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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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First Dickens I've probably read in almost 40 years.
I enjoyed it, probably his popularity threw me off. I was a trifle annoyed that of all the books of his I should choose to read it should end up being the one he died midway through writing, although the trajectory was fair enough that I could make a few sound guesses as to how he would have ended it. What I don't get, though, is what was to become of the abundance of secondary characters - Crisparkle, Honeythunder, Sapsea, etc.
In any event, the bookstores are full of this so in the months it takes for the Postal Strike to resolve itself I can tuck in with a bit of Dickens...certainly he's in the Xmas spirit.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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An amusing recount of Mark Twain's Continental adventures. He's a fair-reliable narrator, except for when he isn't, but always he does a fine send-up of the customs and people's being described.
A fair example is this recounting of his witnessing a "Duel":
Link: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/119/119-h/119-h.htm#p053
You can read the entire book on Gutenberg online, and - while my edition at nearly 500 pages was not shabby, it lacked the hundreds of illustrations. Anyways, travel literature, of a more recent vintage.
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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Found in a "Books Everywhere" pile, everywhere but here, an ex-nun (8 years) writing about the history of world mythology, breaking it into eras of hunter/gatherer, agrarian, axial and post-axial, until finally we reach the "Great Western Transformation".
She's good, not - as you might suspect of a nun, obsessively "religious", she seems to have come to a reasoned understanding or series of epiphanies that explain world mythology.
These books aren't as common as you might think.
Nothing I didn't know, but - she does refer me to an abundance of myths and sources I haven't read. Worthwhile.
And I'm always curious - like minds we always are, we see things the same way, but divide and weigh them differently,
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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In no ways did this disappoint, and I am thrilled there are yet a dozen books left out there by him to find...
(***N.B. I've ordered 4 more already, shipping, US Pricing, makes him an expensive addiction, but...)
Anyways, a couple of other scenes of interest (the whole damned book was fascinating), his description of Gustave Lerouge (and his domestic arrangements), his stay with Paquita, a Mexican Patroness who puts him up in an disused observatory filled with sexually ambiguous automatons and wax dolls of her own invention, furnishes him a library: "...contained nothing but mystical works on the left, and, on the right, illustrated works of eroticism..."
And - of especial amusement - one last description:
"I remember riding on horseback through the Cordillera of the Andes, searching for the ruins of an Inca Temple (or a fortress ?) in Western Bolivia, in a region where the mountains are most desolate, the most crumpled, the most barren, and the country is the most backward and desert-like in the world, and for a whole week watching a grand piano being manoeuvered across the terrain,"
And now he comes to the Piano, and the ruins of an Inca Temple are left far behind.
Fortunately he's several autobiographies, that each run different themes through his life, his style, his poetry, prose, characters, situations, well, first rate. 5 Stars. I'd retype the entire goddamned book here for your pleasure, only we value those things most we search out for ourselves...
(Note: those books ordered, well, Canada Post's Strike means I'll be waiting a while. An-tic-i-.......PATION!. And on that note the ferry strike is ongoing, 3 runs a day, the entire East Shore now forced to confront a voluntary exile they bought into and now are protesting. This will be the state of the US in a couple of years, the infrastructure crumbles, is sold off, cancelled, like the provinces with healthcare and any number of other public services, the times, they are a changing...This is not the beginning of the end, it's the beginning of our recognition of it...)
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
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This, the last of those books ordered through Abebooks.com, and I have to say, the more I read Cendrars the more I like him. His writing style, rhythm, descriptions, all curiously in sympathy with mine own. A shame he's so hard to find (I'll be ordering a few more - fortunately he wrote a great deal).
Notes so far: his references to Gerard de Nerval (whom I can't seem to find in translation, although Umberto Eco referred to him in such glowing terms I'll have to keep up the search); his mentioning of 'thrashing' Rainer Maria Rilke, mentions of Restif de la Bretonne, (another novelist I'll have to track down, also abundantly mentioned by Bloch in his book on de Sade). And a few more authors - always it seems the more I read, the more ignorant I become, but time with Cendrars is time well spent...
"Well then, the gap continued to open in front of us, I led Léger through the market, then took a zigzagging path between the shacks, the yards, the chicken-coops, the tiny gardens, the waste lots of the zone-dwellers enclosed by bare walls topped with broken glass, fenced in by barbed-wire, stakes, old railway sleepers, and full of ferocious dogs, their collars bristling with nails, chained up but running the length of a strong piece of wire, or several meters of taut cable, which allowed them to hurl themselves like demons from one end to the other of their bare pens, bounding, barking, slavering with rage amongst the empty, battered petrol cans tumbled everywhere, the burst barrels, the ripped sheets of tin, the mattress springs that sprouted from the soil of the dung-heap, the broken crocks and pots, bashed-in tin cans, mounds of discarded kitchen utensils, broken-up vehicles, piles of disgorged filth, surrounded by thistles and measly clumps of lilac or dominated, Golgotha-like, by the skeleton of a tree, a stunted elder or a tortured acacia, a runt of a lime, with its amputated stumps poking through the handle of a chamber-pot, or its lopped-off upper branches crowned with an ancient motor-tyre; I crossed rue Blanqui and, on the other side, fortifications, at whose foot the 'Academy of the Little Charlie Chaplins' was installed; it consisted of five or six oblong sheds that served as a dormitory for the children and as dens for the bears that were being trained haphazardly in this sinister institution, which was, to boot, an all-night bistro and a thieves' kitchen for cut-throats and prowlers."
That a single sentence to open the chapter.
Or this, a sumptuous description of a meal:
"...my Don Quixote invited me to share with him the 'plat de Lucullus' in a pleasure-garden in Saint-Ouen, which he had just discovered, and this famous dish, invented and cooked by Lerouge, was nothing less than a salad-bowl filled of blackbirds' tongues cooked in white butter and perfumed with rose and violet, which we ate with croutons dipped in celery-liquor, and washed down with long draughts of Alicante, while the patron of that 'chigana', a Spanish gipsy, pattered round the dish in his espadrilles, excusing himself in a tone of complaint:
'They're only blackbirds' tongues, it's not the season for nightingales . . . .'
There were more than two thousand tongues; it must have cost good old LeRouge a fortune, and he was not exactly rolling in money."
Time to slow down on the reading and get some more books ordered...