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July 1879. Otto Jespersen, The Philosophy of Grammar [1924] 363 pages
This may be the best book I have ever read on language; probably Jespersen's most important work, it is definitely different from and better than the same author's earlier Language which I reviewed two weeks ago. That one was in parts very speculative, while as he says himself, "in this volume I generally keep aloof from speculations about primitive grammar and the origin of grammatical elements." The book is titled accurately a "philosophy" of grammar, in that he discusses all the concepts that have been used for talking about grammar and shows that most of them have been poorly defined, or are in some cases not useful at all. He proposes new explanations and a largely new terminology, some of which have been widely accepted and some not.
Although he occasionally refers to other languages, the book is largely based on the Indo-European (or as he calls it, Aryan) family; apart from Danish, most of his examples are taken from languages I can read. I understand better now many things I never really understood, or in some cases had never even thought about. While not all his comments about English usage seem right to me, this may be because he naturally (as a professor of English in Denmark) bases himself on British rather than American English, and because he wrote this a hundred years ago and the language has of course changed much in a century. In fact he mentions many tendencies which have since gone further.
The book was very influential and is a must-read for anyone who is interested in language.
July 1980. Jon Fosse, Plays Four [1994-2001, Eng. tr. 2005] 292 pages
This collection contained four more plays by Nobel prize-winner Jon Fosse.
The first play, And We'll Never Be Parted (Og aldri skal vi skiljast, 1994) I didn't like; while I enjoyed the ambiguity of some of his earlier plays, in this one he takes it too far; rather than being susceptible to multiple interpretations, this one seems to have no possible consistent interpretation. It has an old woman and a man, and (the same?) man and a young girl (their younger selves?) and the man is sometimes visible but not seen and at other times seen but not there, and the two couples seem to interact, unlike the earlier plays where the there are earlier and younger versions of the same characters who however do not interact.
The other three were better, though not as good as some of the earlier plays:
The second play, The Son (Sonen, 1997) is about a couple who live in an increasingly abandoned rural area, their last neighbor, and their son. It has an actual plot, but it seems rather absurdist.
The third play, Visits (Besok, 2000), is about a disturbed young girl, and what may or may not have been responsible for her problems.
The last, very short play, Meanwhile the lights go down and everything becomes black (Medan lyset går ned og alt blir svart, 2001) is about the breakup of a family.
July 1981. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects v.2 [2nd ed. 1568, Eng. tr. 1851] 508 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
The second volume in the edition I read (of five volumes; other editions divide them differently), this contains the rest of part two (42 biographies, from Antonio Filarete to Vasari's uncle, Luca Signorelli — one of the longest) and the first 10 of part three (beginning with Leonardo da Vinci and ending with the architects Giuliano and Antonio da San Gallo). Highlights were Leon Batista Alberti, Fra Filippo Lippi, Sandro Botticelli, and Leonardo. I can't remember all the lives, let alone their works, but the cumulative impression is interesting. I may be more interested in reading later books which actually have photographs of the paintings and sculptures, but this was important as the first and relatively a primary source.
July 2182. William Inge, Four Plays [1950-1959] 304 pages
Although American playwright William Inge wrote plays right up to his suicide in 1973, he is best known for these four plays from the 1950's. They are very typical of that decade, dealing with bored housewives, their bored children, respectability, dysfunctional families, and in short all the things which caused a reaction to the other extreme in the sixties. All four are set in the rural Midwest.
Come Back, Little Sheba (1950) is about a bored wife and her alcoholic husband, who take in a young woman boarder; the two lovers of the young woman are a rather crude athlete and a rich college student, a pairing which returns in the second play, Picnic (1953). In that play, we have two widows living next door to one another, one with her aged mother and one with two daughters, who also takes in a spinster schoolteacher as a boarder; an athletic "vagabond" shows up to do some yardwork for one of the widows, and we have a triangle involving him, the older daughter, and her rich college student boyfriend.
Bus Stop (1955), best known because of the Marilyn Monroe movie, takes place at a bus stop in Kansas during a blizzard, where the stranded passengers (two cowboys, a nightclub singer, the waitresses, the bus driver and an alcoholic ex-professor) interact; Inge is trying to portray various forms of "love" here, but again one cannot really imagine things happening quite this way after the fifties (or at all, but that's another question.)
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1957) is set in the 1920's rather than the 1950's, but apart from the transition from horses to automobiles, the feeling is still 50-ish, although perhaps the two periods were pretty similar outside the major cities. It is about a traveling salesman and his wife and two children, a dysfunctional family. There is a "happy ending" but it is not really credible and is too late in any case.
I enjoyed all four; Inge is a good playwright, but no Arthur Miller.
July 2583. Heinrich Böll, Die Verwundung und anderer frühe Erzählungen [1947-1952, coll. 1983] 302 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in German]
Heinrich Böll, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972, was among the foremost German writers of the post-World-War-II period. While he wrote several novels, he is perhaps best known for his short stories. He is essentially a realist writer. This collection contains twenty-two of his earliest stories, nearly all from 1947 and 1948, with two each from "about" 1951 and 1952. The stories are in chronological order by the times they are set in, rather than when they were written. The first eight stories take place during the war; they are about the meaninglessness of the war (he is in the tradition of Im Weste nichts Neues), the class conflict between the working-class soldiers and their upper-class officers (in one a soldier shoots his lieutenant, another is ambiguous). Only one deals with the Holocaust. The next ten are about the economic and psychological consequences in the first years of the peace (the Germans have a name for this, Trümmerliteratur, meaning approximately "literature of ruins".) The last four are more diverse: satires about corruption, a crime story, and one that is difficult to classify. He is a good writer and I am looking forward to reading much of his work over the next few months (he is the chosen author for a group I am in on Goodreads for some time in the fall).
July 3184. Henrik Ibsen, The Works of Henrik Ibsen [1867-1892] 595 pages [Eng. tr.]
The edition I read was the one volume edition published in 1928 by Black's Reader Service; it contains ten of the major plays: Peer Gynt (1867), The League of Youth (1869), Pillars of Society (1877), A Doll's House (1879), Ghosts (1881), An Enemy of the People (1882), The Wild Duck (1884), Rosmerhalm (1886), Hedda Gabler (1890), and The Master Builder (1892). There is no introduction or preface, and no translator is listed; but I am fairly certain these are the Archer translations, which were the only ones available so far as I know for some of these plays at the time. (As an aside, when to try to confirm this I asked Microsoft's AI Copilot who the translator was, it just looked at the listings on Amazon and said it was impossible to ascertain; which is why I have yet to discover anything new from those programs that I hadn't already found myself.)
In fact, I rather prefer these older translations, as despite the Victorian English, they are the most faithful to Ibsen's actual language, while the more "modernized" translations take too many liberties. It also helps to be reminded that these are in fact plays written in the nineteenth century and not contemporary plays; it is important to read them in the knowledge that the heroines for instance are transgressive and the conservative figures represent the normal opinion of the overwhelming majority, whereas if one subconsciously thinks of them in a "presentist" way, as a modernized translation tempts one to, they become plays about normal heroines and unusually reactionary communities, which changes the meaning entirely.
It would be presumptuous of me to give detailed reviews of such classic plays about which thousands of books and articles have been written by scholars, but I will venture a few short remarks. Peer Gynt, perhaps the first of his "famous" plays, is based on a somewhat picaresque figure of recent folklore; it is in a Romantic style, more old-fashioned than his later plays and yet, paradoxically, the fragmentary plot gives it a more "modern" feeling. The League of Youth is more realistic, and satirizes the opportunistic liberals and the press of his time; I couldn't help but think of our own Democratic Party. However, the large number of characters and the intricate intrigue make it hard to follow and I am not sure how really successful he is in putting across his points. Pillars of Society is the next of his realistic "problem plays"; a wealthy shipbuilder is engaged in a project to build a railroad, when his brother and sister show up from America and secrets are revealed about the "pillars of society".
A Doll's House and Ghosts are two of his best plays. At one level, they are about marriage and the condition of women; in A Doll's House, a wife is treated as a "doll" who is not capable of understanding "male" business, but we learn that she has been the one to take the initiative in managing finances; at the end she insists on being treated as a person rather than a doll. In Ghosts, we see a widow who on the contrary accepted the subordinate role assigned to her, and is haunted by the "ghosts" of the past. To limit them to the questions of marriage and women would be to treat them as of only historical interest; what makes them and most of Ibsen's plays still effective today are the more general themes of truth to oneself and freedom of choice or "agency". (He was apparently very influenced by the early "existentialism" of Kierkegard.)
An Enemy of the People concerns a doctor, Thomas Stockmann, who discovers that the town's baths are polluted, and tries in vain to get the local authorities, headed by the Mayor, his brother Peter, to take action. The situation seems quite modern, and I could cite many similar examples from the recent past (including from my own family), but again the real question is about the individual versus the conformist community. Unfortunately, Ibsen is a bit too direct and the play is too full of speeches, which I think makes it less successful as a work of literature.
The Wild Duck was perhaps my favorite, but I read it in another edition and will review it separately. Rosmersholm, about a former clergyman, deals with a failed marriage which has ended in suicide before the beginning of the play, enlightened opinions versus a fanatical conservatism, and revealed secrets, but the psychology didn't seem as well-done as in the earlier plays and I didn't appreciate it as much. Hedda Gabbler and The Master Builder are also psychological (and symbolic) studies.
Ibsen of course is one of the major dramatists of all times and influenced much of the drama of the next century, although contemporary drama for better or worse has gone in other directions.
July 31
85. Henrik Ibsen, The Wild Duck [1884, Eng. tr. (Norton crit. ed.)] 236 pages
This Norton critical edition contains the text of the play in a new English translation by Dounia Christiani, as well as much critical material. The play is about a young man who returns to the city (presumably Christiania, now Oslo) from his father's "works" in the north of the country and reveals "secrets" to his childhood friend Hjalmar, with tragic results. The translation was in contemporary English; the biggest problem I had with it was the decision to use the anachronistic term "neurotic" for the original which Archer translates as "overstrained"; this imposes one possible meaning on the text and excludes others which are equally possible.
The meaning is in fact ambiguous in many respects, as is obvious from the various ways in which the critical articles interpret it: is the protagonist, Gregers, intended as a portrait of an "idealist" (as he thinks of himself), and the play as a "correction" of a too extreme position about truth in the previous An Enemy of the People, or is he intended to be motivated (consciously or unconsciously) by his hatred for his father? Is the friend Hjalmar really unaware of the true situation, or has he simply "repressed" his knowledge to maintain his self-esteem, until Gregers makes this impossible? What is the real character of the wife, Gina, and for that matter of Greger's father? Does the daughter, Hedwig, really believe in her father's illusions, or simply go along with them out of her love for him? Who or what is symbolized by the "Wild Duck"; Hedwig as victim, the old man Ekdal, or Hjalmar, or Greger himself as unable to "release" themselves from past wounds, or perhaps all of them? This is a play which requires much thought on the part of the reader.
July 31
86. Henrik Ibsen, Four Major Plays [1881-1896] [Eng. tr.] 315 pages
This is the second volume of the Signet Classic edition of Ibsen, with the modernized translations of Rolf Fjelde. It contains a very good introduction and afterword by Terry Otten, which put Ibsen in the political and economic context of his time, following the 1848 revolutions throughout Europe and the rapid rise of the industrial bourgeoisie to power both in the French Second Empire and elsewhere including Norway, and how that influenced Ibsen's plays. There are four plays; two I skipped, having just read them in another translation (Ghosts and An Enemy of the People). The two I read in this version were The Lady from the Sea (1888) and John Gabriel Borkman (1896).
The Lady from the Sea is about a married woman who has previously been in love with a sailor and made a commitment to him, which haunts her until he finally shows up. For nearly the whole play, it seemed like a Norwegian version of Wuthering Heights, but at the end it becomes another play about freedom of choice.
John Gabriel Borkman is one of Ibsen's last plays. It is about a disgraced former bank president, and about his wife and her twin sister who compete for the affections of his son. In the end it is also a play about gaining independence and freedom from the past.
Aug. 587. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects v.3 [2nd ed. 1568, Eng. tr. 1851] 525 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
The third volume in the edition I am reading, this contained thirty-three lives, most with more than one subject (actually all, if you count the brief lives of their disciples). The first life was that of Raphael Sanzio, which was the longest for a single person (sixty-five pages in this edition), as well as the most interesting. Andrea del Sarto had fifty-four. A collective life of various gemstone engravers and workers in intaglio had sixty-seven, and the last life, of engravers of prints, had forty. Unlike any of the other lives in the first three volumes, this included non-Italians, especially Albrecht Dürer, although the most space was given to Marcantonio. The other twenty-nine lives were all between five and twenty pages, and tended toward repeating the same or similar information. Madonna Properzia de' Rossi was the only woman in this volume; there were none in the first two.
Aug. 1388. Arthur Rimbaud, Collected Poems [1869-1874, OWC ed. 2001] 337 pages [in French]
An example of my usual regress; I began reading Ananda Devi's Ève de ses décombres, because it is the most famous novel by this year's Neustadt Prize winner, and realized about thirty pages in that it was heavily based on the poetry of Rimbaud, which embarrassingly I had never read (I mentioned in a previous review that the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were largely a gap in my reading of French literature.) So I decided to read this collection of his complete poetry, French text with English translation and notes by Martin Sorrell (Oxford World Classics), followed by a popular biography of Rimbaud and a critical work on him, all three of which were in my garage. (I managed to keep myself from reading Baudelaire first, but it was a struggle — he's on my TBR, but a couple years from now, if and when I get to the nineteenth century again.)
Rimbaud is of course not only an important French poet but a major influence on later poetry in all the European languages, including English, either directly or through his influence on the surrealists. His poetry divides into three parts, the earlier verse poetry written in his teens, including bitter political satire inspired by the Commune; Une saison en enfer; and Illuminations, a series of prose-poems. As far as is known, he wrote no poetry after the age of twenty-one; he died of cancer at thirty-seven.
This poetry is a must-read for anyone interested in modern literature. I would not recommend this edition to anyone needing a translation; the "translation" is a fairly loose paraphrase (although he claims it is more literal than previous translations) which often seems to be totally made up, with little relation to the facing text (and lines are omitted, probably to keep the two sides in synch, as French tends to be longer than the corresponding English.)
Aug. 1489. Edmund White, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel [2008] 192 pages
White's book is a popular biography of Rimbaud based on secondary works and the poetry itself. The author is gay and was influenced by Rimbaud as a teenager; the book emphasizes the relationship with Verlaine. It seems fairly accurate, although perhaps not fully up-to-date with the latest scholarship. I wish I had read this first, as the poetry makes more sense in the context of Rimbaud's life, more than is the case with many authors.
Aug. 1890. Matteo Maria Boiardo, Orlando Innamorato: or Orlando in Love [1494, Eng. tr. (A.S. Kline) 2022] 1735 pages
Another example of my regress: I was preparing to read Greene's sixteenth-century play Orlando Furioso, so I decided to read the romance by Ariosto that it was based on first; but then I realized that was a sequel to this romance by Boiardo, so here I am back to the fifteenth century (in my original eighteenth-century project). Fortunately, I had already read the Chanson de Roland, or I would be back to the twelfth century. Boiardo's premise is that he is recounting a suppressed epic by Bishop Turpin, the alleged author of the Chanson de Roland, about the history of Roland (Orlando) before the events of that epic. In fact, although Boiardo's romance uses the characters of the Chanson de Roland, and there are many battles, the style and content are completely different. Where the early chansons de geste are military epics, the Orlando romances are concerned with courtly love and full of enchantment, based more on the Arthurian romances than on the French epics.
To start with the most obvious point: the book is very long. The new translation I read by A.S. Kline (the only one available in e-book format) runs to over seventeen hundred pages in the print edition, and at that the work was left unfinished, probably due to the French invasion of Italy and Boiardo's subsequent death; it breaks off in the middle of a battle, and in the middle of several other episodes (Boiardo's technique is to interweave at least four or five stories at a time.) It was so popular that there were many continuations, of which Ariosto's is the most famous; there was also a revised version in a more standard Italian (Boiardo wrote in a dialect which later became unfashionable) by Berni, which for several centuries was the version most people read. This translation is of Boiardo's original version.
The poem has some evident flaws; many of the episodes are variants on the same ideas (was every bridge in the Middle Ages guarded by a giant? How many enchanted gardens could there have been?) and he is careless of details (in every duel the armor is cut to shreds, and the winning combatants reappear immediately with full armor to fight again with the next knight or giant or monster.) However, the story is always exciting. This is a classic of Renaissance literature and was an influence on such later works as Spencer's The Fairy Queen.
Aug. 2191. Heinrich Böll, Wanderer, kommst du nach Spa. . .: Erzählungen [1950] 174 pages [in German]
Another twenty-two short stories (none more than thirteen pages) by Heinrich Böll, written during the same period, 1947-1950, as the collection I read previously. This book contains two of his most famous stories, the title story about a wounded man who dies in a makeshift hospital in the school where he spent his nine years of schooling before becoming a soldier, and "Auch Kinder sind Zivilisten", a very short story about a wounded man who buys pastries from a young Russian girl outside the hospital he is in. All the stories involve wounded men, if not physically then mentally or spiritually. Some are a bit stranger than in the other collection. Unlike that book, which brought together older stories much later, this one was published as a collection about the time the stories were written and played a part in establishing Böll's reputation as an author.
Aug. 2292. Joseph Bédier, Le roman de Tristan et Iseult [1900] 183 pages [in French]
This is the September (2024) reading for the World Literature Group I am in on Goodreads. I had seen this many times in used bookstores and so forth, but I never picked it up because I assumed it was just a translation of the poems of Béroul, Thomas, or Gottfried, all of which I read a quarter of a century ago. In fact, although it does incorporate a translation of the extant fragments of Béroul, it is much more than that. It is an attempt to reconstruct the content of Béroul's entire poem, or even the text which presumably lies behind both Béroul and Thomas, based on Thomas, Eilhardt, Gottfried, and various anonymous translations and allusions in other works, as well as a good deal of imagination.
After so many years, I can't really say how well Bédier imitates the style of Béroul, but I can say this was a good retelling of the story of Tristan and Iseult.
Aug. 2593. Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune [1988] 170 pages
The back cover calls this "a thrilling ride through the literature of Rimbaud". It's not. It's a dense, jargon-filled academic book. The author is a left-wing academic, somewhat vacillating between Marx and anarchism, with frequent mentions of "Situationism", a tendency which apparently originated in the French May 68 movement and which I know nothing about. Even her fellow academic, the somewhat more definitely Marxist-leaning Terry Eagleton, in his introduction to the book has to criticize her use of the common academic cliché of contrasting the good "young" Marx with the bad "mature" scientific Marx, who allegedly reduces everything to economics. Marx was first and foremost a revolutionary, and his economic works were all determined by the need to understand and abolish capitalist oppression not only to liberate the working class economically but to create a totally different and more human form of society, which is a continuation and deepening of his earliest ideas. His politico-historical writings, including his work on the Commune, belong to his "mature" period. Eagleton also points out that many of the problems she attributes to Marxism should actually be attributed to Stalinism. Leaving these questions aside, the book was interesting if not "thrilling".
The main idea of the book is to identify Rimbaud's poetry with the culture of the Paris Commune of 1871. She does say many things which were interesting about the Commune, and about Rimbaud's poetry, but I wasn't totally convinced by her parallels, especially her ideas about "social space". Of course, Rimbaud was obviously influenced by the Commune — he may or may not have actually been in Paris at the time, and he certainly supported it and wrote several poems about it; and certainly the Commune and his poetry share a common background in the experience of the Second Empire. Perhaps her best points are in the chapter which compares Rimbaud's poetry to Lafargue's The Right to Be Lazy. The book was worth reading, but except for readers with a specialized interest in the Commune or Rimbaud it will probably not be one of my top 500 books to recommend.
Aug. 2994. Maurice Choury, ed., Les Poètes de la Commune [1970] 270 pages [in French]
This book is a collection of poems by twenty-three poets associated with the Paris Commune. It begins with an introduction about the events of the Commune and an essay on Rimbaud. These are followed by twenty-two more poets in alphabetical order from Anonymous to Vermersch, each preceded by a short biographical introduction. Apart from Rimbaud, the two longest sections are on Eugène Pottier, the author of L'Internationale (included here) with 32 pages and Victor Hugo (the one poet included who was not a participant in the Commune and had a somewhat ambiguous attitude towards it) with 24 pages). The other poets are represented by one to four or five poems each.
Many of these poets were killed in the defense of the Commune or executed in the days that followed; some were deported to New Caledonia or escaped into exile in Belgium or England, from whence they mostly returned after the amnesty ten years later. With one exception (Henri Rochefort) they remained committed to the ideals of the Commune for the rest of their lives, and most were politically active. The poetry is somewhat uneven but all very inspiring.
Aug. 3095. Ananda Devi, Ève de ses décombres [2005] 155 pages [in French]
The fourth novel I have read by Mauritien Neustadt prize winner Ananda Devi, I began this at the beginning of the month but then put it aside when I realized that it was largely influenced by the poetry of Rimbaud, which I hadn't yet read. I then read Rimbaud's complete poetry, a biography of Rimbaud, a critical book on Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, and a collection of poems about the Commune before returning to this novel yesterday. (It is a short book and a very fast read.) Not only is one of the major characters influenced by Rimbaud, whose poetry he quotes throughout the book, but the entire writing style of the novel is reminiscent of Rimbaud as well, and there are verbal echoes throughout.
The novel is set in Troumaron, an impoverished quarter of the Mauritien city of Port Louis, inhabited mainly by unemployed factory workers since the closing of the major factory. Written in a post-modernist style, the novel is divided into short segments in the first person representing the thoughts of the four major characters, all in their mid-to-late teens: Ève, the main protagonist, who engages in prostitution, Sad (Sadiq) who is in love with her, and is the character who identifies himself with Rimbaud, Savita, Ève's best friend and lesbian lover, and Clélio, who is a friend of Sad and is given to violence, and has spent time in prison for various juvenile offenses. Sad and Clélio belong to a "band" or gang which dominates the area. There are also short passages in the second person addressing Ève which give information about her which would not be part of her own thoughts. A fifth important character, who is not given his own segments, is an unnamed professor who has an affair with Ève.
The first half of the book is basically background; the second half begins with the discovery of a crime and describes its aftermath for all the characters in the latently explosive situation of Troumaron.
This is the best of the four novels I have read by Devi, and probably her most famous book. (It is also available in English translation.)
Sept. 396. Robert Steven Bianchi, Daily Life of the Nubians [2004] 284 pages
The title of this book is explained by its being a volume in the Greenwood Press Daily Life Through History series, designed for "college and university undergraduates". In fact there is very little that could be called "daily life" (and very little is known, since almost no settlements have survived or been excavated); essentially the book is a summary of what is currently known about the history of Nubia, its relationship, diplomatic, military, and commercial, with Egypt, its art, and its temples and funerary customs. The book is very comprehensive for a book aimed at non-specialists.
After a short description of the few known Paleolithic and early Neolithic remains, it deals with the A-Culture, the C-Culture, the Kingdom of Kerma, the Nubian Dynasty XXV in Egypt, the Kingdom of Napata and the Kingdom of Meroe. Throughout, it emphasizes the role of Nubia as a trade route between Egypt and the wealth of Africa in the south, although it does not specify what regions in the south it was trading with. (The next book I am reading deals with the lands to the south of Nubia during the same time period, but has no mention of Meroe or Napata, and the few mentions of Nubia are just statements that most Americans' knowledge of ancient Africa is limited to Egypt and Nubia. I wish that one or the other book had dealt with the connections.) To sum up, this was a very informative book from which I learned much that I had not previously read about.
Unfortunately, the book is not well-written. This is a book which could have used a good copy-editor. Apart from frequent errors in grammar, the author uses many words in an idiosyncratic way. For example, one of his favorite words is "moot", which he uses continually as if it were a synonym for "unknown". There are many cases where he repeats the same thought in almost the same words two or three times in the same paragraph, like someone with Alzheimer's who doesn't remember what he has just said. There are obvious careless mistakes such as reversing north and south, and in one place saying "Lower Egypt" when he clearly means "Lower Nubia"; in most cases I could figure out what he intended to say, although some paragraphs I could not decipher at all.
The most serious problem was when he says that Nubia was invaded by Psametik II during the reign of King Aspelta in 593 BCE. He adds that while some scholars question whether Aspelta was actually the ruler at this time, all consider Aspelta and Psametik II to be contemporaries. On the next page he says that Aspelta' successor was Irike-Amanote (about 425-400 BCE), apparently not noticing that this would imply that Aspelta ruled for over 150 years. Granted that Nubian chronology is not well-understood, there should have been at least some mention of the problem. Is he using "successor" to mean "next known king" rather than "immediate successor"? I don't know, and his chronology at the beginning of the book skips the Napata period entirely, jumping a couple centuries from Dynasty XXV to Meroe.
So all in all, this is not a book that I would recommend — if I knew of any other book on the same subject at the same level I could recommend instead.
Sept. 897. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects v.4 [2nd ed. 1568, Eng. tr. 1851] 548 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
This fourth volume is mainly devoted to artists who were recently deceased at the time Vasari was writing. It contains eighteen lives from Antonio da San Gallo and Giulio Romano to Razzi and Aristotile and a nineteenth chapter with many painters from Lombardy. The lives in this volume tend to be somewhat longer than in the previous volumes, and there are many more interesting anecdotes about these artists, many of whom were friends, coworkers or rivals of Vasari himself and about whom he has more information. There also seems to be a much greater diversity in the subjects of the paintings and sculptures in this volume; although there are still many Madonnas and saints, crucifixions and resurrections, there are also many works depicting Greek and Roman mythology, ancient and modern history, and allegorical representations, and even in the religious art there seem to be more diverse subjects from the Old Testament. In the final chapter, which contains many artists still living when it was written, the section on Cremona is particularly notable for a number of women artists.
Sept. 1198. Martin MacInnes, In Ascension [2023] 381 pages [Kindle, Overdrive]
This is a recent, very literate post-modern speculative fiction novel which blurs the line between "hard" and social or humanistic science fiction. At one level it is in the tradition of Stanislaw Lem's Solaris and Jeff Vandermeer's Southern Reach trilogy, an ambiguous novel with truly alien aliens whom we never meet, let alone understand. At another level, it is one of the best fictional treatments I have seen of the human — biological and psychological — challenges of long-range crewed spaceflight, which more than the technological challenges may be the real problem in direct human exploration of Mars and beyond. It is also throughout a psychological exploration of memory, knowledge, and one particular human experience, the history of a dysfunctional family including Leigh, the first-person narrator throughout the book, her sister Helena, who takes over in the last section and remembers childhood events in a very different way, and their parents Geert and Fenna. In the end there is also a suggestion of the circularity of time which may tie together various strands of the plot. The novel is set in the present or near future, beginning about 2025 and ending in 2031, although the climate crisis seems somewhat more advanced than it is so far, and the space research is carried out in a very different, more secret way than it is now. I tended, as I often do with near-future science fiction, to add twenty or thirty years to all the dates.
[This plot summary contains spoilers.]
The novel begins with Leigh, a young marine biologist at the beginning of her career, on board a ship called the Endeavor, exploring an anomalous deep sea vent off the island of Ascension in the Atlantic Ocean. There are many memory flashbacks to her childhood which ostensibly are just to provide background, but actually introduce one of the major themes of the book. While returning from this expedition, she learns in passing of the discovery of a new, breakthrough propulsion system called "the power". We learn later that this discovery may not be entirely human. Although there is no real description of the power (the "hard" science in this novel is not physics but biology) it appears to be based on quantum superposition, such that any observation of the propulsion system will cause it to cease to function. At first this seems to have no relevance to Leigh, who is pursuing her biological research into algae.
In the next section, Amy, a senior researcher who met Leigh aboard the Endeavor, arranges for her to work in a well-funded but very secretive Institute in California. Eventually, she learns that her research into the agricultural prospects of algae are intended for supplying a long-range space mission to the Oort Cloud, and it is revealed to her that an obviously artificial body called Datura has appeared and disappeared in the asteroid belt, and that simultaneously the Voyager I space probe has come back to life and is broadcasting from the wrong location. The mission directors assume that to make contact with the aliens they need to send a mission to the apparent position of the Voyager.
After a series of events which are very summarily described (this is just a plot device) Leigh ends up as one of the three astronauts about the Nereus. The flight is described in detail in the next section, and is the most traditionally science fiction part of the novel. After a basically successful flight, there is a sudden unexplainable catastrophe as they reach the boundary between the solar system and interstellar space; the ship is totally disabled and seems to have been displaced two billion years into the past. (Is this the work of the mysterious aliens, or is it a natural result of trying to cross the boundary, which prevents any culture from leaving its own solar system?)
The novel then shifts to the perspective of Helena, trying to overcome the bureaucratic secrecy of the Institute to find out the truth about her sister's death and get access to the expedition's last transmissions. There is then a last chapter which suggests the Nereus has in fact returned automatically to Earth and landed in the sea near Ascension as designed — but two billion years early, and that this explains the anomalous deep vent, which would have been caused by the impact of the ship, and the beginning of eukaryotic life on Earth from the algae aboard the ship. Many of the mysteries of the novel remain unexplained, as in the other novels mentioned above.
Sept. 2199. Christopher Ehret, An African Classical Age: Eastern & Southern Africa in World History, 1000 B.C. to A.D. 400 [1998] 354 pages
This book is a description of African cultures in eastern and southern Africa in antiquity, a subject of which I knew approximately nothing. The author states that the text is for the general reader, while the extensive appendices of word derivations at the back give the specific evidence it is based on for specialists. It seems to me that like many specialists, Ehret overestimates what the general reader would be likely to know.
After a general introduction explaining the purpose and organization of the book, the first third of the text is about the cultural geography of the Western Rift-Great Lakes region. He first describes the distribution of Central Sudanian, Eastern Sahelian and Southern Cushite cultures based on grain cultivation and/or livestock raising before and about his starting point of 1000 B.C. (He bases this largely on the existence in different modern languages of cognate words referring to various environmental conditions, forest or grassland, words for wild plants or various animals that live in particular kinds of environments and so on; see my next paragraph.)
Next he describes the arrival of the Mashariki (Bantu) from the West, with an agriculture based on yam cultivation, into the area west of the Western Rift and their subsequent migrations southward and eastward to the region around Lake Nyanza (which most books in English still call Lake Victoria), coming into contact with the previously mentioned cultures. There are many maps showing the lakes and rivers with the approximate initial positions of the various groups, which is very welcome, and I could follow the movements when he describes them as toward Lake Nyanza or southwest of Lake Tanganika and so forth, that is relative to the places shown on the maps. Unfortunately, in these chapters and throughout the book, he also describes movements in terms of modern countries such as Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, etc., and even particular named regions and districts of these modern countries, not to mention the areas now inhabited by various modern ethnic and linguistic groupings, none of which are included on any of his maps. Now, if you gave me a map with just outlines of the various countries, I could probably label most of the countries correctly — I'm not sure how many general readers, at least in the U.S. could even do that — but if you just gave me a blank map and asked me to draw in the countries I would have no idea where the various boundaries ran, and certainly could not add regions or districts, or locate the ethnic or linguistic groups. So while I got a general vague idea of the movements of peoples in the area, I could not follow the detail at all, even consulting a political map online. He also moves back and forth through time, and there is nothing like a chronological table to help the reader remember which movements and developments in each of the cultures described separately are simultaneous or in what order. These are the biggest shortcomings from the viewpoint of the non-specialist reader like myself.
The next chapters attempt to describe the material and social cultures of the various groups. Since there is very little archaeological material available, mostly limited to burials, whether because of the unfavorable conditions for preservation or to the relative lack of archaeological investigation in these areas, he relies almost exclusively on linguistic evidence. He examines the languages and dialects now spoken in the areas and attempts to date the introduction of various cultural elements based on the distribution of words; for instance, if a word for say, sorghum, (or rather cognate words with the same presumed origin) is found in languages and dialects which have been separated since a particular time, he assumes that sorghum was cultivated by that culture already before the time the subgroups who spoke those languages migrated in different directions and became relatively isolated from each other. If on the other hand, it is found in only a particular grouping of languages he assumes it was first cultivated after that particular group had split from the groups which use different words or have no word for it. He also uses the facts that some words for say, cattle raising are loanwords in Bantu from say some Central Sudanian language, then the Bantu speakers probably derived that cultural trait from the Central Sudanians along with the words at a time when they were in close proximity to each other.
With regard to the positive evidence — words which are found in different languages — I found his arguments rather probable; but with regard to negative evidence — the idea that a culture at a particular time did not yet cultivate some crop or raise cattle, because there is no group of cognate words referring to that trait, I think it is much more speculative. I emphasize again that I have no specialized knowledge of the subject; but it seems to me that if we used the same technique with different dialects of English, we might conclude that many traits first arrived in England with the Norman conquest, when in fact, since we have written evidence in Old English, we know that they were known to the Saxons, but the Old English Germanic words have just all happened to be replaced by words derived from Norman French. In the case of eastern Africa, where writing is very recent, we don't have any written evidence to check the assumptions. Fortunately I have recently read several books on linguistics and language history so I was able to follow his arguments but again I think for the average general reader it would be hard going.
One other problem I had, and this is probably specific to me, is that my last historical reading from earlier in the month was on ancient Nubia and Cush, at the same period Ehret is discussing. Now by comparing the maps in the two books, it seems that at least his Southern Cushite culture overlaps with the region of Cush described in the other book — I assume that's where the word Cushite comes from? — including the urban area of Meroe. But in his discussion of the Southern Cushites he makes no mention of Meroe or of any contacts with Nubia or Egypt. (The previous book emphasized the role of Nubia as a trading route between Egypt and further south in Africa; presumably the trade was with the groups Ehret is discussing, yet there is no mention in this book of any trading relations with the north.)
As an example, he says based on language evidence that the religious conceptions of the Southern Cushites and Central Sudanians, and later by diffusion of the Bantu cultures, replaced the identification of Divinity by the sky and weather with a specific identification with the sun toward the end of the last millennium B.C. Now, this is the same time at which the Napatan and Meroe urban areas were adopting the religion of the Egyptian sun god Amon-Ra. Could there be a connection? He doesn't mention the possibility, even to dismiss it, but just says that the reason is unknown. I wish that this book, which after all has the subtitle, "in World History", had had some discussion of relations with World History as better known.
There is a brief mention of trade on the Indian Ocean coast in the Roman era late in the book; he mentions the port of Rhapta, the only actual town in the region, which has not (at least as of 1998 when the book was written) been found but may have been near modern Dar es Salaam. This chapter also describes the beginnings of the diffusion of East African culture (but not the people) west to the Atlantic coast.
The most interesting thing I learned from the book is that ironworking was apparently discovered independently in the area to the northwest of the Lakes region, near or somewhat before the beginning of the first millenium B.C., or at about the same time it was discovered in Anatolia far to the north. Why two such distant areas should discover iron at about the same time is an interesting question. (And don't tell me it was ancient astronauts or I'll block your posts.) It is perhaps more surprising in Africa, where the previous technological level was still that of stone tools than in Anatolia where it followed on the Bronze Age. While the author refers to an "Iron Age" culture, apart from iron itself it seems as though the book could be summarized as a description of the spread of the Neolithic (food-producing) revolution into areas of eastern and southeastern Africa previously inhabited sparsely by hunter-gatherer populations, similar to what had happened earlier in Europe and Western Asia.
This spread of food-producers into eastern and southeastern Africa, respectively, from the Lakes region in what he calls the late classical period is the subject of the next two chapters. The complicated migrations and the number of different groups involved, as well as the many geographical areas mentioned, made these chapters much more complex and I think here the author has abandoned any attempt to write for a non-specialist audience.
The book ends with a very long chapter going over the technological and social changes of the last seven hundred years (what he calls the Late Classical period), and a very short chapter summing up the book as a whole and trying to draw conclusions for the study of world history in general. There are then several appendices of word derivations in various languages, obviously for specialists. I would have to say that this is basically a specialist work, or at any rate for a general reader with some serious previous knowledge of and interest in modern African cultural anthropology and linguistics, although to be fair that is probably the reader who would read a book with this title.
100. Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, or Orlando's Frenzy [ 1516, completed 1532, Eng. tr. (Kline) 2021 ] 749 pages [Kindle]Orlando Furioso, Ariosto's epic romance, if I may be permitted that oxymoron, is a continuation or sequel to the similar work of Boiardo which I read last month, the Orlando Innamorato. It is about half the length, in this verse translation by the same translator, A.S. Kline, but that seems long enough; it took me almost as long to read. I downloaded both books from the Poetry in Translation website; apparently Kline makes all his works available free online, although annoyingly the book twice stopped and told me I was "not authorized" to read it and I was forced to reload it to continue. As with most e-books, there were an unconscionable number of typos.
The Orlando Furioso was apparently the more influential and better-liked of the two; whether it is actually better poetry is impossible to judge in translation. Although the title suggests that like the older romance it is about Orlando and his infatuation with Angelica, in fact this sequel is focused much more on Ruggiero and Bradamante, as the putative founders of Ariosto's patrons, the House of Este. He interrupts the story from time to time with supposedly ancient prophecies of Merlin and others concerning various members of the House of Este and their various allies and enemies in his own time (these were impossible for me to interpret without a lot more knowledge than I have of Renaissance Italian history, and I found them rather tedious.) Otherwise, unlike the original Chanson de Roland but like Boiardo's romance, it has no relationship to any real historical events or situations, with Africans invading France and besieging Paris, an early invention of gunpowder, and so forth, and there are various other anachronisms (for example, the English nobles have Norman names and titles, in the time of Charlemagne, long before the Norman Conquest).
The other major difference which I noted was that Ariosto has far more authorial commentary, beginning each canto with his own observations on love, the position of women and so forth. Some of these were interesting; he has a very modern-sounding protest against the "double standard" applied to men and women, although in other cantos he moralizes in a different direction. He follows the same technique of interweaving various stories and the plotline was at least as improbable (including a hippogriff and a trip to the moon to find Orlando's lost wits!). He also introduces supernatural and even purely allegorical figures such as Discord and Disdain into the story as actual persons. Some of this was probably intended as humor or satire. The plotline concerning Orlando's madness verged on the grotesque, but fortunately was not as important as the title would suggest.
One of the major features of this edition is that it includes the complete cycle of illustrations by Gustave Doré, finished in 1883, although in the e-book edition they are rather too small to fully appreciate. This is an important book for anyone interested in Renaissance literature, and I assume it would be much more enjoyable in Italian.
Sept. 28101. Heinrich Böll, (ed. Ralph Ley), Böll für Zeitgenossen: Ein Kulturgeschichtliches Lesebuch [1970] 259 pages [in German]
This is a collection of a small number of Böll's writings for second-year English-speaking students of German; it has introductions and notes in English and a German-English glossary at the end — and even a few pages of homework questions. Most of the stories I had read or will read in other editions of his stories, but there were a few I couldn't find easily elsewhere. It also has book chapters and a translation of a story by Salinger. The introductions were helpful and I would say this book would be a very good introduction to Böll and to contemporary German literature for the level it is designed for, that is the high school, undergraduate, or general reader learning the language.
Sept. 29102. Stefan Hertmans, War and Turpentine [2013, Eng. tr. 2016] 289 pages
The author, Stefan Hertmans, inherited the notebooks of his grandfather, Urbain Martien, which led him to write this novel. In the novel, the narrator, Stefan Hertmans, inherits the notebooks of his grandfather, Urbain Martien, and writes a novel which is ostensibly the book we are reading. Thus, in a kind of self-reference common to contemporary fiction, we are led to wonder what is the relationship of the fictional notebooks of the fictional Urbain to the actual notebooks of the real Urbain. Clearly, the notebooks as quoted in the novel are written in a novelistic style we would not expect from the World War I soldier Urbain, and designed to fit into the theme of the novel, the absurdity and horror of war (which of course would be present latently in the actual notebooks). This novel is in the tradition of Im Westen nichts neues, although from a Belgian perspective it emphasizes atrocities of the Germans as well as the imbecility and ethnic prejudice of the officer class in both armies. (The Belgian officers are French-speaking Walloons who are contempuous of the Flemish soldiers.)
In addition to the war diaries which make up most of the second part of the novel, the first and third parts also present us with the portrait of an artist, which is why the novel is titled "War and Turpentine"; there is also the story of a tragic love and a passionless although affectionate marriage. Part one, an account of the grandfather's childhood before the war, also deals with Urbain's own father and mother, Franciscus and Céline; Franciscus was a painter, and the role model for Urbain, while Céline was a beautiful and dignified French-speaking woman. In part three, dealing with events after the war and the end of the notebooks, we accompany the narrator as he visits the sites mentioned in the notebooks and learns more about his grandfather and ultimately comes to understand him better, the man he became and the man he might have been without the war. At times I also was reminded of Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily.
By coincidence, I read this novel simultaneously with the short stories of Heinrich Böll, which treat many of the same themes in connection with World War II: the absurdity and horror of war, the class differences between officers and men, and the triumph of corruption after the end of the war. Both writers are rather anti-clerical; Böll was a Catholic who considered the hierarchy of the Church as having betrayed the values of Catholicism, while Hertmans is perhaps less Catholic than the characters in his novel, but Catholicism plays a major role in the book. Böll is the better writer, but this novel is also very good and I would recommend it highly. It was the reading from Belgium or Flanders in the World Literature group I am in on Goodreads.
A few more sixteenth-century plays, all written about 1590:Sept. 29
103. John Lyly, Love's Metamorphoses [ca. 1590?] 57 pages [Kindle]
Lyly's shortest play, this is another slight play with hardly any dramatic action, which rather demonstrates Lyly's knowledge and wit than any skill as a playwright. The plot, such as it is, is that three nymphs of Ceres (whom Lyly portrays as a goddess of chastity as well as fertility) reject the suits of three foresters, and are transformed by Cupid into a rock, a flower and a bird. Meanwhile, the farmer Ericthonius cuts down a tree sacred to Ceres (which is also a transformed nymph) and is punished with endless hunger. In the end, Ceres and Cupid make a deal and the three nymphs are restored and marry the three suitors, while Ericthonius is cured of his hunger and worships Ceres. In the intermediate time, Ericthonius' daughter Protea has saved her own boyfriend from a Siren. The play ends with all four couples engaged. This is an annotated version from the Elizabethan Drama website and one I had not previously read.
Sept. 30
104. John Lyly, Midas [ca. 1590] 78 pages [Kindle]
A more interesting play, or at least one with more dramatic action, although most of the dramatic events take place offstage and are reported. The subject is the two well-known episodes from the story of King Midas of Phrygia, his Midas touch which turns everything he touches to gold (including his food and drink), and his judgement for Pan over Apollo in a musical contest, for which Apollo gave him ass's ears. Lyly turns the mythical story into an allegory of contemporary politics, with Midas standing for Phillip II of Spain and his attempted invasion of the island of Lesbos for the Spanish Armada. Some of the parallels are given in the extensive annotation of this version, also from the Elizabethan Drama website. It was another play I hadn't previously read.
Oct. 1
105. George Peele, Edward I [1590] 137 pages [Kindle]
I am not a historian, but I have a fairly good layman's knowledge of English history; if I had to choose the two reigns I know the least about, it would have to be Henry III and Edward I. Edward I is known for the conquest of Wales, and his incursions into Scotland. This play concentrates on the resistance ("rebellions") of the Welsh. The events are mainly historical, although the chronology is even more compressed and out of order than in Shakespeare's history plays. The version I read, from the Elizabethan Drama website, was well-annotated, giving the actual history the play was loosely based on.
Oct. 2
106. Robert Greene, The History of Orlando Furioso [ca. 1590] 74 pages [Kindle]
This play has nothing in common with the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto except the names of the characters; their relationships and the whole situation of the plot are completely different. In this play, Angelica is betrothed to Orlando; her other suitors, the Soldan of Egypt, Rodomont (King of Cuba) and Mandricard (King of Mexico) resent her decision, and the two latter decide to make war on her father, Marsilius, Emperor of Africa. Meanwhile, Count Sacripante, who isn't in love with her but wants to marry her to inherit her father's throne, fakes a relationship between Angelica and her squire Medoro, which drives Orlando mad with jealousy. The plot makes little sense, even compared to the Italian Orlando romances, and is full of the most overblown Euphuistic language of any play I have read. Either this is one of the worst plays ever written — or a hilariously brilliant parody. I suspect the latter; even a poor playwright would hardly have kings of Cuba and Mexico fighting in the age of Charlemagne, but as a way of making fun of the anachronisms and pseudo-geography of the romances it makes perfect "sense". I hadn't read this before, and it was from the Elizabethan Drama website.
Oct. 2
107. George Peele, The Old Wives Tale [ca. 1590] 44 pages
This is a play interesting for its form. Three clownish servants, Antick, Frolick, and Frantick, lost in the woods at evening, are found by Clunch the Smith and taken home with him, where Clunch's wife Madge entertains them by telling a "winter's tale". Her tale begins, for the first time in English as far as we know, with the phrase, "Once upon a time. . ." The story she tells, about a princess kidnapped by a sorcerer and the various characters who try to rescue her, is then acted, while she and the clowns remain on stage and occasionally comment on the action. The play has some passages in common with Greene's Orlando Furioso; we don't know which play came first and which borrowed from the other. This was a re-read. It was in Brooke and Paradise and on the Elizabethan Drama website.
Oct. 2
108. Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene, A Looking Glass for London and England [ca. 1590] 27 pages
A satirical play, this was ostensibly set in Nineveh at the time of the prophet Jonah, with a foreground plot involving tyranny, lust and incest, but with a subplot about usury and legal corruption which hits at the problems of contemporary London. This was one I hadn't read before; it was from the Fraser anthology.
Oct. 4
109. "William Shakespeare", A Pleasant Commodie of Faire Em the Millers Daughter of Manchester with the Love of William the Conquerour [ca. 1590] 82 pages
An anonymous play, probably written about 1590 but printed later as by "William Shakespeare"; this is not a seriously disputed play like Edward III but clearly apocryphal. It is an entertaining love comedy, with no serious overtones at all, and utterly unlike any of Shakespeare's plays at any time of his career. The plot consists of two love quadrangles. In one, Manville, Vallinford, and Mountney, three nobles of William the Conqueror's court (and a comic servant, Trotter), are in love with Em, the daughter of the miller of Manchester (actually a Saxon nobleman who is disguising himself as a miller to avoid retribution for his opposition to the Norman conquest); she is in love with Manville. In the other, William the Conqueror and the Marques of Lubeck are in love with Mariana, who loves Lubeck, while Blaunch, the daughter of the King of Denmark, is in love with William (who is disguised as Sir Robert Windsor). After much comic intrigue, the pairs sort out, not as one would have expected. It was from a collection of Shakespeare Apocrypha, and I had not previously read it.
Oct. 12110. Heinrich Böll, Und sagte kein einziges Wort [1953] 153 pages [in German]
I've been reading Böll's short stories recently, so I decided to read one of his novels from about the same period. Like the stories, it deals with the ruins and beginning of rebuilding of Germany in the years after the Second World War, and the corruption that was rampant at the time. The novel is about two people, Fred, the husband who came back from the war depressed, works at a dead-end, boring job as a telephone operator for the Church, and drinks more than he should, and his wife Kate, who is taking care of their three children (two others died in infancy). Fred, unable to stand the poverty of their apartment and appalled at his own tendencies to domestic violence, has left home as the novel begins. The book alternates between first-person accounts of the two protagonists. More perhaps than the stories the novel is set in a context of Catholicism, which may explain why it appealed to me as a non-Christian less than the stories did. (The title is a quotation from the Bible.) In any case, it is a good novel but not as extraordinary as the critics suggest.
Oct. 12111. Jan M. Ziokowski, ed. and tr., The Cambridge Songs (Carmina Cantabrigiensis) [ca. 1050, this ed. 1998] 401 pages [largely in Latin]
The Cambridge Songs are a collection of texts which were originally set to music, although only a few actually have musical notation (neumes). They are contained in a larger manuscript, now in the University Library at Cambridge but probably copied and certainly long kept in the Abbey at Canterbury, until they were moved to Cambridge when the monasteries were suppressed by Henry VIII. While the manuscript was clearly copied in England, as the handwriting makes obvious to those who understand such things, it most probably was copied from an earlier manuscript from Germany, perhaps originally collected at the court of the Emperor Henry III. (The original manuscript no longer exists; it may have been borrowed and returned to Germany after copying, or destroyed in a well-documented fire at the Abbey later in the century.) Most of the poems seem to have some connection with Germany; two are macaronic, that is partly in Latin and partly in Old High German, and several praise German Emperors and one German archbishop. A few, however, seem from their style to have been composed in what is now France or northern Italy; Latin literature was of course international.
Prior to 1982, the Cambridge Songs were identified as consisting of 49 poems; after the discovery of a previously missing leaf, most scholars consider that there were at least 83 poems, and perhaps more which have been lost. Ziolkowski's edition, now available as volume 3 of the Harvard Studies in Medieval Latin, is the first edition to include all 83 extant poems. The book also includes a long introduction, an English translation and extensive commentary to the individual poems.
The Cambridge Songs are the oldest collection of Mediaeval Latin lyric poetry, about a century before the more famous Carmina Burana, and are important for students of Mediaeval Latin language and literature, and of mediaeval music.
Oct. 20112. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects v.5 [2nd ed. 1568, Eng. tr. 1851] 567 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
This is the fifth and last volume of the Foster translation of Vasari, and perhaps the most interesting. It contains seventeen lives, all of persons who were recently dead or still living at the time it was written. Among the most interesting are those of Francesco Salviati, a close friend of Vasari, which contains many personal anecdotes; that of Michelangelo, at 143 pages the longest in the five volumes, who was Vasari's teacher and role model; the life of Titian; and the autobiographical sketch of Vasari himself.
Oct. 23113. Ibn Hazam, The Ring of the Dove: A Treatise on the Art and Practice of Arab Love [1022?; Eng. tr. (A.J. Arberry, 1951)] 288 pages [Kindle]
The next book in my eleventh-century reading project, The Ring of the Dove is the Arberry translation of Ibn Hazm's Ṭawq al-Ḥamāmah; it was earlier (1931) translated by A.R. Nikl as The Dove's Neck Ring. Ibn Hazm — or Abu Muhammad Ali Ibn Muhammad Ibn Sa'id Ibn Hazm, to give his full name — was an Islamic scholar from Andalusia, who wrote many books on theology and law; this was his only work of literature. It is considered a classic of mediaeval Arabic, and some scholars consider it to have been an important influence on the troubadour poetry of the twelfth century, which is why it is probably an important book to read. To be honest, I was not particularly impressed. It is not by any means well organized, and is very contradictory; I got the impression that the treatise is basically just a framework for showcasing his own poetry. Admittedly, this is a translation, and the original Arabic may have had stylistic graces which are not apparent in English.
Oct. 24-28Some more Elizabethan plays.
114. Thomas of Woodstock [1590's?] 75 pages [Kindle]
Thomas of Woodstock, also sometimes called Richard the Second Part One is another anonymous play which has been attributed to Shakespeare, and there are some scholars today that accept that attribution, although the majority do not. In terms of its events, it is a "prequel" to Shakespeare's Richard II, dealing with the earlier years of Richard's reign and the murder of the Duke of Glouster, Thomas of Woodstock; while it is a reasonably good play, it is nowhere near the equal of Shakespeare's play, and I think the conception of Richard II's character is very different in the two plays. The problem is that we do not know when the play was written; according to Wikipedia, it has been placed as early as the mid-1580's, before any of the known Shakespearian plays — in which case it could be a very early work by Shakespeare — and as late as the seventeenth century, in which case it would have been written by someone imitating Shakespeare's style (not to take seriously the claims that it is a nineteenth-century forgery). Most scholars date it somewhere between 1590 and 1595, and in that case it obviously could not be by Shakespeare, who was already writing much better plays by that time. No matter who wrote it, it is worth reading as a good example of the Elizabethan history play. It is in a manuscript along with another apocryphal Shakespeare play, Edmund Ironsides, which I will be reading soon, and was not printed until the nineteenth century. The last page or two are missing from the manuscript. I had not read it before; it was in a collection of apocryphal Shakespeare plays.
115. Thomas Nashe, Summer's Last Will and Testament [1592] 75 pages
This is a unique and original play, which looks back to the moralities and interludes in its use of the debate format, and forward to the later masques. It was performed, probably in October of 1592, at the country residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury. There is really very little plot; Summer, dying, summons various allegorical figures, who debate various subjects, and then leaves everything to his heir, Autumn. It ends in the usual panegyric to Queen Elizabeth. The entertainment is derived from the paradoxical nature of the arguments. There are passages which are obscure and are probably "inside jokes" about the actors and spectators which cannot now be recovered. Another play I had not previously read; it was in the Fraser and Rabkin anthology.
116. The Lamentable Tragedie of Locrine, the eldest son of King Brutus. . . [ca. 1591?] 68 pages [Kindle]
Locrine is another play from the Shakespeare Apocrypha collection I am reading my way through; according to Wikipedia, the play was published as "Newly set foorth, overseene and corrected, / By W. S.", so it may in fact have been an older play edited by Shakespeare in his role as chief playwright for the King's Men. That article says the authors who are most often proposed for the play are Peele or Greene; in fact, before reading the article I thought it resembled Greene's Orlando Furioso and that both plays were deliberate parodies. Locrine is from beginning to end composed of bombastic speeches in a heavily Euphuistic style, and like Orlando Furioso is full of geographical nonsense and anachronisms (the Orlando Furioso has kings from Cuba and Mexico in the time of Charlemagne, and Locrine has a character mention the "Mines of America" more than a thousand years before Christ).
The plot is taken from the legendary history of Britain, first put forward by Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Trojan, Brutus, who supposedly founded Britain, is dying at the opening and leaves the Kingdom to his eldest son Locrine, while his other sons, Camber and Albanact, get Cambria (Wales) and Albania (Scotland). Brutus urges Locrine to marry his cousin Gwendoline, daughter of his uncle Corineus (who is given Cornwall), which he does. The Kingdom is then invaded by Scithians, also described as Huns, led by Humber, who defeat Albanact (he declaims a long speech and then commits suicide) but are in turn defeated by Locrine. Humber makes a long speech and commits suicide by drowning himself in a river, which is then (and still is) called the Humber. Locrine then falls in love with the Scithian king's concubine, Estrild, and abandons Gwendoline, who, with their son Mandan, takes up arms, and defeats Locrine. Locrine, Estrild and their daughter Sabren then make long speeches and commit suicide, the latter by drowning herself in a river, called the Sabren, and Gwendoline rules the Kingdom until her death.
There is also a comic subplot involving a cobbler named Strumbo and his two wives, which has the immortal line, "sweet wench, let me lick thy toes."
As with Orlando Furioso, if it is not a parody, it is definitely a very lamentable tragedy, but if it is, it is funny and well worth reading.
117. Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle, Sir Thomas More [ca. 1591] 120 pages [Kindle]
This is another play from the Shakespeare Apocrypha; according to Wikipedia (and other Internet sites I suspect are derived from Wikipedia) this was "originally written by Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle; later heavily revised by Thomas Heywood, Thomas Dekker and William Shakespeare". I'm not sure what the evidence is for the authorship or the date, and the connection to Shakespeare is controversial.
The play itself is good; it consists of episodes from the life of More, including his quelling of the 1517 "Ill May Day" riots, his period as Lord Chancellor, and his martyrdom at the hands of Henry VIII. The first episode is especially interesting for its speech in defense of immigrants against nativist rioters. The episode dealing with his opposition to Henry VIII and death may have been censored, which would account for the "revision".
118. The Raign of King Edward the Third [ca. 1592] 120 pages [Kindle]
Of all the Shakespeare Apocrypha, this is the play that has garnered the most support for actually being at least in part an early work of Shakespeare, although that is still controversial and it doesn't seem to me particularly Shakespearian. It is essentially a patriotic play, similar in subject if not quality to Henry V, about Edward III and his son the Black Prince and their conquests in France. There is also a long digression about Edward's supposed love for the Countess of Salisbury, full of overdone Petrarchean conceits. Without that, it would be a good history play.
119. A Most pleasant Comedie of Mucedorus the Kings Sonne of Valentia, and Amadine the Kinges daughter of Aragon. . . [ca. 1590] 50 pages
Another play in the Shakespeare Apocrypha, although I do not believe anyone today seriously puts that forward; the most common suggestion as to the real author is Robert Greene, although there is no real evidence for that. Neither do we know when it was written, although it was probably around 1590.
It is a light, unpretentious and entertaining romantic comedy about a prince who disguises himself as a shepherd to woo a princess, with a bear and a rival suitor. There is also a lower level of comedy provided by a clownish servant named Mouse (not really a separate subplot) and an ogre-ish wild man named Bremo.
It was in the Fraser and Rabkin anthology as well as the Shakespeare apocrypha collection; I had not read it before.
120. The Merry Devill of Edmonton [ca. 1600?] 90 pages [Kindle]
The Merry Devill of Edmonton is another play whose publisher claimed it was by Shakespeare and which was in the collection I am reading of Shakespeare Apocrypha; various scholars have suggested other more plausible authors, from Drayton or Heywood to Dekker, but there is no real evidence. Today the play is thought to have been written in the early 1600's, although it was earlier thought to have been from about 1592. It was one I had not read before.
This is another light romantic comedy, about a maiden, Milliscent Clare, whose father wishes to marry her to a rich young man, Franke Jerningham (who is in love with someone else, never actually named in the play) and commits her for a time to a nunnery (so the play is apparently set before the time of Henry VIII) to break off her previous engagement to the man she wants to marry, Raymond Mounchensey. Raymond, Franke, and her brother Harry, with the help of a magician, Peter Fabell, the Merry Devill of the title, rescue her from the nunnery and she is married to Mounchensey by Sir John, a priest who is also involved with some other comic characters in a subplot about poaching deer in the royal forest. The play begins with Fabell deceiving the devil to escape a Faustian deal, but otherwise there is nothing supernatural in the play. It is a fun read but nothing deep and nothing in any way suggesting Shakespeare.
121. Thomas Lord Cromwell [ca. 1600?] 60 pages
Thomas Lord Cromwell was published in 1602 as by W.S., and later attributed to Shakespeare, although the initials could well refer to Wentworth Smith or William Sly, if they are accurate at all. It is a play about the life of Thomas Cromwell who was a high official under Henry VIII and is a major character in Shakespeare and Fletcher's Henry VIII. The play reminded me of Sir Thomas More in the way it uses episodes from the life and execution of the subject. This is my last play for a while from the Shakespeare Apocrypha collection, and is one I hadn't previously read.
Oct. 28122. Ananda Devi, Indian Tango [2007] 254 pages [in French]
Just as Devi's previous novel Ève de ses décombres was based on the poetry of Rimbaud, Indian Tango is based on the films of one of my favorite directors, Satyagit Ray; not only are there many allusions to his films, but the entire atmosphere of the novel resembles a Ray film. The novel is set in Delhi/New Delhi, in March, April and May of 2004. There are a few allusions to the election campaign of Sonia Gandhi, but this does not play as central a role in the book as the blurb and some reviews would suggest.
There are two major characters. Subhadra, usually called Subha, the traditional, conservative middle-class wife of Jugdish and mother of the college student Kamal, is fifty-two years old and dealing with issues of menopause and a very disagreeable elderly mother-in-law, Mataji. The other major character is never named, but is described as an unsuccessful writer from Europe who has come to India to "start over" and is pursuing Subha. The book begins with Subha in April 2004, who has just had an experience which is only explained later, then returns to the pursuer in March, who has just seen Subha for the first time in front of a musical instruments store where they both look at the same sitar in the window. For most of the novel, the chapters alternate between third person indirect discourse chapters from the viewpoint of Subha in April, in a relatively realist style (for Devi), showing the consequences of their meeting, and first person chapters of the pursuer in March leading up to it, but also meditating on writing (at times it is unclear in the pursuer's mind as to whether Subha is real or a character in the pursuer's unwritten novel). At the end, in May, after the meeting is described, the two styles tend to merge with some of Subha's being in the first person, including a surrealist sequence. The book ends with Subha making a decision, followed by a short and to me rather incomprehensible epilogue by the pursuer.
The themes of the novel are the position of women in India, and more generally the nature of conservative Indian society, and the relationship of literature to reality. The novel was very interesting and well-written, although the chapters from the pursuer's viewpoint sometimes were rather obscure and I was unsatisfied by the ending.
Nov. 4123. Hella S. Haasse, In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages [1949; Eng. tr. 1989] 574 pages
Hella S. Haasse was one of the major writers in twentieth-century Dutch literature, known especially for her novels about the Dutch colonies. In a Dark Wood Wandering, however, is a biographical/historical novel about the poet, Charles d'Orléans (1394-1465), who was apart from François Villon (who makes a few brief appearances in the book) the most important French poet of the early fifteenth century. He was also as Duke of Orléans an important figure in French history; his grandfather was King Charles V of France, and his son would eventually become King Louis XII.
The novel is divided into two unequal parts; the first and longer part begins with his christening ceremony and covers his childhood and early youth, focusing mostly on his father Duke Louis and his mother Valentine Visconti and the feud between the Houses of Orléans and Burgundy, during the madness of King Charles VI. This part ends with the Battle of Agincourt and the capture of Charles by the English. The second much shorter part covers his twenty-five years as a prisoner of war in England, and his life after his return to France. This is the part which includes his avocation as a poet. Unfortunately, being half the length of the first part and covering a longer period of time, it seems very condensed compared to the first part and the political situation was more difficult to follow.
The time period of the novel is more or less the same as Shakespeare's history plays, so it was interesting to see the same events from the perspective of France. Charles' first wife was Queen Isabelle, the daughter of Charles VI and widow of Richard II of England; his captivity lasts until early in the reign of Henry VI. Of course Haasse's novel is more historically accurate than the plays.
I now plan to read Charles' poetry later in the month, if I can get through some of my other reading projects first.
Nov. 5124. Han Kang, Greek Lessons [2011, tr. 2024] 173 pages
Han Kang is the 2024 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, and the first since Doris Lessing in 2007 that I had already read anything by before they won the prize. In fact, of the four books by Han that have been translated, this was the only one I hadn't read. All four were good, and this one was much better than I expected from the description.
In post-modern fashion, it is a serious novel about language and communication disguised as a genre romance, but disappointing the expectations of that genre. The book shifts between the viewpoints of two characters, a woman who is mute, studying Ancient Greek, and her male professor, who is becoming blind.
The history of the two characters are told in memories; as in Devi's Indian Tango which I read last month, the chapters from her perspective are in third person indirect discourse, his are in first person (and second person, addressed to various figures in his past, some just in consciousness and others as actual letters, and at the end to her). The writing was very poetic, and some chapters are printed as poems.
Nov. 9125. Heinrich Böll, Erzählungen III 1952-1959 [1952-1959] 294 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in German]
The third volume of Böll's short stories, this contained thirty seven of his stories, only one of which (Ich bin kein Kommunist) was a duplicate of what I had already read in the other anthologies I have read this year. (I'm now up to 83 stories total.)
The stories were more varied in this anthology than in those (which were mainly earlier work, from the 1940's, and mostly Trümmerliteratur); although many of these stories are realist in style, there were also more humorous tales and a few that could be called modernist.
Several of the stories were about Christmas, including one of the longest, Nicht nur zur Weikhnachtszeit. Two were told from the perspective of inanimate objects, Abenteuer eines Brotbeutels and Schicksal einer henkellosen Tasse, also both among the longer stories. Several were also about unusual and obviously unreal occupations. Only a few could be called Trümmerliteratur. The collection was uneven, but most of the stories were interesting.
Nov. 12126.Heinrich Böll, Entfernung von dem Truppe [1964] 141 pages [in German]
Entfernung von dem Truppe is a short novel which is totally unlike anything Böll had previously written, far more experimental in form and style. The first chapter, about a fifth of the book, is simply telling us to make whatever we like of the story, that the characters could be other than how he describes them, e.g. that the priests could be evangelical ministers or rabbis, that he is just giving an outline which the reader is expected to complete. He uses the metaphor of a coloring book and suggests that we can color the figures however we want.
Then the story begins, but it is a collection of disconnected events in no particular order, moving back and forth from just before the beginning to just after the end of World War II, and to a present which is some twenty years later. Frequently it comes back to Sept. 22, 1938, the day he meets his future wife. The self-deprecating first person narrator gives us more meta-narrative than narrative, commenting on his own narration, and we ultimately have to piece together the story as best we can. The last sentence of the book: "The narrator is hiding something. What?"
The title, which can be translated as distance or absence from the troop, the German expression for "going AWOL", literally refers to the narrator's failure to return to his unit after his marriage, but is also a metaphor for his desertion from a society from which he is completely alienated. This is a novel which could have been a very bleak and tragic one, if it weren't treated in such a humorous manner.
Nov. 16127. Charles d'Orléans, Poesies v.1: La Retenue d'Amours, Ballades, chansons, complaintes et caroles [15th cent., Champion ed. 1923] 336 pages [Kindle, Gallica] [in French]
I just read Hella S. Haasse's In a Dark Wood Wandering: A Novel of the Middle Ages, which is a biographical novel about the poet Charles d'Orléans, so I decided to read his poetry. He was among the most important poets of the fifteenth century; I won't repeat here what I said about him in my review of the novel. This first volume of his poetry contains his ballades and chansons (songs), complaintes, and caroles, most of which were written during his twenty-five year captivity in England as a prisoner of war after the Battle of Agincourt.
The ballades were for the most part quite interesting. The collection begins with "La Retenue d'Amours", an allegory in the manner of the Roman de la Rose about his childhood and youth, and his pledging allegiance to the God of Love. The main group of seventy one ballades is concerned mainly with love, in an allegorical style, apart from a few poems dealing with his imprisonment and hopes for release, and are followed with another long allegory, really a continuation of the first one, called "Songe en complaint", about his leaving the service of Love after the death of his Lady (his second wife Bonne d'Armagnac, presumably) and his coming under the guardianship of Old Age. This is followed by a more varied group of fifty two, including debates with other poets, among them François Villon.
The chansons, on the other hand, numbering about ninety, were much more trite and repetitious, although to be fair they were intended to be sung and we no longer have the music. (For many of them, he left space in the manuscript [Manuscript O, which is the basis for this edition], but the music was never copied in and he eventually reused the space for later poems.) The complaintes were not particularly good either, except for the first one, which is about the troubles of France. The collection ends with three short caroles, only the last of which is what we would call a carol, that is a Christmas song, in Latin.
Nov. 20128. Charles d'Orléans, Poesies v.2: Rondeaux [15th cent., Champion ed. 1923] 325 pages [Kindle, Gallica] [in French]
The second volume of his poetry, this contains the Rondeaux, and the notes and variants, glossary, and indices for both volumes. There were 435 rondeaux from the O Manuscript, and a couple dozen in the notes from other MSS. The Rondeaux are not much different in form from the chansons, except they may not all have been intended to be sung. On the whole, they are somewhat better than the chansons, although there is still much that is pure convention and repetition, and they are by no means as original as the ballades. They were written as Charles became older, in his late forties and fifties (which was old age at the time), and are about his battles no longer with Love but with Melancholy and Care, and his longing for Non Chaloir, not caring. At seventy-two, I can relate. There were also more by other poets who participated in his poetry competitions; comparing their verses to his, it is obvious why he is considered a major poet and most of them are not.
Nov. 24129. Heinrich Böll, Veränderungen in Staech: Erzählungen 1962-1980 [1962-1980] 202 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in German]
This is another collection of Böll's short stories (eighteen in all, which brings me up to one hundred, leaving out duplicates), from later in his career. Some good stories, but many of these are satires which require more knowledge than I have of German politics (and Church politics.)
Nov. 27130. Heinrich Böll, Der Blasse Hund: Erzählungen 206 pages [1995] [Kindle, Open Library] [in German]
Der Blasse Hund is a posthumous collection of ten previously unpublished stories (Kurzgeschichte, Erzählungen, a "Prosa-skizzen" and a chapter of an unfinished book); one is a very early religious story from before the war (1937) and the other nine date from between 1946 and 1952. These were quite uneven; a few were very good and one wonders why they were not published, but some were not that interesting or well-written.
Nov. 30131. Heinrich Böll, Romane und Erzählungen 4: 1961-1970 [1961-1970] 529 pages [Kindle, Open Library] [in German]
This collection, the last I will be reading for a while from Böll, contains the two-hundred-page novel Ansichten eines Clowns and twelve stories, some of which I had already read. (I'm up to 113 stories, and the English Collected Stories only has 103, so I assume I have read nearly all of them.) I still have one more short novel before I go on to other things.
Ansichten eines Clowns, from 1963, is probably Böll's most important novel, but also the one on which readers are most divided. It is certainly his most bitter. He based the style on Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, which he and his wife had just translated into German; in other words, it is a slangy, first-person narrative by a young man, Hans Schlier, a professional clown a few years older than Holden Caulfield, full of angst, sarcasm and denunciation of what Salinger calls "phoniness" and Böll calls "Heuchelei". In the case of this novel, the sarcasm is directed largely at the "progressive", intellectual circles of the Catholic Church and the CDU (the Christian Democratic party).
Marie, a Catholic girl who has lived with the narrator for some seven years, has left him to marry a "leading Catholic", and he blames this on a conspiracy by "the Circle". In the course of a number of telephone calls, he insults each of the people in the "Circle", while his potential support dwindles. There are many memory flashbacks which provide background.
As in Catcher in the Rye, there is an emotional trauma about a sister in the backstory.
There are other targets of satire as well — the refusal to deal with the Nazi past, in particular — but Böll, as a Catholic angry about what he considered the betrayal of the German Church of the traditions of Catholicism, concentrates his fire on religious corruption. There are undoubtedly many specific references which went over my head, but the general arguments are fairly obvious.
Dec. 2132. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Welcome to the Monkey House [1968] 308 pages
One of my friends, who knows I have a better library than the city public library, just asked me if I had any story collections by Kurt Vonnegut, so I dug out three; Welcome to the Monkey House which I read maybe fifty years ago, and two posthumous collections I have never read. I decided to read all three before I see my friend and loan them to her next week.
Welcome to the Monkey House includes many of Vonnegut's most famous stories, among them "Harrison Bergeron", which satirized "woke" liberals decades before they even existed. These are some really great short stories, written from between 1950 and 1968, mostly set in New Hampshire and Massachusetts, the two states where I lived at the time (I was in grade school and Junior High.)
On re-reading them, the only story I didn't like was the title story, which is a rather dated satire which I don't believe could have been written even a half-dozen years later. Other stories were also somewhat dated, dealing with the Cold War, for example, but still made points that are valid today.
Vonnegut is a genuinely funny and entertaining writer who discusses serious issues with humor. I enjoyed reading this again, as a relief from my usual diet of bitter and tragic literature.
Dec. 3133. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Look at the Birdie [2009] 251 pages
This was a posthumous collection of fifteen previously unpublished stories by Vonnegut. Not surprisingly, they are well-crafted and entertaining, but also not surprisingly, they are not as imaginative or hard-hitting as the published stories. They tend to be somewhat more sentimental and less critical than the later published stories, probably a reflection of the markets he was writing for early in his career.
Dec. 4
134. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., While Mortals Sleep [2011] 253 pages
This was another posthumous collection of sixteen early, previously unpublished stories, and my review would be the same as for Look at the Birdie.
Dec. 6135. Pierre Gascar, Rimbaud et la commune [1971] 184 pages [in French]
I found another book in my garage on Rimbaud, and given the title I couldn't help but read it. It was very disappointing. The title is misleading; only one of the eleven chapters has much about the Commune, and that doesn't say much about Rimbaud. There is one chapter on the "Illuminist" tradition in French literature which was somewhat interesting, but most of the book is psychologizing Rimbaud from a semi-Freudian perspective; there is far too much unsupported and just plain wrong opinionizing by the author (much of which has no relevance to Rimbaud, let alone Rimbaud and the Commune). The second half of the book is guesswork about Rimbaud's later life in Ethiopia and more opinions of the author.
Dec. 7136. Heinrich Böll, Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum [1974] 122 pages [in German]
I may have spoken too soon when I called Ansichten eines Clowns Böll's most bitter novel. Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum is at least equally so. It is a very powerful book. The plot is a bit more melodramatic; Katharina Blum, a young working-class woman who is in love with a wanted (political) criminal and whose life has been destroyed by the lies of the gutter-press, murders a reporter whom she believes is responsible for the death of her mother. The story is told as if the narrator is deriving it from sources such as the police reports. In the process, Böll, as in the earlier novel and many of his stories, exposes the corruption of post-war Germany. This novel is somewhat easier to understand, since the gutter-press is a more universal phenomenon than the Catholic Church politics of Clown.
Dec. 8137. Jon Fosse, Plays Five [2011] 368 pages
I decided this week to read the last two collections (to date) of 2023 Nobel Prize winner Jon Fosse's plays, since the award will be given on December 10 to the new winner, Han Kang.
Fosse's plays fall into three, not necessarily mutually exclusive, categories: longer, more or less realistic plays (to the extent that Fosse's minimalist style can be realistic) about the problems of communication between people, especially husbands, wives, and adult children; plays which have people at different times in their lives on stage at the same time; and plays which are set in some sort of limbo, possibly an afterlife or some sort of time warp, and are very difficult to follow. When I first started reading his plays, I found them very original and clever, especially the ones that monkey with time; but after five collection I begin to regard them as repetitive, following the same formula in play after play, and often repeating the same or very similar lines both within and between plays — how many times can I read dialogue like "Where are we? Why are we here? Where have we come from? It seems like we have always been here. Yes, we have always been here" or "Yes, I have to go. Don't go. I must go" repeated over and over, without losing interest?
Plays Five contains seven pieces. Living Secretly (Leve hemmeleg, 2011) and A Red Butterfly's Wings (Ein raud sommarfugls vengjer, 2011) are very short, a few pages; the first is a monologue about having a private life and the second is a dialogue among three unnamed persons about politics, and I can't imagine either being performed except perhaps in an acting class. Of the five real plays, Suzannah (2004) belongs to the group of same person, three different times — the only interest is that the character is the wife of Henrik Ibsen; The Dead Dogs (Dei dode hundane, 2005) is about an uncommunicative son who lives with his mother, and as in a few other plays (even such details keep repeating) has given up playing the guitar and seeing his friends; Warm (Varmt, 2006) is a "limbo" play; Telemakos (2011) is a relatively short play which alludes to the frame story of the Odyssey in a contemporary setting; and Sleep (Svevn, 2006) is another couple through time story.
I would probably enjoy any of his plays individually, but only if I hadn't read any of the others.
Dec. 9
138. Jon Fosse, Plays Six [2014] 312 pages [Kindle]
This is the last collection so far of Jon Fosse's plays. I won't repeat the overall description of his work I gave in my review of Plays Five, but I would give this the same general review.
Plays Six contains seven pieces. Rambuku (2007) is one of his strange plays, with a elderly woman who talks about going to Rambuku, which is apparently a Paradise but also a person, to her husband who seems unable to speak without her telling him what to say. Freedom (Fridom, 2011) is a dialogue about freedom in relationships. Over There (Der borte, is a bit different from his usual formula, but also similar in style. These Eyes (Dessa auga, 2009), Girl in Yellow Raincoat (Jente i gul regnjakke, 2010), and Sea are "limbo" plays. Christmas Tree Song is a very short monologue about a Christmas tree and the idea that it would have been better to have left it in the woods; I had to laugh because I had just seen a similar post on Facebook.
Dec. 14139. Benvenuto Cellini, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini [written 1558-1566, first pub. 1730; Eng. tr. (Symonds, 3rd ed.) 1889] 427 pages
Benvenuto Cellini (1500-1571) was a goldsmith, sculptor, and judging by his Vita, more commonly referred to as The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, a swordsman and all-around ruffian. He was born in Florence, where he began his career as a goldsmith; he later worked for the Pope in Rome, for King Francis in Paris, and then again in Florence for Cosimo de Medici. He was mentioned in the last book on art history I read, Vasari's Lives. . ., and he also mentions Vasari, negatively as someone who was conspiring against him. (Cellini believed almost everyone he ever dealt with ultimately conspired against him, and frequently beat up or killed them, for which he was often arrested, but usually escaped thanks to his powerful patrons, who valued his artistic talents so highly, but according to him never paid him sufficiently because of the conspiracies.) Many of his works, including the Perseus which he considered his masterpiece, still exist. However, he is better known today for this autobiography, one of the earliest known, which is a valuable source for the life of Renaissance Italy and France. The book breaks off abruptly in 1566; it was not actually published until 1730. The edition I read is a reprint of John Addington Symonds' translation from the nineteenth century.
Dec. 22140. Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, I: Venetian and North Italian Schools [1907] 236 pages
141. Bernard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance, II: Florentine and Central Italian Schools [1897] 254 pages
Italian Painters of the Renaissance consists of four originally separate long essays together with a preface and a short epilogue called "The Decline of Art." It's one of the classics of art history from the end of the nineteenth century. The first essay, written in 1894, was on the Venetian painters. Berenson describes the development of the painting styles as corresponding to the different stages of Renaissance thought. It's all very Romantic and idealist, but he does give some idea of the major painters, the artistic affiliations or influences between them, and how the styles changed over time, as compared to the simple lists of works and master-pupil relationships we find three centuries earlier in Vasari, whom I just recently read. He concentrates in this essay on the Bellinis, Giorgione, Titian, and Tintorello, although he mentions a few others, and he also treats of Paolo Veronese here rather than in the essay on North Italy.
Between writing this and the second essay on the Florentine painters from 1896, he developed a psychological theory of the nature of art, derived more from the Kantian tradition than from any sort of empirical psychology, which he applies in the rest of the essays. It seems to me to be rather abstract, and I did not appreciate these essays as much as the first one on the Venetians. The essay on the Florentines begins with Giotto, passes quickly over everyone before Masaccio, and most of those afterwards, until he reaches Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, and Michaelangelo.
The essay on the Central Italian schools, written in 1897, begins with the Sienese artists, and gives much more space than I would have expected to the earliest painters, especially Duccio and Simone Martini and their followers. He then moves to three Tuscan painters, Piero della Francesca, Melozzo da Forli, and Luca Signorelli. He ends up with the three from Umbria, Pintoricchio, Perugini, and of course Raphael.
The essay on the North Italian schools, written in 1907, begins a bit on Pisanello, and briefly covers a number of other artists, but the only ones he really approves of are Montegna, perhaps Tura, and Correggio. Much of the essay is devoted to general discussions, recapitulating his theory, talking about the relationship of Antiquity to art, and so forth. This is followed by the short essay on the Decline of Art, also from 1907.
Perhaps as a result of his professional life as as an art critic and connoisseur, he devotes much space to ranking the different artists and works, telling us which ones are better than others (and presumably why collectors should buy them). In this respect he reminds me of Swinburne's approach to the Elizabethan dramatists. His life is apparently quite interesting; I am planning to read two or three biographies next month. My problem with him may be that, as he says himself, he is not writing a history of art, and I am reading him for the history of art, or more exactly the history of the history of art. Nevertheless, he is very interesting and the book is worth reading.
The two-volume Phaidon paperback edition I read has almost four hundred illustrations, but nearly all are black and white (a problem when he is discussing the use of color); the reproductions are good for the older artists who depended on line, but for the later artists who depended on color for delineating the figures they tend to be just blurs where everything is the same shade of gray.
Dec. 23142. Jon Fosse, The Boathouse (Naustet) [1989, Eng. tr. 2017] 129 pages [Kindle]
When Fosse won the Nobel Prize last year, since the award made mention primarily of his plays, I began by reading those; but for a group I am in on Goodreads, this month I am reading some of his short novels or novellas, which are earlier than any of his plays. Some of his plays are rather obscure, and now I realize why: they are essentially scenes or tableaux from the novels. At least one of the plays is based on this novel, and there are also allusions to it in some of his other most obscure plays. The main character in this book is a thirty year old man, who has remained in his village as essentially a failure, single and living at home with his mother; he meets his former childhood best friend, a music teacher in the city who is on vacation with his wife and two daughters. The style is the same as in the plays; slow, with minimal development of what little plot there is, and with repetition of the same sentences hundreds of times. The repetition makes more sense in the novel, since it is essentially stream-of-consciousness, and we do tend to think the same things over and over in about the same way, especially things we are particularly obsessed with.
Dec. 24
143. Jon Fosse, Scenes from a Childhood [2018] 140 pages [Kindle]
This is an anthology of translated texts about childhood. A few are longer, some are very short; one is only a single sentence. Fosse explains that many of them were intended to be about his own childhood, but they ended up becoming fiction. As with the previous book, some of these episodes ended up in his plays.
Dec. 25
144. Jon Fosse, Aliss at the Fire (Det er Ales) [2004, Eng. tr. 2010] 108 pages [Kindle]
This novella is among Fosse's strangest works; it is related to one of his plays, in which different points in a timeline occur together. As in that play, a widow is reliving the day some twenty years earlier when her husband disappeared in the fjord. In this version, however, this is extended, with visions of the husband's grandmother, great-grandparents and great-great-grandmother Aliss at stressful times in their lives.
78. Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects v.1 [2nd ed. 1568, Eng. tr. 1851] 511 pages [Kindle, Open Library]
Vasari's Lives is considered to be the first book of art history. It consists of brief biographies of various artists in (very roughly) chronological order with descriptions of their major works and occasionally remarks as to their role in the development of the arts.
This book is the first of five volumes, each a bit over five hundred pages in the 1851 translation by Mrs. Jonathan Foster which is in Open Library. After a first rather schematic chapter on ancient art from Mesopotamia (the "Chaldeans") and Egypt through early imperial Rome, its decline in Christian times, and the Middle Ages (which Vasari holds in complete contempt), it begins with the rediscovery of "nature" by Cimabue and especially Giotto. Vasari's view of art, which is the viewpoint of his time, is that art is imitation of nature, and the closer it comes to nature the better it is. This volume continues through the late thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, ending more or less with Brunelleschi and Donatello.
The descriptions tend to be a bit repetitious — every artist seems to have sculpted or painted a few Madonnas and several John the Baptists, usually on church doors, but they are invaluable given that so many of the works he discusses have ceased to exist (some no longer existed when he wrote about them.) The chapter on Brunelleschi and the famous dome is the most interesting. Apparently (judging by the footnotes to the translation) Vasari is often inaccurate with regard to dates, and genealogies, especially in these earlier lives. The e-book edition I read omits the woodcut portraits of the artists, which were the only illustrations.
I wondered why I had not read this before, but then I realized: five volumes. It may take me a while to get through.