corollary

Listening to:

Bach, The well-tempered clavier, book 2.

A recent movie:

Shrek. A computer-animated movie, nominally targetting children, but really quite amusing and entertaining for adults as well. Toy Story 2 is also very good in this respect. Shrek wins by not having a nauseating song in the middle about growing up; Toy Story 2 has a better ensemble cast.

Listening to:

Nielsen, clarinet concerto. This is the most modern work for clarinet that I have in my collection, yet it was only composed in 1928. Nielsen wrote it after making the acquaintance of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. He wrote a quintet for them in 1922, and then planned to write each member a concerto. Unfortunately, he only managed two before died in 1931. The other concerto was a Flute Concerto in 1926, which I haven’t heard.

Now reading:

Joseph Conrad, The secret agent. Rather to my surprise, this novel has turned into rather a detective story at the moment. All may yet change as I’m only about half-way through. (I only managed one reading session over the weekend.)

Listening to:

Shostakovich, piano sonata no. 2, op. 61.

Listening to:

Mahler, symphony no. 10.

Just read:

Joseph Conrad, The secret agent.

I enjoyed this a great deal. It’s a dark novel, but one populated by brilliantly drawn characters. Viewed from afar, the plot is extremely simple; only three or four things of real significance happen. However, this is not how you see the novel as a reader. Instead, you are taken into the minds of the various characters, and shown a picture of the world that is incredibly vivid. I think Conrad excels himself both in the description of the characters’ mental states, and also in his descriptions of the physical world they’re in. Even Dickens in Bleak House doesn’t describe as miserable, nor as muddy a London as Conrad does here.

The relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Verloc (arguably the central characters, despite the detective story interlude) is very well done, much better than Heyst and Lena in Victory. Finally, the novel’s ending, both its climax and denouement, is very effective.

Listening to:

Bach, English suite #3 (BWV 808) in G minor.

Listening to:

Bach, Art of the fugue.

Just read:

Italo Calvino, Why read the classics?

This was a birthday present two years ago, and the fact that I’ve only just finished it now is testimony to the length of my back-log list. I’ve been very good since though, and seriously curtailed my book buying. Next year I expect to be reading books that are less than a year old, and getting very close to finished.

Anyway, Why read the classics? is a collection of essays about classic literature. Each essay deals with a particular author, and usually a particular work by that author. The essays are ordered by the dates of the author, so the first four are classical authors (Homer, Xenophon, Ovid and Pliny), and the last few are 20th century (Conrad and Hemingway, for example). The essays weren’t written in this order, but it seems a sensible arrangement. Italo Calvino is (was) Italian, so there are a number of Italian authors discussed, but there are also authors in there who wrote in French, English, Spanish and Russian.

Some of the essays were written for popular newspapers and/or magazines, others were written to be prefaces to the work discussed, and others were written for academic consumption. This means that the level of the essays varies quite a bit. Some are really quite difficult to follow. Others are very good. Even when about things I haven’t read and authors I’ve never even heard of, the good essays make me think, “Hmm, I really think I should try and get around to reading that...” (Then I remember my list.)

Granta 67: Women and children first.

This was an excellent Granta, with lots of neat stuff in it. The title essay is about the Titanic, and was prompted by the film of the same name. The author investigates the story of the band playing a hymn as the ship went down. Other non-fiction included an account of being trapped with some UN soldiers in a Rwandan refugee camp, and an essay about the Antarctic and Scott’s expedition there.

There was also fiction. There was an amusing excerpt from Zadie Smith’s White teeth (which appears on my list, making this an aperitif for a main meal that I know I will be able to enjoy), and an elegant extract from a recent novel by Edmund White.

To read next:

Todd McEwen, Arithmetic.

Listening to:

Oscar Peterson, Sometimes I’m happy.

Just read:

Todd McEwen, Arithmetic.

(Incidentally, if you can’t remember how to spell the word “arithmetic”, you might find the following mnemonic helpful: “a Red Indian thought he might eat turnips in church”. I was told this before I was ten, and it has stuck with me until the age of thirty. Sadly, I’ve never had any trouble spelling the word; it seems to me to be written pretty much as it sounds.)

Anyway, this book is not a guide to adding up. It is a novel about a period of a small boy’s life in California in 1960 (I can date it this precisely because there’s reference to Kennedy’s presidential election campaign). Not a lot happens really. The boy, Joe Lake, has trouble with arithmetic at school, and has to do remedial homework with a horrible book called Arithmetic town. This explains the title, but this facet of the story isn’t really that important. Instead, it’s just one part of the general slice of life.

In this, the presentation of a seven or eight year old’s slice of life, the book is quite convincing. On the other hand, I’ve decided that I don’t believe anything purporting to be the inner life of a child. I remember precious little of what it was like to be that age, and what I do remember has been retrospectively munged by the action of recollection. Joe Lake isn’t Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes (who is definitely not realistic), but there are similarities, and he is occasionally too articulate. I think I will have to have a child of my own, before I will commit to believing that a fictional portrait is accurate or not.

Arithmetic presents a few vignettes of life (dealing with school friends and enemies) that are accurately drawn and quite amusing with it. However, it’s quite a short novel, and nothing happens. There is no plot development. The last chapter is a lyrical reflection on the idealised world of cartoons (Joe earlier complains that his southern Californian suburb has no trees to climb, and that it has none of the neat features that real places should), and is really an unsatisfying way to finish things.

To read next:

Oscar Wilde, The picture of Dorian Gray.

Listening to:

Camille Saint-Saëns, piano concerto no. 1 in D major, op. 17.