I have recently completed In the Shadow of the Pomegranate by Tariq Ali and am currently reading The Forty Days of Musa Dagh by Franz Werfel. Ali’s book is set around 1500 in Spain/Al Andalusia and tells of the final days of Moorish presence in Spain. It paints a picture of an almost edenic Islamic society being put to the sword by a horde of bloody minded Spanish catholics. Werfel’s book is set in 1915 in the former Ottoman Empire and is about the persecution of the Christian armenians by the Moslem Turks.
Both books are exercises in demonizing the “other” while telling the truly sad story of the victimization of one’s own group. The Islam/Christianity conflict is so ancient that it will probably never go away. It is older, even, than the two religions and goes back to the Greek/Persian conflict of antiquity.
My conclusion? The best that can be hoped for is a truce. Not peace, love, and understanding. Just a truce.
dprecosk has written 10 entries about this goal
I’d read it about a dozen years ago and enjoyed it thoroughly. Now there is a new edition of the translation, so I bought the paperback version and again, enjoyed it thoroughly.
I’ve tried in other place to write long, Proustian sentences that slalom across the page. They were long, but obvious parodies. Good for a laugh and nothing more.
Proust must have been the world’s keenest observer. And the world’s biggest neurotic; the worries with which Swann and the narrator torment themselves are truly brilliant in their craziness and truth to reality.
I plan to read the other volumes over time.
About 15 years ago I read the first volume of the old two volume Moncrieff translation.It was slow going, but I enjoyed it. I would read at least 10 pages per day, at around 6:30 a.m., in the family room, with the gas fireplace glowing: I live in a part of the world where we have long, cold winters, when the sun doesn’t rise until after 8 a.m. long after I have arrived at my office at work,a black coffee nearby to warm my innards, while Proust’s sinuous sentences unwound themselves before my eyes and my inner eye saw hawthorns and I could almost smell the aroma of the chicken that Francois was turning on the spit for the family’s Saturday lunch, always taken an hour early on that particular day,until I was so hungry that I went upstairs and made myself some bacon and eggs, because I was on the Atkins diet, which helped me lose 30 pounds but shot my cholesterol level to such heights that, a decade and a half later, I am still taking a lipitor daily.
Last week, while on vacation, I wandered into a book store and found the new revised paperback of Swann’s Way, and on a whim, bought it and can’t put it down. The flow, the detail, the ironies and side issues. Formidable!
I don’t know if this is a great book, but it’s really good. The novel tells the story of a 139 year old con man whose life parallels the development of Australia from the beginning of the twentieth century. The only problem is that, because it is told by a con man, how much can we believe what he tells us? Of course, this is the question that all books raise.
I’ve just finished this book. I’m not sure if it is a “great” book; it certainly is stirring, thought provoking, and irritating. It made it easier for me to understand the still present split in French society about WWII collaborators. It highlighted the fact that moral absolutes are an impossibility. We are all implicated; we will all compromise to save something we love. The compromise leads to further compromises, perhaps even loss of that loved thing for which the original compromise was made.
In the last two weeks I’ve read Bouvard and Pecuchet by Flaubert and am half way through Winter in Majorca by Georges Sand. Over the winter I read several Elizabethan tragedies and a couple of comedies by Moliere. I know the tragedies aren’t French, but I thought I’d better make note of them before I forgot.
Some time back I bought the two volume set of Andre Gide’s Journals in a second hand bookstore. They sat on my bookshelf for about a year until I got round to them. Once I began reading I noticed that there were a lot of passages of no interest to me and also a few passages that were brilliant and insightful. The latter were almost always marked by a line of ballpoint pen drawn in the margin of the page. No comments or underlining, just the vertical blue line.
I decided to trust my anonymous annotator and to read just the marked passages. I suppose I’ve lost the sense of Gide as a person living his day to day intellectual life, but I feel like the previous owner of the books has left me a gift, an act of blazing the trail and guiding me to the best of what Gide had to say.
Moliere is the master of French theatre. He wrote in the late seventeenth century and is most famous for his comedies. Tartuffe, the title character, is a religious hypocrite. While loudly proclaiming his piety, he cynically pursues women and property. Tartuffe was controversial in its own day because it made the upper classes uncomfortable. It certainly has a message for our contemporary world, where professions of piety are essential for political and career success.
I finished reading Eugene Onegin about one week ago. I quite liked it, though I’m not sure my reactions are the ones the author would have wanted. But then again, how are we to know what reactions Pushkin wanted?
The scenes of country life, Russian customs, and the Russian winter were wonderfully realized. The lives of the main characters were hollow, shallow, and meaningless. That Onegin should kill his best friend in a duel because the victim was upset at the way Onegin danced with his fiance is ridiculous. It reveals the imbecility of the gentleman’s code of honour.
Overall I was left with a feeling of distaste, intended I hope by Pushkin, for the Byronic sort of romanticism which exalts the extertion of the young male’s will above all else.
Reading great books can save your life. I don’t mean this in a merely metaphorical or trivial way. They contain a lot of good ideas that you can learn from and apply to your everyday existence.
