his opinions on various philosophical and political questions. The episodes seemed to me to be much more uneven than other stories I have read recently by Calvino — the section on Mr. Palomar at the Grocery Store bored me completely — but this may just be because I have read so many of his books in a row that I am getting burnt out. In any case, not my favorite work of the author.
Apr. 2534. Italo Calvino, Under the Jaguar Sun [1986, tr. 1988] 86 pages
These three stories, published posthumously, were actually written earlier but intended for a book on the five senses, which was not completed at the time of the author's death. The title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun" (1982), is told largely through the sense of taste, mixing archaeological tourism at an Olmec-Zapotec-Mixtec sacrificial temple with meals of current Mexican cuisine. "A King Listens" (1984) is told through sounds (and is another of Calvino's experiments with a second-person narrative). "The Name, the Nose" (1972) deals with the sense of smell; it alternates between three parallel stories, one set in prehistory, one in eighteenth or nineteenth-century Paris at a perfumerie, and one in twentieth-century London where a group of hippies are crashing together. All three were interesting experiments.
35. John Herman Randall, Jr., The Career of Philosophy v. 1: From the Middle Ages through the Enlightenment [1962] 997 pagesAlmost a thousand pages, this is the most comprehensive secondary work I have read on what my college classes called "early modern philosophy"; I have been reading it on and off for over a month. The organizing ideas are that modern philosophy is not a complete break with the past, but has a continuity with the philosophy of the later middle ages, and that it is largely an attempt to do two things, assimilate the new science of Galileo and Newton, and justify the struggles of the rising capitalist class (which he refers to throughout as "the middle class" — a perfect example of how vague that term is, and how absurd it is that certain leftists today try to make it synonymous with the Marxist term "petty bourgeois" — against the Church and the feudal system. Given that perspective, it is almost as much a history of the rise of science as it is a history of philosophy.
The volume is divided into four very unequal "books"; the first book is 43 pages, and the fourth book is over 500. The first book is essentially an introduction. It is rather schematic and his comparisons with contemporary ideas struck me as generally wrong, perhaps because he is a specialist on the late mediaeval and early modern periods, while his knowledge of the present, especially in science, is basically that of an "educated layman" (and like most American academics, he misunderstands Marxism, and confuses it with the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union). His own bias is never quite made clear, but I would say he is essentially a pragmatist and a liberal, as one would expect given that he was a student of John Dewey; his references to "sound theology" suggest that he is also probably at least nominally a liberal Christian. None of this really matters once he enters into the detailed study of the philosophers.
He begins with the recovery of the "new" Aristotle via the Moslem commentators (Averroes) at the end of the twelfth century, and briefly summarizes the three main tendencies in thirteenth-century philosophy: the older Platonic tradition stemming from St. Augustine, the Aristotelian tradition of Duns Scotus (and its theological variant of Thomism), and moving into the fourteenth century, the via moderna of William of Ockham's "terminism". In the first part of the second book, he turns toward the early Humanists, discusses the recovery of the "Hellenic" Aristotle (i.e. Aristotle in Greek, and the Alexandrian commentaries), then describes the introduction of Humanism north of the Alps and the Reformation, ending up with a discussion of sixteenth-century political theories.
He does a good job of explaining what seems to the contemporary reader so paradoxical, that it was the supporters of absolute monarchy and the divine right of kings who were the progressives of the time (looking to the monarchy to suppress the power of the Church and feudal nobility), while the more modern-seeming writers who favor a limited monarchy and natural law were the reactionaries who were supporting the traditional feudal-ecclesiastical establishment. It was only after the nobles were deprived of independent power and the Church tamed (or replaced by the more Erastian Protestants) that the bourgeoisie in the next century turned against the kings and began favoring natural rights (especially of course the absolute right to private property.)
The main interest of book two, however, is the discussion of the Padua Aristotelians, who combined Ockhamism with the Alexandrian Aristotle. Randall had previously written a book specifically on the Padua tradition, so here he is at his most detailed. (Padua had no theological faculty; it was primarily a medical school, and so Aristotle from the beginning was treated as a secular scientist rather than a metaphysician.)
Part two of the second book deals with the Italian nature philosophers, both Platonists and Aristotelians, investigates the mediaeval heritage leading up to Galileo (in an interesting discussion which confronts Pierre Duhem's account with his later critics) and continues the discussion of Padua, ending with a chapter on Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Giordano Bruno. Book three deals with the attempts to interpret the new science, and the scientific method, with the inherited traditions about the sources of knowledge: Descartes and the Cartesians, building upon the Augustinian tradition, Spinoza combining the traditions into a consistent system, and the British Empiricists building upon the Ockhamist tradition; the book ends with a chapter on Hobbes.
The fourth and longest book begins with Newton's philosophy of nature, then covers Locke, Berkeley, and Hume as epistemologists. This is followed by a chapter on Locke's political theories, and chapters on rational religion (the rise of Deism), and rational morality (the Cambridge Platonists); and follows the further development of ethics in Shaftsbury and so forth, ending with another chapter on Hume. The book then turns to the French Enlightenment, with chapters on Voltaire, the Encyclopedists, the materialists such as LeMettrie and Holbach, and the psychology of association. Finally, the book ends with the political theories of Montesquieu, Vico, the Physiocrats, and Rousseau.
All the philosophers I studied in my college class in "Early Modern Philosophy" (or "Philosophy Before Kant" — I assume the second volume will begin with him) are discussed at length, except for some reason Leibniz, who isn't dealt with at all. This was a dense and comprehensive work, and it has tempted me to reconstruct my TBR list for the next two years to include more philosophy and fill in the gaps in my reading.
Apr. 2836. Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings [2003, Eng. tr. 2003] 255 pages
The last of my readings in Italo Calvino for the time being, this is a collection of autobiographical writings, mainly interviews and biographical blurbs from his books, some found in a folder after his death, and edited by his widow Esther Calvino, together with his letters from his first trip to the United States (which make up about half the book). Some cast some light on what he intended by his fictional writings, while others explain his political development, his reasons for joining and later leaving the PCI (Communist Party of Italy.) He gives an account of the various influences on his literary production, especially Emilio Vittorini and Cesare Pavese; there is no mention of his involvement with the OuLiPo group.
May 237. Edward Wilson-Lee, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books: Christopher Columbus, His Son, and the Quest to Build the World's Greatest Library [2018] 401 pages
This is essentially a biography of Christopher Columbus' natural son, Hernando Colón. While everyone knows something about his father and his discovery of America, Hernando's important (and less ambivalent) accomplishments are less well known; I had never heard of him until I accidentally found this book in a group of weeded books being sold by the library.
Hernando accompanied his father, at the age of thirteen, on his Fourth and last voyage to the New World. On the voyage, which ended in their being shipwrecked for two years on the island of Jamaica in very trying circumstances after the mutiny of most of the crew, Hernando discoveried the variation of the Earth's magnetic field (Columbus, on the other hand, thought that the change in the direction of the compass was due to the Earth being pear-shaped around the "Earthly Paradise" which he expected to find, so that the direction of North was actually different) and concluded on the basis of anatomical observation that the manatee was a mammal and not a fish (Columbus thought they were "sirens" and was disappointed that they were not more human-like). On his return to Spain, Hernando began many other projects, including a proposal for circumnavigating the globe (which he was perhaps fortunately not allowed to carry out, but was eventually carried out by Magellan,) a topographical survey of Spain which was one of the first examples of a collective scientific enterprise (eventually shut down for political reasons by the Emperor Charles), a more accurate chart of the Atlantic and the Caribbean, and a new dictionary of Latin to replace those of the middle ages (a massive work which never got past the letter "b").
His most important project, however, was a life-long quest to amass the world's largest private library — and unlike his father's visionary, not to say mad, projects for converting the Indians, reconquering Jerusalem, and by fulfilling prophecies provoking the end of the world, Hernando's vision was successful: by the end of his life he had about 15,000 books, which is about the same number as my own personal library but was by far the largest in Europe at the time. Unlike any existing library, he included not only Christian and classical works, but books in all languages, including "ephemeral" works such as pamphlets, posters and ballads, as well as a large collection of prints and printed music; also unlike other libraries of the time he preferred to collect printed books rather than manuscripts. Hernando's library was the first to have walls of bookshelves with the books arranged vertically rather than piled horizontally, and with call numbers on the spines. He had a mania for lists, which resulted in his advances in cataloguing; in addition to catalogues by author and by title, he was the first to develop a subject catalogue The Book of Materials, and to give descriptions of books in what he called The Book of Epitomes. His plan for his own tomb included the Columbus coat of arms supported by four pillars, representing the four catalogues of his library by author, title, subject, and description. He also made another catalogue on separate pieces of paper which could be reorganized for whatever purpose was needed, the ancestor of the card catalogues which those of us who used libraries before the computer revolution are familiar with.
At his death, he left the library to his nephew Luis, who had no interest in it and sold it to the Cathedral of Seville; much of the collection was soon destroyed by the Inquisition as heretical, and much more was sold or allowed to decay, before the twentieth=century historians realized its value and took action to preserve it. Today less than half, around 6,000 books, remain in the Columbina collection at the Cathedral. Many of the books listed in the catalogues (the Book of Epitomes no longer exists), especially the more ephemeral works, have been totally lost, and we only know of them from Hernando's lists.
Toward the end of his life, he also wrote a biography of his father; it was sold to an Italian publisher by Luis, and while the original is lost, the Italian translation was printed and became the basis for the later legend of Columbus; Hernando left out the supernatural visions, and the project for enslaving the Indians, which we know from Columbus' own writings. Much of our information about the voyages are derived from the excerpts of Columbus' logs in Hernando's book; the originals have been lost.
This is one of the most interesting books I have read in what is already for me a year of interesting reading.
May 538. Ananda Devi, Pagli [2001] 157 pages [in French]
The second novel I have read in the past year by 2024 Neustadt Prize winner Ananda Devi, Pagli is much more experimental than Le Voile de Draupadi. It is a story of a forbidden love, but even that is perhaps telling too much; any summary of the plot, even the few lines on the back cover, is a spoiler, given the style of the novel. It opens in the first person in stream-of-consciousness fashion (or perhaps I should say second person, since it is addressed to the absent love) and the first of the short chapters (Nuit/Lanwit — the chapters are all named both in French and in the local Creole) reminded me of the opening of Peter Handke's early novel Die Hornissen, giving us much information but not what we need to know to follow what is happening. In particular, we do not learn who the character is (only that the others have given the character the nickname "Pagli", the fool), whether it is a man or a woman, or why he or she is locked up (by whom?) and threatened with execution or commitment to an asylum. In the second chapter, someone (the same character? We aren't sure) is walking down a road, we don't know from where or to where, or whether it is after the first chapter or at the same time or before, and then we are suddenly in a flashback where the character is coming to "The Ceremony" and sees a woman in a red dress under a tree in the rain, whom we learn is called Mitsy. In the third chapter, the character is living as an evident pariah in a luxurious home that resembles a wedding cake, and then we are back in Mitsy's hut waiting for her sailor husband to come home, and from one paragraph to the next we are launched into another flashback to "The Re-encounter". And so forth; gradually we do piece together who is who and what is going on.
The novel is almost an anthology of every experimental device in twentieth-century fiction; in addition to the stream-of-consciousness throughout the book, and the ambiguous and non-linear chronology, there are chapters which seem like pure surrealism, and others with elements of magical realism, including a supernatural rain which reminded me of the end of Cien Años de Soledad and seems to have a similar function. Much of the dialogue is in Creole, although most is preceded or followed by a paraphrase in French. The setting is the village of Terre Rouge/Ter ruz, evidently on L'Isle Maurice (Mauritius) although that is never said explicitly. An important role is played by les mofines/bann mofinn, a word which is not in any of my French dictionaries; the first time they were mentioned I assumed from the description that they were a type of bird, but it turned out later that they were women, "guardians of purity" who were a sort of self-appointed vice squad. Maybe that's another spoiler, although it is on the back cover. The book, like the earlier one, gives an idea of the mores and the position of women in the Hindu subculture of Mauritius and is a good read for those who like non-traditional writing.
May 939. Ananda Devi, Soupir [2002] 225 pages [in French]
Devi's sixth novel and the third I have read, Soupir is set on the smaller and less developed Isle de Rodrigues, an outlier near her native Mauritius, which also figures in a novel by the other Mauritian author I have read, J.M.G. LeClézio. It is the story of a group who leave the city (Port Mathurin) to settle on a barren hillside, which is called Soupir (to sigh), hoping to become rich by cultivating ganga. The novel is told by one of the group, Patrice L'Éclairé; each of the short chapters is about one or more individuals in the group. There are also a few ghosts. The style is somewhat experimental but much less so than in Pagli, which was published a year earlier. The book focuses on violence, and has an (unclear) connection with the history of slavery. The psychology is rather unconvincing, and this one just didn't work for me.
May 1140. Jon Fosse, Plays Three [2002, Eng. tr. 2004] 400 pages
This collection contains the next five plays by current Nobel winner Jon Fosse (I've previously read Plays One and Plays Two, and plan to read four, five and six before the end of the year. The style and concerns are much the same as in the earlier volumes.
Mother and Child (Mor og barn, [1997]) is a dialogue between a mother who has concentrated on a career and her alienated Catholic son, and is probably the most conservative thing I have read in several years.
Sleep My Baby Sleep (Sov du vesle barnet mitt, [2001]) is a very short play which is rather difficult to understand, with three unnamed persons in some sort of afterlife.
Afternoon (Ettermiddag, [2000])is a longer play about relationships and lack of communication.
Beautiful (Vakkert, [2001] is the longest play in the book and the only one divided into acts. It is about a couple who visit the husband's childhood home and mother, and meet an old childhood friend; there are hints of past secrets which are never fully explained, and there is also a developing relationship between the couple's daughter and a young man from the local community.
Death Variations (Dedsvariasjonar, [2002]) is another long and somewhat obscure play about a divorced couple and their daughter who has just died; it uses the technique of having the couple appear both as young and old on stage at the same time but not interacting; there is a character called "the Friend" who may represent Death.
All five were interesting.
May 1741. Maryse Condé, Les derniers rois mages [1992] 311 pages [Kindle, Open Library, in French]
The eighth novel I have read by Condé, Les derniers rois mages describes one day, a December 10th, about the time the novel was written, in the life of a middle-aged man named Spero, living in Charleston, South Carolina. We learn that he is an unsuccessful artist, originally from Guadaloupe, who came to Charleston decades before with his wife, Debbie, a liberal academic type from an old petty-bourgeois Charleston Black family, the Middletons, and from whom he is now rather alienated; the couple had one daughter, Anita, who left to work as a development specialist in Africa and whom they have not heard from in two years. This is however only the framework; the actual history is told mostly in memories, although they are often complemented by seemingly objective passages by an omniscient narrator.
The history of Spero's family begins at the end of the nineteenth century, with "the ancestor", a king of Dahomey who has been deposed by the French and sent into exile in Martinique, where he fathers Spero's grandfather, Djeré, with a servant, Hosannah. When he is allowed by the French to return to Africa, though not to his own country, he leaves Hosannah and Djeré behind. Hosannah subsequently marries Romulus, a man from Guadaloupe, and moves to that island; after Romulus is killed in a brawl, the family is left in poverty. Djeré has a son Justin, who is the father of Spero. Djeré, Justin, and initially Spero, are obsessed with their "royal" ancestry, commemorating the death of the ancestor every December 10th, and neither Djeré nor Justin condescend to have any actual occupations, living on the work of their wives. They are mocked by their neighbors as the "rois mages", the appellation for the three kings of the Christmas story. Spero has a bit more ambition, and manages to go to France to study art, where he becomes disillusioned with the story of the "ancestor". On his return, he sells his paintings to tourists in the marketplace, where he meets Debbie, who is on a cruise as a graduation present from her parents. They quickly get married and he goes to live in Charleston.
This history alternates with Spero's own realizations about his life and his relationship to Debbie and Anita. The novel also comments on the views of Debbie about the civil rights movement and other political events from the outside perspective of Spero. Near the end there is also an element of magical realism, but the novel is primarily realist in style. The novel is interesting and well-written but not one of Condé's best.
May 1942. Jean-Paul Sartre, What Is Literature [1948, Eng. tr. 1949] 205 pages
Sartre's What Is Literature, originally written in French as Qu'est-ce que la littérature?, is a collection of four long connected essays. Each essay is about twice the length of the preceding one. The first two at least, "What is Writing?" and "Why Write?", were first published in Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes and in his collection Situations II; I'm not sure of the origins of the two last and longer ones, "For Whom Does One Write?" and "The Situation of the Writer in 1947". Taken together, they are a defense of his thesis of "engaged literature".
In the first essay, he is concerned with defining his theme. He attempts to distinguish prose literature from the other arts and from poetry. Much that he says here is questionable; he is neither an artist nor a poet, and I think at most it applies only to a certain type of contemporary French poetry. (He admits later that his discussion of literature is only meant to be about French literature.) His main point is that prose literature is written in language, which is a form of communication which signifies meanings by signs.
The second essay, "Why Write?", could have had the title of the first, since it is concerned with the nature of writing. He distinguishes between the content and the style, and maintains against certain French writers (he cites specifically Gide) that the content is primary and the style is merely an adornment, although it gives the work its aesthetic value; he considers the aesthetic value, however, only as an "extra", while the content is central. This essay contains much of interest, although it is expressed in abstract language based on his philosophy of "existentialism" (basically an abstract way of saying we should deal with the concrete rather than the abstract). He defines the work of literature as an appeal from the freedom of the writer to the freedom of the reader. What is interesting is his argument that the writer "discloses" the world to the reader, but the reader creates the work by his or her interpretation, giving the signs their signification based on his or her own experiences.
The third essay, "For Whom Does One Write?" distinguishes between the "real" readers and the "ideal" or "virtual" readers; that is between those who would really read the book and those who might but usually would not; he takes Richard Wright as an example, whose "real" readers would be "middle-class" Blacks and liberal whites, but whose "virtual" readers would include working-class individuals of all races, Europeans, and even the occasional white racist. This is an idea which has been taken further by other writers. The majority of the essay is devoted to a history of (French) literature and its relationship to the class structure of society at various times. The earlier history is not particularly accurate; he is no historian, and claims for example that late mediaeval literature is written by "clerks" to justify the ideology of the absolute monarchy, the feudal nobles and the Church — obviously not realizing that the ideology of the absolute, "divine-right" monarchy was developed in opposition to the ideology of the Church and the feudal nobility. As he approaches modern times, his account becomes somewhat better, but he interprets the dependence of the literature on the economic substructure in a very direct and "undialectical" way, and ignores the fact that there is also a dialectic within the superstructure. This is also due in part to his underestimation of style. He is best when he reaches the twentieth century, although he polemicizes too much against the surrealists, whose motivations he doesn't seem to really understand.
The last and longest essay, "The Situation of the Writer in 1947", is the real point of the book. He gives a good explanation of anti-revolutionary Stalinist politics and the positions of the French Communist Party, although at the same time he tries to justify them as necessary given the isolation of the USSR by the failure of the Revolution to spread; he doesn't truly break with Stalinism until after the Hungarian Revolt of 1956. Based on this, he describes the plight of official Communist writers, again very well. But apart from this, and his polemics against surrealism, apart from the negative evaluations of various types of writing, what is his positive recommendation? Not very much, actually; all I can make out is that writers should present various viewpoints and leave it to the reader to decide what is reality — certainly one of the techniques most used by later modernist and post-modernist novelists, but hardly a guarantee of engaged writing as subsequent history has shown.
Unfortunately, the only novel he wrote after this was the third novel of a trilogy published the next year, and his further literary output was only a few plays, so we cannot look to his own work to explain what he thought the way forward should be. The book is worth reading, but seems rather dated after three quarters of a century.
May 3043. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero [1953, Eng. tr. 1967] 88 pages
According to the introduction by Susan Sontag to the English version, Writing Degree Zero was written in response to the previous book I read, Jean-Paul Sartre's What Is Literature; in fact, I was starting to read this book and decided after reading the introduction to read that first. I think she is right that Barthes is in fact responding to Sartre, although his book is never actually mentioned. Both books begin with a chapter titled "What is Writing?". Unfortunately, Barthes is even more abstract (though in the sense of general metaphors rather than philosophical definitions) and much less clear than Sartre. According to Sontag, the essential difference between the two is that Sartre distinguishes between language, the historically determined system of signs which carries the content, and style, which is an ornament, while Barthes makes a threefold distinction of language, style, and l'écriture, which the translators represent by "writing" or "mode of writing".
Barthes agrees that language is historical, though he says it is "not so much a stock of materials as a horizon, which implies both a boundary and perspective"; that it is "not the locus of a social commitment" but "the undivided property of men, not of writers", and in the last analysis he considers it something negative, the limit of what can be said. I found this somewhat confusing, in that I don't think Sartre, or anyone else, sees language as such as the locus of social commitment, but rather that the social content has to be expressed in language if it is to be understood at all.
My real confusion however is what he means by "style" and "mode of writing". Sartre is using the word "style" to mean what most people mean by it, the formal properties of a work. We can divide the usual meanings of the word into two senses, the personal idiosyncrasies of an author, as when we talk about the style of Moliére or the style of Victor Hugo, or the features common to the writers of a period, as when we talk about Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Surrealism and so forth as "styles". Barthes says, "Style is almost beyond [Literature]: imagery, delivery, vocabulary spring from the body and the past of the writer and gradually become the very reflexes of his art. Thus under the name of style a self-sufficient language is evolved which has it roots only in the depths of the author's personal and secret mythology, that subnature of expression where the first coition of the great verbal themes of his existence come to be installed. . . . Its frame of reference is biological or biographical, not historical: it is the writer's 'thing', his glory and his prison, it is his solitude. Indifferent to society and transparent to it, a closed personal process, it is in no way the product of a choice or of a reflection on Literature." He continues in this vein for a couple of pages, very full of metaphor but not really defining what he means, but I think he is talking about the first sense, the individual, personal style of a writer.
What he says about "writing" is that "A language and a style are objects; a mode of writing is a function: it is the relationship between creation and society, the literary language transformed by its social finality, form considered as a human intention and thus linked to the great crises of History." This is not very clear to me, but he further explains by an example: "Mérimée and Fénelon, for instance, are separated by linguistic phenomena and contingent features of style, yet they make use of a language charged with the same intentionality, their ideas of form and content share a common framework, they accept the same type of conventions, the same technical reflexes work through both of them. Although separated by a century and a half, they use exactly the same instrument in the same way: an instrument perhaps a little changed in outward appearance, but not at all in the place and manner of its employment. In short, they have the same mode of writing. In contrast, writers who are about contemporaries, Mérimée and Lautreamont, Mallarmé and Céline, Gide and Queneau, Claudel and Camus, who have shared or who share our language at the same stage of historical development use utterly different modes of writing. Everything separates them: tone, delivery, purpose, ethos, and naturalness of expression: the conclusion is that to live at the same time and share the same language is a small matter compared with modes of writing so dissimilar and so sharply defined by their very dissimilarity. These modes of writing, though different, are comparable, because they owe their existence to one identical process, namely the writer's consideration of the social use which he has chosen for his form, and his commitment to this." It seems to me from this (although I'm not sure) that by "mode of writing" he means the second sense, the shared style of a period or a literary "movement". (I am at somewhat of a disadvantage in that both Barthes, and to a lesser extent Sartre, take their examples from late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century authors, which is a period, especially in French literature, which is a relative gap in my reading, although I have read Mérimée and Camus.) It is a little odd that he uses "delivery" as an attribute of both "style" and "writing".
What is important here is that for Barthes, it is the "mode of writing" or the "form" which is chosen, and represents his commitment to the "social use". However, if this is a correction to Sartre in terms of the verbal analysis, the overall idea is not really that different; even if Sartre doesn't use the term, he is obviously describing the historical development of literature in a similar way. Barthes contradicts Sartre in a number of details: He says "this social arena is by no means that of an actual consumption", where Sartre describes the author as consuming rather than producing, in a rather difficult metaphor. Sartre quotes Gide as saying that style is more important than content; Barthes uses Gide as an example of an author "without style". Both, however, in their socio-economic histories of literature, consider traditional narrative — Barthes uses Literature with a capital L — as "bourgeois" and see the decline in bourgeois ideology reflected in a crisis of language, in attempts to destroy language and traditional Literature. For Barthes, this takes the form of a proliferation of different modes of writing as opposed to the single mode of bourgeois writers of the past. I found it interesting that he identifies the use of the preterite (the passé simple, which is obsolete in the spoken language) and third person narrative as markers of Literature, while present perfect ("passé composé") and present tense, and first person, are attempts at undermining Literature. Barthes in my opinion, probably because of his emphasis on "writing" rather than simply content, is better at understanding the point of some of the modernist styles. His recommendation is even more obscure than Sartre's: a sort of neutral mode he calls the degree zero, which he never really explains, although Sontag connects it with his critical championing of the nouveau roman.
Both books were interesting but I admit when it comes to literary theory I'm a bit out of my depth.
June 344. Mircea Cărtărescu, Solenoid [2015, Eng. tr. 2022] 638 pages
After finishing Solenoid, my first impulse was to say, "What did I just read?" It is an understatement to say that this is a rather strange novel. The author, Mircea Cărtărescu, is the first writer I have read who is an ethnic Romanian translated from Romanian. (I express it that way because I have read some novels by Herta Müller, who is also from Romania, but is ethnic German and writes in German.) He is a self-described modernist writer who is well-known in Romania and becoming better known in the West, and has been rumored to have been shortlisted for the Nobel Prize (we'll know in fifty years, unless he wins it); I read this book for my World Literature group on Goodreads, which is working its way through Europe this year.
As with much modernist fiction, a major theme of the novel is literature itself. Ostensibly, the book is a journal kept by the protagonist, a high-school teacher of Romanian language and literature at a run-down school in Bucharest. (Actually, to believe the novel, all of Bucharest is a ruin and was "designed" from the beginning as a ruin to express the condition of humanity; he describes it repeatedly, almost every time he uses the name, as "the saddest city in the world.") The protagonist was an unsuccessful poet; he rejects literature as "fake doors" painted in the "museum of literature." He claims that his journals are not literature, and that they are intended only for himself; at the end he claims they have been burned. He also describes them as an "anti-book". He uses all the techniques for destroying traditional literature, such as nonlinear order, mixing "reality" with dreams, memories of the past and of the future, hallucinations, automatic writing, and so forth — the reader is not always (read almost never) sure at what level we are at, what is "true" or "real". The novel has been described as surrealism and as "body horror"; it begins with talking about lice in his hair and is obsessed with physical functions and with parasites. There are also allusions to the authors who are associated with modernism, especially Kafka and Borges who are obviously influences on the style and occasionally the content. There are also resemblances to writers he doesn't specifically mention; some of the hallucinogenic episodes could be taken right from Naked Lunch, without the excuse of drugs. He shifts tones without warning, mixing colloquial language with arcane and archaic words and technical jargon of the sciences, sometimes (intentionally, I'm sure) misusing them.
In addition to the literary theme, other themes include the fourth dimension (much about Charles Howard Hinton and his extended family) and relativity of perspectives. Symbols constantly reoccur: dentist's offices and dentist's chairs appear in hallucinations and perhaps in reality, and in his childhood memories — perhaps we can attribute their presence in his hallucinations to a traumatic experience he remembers as a child; insects, especially parasites, appear frequently and in unexpected contexts; shifting rooms and corridors; mysterious tunnels and tubes under the city; and of course there are the solenoids of the title, copper coils with mysterious properties — the man he buys his house from tells him he built the solenoid under the house according to a plan from Tesla, but we are told later that there are many solenoids under the city and that they have always been there.
The protagonist claims that he is different, "chosen", and that he is recording his dreams and experiences as "signs" which he is trying to decipher, to find a meaning for his life, and we follow along with him trying to piece together a meaning from the clues we are given. The book is very long and somewhat repetitious, but I couldn't stop reading it, even after I realized (very soon) that the pieces were never going to fit together in any comprehensible meaning, which is itself the meaning, or perhaps not.
June 7 45. Roman Jakobson, Fundamentals of Language [1956] 88 pages
The next in my mini-project of classic readings in linguistics, this book is actually the first volume of the monograph series Janua Linguarum: Studia Memoriae Nicolai Van Wijk Dedicata. It contains two parts, Fundamentals of Language by Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, and Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances by Jakobson.
The first part goes into depth with regard to the minimal oppositions which distinguish phonemes, and uses a terminology which I was not previously acquainted with, so it was rather difficult reading. The second part distinguishes between two types of aphasia and relates them to the two "poles" of language, the metaphoric and the metonymic or similarity and contiguity. Both parts take the theoretical side of linguistics a bit farther than my only actual college course in linguistics.
June 1346. Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun [2021] 303 pages
The first novel of Ishiguro since he won the Nobel Prize in 2017, Klara and the Sun is more similar to Never Let Me Go than to any of his earlier novels. Both are science-fiction novels set in dystopian technological societies, with important teenage characters which give them somewhat the feel of YA novels, although they are not exclusively for that age group.
The novel is written in the first person from the perspective of Klara, an Artificial Friend, that is an AI android designed to be a companion for a young person (in this case the teenage Josie, who is suffering from a serious and perhaps fatal illness.) We eventually learn that she also has another purpose. The book begins with Klara in the store waiting to be bought by a customer, and in Ishiguro's usual style everything in the first two-thirds of the novel seems somewhat mysterious, as Klara and Josie (and therefore the reader) do not understand much of what is going on.
The novel is very topical today with the advances in AI technology over the past two years. I found it enjoyable, although there were many problems with the plotline that seemed like carelessness on Ishiguro's part; I had to keep reminding myself that he is not a realist writer, and his interests are not in world-building but in the self-delusions that are magnified by our technological progress.
47. Noam Chomsky, Syntactic Structures [1957] 117 pagesI'm still reading the classics of linguistics. Syntactic Structures is one of Chomsky's earliest works and perhaps his most original; this is the book that established transformational grammar as a major trend in linguistics. It is the fourth volume in the Janua Linguarum series, of which I read the first volume last week. Chomsky is concerned with grammar as a device for distinguishing grammatical from ungrammatical sentences, or generating any grammatical utterance without generating any ungrammatical ones (as defined operationally by the behavior of native speakers.) He begins by considering and rejecting two simpler models for grammar, the idea that grammars can be modeled by finite Markov processes (like a Turing Machine, where each state is determined only by the previous state), which he shows is inadequate with examples like either. . .or, if. . .then, etc., and immediate constituent analysis which is similar to traditional grammar.
He then interrupts the argument for a general consideration of the goals of a linguistic theory, which was very interesting from a philosophical viewpoint. After this, he goes on to propose that there is another level distinct from phrase structure which he calls the transformational level; he argues that there are certain "kernel" sentences which are terminal states of the phrase structural level (all simple affirmative declarative sentences) which are then transformed by an ordered series of transformational rules, obligatory or optional. He shows how this simplifies the explanation of things like the passive, interrogations, and negations, and compound expressions. He then gives detailed examples from English. The book is difficult at the beginning; I almost wished that I could have somehow read it backwards, because the earlier chapters make more sense in the light of the later ones.
The transformational approach is certainly a powerful way to consider grammar. It has since been very much modified, in large part by Chomsky himself, but this was the beginning. It is a book that anyone with a serious interest in language should read. I only wish that he had given examples from other languages with grammars very differently structured than English, because he claims that the transformational approach is a universal which should apply to all language grammars.
May-June48. Four early English plays [before 1500] 88 pp.
My eighteenth, then seventeenth-century "fill in my gaps" reading project has finally been pushed back to the beginning of the sixteenth century, as I have been reading plays in four anthologies which cover the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. I intended to simply review the four anthologies, but since I have found more plays by several of the same authors on various Internet sites I decided to review the individual plays. Most of the plays, especially the very earliest, including these four, I had read a long time ago, but some were new to me as well.
One of the four anthologies is Arthur F. Kinney's Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments (Second edition, 2005), which begins (after a lengthy introduction and a very useful chronology of the period) with four of the earliest English plays, the Oxford St. George play and three of the "cycle" mystery plays, which are first attested at the beginning of the sixteenth century but undoubtedly are much earlier. The St. George play is a "mumming" play, a short two-page skit which features the dragon-fighting saint, originally a pantomime but with words being added later.
Two of the "cycle" mysteries are from the Townesley or Wakefield cycle, and are among the best and best-known of the mysteries, the Mactatio Abel about Cain and Abel and The Second Shepherd's Play about the birth of Christ, with a comic subplot about a stolen sheep. The third is Noah from the Chester cycle, with a humorous portrayal of Noah's wife.
49. John Heywood, The Play called the foure PP; a newe and a very mery interlude of a palmer, a pardoner, a potycary, a pedler [ca. 1530] 34 pp.
Another re-read, this was in another of the anthologies, Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin, Drama of the English Renaissance I: the Tudor Period (1976). It is an example of the form called an interlude, designed to be played in the intervals of some other form of entertainment. John Heywood's interludes all take the form of debates, a tradition which goes back to ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and was very popular in the Middle Ages. In this play, a palmer (pilgrim) and a pardoner (seller of indulgences and relics) debate the relative effectiveness of pilgrimages versus buying indulgences for achieving salvation, while the potycary (apothecary or pharmacist) and the peddler comment. The play is an anticlerical satire on religious hypocrisy and corruption, a popular topic at the time even for Catholic playwrights such as Heywood. (He was part of a family which provided many Catholic martyrs including Sir/Saint Thomas More. He was also the grandfather of the poet John Donne.)
50. John Heywood, The Mery Play between the Pardoner and the Frere, the Curate and Neybour Pratte [before 1533] 16 pp.
The first of the plays that were new to me, this was from the Kinney anthology. It is similar in structure and theme to The Foure PP, with the same debate in other words.
51. Anonymous, The Noble Triumphant Coronation of Queen Anne, Wife unto the Most Noble King Henry the VIII [1533] 10 pp.
From the Kinney anthology, a short description of the pageant for the coronation of Anne Boleyn. There were various stages set up along the route that presented allegorical praises of the Queen, similar to the way the cycle plays were performed. This was one I had not previously read.
52. William Stevenson, Gammer Gurton’s Needle [betw. 1552 and 1563] (Pub. as by Mr. S., prev. attrib. to John Still) 24 pp.
While the uncertainty as to the date makes it hard to be sure, this may be the oldest extant full-length comedy in English (the other contender is Udall's Ralph Roister-Doister, which I have also read previously). The premise of the farce is simple; Gammer Gurton has lost her needle. A rascal named Hodge, descended from the Vice of the old moralities, convinces her that it was found and kept by her next-door neighbor, and there is a lot of slap-stick action before the needle turns up and Hodge is punished for his deviltry. This was a re-read and from Fraser and Rabkin.
53. Richard Mulcaster, The Queen Majesty’s Passage through the City of London to Westminster the Day before Her Coronation [1559] 18 pp.
Another pageant description from the Kinney anthology, this describes the entry of Queen Elizabeth I into London for her coronation. The pageant was similar to and undoubtedly modeled on that of her mother.
54. Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, The Tragedie of Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex [1561] 20 pp.
An early attempt at writing classical tragedy, this was the first English play in blank verse. It is one of the best of the older plays. It is based on an episode in the legendary British history of Geoffrey of Monmouth. The political subtext is interesting inasmuch as the Puritan Norton and the Anglican aristocrat Sackville had very different opinions on the nature of monarchy. This was a re-read and from Fraser and Rabkin.
55. George Gascoigne, Supposes [1566] 24 pp.
One of the most classical of the Elizabethan plays, this is a translation of Ariosto's Italian comedy Gli Suppositi, itself modeled on the early Roman comedies of Plautus. Fraser is right in comparing it to Shakespeare's Comedy of Errors, one of the few other plays of the period modeled on Plautus. Both plays are based on mistaken identity and feature comic servants and parasites. It is also important as the first English play entirely in prose. This was a re-read and from Fraser and Rabkin.
56. Thomas Preston, Cambyses, King of Persia [1569] 23 pp.
A historical play about Cambyses, who is essentially just a generic tyrant, under the influence of Ambidexter, a version of the Vice from the morality plays and the only redeeming feature of what was a poor, if very popular, play. This was a re-read and from Fraser and Rabkin.
57. Sir Philip Sidney, The Lady of May [1579] 10 pp.
A short rustic skit put on to entertain Queen Elizabeth who was visiting Sidney's estate. It was hardly worthwhile, and adds nothing to the reputation of Sidney, but it could be considered a precursor of the masque. I hadn't read it before; it was in Kinney.
58. George Peele, The Arraynment of Paris [1581] 21 pp.
George Peele, together with John Lyly and Robert Greene, dominated the theater in the early part of Elizabeth's reign, before the rise of Marlowe and Shakespeare. This was Peele's first play. It was based on the story of the Judgement of Paris which was the cause of the Trojan War; it continues the story by having Juno and Pallas appeal the judgement to the other gods, who appoint Diana to hear the case, and the play ends in a compliment to Queen Elizabeth as combining the beauty of Venus, the Wisdom of Pallas, and the Majesty of Juno. This seems like a rather slight beginning for a playwright who later wrote much better plays. I hadn't read it before; it was in a third anthology, C.F.Tucker Brooke and Nathaniel Burton Paradise's English Drama 1580-1642 (1933).
59. John Lyly, Sapho and Phao [ca. 1582] 82 pp.
This isn't my misspelling; he spells Sappho with one "p" and it has nothing to do with the poet. Given the uncertainly to the dates, it is unsure whether this or Campaspe was Lyly's first play. As he tells us in the prologue, Lyly intended to write a more refined (some might say precious) comedy than those usual up to the time; but if he eliminates the rough language and slapstick of earlier plays, he unfortunately also eliminates any really dramatic action. The slight plot concerns a plot by Venus to make Sapho, the queen of Syracusa, fall in love with a poor ferryman named Phao whom she transforms into a handsome young man; Venus ends by falling in love with Phaos herself, and trying to undo her former actions, but Cupid is won over by Sapho and makes Phao disdainful of Venus. This rather implausible action ends with Phao leaving Syracusa. Some scholars see political allusions in all of this, so it might have been more interesting to audiences of the time. The only redeeming feature today is the language which is filled with puns and Lyly's "Euphuistic" pseudo-learned metaphors from mythology and natural history. There are also some very long and tedius episodes where Sybylla (the Sybil) gives advice to Phao taken from Ovid's Ars Amatoria. All in all this is of purely historical importance, if that. I had not read it before; it was an extensively annotated edition from an Internet site.
60. John Lyly, Campaspe (or Alexander and Campaspe) [ca. 1583] 17 pp.
Whether written before or after Sapho and Phao, this is a similar play. The action consists of a love triangle between Alexander the Great, the painter Apelles, and a young woman named Campaspe. There is also some dialogue between various Greek philosophers including Aristotle and Diogenes the Cynic; I can't call it a subplot because there is really no plot. It was a re-read, taken from an old anthology (nineteenth-century; my copy is brittle and literally disintegrating as I read it) called Works of the British Dramatists.
61. John Lyly, Gallathea [1585] 19 pp.
A somewhat more interesting (if less often anthologized) play by Lyly, which I hadn't read before; it is in the Fraser and Rabkin anthology. The plot is loosely based on a story from Ovid's Metamorphoses. Neptune, angry at the people living around the mouth of the Humber River (between Lincolnshire and Yorkshire), because a Danish army has plundered his temples, sends a sea-monster which must be appeased by the annual sacrifice of the most beautiful virgin in the land. Two beautiful young girls, Gallathea and Phyllida, are disguised by their fathers (shepherds) as boys to avoid the risk of their being sacrificed. They meet and fall in love with each other, each thinking the other is actually a boy. In the end, Neptune relents, and Venus agrees to transform one of the girls into a boy so they can marry. The play combines themes of pastoral with mythology and is written in the usual style of Lyly.
62. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy or Hieronymo is Mad Again [mid-1580s] 49 pp.
One of the most popular and influential of the Elizabethan plays, this was in three of the four anthologies I am working through (Kinney, Fraser and Rabkin, and Brooke and Paradise); it was a re-read for me. It is a revenge tragedy in the style of Seneca's tragedies. Hieronymo's son is murdered, and he pretends to be mad in order to gain his revenge; the play ends with a bloodbath that kills off most of the characters. It influenced much of the later drama including most obviously Shakespeare's Hamlet.
63. Christopher Marlowe, The First Part of Tamburlaine the Great [ca. 1587] 30 pp.
My reading/re-reading of early English drama has finally reached Marlowe, the high-point before Shakespeare. I had previously (long ago) read all of Marlowe's works, so this is a re-read. It is one of the first good examples of the historical chronicle play, and of blank verse in drama. It presents the rise of Tamburlaine, a (historical) conqueror who rose from obscurity to rule much of Western Asia at the end of the fourteenth century; it turns largely on an (unhistorical) love story, and emphasizes the role of Tamburlaine as a tyrant, often in the bombastic style of the mystery play Herods. This was in both the Fraser and Rabkin and Brooke and Paradise anthologies.
64. Christopher Marlowe, The Second Part of Tamburlaine the Great [ca. 1587-1588] 28 pp.
The sequel, obviously, to the previous play, this takes the action to the final defeat and death of Tamburlaine (historically in 1405). It was in Fraser and Rabkin.
65. John Lyly, Endymion, The Man in the Moone [1588] 30 pagesLyly's most complicated play, this tells the story from Greek mythology of Endymion, although Lyly changes it considerably. Endymion falls in love with the Moon (Cynthia, also described as a queen and undoubtedly in part a symbol for Queen Elizabeth); his former lover, Tellus, becomes jealous and hires the witch, Dipsas, to enchant him, which causes him to fall into a coma. His loyal servant, Eumenides, eventually finds a way to wake him; Tellus, confined to a prison, suborns her jailor, Corsites, to attempt to hide Endymion's body. There are many other characters who play minor roles. In the end, there is a happy ending for everyone, including the witch who is reunited with her husband. The fairy-tale chronology is somewhat confusing but this is one of the most entertaining of Lyly's plays. A re-read for me, it was in the Brooke and Paradise anthology.
June 1766. E.W. Bovill, The Battle of Alcazar: An Account of the Defeat of Don Sebastian of Portugal at El-Ksar el-Kebir [1921] 198 pages
This was a popular account of a part of history I hadn't previously read anything about. It begins with a description (about 40% of the book) of the "great power" politics of the period, the civil war in Morocco between Mohammed Mulai and Abdul el-Malek, and the events leading up to King Sebastian's invasion of Morocco ostensibly to restore Mulai to the throne but actually with the intent of conquering Morocco. About half the book is then devoted to the campaign of Sebastian, his disastrous decision to attack Larache by land on in inland route and the actual battle at El-Ksar (Alcazar) on August 4, 1578. It then finishes up (about 10%) with the immediate consequences of the battle up to the death of Abdul el-Malek's successor, Ahmed el-Mansur.
According to Bovill's account, the young King Sebastian was fanatical and irresponsible, insisting on a campaign which was hopeless from the beginning against the advice of his uncle Philip II of Spain and all his more responsible counselors and military men. The Portuguese forces, apart from a small standing army, and some nobles more interested in show than fighting, were largely unwilling conscripts, with no military experience and little training; they were supplemented by mercenaries from the Netherlands and small contingents from Spain and the Papal forces, who were at odds with each other from the beginning. They brought with them a large contingent of non-combatants such as the king's household, the nobles wives, children, and servants, as well as many priests, altogether probably equaling the number of soldiers, with carriages and luxury items. El-Malek's forces were more numerous and better trained, although of doubtful loyalty, and mostly cavalry; he also had more artillery. The Portuguese forces were trapped between two rivers, with only a narrow ford as a possible retreat (as it turned out it was impassible at high tide.) Only a hundred or so of the Portuguese managed to escape; the rest were killed (including King Sebastian and Mulai) or captured.
The result of the battle was that the Portuguese nobility was decimated and the country became for decades a part of Spain. El-Malek himself came to the battle extremely ill (poisoned by the Turks) and died on the field. Morocco was temporarily very prosperous under El-Mansur, first by ransoming the captives, and later by following up the victory by conquering the gold-rich Songhai Empire in the Western Sudan.
Although Bovill clearly has a bias in favor of the Europeans, the account was quite interesting. I read this as background for reading Peele's play about the battle.
67. George Peele, The Battle of Alcazar [1588] 74 pagesAn interesting work given the subject matter, though not one of his best plays for style, The Battle of Alcazar (Complete original title: The Battell of Alcazar, fovght in Barbarie, betweene Sebastian king of Portugall, and Abdelmelec king of Morocco. With the death of Captaine Stukeley) takes up a contemporary historical event which took place only ten years before the play was written. I won't summarize the plot, since it follows the history reasonably closely and I have already reviewed a non-fiction account of the battle. Like Shakespeare in his history plays, Peele condenses the chronology somewhat to make for a more dramatic story; the annotated edition I read, from the Elizabethan Drama website (http://elizabethandrama.org/) notes most of the points on which the play diverges from the historical facts. Writing for an English audience, Peele emphasizes the role of the English "renegade" Stuckeley, and exaggerates the size and importance of his contingent. Most of the female characters seem to be Peele's invention.
68. Robert Greene, Alphonsus [1588]
Greene's first play, Alphonsus is a completely fictional story; although ostensibly about the historical characters of Alfonso V of Aragon and the Ottoman Sultan Murad II, the events are all invented by Greene. The imitation of Marlowe's Tamburlaine is obvious, in the theme, in the style, and even in the wording. This was also an annotated edition from the Elizabethan Drama website and new to me.
69. George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe with the Tragedy of Absalon [1588] 23 pages
Perhaps Peele's best-known, or at least most anthologized play, King David and Fair Bethsabe has been described as a mystery play expanded to the length of a classical play. It begins with the Biblical story of David and Bethsabe but focuses mainly on the rebellion of Absalon, considered as God's punishment for David's adultery. The young Solomon is introduced at the end. The play was a re-read for me, in the Fraser and Rabkin anthology.
70. Anon., Arden of Faversham [ca. 1588] 29 pages
This anonymous play has been attributed, on little or no evidence, to many of the major dramatists of the time, including Shakespeare. It is difficult to confirm or rule out any of the suggestions because the subject matter is so different from the earlier plays, resembling more the Jacobean than the Elizabethan drama. It is a domestic tragedy about the conspiracy of a wife and her lover to murder her husband, and takes place at a lower bourgeois level of society, with no kings, nobles, or mythical personages involved. The play ends in a kind of epilogue with the capture and punishment of everyone involved. It was in three of the four anthologies I am working through, Kinney, Fraser and Rabkin, and the Works of the British Dramatists; it is also on the Elizabethan Drama website, and in a collection I downloaded of Shakespeare apocrypha. I had not read it previously.
71. Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus [ca. 1588-1589] 34 pages
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus is undoubtedly (and deservedly)the best-known Elizabethan play not by Shakespeare. I assume everyone is familiar with the general plot of the occult scholar who sells his soul to the devil, and the famous line, "Is this the face that launched the thousand ships and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?". The play is somewhat simpler and less allegorical than the later plays by Goethe on the same character. The play was also in three of the four anthologies I am using, Kinney, Fraser and Rabkin, and Brooke and Paradise.
72. Christopher Marlowe, The Jew of Malta [ca. 1589-1590] 33 pages
Another important play by Marlowe, The Jew of Malta is based on the same theme as Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, a Jewish moneylender who seeks for revenge on his Christian persecuters. In Marlowe, both the initial persecution (the Jews are essentially all arbitrarily stripped of all their possessions) and the revenge (after causing the death of several Christians, including his daughter's Christian suitor, he poisons an entire convent of nuns, killing his own daughter in the process) are more extreme than in Shakespeare; the play is more cynical, both the Christian and Jewish characters are totally evil and there is no "happy ending" or reconciliation possible. Of course, he is writing a tragedy rather than a comedy, but he also shows the anti-religious ideas for which he became notorious. Unlike Shakespeare's play, this has never been a staple of High School English classes. It was in two of the anthologies, Fraser and Rabkin and Brooke and Paradise, and like all Marlowe's plays was a re-read for me.
73. Robert Greene, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay [ca 1590] 31 pages
In this comedy, Greene is obviously seeking to compete with Marlowe's tragedy, Doctor Faustus. The historical Roger Bacon was one of the first and greatest scientists in mediaeval England; perhaps not surprisingly he was wrongly credited with both real inventions such as gunpowder and occult practices such as the creation of a speaking brass head, which features in this play. Otherwise, Greene treats him as a Faust who makes use of demons to foresee and influence events. Friar Bungay is a somewhat less powerful magician of the same type. They both become involved with a love story between a nobleman and a peasant girl. This is one of the more humorous comedies I have read; it was the first time I had read it, and it was in three of the anthologies, Fraser and Rabkin, Brooke and Paradise, and the Works of the British Dramatists.
74. Christopher Marlowe, The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second [ca. 1590] 54 pages
The longest of the plays I have read (apart from the annotated plays from the Internet), this is the first of the chronicle plays to carry through a single theme, the baneful influence of the favorite, Gaveston, on the king and the opposition to him on the part of the nobility. Today it is probably most interesting for its clear hints of homosexuality, but when it was written the interest was certainly in the theme of royal power versus the feudal power of the nobles. It was undoubtedly a major influence on the history plays of Shakespeare, but it is also worth reading for its own sake. It was in Kinney, Brooke and Paradise, and the Works of the British Dramatists.
June 2575. Javier Marias Franco, Todas las almas [1989] 294 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
Javier Marias was apparently one of the major Spanish novelists of the post-Franco era. I had never read anything by him previously. Todas las almas (All Souls,1989) was his sixth novel; this and his next novel, Corazón tan blanco (Heart so White, 1992, which is this month's reading for a group I am in on Goodreads) were the books which brought him to attention outside of Spain.
Science-fiction writer Joe Haldeman famously wrote, “Bad books on writing tell you to "Write what you know", a solemn and totally false adage that is the reason there exist so many mediocre novels about English professors contemplating adultery.” I wouldn't exactly describe this as mediocre, but it belongs to the genre of "campus novels", with a first-person protagonist (never named) who is a two-year visiting professor of Spanish Literature at Oxford University (All Souls College) and his affair with a married colleague, Clara Bayes. (Marias himself spent two years teaching at Oxford.) The novel has a good deal of satire on the city of Oxford and the University "dons".
However, in post-modernist fashion, the genre novel is merely the wrapper for a novel about knowledge, reality, and of course literature, and it was these discussions which were the heart of the book, while the ostensible plot sometimes became somewhat boring. I admit that the only thing I could really relate to was the narrator's frequent visits to the many used-bookstores of Oxford and London, where he searched for books by or about Arthur Machen and the even more obscure John Gawsworth, who may or may not turn out to have had a relationship to one of the characters in the novel.
July 376. Javier Marías Franco, Corazón tan blanco [1992] 308 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in Spanish]
Corazón tan blanco (available in English as Heart So White) is a postmodernist novel about memory, about the power of language, about speech versus silence (asking questions versus remaining silent), about secrets, about wanting to know and not wanting to know, and their roles in creating, negating or deforming reality. To a certain extent, the book could be considered as a long commentary on a few passages from Macbeth, from which the title is taken; the "heart so white" denotes both innocence and the guilt of cowardice, of refusing to know. The opening sentence of the novel begins, "No he querido saber, y he sabido . . . (I didn't want to know, and I knew . . .)
The book begins with the suicide of a young woman, Teresa, who has just returned from her honeymoon voyage. The ostensible plot of the novel is the discovery of the reason for her suicide, which no one seems to understand. People refer to his "misfortune" in having been widowed for a second time. However the book then immediately jumps forward about forty years, and the main narrative begins with Juan, the son of Teresa's husband Ranz and his third wife, Teresa's sister Juana. Juan, who is the first-person narrator of the novel, is an interpreter/translator (which is symbolic in the context of the novel) who works for various UN and other international organizations. He is about thirty-five at this point, and knows very little about his Aunt Teresa except that she died shortly after marrying his father; he has always been told vaguely that she was ill, and has never been interested in pursuing the question. He knows nothing about any previous wife.
Juan and his wife Luisa, also a translator, are recently married and we now learn about their first meeting and their own honeymoon voyage in non-consecutive chronology. This chapter introduces a second major theme of critical discussion about the institution of marriage, which runs throughout the novel.
There are also two important subplots, one concerning Miriam and Guillermo, whom Juan and Luisa overhear in the next room on their honeymoon, and one about Juan's friend and one-time lover Berta and her prospective relationship with Bill, a mysterious man who has contacted her from a personal ad she has put in a newspaper or magazine. As in Marias' previous novel Todas las almas, the various episodes seem to be unconnected and to depend for their order in the novel on mere association or chance rather than any sort of logical plan, but in fact there are many parallels between the four stories of Ranz and Teresa, Juan and Luisa, Miriam and Guillermo and Berta and Bill (and in the background, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth). Many phrases and even entire paragraphs are repeated as leitmotifs which knit together the various episodes.
Corazón tan blanco was one of the major novels of post-Franco Spain, although it was most popular in Germany (in the first twenty-five years after its publication, about half the copies sold were in German translation); Marías is obviously less well-known in the English-speaking countries, and I had never heard of him before a group I am in on Goodreads chose this for our reading for this month. The edition I read (the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, in the original Spanish)followed the three hundred pages of the novel with about a hundred and fifty pages of additional material, including reviews from Spain and Germany, interviews with Marías, and comments he made about his writing. These were very uneven and most were not useful.
July 577. Otto Jespersen, Language: Its Nature, Origin and Development [1922] 428 pages
I have found several more classic linguistics books in my garage, written before the last one that I read (Chomsky's Syntactic Structures) so once again I am pushed backwards before going forwards.
Jespersen's Language is a popularly written book which, after a long first part (about 100 pages) giving a history of nineteenth-century linguistics, goes on to treat of a number of previously underemphasized and some very speculative topics. The second part is on the child's acquisition of language and its probable influences on the history of language; the third part is on the effects of foreigners or second-language speakers and their influences, and contains chapters on pidgin languages and on what are now called genderlects (the differences in usages between male and female speakers of a given language) — some of his attitudes and assumptions are almost comic from a contemporary perspective; the last part deals with the development of languages and the origin of language, and is totally speculative. Among other things, he argues that the development of language has been progressive rather than a deterioration from a more perfect origin as most linguists at the time assumed, going in general from very complex but also very irregular earlier languages (think of Sanskrit, classical Greek and Latin) to more efficient and flexible analytic languages. Not surprising given that Jespersen was Danish and wrote mainly in (and about) English, he sees English and Danish as the most perfect languages.
He then extrapolates this argument backwards to claim that language began in a state in which very long, musical or poetic words represented vague and largely emotional total meanings which later had to be analyzed to convey more rational thought.
All of this was fascinating to read, but I am not sure how much of it would still be accepted after a hundred years; I suspect that what has held up best, apart from his emphasis on language acquisition as fundamental to understanding language change, is his common-sense demolition of other writer's speculations, rather than his own equally speculative theories with which he tries to replace them.
The book is probably most important for those who are interested in the history of linguistics as a discipline; I am following it up with the same author's Philosophy of Grammar published a couple years later.
ACTUAL: 105 books/33 nE, 29,380 pages, avg. 280 pages
Obviously, I fell far short, probably because I spent almost two months on two books, one in Greek and one in Latin, and generally read a lot of Latin; since I am not planning on any long readings in Greek or Latin this year, I will only decrease my goals slightly:
YEAR GOAL: 145 books/35 nE, 37,000 pages