I have enjoyed Alberto Manguel’s book about reading for many years now (A History of Reading, A Reader on Reading, The Library at Night and others). It was with some trepidation that I came to my first work of fiction by Manguel - would he be able to create fiction as well as he critiques it? [...]
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Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman, the third in the series, is published this week. It is simple in concept, being an account of a young woman’s walk to church from her home in a guest room of an old-people’s home in Rome (which is run by Protestant nuns). The year is 1943, and the young woman is German, her husband a young ordinand who despite an earlier injury to his leg, has been sent to support the German army in their campaign in Tunisia. The woman is heavily pregnant with only a month to go before the baby is due, and as she walks through the city we read of her thoughts on love, war and the German cause, while she also notices the beautiful surroundings as she passes the landmarks of Rome – which Delius describes in such detail that it is tempting to get on a plane and fly out to see them for yourself. The novel consists of a single sentence extended over its 117 pages. But this does not make the book difficult to read because the text is broken up into paragraphs, and the technique preserves the flow of the woman’s thoughts over the hour of her walk. Continue reading Review: Portrait of the Mother as a Young Woman – Friedrich Christian Delius
I’ve never liked reading more than one book at a time, and so its not been particularly easy to interrupt my current book to return to Don Quixote which I am reading over the course of ten weeks. However, I soon get back into the tales of the valiant knight and his exploits with his servant Sancho Panza. This week’s reading in Don Quixote covers pages 276 to 368. I am reading the book in ten chunks of about 90 pages each, and this is chunk number four. Untangling a mistaken coupling This week we read of two pairs of lovers, previously mis-matched, now reorganising themselves so they are in the correct pairs! Don Quixote has little part in this, it being left to the noble Don Fernando to be persuaded of the rightness of the new arrangements – after all, he was to get the lovely Dorotea who his associates assured him was unequalled among women, humble, beautiful, virtuous and loved him greatly. Who could resist? The war against the wineskins Meanwhile our brave Don Quixote persisted with the belief that he had resolved the amorous confusion by doing battle with two huge wineskins containing about 18 gallons (about 70) litres) of wine believing it to be a giant. Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong Part 4 – war and peace
I’ve pulled out three themes from this week’s reading: Wilderness Spain is a country of mountain ranges and high sierras and in the 16th century it wasn’t difficult to get off the track and find yourself in a place only inhabited by lonely goat-herds and the creatures of wild places (wolves are mentioned but I think these were the Iberian wolf which is less dangerous to humans than some other varieties). In the Gospels, the mad man who had enough devils cast out of him to drive a herd of pigs over a cliff wandered in the wild places. The wilderness is a place of lunatics and mad adventurers, which must make it hard to those who have to scrape a living in those places by hunting animals or tending goats. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza travel through the wilderness while fleeing retribution for freeing a group of convicts destined to become galley slaves. They meet a young man with lacerations all over his body and wearing ragged clothes. His tale seems lucid enough – the Duke’s son he served had stolen his beloved Luscinda from him by trickery. But while he started his tale with sanity, a fit of madness came over him half way through, causing him to throw a rock at Don Quixote then beat Sancho to the ground and jump up and down on his ribs. Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong Part 3 – the complexities of love
So far, my reading of Don Quixote has shown me that its humour is its strongest feature, quite apart from the compelling drama of the ridiculous “adventures” and the lyrical tales which are told along the way (by the way, the idea of reading Don Quixote over ten weeks came from Stu of Winstonsdad’s blog). In a recent interview for Reading Matters Triple Choice Tuesday I selected A Diary of a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith as my favorite book of all time and I am now struck by the similarities between Charles Pooter and Don Quixote.
Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong Part 2 – when danger outweighs hope
I’m not going to provide background information on the book or any sense of literary criticism – there are vast amounts of material already on the net including a comprehensive and highly informative Wikipedia entry. I shall instead concentrate as usual on my reading experience, what I thought of the book, passages I particularly enjoyed, overall impressions. Firstly, I was impressed with the sheer modernity of this book. De Cervantes’ humour and satire is bang up to date, and the whole book has a freshness about it which made me feel it could be a modern novel. It wasn’t a difficult read, but raced along from one episode to another with terrific pace. If the next eight hundred pages are going to be anything like the first hundred that I’m really not going to be bored in the company of Don Quixote. Let me just pick up a few points that struck me - Reading can make you go mad Well, we all know that – Timothy Ryback’s book Hitler’s Private Library shows the power of literature to shape character with disastrous results. Don Quixote developed an obsession with “books of chivalry” and read them with such devotion and enthusiasm that the he let his affairs go to pot and “with these words and phrases the poor gentleman lost his mind”. In fact he read from dusk to dawn and sunrise to sunset and was caught up in so much reading “that his brains dried up”. A warning there for book bloggers I think. This takes me back to being eighteen and reading the whold of Lord of the Rings in one weekend and expecting to see hobbits in the woods when I next took a walk in the country (a belief that soon faded I’m pleased to say). Continue reading Don Quixote Readalong – Part 1
Amos Oz is renowned in Israel for his courageous political stance as a secular social-democrat, having lived on a Kibbutz for thirty years and being a leading voice in the peace movement. He has won numerous literary awards as listed in his Wikipedia entry. In his latest novel Rhyming Life and Death, Oz addresses the nature of writing fiction by letting his readers in on the internal reflections of the “Author”, a fictional writer, who is invited to attend a public reading of his work in Tel Aviv. During the following eight hours we read of his preparation for the reading, the event itself and then his wanderings around the city through the night-time. The Author anticipates the questions he is likely to be asked by the audience after the reading -
. . . and so on, and on, and on. The Author sits in a café down the road from the literary centre to try to prepare his answers to these questions, but his thoughts are taken up by the waitress, with her “shapely, attractive legs”. He steals a look at her face, and finds it pleasant, sunny, with her hair tied back with a red rubber band. While he is waiting for his omelette and salad he begins to imagine her life, giving her the name “Ricky” as he writes her personal history in his head. We, the readers, are drawn into the creative process, as “Ricky” takes form before our eyes (this is perhaps a little like looking into a mirror placed in front of another mirror – the fictional “Author” creates a fictional personal for the twice-fictional “Ricky”). Continue reading Review Rhyming Life and Death – Amos Oz
My nostalgia for France is fed when I turn to Guy Savage’s book blog, His Futile Preoccupations. Guy has a love of French literature and has read far more Balzac, de Maupassant and Zola than most readers. Being conscious of a Balzac-shaped gap in my reading I decided on Guy’s recommendation to begin with Père Goriot. Guy reviewed this himself but I have not reminded myself of what he wrote and will only go back to re-read his review when I have finished my own – such is my fear of being influenced by someone who knows far more about Balzac’s books than I do. Père Goriot forms part of Balzac’s life-work, La Comédie humaine, and he placed it in the section Scenes of Private Life. It tells the story of Eugène de Rastignac, a young man who comes to Paris to study law. His widowed mother has gone out of her way to provide his means of support at great cost to herself and his two sisters, and it is her hope that Eugène will make his way in the world and restore their fortune. Continue reading Review: Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
An 82 year old man, the musicologist Reger, sits on a settee in the Bordone Room of the Viennese Kunsthistoirisches Museum, contemplating Tintoretto’s painting, The White Bearded Man – as he has done for four or five hours every second day for the last 30 years. While doing this he rails against society, art, his fellow men, the state of Vienna, even the condition of the cities public lavatories. His thoughts are communicated to the reader by his friend Atzbacher, who seems in awe of the great musicologist and shares his dismal world view. The only other character in the book is the gallery steward Irrsigler, who has assisted Reger over the last 30 years by making sure that no-one else sits on the settee when Reger is due one of his visits. Reger has so many chips on his shoulders it is almost impossible to count them: The art hanging on these walls is nothing but state art, at least that hanging here in the picture gallery of the Kunsthistoirisches Museum. All the paintings hanging on these wall are nothing but painting by state artists. Always only a visage, never a face. Always only lineaments, never features. All these painters were nothing but utterly mendacious state artists, pampering to the vanity of their clients, not even Rembrandt is an exception. Just look as Velazquez, nothing but state art, or Lotto or Giotto, always only state art, just as that dreadful proto-Nazi and pre-Nazi Durer, who put nature on his canvas and killed it, this horrible Durer from the depth of his soul. Continue reading Review: Old Masters – Thomas Bernard
Daniel Loew is a published poet, totally committed to his art despite the financial constraints such a life brings. He lives with his wife and their baby in London, but he seems to be unable to let go of his vocation as a poet in order to take a job that might enable them to live more comfortably. Then word comes that Daniel’s Uncle Alexander has died in Caracas and made him sole inheritor of his estate. Daniel begins a quest for an elusive fortune, which dangles before him like a ripe fruit, always just out of reach however many steps he climbs to pluck it. Daniel flies to Caracas only to discover that things are not as they might seem. For Uncle Alexander has appointed as executor of his will, one Julio Kirshman, a highly dubious businessman who seems to have other motives than ensuring that Daniel gets the considerable fortune owing to him. The book is set in 1992 when Hugo Chavez attempted to overthrow the government by coup d’état. When Daniel arrives in Caracas, the coup is underway and jet fighters thunder over his hotel and rebels attempt to storm the presidential palace. Daniel is confined to his hotel while the fighting goes on, eventually managing to get out to meet the executor, Julio Kirshman, at his offices. Kirshman owns a flourishing import/export business, but is strangely evasive about the will, while claiming to be Uncle Alexander’s closes friend:
Continue reading Review: The Inheritance – Peter Stephan Jungk
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