Category Archive: WRITING & LITERATURE
Memoirs of Hector Berlioz
Like Wagner, Berlioz was a pain in the neck, a necessary pain, the kind reminding one both of life and mortality. There is still no agreement as to how good he was and a lot of his work has Wagnerian length without the same depth. But check out his Faust, Trojans and Symphonie fantastique. This autobiography, painstakingly translated by David Cairns, (who has also produced a massive biography) shows the composer kicking like a mule to get ahead, to get his way, to get some recognition, in a France that has always been indifferent to him. A great work even for…
Continue Reading →Lord Berners
(by Mark Amory) It’s not possible to know what made Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners tick, but everyone seemed to like him and his eccentric acts were mostly harmless; dyeing animals, driving around in grotesque masks, hiding under a bearskin rug to ‘fool’ tedious guests. A soft spoken flower with a small but keen talent justifies this very readable and accomplished bio. And remember, ‘Red roses blow but thrice a year, in June, July and May. But those who have red noses can blow them every day.’
Continue Reading →The Leopard
(by G. T. di Lampedusa) The times, they are a-changing. But the Prince of Lampedusa, understands that “everything needs to change, so everything can stay the same.” Fragments aside, this is the only book the author, himself a Sicilian Prince, had in him and it is a jewel. Clear, unhurried, conventional in structure, it shows all the hallowed power of the novel in evoking time, place and mild regret for things that pass. Its nostalgic pessimism skewers Italian politics and history, without being political or historical, which turned-off publishers in the author’s lifetime, and seemed to enrage the partisan…
Continue Reading →The Last Confession
Karol Józef Wojtyła was born on May 18 (1920) and we take the opportunity to remember The Last Confession, a papal election drama that suggests mere mortals can somehow connive their way to the right result… (by Roger Crane) (Australia, 2014) The Pope is dead. Long live the Pope. And his election shall be the wish of God, even if the processes seem all-too awful and human. This is a fascinating account of the serpentine path to that puff of white smoke which signals the supposed will of God. These Cardinals are wily, sly, two-faced and yet somehow, they seem to genuinely…
Continue Reading →Language, Truth and Logic
(by A. J. Ayer) It is a pleasure to read Ayer’s demolition of metaphysics, even though it leaves an arid philosophical landscape. Written in 1936, a time when perhaps we might have done with a small dollop of silly spirituality, Ayer has the cracking lines: ‘Our charge against the metaphysician is not that he attempts to employ the understanding in a field where it cannot profitably venture, but that he produces sentences which fail to conform to the conditions under which alone a sentence can be literally significant. Nor are we ourselves obliged to talk nonsense in order to show…
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