Books Read in June 2024 - "Why can't we steal the calm vegetable clairvoyance of these great rooted lives?"

Three weeks in Portugal meant less and different reading.

FICTION

Wolf Solent (1929), John Cowper Powys – among the most eccentric novels I have ever read, up there with his contemporaries D. H. Lawrence and Ronald Firbank!  I feel I should write about it; I feel I should read The Glastonbury Romance (1932) first!  See where he is going with this.  The exclamation points in puzzling places are one of Powys’s eccentricities.  The quotation in the title can be found on p. 356 of the 1961 edition.

Winter’s Tales (1942), Isak Dinesen – for all seasons.

Loving (1945), Henry Green – just perfect.

Brat Farrar (1949), Josephine Tey

Grendel (1971), John Gardner

High Stakes (1975), Dick Francis

I had both the Tey and Francis in Portugal with me as my light reading which was a minor mistake.  I knew that the Francis novel was obviously (see left) a horsey book, obviously, but I did not know that Brat Farrar was also a horsey book (see below – I guess I did not look too carefully at the cover), and two in a row pushed a bit past my threshold of interest.  But there I was.  

I enjoyed that neither book was in a hurry to turn into a mystery or thriller.  It was not until at least halfway through Brat Farrar when I saw that the book would indeed qualify as a mystery.  A third of the way into the Francis it was unclear if it had any story at all (it does).  None of this is meant as a complaint, since I enjoyed both books’ voice and characters and even horses and am frankly often happiest when the genre formulas are set aside for a while.

POETRY

A Treatise on Poetry (1957), Czeslaw Milosz – a survey of Polish poetry in poetry form.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Portuguese was mostly menus and worksheets.  French was neglected.

Douze petits écrits (1926), Francis Ponge – like a preface to Ponge’s next book, the 1942 masterpiece Le parti pris des choses.

Trente-trois sonnets composés au secret (1944), Jean Cassou – composed in his head, a half-sonnet per day, in a Vichy prison where he was being held for Resistance activities.  Kept in his head, too, since he had no means to write anything down until his release.  Beyond criticism, really, although I found a non-sonnet, a translation of a Hugo von Hoffmansthal poem, especially beautiful.  All published in 1944 under the name Jean Noir.  Poetry as heroism.

Three weeks in Portugal

I was in Portugal for three weeks in June.  Five hours a day for four days I was in this inlingua classroom in Porto, or one much like it:

The results:

B1 in Portuguese after about two years of fairly relaxed study – relaxed until those four days – which seems pretty good.  Maybe B2 in reading (standards defined here).  An enjoyable part of this visit to Portugal, my fourth, is that I could aggressively buy books:

And also:

And even moreso:

The Portuguese school curriculum includes an anthology of historic shipwrecks.

Still a while before I can, or I mean dare, read Saramago or Lispector in Portuguese, but I have plenty to read until then.

I strongly encourage anyone who does not overcome with anxiety at the idea of taking a language class to take an immersive class in the relevant place.  Cavilam in Vichy is pleasant, for example.  They give you a test and drop you right into a class.

I put a photo on Twitter every day, mostly adding to my collection of Pessoaiana.  Pessoa soap, Pessoa dish towels.  The Fernando Pessoa brand expands with Portuguese tourism, my puzzle being that so few people who did not go to a Portuguese-language school have any idea who he is.  Yet his image is everywhere, on everything.

A minor pleasure was this photo of a Pessoa board game, photographed in a museum gift shop, that went mildly viral, my only such experience.  At this moment, 481 likes, 37,000 views, whatever any of that means.  I wonder how many copies I sold.  The main use of Twitter is advertising, and turning  its users into marketers.  Still, it was amusing.

It was an extremely educational vacation.  Many thanks, as usual, to St. Orberose for his time and advice.  How sad that I cannot link to his blog anymore, but he is busy with his novel.