13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 1/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
John Cowper The Overlook 2000 Jan. A Glastonbury Romance english / - novel 1120 10 Powys Press
La Grèce archaïque d'Homer à Ancient Greece from history of 2000 Jan. Claude Mossé french / Points Histoire 165 **** Eschyle Homer to Aeschylus civilizations
essay 2000 Feb. L'écriture poétique chinoise François Cheng french Chinese poetry / essais Points 281 **** (literature)
2000 March Men of Mathematics E.T. Bell english / - maths Simon & Schuster 580 *****
2000 March Bach: une vie Davitt Moroney french Bach: A Life / biography Actes Sud 208 ***
Great Ideas of Modern 2000 March Jagjit Singh english / - maths Dover Publications 306 *** Mathematics The Atom Up Against The 2000 March L'Atome au pied du mur Etienne Klein french / physics Le Pommier 154 **** Wall Intellectual Terrorism essay Le Terrorism intellectuel de 1945 2000 March Jean Sévilla french from 1945 to the Current / (current Perrin 257 *** à nos jours Day events)
2000 April Bel-Ami Guy de Maupassant french Bel-Ami / novel la Guilde du Livre 316 8 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 2/70
Comments What a way to start the new century off! This is a big, towering novel that left me stunned with its scope and ambition and above all the force of its magnificent prose. Set in the ancient numinous ("suggesting the presence of a divinity") town of Glastonbury with its venerable ruins and aura of mystery and memories of pagan beliefs, Powys creates, in this story of conflict between the spiritual and the material (the central figure is preparing a Passion Play as part of a plan to restore Glastonbury to its former position as one of the great spiritual centres of the world, while an industrial magnate plans for for industrialization and modernization of the the city), a timeless epic enfolding the distant and mysterious past - the Celts and pre-Celts, the Romans and the immemorial Grail of Glastonbury and its newer Christian significance - with the passions of the present and the portents of the future to build a work of cosmic proportions Powys is one of the greatest masters ever of the English language: his full, rich, smoothly flowing, expressive and inventive prose makes every page a delight to read, particularly the tremendously effective and vibrantly alive dialogues (often in the vernacular of the south-west of England) and the quite amazingly beautiful and intense descriptive passages, and he has a way of placing people in a large, very large perspective, as if we were viewing them and their actions and thoughts through an instantaneous telescope from a far-off planet, that constantly reinforces the dimensions of the work in the reader's mind. A treat is in store for those who have not yet had the pleasure and excitement of reading this very special novel. I just can't find anything to begin to criticize in this extraordinary book! A useful and eye-opening detailed account of the events and evolution of ancient Greek civilization and culture in the period that led up to the seemingly-miraculous Golden Century of ancient Greece, the 5th Century BC, by one of the best-known academic specialists in the field, who just happens to be able to write in the most elegant and readable way.
An interesting analysis of the rules and aesthetic principles governing the very ancient art of Chinese poetry, which was already a long-established and absolutely major discipline in the time of Confucius (6th Century BC), by a distinguished French poet, painter, and writer of Chinese origin, member of the Académie Française. Not easy going though, as the rules are complex and subtle to the extreme, albeit essential to a proper appreciation of the infinite beauties of classical Chinese poetry, and the numerous examples studied and the explanations of the different forms and approaches are quite bewildering at first read, so much pondering and rereading is required to get the most out of this exceptionally rich study.
I was delighted to find that this quite remarkable book, that I had been enthralled by when I first read it in a pocket-book edition as a young man and which has been out of print for years, has justly acquired the status of a classic and has been republished in the USA in a handy, nicely-printed one-volume edition, thus enabling me to savour anew this engaging account of some of the most brilliant intellectual achievements in the history of mankind. Written for the layman in everyday language by one of the leading American mathematicians of the first part of the past century, this is a lively, very readable account of the (often bizarre and unusual) lives and (marvellous) discoveries of the greatest mathematicians from antiquity through to the beginning of the 20th Century: Zeno, Archimedes, Descartes, Fermat, Pascal, Newton, Leibniz, the Bernoullis, Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Monge, Gauss, Cauchy, Lobatchevsky, Abel, Hamilton, Galois, Sylvester, Boole, Riemann, Poincaré, Cantor and half a dozen other giants. Written for those like me who have forgotten everything they ever learned about maths at school, the (very brilliant, natch) author takes you effortlessly through the thought processes involved (often astoundingly simple and almost always breathtakingly beautiful, in the way a surprising solution to a chess problem can be aesthetically beautiful) to an appreciation of the significance of the achievements of these great minds. A short, too short really, account of the life of this musical giant and the circumstances in which he wrote his major works. This universal genius, who was recognized throughout his life as a master had to work like a nignog all his life producing works now considered to be universal masterpieces on an assembly-line basis to earn his daily bread and to hold onto his job. Think of the way popular "musicians" are treated today in comparison! But then in 300 years time their "works" will be forgotten while people will continue to listen to and be inspired by and to revere those of the creator of The Passions, the Cello Suites, the Chaconne and many other eternal masterpieces.
This was hard slogging and definitely needs a careful reread. Still, it was stimulating to have a glimpse into what has been going on in the higher spheres for the past many decades.
A good, enticing introduction to the magical world of quantum mechanics. A virulent attack on political correctness in France from the bad old days of the fifties when the French PC and Stalin called the shots up to the present day, in the pamphleteering tradition of the politically engaged French press. Not very academic or sedate in tone but lively reading, even if a bit too right-wingish for my tastes - but then, should one only read prose that conforms with one's own way of looking at the world, one's Weltanschauung? One of the only two novels that Maupassant wrote, this hard-hitting account of the rise and fall of a handsome, dashing, talented, cynical and very egotistical journalist working and womanizing his way up the social ladder with brutal determination is written in the straightforward, tell-it-as-it-is style that makes his short stories so impressively stark and powerful and which contributes effectively to the emotional and social power of this realistic drama that somehow captured a certain self-aggrandizing and mercantile spirit of our modern times. This man could write! 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 3/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating 2000 April Steppenwolf Hermann Hesse french Steppenwolf german novel le Livre de poche 195 7
Trésor de la nouvelle de la Anthology of French 2000 April littérature française t. 1 anthologie french Short Stories: 17th-19th / short stories Les Belles Lettres 231 ***** - XVII-XIXe siècles Centuries
Trésor de la nouvelle de la Anthology of French 2000 May littérature française t. 2 anthologie french Short Stories: 19th / short stories Les Belles Lettres 242 ***** - XIXe siècle Century
Les Editions de 2000 May Je m'en vais Jean Echenoz french I'm Leaving / novel 253 6 Minuit
2000 May Phèdre Racine french Phedre / theater Librio poche 91 *****
essay Jean-François 2000 May La Grande Parade french The Big Parade / (current Plon 343 **** Revel events)
2000 May l'Ecole des femmes Molière french The School for Women / theater le Livre de poche 190 ****
Stay Living and other 2000 May Rester vivant et autres textes Michel Houellebecq french / short stories Librio poche 93 *** stories
2000 May The Irish Civil War Helen Litton english / - history Wolfhound 135 ****
2000 June Journal d'un vieux fou Junichiro Tanizaki french Diary of a Mad Old Man japanese novel Folio 222 8
2000 June Night Train Martin Amis english / - novel Vintage 149 6
2000 June Heavy Water and other stories Martin Amis english / - short stories Vintage 231 *** Mr. Barrett's Secret and other 2000 June Kingsley Amis english / - short stories Penguin 185 **** stories 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 4/70
Comments Although I have always liked what I have read by the great German-Swiss writer I was not as interested by this famous book as I was expecting to be, finding it much calmer and staider than I was expecting. I suppose that the spiritual and intellectual implications of his prose passed way over my down-to-earth positivist Anglo-Saxon head. As indicated by the title this is a treasure-store of a number of the most celebrated French short stories from the 17th Century (Scarron, La Fontaine) and 18th Centuries (Voltaire, Diderot) through to the glorious 19th Century. Printed on especially fine-quality paper, the physical pleasure of holding this book in one's hand is a nice complement to the intense aesthetic pleasure provided by these masterpieces. Apart from Mérimée's famous tale of a slavery and revolt Tamango, all of the other stories were discoveries for me, amongst which de Maistre's Les Prisonnier s du Caucase, Balzac's La Femme Abandonnée and Théophile Gauthier's Deux Acteurs Pour un Rôle particularly stood out. And a nicely cynical tale about shenanigans in high society by Stendahl (Vannina Vannini) put me back on the right track about that great writer's ability in the short story genre. More splendid short-story classics from the magnificent 19th Century, by Barbey d'Aurevilly, Flaubert, Zola, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Verlaine, Maupassant, Marcel Schwob and a few others. Un Coeur Simple by Flaubert is I would guess the the most famous of them all, and quite rightly so, but they are all really on the same level, namely the highest. I had to put the book down for a while though after reading Zola's stunning L'Attaque du Moulin, which left me emotionally drained with its unforgettable account of violence and vainglory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1871. This novel was a surprise winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1999 but this sort of highbrow mystery about a trendy art-gallery owner who shoots off on a mysterious trip to the North Pole didn't turn me on; the subtleties of its style passed way over my head, I'm sorry to say, and most of the innuendos and aspersions about the artistic and literary Parisian milieu that seem to have so much impressed the critics passed me right by too. Racine's tragedies are the high point of the classical (17th Century) period in French theater, and this is perhaps his most refined play, a model of elegance of tone combined with poetic power and emotional force. Not the easiest of reading, though, and not for those in the mood for distraction - a great deal of concentration is required of the reader/spectator to be able to extract the rich spiritual and poetic essence from this intense, complex, profound masterpiece.
A sharp critique of the neo-Marxism that has dominated French political life for decades by one of France's leading "liberal" (meaning non-socialist in French political parlance) intellectuals, a very articulate essayist, polemicist and philosopher, a former editor of the weekly news magazine l'Express.
An excellent and almost spicy comedy about the unsuccessful efforts of a salacious old tutor to preserve the innocence of his adorable young female pupil so as to have her all for himself. One of Molière's earlier and lighter works, but one that caused a rumpus when it first appeared with its down-to-earth attitudes, and one that must be a lot of fun on the stage, for example the scene where the enterprising lover gets a rollicking beating from the tutor's servants, amongst others. This was my introduction to one of France's leading modern writers, who has consistently aroused controversy and for-and-against passions with his cynical and rather glaucous nihilism. Interesting and original, even though the bleakness of the stories and the banality of the prose and the ordinariness of the people in the stories are hard to get enthusiastic about. A short but comprehensive and apparently most objective account of the internal civil war in 1924-25 that followed the independence of Ireland from the British Empire and the establishment of the Irish Republic in 1923. An understanding of the chronology of these dramatic events, which led to the victory of the moderate Free State Provisional Government faction led by Michael Collins over the IRA/Sinn Fein radicals led by de Valera who refused to accept the non-inclusion of the protestant North in the new republic, is quite essential to a proper understanding of modern-day politics in both southern and northern parts of that small but significant island, so this book can be heartily recommended. The French version of the title sounds decidedly better than the English one, and that perhaps reflects the fact that Tanizaki translates particularly nicely into French, in a crisp, precise kind of way that effortlessly gets you deeply involved with the intricacies of the urges and pulsions of a man on the wrong side of sixty trying very hard to satisfactorily quench the fires still burning strongly deep down inside him. An in-depth portrait of a man and his psyche that leaves the reader almost exhausted with its unrelenting tension and force. Most impressive. The young Amis (son of the literary icon Kingsley Amis) gets a lot of press coverage so I wanted to look into the matter but I shall have to keep on looking to understand what the fuss is all about. I think that this was an attempt to write an original kind of detective story but I don't much like detective stories any more (I did use to read billions of them in another life, I cannot deny, though) and didn't find this story interesting enough to modify my view on the subject. Perhaps there was a cold tone of neo-nihilism that could have become interesting though - more investigation into this star of contemporary British fiction is decidedly in order. Amis's stories are not all that much fun to read, but they do have a certain punch to them, that cannot be denied. Amis senior, the author of the brilliant Lucky Jim, was an outstanding penman, as evidenced by these elegant, urbane and quite flawless stories that were a real pleasure to read. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 5/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2000 June Extension du domaine de la lutte Michel Houellebecq french Widening of the Struggle / novel J'ai lu 156 7
2000 July Les Particules élémentaires Michel Houellebecq french The Elementary Particles / novel Flammarion 394 7
For Her Lovely Eyes / Pour ses beaux yeux / Entre 2000 July René de Obaldia french Between She-dog and / theater Grasset 192 **** chienne et loup / Rappening Wolf / Rappening
Night Train in the Milky Le Sepent à 2000 July Train de nuit dans la voie lactée Kenji Miyazawa french japanese short stories 204 **** Way Plumes
2000 July In Cold Blood Truman Capote english / - novel Penguin 343 9
2000 July Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry english / - novel Penguin Classics 385 9
Eric-Emmanuel 2000 July Variations énigmatiques french Enigmatic Variations / theater Albin Michel 135 **** Schmitt
Vintage 2000 Aug. The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner english / - novel 326 9 International 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 6/70
Comments I couldn't help resenting the fact that Houellebecq chose a computer professional for his drab, boring, personality-void anti-hero who represents the inhumanity of the everyday life experience of the contemporary man. But I have to admit that his stark colourless style nicely suited the drab despair of his story in an almost poetic way. An original voice indeed, even though I still like to think that there are some computer professionals out there who don't lead as awful an existence as the author seems to believe they do ... I didn't really enjoy reading this unusual, nonconformist, nihilist second novel of Houellebecq, which attracted a very considerable amount of press coverage and almost won the Prix Goncourt. It paints an even bleaker and more pessimistic portrait of our modern world than its predecessor, and is far more dominated by sex in all its forms, especially group and communal ones, seen in harsh terms as an obsessional central and not in the least joyful driving force of our selfish, individualistic age - an age which is seen as stereotyped in an ugly, conformist way. In spite of the unlovable characters and their unlovely ways and the doubtful value of their constant blabberings on sociological themes, my interest was maintained by the intellectual tone and the variety and quality of the ideas that keep on popping up, and by the importance in the realm of ideas accorded by the author and his characters to scientific theories and practise, from quantum mechanics to genetics and from the book's title through to the last page; at last, I found myself thinking, an intellectual who deigns to address and integrate science into his vision of the world! That being said, the most important quality of any work of fiction just has to be the quality of the writing, its energy and individuality and richness, and in that respect, even though this book, like his first, does have a certain recognizable (bleak and drab) style to it, Houellebecq is decidedly not up to the mark. A mixed bag, thus, which one on the whole does not regret having had a go at. I'm a pushover for theater and was pushed way over by this collection of three excellent one-act plays by a very witty playwright, recently elected to the Académie Française. In fact I do believe that Entre chenne et loup, about what happens when a young lady takes her pet dog (who, admittedly, has some way-out problems) to see an "animal psychiatrist" is the funniest play I have ever read! Rappening, as its imaginative title suggests, is a happening in rap mode where a newly-released prisoner articulately recounts his not-enviable situation with considerable energy and force and of course wit, this being not any old happening but an Obaldia one. Although the third piece, about TV-quiz mania, was less original, it would probably be most effective live on the stage. The whole set would certainly constitute a wonderful evening of theatre. Three stories in a poetical, almost mystical vein, strongly inspired by a buddhist humanism that revealed to me the power and the scope of this major writer and poet who died way too early in 1933 at the age of 37. Capote's masterpiece, this fictionalized but totally credible account of a crime that shocked North America at the time (and since - who likes the idea of their whole family being slaughtered in their beds in the middle of the night?) is as readable and relevant now as the day it was published. Because of the dialogues, it has to be catalogued as fiction, and great fiction at that. There is only one other novel ever written that I know of that takes you so completely and intensely and convincingly into a criminal's mind before, during and after he has committed his act (actually two very different criminals in this case) as this book, and that is Crime and Punishment. Mescaline misery in Mexico: not a particularly easy read, this stunning description of decline into despair is quite overwhelmingly powerful. A major reading experience, written by an inspired master of the language. But a master who is not constantly showing off what he can do with words like a certain Irish writer I could name - one who uses all the resources of the English language not just to transport you to the dry desolate depressed and depressing backlands of Mexico in a timeless setting that could very well be the Depression days of the thirties when Lowry lived there, but to make you feel and live the heat and the despair and the whirling, wondrous relief that the expatriate European self-exile experiences while he downs yet another glass of mescaline on his descent into oblivion. Lowry settled in a log cabin in British Columbia for five years after leaving Mexico while he put this wild masterpiece down on paper, so it is almost a Canadian book!
An initially polite interview of a writer and a journalist on a remote island in the North Sea rapidly cascades into an ever-more-intense exchange of repartees and revelations that keep the reader-spectator constantly on the edge of his seat. The pace and the brio of the dialogues are remarkable - this play by the author of The Visitor must be marvellous on the stage.
This striking novel is certainly a tour de force, written largely - as one eventually ends up realizing - from the viewpoint of a mentally retarded youth in the backlands of the deep South, in a stream-of-consciousness mode that most effectively transcribes what one can very well imagine to be the thought processes of a deranged mind. But does a spectacular technical display of great originality make for a great work of art? On the whole, I would say not. The subject matter though - the mindset of the southern USA man (we are in the thirties, the height of the Dark Ages down in those there parts in the days when Mississippi and Louisiana had more in common with the banana republics southwards than with the rest of the US of A northwards) - is of enormous interest and significance and there are some superb passages in the more straightforward parts, notably the all-too-short chapter where the black folk make their way to Sunday church to listen to a famous guest preacher, whose absolutely fabulous address to the congregation, one of the finest pages in all of American literature I would say, cannot fail to send shivers of emotion down the most hardened reader's spine. My annoyance at the pyrotechnics of much of the book prevented me from placing it on the very highest pedestal, quite possibly an error on my part. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 7/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2000 Aug. The Alexandria Quartet Laurence Durrell english / - novel Faber and Faber 884 9
Livre de poche 2000 Aug. Le Passé Ressucité Franz Werfel french The Past Ressucitated german novel 192 8 biblio
A Pale Blue Woman's Livre de poche 2000 Aug. Une écriture bleu pâle de femme Franz Werfel french german novel 127 8 Handwriting biblio
Massimo Venturi 2000 Aug. Jardin du Japon french Japan's Garden italian photography Chêne 196 **** Ferriolo
2000 Oct. The Great Gadsby F. Scott Fitzgerald english / - novel Penguin 172 9
H. Prem, U. history of Bordas 2000 Oct. Le Mexique Ancien french Ancient Mexico german 396 **** Dyckerhoff civilizations Civilisations
The Man who outlived himself: D. Beardsley and A. essay 2000 Oct. english / - Penguin 109 **** an appreciation of John Donne Purdy (literature)
2000 Oct. John Donne - selected poems John Donne english / - poetry Everyman's Poetry 104 ***** 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 8/70
Comments The four novels that comprise this opus (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea) were published separately but conceived as part of a whole, intended to be read together. The construction is brilliant, with each of the separate novels relating the point of view and life and personality of one of the interlinked characters, with the first three running more or less in parallel and the final one being a sort of sequel, thus deconstructing to great effect the linear time-line almost inherent in the novel form. The ultra-cosmopolitan setting in the multi- cultural Alexandria of the thirties and forties (and, later, the Greek islands) with its mix of populations (European and oriental) and languages (English, French, and Arab) provides a background seeped in history and culture that, with its mix of the familiar and the exotic, the understandable and the mysterious, transposes the interweaving lives of the actors in this drama to a level of universal significance. But of course it is the writing that matters most, as I am sure you will agree, and here we have one of those masters of the language that the English educational system (Durrell was a Cambridge graduate) regularly produces. The prose is both sparkling and lively and rich in power, with particularly snappy and often witty dialogues, so reading this vast work is not only easy but enjoyable - and as a special bonus you benefit from the sophistication and articulateness of the author and his characters to soak up a bit of culture and word-wisdom while you're at it: for example about the Grand Old Man, the great poet Cavafy whose powerful poems and mysterious aura are so present throughout this magnificent work. A finely-wrought short novel of quite theatrical intensity, describing the confrontation of a renowned judge with a man accused of murder whose past turns out to have been intimately linked with the judge's own past, and whose descent into the depths menaces to sweep the judge along with him. A psychological drama of great intensity and power, set in the Vienna of both the glorious pre-First World War and the more sedate twenties, in the great Viennese tradition of Schnitzler and Zweig and Musil for whom Werfel is a most worthy continuer. A very short novel with the feel of a long short story but the emotional impact of something much vaster, this account of a top civil servant's unsuccessful struggle in the mid-thirties with his conscience when faced with a secret from his past that threatens his social position is a relentless (and contemporary) condemnation of the moral turpitudes of an Austrian society almost effortlessly integrating the brutal anti-Semitism of hitlerian Germany in a vain attempt to preserve their comfort, tranquillity and independence The art of Japanese gardening is an art of the highest order to which this rather nicely-put-together book of photographs is an excellent introduction. Peace and harmony are the master concepts here, where the universe and its interrelated elements are symbolized at every turn and the act of contemplation of every stone and stream and tree and patch of vegetation becomes an aesthetic experience of quite cosmic dimensions.
All that glitters is not gold … This sparkling tale of the brilliant social life in the Long Island of the glittering Twenties makes good reading indeed for those non-socialites among us for whom the rich, handsome, elegant, cultured, and mysterious eponymous (war-) hero would be quite insupportable if he had turned out to really be all those American-dreamy good things with no redeeming awfulnesses to get him back down nearer to our lowly level. The story reads for the most part in its relaxed narrative way like a New Yorker story for sophisticated suburbanites which it just might have been at some point, but it somehow develops a deeper tone as it starts getting behind the surface shine and broadens its scope and widens its significance in a most effective and even moving way. The author captures with his casual but sophisticated style the glamour and punch of a jazzy nouveau-riche age that indelibly marked the imagination of America and the world, making this short novel undoubtedly one of the most interesting and enduring American novels of the century.
Yet another outstanding overview of an ancient civilization in the superb Bordas Civilisations series, of German origin. Civilisations in the plural here, ranging from the ancient Olmecs (1550-1100 BC), the Mayas (250-850 A.D.), Teotihuacan with its enormous megalopolis near Mexico City (0-600 A.D.), the Toltecs, Zapotecs and Mixtecs (ca 1000 AD) through to the Aztecs, who had just reached their apogee when Hermann Cortez and his Spanish troops arrived in 1519. Although none of these peoples, mostly belonging to widely different language groups, developed a written language, the Mayan glyphs and the Mixtec Codexes are language-related documents of enormous interest whose intricacies are nicely clarified by the erudite text and lavish illustrations of this magnificent edition, and all of these peoples left behind works of art and architecture of quite stupefying beauty which are abundantly displayed and analysed in these pages. A fascinating document of unsuspected richness. Insights into the attitudes and values of one of the greatest English poets, John Donne, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, expressed in the form of a lively conversation between two well-known Canadian poets and writers. This book concentrates on the shorter poems especially treasured by the authors, which helped me no end to improve my understanding and appreciation of these inspired texts; The Sun Rising particularly excited the two authors' admiration for reasons which they are only too happy to explain - and the reader to cogitate upon. John Donne is tops, and the choice of texts in this compact, easy-to-handle edition, intelligently organized in chronological order, is irreproachable. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 9/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2000 Oct. Dylan Thomas: selected poems Dylan Thomas english / - poetry Everyman's Poetry 122 *****
Das blaue Licht und andere The Blue Light and Other children's 2000 Oct. The Grimm brothers german german Folio bilingue 199 **** Märchen Fairy tales literature
history of 2000 Nov. Le Monde d'Homer Pierre Nidal-Vaquet french The World of Homer / Perrin 154 **** civilizations
Stop the Demise of 2000 Nov. Halte à la mort des langues Claude Hagège french / linguistics Odile Jacob 367 *** Languages!
2000 Nov. Les Batailles de Napoléon Laurent Joffrin french The Battles of Napoleon / history Seuil 239 ****
2000 Dec. L'Idiot Fedor Dostoyevsky french The Idiot russian novel La Pléiade 751 10
essay 2000 Dec. Les Larmes d'Ulysses Roger Grenier french The Tears of Ulysses / Folio 161 **** (literature) 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 10/70
Comments
Dylan Thomas is one of my very favourite poets, and I put absolutely nothing higher than his magnificent Fern Hill that sums up the kaleidoscopic whirl of precious childhood memories in the most incredibly inventive, modern, moving, evocative, powerful, rhythmic, inspiring way. Many of the other texts that he wrote throughout his all-too-short career (the Welsh poet drank himself to death at the age of 39) are of about the same level of magnetic excellence, although not to be found in many other anthologies - I think, for example, of After the Funeral and A refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London and the complex In the White Giant's Thigh, amongst others, whose very titles send a thrill of emotion down my spine. Extremely interesting and informative commentaries on each poem complete this precious little book which everyone should have on their bookshelf.
The classic Grimm Brothers tales with all their sharpness and cruelty - no punches pulled for the kiddies in those days! The title story, about the revenge a soldier wreaks on the king who had dismissed him without a cent, thanks to a magic light which he stole from a wicked witch (before getting her killed!), is typical of the pitiless methods applied by one and all, children included, on their enemies. The most striking feature of these stories - extremely well know in German-speaking countries - apart from their fairy-tale and magical elements, their princesses and kings and witches and strange gnomes, is their almost breathless pace, the way they zoom along and tell their story in a rush that leaves no time for the reader, young or old, to worry too much about the morality of what is going on. They really get to the often gory point without beating around the bush - no doubt one of the main reasons for their long-lasting success with the younger generations since they were first published in the 1840s. An exceptionally interesting overview of Homer's epics and what they tell us about the Greek civilization of the 8th Century BC when they were most likely composed, with magnificent colour photographs of Greek vases and armour and sculpture to illustrate the erudite but very accessible text. A passionate pamphlet by a renowned and very articulate linguist about the tragic decline in the number of living languages in our times and the ever-accelerating linguistic imperialism of the English language and its massive importation into all other languages, including of course French. The cultural and humanistic impoverishment entailed by the widespread use of basic and banal and often misunderstood English terms in so many European languages is seen as a cause for great alarm and concern for the future by the very articulate author of Homme de Paroles and La Structure des Langues, somewhat contrary to the mainstream direction of current thought in linguistic circles, which sees (far too complacently in Hagège's view) this massive importation of terms as a natural process that has accompanied the development of all languages, and notably the English language itself. A fascinating account of the military aspects of some of Napoleon's most famous battles (Lodi, the Pyramids, Marengo, Austerlitz, Auerstadt, Eylau, Wagram and Waterloo) by one of France's leading authorities on the big little man and his era, with very clear colour diagrams and fold-out maps of the battlefield areas to clarify the often-complex and always dramatic events related. The bottom line seems to have been that on the whole it was his leading generals (Davout, Massena, Murat, Ney, Macdonald ...) who provided the spark of genius or crazy charge or inspired manoeuvre or heroic sacrifice that won (or saved) the day on the field, although it is true that at Ulm the day was won without battle after the Napoleon's superior strategic manoeuvres. Hair-raising reading, as the bloodshed and the gore and the violence increase from battle to battle as Napoleon's grip progressively weakened, ending in the ultimate almost-inevitable catastrophe (for the French) of Waterloo - almost but not quite, as Grouchy's incomprehensible insistence on finishing his lunch and keeping his whole army of seasoned troops away from the fray does leave the question open somewhat as to the inevitability of the tide of that particular slice of history.
I can't do justice to Dostoevsky's masterpiece, but I can say that its central figure, Prince Mychkine, is probably the single most moving and unforgettable character that I have ever encountered in fiction, that the central theme of a saintly man subtly challenging by his very integrity the values of his time is immensely powerful, that the very many characters that people this panoramic novel are all vibrantly brought to life by dialogues and descriptions that just could not be better, that there is a special tone of import and intense significance throughout this long novel that maintains it from start to finish on the very highest heights. No, I can not put anything higher than this masterpiece of Russian and world literature.
A delightful and very touching book about the attitudes of writers and thinkers towards animals - especially dogs - in literature and philosophy throughout the ages. The title refers to the tears Ulysses sheds when, disguised as a beggar on finally returning to his palace in Ithaca, the only being to recognize him is his faithful dog Argos. On the cover is a large dog, upright and in a man's suit, leading a small happy-looking man following him on all fours on a leash, a reference to the attitude the author, a very excellent writer and essayist, shares with the 18th Century playwright Beaumarchais, whose dog had a collar engraved: "My name is Florette, M. de Beaumarchais belongs to me". 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 11/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2000 Dec. Vile Bodies Evelyn Waugh english / - novel Penguin 233 8
2000 Dec. A Wodehouse Bestiary P.G. Wodehouse english / - humour Tickner & Fields 329 *****
Alice in Wonderland and children's 2000 Dec. Lewis Carroll english / - Castle 245 ***** Alice Through the Looking-Glass literature
2000 Dec. England, England Julian Barnes english / - novel Picador 266 6
The Execution of L'Exécution de Troppmann et 2000 Dec. Ivan Tourgueniev french Troppmann and other russian memoirs Stock 205 **** autres récits stories
Ahmadou 2000 Dec. Allah n'est pas obligé french Allah is not Obliged / novel Editions du Seuil 233 8 Kourouma
Ahmadou The Suns of the 2000 Dec. Les soleils des indépendances french / novel Points Histoire 196 7 Kourouma Independancies
Ionesco, Adamov, 2000 Dec. Absurd Drama english / french theater Penguin 185 **** Arrabal, Albee 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 12/70
Comments An extremely brilliant, and at times extremely funny, novel set in the frantic pleasure-seeking period immediately after the First World War, peopled with Bright Young Things dressed and behaving and thinking about things in general and partying in particular as never before. Although Waugh's book can be read as a sort of social document on the mores and attitudes of a brilliant, innovative, thrusting decade bursting with a desire to live life to the hilt (before another catastrophe occurred?) that stands out in the European and American imagination in a way that few decades before or after have ever done, it is a complex work with a number of interleaving themes that cannot be so simply classified as a sort of period drama. The sex referred to in the title, which is part of the image we retain of those outlandish and daring times when it first became the over-riding public topic that it still is in our own times almost a century later, is certainly present but only in a smooth understatement kind of way as the party-going and satisfaction-seeking Bright Young Things (a term first coined I do believe in this novel and which instantaneously entered the language to categorize the frenetic young socialites who came to symbolize the new spirit of that post-war age) try to sort out their relationships and find their way in the world. Above and beyond the (fascinating) subject matter of this outstanding book I appreciated especially the smooth, elegant, classy prose and dialogues of this very gifted writer. A marvellous anthology - but aren't all Wodehouse anthologies marvellous? - of stories by the creator of the lovable nincompoop Archie and his superiorly intelligent manservant Jeeves in all of which an animal - a sleepy cat whose tail gets stepped on at the worst possible moment, or a dog entrusted to Archie's care by a fearsome aunt and which a loopy lady friend has light-heartedly given away shortly before the redoubtable relative's return, or an escaped chimpanzee, that sort of thing - plays a prominent part. One just does not stop chuckling from page 1 onwards; this man - Wodehouse, that is - is a genius and a benefactor to mankind! The originality and exuberance of these two famous stories can never fail to please, I would think - and not just the young girls for whom they were originally written but people of whatever age and sex. They just sweep you along with never a pause from one astonishing scene to another, all totally credible in a mad but somehow natural Carrollian way - what a joy it would be if all books could whisk you along in such a spellbindingly enjoyable way. But what stands out most I would say are the dialogues, so unexpected and yet so coherent and logical in their own inspired, mad way. Thank you, Mr. Carroll! This satire of the ways and mores of contemporary Britain by the author of Flaubert's Parrot had an excellent press worthy of his big reputation, but I found the story overblown and tedious and frankly had trouble getting through to the end. I am sure that this book has many merits but they all seem to have gone way over my head - not that this heavy-handed approach to social satire could easily be qualified as too subtle even for insensitive souls dans mon genre. A series of articles that Turgeniev wrote at various stages of his life, including the aptly named An End that closes the book, a final disillusioned account of disintegrating social relationships in Russia that he dictated on his death-bed, which had been previously unpublished in the West. One of the highlights is the title story, a detailed and very impressive eye-witness account of the public execution in Lyon of a young man condemned for a much-talked-about multiple murder, a subtle but direct and very moving condemnation of both public executions and the death penalty itself, quite what we have come to expect from one of the leading humanistic voices of the Russian 19th-Century intelligentsia. In another extremely striking eye-witness account, Les nôtres m'ont envoyé, Turgeniev described the dramatic events of the June 1848 Revolution in Paris and his conversations with passers-by and with participants on both sides of that dramatic and very fierce and bloody struggle, most notably a "blouse blanche" (worker) who had come at great risk from the front lines through enemy (government) territory to bring news to one of T's neighbours about his family who had been taken hostage by the insurgents. Hair-raisingly vivid, deeply-felt articles written with the intensity and commitment that one could expect from the author of A Sportsman's Notebook. This book won the prestigious Renaudot prize in 2000 and one can only approve of the choice - this fictional autobiography of a orphan child-soldier on a quest through the wild, savage lands of West Africa (the Ivory Coast, Liberia and Sierra Leone) to find a relative is a terrific read, not only because of the hair-raising adventures of its young narrator (no way a hero, though: more a product of his time and place that one can just about sympathize with - he doesn't after all actually go around chopping people's arms off like so many of those bad little guys did) and the eye-opening practices of his witch-doctor blood-brother companion, but especially because of the force and colourfulness and vivacity of his deceptively simplistic style peppered with colourful expressions from the West-African Malinké language of his young hero. An exciting voice that Africa can certainly be proud of. This was Kourouma's first novel, an impressive exploration of the West African way of life and way of of looking at the world and of reacting to the political adventures and misadventures consequent to decolonization and independence Karouma's talent for writing is multiplied by the dynamic cultural and linguistic resources of the West African Malinké people, predominant in the west-central part of the Ivory Coast, to produce a colourful, vibrant style unlike any other, a very good read indeed. Three French plays and one American one from the fifties and early sixties: a remarkable full-length play, Amadée, by Ionesco, one of the founders of the Theater of the Absurd that so marked the post-war artistic scene, and three shorter ones by Artur Adamov (Professor Taranne), Fernando Arrabal (The Two Executioners), and Edward Albee (Zoo Story). They all tend to bear out Camus's well-put comment quoted in the introduction that "The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world". Perhaps more than for more conventional drama one has the feeling that these plays need to be seen live to get into the right receptive spirit, but nevertheless these plays impressed me no end with their subtle but very real emotional power, with the exception of Adamov's piece which is distinctly lighter in tone and impact than the others. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 13/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2000 Dec. La Steppe rouge Joseph Kessel french The Red Steppe / short stories Folio 178 ****
L'Imaginaire 2000 Dec. Hotel Savoy Joseph Roth french / german novel 187 7 Gallimard
Le Brave Gaspard et la belle The brave Gaspard and 2000 Dec. Clemens Brentano french german short stories Mercure de France 90 **** Annette the beautiful Annette
2000 Dec. Modern Short Stories anthology english / - short stories Faber and Faber 217 ****
TOTAL YR: no. of books = 57 avg. pages/week = 285 pages = 14819
Les 20 meilleurs nouvelles de la The 20 Best Short Stories 2001 Jan. anthology french various short stories Marabout 279 **** littérature mondiales of World Literature
Ernestine ou La naissance de Ernestine or the Birth of 2001 Jan. Stendahl french / short stories Mille eu Un Nuits 62 *** l'amour Love
2001 Jan. Poil de Carotte Jules Renard french Carrot-Head / novel Phidal 184 8 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 14/70
Comments All the violence and cruelty and drama of the immense social upheaval of the early days of the Soviet Union are brought vividly to life in these almost-always-tragic vignettes of life and death in that troubled land. This was the first book by the future author of Belle de Jour and Les Cavaliers and Le Lion and many other very successful books, and what a book! This is literature with a punch, that one cannot just calmly take one's time with when one has an idle moment: these are stories that twist your innards and send tingles along your scalp and an odd sort of watery crispness about the eyes, primarily not because of the brutality and injustices of those social-war times that they so vividly depict but essentially on account of the atmosphere of authenticity that they are seeped in and their concentration on the individual and his/her (we need another pronoun here) fate when swept up in the onrush of war and terror. Kessel was a born writer of adventure stories who was himself a life-long adventurer, and clearly his own experiences in Siberia during the Russian Civil War combined with his natural talent for telling a tale to create the aura of authenticity and conviction which characterize these seven striking stories, quite in the vein of another and longer tale of his in the same setting, La Nagaïka (The Whip), an unforgettable masterpiece, now unfortunately out of print, which nicely balances the severe condemnation of the political terror of the new revolutionary regime in the stories here by a similarly unfavourable portrayal of what was going on on the other side. Life in the provinces in the ultra-cosmopolitan atmosphere of eastern Europe after the Great War by a major German writer, a book I am glad not to have missed and an author whose oeuvre I would like to pursue further. This stirring and violent tale of the unhappy fate of the beautiful Annette and the soldier Gaspard is a classic of the Romantic movement in Germany at the beginning of the 19th Century. The obsession with honour to the point of self-destruction is the driving theme of this sombre tragedy full of darkness and the fear of the Devil and violence of all sorts, including robbery, a suicide, public executions, and an infanticide. Hair-raising stuff, really, and a splendidly vivid description of the mores and mentalities of that far-off but fascinating time. An outstanding anthology of stories by modern English and American authors - Dylan Thomas, Alan Paton, Kathlyn Mansfield, Ted Hughes, D.H. Lawrence, Scott Fitzgerald, Willliam Faulkner, Walter de la Mare and others, in an edition designed for students with introductory comments and suggestions for follow-up reading for each story. Among the most striking was Fitzgerald's elegant tale tinged with humour, The Ice Palace, about a Southern belle's culture shock on coming north to discover snow and ice and her fiancé's family, but the prize of the lot for me was being able to reread James Thurber's classic story The Secret Life of Walter Mitty which I had been so impressed by when I read it in my youthful days when it first appeared in The New Yorker magazine, and whose title hero has found his way into the language as a symbol of the common man secretly infused by heroic but hopelessly unrealizable inner dreams. The closing scene where the henpecked Walter Mitty snaps off one quick last smoke before heroically turning in his mind to face the firing squad (Then with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated, inscrutable to the last.) is quite simply unforgettable.
The title was a good come-on and although it is somewhat overblown - in no way can some of these stories be classified in the all-time Top Twenty, even if such a dubious concept were acceptable - this book does indeed contain short masterpieces by Cervantes, Hoffmann, Poe, Gogol, Chekhov, Maupassant and Borges that do represent the summit of the art of the short story. But in general the atmosphere and aura of the short stories of a given writer can best be appreciated when grouped together in a full set of his stories, where the flavour and varied aspects of his style and approach, the world that he creates and reflects, are progressively revealed story after story like a dancer progressively displaying her splendid robes and trappings before finally revealing hitherto hidden treasures, thus providing a more rounded view of the author's aesthetics and flair and talent. And on the whole the constraints of this type of pocket-book-sized anthology, necessarily restricted to stories of only a few pages in length so as to be able to include a maximum number of authors, with a maximum of one story per author, and with practically only one author per nation - and none by Japanese writers! - are such that a more more appropriate title would have been something less pretentious about short stories by outstanding writers throughout the ages. I can honestly say that this story written in the romantic vein did not leave a lasting impression on me, and that it did not change my feeling that Stendahl's talent not to say genius lay more in the novel genre. This is a powerful late 19th-Century tale (1894) of a very unhappy childhood indeed, that of a young boy scornfully nicknamed Poil de Carrot (something like “Carrot-hair”) by his truly hateful mother who treasures and coddles his elder brother and sister while blithely exploiting and mistreating him much in the same heartless and vindictive way that Cosette was treated by the Thénardiers or Cinderella by her stepmother. But this has nothing of the fairy-tale about it, and everything of the harsh reality of almost-everyday and totally-believable family relationships later celebrated by Hervé Bazin in his resounding 1945 Goncourt-winning Poing de Vipère on the same "Mother I hate you" theme. The narrative is extremely original and recognizable, almost entirely composed of dialogues of the most credible and realistic kind and with a remarkable exchange of letters at the end, and the style is sparse and bitter and original, particularly well adapted to its moving theme of love-deprived childhood. Jules Renard died early of a heart condition, but he did have time to found the celebrated militant daily newspaper l'Humanité as well as writing this poignant book (dedicated to his own children) that can leave no one indifferent. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 15/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2001 Jan. Génitrix François Mauriac french / / novel Le Livre de poche 160 7
2001 Jan. Remorques Roger Vercel french Tugboats / novel Le Livre de poche 247 7
2001 Jan. Au Large de l'Eden Roger Vercel french Offshore of Eden / novel Le Livre de poche 244 7
2001 Feb. The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck english / - novel Penguin Classics 476 9
l'Imaginaire 2001 Feb. Battling le Ténébreux Alexandre Vialatte french Battling the Moody / novel 238 6 Gallimard
2001 Feb. The Dean's December Saul Bellow english / - novel Penguin 307 6
David Clement- children's 2001 Feb. Fire-Bringer english / - MacMillan 551 *** Davies literature 2001 March The King's English Kingsley Ames english / - linguistics Harper Collins 261 ***
2001 March Captain Corelli's Mandarin Louis de Bernières english / - novel Vintage 435 7
2001 March Blindness José Saramago english / portuguese novel Harvest 326 7
2001 April Tous les noms José Saramago french All the Names portuguese novel Points Histoire 271 8 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 16/70
Comments
The intricate but nevertheless passionately-felt relations between a mother and her middle-aged and eternally-spoilt son after the tragic death of the latter's wife in the near- claustrophobic atmosphere of an upper-middle-class home in the dignified and distinctly provincial town of Bordeaux that is so central to Mauriac's oeuvre. This sharp, perceptive portrayal of a family drama published in 1923 reads in hindsight as a sort of preparatory sketch for Mauriac's later masterpiece Noeud de Vipères (1932), set in the same milieu. Here as there the central interest of the book is really the beautifully clear, elegant, precise style of writing, a model that few modern writers have ever equalled and none surpassed.
A terrific and justly-renowned story of the dramatic existence of the captain and crew of a salvage ship on constant call to try to rescue - and claim for salvage - ships in distress along the Normandy and Brittany coasts in the 1930s. Full of human and natural dramas, this is also an exceptionally interesting portrayal of the way of life of seamen who earn their living in those well-travelled but unpredictable and always-dangerous waters. More than a good adventure story, this rousing tale is a modern sea classic. Another rousing adventure tale with a documentary bent by the author of Remorques - here we zip wide-eyed through 244 pages with a crew of cod fishermen seeking a bonanza catch in the icy waters of the North Sea in winter. There certainly are easier ways to earn a living, but none more exciting! Told in a straightforward low-key unflowery American kind of way, this tale of suffering and strife in the depression days in the dust bowl and in the orchards of California is an American classic that should be on anyone's list of all-time great novels. Vialatte was a brilliant and very non-conformist essayist and writer of pungent chronicles that have assured his posthumous fame, but I had trouble getting involved in this somewhat chaotic account of a misunderstood and marginal - but big, tough and strong-willed, with somewhat brutish tendencies - youth, the first of the three novels that he published during his lifetime. I am sure it was wrong of me to have had such trouble getting through this dense, complex account of an American college dean on leave in communist Hungary (we are in 1982) to visit his dying mother, meditating on his not-very-happy life and on his professional worries and on the ills of America while discussing politics with various servants of the Hungarian state. The author is certainly an erudite and cultivated man with lots to say about you-name-it, but this just cannot be one of his best books, even if it was recommended to me by an expert in the field of contemporary American literature. Pretty good, although not up to the epic standard of the modern classic of the animal-story genre, Watership Down, this tale of anthropomorphic stags battling with wolves and with each other can be recommended to ten-year olds and a bit olders. Authoritative comments on the proper usage of the language of Laurence Sterne by one of the foremost modern English writers. A rousing and best-selling (in England) tale of conflict, adventure, romance and nascent civil war in Greece during World War II that was understandably but somewhat surprisingly unsympathetic to the communist partisans there (who it cannot be denied did later on initiate a bloody civil war at the end of the war). I couldn't help feeling that it lacked depth and that the writing was quite skimpy in parts, but it was nevertheless a good read and by no means a waste of time. A harrowing, even nightmarish tale set in an unnamed city in an unnamed time (close to our own, though) whereby a whole city is suddenly struck by a devastating epidemic of unknown nature, White Blindness, which - get this - makes an ever-increasing number of people in the city go suddenly blind. Not a very enticing start - but hang on, it gets worse. At a loss as to how to react, the authorities quarantine them in an abandoned mental hospital, where conditions go from bad to worse to unbelievably and stomach-turningly horrible as a group of well-organized and very ruthless inmates take over all the food and goods and establish a brutal regime whereby the women become sex slaves and the men and children slaves, period. A parable of man's infinite capacity for being nasty to man, this long and detailed description of rape and murder and starvation and degradation is perfectly credible and probably not all that different from what actually goes on in some prisons in various places around the world, but reading about all that is decidedly not my idea of the nicest way to spend a few leisure hours. No getting away from the fact, though, that the dense, articulate writing grips you from the beginning and with force transports you into the tense, desperate, enclosed atmosphere where the people suddenly trapped in this hellish situation concentrate on surviving and on organizing resistance to their oppressors as best they can. With this strong theme and the quality of its writing this could I suppose be considered as a superior kind of science-fiction story, albeit with distasteful content, but it never goes beyond the level of an imagined parable to establish any kind of effective relevance to the the real world we live in and thereby finally leaves you with a basically unsatisfactory feeling, asking yourself: Just what after all is the point of all this? - unless you are a big sci-fi fan, that is. On the same theme of a community suddenly trying to face up to a collective disaster I would suggest that Camus's La Peste holds pride of place, in spite of the excellence of the writing here. A kind of mix between Elias Canetti's Autodafé and Kafka's The Process, this book about a librarian's passions for books is superbly well written with a Proustian swell of long never- ending phrases, quite pregnant with significance and import. Although it is not a particularly easy novel to read, once you are caught up in the long even flood of words you will want to continue for ever, as I did. Although it tapered off somewhat towards the end from the almost spellbinding level it had been floating on, this book impressed me no end with its depth and its powerful prose where in fine every word seems to fit perfectly into place. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 17/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
Behind the Scenes at the 2001 April Kate Atkinson english / / novel Black Swan 382 6 Museum
2001 April L'Amour en fuite Bernhard Schlink french Flights of Love german short stories Gallimard 313 ***** Les Cahiers 2001 April Siddharta Hermann Hesse french / german novel 200 8 Rouges
2001 April Candide Voltaire french Candide / novel Librio poche 95 8
The picnic of the Jacqueline 2001 April Le pique-nique des coiffures Felicitas Hoppe french german novel 109 6 Hairdressers Chambon
John Cowper 2001 June Wolf Solent english / - novel Vintage 613 8 Powys
2001 June Napoleon: Idées reçues Thierry Lenz french Napoleon: Set Ideas / history Le Cavalier bleu 119 ***
Speak Dutch in 40 2001 June Parlez Néerlandais en 40 leçons Frans Van Passel french / grammar Presses Pocket 251 *** Lessons natural Bibliothèque 2001 June La Vie des termites Maurice Meaterlinck french The Life of Termites / 212 **** science Charpentier 2001 June Nouvelles ironiques Henri Vincenot french Ironic Stories / short stories Le Livre de poche 217 **** She Looks Like an 2001 July On dirait une actrice Eric Holder french / short stories Librio poche 90 *** Actrice
La Pratique courante du 2001 July D. Kouizzer french Speaking Everyday Dutch dutch grammar Le Livre de poche 251 ** néerlandais
Dictionnaire amoureux de la A Affectionate Dictionary history of 2001 Aug. Jacques Lacarrière french / Plon 564 ***** Grèce of Greece civilizations 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 18/70
Comments Atkinson is one of England's most highly-regarded contemporary authors and this Whitbread-prize-winning first novel is I believe one of her best-known or at least most successful books, but I don't really see what all the fuss was about. True it does tell about an ordinary woman's day-to-day existence in a convincing, believable way and it does trace with a lot of realistic detail and dialogues the history of her (pretty ordinary) working-class family since the beginning of the century but I'm sorry to say that I found the people and the events too ordinary to keep me wide awake at night-time and while, yes, there are a lot of feminine insights and sensibility and certainly the writing is literate with much realistic ordinary-persons talk (I'm trying to avoid the increasingly meaningless term working-class here) I just found it all to be, well, pretty ordinary. An absolutely first-rate collection of nicely-written stories all with considerable punch and emotional impact, I hereby vow to reread this book some day in the original text ... The search for internal peace and spiritual understanding of Siddharta, told in a way that is halfway between a novel with dialogues and internal monologues and a sacred text recounting with awe the spiritual messages of Buddhism and Hinduism. Much easier to read and even assimilate than I had been expecting, this book's awesome reputation is on the whole well justified, although I wasn't as shaken by its eastern spirituality (that's not what I'm looking for in a novel, anyway) as many of its reader-believers seem to have been. This book is probably funnier now than when it was published in the 18th Century, as its violent denunciation of the evils of war, poverty, egoism, conformism, etc. probably did not particularly amuse the exponents of positivism and economic laissez-faire liberalism whose optimistic attitudes to progress are held up to such scathing and effective sarcasm and ridicule by this master of the vitriolic pen. A continuing debate, really, although Voltaire's overall moral stance does seem to have come out on top in today's world, and no one can deny the exceptional value of this sweeping satire. A recent German novel about life in the DDR, which turns out to have been just about as drab and discouraging as one had always imagined it to be. Sort of OK, one suspects it has lost a certain Saxon twangy touch in the translation process. This was John Cowper Powys's first novel, published in 1929 when the author was 57 years old(!), three years before his crowning achievement, A Glastonbury Romance (1932). Here too we find the huge cast of characters, the lyrical, semi-mystical and semi-pagan, almost worshipful attitude towards the beauties and the mysteries of the ancient untamed lands of south-western England (Dorsetshire) that contribute so much to Glastonbury's impact. Not particularly easy reading, with Powys's long, involved, passionate prose, his many references to classical and Celtic mythologies, his unceasing search for significance and his mystical pulsions that never let the reader just coast along with the story. But the effort is well worth the while: the prose is rich and masterful, the dialogues are absolutely brilliant as Powys had a Welshman's ear for the music of the spoken word, there is drama and passion and sensuality and a permanent sense of the quasi-spiritual glories of just being alive throughout this marvellously original, powerful, exceptional book. An interesting albeit brief analysis of the main clichés currently in vogue about the big little man, such as: "The Napoleonic wars ruined France" (not really); "Napoleon governed alone" (no); "France was never so powerful as under Napoleon" (no); "Napoleon started from nothing" (no); "Napoleon reinvented the art of warfare" (sort of) - by an highly qualified historian expert on the subject, neither as pro- or as anti- as I had feared but calm and dispassionate in a most readable, conversational way. It all seems so easy at first, with at first sight so many similarities with German with which I am well beyond the beginner's stage - but the disillusion sets in rapidly. It appears that Schliemann, the discoverer of Troy, taught himself Dutch in three weeks with a book like this, but he either had a better book or a better brain than I have, for sure. Described by a master of prose, this brilliant evocation of the astonishing development of these incredibly well-organized insects who so successfully went underground, turning blind in the process, to avoid their mortal and fiercer enemy the ant (if you can't beat 'em, avoid 'em), this fascinating book is just about as enchanting as his masterful and poetical The Life of Bees. A discovery for me - highly recommended. The title story is well worth reading.
This utterly confirmed my impression after a first bout with the language of Erasmus that it is a lot tougher than it looks at first sight. As there is a lot of good literature written in Dutch and it's a very speaker-friendly kind of lingo, with a much wider use of friendly-sounding diminutives (simply add a -je suffix to just about any word) than most other languages and with tons of expressions and jazzy ways of shortening words and running them together, it seemed like a good idea to get it under my belt, or rather my tongue. Alas, it turns out to be just as tough to master as all the others ... Does anyone know and understand both modern and ancient Greece better than Jacques Lacarrière ? I think not. The scope of this anthology of 50-odd dense and lovingly-drafted essays in alphabetic order from A as in Alexandria, Argos, Alexander, Aphrodite, Alcibiades, Anaxagore, Antigone, the poet Alexandrou Aris and other equally essential and eye- opening subjects through B as in Byzantium and C as in Cappadoce and Cavafy and Crete for starters through to Z as in Zeus and Zebecco (the dance), Lacarrière takes us on a giddy whirlwind and truly inspiring tour that not only takes us through the glories of the ancient Greek and Hellenistic civilizations but also illuminates the cultural splendours and treasures of contemporary Greece and its inhabitants, writers and poets. One of the very best volumes in an exceptionally praiseworthy collection of books entitled Dictionnaire amoureux de ...by outstanding writers and artists and thinkers on their most beloved subject. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 19/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating nrf poésie 2001 Aug. Poèmes Constantin Cavafy french Collected Poems greek poetry 266 ****** Gallimard 2001 Aug. Treize Contes Etranges Vincent Ravallec french Three Strange Tales / short stories J'ai lu 217 ***
2001 Oct. Set in Darkness Ian Rankin english / - thriller Orion 466 ***
L'Espagnol d'aujourd'hui - 2001 Dec. / french Today's Spanish / grammar Le Livre de poche 478 *** Methode 90 TOTAL YR: no. of books = 31 avg. pages/week = 171 pages = 8884
2002 Feb. Don Quichotte Miguel Cervantes french Don Quixote spanish novel La Pléiade 1055 10
La Pratique courante de Speaking Everyday 2002 March / french spanish grammar Le Livre de poche 317 *** l'espagnol Spanish 2002 March La Bataille Patrick Rambaud french The Battle / novel Le Livre de poche 284 7 Nouvelles espagnoles Contemporary Spanish 2002 March anthology spanish spanish short stories Langues pour tous 176 ** contemporaines Short Stories Ruses et strategèmes de Ruses and Strategems in 2002 March Daniel Appriou french / history Le Pré aux Clercs 204 ** l'histoire History
Robert Louis Oxford World's 2002 March Treasure Island english / - novel 245 9 Stevenson Classics
2002 March The Mosquito Coast Paul Theroux english / - novel Penguin 380 7 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 20/70
Comments One of the greatest poets of the 20th Century if not the greatest, author of Waiting for the Barbarians and Les Dieux Désertent Antoine and Le Soleil de l'Après-Midi (pardon my French) among many other masterpieces, the Old Man so venerated throughout Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, magnificently translated here from the original Greek into French by Margaret Yourcenar herself, who also contributes an extremely erudite and penetrating analysis of Cavafy's oeuvre. Eblouissant! Very good stories by a contemporary writer, a confirmation for me of Ravalec's solid reputation in the French literary milieu. This was my first Rankin mystery, one which had been recommended to me my a connoisseur, and while I can understand the appeal of his hard-nosed, cynical and rather bleak vision of the city of Glasgow and its not particularly loveable inhabitants, I don't really think that this is my cup of tea - too violent in a nasty sort of way, really, and the gloomy police inspector Rebus while certainly well-drawn is not the kind of person I admire much, to be frank. An introduction to a language which I'd ever so much like to be able to read. Although that will probably never happen, learning about its basic structure was most interesting - wow, those irregular verbs and those omnipresent imperfect subjunctives!
This eternal masterpiece will never cease to impress and awe. Published in 1605, way before anything of similar stature was produced elsewhere in Europe (but then it is true that the first great Japanese classic, the Genji Monagatari by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman, had been written 500 years earlier!) this rollicking tale of a man driven to the edge of folly by his passion for books (readers, beware!) - a profound theme indeed, investigated more recently by Canetti (Autodafé) and Saramago (All The Names) with great effect - and his immersion in the dream-world they project (video gamers, beware!) to go out into the wild world out there to combat its injustices (social reformers, beware!) and win the heart of his idealized Dulcina (lovers, beware!) is a picaresque farce that is transformed into a universal epic by the forceful presence not to say omnipresence of his resourceful equerry and general factotum Sancho Panza, who actually ends up achieving his own dream of acquiring a duchy of his own with surprising results (power-seekers beware!) and who provides the realistic and everyman element that combines with Don Quixote's world of the imagination and of noble knights and ladies to make this inseparable pair so memorable, so humane and so universal. Interesting but not as easy as it looked by any means: those irregular verbs! those subjunctives! that vocabulary! After battling with them for a few months I felt like Don Quixote coming home bruised and battered and disillusioned after his bout with the windmills ... A prize-winning fictionalized account of the key and very bloody battle of Wagram that established Napoleon's mastery over Europe in 1805, nicely written. A terrific albeit blood- curdling read. It was fun trying to decipher the original German texts in this bilingual edition, but I didn't find any masterpieces in this set of very short contemporary stories. Crude and simplistic, this title turned out to be a come-on for a very sloppily-written, obviously hastily-put-together book, full of clichés and trite stories of the most low-brow kind. Very disappointing - yet again the lesson learned was not to buy books at cut-rate prices just because of the price - get the best and to heck with avarice when it comes to fodder for the mind! One of the best books for younger readers ever written, this reread gave me just about as much enjoyment as when I first read it a million years ago. The writing is taut and the story moves along steadily at a nice pace, the bad guys are really well done - for once, unlike the current mythology, pirates are not portrayed as romantic rebels or gentlemen of fortune revelling in their marginal ways while battling for freedom against the establishment, but mostly as the savage cut-throat scum that they really were - and we meet one of the outstanding characters in all fiction I would say, I am referring of course to the extraordinarily resourceful, capable, likeable and dangerous Long John Silver, who actually gets away at the end! What a shame that Stevenson didn't write a sequel about what he got up to next ... But then Bjorn Larssen did do just that with his most interesting (although with a way too pro-pirate bent for my taste) novel Long John Silver, a fictionalized autobiography of our bad hero supposedly written at the end of his long and adventurous life, where Larssen imagines not only the sequel to TI but also the prelude to it, featuring Captain Flint (so often referred to in TI) and explaining how the famous treasure ended up where it did and how and why the map got drawn and so on. In any case my not very original but firmly-held lifelong feeling about this book was confirmed by this reread: anyone who has not read this book at 12 years old or so has missed something important in the growing-up experience! Practically a modern classic, this story about getting away from it all by getting closer to mother Nature will discourage more than one from following suit. Good reading but scary and rather depressing in a way, because it is all so very credible. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 21/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
essay 2002 April Hommes et Destins Stefan Zweig french Men and Destinies german Le Livre de poche 215 ***** (literature)
2002 April The Arithmetic of Life and Death George Shaffner english / - maths Ballantine Books 200 *** natural 2002 April Histoires d'Insectes Jean-Henri Fabre french Stories of Insects / Librio poche 94 ***** science
2002 April Vineland Thomas Pynchon english / - novel Penguin 385 7
Oxford University 2002 May Mathematics for the Curious Peter M. Higgins english / - maths 220 *** Press
2002 May The Satanic Verses Salman Rushdie english / - novel Vintage Canada 561 8
Jean-Claude A Affectionate Dictionary history of 2002 June Dictionnaire amoureuse de l'Inde french / Plon 471 ***** Carrière of India civilizations
A Short Lexicon of 2002 June Petit lexique des mots essentiels Odon Vallet french / linguistics Albin Michel 295 *** Essential Words 2002 July The Virgin in the Garden A.S. Byatt english / - novel Vintage 566 7
l'Italien en 90 leçons et en 90 Italian in 90 Days and in 2002 July Vittorio Fiocca french italian grammar Le Livre de poche 385 ** jours 90 Lessons 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 22/70
Comments A master of the brilliant intellectual biography (of anything he undertook to do, in fact) in his element, with 22 articles on the leading intellectuals and writers and artists of his time, most of whom he knew personally and all of whom he had met and empathized with: Verlaine, Romain Rolland, Josph Roth, Rilke, Arthur Schnitzler, Tagore, Theodore Herzl, Jean Jaurès, Mahler and Freud amongst others, as well as essays on some of the outstanding intellectuals of the previous century, notably Chateaubriand, E.T.A. Hoffman, and Nietzche. Full of tenderness and admiration for the brilliant spirits he is writing about en connaissance de cause, Zweig's penetrating mind and incisive pen bring us new insights into the works and characters of every one of the objects of his scrutiny. Most appropriately and effectively, the opening essay is a powerful tribute to the genius of that prince of writers Marcel Proust, entitled The Tragic Destiny of Marcel Proust that sent shivers of emotion down my spine. What a book! What a writer! Maths applied to everyday events - the kind of book, especially interesting for young people, that is much more common in the USA than elsewhere, unfortunately for those elsewhere. Another good book to put in the hands of every 12-year-old, I would say. A selection of masterful studies by the great 19th Century etymologist, these charming, sprightly, erudite, poetical accounts of the wonders of the insect world are absolutely fascinating. Brilliant and flamboyant, this account of hippies in California in the seventies has a big reputation, although the author's pyrotechnic style is not necessarily to everyone's taste - I for one started to find it pretty trying around the halfway mark. And I just couldn't work up much sympathy or even interest in the off-beat but boring people it keeps blasting off about. But there's no denying that the style is distinctive, even if it does get in the way of the message, whatever that was supposed it be - it passed me quite by, I'm sorry to say. Once again I was torn between my admiration for a writer's mastery of language and my dislike of the exercise de style kind of literary showing-off, with the latter largely and negatively outweighing (for me) the former. With chapters like The Truth About Fractions, Numbers, Some Geometry, Algebra, Chance and Games of Chance, The Golden Ratio, Networks, Ten Questions (When do the hands of a clock coincide? How many matches are played in a tennis tournament? Why does adding successive odd numbers always yield a perfect square? and seven others equally intriguing) and More Questions Answered (At a party must there always be some pair of people who have the same number of friends present? How many n x n squares are there on a chessboard? ...) this is another very good book to put into the hands of young and not-so-young people alike. No one could possibly regret the time spent pondering the questions asked herein and savouring the mental joy of understanding the answers. Not only a courageous book, with its critical reinterpretation of the saga of Mohammed and his frequent hikes up the mountain to discuss things with the angel Gabriel (and as it just so happened coming back every time with a verdict from G. that settled his latest dispute with his neighbours in his favour), but a wide-ranging, well-written, almost lyrical saga ranging widely over time (M's and ours) and space (India and England). A really quite inspired work, by a major writer on a very big theme indeed. A must. A superb series of eye-opening essays on many varied aspects of a great civilization, arranged in alphabetical order from A as in Agra (where the the Taj Mahal is) and Ajanta (the great Buddist caves) through B as in Bombay and C as in Calcutta and D as in Dalai-Lama and Dharma and Delhi through M as in Mahabharata and Miracles and Modernism and Mythology and Music and so on through to Vishnu and Yoga via many others. By a very talented writer and man of theater and thinker profoundly impassioned by the subject. I was very impressed by this uplifting book, another example of the exceptional level of quality of the Dictionnaire Amoureux series published by this editor. Interesting analyses of the inner meanings of many well-used but often-misunderstood french words, their origins and evolution and subtleties and the expressions which they enliven and provide substance to, by a distinguished lexicologist. How has it come to be that England seems to produce so many more top-notch women writers than other countries? This erudite, well-written novel will disappoint no one, in spite of its rather slowish pace. An interesting introduction to the most beautiful-sounding language on earth AND the language of Dante. It was encouraging to see that the irregular verbs are almost all miraculously close to their French equivalents, but then discouragement set in when I got around to the subjunctives and the vocabulary and the endlessly subtle rules and regulations, let along the tonal modes and accentuations that are such an important component of the music of the tongue. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 23/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2002 Aug. Moby Dick or The Whale Herman Melville english / - novel Penguin Classics 650 9
2002 Aug. Barchester Towers Anthony Trollope english / - novel Penguin Classics 551 9
2002 Sept. Long John Silver Björn Larsson french / swedish novel Le Livre de poche 509 7
Le Son des tambours sur la The Sound of Drums on 2002 Sept. Jean Raspail french / short stories Robert Laffont 236 *** neige the Snow
2002 Oct. La Fête du Bouc Mario Vargas Llosa french The Feast of the Goat spanish novel Gallimard nrf 604 9
Summary of Italian Hachette 2002 Nov. Précis de grammaire italienne / french italian grammar 250 ** Grammar Education 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 24/70
Comments Why is there so much talk about the long-awaited Great American Novel? Here it is! Written in a vigorous style peppered with very American humour and a quite unparalleled enthusiasm for his subject, the quality of the text is of the very highest order, complex and rich and highly articulate - perhaps too sophisticated in fact for the American public of the time who practically ignored this novel at the time of its publication in 1851 in spite of the big successes of his previous books, Typee in 1846 and Ogoo in 1847, both about life in the Polynesian islands in the exotic South Seas. Here Melville embraces very deep themes in this epic adventure laced with metaphysical implications, where the ship and its crew become a microcosm of the universe itself and the obsessional pursuit of the White Whale a metaphor of man's impassioned but probably futile course through life. But the story has its feet firmly on the ground, or rather of the ship-planks, it is infused with a hardly believable energy and drive, its central figure Captain Ahab is as monumental a creation as any in literature, the text is studded with moving and profound and brilliant passages and with many appropriate mythological and biblical references, the dialogues are as real and true to life as can be ... if only Melville had managed to contain his enthusiasm for the subject of whales in general and white whales in particular a bit more by eliminating a number of those long documentary passages which interrupt the narrative so often! But then, that was in a way the style of the time, and Les Misérables and War and Peace, which were both being written at about the same time as Moby Dick, are also full of long documentary chapters that break into the flow of the narrative in the same way. But there is no way I would want to have the magnificent and highly appropriate documentary passages in Les Misérables (on Waterloo, on the history of Paris convents, on the Paris sewage system, on the construction of barricades ...) to be removed from that masterpiece whereas the extraneous chapters that give Moby Dick its "Encyclopedia of the Whale" aspect could probably be put with advantage into an Appendix (as could the huge and boring chapters in War and Peace on Tolstoy's theory of History). Moby Dick is certainly a hard number to follow without coming across as small and trite, but this enthralling work, of a totally different nature, managed the feat. Helped by a particularly heartfelt preface by John Kenneth Galbraith and by the excellent introduction (as usual with Penguin Classics editions) to approach this work in a relaxed, at-peace-with- the-world, unhurried frame of mind ready to enjoy the fine flavour of that which I was about to receive, I found myself savouring and sipping and smiling at practically every page throughout this quite bewitching story of strife in the Anglican Church in a glorious and ancient and utterly civilized corner of south England baptized Barchester. A story that subtly is saying things about tolerance and justice and openness to men's hearts and the virtues of kindness and understanding in an increasingly harsh, competitive, strife-ridden world. All that in the most easy and natural prose one can imagine, constantly underpinned with a sense of humour and whimsy at the foibles of the men and women in this imperfect world. But this being peaceful and civilized Barchester where the gardens are somehow closer to Eden than elsewhere, when I put this wonderful book down I felt that I too had had been touched by its special grace, thanks to the magic of Trollope's art. A very successful (in Europe) fictional autobiography of Long John Silver, where you find out all about his career and notably about what he and Captain Flint and his men did before the treasure of Treasure Island fame got buried there, as well as about what happened to Long John after he had sailed away after the Treasure Island incident. A good bit too pro- pirate for me, though, although I can understand their freedom-loving, anti-establishment appeal to the young at heart, and there is no denying that Long John had a sympathetic side to him, or at least that he knew how to put a sympathetic face on. No doubt if Larssen got attacked on his own boat by real-life pirates like those not-so-nice ones around Malaysia and Thailand he might sing a very different tune; but then he wouldn't have survived that interesting experience ... I enjoyed these clever stories with a strange undercurrent of semi-mystical significance by the writer to whom I am eternally grateful for having explained to me (and others, in a remarkable series of essays in the Figaro weekly supplement by various authors on their favourite novel) the exceptional value of the oeuvre of Théophile Gauthier in general and his brilliant Capitaine Fracasse in particular. This was my introduction to the works of this immensely talented author of Peruvian origins. A brilliant and powerful study of a modern totalitarian state with a Latin American veneer and a universal core of terror and thought control and cult of the personality, the thirty-one-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic from 1930 when he took power (with the help of the US of A, natch) to 1961, when he was assassinated. With finesse and artistry, Vargas Llosa takes us into the minds of all of the actors in this drama: the enclosed world of this in many ways typical totalitarian state is progressively seen through the eyes of the police chiefs, of the middle-level officials, of the collaborators, of the citizens forced to collaborate in order to survive, of the rare opponents and even through the eyes of the exceptionally capable and charismatic dictator himself - a man with a spellbinding aura of personal magnetism and power whose gaze (he stares out at you from the dust-cover so that you can judge for yourself) no one was ever able to withstand. The writing is so clean and sharp, the structure is so original and effective, the psychology of each of the successive narrators is so effortlessly and effectively portrayed, the basic existential quandary - the quasi-impossibility of resistance to an efficient totalitarianism from the inside - is so powerful and so significant, the story itself is so gripping that I was captivated and enthralled and moved by this brilliant and masterful book, many of whose scenes are forever burnt into my mind, from start to end. More Italian basics that I struggled with just as unsuccessfully as the first time around a while back. I am afraid that I shall have to consider the Italian language in the same way as one looks at Italian Renaissance art - as an inspired manifestation of man's potential on quite another plane of accomplishment than my own, whose splendour I can perceive and appreciate from afar and whose practitioners I can admire but never emulate. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 25/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2002 Nov. Les Misérables Victor Hugo french Les Misérables / novel La Pléiade 1486 10
2002 Nov. Tender is the Night F. Scott Fitzgerald english / - novel Penguin Classics 374 8
The Universal Story of 2002 Nov. Historia universal de la infamia Jorge Luis Borges spanish spanish short stories Pocket bilingue 185 ***** Infamy
From Where The Song 2002 Nov. D'où jaillit le chant François Cheng french / art Phébus 157 **** Came
Travel Tales and Renaissance du 2002 Nov. Récits et dessins du voyage Victor Hugo french / memoir 139 **** Drawings Livre
Vous trouvez que je suis trop Do You Think I Am Too 2002 Nov. Stephane Denis french / short stories Fayard 218 *** grande ? Big? Diary of a Sentimental 2002 Nov. Journal d'un tueur sentimental Luis Sepulveda french spanish short stories Points 146 **** Killer
2002 Nov. Le Dîner de filles Patrick Besson french The Girls' Dinner / novel Presses Pocket 141 7 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 26/70
Comments This is a sublime reading experience, without any doubt one of the greatest novels of all time. From start to finish one is swept up by its steady and solidly-sustained pace, by its ambition and scope and universality, by its forceful mix of humanism (the good side of man) and its realism (the down side), by its passion and its power and its drama. And one is moved to the depths by some of the greatest scenes in all literature, such as the scene where the young Cosette, miserable and cold and terrified of the night and its shadows, alone in the middle of the threatening woods where she is struggling to carry the pail of water she has been sent to fetch by her tormentors, finds the heavy pail suddenly lifted from her hands and the strong hand of Jean Valjean leading her out of the dark into a new life - one of the absolute highlights of my entire reading experience. There are many other passages of exceptional grandeur in this big book, such as Jean Valjean's life-moulding encounter with Monseigneur Bienvenu in the early stages of the novel, or his flight from the police through the streets of Paris at night, or the barricade battle scenes, or his epic escape through the sewers of Paris, or his final dramatic confrontation with his nemesis, Inspector Javert, and many others, but the key merit of the book for me as for most readers I would think, at least those who can benefit from the original text without recourse to a translator's services, is the quality and sheer intrinsic interest of the text: this man was a writer of immense stature. Hugo was both a novelist and a poet, and there is an ease and fullness and breadth about the text that is the mark of a born master of words - it turns out in effect that his oeuvre contains the largest number of different words of any writer in the history of the French language. So although some have baulked at the long, very long documentary-type chapters (on Waterloo, on the history of Paris convents, on the building of the sewers of Paris, on the construction of barricades in the 1848 revolution (17 years after the events described in the novel!)) that are scattered about the book, most reader-admirers of Les M. find them so engrossing in their own right and so helpful to a heightened appreciation of the key episodes that they introduce that it would be impossible to feel that they would have been best omitted in the way one can easily feel about the big digressions in other major works written practically at the same time, such as the many whale-documentary chapters in Moby Dick and the long Theory of History chapters in War and Peace. So what is there to criticize? Perhaps Jean Valjean does disappoint us somewhat at the end when he bows down to conventional values and behaviour in his old age, but that is the natural and hardly-condemnable consequence of his obsession with his adopted daughter's well-being, and I found a certain form of subtle realism in this portrait of a once-towering man declining into as peaceful and strife-free existence as possible in the twilight of his life cycle. This book just has to be on anyone's list of the Top n.
A brilliant account of a couple of sophisticated jazz-age Americans on a jag around the French Riviera in the 1920s, hobnobbing with fellow expatriates and distilling their existential ennui in a flurry of cocktail conversations and domestic strife. Fitzgerald manages somehow to create a very adult, credible tone and an atmosphere of significance around his classy couple and their coterie, helped by his gift for witty, wry dialogues and his narrative skill. Perhaps the innate cynicism of the actors in this very contemporary drama put me off my stride though, as although I admired this book I was not moved or touched by it the way I rather expect to be by a great book, possibly mistakenly.
A master of the art of the (strange) short story at his mysterious and creative best.
Flowers and birds were the main subjects of classical Chinese painting of the brilliant Song dynasty in China (960-1279), a period of cultural renaissance in which painting (as well as music and poetry and the decorative arts) played a major role. François Cheng, a member of the Académie Française of Chinese extraction, explains with elegance and style the aesthetic connotations and pictorial significance of the art of the Song period and its influence throughout the following centuries in delicate, instructive analyses of the hundred-odd masterpieces collected in this splendid book. One can never tire of looking at these timeless portraits of birds and animals and plants and insects somehow appearing to radiate with the happiness of appearing before us in such perfect harmony with the world around them. Man is not absent from this world of beauty and harmony: there is often a calmly contemplative figure leaning on the sidelines or in the background gazing with unconcealed admiration at the wonders before him ... how can one not be moved to the core by such a spectacle, indeed? Hugo writing about his travels here and there, mostly around some of the most picturesque areas of France (Picardy, Champagne, Normandy, Brittany, the Pyrénées...) but also in Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg and, famously, the Rhine valley in Germany. Interesting and of course extremely well-written, all of these travel anecdotes, poetical and full of the interest in his fellow man that so characterizes the author of Les Misérables, are illustrated by the master himself who was an extremely talented artist in his own right, on top of all his other claims to fame.
These stories by a well-known contemporary French writer were not quite as classy as I had been expecting Sharp and on the whole cynical - but effective - stories told by a leading contemporary Chilean writer, who certainly knows how to put a good, well-told story together. An action writer, if you'll pardon the expression, without deliberate literary frills; there is a solid dose of humour and sophistication in these realistic tell-it-the-way-it-is tales that can be recommended to one and all. Catty talk among girls when they get together and really get going about the men in their lives (and about each other). Besson is never boring and can be very good indeed, as he shows here once again. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 27/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating 2002 Nov. Le Deuxième Couteau Patrick Besson french The Second Knife / novel Le Livre de poche 222 7 Eric-Emmanuel The Bible According to 2002 Nov. L'Evangile selon Pilate french / novel Le Livre de poche 283 7 Schmitt Pontius Pilate 2002 Nov. Electre Jean Giraudoux french Electra / theater Le Livre de poche 177 **** 2002 Nov. Shitao François Cheng french Shitao / art Phébut 156 ***** 2002 Nov. Sempre Caro Marcello Fois french Caro For Ever italian thriller Points 118 6
essay 2002 Nov. Le Progrès et ses ennemis Guy Sorman french Progress and its Enemies / (current Fayard 289 *** events)
2002 Nov. La Caverne José Saramago french The Cavern portuguese novel Seuil 347 7 2002 Nov. La Musique d'une Vie André Makhine french A Life's Music / novel Points 129 7
2002 Dec. Les Foulards Rouges Frédérique Fajardie french The Red Scarves / novel J.C. Lattès 570 6
L'Univers, les Dieux, les The Universe, the Gods history of 2002 Dec. Jean-Pierre Vernant french / Points 228 **** Hommes and Men civilizations
2002 Dec. Le Misanthrope Molière french The Misanthrope / theater Théâtre de poche 164 *****
2002 Dec. La Peinture de Pompei Georges Vallet french Paintings of Pompei / art Hazan 354 *****
2002 Dec. Requiem pour l'Est André Makhine french Requiem For The East / novel Points 362 7
2002 Dec. Tom Thompson Dennis Read english / - art Canadian Heritage 319 ****
The Life, Play and Death 2002 Dec. Vie, jeu et mort de Lul Mazrek Ismaïl Kadaré french albanian novel Fayard 276 6 of Lul Mazrek
2002 Dec. Colline Jean Giono french Hill / novel Le Livre de poche 158 7 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 28/70
Comments More good Besson, ie: more good snappy punchy prose - what more can one ask for to while away a few hours in the most pleasant and fruitful way possible? Pontius Pilate tells what it was like meeting and listening to and judging a very special man, and the effect that that man unlike any other had on those around him (overwhelming), on the man in the street (largely hostile), on the local legal and religious authorities (totally negative), on himself and, in an original but totally credible twist, on his (Pontius P's) own family. I was unexpectedly very impressed and moved by this surprisingly powerful book which I have heartily recommended to my entourage. The best-known and perhaps most serious play by my favourite contemporary playwright. Good solid stuff, even if I prefer his comedies. The works of an unorthodox master of 17th-century Chinese painting presented and explained by a poet and expert on Chinese aesthetics An exciting discovery of a major artist whose works overflow with poetry and passion. Set in a timeless Sardinian village, this pastoral drama by one of Italy's leading young writers in the modern thriller genre is enjoyable and interesting, albeit way too short.
Do we and should we still believe in progress? Do progressives (a term long monopolized by the Party and its sympathizers and which remains appropriated by those on the left of centre) believe in it and promote it? The author, a well-known essayist and liberal (meaning right-of-centre in French political parlance) polemicist rather thinks that recent tendencies on the left in France such as alter-mondialism and anti-liberalism and greenism (pardon the neologism) have their minds decidedly set against the very idea of material progress, in the name of a higher, more social and greener ideal, and explains why he thinks this is a wrong-headed and potentially catastrophic Weltanschauung (outlook on the world).
A good read, although the parallel with the shadows of the real world perceived by the inhabitants of the cave in Plato's Republic did not come across all that convincingly, I thought. I must say that I prefer his earlier works, notably All the Names and even Blindness . Beautifully written, this powerful short novel by a Russian author writing in French confirms the major status of the author of Le Testament français, his masterpiece. A dashing cape-and-sword historical novel in the Three Musketeers tradition, set in the days of quasi-civil war in the mid-17th Century when the Fronde rebellion by princes and Paris mobs threatened the rule of the young boy-king Louis XIV, by a leading French writer of popular novels and thrillers. This obviously well-researched book was certainly interesting historically (taking place at about the same time as the bloody civil war in England that led to the overthrow of the monarchy there, one tends to forget how close the French monarchy came to suffering a similar fate) but I somehow found that it lacked the sparkle and punch of its illustrious predecessors in this well-loved genre in France, notably The Three M (of course) but also two others that I just adore: Le Capitaine Fracasse by Théophile Gautier and the magnificent Angélique saga by Serge and Anne Golon. One of the leading French specialists on ancient Greece presents in an attractive, flowing style that flatters the intelligence of the reader many of the major Greek myths and beliefs: the origin of the universe, Zeus and the wars of the gods, the Trojan War, Ulysses, Dionysus, Oedipus ... a real treat. A summit of the art of the theater that has brilliantly passed the test of time. A basically sombre, pessimistic comment on the moral compromises that are a necessary part of the social graces, the subtlety and sparkle of the dialogues, the profundity of the characterization of the central characters, and the timelessness of the theme - not to mention the elegance and clarity of the verse - contribute to making this play as about as close to perfection as you can get. A milestone. This elaborate study of the evolution of the styles of the paintings at Pompei and nearby Herculaneum over a period of two hundred years or so is fascinating. This being a Hazan edition, the quality of the reproductions are absolutely first-rate, and the erudition of the absolutely fascinating commentaries is of the very highest level. What an amazing civilization, so close to us in their way of life and values, although 2000 years in time away! Yet another superb novel by the author of Le Testament français. The remarkable catalogue of the great retrospective a few years ago in Ottawa and Toronto of Tom Thompson, whose life and works and aesthetic reaction to the Arts and Crafts movement inspired the Group of Seven (which his untimely death in 1917 in a canoe accident at the age of only 40 prevented him from joining). An interesting and very Canadian life, mostly spent in the woods of Algonquin Park and on Georgian Bay. A big plus in my bookshelf. I am a big fan of the great Albanian master who generally has the talent, indeed genius, of being able to make his tiny, outlying homeland seem to be one of the most interesting and significant places on earth, but this his latest book, set in the post-communist period still suffering from the devastation of 45 years of Marxist-Leninist totalitarianism, is distinctly less compelling than any of his previous books that I have read. Giono's unique, very flamboyant style is not to everyone's taste, but I find that not only does it suit his Provençal themes admirably, but that it grows on me the more I get used to it. Not only a precious testimony to the sun-beaten southern splendours of a bygone age, to its population, its mores, its savage beauties and its colourful and extraordinarily expressive language, but an authentic literary voice that is well worth the effort and perseverance needed to penetrate these pages unlike any other. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 29/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
The Cicada and other 2002 Dec. La Cigale et autres nouvelles Anton Tchekhov french russian short stories Librio poche 90 ***** stories
TOTAL YR: no. of books = 48 avg. pages/week = 307 pages = 15941 2003 Jan. La Défense Loujine Vladimir Nabokov french The Loujine Defense russian novel Folio 282 7 children's Dover Juvenile 2003 Jan. The Jungle Book Rudyard Kipling english / - 151 ***** literature Classics
2003 Feb. The Pickwick Papers Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 953 8
2003 Feb. Oliver Twist Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 558 8
2003 March Les Indes Noires Jules Verne french The Black Indies / novel Le Livre de poche 246 7 2003 April Tom Jones Henry Fielding english / - novel Penguin Classics 855 9 Arturo Perez- The Flemish Master's 2003 April Le Tableau du maître flamand french spanish novel le livre de poche 347 7 Reverte Painting 2003 April Plain Tales from the Hills Rudyard Kipling english / - short stories Penguin Classics 295 ***** The Marvellous Voyage of La Merveilleux Voyage de Nils 2003 May Selma Lagerlöf french Nils Holgersson across swedish novel Actes Sud 635 9 Holgersson à travers la Suède Sweden Arturo Perez- 2003 May Club Dumas french The Dumas Club spanish novel le livre de poche 446 7 Reverte Nathaniel 2003 May The Scarlet Letter english / - novel Penguin Classics 267 9 Hawthorne 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 30/70
Comments A collection of six short stories by one of the greatest masters of the genre, if not the greatest, of which the longest is the masterful 35-page title story about a gay young woman, her brilliant social life in a sophisticated artistic milieu and her drab and accommodating husband whose worth she learns to appreciate too late, a tale that like so many of his stories starts off calmly depicting a milieu so effectively that you feel you have been there too, with people who become immediately so alive and so individual that you feel you could recognize them if they passed you on the street, to move you along at a steady pace towards a final usually-bitter twist with an emotional punch in it that balances out the plus and minus aspects of life in a superior - I almost said godlike - sort of way that leaves the reader shaken with the impact of his reading experience and awed by the artistic magic of this supreme painter with words. The other five stories, all also translated into elegant, expressive French by the gifted Franco-Russian writer Vladimir Volkoff, are all of the same superior level, naturally.
An excellent early Nabokov novel on a chess theme. Highly recommended, and not of course just for chess lovers, as no knowledge of the game is needed to appreciate the subtlety of this psychologically complex novel. This book should be read by every young person - and their elders too.
Dickens's first and funniest novel, published when he was 25 - a huge worldwide hit which had people lining up on the wharfs in Sydney and New York when the boats came in with the latest instalment, and which went through 100 English and American editions before the end of the century. An English version of the Don Quixote/Sancho Panza theme, with an utterly likeable but impractical nouveau riche would-be gentleman from London (Mr. Pickwick) travelling around the country-side with a street-wise and resourceful young Cockney lad, the equally likeable and way more practical young Sam Weller, as servant-guide and fixer-upper of awkward incidents, this is a hugely enjoyable book just packed with the vignettes of life that are Dickens's trademark. Note that it would be a big mistake to read this book in an edition without the facetious illustrations by Phiz (George Cruickshank) that were so carefully elaborated in collaboration with Dickens that they are really an integral part of the text - in a quite literal sense too, as Dickens was originally hired to write around the illustration, by another artist, of the first instalment that had already been established and which was at the core of the publisher's project, after which the first illustrator promptly died and Dickens hired Phiz and took over editorial direction of the entire project. This book was a shock to Dickens's vast public, who were looking for further Cockney comedy in the Pickwick vein, and got a hard-hitting description of some of the most shocking aspects of the social tragedies of the world's most advanced country at the time: criminal child neglect in orphanages, inhuman conditions in public work houses, crime and prostitution ... This is sock-it-to-'em fiction at its very best, with scenes of low life in London that just cannot be forgotten. And with a number of his most outstanding "supporting role" characters: the resourceful and worldly-wise young pickpocket The Artful Dodger, the moll Nancy, the clever, scheming (and caricaturally Jewish) gang leader Fagin, and the brutal arch-criminal Sikes. The one major reserve modern readers can have about this famous book is about the anti-semitic portrait of the arch-villain Fagin, the central figure in the last two-thirds of the book, in which the young (27 year-old) Dickens reflected the current prevailing attitudes towards those strange folk, and for which Dickens, influenced by the comments of close Jewish friends, later tried to made amends by portraying another central Jewish character, the dustman Old Riah in A Mutual Friend, his last completed work, in an almost exaggeratedly positive light. Here again, the original illustrations by Phiz are an admirable and important supplement to the text. Jules Verne explores what might be going on in the depths of a huge, abandoned coal-mine in northern England. Very readable, of course. Exploding with life and vigour and humour and drive, very cosmopolitan with an engaging young hero wandering all over 18th Century Europe learning the ways of the world, full of snappy dialogues, nicely written but unpretentious, this wonderful big book epitomizes the spirit of that momentous century in a unique way. My favourite Perez-Reverte novel, really informed and even enthusiastic about the great early-Renaissance 14th-Century Flemish artist Van Eyck. It is impossible not to want to read other books by this author after finishing this excellent historical novel by one of modern Spain's leading - and, I would think, most popular - contemporary writers. Kipling for adults - and at his best, which is very good indeed. The journey of a young boy around Sweden on the back of a wild goose at the turn of the 20th Century, a modern classic justly famous throughout Scandinavia and elsewhere, celebrating the call of the far-off and the love of the land. Heart-warming and timeless, and not by any means only for young people. This edition presents for the first time the full saga, with all the bits that had previously been cut out of the French (and I believe other foreign-language) editions on the grounds that they were too literary for young people(!). Another good Perez-Reverte, although a bit too facile for my tastes. The classic tale of parochial puritanism in a primitive place: pioneer pre-revolutionary America. A powerful portrayal of the practically-irresistible pressure exercised by dominant social attitudes on the individual that is just about as relevant today as ever. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 31/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2003 May Poe: Selected Tales Edgar Allan Poe english / - short stories Vintage Books 436 ****
2003 May La double inconstance Marivaux french Double Inconsistency / theater Classique Hachette 189 **** literary 2003 May Anthologie Rabelais Rabelais french A Rabelais Anthology / Librio poche 124 **** anthology
10/18 domaine 2003 May Le Sentier des nids d'araignée Italo Calvino french The Spider-Web Path italian novel 222 7 étranger
Land of Exile and other 2003 June Terre d'exil et d'autres nouvelles Caesare Pavese french italian short stories Folio 101 **** stories
Captain Pantoja and The 2003 June Pantaléon et les visiteuses Mario Vargas Llosa french spanish novel Folio 313 8 Special Service
essay 2003 June Après L'Empire Emmanuel Todd french After Empire / (current Gallimard 233 *** events)
2003 June Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play Mahon Khalsa english / - management White Water Press 239 ***
2003 June Café Nostalgia Zoé Valdes french Nostalgia Café spanish novel Folio 374 7
The Cubs and other 2003 June Les Chiots Mario Vargas Llosa french spanish short stories Folio 84 *** stories 2003 July La Forêt Alexandre Ostrovski french The Forest russian theater José Corti 161 **** 2003 July Unless Carol Shields english / - novel Fourth Estate 213 6
2003 July Lituma dans les Andes Mario Vargas Llosa french Death in the Andes spanish novel Folio 358 8
2003 July La Peinture de la Renaissance Stefano Zuffi french Renaissance Painting italian art Editions Gallimard 395 ***** 2003 July Une Nouvelle pour vous Roger Grenier french A Short Story For You / short stories Gallimard 215 **** Who Killed Palomino 2003 July Qui a tué Palomino Molero? Mario Vargas Llosa french spanish novel Folio 190 7 Molero? 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 32/70
Comments These stories by Edgar Allen Poe had a major impact upon European writers and intellectuals, for example Baudelaire They are not all on the level that would get a genius like Baudelaire excited, and the Gothic side of Poe is not necessarily everybody's cup of tea, but the almost novel-length (70 pages) Arthur Gordon Pym is a quite extraordinary adventure tale with soul to it and quite justifies Poe's reputation all on its own, as do of course The Pit and the Pendulum, The Purloined Letter, Metzgerstein and most of the others in this excellent collection.
The charm and the wit and the sparkle of the French 18th Century at its best - a classic comedy with somber undertones, a brilliant play with something for everybody. Mouth-watering extracts from Gargantua and Pantagruel by Ralelais that certainly encourage the desire to have more of the same and to attack the full texts of these 16th Century monuments. The prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino's first novel, based on his experience fighting with the partisans in northern Italy during the Second World War. Nowhere near as militant or black-and-white as I had been expecting, written simply and straightforwardly, it recounts in an almost juvenile, naive way a number of not-particularly heroic, sometimes pretty dark and sometimes bordering on the comical (as when the hooligan hero Pino initiates his resistance career by lifting the revolver of a feckless German sailor busy frolicking with his sister), Calvino manages to convey convincingly the atmosphere of that particular corner of the war theater in all its complexity. Melancholy short stories with a poetical touch and a surprising intensity of feeling by one of Italy's leading poets, whose short but intense career was cut short at the height of his creative period by his suicide in 1950 at the age of 42. The young and competent Captain Pantaléon (Pantoja in the English translation) is sent by the Peruvian high command to sort out a serious problem of morale among the troops in the army garrisons on the Amazonian frontier, who have been excessively venting their sexual frustrations on the local women. This is a very funny book by an immense writer, in an original and very effective staccato style with dialogues where you have to figure out by the context just who is talking (a technique later used extensively if not excessively by Vargas Llosa in his ambitious Conversations in the Cathedral). The subject - frontier life in the Amazonian jungle - is more than first-rate and Vargas Llosa just cannot help bringing in larger socio-religious factors that put things in a big perspective. I LOVED this brilliant book by the author of the masterful The Goat's Festival.
An outspoken French sociologist's biting analysis of where America is heading. Hint: it's not upwards.
Mandatory reading for all 130,000 Electronic Data Systems employees around the world at the time, about the need for honesty and straight talk in the business place, even - get this - with customers and subordinates. Hard to argue with, really, even if the chatty Americanese style was a it too simplistic for my tastes. A spirited and somehow moving account of the longing for home of the large colony of Cuban exiles in Paris. Not at all about politics, all about soul and family and belonging and the lure of that famed isle, this book can even be read with benefit and compassion by the Cuba Si! crowd, not that this book will give anyone much inclination to emigrate to that lovely but troubled land. Mario Vargas Llosa's first published story (1979), about growing up and learning about life in the streets of Lima. Darned interesting - a good preparation for reading his brilliant first novel on that same theme (plus schoolboy life in a military academy), The Time of the Hero. One of the most celebrated plays of Russia's most famous playwright after Chekhov, author of more than thirty major comedies and tragedies. Tender, nostalgic, sensitive to nature and to ethereal things of beauty, full of what-might-have-beens and if-onlys, it is, well, very Ostrovskian! This was an easy read, but too slow and uneventful for my taste. Still it had great reviews, so I suppose that it is worth trying. This is a vague sequel to Vargas Llosa's Who Killed Palomino Molero, which could and probably should be read first so as to get the most out of this impressive, really major work set in the mountains of southern Peru during the atrocious "Shining Path" maoist terror campaign. The skill, subtlety, humour and psychological insightfulness of Varga Llosa's pen are put to good effect to tell this captivating story with, as usual, large overtones. The Renaissance in Flanders (first!!) and then in Italy and most everywhere else was certainly a period of mind-boggling achievement, especially in painting. How culd I have waited so long to read this book? My favourite contemporary French short-story writer does it again. Excellent as usual. This is not a murder mystery, this is a story about power and integrity written with the mix of compassion, humour, brilliance and psychological insight that is Vargas Llosa's trademark. You will read this book in no time and wish it were three times as long - but then the further adventures of the central character, the somewhat too-upright sergeant Lituma, are recounted in the superb sequel Death in the Andes (see above), so not to worry. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 33/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2003 July La Joueuse de Go Shan Sa french The Go Player / novel Folio 326 7
McClelland & 2003 July Dancing Girls Margaret Atwood english / - short stories 242 **** Stewart
2003 July Regain Jean Giono french Regain / novel Le Livre de poche 183 7
2003 July Nicolas Nicolby Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 845 8
2003 Sept. Shelley, the Man and the Poet Desmond King-Hele english / - biography Thomas Yoseloff 372 ***
2003 Sept. Johnson and Boswell Hesketh Pearson english / - biography Heinemann 374 *** The Indifferent Horseman: The 2003 Sept. divine comedy of Samuel Taylor Maurice Carpenter english / - biography Elek Books 351 *** Coleridge
Theodore H. White essay William Sloane 2003 Sept. Thunder out of China and Annalee english / - (current 325 **** Press Jacoby events)
Beatrice and the 10/18 domaine 2003 Sept. Beatriz et les corps célestes Lucia Extebarria french spanish novel 317 7 Heavenly Bodies étranger 2003 Nov. La Ville et les chiens Mario Vargas Llosa french The Time of the Hero spanish novel Folio 530 7
Oxford World 2003 Nov. The Old Curiosity Shop Charles Dickens english / - novel 579 8 Classics
Alexander A Day In The Life of Ivan 10/18 domaine 2003 Nov. Une journée d'Ivan Denissovitch french russian novel 189 8 Solzhenitsyn Denissovitch étranger 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 34/70
Comments The critics rather disparaged this book, partly perhaps because of its big popular success and maybe also because its author is a most photogenic young female, but I couldn't help being as impressed and moved as everyone else by this account of the devastating impact on China and the indelible impact made on the consciousness of its people by the incredibly brutal Japanese invasion in the 1930s. Margaret Atwood's very first book! These stories all have the unmistakable Atwood touch: crisp writing with an underlying hard kind of femininity and almost always a satisfactorily unexpected twist towards the end. I especially liked The Man From Mars about the delights and dangers of the cult of diversity, but they are all pretty much up to the same level of excellence.
A very lyrical celebration of the beauties and quasi-spiritual pantheistic essence of peasant life in the more secluded parts of Provence a century or so ago. Giono's style is so lush that it can be quite off-putting, but I found his enthusiasm and urge to extol the timeless land of his forefathers finally quite irresistible An authentic, original voice well worth knowing.
This is one of Dickens's best books, apart from the last 150 pages, which are disappointingly conformist as Nicolas finally settles down and starts leading a normal middle-class life and we start losing interest. The first 150 pages are spectacularly good, taking Nicolas up to the wilds of Yorkshire where he struggles with a shyster schoolmaster who is exploiting his pupils like you wouldn't believe, before fleeing down south after a dramatic show-down to join a roving band of actors(!!) and get involved in many more pages of rousing adventures peopled by many wonderful Dickensian personages Coming on the heels of the hard-hitting Oliver Twist (or rather written and published in monthly instalments at the same time as the last part of OT itself was being written and published) at the height of Dickens's celebrity, this book had one of the greatest sociological impacts on its times of any novel ever published, as the scandalously self-serving "Yorkshire schools" which it so effectively denounced had been abolished by the time the second edition of the book was published only 10 years later, as Dickens himself proudly announced in his preface to that edition. With interesting insights on Shelley's life and poems, for example the scientific knowledge he displayed in his masterful The Cloud, my favourite poem of his with To a Skylark. This was one of my mother's books, I which I wish I had read earlier so as to have been able to discuss with her ... What an extraordinary man Samuel Johnson was! And Boswell, the precious chronicler of the great man's sayings and doings, was no slouch either. This joint biography of both men, another one of my mother's most beloved books, is the next best thing to reading Boswell's own life of Johnson. An account of the rise and very sad final decline into dementia of the author of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, this book from the fifties (another one of my mother's) did not attempt to delve into the mysterious depths of that great masterpiece, unfortunately. Still, the account of the great poet in his prime and his intense friendship with Wordsworth and W's sister was no waste of time, by any stretch of the imagination. This best-selling book, based on Theodore White's travels around the communist-held areas of China during the Second World War, was one of the most influential political books of the forties, describing the Red Army's struggle against the Japanese army from a favourable perspective and announcing to the American public that here was a world-shaking phenomena that had hitherto been totally underestimated and which needed to be understood better, with the strong implication that America should continue to aid the Red Army after the war as it had done extensively during the conflict. Filled with eyewitness accounts and informed analyses of that key but little-known period, this famous (in America) book is still interesting reading almost sixty years later, even if the author's view of the Chinese communists as a force for progress and liberation seems excessively naive in the light of history. Another of my mother's books, one that I had always wanted to read - thank you once again, Mum.
Current fiction from Spain about a bunch of wild women à la Aldomovar. I have to admit that it was enjoyable with lots of sparkle. Varga Llosa's first full-length novel, a superb account of a young boy learning about life in a military academy that is just about as effective as the masterful The Cadets on the same theme by the German writer Ernst von Solomon, even if von Solomon's starker story set in the early days of the First World War has distinctly grimmer overtones. Dickens's fourth novel, another best-seller, a "road novel" about the adorable Little Nell and her grandfather on the run from a grasping creditor all around England. The young heroine shines like a beacon through the gloomy moral and physical aspect of England of the times that Dickens was so good at portraying. The ending, which I can't bear to talk about, shocked his readers so much that his next books were more or less boycotted by a sizeable portion of his then-vast reading public. As always, the full set of original illustrations (by Phiz) are indispensable complements to the text - please do not read this book (or any other of his) that does not have them all. The little book about life in the Goulag that rocked the Soviet Union and the world when Nikita Khrushchev authorized its publication in 1962. Its stark, low-key way of portraying a single day in a prison camp during the later period of Stalin's reign as seen through the eyes of one of its countless victims has never been surpassed in its penetrating exposure to the light of day of the evil essence of that morally bankrupt regime. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 35/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
Oxford World 2003 Dec. Barnaby Rudge Charles Dickens english / - novel 764 8 Classics
2003 Dec. L'Homme qui parle Mario Vargas Llosa french The Storyteller spanish novel Folio 279 8
2003 Dec. The Christmas Books vol. 1 Charles Dickens english / - short stories Penguin Classics 259 *****
2003 Dec. Les Mystères de la Havane Zoé Valdes french The Mysteries of Havana spanish novel Le Livre de poche 243 7
James Fennimore Wordsworth 2003 Dec. The Last of the Mohicans english / - novel 368 7 Cooper Classics TOTAL YR: no. of books = 44 avg. pages/week = 297 pages = 15428 Oxford World's 2004 Jan. The Warden Anthony Trollope english / - novel 292 7 Classics Alexander 2004 Jan. Deux récits de guerre french Two War Chronicles russian short stories Le Livre de poche 222 *** Solzhenitsyn
The Apprenticeship of Duddy New Canadian 2004 Jan. Mordechai Richler english / - novel 326 7 Kravitz Library
The 9th Directive (Quiller in 2004 Jan. Adam Hall english / - thriller Headline Feature 277 **** Moscow)
Alexander 2004 Jan. Cancer Ward english / russian novel Vintage Classics 569 9 Solzhenitsyn
2004 Jan. Le lièvre de Vatanen Arto Paasilinna french Vatanen's Hare finnish novel Folio 236 8 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 36/70
Comments Dickens's first (of two) historical novel, set in the period of the ultra-violent anti-catholic Gordon Riots in the London of 1780. The historical novel genre, the untopical subject matter and the unusual simple-minded "hero" of the title perhaps explain, at least partially, the public's rejection of the book, which has remained one of his least-known and apparently least- considered books. However, the villains, and there are several main ones, are really strikingly portrayed, the story is dramatic in the extreme (although the first 200 pages are calm albeit as charming as anything Dickens wrote), the historical events are astounding - England came close to having its own Bastille Day nine years before the French had theirs - and, unusually for Dickens, the pace and intensity carry on full-blast right up to the end. I really enjoyed this book, and urge everyone to read it. A striking story set in the Amazonian tropics of Peru on the powerful theme of the tragedy of the inexorable extinction of the native languages and cultures of that vast region, brilliantly told. Mario Vargas Llosa reveals yet another major aspect of that far-off country - and of his talent. A book one just cannot forget. This volume contains A Christmas Carol, another huge hit which put the name Scrooge into the English language, and whose utter charm is as effective today as when the book first appeared. In the other long story in this volume, The Chimes, Dickens really takes the gloves off to lambaste the selfishness and callousness of the well-off who even during the holiday season close their eyes and hearts to the sufferings and needs of the poor, strong stuff indeed. Set in post-revolutionary Havana, with no punches pulled, this book, full of vim and vigour and love of the Cuban way of life in spite of everything, enables you understand why Zoé Valdes is one of Cuba's most highly-considered contemporary authors. An American classic, well worth its reputation, to be put in the hands of every young person, in spite of its violent anti-French bias. After all, Montcalm and especially his blood-thirsty Iroquois allies (who infamously massacred a colony of civilian and military American prisoners) were no heroes, at least not in this (Indian) war, so one can just relax and forget about old enmities and new taboos, and enjoy this rousing and most credible adventure story.
All the charm and calm intelligence of Trollope's smooth style are here in this first novel in the Chronicles of Barsetshire series, which can and should if at all possible be read with benefit as a run-up to the following work in the series, the superb Barchester Towers. S. was a Soviet war correspondent on the Stalingrad front, so these tales do have the ring of truth about them, albeit in the framework of wartime journalism. For an in-depth insight as to what Stalingrad was like, though, nothing can compare to Valery Grossmann's monumental Life and Destiny ... I cannot understand why I waited so long to read this very good book, one of the best and best-known works of Canadian fiction, dealing with the quaint and sometimes sordid and often funny and always wonderfully human atmosphere of the Jewish quarter of central Montreal in the old days before and just after the Second World War. And of course with summer life in the nearby Laurentian mountains, an essential part of the upbringing of Montrealers of whatever background. There is something a bit off-puttingly crude about Richler's style and especially his dialogues, but then that is what his characters are all about, really - and the tension between the rough veneer of the St. Urbain street culture and the drive and energy and the essential good-nature of the characters gives this novel the touch of universality that has ensured its continuing and well-justified renown. One of my favourite novels (with The Warsaw Document) by my favourite espionage writer, a book that I always enjoy rereading because of Hall's terse, tense style so perfectly suited to the subject matter. Those dramatic chapter openings and endings! Those too-rare but awesomely credible combat scenes! The classy style and utterly believable characters, heroes and villains alike! The only trouble is that it's too exciting for bedtime reading, no hope of dropping off at a reasonable hour with an adrenalin-pushing book like this one under way! An unforgettable insight into the human condition in the Soviet Union under Stalin as seen via the filter of the conversations and biographies and internal dialogues of the patients in a ward for cancer patients towards the end of Stalin's (too-) long reign. This story of one man's sudden break with his not particularly satisfying urban way of life to go off wandering through the forests of Finland with a young hare whose leg had been broken by the car he had been driving in (so far we are up to page 2 or thereabouts) on a quest for new values and a different way of life is a modern-day classic throughout Scandinavia and should be so elsewhere too. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 37/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
Oxford World's 2004 Feb. Martin Chuzzlewit Charles Dickens english / - novel 735 7 Classics
2004 Feb. L'Eternité n'est pas de trop François Cheng french Eternity Is Not Too Much / novel Albin Michel 282 6
2004 Feb. La forêt des renards perdus Arto Paasilinna french The Forest of Hung Foxes finnish humour Folio 259 ****
2004 Feb. Hotel Nomade Cees Nooteboom french Hotel Nomad dutch novel Actes Sud 285 7 The Song of Being and 2004 Feb. Le chant de l'être de de paraître Cees Nooteboom french dutch short stories Folio 2€ 102 **** Appearing 2004 March Midaq Alley Naguib Mahfouz english / arabic novel Anchor Books 286 8
Dover Thrift 2004 March Frankenstein Mary Shelley english / - novel 166 7 Classics
2004 March L'Histoire suivante Cees Nooteboom french The Next Story dutch short stories Folio 2€ 136 **** 2004 March La douce empoisonneuse Arto Paasilinna french The Sweet Poisoner finnish humour Folio 255 ****
Vintage 2004 March The Real Life of Alexander Mayta Mario Vargas Llosa english / spanish novel 310 7 International
A Summary of German Hachette 2004 March Précis de grammaire allemand Daniel Bresson french german grammar 240 ** Grammar Education 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 38/70
Comments The most interesting aspect of this middle-period Dickens novel is that much of it takes places in the States, to where Martin flees to escape from disgrace in London and to make his fortune. However everyone in New York is a hustler scrambling after the almighty dollar, and things get (much) worse when he goes pioneering down south along the Mississippi river to take possession of a farm he has been sold by a glib Noo-Yawkaw property shyster. Although the book abounds in stunning portraits of off-beat characters like the adorable Mrs Gump and the biggest hypocrite in all literature (with Molière's Tartffe), Mr. Pecksniff, and features yet another clever and truer-than-life arch-villain, his own uncle Jonas, this book was not well received at the time, particularly in America where his public much preferred (and still does) reading about the down side of England than of that of the US of A, but also in England, where the mass public that had devoured his previous four best-sellers (Pickwick, Oliver Twist, Nicolas Nickelby and Little Dorritt) was unprepared for the absence of a societal theme and of a central character easy to relate to - and it cannot be denied that Martin C. is harder to feel strongly about than Oliver Twist or the adorable Little Nell of The Old Curiosity Shop. The pace falls off at the end too, as usual with most of Dickens's longer books, and the hero is hardly that, also as usual, but you will want to read or reread this highly-enjoyable book nevertheless - but not in this edition: get one that has the full set of original illustrations, please. A delicate tale set in ancient China by the very gifted poet, sinologue and art historian François Cheng, distinguished member of the Académie Française. A very funny story featuring a disabused ex-army major with alcoholic tendencies holed up in the middle of Finland's vast forests with a gangster on the run and a nonagenarian Lapland lady escaped from a retirement home, not to mention various representatives of the legal authorities, more gangsters, and a good number of hares and foxes. By the author of the cult novel Vatinen's Hare, the man who invented a whole new genre, the humoristic-ecological novel. This is one of Paasilinna's best books - I guarantee that you will love it.
On the eternal and really quite immense theme of restless moving around, especially via boats, by one of Holland's most outstanding contemporary writers. The very evocative title is typical of his pregnant style, full of significance and references to other writers and thinkers both classical and modern. A beautifully written and haunting long short story by a very gifted Dutch writer. The intellectual and poetical promise of the superb "Noteboomian" (especially in French) title gives a good idea of the quality of the subtly erudite and crystal-clear prose of the very highest order that impressed me no end from page one onwards. Life in the rougher part of Cairo in the thirties told by a master of the delicate touch, a master of the art of story-telling who brings to life the whole panorama of that unique city with only a few brush strokes. The original Frankenstein story, written by Mary after she, her husband Shelly and their intimate friend Byron had set themselves a challenge during a dinner party on a dark and stormy night on the Italian coast to each write a ghost story. This work had considerable popular success at the time, far more in fact than anything Percy Bysshe ever published during his lifetime. Influenced no doubt by her husband, who was quite au fait with the development of the sciences of his time, this long short story has withstood the test of time far better than the Gothic novels of its day which are hardly any longer read. And the theme is of continuing relevance, of course, as the quest to penetrate the secrets of life is of course going on stronger than ever nowadays. I really liked this elegant long short story, which confirmed once again for me the major literary and intellectual stature of this heavyweight Dutch writer. What happens to a couple of young hoodlums when they try to racketeer a nice old lady living alone in the suburbs of Helsinki. Almost as funny as his best books, which is saying a lot, in spite of or rather probably because of its deadpan, simple, low-key sort of gloomy-Finlandish style. The only Mario Vargas Llosa book that I have read so far in English, and the first one that I found to be rather flat and lacking the usual Varga Llosa sparkle: perhaps his Spanish translates better into French? The subject matter is (of course, with a writer of this calibre) interesting - the struggle of a Troskyist militant to exist politically in the urban Lima of the fifties - but the hero is such a loser and his way of expressing himself and of thinking about his ideas and ideals is so simplistic that I ran out of patience well before the end. There are, though, several layers of significance to the story, not least of which is the vivid portrayal of life in the left-wing political milieu in post-WW2 Peru. This is by far the most political of Vargas Llosa's books, which may explain why many (including the dearly beloved person who kindly offered it to me) think highly of it, but I would certainly not recommend it as an introduction to this exceptionally gifted, world-class writer - start rather with Captain Pantoja or Death in the Andes, before moving on to the heights of The War of the End of the World or The Feast of the Goat. I keep forgetting all the rules and regulations which abound in the language of Goethe, so reviewing German grammar and doing exercises is a never-ending trip back to the basics, for me, unfortunately. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 39/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2004 April Dombey and Son Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 996 8
2004 April Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee english / - novel Penguin Books 152 8
2004 April Et chaque lent crépuscule Wilfred Owen french And Each Slow Sunset - poetry Editions du nord 121 ***** 2004 April Fromage William Elsschot french Cheese dutch novel Escales du Nord 157 6 2004 April La Vase d'or E.T.A. Hoffmann french The Golden Vase german short stories Folio 2€ 129 *****
2004 May La découverte du ciel Harry Mulisch french The Discovery of Heaven dutch novel Gallimard 683 9
2004 May Dérives sur le Nil Naguib Mahfouz french Adrift On The Nile arabic novel Folio 190 8
2004 May La cavale du géomètre Arto Paasilinna french The Surveyor On The Run finnish humour Folio 268 *** Première nuit et autres First Night and other 2004 May Luigi Pirandello french italian short stories Folio 2€ 142 *** nouvelles stories 2004 May Les Indes Noires Jules Verne french The Black Indies / novel Le Livre de poche 236 7 German Exercises from 2004 May Exercises A-Z: allemand J. Janitza french german grammar Hatier 128 ** A-Z
Oxford World's 2004 June David Copperfield Charles Dickens english / - novel 855 8 Classics
2004 June Quiller Bamboo Adam Hall english / - thriller Headline Feature 277 ****
McClelland & 2004 June No Great Mischief Alistair MacLeod english / - novel 283 7 Stewart
2004 June La Procédure Harry Mulisch french The Procedure dutch novel Gallimard 288 7 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 40/70
Comments After the huge popular successes of his first four novels and the lukewarm reception by the mass public of the next two (his first and quite unusual historical novel, Barnaby Rudge, and Martin Chuzzlewit, exotically set mostly in America), but encouraged by the huge success of A Christmas Carol, Dickens raised his sights and clearly aimed at impressing the arbiters of literary good taste, to show them just what he could do. Dombey and Son thus flows at a calmer, more sedate pace than any of his previous works, with more attention to atmosphere and psychology and with somewhat fewer dramatic goings-on. But there is a big social theme (commerce and big business), there is perhaps Dickens's most complete and convincing portrayal of a major female personnage (Dombey's seductive and dissatisfied wife Florence), there is a yet another terrific villain who steals the show from the good guys, and there are as always the most marvellous secondary characters (notably the loveable Captain Cuttle and his dreaded landlady). So this big novel has something for everybody in it, and well rewards the effort required to penetrate its somewhat staid outer surface. Remarkably well written on the very major theme of the coming fall of civilization (or at least of South Africa's) announced by its title, I nevertheless found this book somehow wanting. As a parable about South Africa's future it is way too simplistic, and if the parable is to be taken as having wider implications it lacks the quasi-biblical, almost supernatural overtones that make Buzatti's classic The Desert of the Tartares elevate the same theme so effectively to the level of universality. And how could Coetzee get away without acknowledging front- on his debt for the title to the great Greek poet Cavafy and his justly famous and best-known poem of the very same name? A good selection of impressive poems by the author of the immortal Anthem for Doomed Youth, with several terrific letters that Owens (who was killed by a stray shell at the age of 25 one short week before the First World War ended) wrote home describing life on the Flanders front lines. A short novel about life in Flanders in the twenties. One suspects that it loses some of its native flavour in translation. A really terrific fable with a touch of the fantastic from one of the the greatest writers of the German Romantic movement, E.T.A. Hoffmann. You are just swept along, caught up by the author's enthusiasm and irresistible charm and the way the words just flow along with brio and poetry. What a writer ! A modern epic with cosmic overtones by one of Holland's top writers, this big, ambitious book sparkles throughout in the most engaging way. Embracing big questions - science, astronomy, the religious mystique, the meaning of life, man's place in the overall scheme of things - we move along at a good steady pace with the author's formidable erudition and intelligence discretely tucked away in the background while we get increasingly caught up in the central character's personal life, his intellectual questionings, and his spiritual quest that takes him on a sort of irresistible drive through to the holy city of Jerusalem and its mysteries. Hats off! A really impressive short novel that in so few pages gets you right inside the mindsets of a group of very cosmopolitan, liberated people in modern Cairo. Mahfouz is one of those rare writers about whom one finds oneself saying "This is my favourite book of his" every time you read another one of his books. An lonely old guy starts losing his marbles and wandering all over the place, or rather all over Finland. Darkish (Finlandish) humour with a human touch, this is one of P's later works which although fun is not quite up to the cult-comedy standards of some of his earlier works. Pirandello wrote a very large number of short stories so it seemed reasonable to start getting acquainted with some of that side of him. The title story is certainly a winner and so I am looking forward to reading more, in spite of the hard-to-relate-to setting of these stories in pre-World War One rural Sardinia. By the time I realized that I had already read this book only a year earlier, I was caught up by the story so I just coasted along to the end. Not bad, although not up to the enthralling standard of my favourite Jules Verne, l'Isle Mystérieuse. More gruelling German grammar exercises: getting to grips with this ****** language seems like a hopeless uphill struggle endlessly restarted …
This is the mature Dickens writing at his best, and the first and largely autobiographical first half of the book is very close to perfection. Although it peters out somewhat in the latter part where the adult David comes across as so much less interesting and promising than the youthful one (but perhaps that is Dickens's underlying message about life in general and himself in particular?), the wonderful Dickensian secondary characters - led by two of the best-known of them all, the creepy Uriah Heep and the eternally optimistic and forbearing Mr. Micawber - are there aplenty, the portrait of a sensitive young boy's struggles with his school mentors and with his schoolmates is as powerful and humanistic as anything Dickens or anyone else ever wrote, and the heard-hearted but oh-so-smooth uncle Mr. Murdstone is as worthy a villain - always a Dickens strong point - as any in his oeuvre. A classic, of course, perhaps Dickens's best-known and best-loved work after Great Expectations. A very good Adam Hall, set in China. The opening chapter and the key combat scene quite early on are absolutely fantastic. Again, not to be started in the evening - you'll never be able to get any sleep until you've zipped through the whole thing. The first novel by one of Canada's foremost short-story writers, this moving account of the visceral attachment to their homeland of Nova Scotians often forced to seek their livelihood in far-off places is told in the delicate, almost poetical manner that so impressed me and everyone else in his earlier short-story collections The Lost Salt Gift of Blood and As Birds Bring Forth the Sun and other stories. Sharp and erudite prose from the brilliant Dutch author of The Discovery of Heaven. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 41/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2004 June Lettre au Père Franz Kafka french / german short stories Folio 2€ 99 *****
180 Exercises de grammaire 180 German Grammar 2004 June M. Bonnet french / grammar Martorama 139 ** allemande Exercises
2004 July Momo Michael Ende german / german novel Thienemann 304 7
2004 July Tango Briefing Adam Hall english / - thriller Fontana 273 *****
Conversation in The 2004 July Conversation à La Cathédrale Mario Vargas Llosa french spanish novel Gallimard 564 8 Cathedral
2004 July Le Procès Franz Kafka french The Trial german novel Folio 375 9
2004 July Le meunier hurlant Arto Paasilinna french The Howling Miller finnish novel Folio 278 7
2004 July Prisonniers du paradis Arto Paasilinna french Prisoners of Paradise finnish novel Folio 203 6
2004 Aug. Bleak House Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 989 8
2004 Aug. Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh english / - novel Penguin Books 331 9
2004 Aug. Vienne la nuit Naguib Mahfouz french Let The Night Come arabic novel Folio 514 8 The Son of The God Of 2004 Aug. Le fils du dieu de l'orage Arto Paasilinna french finnish humour Folio 296 **** Thunder 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 42/70
Comments The long letter that Kafka actually wrote (but never delivered) to his father to explain to him why he (Kafka junior) had so much difficulty communicating with him. An extraordinary document, told from the heart by a son who may not have been as good a talker as his domineering and self-assured father but who sure knew how to put words together in a flowing, expressive way. A prose masterpiece.
More ********* German grammar and another not very successful attempt to master it. A modern-day classic for young people that is as well-known in Germany as Treasure Island. And rightly so - this is a terrific book with a great theme: the fight of a marginal young girl against the powerful but obscure forces that robotize adults by convincing them to constantly "save" time. As this book by the author of the marvellous Story Without End is for some odd reason unobtainable in France in translation, I read it in the original text (without much trouble as it turned out, thanks to the simplified vocabulary and sentence structure) and was able to savour the full charm of this book which I would recommend to anyone of any age. As usual with Adam Hall's earlier espionage novels, on finishing this fast-paced and quite faultless story I wondered whether it wasn't the author's very best and my favourite. It is certainly one of the best, and it is amazing to think that it is out of print - but at least it can be quite easily obtained second-hand … This was Mario Vargas Llosa's most ambitious work to date, where he experimented with an original conversation-only technique without identification of the speakers that he had already used in Captain Pantoja and in The Green House and which he used here systematically throughout. The Cathedral of the title is not a church but the name of a bar where the protagonists meet to talk about one another and about their past and present exploits, so the reader really has to concentrate hard to have a chance of understanding just what is going on. It is hard going, but it does all fit together towards the very effective and quite moving end. Having shown what he can do (and this is a writer who really can do anything) and how effective this technique can be to provide insight into the protagonists' mindsets (do we not only really get to know people via their conversation?) Vargas Llosa moved on to other things and basically dropped this demanding technique, although there are echoes of it in some of his later works. Kafka's masterful account of the struggle of Mr. Average Citizen with the state apparatus, unfortunately never completed. But can a book like this about the difficulty if not the impossibility of communication in the modern world ever be finished? Kafka opened up the whole field of absurdity and incommunicability in modern literature with this theme and the style of this seminal work. Unfortunately it was left in an unfinished state, without the faintest indication of how it all was to end, possibly most fittingly … One of Paasilinna's more sombre comedies, about a stroppy loner's struggle with his not very understanding neighbours, set in the north of Finland, although it could have been put anywhere, it rings so true. Of course all is not black and the cheerful side of man and of nature break through often enough to make this just about as enjoyable as most of his other books. P's first book, and the only one set in a foreign (non-Finnish) setting - the South Seas where the mostly-Nordic survivors from a plane crash organize themselves as well as they can along Scandinavian environment-friendly, woman's-lib and free-love lines. Not bad at all, a promising start by the man who gave Vaatanen's Hare and a whole series of eco-friendly comedies to the world. A blockbuster of a book with what was to Dickens a big theme - the incredibly antiquated and abstruse, bureaucratic procedures involved in property legislation via the time-hallowed Chancery Law courts. However at the time of its publication the scandal of the incredibly lethargical Chancery system had lost its sting as it had by then been basically abolished, so the novel both then and now has to be judged purely on its literary merits and not on the effectiveness of its social comment as had been the case with many of Dickens's previous novels. Today the very lengthy satire about the inefficiencies of that antiquated system has lost much of its sting and I could not help finding the subject overworked, although it cannot be denied that as a symbol for monstrous bureaucracies - that have not by any means all disappeared even in our enlightened age - it is by no means irrelevant. The heroine is, like most of Dickens's leading female characters with the possible exception of the loveable Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop and the wonderfully plucky Jenny Wren in A Mutual Friend (but then they are both young girls rather than grown-up women ...) too nice and virginal and near-perfect to sustain interest for a full 900 pages. But this is mature Dickens writing as best as he can, which is very good indeed, so his trademark vignettes of life and sparkling minor characters are all there, the plot is solid, the anti-heroes are as brilliantly portrayed as ever and as an added point of interest the novel features a remarkably efficient police detective, Mr. Buckley, one of the first to ever feature in a novel, as far as I know (the book was published in 1853). A faultless, frankly brilliant and subtly nostalgic evocation of the life of the upper circles in England before the social upheavals of the Second World War and the disappearance of their way of life by one of England's most outstanding writers of the 20th century. Another wonderfully complex, poignant, moving saga by Mahfouz about life in Cairo - the best and most ambitious book of his that I have read so far (but then I tend to think that after finishing each one of his books …). About what happens when the old-time Nordic pagan religion literally comes to life in a big way in modern-day Finland. A funny Finland fable that just might be Paasilinna's funniest book. I loved it. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 43/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating German Exercises from 2004 Aug. Exercises A-Z : allemand J. Janitza french german grammar Hatier 128 ** A-Z
2004 Aug. Funeral in Pekin Adam Hall english / - thriller Fontana 284 ***
John Kennedy 2004 Sept. A Confederacy of Dunces english / - novel Grove Press 394 8 Toole
Little Suicides Among 2004 Sept. Petits suicides entre amis Arto Paasilinna french finnish humour Folio 300 *** Friends
2004 Sept. Quiller Meridian Adam Hall english / - thriller William Morrow 287 ***
2004 Sept. Vie et destin Valery Grossmann french Life and Destiny russian novel l'Age d'Homme 818 9
La crépuscule des dieux de la The Sunset of the Gods Le Livre de Poche 2004 Sept. Ismaïl Kadaré french albanian novel 189 7 steppe of the Steppe biblio
2004 Sept. Le voleur et les chiens Naguib Mahfouz french The Thief and The Dogs arabic novel Babel 166 8
2004 Oct. Hard Times Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 288 7 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 44/70
Comments Another long, painful and not very successful bout with German grammar and sentence structures and verbal forms (that Passive mode! those Subjunctive modes! those separable and inseparable verb prefixes! those gerundives!) and prepositions and so on - I am beginning to heartily agree with Mark Twain 's evaluation of the awful German language that can be seen elsewhere on this site. Another very good Quiller thriller, even though at the end the scenario becomes a bit dubious. The scene where he has to get out of a building in hostile territory (Peking) under surveillance by top-notch enemy agents is a morceau d'anthologie. This was by no stretch of the imagination a waste of time. A full-of-life saga about a big slob's efforts to find a place for himself in the world or at least in New Orleans. Full of punch and vigour, its explosive style and extroverted central characters became a bit tiring towards the end, at least for me - I couldn't avoid the feeling that here was a bit too much of a good thing. But then I never did particularly like the exercise de style look-at-what-I-can-do kind of writing, which this mostly rather tends to be. Still, I can understand its big reputation and certainly think that everyone should read it - there haven't been all that many American books of this stature published in recent times, for sure. When one depressed Finn prevents in extremis another one from committing suicide, they decide to form a club and advertise for like-minded people to join them on a last-splurge bus drive down to sunny Spain where they can all happily do themselves in all together. The usual Paasilinna mix of Nordic gloom, offbeat characters, woodland wonders and tongue- in-cheek zany humour makes this a good read but it somehow lacks the zest and unexpectedness of P's earlier creations. A post-fall-of-the-wall Quiller novel which although a good read was, as expected, not quite up to the unparalleled levels of tension and excitement and credibility of the Quiller novels of the Cold War era in the sixties and seventies such as The Warsaw Document, The 9th Directive and Tango Briefing.
The scope of this big in every way novel is vast: the battle of Stalingrad, the mass executions of the Jewish population in German-held areas during the Second World War, civilian Russia during the forties and fifties, postwar Soviet antisemitic oppression, the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of Stalin's regime, the goulags, the struggle of the individual to survive in the face of a faceless state bureaucracy ... the intensity, the drama, the poignancy is maintained throughout in this remarkable book whose manuscript survived in the KGB archives by miracle. Not particularly political or even anticommunist, Grossmann's account of those tragic times sweeps you along in an effortless, natural way that is the mark of a major writer. This moving, eye-opening novel was first published, in the West, 20 years after its author's death in 1960 shortly after its completion. A great reading experience.
The life of an Albanian student in Moscow in the sixties among the community of foreign students from all over the "socialist" world, before the breaking off of relations between the Soviet Union and Albania and the recall of their students. One of the numerous highlights of this first Kadaré novel (what a superb title! - always a good sign) is the account of the Orwellian campaign against Pasternak throughout the Soviet Union and especially in the university milieu that broke out on his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Dr. Jivago. A very interesting and attractively written book that has well withstood the test of time. This short novel is a masterpiece. Poignant, dramatic, intense - the everyday adventures and tragedies of a big-city petty thief have never been more effectively described than in this terrific little book. The only book in which Dickens ventures into the industrial heartland of the England of his time, the sprawling factory belt in the north around Manchester and Liverpool. Also the shortest by far of any of his novels, one-third the average length of his other books. So he is in unfamiliar territory (as was the case for the Yorkshire schools theme in Nicolas Nickelby, for which Dickens also made a documentary trip north, it is true - but that episode lasted less than 150 pages there) both geographically and socially speaking, and he didn't have the space he was used to having to develop his story and especially his characters, big and small. The result is an interesting critique of the materialism of his age (and others ...) that however totters constantly on the caricature and which is to my mind not one of his most notable efforts. That being said, the hard-hitting portrayal of the exploitation of workers by unscrupulous factory owners and the poignant description of the near-starvation-level living standards of male and female workers in the burgeoning factory towns of the industrial north are of great interest, particularly as no other major British novelist of the time seriously looked into the social impact of the Industrial Revolution, as far as I know. It is true that de Tocqueville's description of the social conditions in the Liverpool complex (and in neighbouring Ireland) after his tour there in the early 1830s is more credible and complete as far as sociological comment is concerned - but of course de Tocqueville was a sociologist and political thinker and not a novelist. The anger Dickens felt at what he saw on his own background-gathering tour gives the text a distinctly bitterer, less overall genial tone than that of any other of his novels - a tone that, combined with the exceptional brevity of his novel and the industrial theme, make this a distinctly atypical work in his oeuvre. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 45/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2004 Oct. La favorite Yasushi Inoué french The Favourite japanese novel Picquier poche 248 7
2004 Oct. Cannery Row John Steinbeck english / - novel Penguin Books 196 8
2004 Oct. The Life of Pi Yann Martel english / - novel Vintage Canada 354 8
New Canadian 2004 Oct. Literary Lapses Stephen Leacock english / - humour 157 **** Library
2004 Oct. The Volcanoes of San Domingo Adam Hall english / - thriller Pyramid Books 239 **
2004 Oct. Tortilla Flat John Steinbeck english / - novel Penguin Books 154 7
The War of the End Of the 2004 Oct. La Guerre de la fin du monde Mario Vargas Llosa french spanish novel Gallimard 558 9 World
2004 Oct. Northlight Adam Hall english / - thriller Ben Bella 290 **** Alexander McCall 2004 Oct. Portuguese Irregular Verbs english / - humour Vintage Canada 128 **** Smith The Finer Points of Sausage Alexander McCall 2004 Oct. english / - humour Vintage Canada 128 **** Dogs Smith
2004 Nov. Language Matters Donna Jo Napoli english / - linguistics Oxford U. Press 191 ***
The Aspen Papers and other The World's 2004 Nov. Henry James english / - short stories 204 **** stories Classics 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 46/70
Comments In this historical novel the great Japanese master Yasushi Inoué recounts the extraordinary story of the infatuation of the Emperor of China with a courtesan that caused the tragic ruin of the most developed civilization in the world at the time, the Tang dynasty in China, in the middle of the 8th Century AD, when a military rebellion occupied the capital city and slaughtered most of its million inhabitants; the eventually successful struggle to re-establish royal authority wreaked unprecedented damage on the country from which the glorious Tang dynasty (615-907 AD) never fully recovered. This saga was also, by the way, the subject of a famous poem by the great Tang poet Bai Juyi, The Song of Eternal Regrets. Surprisingly, Inoué, a renowned aesthete, hardly mentions the extraordinary cultural life that was so flourishing at the time and that was so present and influential in court life, notably via the three most famous Chinese poets of all time, Li Po, Wang Wei, and Du Fu, who were all living at the time of the dramatic events described. He concentrates on his main subject: the exploration of the mindsets of the main actors in this famous drama. Certainly one of Inoué's best historical novels, with Confucius and The Desert Paths. With The Grapes of Wrath, this just has to be one of Steinbeck's best books. This tale of down-and-outers in a lazy corner of California in the thirties is told with humour and humanism in the most captivating way. This simple, charming tale is utterly American in tone while attaining to the universal: there always will be people like these just about everywhere, at least one hopes so! This original, brilliant, moving book starts off strongly and keeps getting better right through to the end, an authentic tour de force. It is not giving any secrets away to reveal that the central personnage is a tiger, and that splendid animal will always be epitomized for me from now on by the one in this terrific book which could well become a classic. And by a Canadian author too! The first story in this excellent collection is the famous one about the author's first dealings with his local bank, a classic. A number of the others are on the same ultra-enjoyable level, infused with the charm and wry humour of Canada's first and perhaps still most famous writer. Hall's first and only, I think, venture into adventure novels not featuring his spy man Quiller. Nowhere near as impressive, many years after its intital publication in the sixties, as the Quiller series. A sort of sequel to Canary Row, written ten years or so later, after the Second World War. While not quite as perfect as that masterpiece, it is full of the same kind of warmth and optimism about people on the lower rungs of the social ladder. A sequence of loosely related but utterly charming vignettes that one cannot but help enjoy. This is a brilliant, sensitive, very powerful fictionalized account of the massive uprising in the north-east of Brazil at the end of the 19th Century that rocked that giant country to its foundations. Vargas Llosa recreates the atmosphere of those times and the attitudes and mentalities of the actors in this epic drama by a combination of expressive language - this man is a master of words - using very many untranslatable Brazilian terms (the large glossary of these terms at the end of the book is an essential part of the book), stylistic techniques experimented in his earlier works for getting ever deeper into the minds of his protagonists, and an art of narration that literally leaves you breathless. This is the kind of book that you put down with regret and with tears in your eyes. It is a masterpiece. Quiller the spy man who never carries a gun on the chase and being chased in the northlands of Soviet Russia in winter - spectacular! You will forget your worries - and everything else - when reading this, guaranteed! The travails of a very uptight Oxford don lecturing on his arcane philological speciality in the wilds of provincial America. Original and very funny, one only regrets that it wasn't longer. The academic and extra-academic adventures of the very stuck-up, very pompous and at times very ridiculous Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld, hero of Portuguese Irregular Verbs, absolutely obsessed by his struggles with his nitpicking academic counterparts both at home and abroad in this second episode of Alexander McCall Smith's comic saga. Just about as funny as PIV, and again one wishes that it could have been a little longer ... A straightforward, common-sense approach to language matters, applying the results of recent research studies and the author's considered opinions to everyday sorts of questions of general interest such as: How do we acquire language? Why is it hard to learn a second language? Does language equal thought? Do animals have language? Whose speech is better? Should English spelling be reformed? Does offensive language harm children? and a few others. The conversational tone evokes a relaxed classroom atmosphere, and not surprisingly these essays turn out to be lectures the author gives to her college students in linguistics. On the whole not quite as stimulating as I was expecting, although it is undeniably useful to confront one's own uninformed opinions on such basic questions with a more scientific approach, even if the end result is pretty much the same. In any case there can not be much argument about the fact that yes, language does matter. Apart from The Turn of the Screw, I am unfortunately a total ignoramus when it comes to Henry James, so these four stories were a good place to start to get to know him better. His somewhat long-winded prose tends to move things along pretty slowly, but one eventually realizes that it is effective at creating an atmosphere and in maintaining interest. His cleverness and erudition do the rest - these are all excellent stories with a certain impact that do make one want to read more of the same. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 47/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
The Modern 2004 Nov. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Mark Twain english / - novel 278 8 Library Classics
The Adventures of Huckleberry 2004 Nov. Mark Twain english / - novel Penguin Classics 327 9 Finn
2004 Nov. A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway english / - novel Scribner 332 8
2004 Nov. The Snows of Kilimanjaro Ernest Hemingway english / - short stories Scribner 154 *****
2004 Nov. The Rings of Saturn W.G. Sebald english / german memoir Vintage 296 ******
After the Plague and other 2004 Nov. T.C. Boyle english / - short stories Penguin Books 303 **** stories Livre de poche 2004 Nov. Les Braises Sandor Marai french The Burning Coals hungarian novel 219 8 biblio
2004 Nov. Quiller Barracuda Adam Hall english / - thriller Headline Feature 341 ***
McClelland & 2004 Nov. The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood english / - novel 358 7 Stewart
science Panther Science 2004 Nov. Destination: Universe! A.E. Van Vogt english / - 172 ****** fiction Fiction
McClelland & 2004 Nov. The Blind Assassin Margaret Atwood english / - novel 521 7 Stewart 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 48/70
Comments The classic, homespun-style tale of growing up in grassroots America in the middle of the 19th Century, with two of the best-known characters in the whole of American fiction, the resourceful and imaginative Tom Sawyer and his adventurous, semi-wild bosom friend Huckleberry Finn. An American classic (although first published in England!) it was really intended for young people by its structure (anecdotes loosely linked together) and its content matter (youthful escapades and highjinks) and its style (dialogue-intensive, heavily laced with rural forms of speech and local superstitions), but it veers towards darker, wider concerns when murder and lynching and race relations enter the picture as the narrative builds up pace and the writing becomes more descriptive. With its charm and homespun humour and its almost magical way of recreating the atmosphere of life in the halcyon days of America's youth before the Civil War on the banks of the Mississippi river, this very special book by a very gifted author has a universal appeal that has superbly passed the test of time to become a classic for not only young people of both sexes but all those who were young once too. Mark Twain's masterpiece, his sequel to Tom Sawyer, this time written directly for an adult public, where Huck recounts at first hand his harrowing "road trip" down the Mississippi River after escaping from the clutches of his ultra-violent, brutish father(!) into the heartland of the Deep South(!!) with an escaped black slave(!!!) The scenes of everyday violence in the fronter towns of the Far South are as striking, I would even say hair-raising, to us today as they must have appeared to be to the East Coast readers of Twain's time for whom he was writing. An epic adventure tale with a very hard undertone that highlights Twain's compassion for the weak and the oppressed, conveyed throughout this ambitious work in the heavy vernacular prose and dialogues of Tom and his black companion. The First World War on the Italian front seen through the eyes of an American participant, first published in 1929. The dramatic events described, notably the chaos of a major retreat amid scenes of panic and summary executions and desertions, are strikingly recounted in a low-key, terse kind of way with straight talk and straightforward albeit wry writing with cynical and rather disabused overtones that is very effective and which confirmed Hemingway as one of the most influential writers of his time. Hemingway's nonchalant but terse style is admirably suited to the short story form. The title story is of course justly famous. Several others (The Killers, Fifty Grand, and The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber, notably) are just as good. Sebald goes wandering around rural England visiting places of interest to him and thinking about writers and painters and thinkers and cities and landscapes that these places bring to his erudite and fertile mind. Since everything he looks at and writes about assumes near-cosmic significance thanks to the magic of his bewitching prose and penetrating internal vision, the reader is in for a big treat indeed, boosted by the neat way images of the subject under scrutiny are systematically inserted throughout the text. A renowned set of stories from one of America's leading contemporary writers. I found them interesting but rather uneven, perhaps because as so often it seems with American writers, the people portrayed are so average and common, if you'll pardon that very unfashionable term. Set in Hungary in the 1930s, a confrontation of two old men who relive the sudden break-up of their intensely-felt friendship in pre-World War One Vienna. Marai is a master of the long intense monologue-dialogue which he uses to great effect here to vividly evoke the splendours of the Austrian-Hungarian empire and the impossibility of avoiding the consequences of our past errors. Quiller in the South Seas. With long flashes of the old brilliance, this post-cold-war espionage novel is not quite up to the level of the early books in the series, the ones written in the seventies and early eighties. Still, not to be started in the evening, as usual with Quiller books - you won't get much sleep that night, be forewarned. Contrary to the blurb on the cover, I didn't find this account of the forthcoming enslavement of women to a breeding-only role in a macho male military dictatorship "prophetic" in the least. Still, one has to take the political aspects of fantasy fiction (or any fiction, for that matter - we wouldn't have all that much to read if we limited ourselves to writers whose politics we like!) with a grain of salt and judge a book on its pace and atmosphere and story and character development and general literary merits, and on those scores this book does rate. It moves along with Atwoodian alacrity, the writing is crisp and the dialogues flow as naturally as can be. But the whole thing smacks too much of an exercise de style for my taste - I prefer the more credible and sincere Atwood of Wilderness Tips and The Robber's Bride where she can be taken utterly seriously, hardly the case here. This is the best collection of science-fiction short stories that I have ever read, one that can be reread and reread with constant pleasure, as always with the great classics. Written in the golden age of sci-fi in the forties and fifties (by a Canadian!), when the explosion of the possibilities of science (the atom bomb and rockets!!) inflamed the imagination of people around the world in general and in America in particular, before the barrenness of the other planets in the solar system had become apparent and the excitement about unidentified flying objects had died down. And this collection includes my nomination for the best sci-fi short story of all time, The Monster. Although this book is, amazingly enough, out of print in English (it has always been available on the bookstalls in France), a good-condition copy can and should be obtained through the Internet. Although the atmosphere of the thirties in Ontario is most convincingly evoked, I wasn't particularly convinced by this fairly recent Atwood work, although I did like the style (of course) and it cannot be denied that there are some very good parts. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 49/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2004 Nov. Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises Ernest Hemingway english / - novel Arrow books 216 9
McClelland & 2004 Dec. Runaway Alice Munro english / - short stories 335 **** Stewart
2004 Dec. Vertiges W.G. Sebald french Vertigo german memoir Folio 267 *****
science 2004 Dec. Away and Beyond A.E. Van Vogt english / - Panther Books 219 **** fiction
2004 Dec. Disgrace J.M. Coetzee english / - novel Vintage Books 220 7
2004 Dec. Love and Garbage Ivan Klima english / czech novel Vintage Books 222 8
The Flight Of The Livre de Poche 2004 Dec. L'Envol du Migrateur Ismaïl Kadaré english albanian short stories 155 ***** Migrator biblio
2004 Dec. Quiller KGB Adam Hall english / - thriller Chapter Books 312 ***
TOTAL YR: no. of books = 84 avg. pages/week = 485 pages = 25196 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 50/70
Comments I don't know if this is Hemingway's best novel, but this scintillating portrait of American expatriates in Paris in the twenties and of spectacular bull-fighting in Spain is certainly a very good one, in the simple snappy style that established Hemingway's reputation and that was to sweep the literary world. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site.
These stories about people in rural communities in Ontario and British Columbia do not purport to carry significant messages about the meaning of life, they unwind in a calm straightforward way that nevertheless somehow gets you involved and interested as they unfold in their quiet but not uneventful way. They all end up delving rather deeply into the souls of the various individuals that we follow on their intertwining paths through life. They are all about women as it turns out, and they are all about people who lead rather isolated, inward-looking existences, but they somehow form an extremely convincing whole. To be very much recommended. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site.
This is a literary essay on memory and the tricks it plays on us by a modern master of evocative, erudite, clear-sighted prose. Sebald takes us in the superb opening chapter with Stendahl through the Alps during Napoleon's Italian campaign to meditate on the contrast between Stendahl's vivid memories of the events he lived through and their objective, photographic realities, and continues to wander around Verona, Venice and Vienna in company with Casanova, Kafka and his own memories of places seen and people met, to finally confront his snatches of childhood memories in his birthplace in the mountains of southern Germany. As in his other works the book is amply illustrated with photographs and images of the subjects under consideration to add an extra, visual layer of significance and poetry onto the penetrating power of the prose itself. A memorable reading experience, as always with the author of The Rings of Saturn. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. A number of very good stories from the golden age of science fiction by one of the greatest masters of the genre, and Canadian-born to boot. See the review of this book elsewhere on this site. An elderly professor's infatuation with a young (female, one nowadays needs to clarify) student leads to scandal on the campus, to flight to the farm to get away from the hypocrisy and shallowness of big-city ways, and to large themes like the generation gap, security, race relations in post-apartheid South Africa, and the feminine condition. Coetzee is so easy to read and yet so erudite in a quiet sort of way that his books always make for good reading, so I did enjoy this book, although I must say that I remain out of tune with his underlying rather pessimistic premises and outlook on life. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. A writer gets a job as a street-sweeper in Prague in the 1980s to see how the working class lives and to come to grips with his tortured past and with his tortuous love-life. Introspective and meditative, this powerful book is full of interesting thoughts and insights into the atmosphere of those far-off days when communism reigned in Eastern Europe. Quite a discovery, really - thank you Mr. Unknown Stranger who recommended it to me a while back when we were sitting in an airport lounge waiting for our flights. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site.
Three longish short stories or "micro-novels" (to use the author's term) set in contemporary Albania by a master who has the gift of being able to find universal significance in almost all aspects of past and present life in that small peripheral Balkan land. Here the pace grows in crescendo from a first calm account of that country's changing contemporary political destiny, The Knight With the Flower, as reflected in the changing destinies of an elegant hunting lodge used by the dignitaries of each succeeding regime. The pace and the tension build up with the second story, History of the Writer's Union, where the stultified but precarious and ever-exposed existence of the "intellectual workers" in a totalitarian regime is just so well described and brought to life. And the third, title story, The Flight of the Migrating Bird, is a sheer masterpiece, recounting the epic confrontation of the country's hallowed Leader with an aged bard as seen through the (extremely funny) interior monologue of a politically prudent narrator. This is classy writing of the very highest order by one of those writers who can apparently do just about anything better than just about anyone else, one of my very favourite authors. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site.
A pretty-good Quiller espionage thriller set in East Berlin originally published in the summer of 1989, with a remarkably credible plot in hindsight: the coming fall of the wall, which actually happened, incredible as it seemed to me and to just about everyone else at the time (except Adam Hall?) later that same year! For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 51/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
The Conversation at Livre de poche 2005 Jan. La Conversation de Bolzano Sandor Marai french hungarian novel 285 9 Bolzano biblio
2005 Jan. Le Jour des Morts Cees Nooteboom french The Day of the Dead dutch novel Actes Sud 368 7
The Manuscript Found in L'imaginaire 2005 Jan. Manuscrit trouvé à Saragosse Jean Potocki french / novel 346 9 Saragosse Gallimard
2005 Jan. Le Loup Bleu Yasushi Inoué french The Blue Wolf japanese novel Picquier poche 305 7
essay 2005 Jan. The Art of Travel Alain de Boton english / - Hamish Hamilton 254 ***** (literature) 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 52/70
Comments A particularly gifted writer - one of those who always seems to find exactly the right words to say what he or his characters want to express in the most harmonious and flowing way possible - on a huge and timeless theme: the seduction a man exercises on a woman and vice-versa. As in Arthur Schnitzler's superb Casanova's Journey Home on the same theme published 30 years earlier (this book was first published in 1940), the author explores the mindset of the most celebrated womanizer of all time, Casanova, after his spectacular escape from Venice's central Fenice prison over St. Mark's Square. From a superb opening scene where Casanova surprises a group of servant girls spying on him through the keyhole of his hotel room, through to the sweeping and dramatic final encounter with a past but never-forgotten conquest, the novel unfolds in a series of conversation-encounters like an extended theatre play. Writing of the highest order, a terrific subject, drama and emotion: what more can one ask for? For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. A loner wanders around the Berlin of the 1990s, meditating on life in general and on the possible past lives of those he sees around him in particular. A short encounter with a mysterious woman leads him on a search from Berlin through his native Holland (Nooteboom is one of the leading contemporary Dutch writers) on to one of the more barren parts of Spain. This is a Germanic-intellectual kind of novel with a dense, meandering prose that requires effort and concentration on the part of the reader, but that effort is amply rewarded by a lot of stimulating ideas and questionings and erudite but apt references that make this book an enriching reading experience. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. This story within a story within a story, written in French by a Polish nobleman, explorer, archaeologist, diplomat, linguist and historian at the beginning of the 19th Century, purports to be a manuscript, discovered by a French officer in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars there, which recounts the bizarre encounters of a Spanish officer during a mission in the barren Sierra Morena mountains where he encounters, for starters, a couple of mysterious and voluptuous young sisters who, after proposing imaginable delights and unimaginable treasures (on certain terms) recount their own encounters, and so on. The book abounds in an extravagant variety of semi-fantastical figures, including devils in male and especially (seductive) female form, a wandering Jew, a saint, a heroic knight, bandits, hermits and many more. Written in the intellectual aftermath of the French Revolution, the novel embraces large themes under a mystical-oriental cloak, whereby Christian values are challenged, the merits of Islam are considered and taboos in general are flaunted in a rather gay, fantastic way. The scope is universal and the tone cosmopolitan, even for our modern, blasé eyes and minds. The reader is swept along in this strange,original, fascinating book and one can only regret that the final chapters were tragically lost in or en route to Paris after the first part had been published in a Russian translation in St. Petersburg in 1805. But then the fragmentary nature of the text is well in keeping with its complex structure, so the resulting text is not only a masterpiece of fiction in the fantastic vein, but a masterpiece of fiction, period. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. In the form of an historical novel, this is really a biography of Genghis Khan with dialogues, written by a master of the genre, author of the remarkable Confucius and The Master of Tea, among many other outstanding works. In a low-key, dispassionate tone the author follows the evolution of the young Temüjin from leader of his outcast clan of 7 persons at the age of 14 to his conquest of the vastest empire in history at the age of 40. The tone is so objective that one cannot really say whether or not the author admires his hero - he concentrates on trying, largely successfully (although a good part of the mystery remains), to clarify why and how he acquired his phenomenal will for power and domination. Interesting and educational, with many fine insights into one of history's greatest upheavals, although not really my cup of tea - reading about the many massacres he and his troops perpetrated and the repeated genocides of whole peoples who had opposed him at one stage or other is not the most enjoyable of pastimes as far as I am concerned. For further comments see the review elsewhere on this site. A remarkable, erudite, enlightening and very enjoyable analysis of the act of travel itself, absolutely packed with superb literary and philosophical citations and infused by the author's sensitivity and questioning spirit. Nicely embellished (à la Sebald) with images of the many paintings which de Botton evokes to illustrate his themes, this thoughtful and thought- provoking book takes us through the joys of anticipation and the sights to be savoured in travelling-places such as airports, railway stations and highways, on to the art of contemplation of artistic and archaeological and natural treasures as practised and theorized by artists and thinkers throughout the ages, with especial emphasis on the thoughts and experiences of Des Esseintes, Baudelaire, Edward Hopper, Flaubert, Alexander von Humboldt, Burke, Nietsche, Van Gogh and John Ruskin, to finish with an evocation of "room- travel" as celebrated by Joseph de Maistre in his books Journey Around My Bedroom and Nocturnal Expedition Around My Bedroom, where he concentrated on the beauties and interest to be found in the everyday world around us. A really superior kind of book. For further comments see the review (and the extracts) elsewhere on this site. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 53/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
De la destruction comme essay 2005 Jan. W.G. Sebald french Air Warfare and Literature german Actes Sud 144 **** élément de l'histoire naturelle (literature)
Les Cahiers 2005 Jan. La Chasse aux Canards Hugo Claus french The Duck Hunt dutch novel 137 7 Rouges Grasset
Le Matelot sans lièvres et autres The Sailor Without Lips 2005 Feb. Cees Nooteboom french dutch short stories Le Passeur 121 **** nouvelles and other stories
2005 Feb. Little Dorrit Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 954 9
2005 Feb. La Peste Albert Camus french The Plague / novel Folio 279 9
2005 March A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 430 7
Classiques de 2005 March Nouvelles de Petersbourg Nicolaï Gogol french Stories from Petersburg russian short stories 286 ***** Poche 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 54/70
Comments A series of lectures on the subject of the Allied terror bombings of German cities throughout the Second World War, avowedly aimed at destroying the morale of the German population by killing as many civilians as possible, that really began with the surprise levelling of the residential areas of Hamburg in the summer of 1942 and that was carried steadily onwards up to the apocalyptic 2000-bomber raid on Dresden and its masses of refugees in April 1945(!). Sebald wonders aloud, in his clear, straightforward, implacably logical way, why this painful subject has been with one or two exceptions almost entirely swept under the carpet in post-war Germany, with the subject being avoided by almost all writers and intellectuals, with the many eyewitness accounts by survivors being quite unobtainable, so that the very subject itself has become a non-subject in the modern German consciousness. A striking plea for intellectual honesty by the author of The Rings of Saturn. The interesting first novel of a major Flemish writer, set in rural Flanders just after the Second World War. Although the dialogues of the rough farmer folk obviously have lost a certain amount of their rural flavour in translation, the atmosphere of that remarkable corner of Europe in the immediate post-war period is startlingly present throughout this short, sharp, sensual tale of brutality in the boondocks. Beautifully-written stories on the favourite theme of a very powerful pen indeed: travel and the sea. As usual with Nooteboom one regrets somewhat that the stories aren't longer, or that there weren't more of them. They are mostly about cynical and hard-bitten sailors in run-down dock zones or strange faraway places, and the overall tone is, most appropriately, as gloomy and disenchanted as the people and places portrayed. This is Dickens in his prime (his 11th of a total of 14 completed novels) and one of my very favourite Dickens novels. It starts off very strongly with a dramatic and utterly convincing scene set in the prison of Marseilles, and carries on equally strongly with an in-depth study of the Marshalsea Prison for Debtors in London starring the real hero of the book (or rather anti-hero), the father of the eponymous heroine, a vacuous and pretentious liver-offer-of-other-people who is so foolishly unconscious of the harsh world around him that he becomes positively likeable. After which it zooms around Europe on a Grand Tour through France and Italy, and finishes off strongly - unusually for a Dickens novel - with a rounding confrontation in ... no you'll have to read this superb novel yourself to appreciate the sparkling dialogues, the very effective denunciation of rampant financial capitalism, the zany (Dickensian) secondary characters and the inimitable villains in this kaleidoscopic portrait of Victorian society. For further comments see the review (and the selected extracts) elsewhere on this site. Camus's great portrayal of a community - the inhabitants of the European sector of the city of Oran in Algeria - struggling to survive a sudden and deadly menace to their very existence. A parable of the struggle against the forces of destruction in all their forms, the strong moral and existential questioning that runs through the book, expressed with detachment via dialogues and monologues in a calm and impassioned manner that multiplies the effect and power of this grandiose work. Camus manages to rise above the dramatic political and historical conflicts of his time to create a work of art that has as powerful an effect of the reader of today as it must have had at the time of its initial publication in 1948, although the outspoken denunciation at one point of the crimes of means-justifies-the-ends resistance fighters was not well received, to put it mildly, by the pro-Party arbiters of literary taste at the time. Dickens's second (after Barnaby Rudge) and best-known historical novel, the one that starts off with the famous "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times …". This is also one of his shortest novels (half the standard length of his other novels) and also his most overtly political one, centered as it is on the violent injustices of the French revolution and on the despotism of the ancien régime which Dickens sees as having inevitably led to that momentous upheaval. Not that Britain escapes unscathed from his acerbic political pen, as the book opens with description of an Old Bailey treason trial that decrees on the flimsiest of grounds the most horrifying and inhumane punishment imaginable for treason, that was based moreover on a well-known real-life trial. Because of its relatively short length and dramatic story line this is a good introduction to Dickens for young people, although there are fewer typically Dickensian offbeat characters than usual and the villains are more caricatural and less well-rounded than in his other novels. Perhaps the foreign setting, with which he was necessarily less familiar than with his beloved London scene, explains the relative lack of depth of this novel. And although he did careful research for this novel using as his prime source the solid The French Revolution by Carlyle, whom he greatly admired, Dickens's analysis of French social realities in France (the medieval droit de cuissage in the 1780s???) is too black-and-white to be really convincing. it cannot be denied, however, that the terrifying terrorism of mob rule and the bloodthirsty brutality of revolutionary justice in the dark period of the French Revolution are most starkly and impressively portrayed This book regroups in one volume four of the most famous short stories of Russian (and world) literature: The Perspective Nevski, The Nose, The Portrait and The Diary of a Madman, all written in the tremendously creative 10-year period (1833-1843) during which Gogol was writing Dead Souls, Taras Bulba and The Inspector General. There is a touch of the fantastic in all of them, they all take place in Gogol's beloved but not yet saintly Petersburg, they are all as Russian as can be, they are all bizarre and off-beat in an odd, unforced and almost normal kind of way that is Gogol's trademark, and yet they all reach out across the years that separate us from this faraway (but nevertheless strikingly European) past to carry us along in the flood of the author's wry but straightforward prose to engage us intensely as few writers can do. The Diary of a Madman fittingly enough concludes this extraordinary collection of longish stories - after reading that quite shattering masterpiece one wants to just quietly sit down to meditate for a while or otherwise recuperate one's senses before trying to return to normal life. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 55/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2005 March The Admirable Crichton J.M. Barrie english / - theater Indy.Publish.com 135 ***
Le Livre de Poche 2005 April Avril Brisé Ismaïl Kadaré french Broken April albanian novel 216 8 biblio
Sganarelle ou Le Cocu Sganarell or The 2005 April Molière french / theater Folio Theatre 134 **** Imaginaire Imaginary Cuckold
L'Imaginaire 2005 April La Maison Verte Mario Vargas Llosa french The Green House spanish novel 419 6 Gallimard
2005 April L'Etranger Albert Camus french The Stranger / novel Folio 186 8
2005 April Great Expectations Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 484 9 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 56/70
Comments Chrichton is at thirty the utterly competent butler of the Mayfair house in London of Lord Loam around the turn of the century, who accompanies his distinguished and affable but not particularly dynamic Lordship and family on a boat trip to the South Seas - where their ship is wrecked and social standings are put to the test in a big way. The competent Chrichton of course rapidly rules the roost and corners all the women too, including not only his Lordship's wife but his daughter too(!!), but then they end up being saved and the new social order ... I won't spoil the ending, suffice it to say that this wry comedy about the artificiality of social conventions packs more punch than its sedate, urbane style would lead one to expect. A well-deserved success in 1902, two years before the first theater performance of Peter Pan escalated its author to eternal fame. A cosmopolitan writer and his newly-wed wife drive through the mountains of northern Albania in a timeless period which could be the twenties or thirties on their honeymoon, where they cross the pass of a young man who has just revenged the murder of a member of his family and who is on a trek to the place where tribute must be paid according to the age-old feudal rites of the Kankun, the time-honoured custom that has governed the practise of honour killings in the region throughout the centuries. The story balances between the two sets of actors in the drama, the city couple on the one hand and the youth and his pursuers on the other hand, who are honour bound to revenge in turn the killing, already the 70th in a long dispute whose precise origin no one can remember any more. This stark, powerful story mounts with a constant sense of foreboding towards the inevitably tragic denouement in a driving, forceful way that left me shaken and moved by the darker side of this life on earth. After Kadaré's artful account of the implacable rigour of this age-old mechanism for solving the overpopulation problem in this strange, mysterious, sombre land - a custom that has survived determined efforts to suppress it by successive regimes for centuries right up to our own time - one can better understand the persistence of vendetta practices elsewhere, even though nothing, absolutely anywhere, can compare with what has been going on in those Albanian mountains, believe me. Another example of the talent, indeed I would say the genius, of this admirable author who has such a gift for making whatever aspect of the life and history of his beloved homeland that he turns his attention to acquire a universal significance and impact. An early and very impressive Molière play, witty and sparkling from start to end. And a touch of the subtle depth that is so characteristic of the author of Tartuffe and Le Misantrope. One smiles at Sganarelle's sallies, but one cannot help but seeing the wisdom in his flippant but perfectly pertinent questioning of the then-prevailing concept of honour as the ultimate virtue to be defended at all costs. Set in the Amazonian region of Peru, this early (1966) and not entirely successful (to my way of thinking) Vargas Llosa novel, his second, experiments with the difficult parallel- dialogues-by-unnamed-speakers technique that he later used so extensively in Conversations in The Cathedral. On the same Amazonian theme, I recommend rather the brilliant Captain Pantoja and the Special Service for the lighter side and the profound and moving The Man Who Speaks for the darker side. This is the book that put Camus on the literary map. A universal subject (the outsider who just doesn't fit in with the rest of the world), an original stream-of-consciousness approach and a concise, ultra-simplified style set this masterful account of an everyday tragedy with universal overtones quite apart. This is perhaps a great novel, which certainly impressed me no end when I first read it many years ago, but I found on rereading it that its oversimplified style bordered too much on the the showy exercise de style, see-what-I-can-do approach that puts the emphasis too much on the packaging at the expense of the content for my sedate tastes. I may be wrong, but I didn't find that it withstood the test of time as well as the magnificent La Peste which Camus published a few years later. This is Dickens at his very best. A mature work, his penultimate novel, it gets off to a rousing start (the famous encounter of the young Pip with an escaped convict takes place on page 2!!), the writing is absolutely sparkling, the characters are finely chiselled and marvellously full of life, and the theme is a large one - this is a Bildungsroman, a tale of youth growing up and learning about life's ups and downs. So, yes, this is a masterpiece. Although it is one of his relatively shorter novels, about half the length of most of his other novels, as it was written for publication in weekly instalments briefer than the standard (for Dickens) long monthly ones, it makes up for the lack of the more leisurely, sprawling, panoramic atmosphere of his longer works with its pace and its sparkle, and although there are fewer of those wonderful Victorian-Dickensian secondary characters extraneous to the central story line that he had such a special genius for imagining and portraying, they are present here too of course, notably in the persons of the hopelessly honest Mr. Pocket with his turbulent household and the amazingly human - in his private life - notary's clerk Mr. Wemmick and his aged mother. The prose and dialogues are superb, with many remarkable passages, with a constant touch of gravity beneath the surface as well as a steady tinge of humour of the most charming kind. Although the romanesque ending (which in fact was changed after the manuscript had been completed on the probably misguided urging of his close friend the renowned author Arthur Lytton-Bulwell) is a bit too convenient to be fully satisfying, the novel as a whole certainly is that and more - an almost perfect example of the art of this great writer at the peak of his powers. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 57/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2005 April Bahia de tous les saints Jorge Amado french Bahia of All Saints portuguese novel Folio 373 7
Dans les montagnes des Pays- In The Mountains Of The 2005 April Cess Nooteboom french dutch novel Calmann-Levy 159 6 Bas Netherlands
Elleston Trevor 2005 May Deathwatch english / - thriller Star pocketbooks 277 ** (alias Adam Hall)
Oxford University 2005 May Britain in Revolution 1625-1660 Austin Woolrych english / - history 796 ****** Press
2005 May Our Mutual Friend Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 845 8
2005 May Le Partage des eaux Alejo Carpentier french The Parting of the Waters spanish novel Folio 371 7
A Blow Of The Wing and 2005 May Un Coup d'Aile et la Vénitienne Vladimir Nabokov french russian short stories Folio 2€ 109 *** The Venetian Lady 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 58/70
Comments This is one of Jorge Amado's best-known works, from his early period in the thirties when he burst upon the Brazilian literary scene with his earthy, flamboyant celebrations of the vibrant life style in the North-East and its animated capital Bahia (alias Sao Salvador de Bahia). We follow the very rough, very tough, very black and very street-wise Antonio Balduino from fight to fight and scrape to scrape and hardship to hardship, in between drinking bouts and love sessions trying to find his way and to make a name for himself, which he eventually finds (without giving any secrets away) in the solidarity of workers uniting to strike and struggle against their class enemies. So there are lots of good things here, although I cannot deny having found Amado's lush manner, whereby he continually seems to recounting a heroic fable of glorious proportions, to be somewhat trying from about the halfway mark onwards, and I just could not feel at ease with the practically maniacal insistence on Antonio's negritude, which, irregardless of the sociological and historical importance of African culture in that ancient region which Amado understandably wants to illustrate and celebrate, becomes in the long run positively distasteful and a form of covert racism in itself - not to mention Antonio's own weird and pernicious delusions about some kind of superiority he possesses over those unfortunate enough not to have skin the same colour as his own. But then, I suppose a lot of people did then and still do feel that way about themselves, and Amado's foray into the consciousness of black Brazilians in this least cosmopolitan area of that vast country is of undeniable interest, so I was glad to have had a good introduction to this important writer, extremely popular in that gigantic country of ever-increasing importance, even if his flamboyant style is not really my cup of tea. An odd sort of fable about the rather strange adventures of a couple of circus performers wandering around an imaginary and vast Holland divided between a northern part resembling the one we know with Flanders thrown in, and a larger southern one with lakes and mountains speaking a hardly-understandable dialect, recounted by a Spanish professor of letters in Saragossa who peppers the text with a good number of philosophical meditations and esthetic reflections - of the most stimulating sort it must be said - addressed directly to the reader, who thereby becomes a participant in the advancement of this fantasy adventure. Filled with the erudition and depth characteristic of this brilliant Dutch writer, the book is undoubtedly original in structure and content (mountains in Holland ???) but I admit to having found my attention wandering as I progressed with difficulty through this complex and not particularly easy-to-follow book. My favourite espionage author Adam Hall does not shine the same way in mystery fiction, at least to judge by this effort. This was the first non-espionage novel of his that I have tried, and do believe that it will be the last.
This is a masterful account of a momentous event, the civil war in Britain - not just England, as it started with a Scottish invasion of England and heavily involved Ireland - in the 17th Century. Superbly well written by a renowned English scholar, a specialist on the period, this absolutely fascinating book reads like the most exciting and dramatic adventure story you can imagine, which it in fact is. All of the clichés and controversies that still surround those momentous events that were so instrumental in making Britain - and consequently the rest of the world, given the leading role of Britain in shaping world events then and for long afterwards - what it is today are addressed and clarified in a dispassionate and considered but involved way that contribute to making this big and extremely well documented book without the shadow of a doubt one of the best history books that I have ever read.
Although this novel was written by Dickens at the height of his powers - his previous work was Great Expectations - this last of his 14 complete novels is, I would guess, his least- known work, strangely enough: most well-educated and well-read people have never heard of it, if I am not mistaken. But the theme is a very stong one, one of his best and most timeless: the Thames river which dominates the lives of those who work on and beside and near it and which symbolizes the force and power and also violence of the current of life itself, a theme which is powerfully developed from the dramatic opening scene throughout the book; the writing is first-rate, with at least as many if not more remarkable passages as in any other of his novels; the characters are on the whole more firmly rooted in the lower (and more interesting to the modern reader) levels of society than elsewhere in his oeuvre, with the possible exception of Oliver Twist; the novel has the full 800-page length that Dickens seems to have felt best at ease with and within which he had the scope to develop his genius for the studies of the multiple secondary characters which are his special trademark; and, especially, the book has the most remarkable, credible and admirable secondary character of all his oeuvre, the quite unforgettable crippled 12-year-old girl-woman Miss Jenny Wren (only introduced halfway through the novel!), who so effectively and energetically takes charge of her totally inadequate alcohol-prone father. A particularity of Our Mutual Friend is that one of its main secondary characters is a Jewish moneylender with a kind heart and the very best of intentions who is in fact portrayed so favourably that he loses credibility even to our modern eyes, a deliberate effort by Dickens to make up for the nasty and caricatural - but better-rounded and more memorable - image of a bad Jewish exploiter that he had created in the person of Fagin, the archetypal villain in his early (written when he was 26) success Oliver Twist. All in all, with Little Dorrit and Great Expectations, this is one of my favourite Dickens books. Yet another first-rate Latin-American writer, the Cuban writer of French descent, here on the theme of a trek through the mountains of Venezuela to get away from the pressures and political menace of the big city and to confront a fabled past. Much very fine writing, especially the striking description with strange mystical overtones of the bus ride up through the mountains of eastern Peru which is a morceau d'anthologie, if you'll pardon my French, of which an an extract can be seen elsewhere on this site. Two rather cynical but highly polished stories set on the French Riviera during the thirties by the immortal author of Lolita. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 59/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2005 June Tocaia Grande Jorge Amado french Tocaia Grande portuguese novel Le Livre de Poche 638 7
L'Imaginaire 2005 June Tous les feux le feu Julio Cortazar french Fire All Fires spanish short stories 188 **** Gallimard
Livre de Poche 2005 June Clair de lune Ismaïl Kadaré french Moonlight albanian novel 125 7 biblio
2005 June Concerto baroque Alejo Carpentier french Baroque Concerto spanish novel Folio 107 7
2005 June Théâtre t. 2 Alexandre Ostrovski french Theater vol. 2 russian theater L'Arche 317 ****
The Kingdom Of This 2005 June Le Royaume de ce monde Alejo Carpentier french spanish novel Folio 184 7 World
2005 July Tierra del Fuego Francisco Coloane french The Land of Fire spanish short stories Phébus libretto 181 ***** 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 60/70
Comments A flamboyant epic about how the upper Amazonian region of north-eastern Brazil, their equivalent of the Yankee Far West, was settled in the turbulent days of the 19th Century. Amado's way of describing the chaotic and violent evolution of the eponymous trading post and shack town for migrant farm workers into something practically civilized as if viewed by a narrator situated on high watching the follies of nascent capitalism drive the evolution of this particular corner of the earth (the southern part of the state of Bahia) gives the story the feel of an epic narration of singular significance, and certainly does bring vividly to life the ebbs and flows of the violence and strife that accompanied the development of that vast and very special region so dear to the author's heart, even if it is harder for the reader to get as emotionally involved with the changing fate of a shack town as with an easier-to-identify- with central character or family line that one sort of expects to find in a long historical saga and which is not to be found here. Amado's turgid style and tendency to see people as representatives of their economic role rather than as individuals can be trying, but on the whole this story moves along nicely and it does give you a good insight into an important part of the cultural background of an immense country with a spectacularly rich culture and history and future, so this was a globally very positive reading adventure with lots of ups in addition to the downs. A huge Sunday-afternoon traffic jam on a freeway that lasts for days while relationships form and dramas develop and life continues in the closed world of those ensnared in the gigantic time trap (the lead-off story); an epic struggle between elite gladiators in a Roman stadium unfolds in parallel with a tangled modern love affair which evolves towards a similar dramatic and unexpected conclusion (the title story): these tales of everyday dramas in a familiar setting but with strange, fantastical overtones with their mix of the bizarre and the banal have that touch of fantasy that we have come to associate with much of Latin American literature, but their almost-but-not-quite ordinariness (if you'll pardon the term) couched in long, elaborate, flowing phrases without breaks for the dialogues mark them as the work of an authentic and original writer. One again I was struck by the high rate of satisfaction one tends to get with collections of short stories ... A short but incisive novel about the devastating effect on a young woman's previously tranquil life of an organized calumny about her morals which menaces to cost her her job and her career in the rigidly closed Stalinist world of Albania in the mid-1980s. The injustice of the cabal mounted against the heroine Marianne, a laboratory assistant dedicated to her profession, by a scheming older woman jealous of her youth and beauty, using the leverage of the party and the union hierarchy to politicize the vicious slander campaign against her, subtly but unequivocally highlights the power of a totalitarian regime to impose conformity and subservience at all levels of society, a fact that did not escape the attention of the regime at the time, who initiated a purge process against the author just after its publication, fortunately ended by the death of the dictator Enver Hodja on the opening day of the kangaroo trial mounted against Kadaré by Hodja's wife and the official Albanian Writer's Congress. A baroque story in the fantastic vein about an encounter of the composer Vivaldi with an extravagant but rich and erudite Mexican lord disguised as Moctezuma during the Venice carnival in the 1730s and their subsequent adventures, with the Mexican's Indian slave, in a distorted time-frame interspersed with memorable concerts and animated discussions with Handel and Scarlatti about Stravinsky and Wagner(!). Very erudite and very knowledgeable and interesting about music and musicians (with a memorable passage describing an intense musical trance), this book is impregnated with the subtle but vivid touch of the magical and the bizarre that seem to be this distinguished Cuban writer's trademark. A nicely-printed anthology of three weighty plays by Russia's foremost 19th Century playwright with Chekhov: Between Us We Can always Manage (Entre soi on s'arrange toujours), You Can't Avoid Sin Or Misery (On n'évite ni le péché ni le malheur), and The Forest, one of his best-known works, quite recently added to the repertory of the prestigious Comédie Française in Paris. The first two take place in the burgeoning merchant-class milieu, an interesting speciality of Ostrovsky and a milieu practically ignored by the urban intellectuals of his day (and others); the first one veering more to comedy albeit with a hard, not-so-funny twist at the end where the rich and devious Bolchov finds that his ambitious clerk is less dedicated to his (B's) interests than he thought, and the second play is a straightforward sentimental and existential drama that ends very badly indeed, both plays passing well the test of time. The Forest has an intensity and a poetical aura that raise it to the highest level of Russian and world drama, and all three plays have a je-ne-sais-quoi touch and tone of being Russian in essence that never fails to introduce a tantalizing element of poetry and soul into what on the surface might otherwise have appeared to be unexceptional. Vive Ostrovsky ! A vivid evocation of the bloody uprising of black slaves on the French-ruled island of Saint-Domingue (the present-day Dominican Republic and Haiti) during Napoleon's reign, told with a mix of harsh realism and esoteric mysticism as we follow the black slave Ti Noel, the all-powerful voodoo sorcerer Mackandal, the slave leader and temporary king Henri Christophe and Napoleon's sister Pauline through those incredibly violent events shaped by the sub-human conditions which the dominant French settler-farmers had imposed on their African slave labourers to maintain their dominance and prosperity. To think that it was for these few acres of sugar-cane that the French traded the whole of Canada! Too short and too fragmented to be able to pretend to give an overall perspective on the actual events, this forceful tale, first published in 1949, told in an inventive way with an impressive luxury of insights into the voodoo-influenced consciousness of the black slaves, has well withstood the test of time and quite captivated me. A stunning collection of short stories from one of Argentina's outstanding contemporary writers, all set in Patagonia, the rough pioneer land of the extreme south. On rereading these stories many years after I had first discovered them, my very positive initial impression was reinforced: these are the work of a master who has a gift for creating with a very few words the atmosphere of that windswept land of mountains and plains and seashores where violence, both natural and human, lurks everywhere. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 61/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2005 July The Mystery of Edwin Drood Charles Dickens english / - novel Penguin Classics 402 7
Chronicles Of The Town 2005 July Chroniques de la ville de pierre Ismaïl Kadaré french albanian novel Folio 316 7 Of Stone
2005 Aug. Le Chat Murr E.T.A. Hoffmann french The Tomcat Murr german novel Phébus libretto 494 9
Edition de la 2005 Sept. Les trois mousquetaires Alexandre Dumas french The Three Musketeers / novel 779 9 Pléiade
Alexander McCall 2005 Sept. The Sunday Philosophy Club english / - thriller Anchor Books 247 *** Smith
2005 Sept La Peur Stefan Zweig french Fear german short stories Le livre de poche 249 ***** 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 62/70
Comments Dickens's last work, his 15th novel, tragically interrupted by his sudden death from a stroke in 1870 at the age of 58. It was in fact a mystery novel, written to rise to the challenge of showing that he too could write in that new genre after the considerable success of his good friend Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860), generally recognized as being the first mystery thriller in literature - although Dickens himself had innovated with his creation of the remarkably resourceful and penetrating police inspector, Mr. Battersly in Bleak House (1853). The first five of a projected total of twelve monthly instalments of Edwin Drood were published during Dickens's lifetime, and he finished the (magnificent) last page of the sixth instalment (an extract of which can be seen elsewhere in this site), which ended the first part of the novel, on the very day he died. So this work is not as incomplete as could be surmised: it is in fact the finished version of the complete first half of the novel. Full of the atmosphere of a rather sleepy provincial cathedral town, this is excellent Dickens, although without the sociological depth of his major works, with a number of sharply-portrayed characters, excellent dialogues (a Dickens strong point) and a fairly steady stream of Dickensian humour and satire. A treat for any Dickens fan. A homely and almost nostalgic evocation of life in a sleepy provincial Albanian town in the 1940s before, during, and after its occupation by Italian, German and partisan forces during the Second World War. The politics are almost surprisingly non-committal, a characteristic of all Kadaré's oeuvre, and not at all as engaged as one might have expected in a text about the wartime written and published in 1970 in that rigorous people's democracy. The part I liked best was in any case the superb long introductory chapter describing the town before war and politics got under way in a big way, masterfully presenting us with the steep winding streets and the sloping roofs and the intricate system of gravity-driven water drainage and the general relaxed and timeless atmosphere of this picturesque mountain town, based certainly on Kadaré's own home town of Girocaster in southern Albania. I just loved this story about - in part, but what a part! - a particularly gifted cat who is not only smart enough to learn the language of humans (something our own cat Mistigri could obviously do too) but who was lucky enough to have a superior kind of master who reads aloud to him (unlike Mistigri) so that he learns how the letters in the book he is staring at correspond to the sounds that he is hearing, and thus learns to read as well. After that, writing is a piece of cake for this super-cat, and this book is his autobiography, recounting not only his intellectual attitudes to life (the original German title is literally Views On Life Of The Cat Murr) but the conversations of his master with his erudite friends as well as his own thoughts and escapades and involved love-life. To help stir things up, the manuscript is presented as having been mixed up with the biography of a strange and inspired musician and writer-intellectual named Kreisler, also the theme figure in Hoffmann's renowned Tales in the Manner of Calot, who has his own scrapes and escapades and semi-mystical meditations, so the Murr chapters alternate with the Kreisler ones in a bizarre and unsettling but totally original and intriguing way that leaves the reader quite overawed at the vigour and scope of this work like none other. The overall result is a funny, brilliant and profound parody of a Bildungsroman (a novel of a young man's learning-about-life process) that just explodes with the individualism and the fascination with the mysteries of life and with the world of fantasy that characterized the romantic spirit of the time, of which Hoffmann was a leading spirit. An unusual and quite inspired book that I rank very highly indeed. Athos, Aramis, Porthos and D'Artagnan: four of the best-known characters in all fiction (and all in the same book!), whose names are recognized all over the world by people who have never even read this famous book that has caught - and continues to catch - the imagination of people everywhere in a way that very few other books have ever done. True, it is basically just a popular best-seller, an action story of the cape-and-sword genre, written in a hurry for the mass public by one of the most prolific writers of all time with the collaboration of a ghost writer, Auguste Macquet, who provided much of the basic story line and the initial draft of a part of the text. Yet in spite of all these drawbacks from a certain elitist literary point of view, its qualities sweep all obstacles aside in its irresistible ascension to the highest ranks of world literature: its unrelenting pace, carrying the young d'Artagnan (at 19 young enough for young readers to empathize with and old enough to capture the imagination and win the hearts of the not-so-young) without a pause from his native Gascoigne to court intrigues in Paris and London and battles in the company of his musketeer comrades throughout the kingdom, not to mention dangerous adventures of another sort in the arms of Milady; the terrific story line; the atmosphere of daring and bravache and enterprise that seems to dominate the spirit of that rambunctious age in these pages; the sheer energy of the writing; the brilliance and sharpness of the dialogues. Throw in those ingredients, add a touch of genius and a never-failing inspiration and a mysterious chemistry (or alchemy) and you get a work of art of surprising but undeniable stature. A work of art whose surface glitter is rounded out by its darker side, the darker side of the four heroes as a parable for the downside of humanity itself, when they commit in cold blood and with solemn solidarity a deed that will haunt them for the rest of their lives and that will drive the events of the superb sequel to this great novel that Dumas produced the following year, Twenty Years After. An excursion into the lighter side of mystery novels à la Miss Marple by the humorist Alexander McCall Smith, author of the remarkable The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency. Smith's relaxed, humane, humorous style is always enjoyable, and this book is no exception, so yes, I do think I will probably read any further works in this new series set in Smith's own beloved Scotland, where a certain exotic atmosphere, so essential to the charm of Ladies No. 1, is very much a part of the fun too. This excellent collection of stories by the author of Amok and The Confusion of Sentiments and Letter From An Unknown Woman starts off with the terrific title story that will I can guarantee impress you and shake you no end as it did me. It finishes too with a small masterpiece, The Invisible Collection, that will not leave you unmoved either. What a talented, brilliant, superior kind of writer Zweig was! To think that he committed suicide in 1942 with his wife(!) in exile, in despair at Hitler's early military victories - if only he could have hung in there a little longer ... 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 63/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
Edition de la 2005 Oct. Vingt Ans Après Alexandre Dumas french Twenty Years After / novel 949 8 Pléiade
Laurent 2005 Oct. Loin de Quoi ? french Far From What? / novel Actes Sud 170 6 Sagalovitsch
2005 Oct. Les tambours de la pluie Ismaïl Kadaré french The Drums of Rain albanian novel Folio 332 9
2005 Oct. L'Architecte du désastre Xavier Hanotte french The Architect of Disaster / short stories Belfond 225 ***
The Count of Monte- 2005 Nov. Le Comte de Monte-Cristo Alexandre Dumas french / novel Folio classique 1449 9 Cristo 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 64/70
Comments Dumfries's big sequel to The Three Musketeers, about as highly regarded as the 3M in France, especially in literary circles where its denser style and less light-hearted tone are more in keeping with highbrow taste, but decidedly less well known in the Anglo-Saxon world, no doubt because of its outspoken engagement on the Royalist side and its anti-Puritan and anglophobe stance bordering on the caricature (although Cromwell himself does get off pretty lightly). It's a good action story, much grimmer than its predecessor and more of a historical novel, centered on the final stages of the English Civil War and the decapitation of Charles I, than a universal tale for young and old alike, which the 3M certainly is. The story is a really good one, though, that certainly keeps a good hold on the reader's attention throughout, and from the start there is a tightly-twisted coil of dramatic tension that confers an element of grandeur to the story, as the reader cannot help but understand if not sympathize with the (English of course) villain's passionate conviction that the four famous friends really should be made to atone one way or another for what they did to his mother Milady twenty years earlier. A book that really should be read by anyone who has enjoyed reading the 3M and wants to round out his appreciation of d'Artagnan and his friends, i.e.: just about everyone. And if that's not enough, there is a huge third part of the saga, as long as the 3M and Twenty Years put together(!!), The Vicount of Bragelonne, that the ultra-prolific Dumas churned out two years after this opus.
This was a well-reviewed first novel with a comic touch that takes place to a large extent in Vancouver, to where the neurotic Jewish protagonist flees so as to get as far away as he possibly can from his anti-semitic neighbours and stressed-out life in Paris, so it seemed to be a good idea to buy it to keep up with current output and help a young author make his way in the world. I cannot deny that there were some good and pretty amusing parts in it - Jewish humour being a reliable value that you can always count on for a smile or two - and the image of Vancouver as a bland, hygienic and ultimately pretty boring albeit pot-smoking place (where our hero is hassled by his family by phone just as much as he ever was back home) was sort of credible. Too short and not well-rounded enough though to put it in the category of, say, Mordechai Richler's works. And, by the way, I just hate the format of this arty Actes Sud publisher, whose books are all of the most awkward non-standard size whereby the pages are too short in width to stay open without a lot of finger pressure, a nuisance that I could well do without. What is the point, other than getting away with selling books with (almost) as many pages but a lot fewer words per page than everyone else?
A historical novel of exceptional force recounting the siege of a strategic mountain citadel in Albania by the forces of the expanding Turkish empire in the mid-15th Century, as seen through the eyes of a Turkish chronicler accompanying the invasion force, interspersed with short extracts from the journal of an Albanian defender of the besieged fortress. Little known outside of that small but distinctive corner of Europe, this struggle of Homeric proportions lasted for twenty-five years as the Albanian defenders under the leadership of their national hero Skanderberg resisted year after year the all-out assaults by the most powerful empire in the world, fresh from its historic triumph in Constantinople, until the arrival of the fall rains each year, announced by the military drums referred to in the poetical title (a Kadaré trademark) signalled the forced retreat of the invasion forces for the winter season and the disgrace and probable execution of the failed Turkish commander. Appointed by the Sultan to record truthfully for posterity the coming victory, the chronicler is a cultivated and erudite member of the Turkish elite whose open mind, free-ranging conversations and alert observations give us a an objective and dispassionate but extraordinarily vivid and impressive picture of this awesome struggle. With this view from the inside we fraternize, in a natural and almost relaxed way that immerses the reader in what just must be the authentic atmosphere of a vast military force on campaign, with the leaders and officers and rank-and-file soldiers of the many specialized corps - cavalry, archers, artillery units, assault troops, janissaries and others, notably the fearsome final-assault shock troops for whom the punishment for retreat is death - to penetrate their soldatesque façade and apprehend their individuality and their humanity while they are struggling to overwhelm the enemy citadel and impose the law of the Sultan and of Islam on this last bastion of resistance to Turkish expansion in the Balkans, even though our sympathies cannot help but lie with those on the ramparts who are offering such determined and unexpected and long-lasting resistance. Written with finesse and intensity and a subtle sense of the infinite complexity of the forces that drive men to be what they are and to do what they do, this gripping account of a very real drama is perhaps the most flawless of Kadaré's considerable and admirable oeuvre A mix of stories, short novels, and fragments of novels and diverse texts with the disabused, rather melancholy tone that attracted me in the first novel by this Belgian author, Manière Noire (Back Manner), ten or so years ago. I do wish he would write a proper sequel, though, to that first most impressive effort. Dumas's great, massive epic on the theme of revenge, his only non-historical novel. This is a strange story that goes way beyond the main plot line of treachery, escape and revenge to explore large side avenues in unexpected ways, becoming progressively more and more cloaked in a veil of oriental mystery. A surprisingly complex tale that combines action and mystery and meditation and morality with a relentless drive that has impressed its countless readers all over the world (the book has apparently long had a semi-cult status in China) since its publication in 1844 (the same year as The Three Musketeers!!) by a Dumas at the height of his formidable powers. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 65/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating
2005 Nov. Les Emigrants W.G. Sebald french The Emigrants german memoir Folio 309 *****
2005 Nov. A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens english / - short stories Penguin Classics 89 *****
George Allen & 2005 Dec. The Gift of Tongues Margaret Schlaugh english / - linguistics 297 *** Unwin
2005 Dec. Princesse Brambilla E.T.A. Hoffmann french Princess Brambilla german novel Phébus libretto 183 *****
Flamingo modern 2005 Dec. The Grass is Singing Doris Lessing english / - novel 206 7 classics
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Alexander McCall David Philip Cape 2005 Dec. english / - novel 226 7 Agency Smith Town
Le Livre de poche 2005 Dec. La Faim Knut Hamsun french Hunger norwegian novel 285 8 biblio
TOTAL YR: no. of books = 50 avg. pages/week = 334 pages = 17360 TOTAL: no. of books = 314 avg. pages/week = 313 pages = 97628
2000-2005 Summary avg. no. of books per year = 52 avg. pages/week = 313 avg. pages/year = 16271 total no. of books = 314 avg. pages/book = 311 Genre Count % Language read Count % Rating Count % 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 66/70
Comments In four separate, unrelated chapters Sebald explores the passage through time of four almost-average and almost-unassuming persons that had crossed his own life path at one time or another. In his uniquely penetrating way he digs ever further to explore the ever-widening implications of his findings to present us with a deeply moving, intense and profound portrait of the times through which these in fact exceptional people lived. Sebald can make you see into the heart of things like no one else, thanks both to his superb mastery of language and to the innate integrity and honesty of the way he approaches his subjects, going from the topmost, surface impressions through to the deepest layers of significance. The growing interest one feels as each of the people-stories unfolds is, as always with the author of The Rings of Saturn, considerably enhanced by the ubiquitous photos and images of the subjects being considered, which combine with the pregnant prose to heighten the ever-present sense of significance. This was the first book published by Sebald, which quite understandably immediately established his reputation as one of Germany's leading contemporary writers. This must be the one of the best-known short stories of all time, at least in the English-speaking world, which I liked more than ever after this reread. The perfect introduction to the world of Dickens for younger readers (and for learners of the language) because of its brevity, for the vividness of its portrayal of life in Victorian England and above all for its everlasting charm. This primer on linguistics for the general (American) public, now out of print, was particularly interesting in the part devoted to phonetics explaining notably the general drift between the various types of sounds through time which is standard for languages of all types. Nothing much new under the sun, really - the evolution that English, for example, has been undergoing has happened before and elsewhere, it's all a question of cycles ... Another masterpiece from the pen of the great German Romantic of the early 19th Century. This is a long story - really a shortish novel - in the fantastic vein that rushes along with brio and creative energy and a joie de vivre that are just irresistible What a writer !! A seemingly routine crime in the farm belt of Southern Rhodesia in the late forties - the murder of a white farmer's wife by her black servant - becomes progressively infused with significance as the narrative takes us from the banal newspaper report of the incident to the more complex and less avowable aspects of the situation of the settler couple as seen by their neighbours - their outcast status on the borderline of bankruptcy and their marital difficulties - through to the harsh reality of social strife and racial oppression in the settler- dominated Rhodesian colony and the sterile quality of life on the white farms as seen through the eyes of the woman victim in the months and days leading up to the crime. Doris Lessing's first novel put her on the literary and even political map with this unrelentingly harsh portrayal of white English society in South Rhodesia when it was first published in 1950, and one can certainly understand why it did not make her very popular with the powers that be in that colony. The book stands, though, on its literary merits, and its effective narrative structure, introspective style and sensitivity to the nuances of social and group interrelationships (rich and poor, black and white, English and Boer, town and country) and to the feminine condition all contribute to making this an important book of considerable literary merit that provides much insight into a key, formative period of that interesting part of the world. The thirty-something widow Precious Ramotswe starts up a business of her own in the suburbs of Gaborone, the capital of Botswana next door to South Africa. The first novel of Alexander McCall Smith, the future author of the hilarious Portuguese Irregular Verbs, put him on the literary map all around the English-speaking world with this utterly charming tale of a younger, fleshier and blacker version of Miss Marple in the backwoods of southern Africa who manages to solve just about any problem, big or little, with her combination of warm-heartedness, ever-sharp mind and not a little pluck. This book is now practically a modern classic, most deservedly. This was the great Norwegian writer's first novel, published in 1870 - and what a novel! No doubt somewhat autobiographical, it describes the fight against hunger of a young penniless journalist-writer in the poverty-stricken northern Norwegian town of Christiana who is slowly starving to death for want of food. His fight against the pangs of hunger and his whole relationship with life via the need for nourishment is described in a most effective factual and laconic way that carries all the more weight because of its understatement tone. Never before or since has the vital act of eating been explored in such a powerful, profound way. This is a book both for weight-watchers - if he can get by with so little food for so long, why can't I cut down a bit? - and gourmets, who are sometimes almost as passionate about the act of eating as the hero of this book. I had been meaning to get around to reading Hamsun for many years now, and was ever so glad that I finally made it there - this was en enriching experience indeed. 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 67/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating Novels 162 52% french 189 60% Novels - 10 4 1% Short stories 47 15% english 121 39% Novels - 9 30 10% Theater 12 4% german 2 1% Novels - 8 44 14% Poetry 4 1% spanish 2 1% Novels - 7 67 21% Memoirs 5 2% 314 100% Novels - 6 17 5% Children's literature 4 1% Novels - 5 0 0% Thrillers 13 4% Original language Count % Novels - 4 0 0% Science fiction 2 1% french 83 26% Other - ****** 4 1% Biographies 4 1% english 113 36% Other - ***** 36 11% Essays on music/literature 6 2% german 25 8% Other - **** 59 19% Essays on current events 5 2% spanish 26 8% Other - *** 42 13% History of civilizations 6 2% russian 12 4% Other - ** 11 4% History 5 2% japanese 4 1% Art 5 2% dutch 11 4% 314 100% Photography 1 0% italian 8 3% Natural science 2 1% portuguese 5 2% Maths 4 1% albanian 7 2% Physics 1 0% finnish 8 3% Linguistics 5 2% hungarian 2 1% Grammar books 10 3% czech 1 0% Management 1 0% arabic 4 1% Literary anthologies 1 0% norwegian 1 0% Humour 9 3% swedish 2 1% Philosophy 0 0% chinese 0 0% Sagas 0 0% greek 1 0% Gastronomy 0 0% various 1 0%
314 100% 314 100%
1994-2005 Summary avg. no. of books per year = 52 avg. pages/week = 301 avg. pages/year = 15667 total no. of books = 620 avg. pages/book = 303 Genre Count % Language read Count % Rating Count % Novels 256 41% french 426 69% Novels - 10 10 2% Short stories 88 14% english 179 29% Novels - 9 43 7% Theater 36 6% german 13 2% Novels - 8 70 11% Poetry 13 2% spanish 2 0% Novels - 7 104 17% 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 68/70
Comments 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 69/70
Year Month Title Author Language Title in English trans. from Genre Editor pages rating Memoirs 16 3% 620 100% Novels - 6 24 4% Children's literature 10 2% Novels - 5 2 0% Thrillers 23 4% Original language Count % Novels - 4 4 1% Science fiction 6 1% french 219 35% Other - ****** 18 3% Biographies 17 3% english 182 29% Other - ***** 107 17% Essays on music/literature 23 4% german 58 9% Other - **** 133 21% Essays on current events 12 2% spanish 32 5% Other - *** 85 14% History of civilizations 30 5% russian 31 5% Other - ** 20 3% History 14 2% japanese 22 4% Art 14 2% dutch 12 2% 620 100% Photography 7 1% italian 12 2% Natural science 4 1% portuguese 7 1% Maths 5 1% albanian 12 2% Physics 2 0% finnish 8 1% Linguistics 7 1% hungarian 2 0% Grammar books 12 2% czech 2 0% Management 7 1% arabic 4 1% Literary anthologies 3 0% norwegian 1 0% Humour 9 1% swedish 2 0% Philosophy 3 0% chinese 8 1% Sociology 2 0% greek 2 0% Sagas 1 0% various 4 1%
620 100% 620 100% 13.3.2009 My 2000-2005 Booklog page 70/70
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