Category Archive: Classic Books
Don Quixote
"I shall be the more highly esteemed..." (poster by Georges Rochegrosse, 1910, for the opera by Massenet)
(Miguel De Cervantes) (1605 -15) The man of La Mancha is somewhat akin to Walter Mitty, braver and with dementia. A proud and hapless dreamer, he is perhaps rather the inverse of Mitty (a modest man who dreamed of himself as doing great feats) in doing silly things and imagining them as great. Not just silly, mind – proud and uncanny – some of his acts verge on the psychotic. Idealised as the first ‘modern’ novel, arguably post-modern, reading it today, you start to feel as mad as the faux knight after working through the artless courtly romances of his time. A minor noble…
Continue Reading →Divina Commedia
See for yourself, or read the Book (painting by Domenico di Michelino, 1465)
(by Dante Alighieri 1/6/1265 – 14/9/1321) (completed 1320)
[Note: extracts are from, and reference is to, the John Ciardi translation]
The greatest epic poem of all time (and we can say this with confidence, despite the dodgy standard of TVC’s latin).
It has a brilliantly (classically) simple structure – Recounting, in terza rima, how Dante spends the 1300 Easter vacation on a salvational tour of the worlds of our minds (and souls), guided through Hell and Purgatory by his poetic mentor, Virgil and accompanied by his poster-girl, Beatrice, in Paradise. There they meet Dante’s fiamma benedetta a flame of heavenly wisdom, S. Thomas Aquinas. S. Thomas was a formidable thinker but no great writer. Dante, taking hold of the 13th C theologian, supplied the art. “it is the flame, eternally elated, of Siger, who along the Street of Straws syllogized truths for which he would be hated.” (Pa. X) But he did something more: he created a new universe. And it was a universe that left Aquinas and Augustine, the best of the ancient Christians, pounding in the wake of something strange and monolithically modern. As Harold Bloom said with his usual wisdom in The Western Canon, “The Comedy…destroys the distinction between sacred and secular writing.”
Continue Reading →The Heart is a lonely Hunter
(Carson McCullers) Not as completely ghastly as a Flannery O’Connor but up there in the southern Gothic oh-my-gawd stakes. The ultimately empty, Christ-like Singer and the yearning tomboy Mick are stock characters perhaps but they live and breathe in this story of poverty, hopelessness and waste. Ian Hunter’s “Cambreau” from Strange Cargo and Conrad Veidt’s “Stranger” from The Passing of the Third Floor Back meet Scout Finch in a boarding house, a café and a ditch.
Continue Reading →A House and its Head
(by I Compton-Burnett) Ivy Compton-Burnett* must have had a strange family life (just look at her hair). She was the seventh of her father’s children and the first of her (less than affectionate) mother’s five. A brother died of pneumonia, another on the Somme. Two of her sisters (“Baby” and “Topsy”) committed suicide together one Christmas Day. None of the twelve had children. None of the girls married. Certainly her books are about strange families. The Edgeworth family of A House and its Head is unhappy, decidedly in its own way. The solipsistic father Duncan is oblivious to his (first) wife’s misery and to…
Continue Reading →The Clearing House
Are we over the publishing tactic of “tease, obfuscate, hit-and-run”? Reports (and comma errors) are rife over the discovery of a Harper Lee spin-off, Go Set a Watchman, with Scout Finch now grown up and sittin’ at the back of the bus. The latest in a long line of similar finds, from The Original of Laura (nb: notes on index cards, not a novel) and similar teases over Kafka and J. D. Salinger, this has the added frisson of publication in the author’s lifetime. TVC can’t wait for future unearthed treasures: Luke Rhinehart’s Snake Eyes; J.K.Rowling’s Harry Potter Goes to…
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