Vanity Fair

July 16, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classic Books, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

(William Makepeace Thackeray) (1848) Well. Rebecca Sharp. She’s a real dilly. Nabokov, apropos Humbert Humbert, pointed out there were not many memorable literary characters we’d like our children to meet: “Would we like our sons to marry Emma Rouault, Becky Sharp or la belle dame sans merci?”* This vivid and wordy book has caused charges of carelessness to be leveled at WMT: the chronology is at times out of whack, different characters seem to age in different time dimensions, for instance.  But so what?  This is a masterpiece of playful improvisation, and after all, plenty of dull, dud novels have been…

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Bastille Day

July 14, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | HISTORY, Ulalume |

Bastille in trouble: La Bastille dans les premiers jours de sa démolition, by Hubert Robert

14 July: La fête nationale On this day in 1789, a bunch of disaffected Parisians gathered at Number 232 rue Sainte-Antoine, address of that pygmy-monolith, the Bastille, formerly a fort, now a prison for marginal types.  They wanted a symbolic victory and eventually, the Governor, M. de Launay, would hand it over: a paper surrendering control, on the basis of clemency. This mercy was promised, and then ratted-on, in a piece of barbarity that would sum up the French Revolution in general.  De Launay’s head was soon off his neck and sat atop a pike.  As Carlyle recounts in his superb…

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The Burglars

July 13, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Drama Film, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

"Confidentially...I never pay here."

(Dir, Henri Verneuil) (1972) A nifty cat-and-mouse jewellery heist caper set in Athens, in a time when you could get a decent meal for a fistful of drachmae.  Omar Sharif is very good as the oily and corrupt copper, who is on to Jean-Paul Belmondo and his gang of emerald thieves.  A top car chase, fights, romance, double-dealing and a unique climax in a grain hopper.  A little cheesy but a relief to watch nowadays if you’re sick of Fast and Furious # 43. Vale Omar Sharif (10 April 1932 – 10 July 2015).  He was not a great or imposing actor…

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Pnin

July 12, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Classic Books, THUMBNAIL REVIEWS |

(Vladimir Nabokov) (1953) Say what you like but America and Americans are lovely.  In this grand, concise novel, Nabokov sets his fish, Professor Timofey Pnin, given new teeth to match the wounds of his new challenges, in unaccustomed, American, waters, with morbidly hilarious results, in an “almost perfect work” according to Harold Bloom, the man who, like Anna Cunningham, has read everything. Nabokov described the pedantic Professor as “A man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity…

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Dumb and Dumbest

July 9, 2015 | Posted by Peter Jakobsen | Ulalume |

"You were a wonderful Goneril at Eton." (Painting by Edwin Austin Abbey, 1902)

In Tom Stoppard’s play Travesties, the character Henry Carr is suggested to play the leading role in The Importance of Being Earnest because he’d been ‘”a wonderful Goneril at Eton.”  This line has recently been dusted off, again, in the context of Stoppard’s bemoaning the decline in cultural literacy.  As The Wall Street Journal records, Stoppard said the joke was understood and appreciated in 1974 but materially less so in the early 1990s.  Tom claims half of the more recent audience didn’t know who Goneril was.  A generation later, they fail to get his latest work at the National Theatre…

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