UNESCO Part XII

I read De Gaulle's Fil de l'epee, an interwar essay on the military. As my partner Tony ably put it: "How many ways can you say: "I'm important!"?" What stands out for me is the line, roughly translated, which reads: "Men can no more go without leadership than they can go without food or water." And who is going to provide that leadership, may we ask, Charles?

I also read L'exclu by Constantin Toiu. Translated from the Romanian and published as a monster hit in the totalitarian period, I don't understand why it wasn't banned. Granted the protagonist slowly grows to become a dissident in his own thoughts, and the scene with an interrogator is a masterpiece of political jousting. It's towering, but otherwise it's fairly pedestrian. I wonder if it isn't context, if the book wasn't different with its slow hints compared the drivel allowed by officialdom at the time.

I also read Le cousin Basilio, a Portuguese novel, by Eça de Queiros, which didn't make much of an impression on me.

Rum Island by Simon Vestdjik was a standard historical romance, except that it was written in Dutch about the Dutch West Indies. There was no actual bodice-ripping, thank goodness, but otherwise it was a cut above some drivel I used to read for relaxation. Now I find it too dumb, just like I kept reading this book to the end expecting for it to deviate from the expected.

UNESCO Part XI

I finished read Hahn Malsook's Chant melodieux des ames, and it started to remind me of Mrs. Dalloway, with the lover's suicide and the hearing of the protagonist's thoughts. It is a step down from stream of consciousness from Woolfe, just as Woolfe is a step down (thank goodness) from Joyce. I also read Vent du Nord Est, by Othman Kelantan, a novel translated from the Malay. Malay novels are not yet 100 years old, it's amazing, and this was a pastoral, the sad story of a fisherman who struggles to feed his family and dies in a storm. I also read Hiltu et Ragna, Sillapaa's novella of a suicide. Yes, it was up with people at our house last night.

Finally, I read two essays, Delighted States by Adam Thrilwell -- this is a post-modern essay with drawings and pictures and chapters called books, and interjections by the author, about the problems of translating great works of art -- and The Dumbest Generation, by Mark Bauerlein-- predictably slaying the impact of technology on capacity to read.

UNESCO Part XI

I read Haut le coeur and de la Parra's Iphigenie. Haut le coeur is a novel of Japan's militaristic interwar period, with the protagonist a violent right-winger who frequents prostitutes. If the author's goal was disgust, he succeeded. Iphigenie is supposed to be a proto-feminist south American novel, but I found it a conventional novel of a young woman loving a man who marries someone else, and eventually refuses to become his mistress. Hohum. I read an issue of The New Yorker and The Economist. At present I reading Tagore's Gora, which I would call a philosophical novel about caste.

UNESCO Part X

I read Osaragi's Retour au pays, a postwar novel in Japan published as a serial in 1948. It is quite simple in language and plot, and was wildly successful for its implications at a time of lack of freedom of expression. Whatever those implications where, however, went right over my head. I also read another of Machado de Assis' madness novels, called Philosopher or Dog? It was surprisingly conventional, for the subject matter.

UNESCO Part IX, Banfield, Maxwell

So far today I read Revolution aux Philippines by Jose Rizal, Martin Coucou by Jeno Tersansz, Banfield's Phantom Table, Maxwell's Integrating the Mind and Yao Xueyin's La longue nuit. Revolution is a political novel, that is to say a novel written for political reasons, about the turn of the century political troubles in the Philippines. Coucou is a picaresque novel translated from an everyday Hungary. Banfield is that essay on Virginia Woolfe that was jargon laden: and so it was, right to the last page. Maxwell's book is an edited collection on cognition; I only read five essays about analogical cognition, and as with the rest of this field, I was disappointed. Yao's book is an autobiographical novel of a Chinese youth kidnapped by a roving band of criminals and adopted into their fraternity against his will. All's well that ends well, but it is hair-raising to think what the poor guy went through.

UNESCO Part VII

I read an issue of OK and started the latest New Yorker yesterday, but I also read three titles from the UNESCO list. Yaka, by Pepetela, is an unusual story of the white community in Angola for the last hundred years. The narrative device is the statue, Yaka, which observes all the sad occurrences of colonialism and post-colonialism, and sometimes speaks. In Gallegos' Cantaclara, cavalier errant, I could feel the sun on the drenched plains of Venezuela throughout the book, however conventional the plot was. Finally, I read Kemal's Memed le mince, the story of a maquisard, a story filled with ineffable sadness at the circumstances that drive such people to such difficult lives.

More odds and ends

I forgot to mention, I think, that I read Force of Choice and Evolution of Special Forces in Counter-terrorism, both by J.P. Taillon. They were both dissertation-types of book; precise, detailed, prose obviously worked over.