Since my last post, I read a couple of stragglers, i.e. books written by authors whom I thought I had completed. One was Buenos Aires Affair, by Puig, an excellent satirical novel and my favorite of his works; another was Marquez's non-fiction Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, also quite good. Read the introduction, if you want to laugh out loud. Apparently Marquez didn't see the point of publishing this, except that he was now fashionable and didn't want to go back on his word.
After that I read two Stefan Zweig's Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles, and Conquest of the Seas, the story of Magellan. My favorite biography of Mary is by Antonio Fraser, and she refers in her introduction to Zweig's 'psychological interpretation', but I didn't find it as gripping as I had hoped. With his biography of Magellan, except for a few terrible stories like the one of the deaths at the Island of Cebu, it wasn't particularly interesting.
After that I read works by Carlos Gaddo, an Italian radio personality and writer, and Kleist, a writer in the German canon about whom I had heard absolutely nothing. Gaddo wrote L'art d'ecrire pour la radio, with an introduction ten times longer than the text he wrote himself! I'm also reading his masterpiece, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana. I also read a play of his, Conversation a trois voix, which I liked.
After that I read three of Kleist's novelle, The Marquise of O, Earthquake in Chile, and Foundling, all of which I liked for their lack of preciousness, or artifice. They should not be read for people looking for an optimistic view of human nature. I also read some plays. I had read Prince of Homburg. Now it was Penthesilea, and Amphitryon, which I liked. I have yet to read Broken Pitcher and Ordeal by Fire.
Not bad for someone who was worried about reading enough yesterday. All these works were pretty short and pretty easy to read.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment