Category Archive: Classic Books
The Day of the Dead
(photo Richard Ellis)
Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry (filmed by John Huston, 1984) 1 November – The Day of the Dead. A great festival, we gather, but our interest is naturally aesthetic, and as background to that superb Malcolm Lowry novel, Under the Volcano. And a terrific film as well, the last great John Huston picture, featuring Albert Finney’s best performance since Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Lowry takes this single day, the Day of the Dead, and its doomed British Consul, Geoffrey Firmin, and has them represent western enlightenment in decline, with Firmin as a dissolute diplomat who can see the Nazis coming, through his alcoholic…
Continue Reading →Catch-22
(by Joseph Heller) (1961) “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he…
Continue Reading →Butterflies Aren’t Free
Most famous lepidopterist (photo by Giuseppe Pino)
2 July – A Day of Loss – Vladimir Nabokov (22 April 1899 to 2 July 1977) He was the most luscious wielder of words in our time. Raised in a manner akin to the upbringing of George Amberson Minifer, VN was a precocious prodigy who grew a coat of hard varnish when he lost his home, his inheritance, his country (although he remained fond of Mother Russia, he deprecated her barbaric minions) and, in Berlin, his father (to an assassin’s hand). He moved around but never really settled and his moorings became his wife and his works. His works are superb….
Continue Reading →The Magnificent Ambersons
Charles James Fox. Parental indulgence never did him any harm.
(by Booth Tarkington). Charles James Fox was born on the 24th January 1749, the third son of Henry Fox, First Baron Holland and Caroline Lennox. “Once a grand dinner was held at Holland House for some visiting foreign dignitaries. The Fox children were brought in for dessert. Charles, still a toddler in petticoats, said he wanted to bathe in a huge bowl of cream that stood on the table. Despite Caroline’s remonstrances, Fox ordered the dish to be put down on the floor and there, in full view of some of Europe’s most powerful politicians, the little boy slopped and slid…
Continue Reading →Kafka’s Trials
June 3 – we recall Franz’s Death Day (1924) and mark his enormous posthumous legacy. Though a Czech, he wrote in German; Thus Nabokov called him the ‘greatest German writer of our time.’ You have to read Kafka’s situation tragedies as black comedy; jet-black comedy. “Kafka developed an obsessive awareness of the opaqueness of language. His work can be construed as a continuous parable on the impossibility of genuine human communication, or, as he put it…the impossibility of writing…In Kafka speech is the paradoxical circumstance of man’s incomprehension. He moves in it as in an inner labyrinth.” (George Steiner, After…
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