What are you reading now?

[Katzelmacher]

Anna Karenina for the fifth or sixth time - I've lost count: it may even be the 7th or 8th time. Each time I encounter something new in addition to the sheer joy of anticipating certain favourite scenes. This time around I am particularly struck by the minutiae of Tolstoy's observations - the light inside a railway station building seen from outside on a winter's night; late afternoon summer sunlight flooding a railway carriage. There is something uncanny about how Tolstoy can transport one to a room or a place.
Alongside this I am reading Tolstoy's diaries together with Sofia's, his wife's. I do recommend this approach. When one reads his diaries in isolation one always sides with him, and when one reads her version of events then you can't help but see her as a wronged woman. Only when taken together do we get a more balanced view. Interestingly both of them would periodically run away with the intention of ending it all and then usually a few weeks later the diaries reveal them to be full of the joys of spring. But, of course, Leo did eventually run off never to return.
I wonder, incidentally, if any here would commend the music of Sergei Taneyev - a regular visitor to the Tolstoys . Leo became convinced that he and Sofia were having an affair - not true. But then Sofia believed that Leo, in his extreme old age, was having a homosexual affair with one of his elderly disciples. Chertkov - again, not true, although there are hints in his early diaries that Tolstoy was occasionally physically affectionate with men. Theirs was certainly a very odd household.

Everything I’ve read about Tolstoy suggests he was a monster who made periodic (and failed) attempts to ‘be good.’

A bit like Nero, but with genius and somewhat less depravity.

[ardcarp]

Just got round to reading Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson. (A fictionalised account of an episode in Elgar's later years.) Quite superb and often witty. I dare say it's been discussed before, but I thought I'd post up my pennyworth.

[french frank]

Just got round to reading Gerontius by James Hamilton-Paterson. (A fictionalised account of an episode in Elgar's later years.) Quite superb and often witty. I dare say it's been discussed before, but I thought I'd post up my pennyworth.

Yep, read that when it first came out. When FoR3 had a communication from a J H-P, offering his support, I had to gasp, 'Not THE J H-P of Gerontius?' I can't remember his exact reply

PS I cut out an interview with him in the Observer, 12 Nov 1989, in which the novel was discussed and tucked it in the book.

[french frank]

Well, what a strange book - Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson. I thought 'fantasy' though a somewhat grotesque one. Wikipedia informs me that it is a 'satire' on Oxford student life, though MB's later note of 1946 insists it's not a satire of anything - just 'a fantasy'. Not sure that its reading would be encouraged among present-day students in light of the concerns about their mental health. Given the many signposts, I'd hoped that after all they wouldn't. But they did.

I'd always pronounced it Zoo-like-uh (like the Leica cameras), but the all-knowing Wiki says its Zuleeka, giving a reference to a book to which I do not have access.

[jayne lee wilson]

The Very Last Edition of Guardian Weekend.....
From next week its...."Saturday".......

I hope Annalisa Barbieri is still there...

[LeMartinPecheur]

Tarka - Children's Fiction??

Just reread Tarka the Otter for the first time since, IIRC, my teens. What a desperately sad book: thought so then and no change at all now, worse if anything. It's a realistic, unsentimental description of nature utterly red in tooth and claw, with Man leading the hunt for blood.

So why is it now treated as a children's book? There's no sign whatever that I can see that Williamson wrote it as such. According to the introduction, after publication he sent it to Lawrence of Arabia and it was praised by John Squire, Hardy, Galsworthy and Arnold Bennett, not exactly noted children's authors surely. It won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927, an adult literature award, with Vita Sackville-West's The Land and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man winning immediately before and after.

My edition is a Puffin. Penguin brought it out in 1927 yet it switched to Puffin in 1949. Amazon currently lists it as suitable for 10-12-year olds which surely will prompt plenty of bedtime tears - all the way through, not just with the final death of Tarka!! I am utterly baffled.

[ardcarp]

I agree with much of that. However I don't see that children should always be protected from sad things....look at the end of The Snowman for instance,
I too enjoyed Tarka the Otter which I read as a young adult. I subsequently learned of Henry Williamson's political views which had a a fascist tendency to put it mildly. However we should not judge great art by its creator's proclivities....to us Wagner being an obvious example.

[Bella Kemp]

Henry Williamson wrote some marvellous short stories, rich in descriptions of the countryside. I wonder if his writing here was influenced by a longing he must have had for the Devon landscape when he was in the First World War. He certainly developed odd views later in life - I seem to remember reading that he once planted tulip bulbs in his garden and when they grew they took on the shape of a swastika. It may be that, again as a consequence of his war experiences, he had quite lost his mind by then.

[ardcarp]

marvellous short stories, rich in descriptions of the countryside

Does anyone remember an author who always known as BB ? He wrote children's books...not short stories... such as The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream. English countryside was a major feature.These were in many ways serious books, recounting the plight of a near extinct species of (fictional!) dwarfs. But they were full of very human emotions of fear, hope and matters of survival. I loved them as a kid, but I'm not sure they were widely read by my generation. And who was BB ?

[LeMartinPecheur]

Does anyone remember an author who always known as BB ? He wrote children's books...not short stories... such as The Little Grey Men and Down the Bright Stream. English countryside was a major feature.These were in many ways serious books, recounting the plight of a near extinct species of (fictional!) dwarfs. But they were full of very human emotions of fear, hope and matters of survival. I loved them as a kid, but I'm not sure they were widely read by my generation. And who was BB ?

The power of Google! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Grey_Men

Still available according to the river people.

[DracoM]

'Tooth and Nail' / Ian Rankin.

[french frank]

Had never heard of Abdulrazak Gurnah until today's news. Now tempted to get Paradise but have genuinely just started on A la recherche du temps perdu again and have only read 100 pages of the first volume, first book. Maybe I need an excuse to stop? Being stubborn and stiff-necked, I've always refused to stoop to reading it in English (and have consequently never got to Le temps retrouvé .

[Petrushka]

Just started Silverview by John le Carre, his last book, released today.

[Padraig]

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain It's a sort of workshop on the short story with 7 stories by Russian masters Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy and Nikolai Gogol as examples for in-depth discussion.

I wish I had had lessons like this before now. This book was designed for young writers, not for me, but the advice offered them on the art/craft of writing has served to emphasise to me what my mind ought to be doing as I read. The stories themselves are worth the reading but the discussion topics open up a much wider horizon of ideas. Who would have thought that the short story had so much depth?
Of course, you all did.

(i.e. you all knew that the short story had so much depth)

[Katzelmacher]

Today, I finished Ford Maddox Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy. I found it awesomely unimpressive, largely because I failed to share the author’s enthusiasm for his statistician hero.

His eventual wife sounded like a bit of alright, though.

Just started on another Murakami novel, After Dark. I expect this to be a lot more enjoyable than FMF’s plodding would-be epic.