Author Archive: Lesley Jakobsen
The Tenants of Moonbloom
Mott Street, NY, in which Moonbloom Realty Corp owned a tenement
(by Edward Lewis Wallant) The tenants of Moonbloom Realty Corp are the poor, the dissolute, the forgotten and the forgetting. Several have blue numbers tattooed on their forearms. Norman Moonbloom, “New York’s most educated rent-collector” now works for his slum landlord brother, Irwin, after decades spent as a feckless student, hopping from discipline to discipline. Norman, small, thin, with a ” gambler-white face”, wears a suit and oversized fedora which make him look like a child dressed as a gangster, and spends his days traipsing between the four Moonbloom tenements, gathering complaints, collecting rent and prioritising the repairs which Irwin will never finance. Irwin rants…
Continue Reading →Money (L’Argent) by Emile Zola
The Pope in Jerusalem
As Zola’s The Masterpiece (reviewed here) is about art, the subject of Money is money, money, money, filthy lucre and all that. Aristide Rougon (known somewhat mysteriously as Saccard) loves the stuff. Saccard is an unscrupulous financier, rapist and fantasist who would sell his soul (again) to recapture his lost fortune and rule the Bourse (the nineteenth century French stockmarket). He lives in the house of the widowed Princess d’Orviedo, who is busy deliberately impoverishing herself by pouring her money into ludicrously luxurious and pointless charitable works…”intent on being true to the vow she had made to give all her millions back to the poor, without ever again earning…
Continue Reading →The Midnight Watch (David Dyer)
'Wreck and sinking of the Titanic.....a graphic and thrilling account...
David Dyer’s dissipated newspaper correspondent, John Steadman, defines Philip Franklin, Vice President of J P Morgan’s International Mercantile Marine, which owned the Titanic, by one word – “fear” – when the missing ship’s fate is uncertain and by the word “courage” when its fate is known. The word for The Midnight Watch is “gripping”. Although Steadman is fictional, Franklin is not. The real people from this infamous event – the failure of the SS Californian to come to come to the aid of the sinking Titanic – are effectively imagined by Dyer. None are superfluous. Franklin, a good and caring man, sobs when he has to deliver the news that the…
Continue Reading →Freya (Anthony Quinn)
The best thing about this, Anthony Quinn’s fifth novel is its unsympathetic protagonist. Freya Wyley, (twenty at the commencement of the novel and the end of World War 2, forty or so at the end of the story), is bold, rude, devious, suspicious and smug. She lacks insight and never learns. After repeatedly wrecking lunches, parties and work meetings with outbursts of vituperative personal abuse and being called to account time and time again, “her habitual response to criticism was one of airy indifference, since it usually came from people not qualified to give it”. The characters are the best part of the book – Freya’s closest…
Continue Reading →All by Myself
Songs in Our Heart # 3 All by Myself (Eric Carmen) (Written by Eric Carmen; released December 1975) [Ah, Memories…]
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