Wednesday, July 30, 2014
Present at the Creation--Virginia Woolf's "Orlando"
Staggeringly brilliant. "Orlando" vaults immediately onto my all-time "Ten Best" list, and Woolf joins Stendahl and Ishiguro and Potocki and their compeers in a very elite club. I had stumbled upon this novel on the shelves of my local public library at the age of seven or eight and had passed it up, imagining that it was merely a modern version of "Orlando Furioso" or the "Chanson de Roland." A few days ago, I found it again at a used book store at a dollar for a pristine copy and, having been thoroughly impressed by "Mrs. Dalloway," I acquired it with considerable confidence in its worthiness to enter my collection. This will in all likelihood be the best dollar I will ever spend. How did I get through four years at an Ivy League college without ever hearing this novel even mentioned? For those who fail to appreciate this literary tour-de-force I have inestimable pity. To borrow a phrase from T. S. Eliot, one would have to be a hopelessly private person not to perceive that one is in the presence of genius and wit of a very high order indeed. A love letter for the tradition of English letters, a meditation on the writer's craft, a eulogy for the decline of the landed interest, a bravura performance by a sublime master of the language, and an acceptance of the reality of change and an embrace of the modern world, this "biography" is about gender politics in much the same way that "Moby Dick" is about fishing.
Monday, July 28, 2014
A Resurrection, Of a Sort
After an absence, of some years, I have decided to return to this journal of my current reading and my reactions thereto. The proximating cause has been the recent discovery of a new bookshop cum beer garden cum Spanish wine bar not far distant, The Wild Detectives. Having spent some hours there this past Saturday evening, allow me to furnish several immediate impressions. The pints are cold, there are no bottled beers, but merely a half dozen on tap, beginning at $5.50. There are rather more wine selections, perhaps a dozen and half, including three whites, all of Spanish provenance (the two owners are apparently emigres from Madrid) with various obscure varietals and starting at $7.00 a glass.
The books available for purchase are a curious lot. A few hundred novels, a couple of hundred volumes of poetry, and perhaps the same number of volumes in Spanish. The inclusions are impressive. I left with the Comte de Lautreamont's "Maldoror and Poems" which had been shelved, unaccountably, in the poetry section, notwithstanding the fact that "Maldoror" is a novel and the "Poems" of the title are written in prose and are screeds of a literary critical type, and a collection of Rimbaud's letters (as I already possess his poems in the same Modern Library edition, it seemed a shame not to acquire the companion volume if only for the sake of completeness). $16.00 and $15.95, respectively.
As I said, the inclusions and omissions are highly idiosyncratic. For Patricia Highsmith, they offer all the Tom Ripley books EXCEPT for "The Talented Mr. Ripley". For Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the volume stocked is NOT "Journey to the End of Night", which I would certainly have acquired had it been available. Gide is well-represented, "Madame Bovary" is here, but there is no Balzac. Arturo Perez-Reverte is likewise absent; too popular? In poetry, there is no Yeats, but Cavafy is available; I would have purchased the letters of John Keats had it been stocked. There is no Guillaume Apolinaire; I should rather have expected to see "Les Alcools" and "Les Calligrammes", but Rimbaud's poems were likewise missing. Joris-Karl Huysmans' "A Rebours" and "La Bas" were also unavailable, but they stock the Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness.
As I said, curious. In many cases the selection appears to be inspired by the personal tastes of the two owners.
The staff appear friendly and personable. I was obligated to correct a statement by one of the bartenders that Hemingway drank himself to death with the words "Actually, he committed suicide by putting a shotgun in his mouth. Ketchum, Idaho, 1962 (sic)" The room is pleasant and seats perhaps twenty, although by nine o'clock on Saturday night there were perhaps twice that many persons present both inside and out. The crowd is generally young, heterosexual, of the bohemian middle-class, and dressed in the singularly graceless style that one associates with Deep Ellum: some very bad haircuts on the boys, a plethora of ill-considered tattoos, vast herds of flip-flops and cargo shorts stretching to the distant horizon. Intelligent life, perhaps, but not as we know it.
For a bookshop that appears to wish to characterize itself as a pleasant nook to enjoy a glass of tempranillo over a volume of Auden, I found it ironic that I was virtually the only person in the room actively reading. One couple was playing chess, rather badly, or so it appeared from my vantage point. I had brought two books on which I am currently engaged--Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and a translation of Montesquieu's "Les Lettres Persanes" and the bartender Caroline was sufficiently civilized as to ask me my impression of the novel. But it appears that The Wild Detectives will be rather more Ice House and rather less Les Deux Magots or Cafe Central.
Pity.
The books available for purchase are a curious lot. A few hundred novels, a couple of hundred volumes of poetry, and perhaps the same number of volumes in Spanish. The inclusions are impressive. I left with the Comte de Lautreamont's "Maldoror and Poems" which had been shelved, unaccountably, in the poetry section, notwithstanding the fact that "Maldoror" is a novel and the "Poems" of the title are written in prose and are screeds of a literary critical type, and a collection of Rimbaud's letters (as I already possess his poems in the same Modern Library edition, it seemed a shame not to acquire the companion volume if only for the sake of completeness). $16.00 and $15.95, respectively.
As I said, the inclusions and omissions are highly idiosyncratic. For Patricia Highsmith, they offer all the Tom Ripley books EXCEPT for "The Talented Mr. Ripley". For Louis-Ferdinand Celine, the volume stocked is NOT "Journey to the End of Night", which I would certainly have acquired had it been available. Gide is well-represented, "Madame Bovary" is here, but there is no Balzac. Arturo Perez-Reverte is likewise absent; too popular? In poetry, there is no Yeats, but Cavafy is available; I would have purchased the letters of John Keats had it been stocked. There is no Guillaume Apolinaire; I should rather have expected to see "Les Alcools" and "Les Calligrammes", but Rimbaud's poems were likewise missing. Joris-Karl Huysmans' "A Rebours" and "La Bas" were also unavailable, but they stock the Icelandic Nobel laureate Halldor Laxness.
As I said, curious. In many cases the selection appears to be inspired by the personal tastes of the two owners.
The staff appear friendly and personable. I was obligated to correct a statement by one of the bartenders that Hemingway drank himself to death with the words "Actually, he committed suicide by putting a shotgun in his mouth. Ketchum, Idaho, 1962 (sic)" The room is pleasant and seats perhaps twenty, although by nine o'clock on Saturday night there were perhaps twice that many persons present both inside and out. The crowd is generally young, heterosexual, of the bohemian middle-class, and dressed in the singularly graceless style that one associates with Deep Ellum: some very bad haircuts on the boys, a plethora of ill-considered tattoos, vast herds of flip-flops and cargo shorts stretching to the distant horizon. Intelligent life, perhaps, but not as we know it.
For a bookshop that appears to wish to characterize itself as a pleasant nook to enjoy a glass of tempranillo over a volume of Auden, I found it ironic that I was virtually the only person in the room actively reading. One couple was playing chess, rather badly, or so it appeared from my vantage point. I had brought two books on which I am currently engaged--Virginia Woolf's "Orlando" and a translation of Montesquieu's "Les Lettres Persanes" and the bartender Caroline was sufficiently civilized as to ask me my impression of the novel. But it appears that The Wild Detectives will be rather more Ice House and rather less Les Deux Magots or Cafe Central.
Pity.
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