Feb-Mar reading Another busy month, so here’s a brief look at what I’ve read. Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now Penguin Classics, 1994. First serialised 1874-75; first book form 1875 I can’t do justice to AT’s longest novel in a brief note, but let’s give a go. The last few years of politics here in the UK, let alone in the USA and beyond, have been pretty unedifying; post-truth, fake news, sleaze. But AT had it all taped in the high Victorian age. Dodgy businessmen speculating and spinning non-existent railways in order to profit on the share flotation – not even having to pretend to buil ..read more

Here’s my latest round-up of recent reading. Winifred Watson, Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day Persephone Books, 2008; 19381  I’d read some glowing reports of this novel, and admire Persephone’s initiative in publishing works by women that have often been neglected. Unfortunately, I didn’t get on with this confection at all. I gave up halfway through. Its tone and content were similar to those frothy romantic comedy films of the 30s starring people like Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn – but lacking, I thought, their charm and wit. I didn’t warm to dowdy Miss P, whose transformation from im ..read more

More recent reading. John Williams, Butcher’s Crossing (Vintage, 2014; 19601) A very different, more brutal and elemental novel from the author of Stoner. Young Will Andrews travels west to Kansas, to the prairie buffalo-hunters’ town (aptly) named in the title, after three years at Harvard, to escape the urbane conformity of eastern civilisation in search of his ‘unalterable self’ in the wilderness. His Ahab-like quest also becomes a sort of Heart of Darkness trip: Miller, a seasoned, gritty hunter-trapper who knows this wild territory better than anyone, takes him and two other troubled men ..read more

Work and other commitments have kept me from posting much lately. Time to start catching up on recent reading – and some other things that have interested me lately. First, before the books, a word that popped up in my OED word of the day email a while back: OPHIOLATRY: the worship or reverence of snakes. From the Greek ophios – serpent, plus the usual suffix meaning, well, worship. I consulted the OED online (as always, thanks to them for allowing free access via library card number): the first citation is from Cotton Mather in 1723. Other dictionary sites provide related words, including oph ..read more

Julietta Harvey, Fear of Light. Starhaven Press, 2022. Seven years ago, I posted on Julietta Harvey’s first two novels. Familiar Wars portrays abrasive family dynamics in a Greek society (Dr Harvey was born in Greece) that is fiercely partriarchal – its men display ‘casual misogyny and [a] swaggeringly patronising attitude’ to their wives and daughters. Women were denied agency and autonomy. In its sequel, One Third of Paradise, the youngest sister, Eleni, is appalled by her father’s erratic, tyrannical behaviour – he’s a King Lear type – but she’s unable to join her ‘vulture’ sisters in teari ..read more

Mrs TD’s father was Irish and she has quite a few relatives living in the Republic of Ireland. My ancestry is also Irish, though mostly from N. Ireland. We recently went to visit some of her cousins and other extended family there. He took us to some of our favourite places in the area, and several we’d not seen before. There was a magical drive across the Wicklow mountains to the village where some of Mrs TD’s ancestors are buried. Several pints of Guinness were involved in some delightful rural pubs. At one, high in the hills above Dublin city, we asked an old chap sitting at a table if it w ..read more

Rana Bose, Shaf and the Remington. Baraka Books, Montreal, 2022. The Remington in the title is a shotgun, and it plays a central part in the plot. Shaf is the brilliant, enigmatic maths and physics genius employed to home tutor young Ben, who’s falling behind at school. Ben quickly grows to revere this eccentric philosopher-scientist; his sister Nika falls in love with him.  But this is the Balkans at the start of WWII, so we know all will not turn out well. The setting is the fictional town of Sabzic, with an iconic centuries-old arched bridge spanning the divide between the ethnic and r ..read more

Vincent Brault, The Ghost of Suzuko. Translated from the French by Benjamin Hedley. QC Fiction, 2022 Québec-based QC Fiction continues to put out an impressive range of stimulating fiction translated from its creative local Francophone pool of writers. I’m lucky enough to be sent copies of ARCs of most of their new titles, so have developed a bit of a backlog of TBRs.  The Ghost of Suzuko is Vincent Brault’s third novel, but the first to be translated into English. Benjamin Hedley has done a good job – the prose is never stilted or awkward, as translations can be. It’s a haunting love sto ..read more

Paul Auster, Mr Vertigo. Faber and Faber, 2006. First published 1994 I took this novel with me on a long journey recently. I nearly gave up after 30 pages, because the style and subject-matter were so implausible and grating. I had no other reading matter to hand, so persevered. Although the later parts of the novel showed sporadic signs of improvement, I was still left unimpressed by the end.  The central character is the whimsically named orphan Walter Rawley, just nine years old at the start of the narrative, and a wise-cracking street-smart hustler in St Louis in the 1920s. He’s taken ..read more

In my previous post I mentioned that I’d been on holiday in Croatia at the start of this month. Mrs TD’s sister and her husband have a yacht and had invited us to join them for eight days’ sailing down part of the Dalmatian coast. That’s the boat we lived in for over a week They’d been sailing for some time up and across the Adriatic before we arrived. We joined them at a marina just outside Split (we’d flown to Split airport). It was my first visit to Croatia, but Mrs TD had been many years ago in the days of Yugoslavia. It was also our first experience of sailing, so we were a bit apprehen ..read more