What are you currently reading?

[Valentino]

You make me think of that photo of the man in front of Brandenburger Tor with the board saying something like "Dear Mr. Putin. Why don't we skip to the part where you shoot yourself in a bunker?"

Reading Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness by Norman Lebrecht. Just as fun as the first time.
Sod DG.
A couple of recordings that I should get hold of too I see.

[Mandryka]

Totally weird. The ideas and values of the France of 200 years ago have about as much to do with my life now as the Greece of Homer. It doesn't work through story, it rather works through the tension caused by the interaction of alien life forms. Balzac is good at it, 400 pages and no boring bits. He's easy to read and there are some super passages of purple prose -- I mean, it's not Alexandrines but apart from that, the prose is sometimes as purple as Racine's verse. As I'm reading, I'm wondering what should I read next -- Pere Goriod, Peau de Chagrin, Illusions Perdues . . . ?

Without wishing to lower the tone of the forum, why on earth doesn't Felix just shag Henriette -- she'd be a lot better as a result -- and give her husband a good slapping?

There's also some bizarre gender stuff going on which I haven't got my head round. There's a point where Henriette says to Felix something like "you must be a woman!" . . . and Louis XVIII gives him a woman's nickname. Hmmmmm

[Florestan]

Totally weird. The ideas and values of the France of 200 years ago have about as much to do with my life now as the Greece of Homer. It doesn't work through story, it rather works through the tension caused by the interaction of alien life forms. Balzac is good at it, 400 pages and no boring bits. He's easy to read and there are some super passages of purple prose -- I mean, it's not Alexandrines but apart from that, the prose is sometimes as purple as Racine's verse.

I started it twice but neverr finished it. I found the prose too purple even for my taste and the action plodding. I might give it a thrid and final try.

As I'm reading, I'm wondering what should I read next -- Pere Goriod, Peau de Chagrin, Illusions Perdues . . . ?

Try Le colonel Chabert. You might find it to have a more modern flavour, if only because one of the main characters is an ambitious, succesful, rich and workaholic lawyer. 

Of the three you listed, I read the first two. Pere Goriot is a very good novel, La peau de Chagrin is a rather Hoffmannesque novella.

Without wishing to lower the tone of the forum, why on earth doesn't Felix just shag Henriette -- she'd be a lot better as a result -- and give her husband a good slapping?

Too introvert, too shy, too much a bourgeois nature as opposed to a passional one.

Compare Schumann and Clara (no shagging until marriage, obtained by years long legal battle) with Liszt and Marie d'Agoult ( lots of shagging, to hell with marriage). 

[Ganondorf]

I have a soft spot among Balzac's oeuvre for La fille aux yeux d'or which many people outright hate not only for the long intro and also the sadistic final scene. However I think it is really relatable and, for its time, handles lesbian themes with relatively large amount of compassion. The book in fact makes it quite clear that the main male character is a heartless cad. Also, the prose is superb (at least, in translation which I read since I don't know any French).

[Spotted Horses]

Boris Yeltsin: A Revolutionary Life.
Re-read. One of my political heroes along with Churchill and MLK. He wanted the new Russia to be a democratic and developed country.

He also installed Putin, whose first official act as president was to cancel all ethics investigations of Yeltsin. Yeltsin facilitated the transfer of essentially the entire Soviet State economy to a small group of 'oligarchs' and was in power during the time when the FSB orchestrated the apartment bombings that were used as a justification for the second Chechen war. You might say he showed courage in preventing to putsch against Gorbachov, but once in power he was utterly corrupt, in my view.

[Mandryka]

I started it twice but neverr finished it. I found the prose too purple even for my taste and the action plodding. I might give it a thrid and final try.



Too introvert, too shy, too much a bourgeois nature as opposed to a passional one.

Ah you probably never got this far but he's definitely not introverted, shy or bourgeois. When he leaves Henriette to go to work for the king in Paris, he straight away meets an older English lady, she's in her thirties, kougar, beautiful,  and they fuck like rabbits, he makes it clear that her age and experience meant that she could show him all sorts of unusual ways to jouir .  She's called Lady Arabelle Dudley, Balzac paints her using all sorts of biblical allusions -- she's the devil, the serpent etc . I'm rather proud that she was English.

Balzac has some things to say about the English . . . he thinks he's got us nailed.

[Florestan]

Ah you probably never got this far but he's definitely not introverted, shy or bourgeois. When he leaves Henriette to go to work for the king in Paris, he straight away meets an older English lady, she's in her thirties, kougar, beautiful,  and they fuck like rabbits, he makes it clear that her age and experience meant that she could show him all sorts of unusual ways to jouir .  She's called Lady Arabelle Dudley, Balzac paints her using all sorts of biblical allusions -- she's the devil, the serpent etc . I'm rather proud that she was English.

Balzac has some things to say about the English . . . he thinks he's got us nailed.

Must definitely read it again, then.

[Florestan]

He also installed Putin, whose first official act as president was to cancel all ethics investigations of Yeltsin. Yeltsin facilitated the transfer of essentially the entire Soviet State economy to a small group of 'oligarchs' and was in power during the time when the FSB orchestrated the apartment bombings that were used as a justification for the second Chechen war. You might say he showed courage in preventing to putsch against Gorbachov, but once in power he was utterly corrupt, in my view.

+1.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

He also installed Putin, whose first official act as president was to cancel all ethics investigations of Yeltsin. Yeltsin facilitated the transfer of essentially the entire Soviet State economy to a small group of 'oligarchs' and was in power during the time when the FSB orchestrated the apartment bombings that were used as a justification for the second Chechen war. You might say he showed courage in preventing to putsch against Gorbachov, but once in power he was utterly corrupt, in my view.

I partially agree with you. Late Yeltsin became corrupt, if not utterly corrupt. He didn't make the post-Soviet Russia like Switzerland. However, since the condition of the USSR was very bad, I still think Yeltsin contributed to the improvement in human and political condition in Russia. We are dealing with the history of the real-world, rather than a fantasy- ideal place. In Russia in the 1990s with very limited alternatives and resources and bunch of oppositions, who else would have done better than Yeltsin? Sakharov, Popov, Yakovlev?
But again, I think he became substantially corrupt later.

[Artem]

Books that I finished last month. Several short ones among them. Ivan Klima was the best from the bunch. He's been one of my favourite recent literary discoveries. I like this blurb from goodreads about My Golden Trades. Very fitting book for these times.

One of the last artistic expressions of life under communism, this novel captures the atmosphere in Prague between 1983 and 1987, where a dance could be broken up by the secret police, a traffic offense could lead to surveillance, and where contraband books were the currency of the underworld.

[Mandryka]

Maybe my French isn't à la hauteur but, I think it's funny -- a bit like Pickwick but not as good. Are you supposed to laugh out loud?

[SimonNZ]

These two on the go:



And winding up volume one of Caro's LBJ the next Big Fat Book set to start will be another of Dominic Sandbrook's on modern Britain:

[joachim]

The biography of Süssmayr, by Thierry d'Alberto, released in february 2022.

This biography, the only one in French, teaches us a lot about the musical life of the time, about the last year of Mozart and Constance, about the Abbey of Kremsmünster where Süssmayr spent part of his youth, and about his sad end. , undermined by tuberculosis and ruined because of medical care, he dies when he was about to get married!



This portrait, which has often been attributed as being one of Mozart's, would be that of Süssmayr around 1802.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. Robert McNamara.

[ritter]

This biography of Bruno Maderna, purchased in my recent trip to Italy:


I'm at the end of WW2, when Maderna is no longer the conducting child prodigy "Brunetto" and has taken as a young adult conducting courses with Antonio Guarneri and composition lessons  from (among others) Malipiero. He's producing his first important works (of course, not yet serial —even if he's conducted Webern's Variations op. 30 when on leave from military service in wartime Italy). Quite a character!

[Karl Henning]

Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

[SimonNZ]

Along with Sandbrook's book on the Heath years in Britain:

[Spotted Horses]

Tono-Bungay, by H.G. Wells.



I stumbled on this book because it is said that the final chapter was an inspiration for Vaughan-Williams A London Symphony, and a particular passage is often quoted as being the inspiration for the finale epilogue.

Light after light goes down. England and the Kingdom, Britain and the Empire, the old prides and the old devotions, glide abeam, astern, sink down upon the horizon, pass – pass. The river passes – London passes, England passes.

Bad choice. One of the most unsatisfying books I can remember reading.

It is written as a first person narrative, as though it were a memoir. The narrator is the son of a servant in a grand aristocratic estate (think Downton Abbey). A daughter of the family takes a liking to him, so to placate her he is allowed to hang on with his betters. This seems fine, until one of the aristocratic brats bullies him and he returns the favor by bloodying his nose. Of course he is banished from the housed, and eventually exiled to his uncle. The uncle is a chemist (pharmacist) with a small shop in a nearby village who has grand ideas. He looses his shop and the narrators small endowment in a money-making scheme and has to work as an assistant chemist in London. But then, the uncle invents a patent medicine, Tono-Bungay, which is useless, maybe mildly poisonous, but "goes viral." The uncle becomes a financier on a colossal scale and the narrator gets swept up. It seems like the uncle has entered a new aristocracy, building a monstrous grand building to supplant an elegant but uncomfortable country estate he has acquired. The aristocratic girl then reappears and reveals she has always been in love with our narrator. Of course it goes bust and the love interest announces she is not strong enough to be the wife of a poor man.

This gives H.G. Wells a framework to hang his philosophizing about England, the hollow nobility of the old order, the tawdry, rapacious greed of the new order, the hypocrisy of it all. But the characters are as flat as paper, and are just props for illustrating his social ideas.

[Dry Brett Kavanaugh]

Along with Sandbrook's book on the Heath years in Britain:

I assume you already know that Drive My Car won Academy foreign movie award.

[SimonNZ]

I assume you already know that Drive My Car won Academy foreign movie award.

Yes. As it happens I'm actually set to see it tomorrow. Luckily its run here was extended after it got the award , as this is the first chance I've had.

I read the story in the Men Without Women collection not long after it came out, but wont be able to remember it well enough now to tell what's been changed.