Dad “was an insurance claims adjuster, and he told me once that the only pure accident he ever heard of was a man in Arizona who was killed when a meteor hit him in the head.”
No one writes like Stephen King, no one.
Tag: praise
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Had they been able to read his Diary, some at least would have marvelled at the achievement of a man observing himself with scientific curiosity, as he voyaged through the strange seas of his own life.
— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, p. 252 -
In preparing to keep a journal he was giving himself a task, and his temperament and training meant he was going to take the task seriously . . . even if he had no idea what he might achieve, he appears to have seen himself as a man who might do something in the world. Without his enthusiasm for himself, the Diary would hardly have begun to take shape as it did.
He was a passionate reader and cared for good writing. He had already tried his hand as a novelist and discovered a flair for reporting history in the making. Like many others, Pepys started off wanting to write something without quite knowing what it was, and the Diary could be a way of finding out. He may have seen it as a source book for something grander to be undertaken later. The high drama of the world in which he had grown up, the still continuing conflict between republic and monarchy, the heroic figures set against one another, paralleled the conflicts of the ancient world he had studied in classical texts. And principally, there was his curiosity about himself, which made him see his own mental and physical nature as not merely a legitimate but a valuable and glorious subject for exploration.
— Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin, p. 79Claire Tomalin, wow. Just wow.
This is a re-read. The first time she read it, she was on her way to Berlin to give a reading. She had it on her lap the whole flight, but it turned out her seatmate was a young Finnish architect who was going home after making a bid on behalf of his architectural firm for a building in Beijing. He ended up explaining Berlin to her, making little drawings on her notebook: here’s the Brandenburg gate, here’s Oranienstrasse, this street has the best Turkish food, etc.
She remembered being amazed, not just by Berlin, but by the book. Who knows why she decided to re-read it now (motives will be examined, later, in her journal, lol). She didn’t expect her re-read to evoke the same spark of excitement that it did on first read, 15 years (!) ago, but for some reason the above passage read really fresh.
(To be continued)
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Loving Ordinary Monsters. What a book. There is nothing ordinary about its monsters. That said, great title!
Chapter Six: Waking the Litch
Mr. Coulton takes Charlie, the newest talent, to the Cairndale Institute.
“London’s a right stew of folk. I seen every kind there. Oh, I don’t mean just the Cathays and the Moors and the like. I mean card sharps and cutthroats and pickpockets what’ll take a piece off you without your even feeling it. Aye. Heart of the bloody world, it is. And every bloody one of them is free to come and go as they please.”
. . . . . And so, when they arrived at St. Pancras Station, in a roar of steam and smoke, Charlie stepped down and looked all around in amazement.
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The reading pace has picked up! Self finished Olga Zilberbourg’s short story collection in four days. The stories in Like Water and Other Stories were absolutely fascinating: not just a record of an immigrant mother’s life in San Francisco, but an indelible record of Russian life in St. Petersburg. It was published three years ago by a small press, Why There Are Words, and is a really good example of why we need small presses.
Self’s current read is The Song of Achilles. Anyone who’s read The Odyssey knows about the tragic end of Achilles and his lover Patroclus (Self is wondering how the author is going to pull that off, since the point of view is Patroclus’s, in first person. In The Odyssey, Patroclus gets killed first, so who is going to narrate the death of Achilles, which happens soon after? She also hates novels with a first-person narrator who dies in the end. It seems like the biggest cheat. But for some reason, she is still reading The Song of Achilles)
As usual, the earthiness of the descriptions of gods and goddesses is part of what self finds so arresting about Madeline Miller’s writing. Achilles’ mother, the sea nymph Thestis, is downright scary. Much taller than any mortal, with eyes that are entirely black, flecked with gold. YIIIIIKES. And self always thought sea nymphs were supposed to be delicate and airy. NOT SO!
Chiron the centaur is huge, too, and the place where horse becomes human — that exact point where horse hide becomes human skin — is given such solidity in the descriptions. Achilles and Patroclus spend three years living with Chiron in a cave. Given how huge Chiron is, it’s a wonder he can move around in there, especially after the two boys move in with him, but move he does, because the cave is also his kitchen, and he cooks all the boys’ meals.
In one scene, Achilles is spirited away by his mother (because she knows about the hanky panky taking place between him and Patroclus in Chiron’s cave, after Chiron’s gone to sleep, LOL), and she hides him on an island that is ruled by a decrepit King and a very nubile Princess. Patroclus comes to the island in search of Achilles, and is entertained at dinner by the Princess and her dancing women. The Princess dances suggestively with one of the dancers in particular, and not until the dance is over and the women go up to the guests does Patroclus realize that the tall dancer is actually — yup, you guessed it: ACHILLES!
HAR HAR HAR!
Achilles immediately falls on Patroclus and introduces him to the Princess as “my husband.” Then Achilles reaches up and tears “the veil from his hair,” whereupon the Princess sets up the most infernal screaming, and the old King turns out not to be that decrepit because he looks dangerous, suddenly.
Self honestly does not know how Achilles got away with pretending to be a woman — isn’t he supposed to be covered with muscle, especially his chest? That scene is pure high comedy!
Stay tuned.
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Telemachus tells Circe about meeting his half-brother, Circe’s son Telegonus:
- Into such miseries, your son came. Bright as sunrise, sweet as ripe fruit. He carried that silly-looking spear, and gifts for us all, silver bowls and cloaks and gold. His face was handsome and his hopes crackled loud as a fire. I wanted to shake him. (Circe, p. 308)
Almost done with this compulsively readable, beautiful re-imagining of Greek mythology.
Stay tuned.
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There are herbs that grow nowhere else. They are so rare, few have been given names. I could feel them swelling in their hollows, breathing tendrils of magic into the air.
Wow. Self loves this writing. She loves the book.
Kudos, Madeline Miller.
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Sorry, you’re just going to have to put up with self going on about ancient Greece and the Athenians and the Peloponnesians for a while because self is only on Book II (out of eight)
Can you believe summer’s over? And she didn’t even get to go to Cal Shakes. Not once.
Anyhoo, the Peloponnesian advance is extremely slow. So slow that the Athenians have plenty of time to have its people evacuate to the city (and they managed to take a lot of their property with them) The Peloponnesians got stuck at a border town called Oenoe which, being a border town, was of course walled. They were led by a man named Archidamus.
. . . after he had assaulted Oenoe, and every possible attempt to take it had failed, as no herald came from Athens, he at last broke up his camp and invaded Attica. This was about eighty days after the Theban attempt upon Plataea, just in the middle of summer, when the corn was ripe and Archimadus son of Zeuxidamus, king of Lacedaemon, was in command.
— the peloponnesian war, book IISelf just loves this sentence: “This was about eighty days after the Theban attempt upon Plataea, just in the middle of summer, when the corn was ripe . . .”
SWOON!
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This book is every bit as good as The Crossing Places. No, it’s actually better. So much funnier! Though the parts told from the murderer’s point of view (thankfully, brief) are gut-churning. Do not read any further if you do not want to know the identity of the murderer! The dialogue is A++.
Ruth screams, so loudly that it startles both of them. Roderick stops and looks at her quizzically.
“Why are you frightened?” he asks.
“What do you think?” shouts Ruth. “I’m stuck here on a boat with a madman. A madman with a knife.”
Roderick looks quite hurt. “I’m not mad,” he says. “I’ve got a first in classics from Cambridge.”
From what Ruth has seen of Oxbridge graduates, the two are not mutually exclusive.
— The Janus Stone, p. 287This conversation follows immediately after a scene where we see DCI Harry Nelson running around like a chicken without a head. Eventually, he figures out (through the timely appearance of Cathbad) that he’s been worried about the wrong daughter. Self wanted to pull her hair out.
Stay tuned.
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A few weeks — or was it months — ago, self waxed lyrical over James D. Hornfischer’s ability to evoke landscape (completely redundant in a book about battles, some might think). Well, here she is at a major engagement of the American Revolutionary War (How does self know it’s a major engagement of the American Revolutionary War? Because it’s taken chapters and chapters to get to this point, ARRRGH!) Patrick K. O’Donnell matches Hornfischer in his description of the Green River in Georgia.
It is just before dawn on January 17, 1781. Sergeant Lawrence Everhart and twelve men have “trotted down the Green River Road into the predawn darkness on a special reconaissance operation, three miles beyond American outposts . . . For more than a mile, the cavalrymen rode silently through frostbitten trees dotting barren fields, when suddenly they collided head-on with” the British army.
Everhart and his men “wheeled their horses and bolted in the opposite direction, with the British advance in hot pursuit.” The British rode the “fleetest race horses which (they) had impressed from their owners . . . and which enabled them to take Sergeant Everhard and one of his men . . . After shooting Everhart’s horse out from under him . . . a Loyalist quartermaster took him prisoner and brought him before” the British commander.
“Do you expect Mr. Washington will fight this day?” asked the officer.
Everhart: “Yes, if they can keep together only two hundred men.”
Washington’s Immortals, p. 285Fighting words! The British had over 1000 men.
The British attacked, advancing over a frozen field. “Two three-pound grasshoppers fired into the American line. The British infantry broke into a jog, crossing nearly the length of two football fields in three minutes.”
Postscript: As the British were forced to leave the field, they shot their prisoners, one of whom was Everhart. They shot him “in the head at point-blank range . . . Remarkably, the Marylander survived the traumatic wound and remained lucid enough to talk to Washington . . . ” Washington asked “Everhart who had attempted to execute him. Everhart pointed to the man who shot him . . . and just Retaliation was exercised.” The Redcoat was “instantly shot.”
Savage! Washington did not want a single Redcoat to escape. He set out furiously after them. “Despite their casualties, the American foot soldiers set out immediately on a forced march, a feat they repeated several times in the coming months.”
Stay tuned.
Kanlaon 