Wild garlic and nettles, industrial archaeology, grumpy farmers with fiercesome hounds. (Well, a pug.) Not an awful lot of reading. (Beware the travelogue!)
Harboro Rocks is a typical Derbyshire rocky outcrop, accessed past a very ugly limestone milling plant. Fortunately there is an alternative scenic route, via eerie Mark Dale, in Griffe Wood, off the Via Gellia.
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Anna Karenina comes in at just over a tremendous eight hundred pages. Having on a previous occasion read some four hundred of those pages I can now assert with confidence that all eight hundred are indispensable.
By some this is accounted Tolstoy’s masterpiece. I am not sure that I did not enjoy War and Peace more, but objectively (bearing in mind that it’s been a few years since I did the War and Peace thing) I believe that Anna Karenina has more to offer. In this peace-time novel Tolstoy brings out the really big guns. A tighter novel (despite its great length) the focus is turned minutely and unrelentingly on the characters, with remarkable results.
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Having reached the halfway point in both books (Demons/The Master and Margarita) I have several more or less trivial observations.
Firstly, that (near!) simultaneous reading can be good thing, but a considered and careful choice of compatible books is essential.
Secondly, my disparaging remarks to the OH that Russian names are a doddle, you just need to get a grip… Well, with double helpings of Russian names that one is coming back to bite me in the ass.
Less trivially, I am stunned by the similarities of the two novels, given that they were completed some seventy years apart. I keep having to remind myself that Demons is set way before the Soviet era, and yet both books reference common phenomena, for instance, ‘collective protest’ against ‘outrageous acts,’ versus a press campaign against a book denied publication, or the pervasive presence of ‘secret police.’ It is certainly giving me a more cohesive view of Russia than I have had before, not to mention providing fascinating insights into the political background of Anna Karenina.
It also appears that a basic grounding in Pushkin would be A Very Good Thing.
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Translated by Roger Whitehouse
Steeped still in Bovary realism, the whimsicality of Three Tales was surprising. Although each of the tales is essentially a religious exploration, I stand by my use of the word of whimsical: Flaubert has a light-hearted and questioning touch.
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I wasn’t even looking, but still ended up inadvertently stumbling over today’s review of The Pale King in The Guardian. The review hasn’t made so much of an impression as the fact that there are any number of people who have already read this book.
The original intention was to wait for the paperback. And I was enjoying my Russian double bill up to this point. But it’s DFW…
My prior awareness of Arnold Bennett extended only as far as a composite Bennett, incorporating Alan and Arnold, and, quite incomprehensibly, Samuel Beckett… Having extracted Arnold from the tangle it only requires a brush with Beckett to finally resolve these quite different exponents of the literary arts!
I am not often moved to highlight specific book blogging posts because the problem would be not where to start – but where to stop. However Stu’s interview with translator Frank Wynne is not only eye-opening, but timely and pertinent, as the IFFP short list was announced earlier this week.
Stu is well known for both specialising in, and the championing of, novels in translation. Reading his interview with Wynne I was struck by how often I read a translation and how rarely I credit the translator. I like to read foreign literature but tend to take the translation for granted. I can now envisage a situation where I might seek out a translator on his or her own merits.
For translation inspiration the IFFP short list (hosted by BookTrust) is a good place to start:
Per Petterson is already on my TBR, and Kamchatka will be joining him shortly.
Having completed Anna Karenina a week ahead of schedule my appetite for Russian literature remains unsated. I hope my proposed indulgence will not leave me with literary indigestion!
The Master and Margarita thoroughly defeated me on my first attempt but there is every reason to savour the surreal flavours of this novel: I just need to try harder. As for Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment did not agree with my juvenile palate, and forcing down The Brothers Karamazov became a grim struggle seasoned with obstinacy. Demons is fewer pages, larger text, and the apparently lighter prose of my relatively recent translation may slip down easily, taken in small bites. She says hopefully.
