Even more Pleasures of Reading

[french frank]

Not a quiz, but some extracts that might tempt others (and will no doubt say as much about us as the book):

Sitting in the local tratt because it started raining just as I was going out and I couldn't make it to the local bistro ten minutes further on down the road (vinteuil's lip begins to curl, even though the word 'bistro' makes him think, On ne mange pas au bistrot), I opened my book with sheer pleasure at this:


"I have been reading Sainte-Beuve's Port-Royal, a book I have often thought of reading, but its length, and my slight interest in that period, always held me aloof. Happily, chance and the mood came together, and I am richer by a bit of knowledge well worth acquiring. It is the kind of book which, one may reasonably say, tends to edification. One is better for having lived a while with "Messieurs de Port-Royal"; the best of them were, surely, not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.

Theirs is not, indeed, the Christianity of the first age; weare among the theologians, and the shadow of dogma has dimmed those divine hues of the early morning, yet ever and anon there comes a cool, sweet air, which seems not to have blown across man's common world, which bears no taint of mortality."


I could quote endlessly from Gissing (and probably will do so again) who is such a good writer, but choose this piece because he tempts me towards Sainte-Beuve who I ought to know better than I do.

[vinteuil]

Sainte-Beuve?

YES!!

- sadly the enormous gravitational pull of Proust has been detrimental here, and has tended to make everyone dismiss poor old S-B.
I was introduced to him by way of Cyril Connolly ('The Unquiet Grave') and then managed to pick up cheap all the vols of the Lundis and the Nouveaux Lundis - which in turn introduced me to Senacour - and Maurice de Guerin - and Eugenie de Guerin - and lots more - and plunged me back to the world of Port Royal...

Yes, he's due for a revival. And Gissing too!!

[vinteuil]

"In the Pedant's kitchen there is the usual drawer for knives and peelers and prodders, some 80% of which see regular use. There's a large pot for wooden spoons, spatulas and suchlike - 95% use here, and it would be 100% were it not for that inevitable large strainer-cum-spoon thing whose bowl is made from a gourd. But then there is the other drawer - the one where items of sporadic usefulness live, the one where everything is tangled up and furtive, into which you insert a tentative hand, not knowing where sharp edges lurk. When did I last empty it? Ten years ago? It seemed time to take an inventory.

It is a small drawer, but it disbursed 82 items (counting the pack of wooden barbecue skewers as one). The meat cleaver and the jelly bag see regular service; of the four champagne stoppers (I blame the generosity of friends), one is definitely used; and there's an egg-whisk and a turkey-baster which I have probably twirled and squirted at some point in the past decade. But the remainder? Inevitably, there's a pair of salad servers with giraffe handles; also a deeply unhygienic- looking white plastic spatula; there are 21 chopsticks, three knives and one fork from the days when airline cutlery was worth stealing, various adze-hewn wooden spoons, and a trufflegrater left by a guest; six comic bendy straws, a plasterer's tool, which I must have thought handy for prising stuff off the barbecue, a deeply tarnished six-pronged serving fork of unknown origin and uncertain purpose, though fish is a possibility; and so on. Three assorted bits of ironmongery may or may not relate to the rotisserie we never used and junked years ago. At the very back of the drawer: one picture hook without its nail, two spider corpses and a blanched almond.

With virile forcefulness I threw away the almond, the obscure metal bits and bobs, and the airline cutlery (it was so 80s). Then I stalled. Logically I could have discarded three of the four champagne stoppers, but each had a certain attraction. I did reduce the number of chopsticks, as cooking Chinese for ten-and-ahalf people seemed improbable. For the rest, it was a case of throwing it all out or putting it all back. I put it all back."

from: Julian Barnes The Pedant in the Kitchen [2003]

[french frank]

from: Julian Barnes The Pedant in the Kitchen [2003]

I'm not sure whether that would make me want to read the book or go and investigate the jugs and drawers of implements in my kitchen. And report back

[vinteuil]

I'm not sure whether that would make me want to read the book or go and investigate the jugs and drawers of implements in my kitchen. And report back

... it was precisely the terrifying similarity of the situations in the book to life chez moi that has made this book so appealing!

[Roslynmuse]

... it was precisely the terrifying similarity of the situations in the book to life chez moi that has made this book so appealing!

For me too! Particularly the frustration with recipes - 'a cup-full', 'a hand-full' etc!