What are you reading now?

[Pianorak]

I have given up on Doctor Faustus. Again. Some 300 pages into it.

It's longueurs just haven't convinced me the way The Magic Mountain's did.

The appearance of Mephistopheles was a bit of a disappointment (sorry, umslopogaas). However, have reached page 400 and am now a fully qualified deep-sea diver and astronaut. But I do agree, The Magic Mountain is more of a page turner.

[Richard Tarleton]

I have given up on Doctor Faustus. Again. Some 300 pages into it.

It's longueurs just haven't convinced me the way The Magic Mountain's did.

I read both while at university. Of the two I found MM the heavier going. I thought I'd try Dr F again after 40 years but couldn't get into it at all.

[Thropplenoggin]

Thank you, Pianorak and Richard. For one awful moment, I thought, perhaps, it was me!

[umslopogaas]

Well, I am surprised. Admittedly neither 'Doctor Faustus' nor 'The Magic Mountain' are exactly light reading, but at least in 'Doctor Faustus' something HAPPENS. In MM, you have to wait two hundred pages before the girl appears, another two hundred before the hero kisses her and then there are three hundred more to wade through, but a kiss is as far as he gets (I think, it is a very long time since I read it). Whereas in Faustus there is quite a lot of plot, plus all the music theory. It appears he got the Nobel Prize for MM, but I much prefer Faustus.

[Richard Tarleton]

I wonder if the translation has anything to do with it? Or else the wiring of my brain has altered over the years!

[Pianorak]

I read both while at university. Of the two I found MM the heavier going. . .

Don't remember much about the plot in MM as such, but the language I found to be sheer magic and not at all heavy going. Dr F has plot but the language I find rather more pedestrian. That said, the amount of research Mann must have undertaken (pre-Google!!) is quite astonishing.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I have given up on Doctor Faustus. Again. Some 300 pages into it.

I first read this when I was about 17 and loved it. I tried it again when I was 30 and couldn't get into it at all ... Mann's evocation of the dull, mediocre narrator seemed all too successful second time round!

[Nick Armstrong]

I first read this when I was about 17 and loved it. I tried it again when I was 30 and couldn't get into it at all ... Mann's evocation of the dull, mediocre narrator seemed all too successful second time round!

How strange! That was exactly my experience - though I think I was nearer 20 when I read it.

[gurnemanz]

When I was doing a German degree 40 years ago the lecturer doing Thomas Mann with us claimed vehemently that Mann would be more widely read in the English-speaking world were it not for the appalling versions by H T Lowe-Porter who had exclusive translation rights. I've never tried reading him in English so cannot really comment and I think there are alternatives available now.

[Richard Tarleton]

I went through a Hemingway phase in my late teens but hadn't read any since then, apart from a Spanish translation of The Old Man and the Sea which I picked up in an airport. I recently came across The Dangerous Summer in a second hand bookshop. It is the account of the summer-long duel in 1959 between the two leading matadors of the day, Antonio Ordoñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín, which Hemingway and his entourage followed around Spain and acorss the border into France's Basque country. This is the story of how the book came about - it was initially intended as an appendix to a reissue of his classic 1932 account of bullfighting Death in the Afternoon, but expanded to an impossible 600,000 words. It wasn't published for another 25 years, as a much edited slim volume. Hemingway had killed himself in 1961.

Either Hemingway was at the centre of events in the way he describes, or he was monumentally self-deluded. Much later Dominguín described Hemingway as ''a commonplace bore . . . a crude and vulgar man'' who ''knew nothing about fighting bulls.''

For 40 years I've only read or heard parodies of Hemingway, and coming back to him some of his prose sounds like parody, almost beyond parody. Passages like "Three days later we were all to be together again in the [hospital] in Madrid with Antonio in bed on the third floor and Luis Miguel on the first. Fifteen days later they fought their second mano a mano in Malaga. That was the way it was that year." ( )

The key elements in Hemingway's prose are terse sentences and no commas, or as few as possible. Still, several of his descriptions both of the corridas and of Spain in 1959 (Hemingway had been a very hands-on correspondent on the Republican side in the civil War) are both beautifully written and pack an emotional punch (he had not been back to Spain since the Civil War). Most amusing passage is the one in which his friend and later biographer AE Hotchner dresses up as Ordoñez's sobresaliente [junior bullfighter whose job is to kill the bulls if both leading matadors are put out of action] and takes part in the proceedings, fortunately his services not being called upon.

[vinteuil]

Hemingway .

... personally, I can't be doing with the look-at-me macho of the big butch bullfighter Hemingway : howsomdiver, there is one work of his that for me entirely redeems his reputation - "A Moveable Feast". Memories of his life as an unknown writer in Paris in the '20s - his experiences with such as Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald - a luminous account of Paris, and some of the best café and restaurant writing...

[Richard Tarleton]

"A Moveable Feast".

"The wine was served in stone pitchers and we had the delicate Burgos cheese I used to bring back to Gertrude Stein in Paris when I'd come home from Spain in the old days third class on the train"

[Nick Armstrong]

Hemingway: "A Moveable Feast". Memories of his life as an unknown writer in Paris in the '20s - his experiences with such as Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald - a luminous account of Paris, and some of the best café and restaurant writing...

... and the inspiration I think for Woody Allen's wonderful parody as part of his early stand-up act:

"I mentioned before that I was in Europe. It's not the first time that I was in Europe, I was in Europe many years ago with Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway had just written his first novel, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said that it was a good novel, but not a great one, and that it needed some work, but it could be a fine book. And we laughed over it. Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter Picasso lived on the Rue de Barque, and he had just painted a picture of a naked dental hygenist in the middle of the Gobi Desert. Gertrude Stein said it was a good picture, but not a great one, and I said it could be a fine picture. We laughed over it and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

Francis Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald came home from their wild new year's eve party. It was April. Scott had just written Great Expectations, and Gertrude Stein and I read it, and we said it was a good book, but there was no need to have written it, 'cause Charles Dickens had already written it. We laughed over it, and Hemingway punched me in the mouth.

That winter we went to Spain to see Manolete fight, and he was... looked to be eighteen, and Gertrude Stein said no, he was nineteen, but that he only looked eighteen, and I said sometimes a boy of eighteen will look nineteen, whereas other times a nineteen year old can easily look eighteen. That's the way it is with a true Spaniard. We laughed over that and Gertrude Stein punched me in the mouth."

[Thropplenoggin]

"The wine was served in stone pitchers and we had the delicate Burgos cheese I used to bring back to Gertrude Stein in Paris when I'd come home from Spain in the old days third class on the train"

Ah, yes, before he had to slum it in freight class, laden down with all the trophies he was bringing back from the plains of Africa.



Oh, and to Nice Guy Caliban. Can't beat a bit of vintage Allen.

[vinteuil]

... and the inspiration I think for Woody Allen's wonderful parody as part of his early stand-up act

... that is so good - thank you!