Voltaire, UNESCO, Mags

I finished Voltaire's plays and I was surprised not to read Candide, but this is probably the adaptation of a novel or short story. There were a few translations included in the complete works, so that made the whole thing a bit shorter. The histories now await me.

I read an issue of OK Magazine, of The Economist, and of The New Scientist.

I also read a biography of Marc Chagall, complete with color photographs. I was trying to verify the hypothesis of the latest biography, that he never regained the originality of the years in Russia, but I can't judge from what I read. I also read another extraordinary Japanese novel, called Twilight Years. It is the story of a working woman caring for her increasingly demented father-in-law, in a great deal of detail. The result is an extraordinary verisimilitude. I then read Claess' Swordfish, which didn't make much of an impression on me, and Orly Castel-Bloom's Dolly City. This translation from the Hebrew was too involved for me. It was clearly a satire of the Israeli state, but I didn't know enough details to appreciate. It had some pretty shocking content, like a surgeon operating on her own infant son and deciding to have an 'organ roll call' i.e. taking out and checking all organs in the body. Sounds painful. I also read Kindness of Strangers by Salka Viertel, which was a little more superficial than I had hoped from such a cultured and erudite actress and screenwriter.

I also read and was profoundly moved by Le livre de ma mere by Albert Cohen. It is a song to the author's late mother, beautifully written. I had to wonder at how much guilt figured in this song of loss, written several years after the death of the mother. She did die in occupied France, a Jew, while her son was safe in Geneva, so I am reminded of Life and Death.