specimens of the literature of Sweden - Påskmust

Stay away from anything that ends in "must", advised my Mum.

 I thought it tasted all right, though. That's supposing you can cope with very sweet soft drinks at all. It looks like Coke (as usual, I din't think of photographing it until I'd drunk it.) Tastes a bit like it and a bit like Dandelion & Burdock.




In 1910, as you can read on Wikipedia, the Roberts' (a father and son team in Örebro) developed a new soft drink. It was flavoured with barley and hops, was sweet and coloured with caramel. They marketed it as a festive non-alcoholic alternative to beer.

With teetotalism so strong in Sweden, the idea took off.  (Compare Vimto's connections with the UK temperance movement.)

They called it "Julmust". "Jul" = Christmas. "Must" literally means unfermented berry juice. That was a way of saying that it was non-alcoholic. (In fact it doesn't contain any berry juice.)

At some stage people began to sell it at Easter, too. Påskmust ("Påsk" = Easter) is exactly the same drink as Julmust, just with a different seasonal-themed label and a different name.

The base syrup is still made by Roberts AB; this is supplied to other drinks manufacturers to make up into drinks. Remarkably, Julmust remains as popular as ever in Sweden, outselling Coke during the festive period.

If "sitting is the new smoking" (as I heard on TV a couple of days ago), then soft drinks are the new alcohol, that is, they're increasingly regarded as a menace to public health and associated with the most messed-up echelons of society. The time may yet come when drinking Julmust or Påskmust is seen, not as a badge of virtue, but as a thrillingly naughty bit of licensed misrule.

Actually, there might be something in this. Marketing sticky drinks and fast food as seasonal might be quite a civilized way of breaking the habits that form obesity and diabetes while still licensing us to enjoy the occasional guilt-free blowout on cheeseburgers and Fanta. On the theory that the biggest risks to a person's health are what they do every day.

The magic of mass production: you can get it more than once. 

Prosper Mérimée (1803-1870)

Prosper Mérimée iPhone Case

[Image source: http://fineartamerica.com/products/prosper-merimee-1803-1870-granger-iphone6-case-cover.html]

Mérimée is one of my compensations for not being able to read French well enough to manage Balzac or Proust. His most productive period came early and did not last very long; in 1834 he was appointed Inspector of Historic Monuments and thereafter his brilliant career as a hard-working public servant meant that the literary output became fitful. But when the stories did emerge, like Carmen (1845), they were as casual and wily as ever.

Chronique du temps de Charles IX (1829)

One of the first works to show how fertile Scott's influence would prove in Europe: the effect, as usual, very different from Scott and playing on a wholly different register of ironic subtleties. A wonderfully readable book.

Mateo Falcone (1829)

The "ravins" of the topographical opening paragraph return with changed effect at the end; Mateo tells his wife that Fortunato's body lies in the ravine. The comedy of "Si vous avez tué un homme" is also changed, into the harshness concealing tenderness of "Elle est bien longue, n'importe". In the key central scene, the soldier turns the child's inherited pride this way and that until he finds a way to get what he wants. This is a perfect short story - the challenge for later writers was to achieve that perfection without resorting to such soon-exhausted extremes as filicide.

La Partie de trictrac (1830)

One of the great gambling stories. Roger's moment of dishonesty proves to have appalling consequences that he is unable to avert or undo, though he tries to give half the money back. In fact it's the Dutchman's principles, as well as his own lack of them, that destroys them both.

Le Vase Etrusque (1830)

Auguste Saint-Clair, a man whose opinions are concealed, has influenced conceptions of his author. So too Stendhal's remark: I am not too sure of his heart, but I am of his talent.  

La Double Méprise (1833)

This is an extremely wily, sinuous, story in which the reader comes to share in Julie de Chaverny's illusions; they are shattered for both reader and heroine at the same time. There's no suggestion of anything exceptional about Julie, any really amiable qualities, but she is a victim. As a presentation of the male-dominated social structure under which she suffers, it is devastating. I thought while reading it that she might have communicated better with her husband, that the marriage had become fossilized at an early stage into patterns for which she must bear partial responsibility - I still think Mérimée intends that suggestion, in the scene where she so expertly rids herself of Chaverny by entering into dressmaking details with her maid. Yet the necessary level of communication between men and women is scarcely shown to be possible. Those women who thrive in this high society do so by restricting their needs to what can be satisfied within it - Mme. Lambert, etc. Julie's need for rescue does not come into this category.

The graduated presentation of Darcy is brilliant. In a short story, imagine the author opting to tell the sideline story of Darcy's rescued woman in Constantinople not once, but twice! When Darcy tells the story about himself more circumstantially, he strips off a lot of the idealistic colouring, yet (along with Julie) we interpret this as modesty, we think Darcy is understating his good nature, comically exaggerating his irritation. In fact he is, no doubt, still idealizing himself. Then there's the famous coach-scene, later used in defence of Flaubert's Mme. Bovary. And then the heroic image of Darcy collapses, in his words immediately following, in his post-coital pipesmoking scene at home, and later in his shallow message, the one in English. I use the word "shallow" from Julie's point of view. Yet it's clear that she has to a large extent deceived herself about Darcy; he has indeed lied, but as it were automatically (remember those oh so intimate "revelations" of the two things he has always wanted...), he has not engineered the situation.

Julie has believed - a belief she has created now, not long-nurtured, that their youthful companionship, based on a common fondness for ironic médisant, implied similar ideals. Now we see that it meant nothing of the kind, but should instead have acted as a warning of what Darcy, a man, was really like.

Julie's subsequent, so-sudden demise (a high fever, spitting blood) is absurd but it doesn't spoil the story. It is like a Euripidean deus ex machina, bringing down the curtain on a web of problems that have now become too intractable to pursue. It leaves us wondering how this not uncommon train of events would have worked itself out in reality, and why this could not be shown in fiction.

Les Âmes du Purgatoire (1834)

This is Mérimée's version of the Don Juan legend. He presents it, first of all, as a descent into libertinism under the guidance of the tempter, Don Garcia. The libertinism is made coldly unattractive.Then Don Juan is converted by a terrifying vision (just as he is about to complete the ruin of a nun for whose sister's death he is already responsible) and becomes austerely devout. The story mutates into a religious hagiography of a reclaimed sinner. In view of Mérimée's lifelong atheism, the apparently complete seriousness of this exercise is unnerving. The irony has gone missing, leaving in its place an ironic vacuum.

Carmen (1845)

Mérimée's fascination with Spain invites comparison with Richard Ford's. He was there in the second half of 1830, overlapping with Ford, but unlike Ford returned in 1840 and twice more in later years (after Carmen had been published).

Bizet's great opera was produced five years after Mérimée's death. Comparisons between the two are inevitable and fascinating. In the opera Carmen has no betrothed; in the story she has, and José kills him. This José becomes thoroughly immersed in his new and violent career as a robber and smuggler. All the same, we are expected to endorse some of José's highly critical view of the woman he murders. Carmen is an effective and unscrupulous criminal operator. The two works take quite different approaches to exploiting the glamourous appeal of Bohémiens/gitanos.

Mérimée's story is in four parts. In the first part the narrator, engaged in archaeological research in the wilds of Andalucia, falls in with the notorious contrebandier Don José and connives in his escape from justice; in the second, now in Córdoba, he runs across Carmen, who steals his watch, and then re-encounters José, now portrayed as a Carmen's grumpy partner; leaves Córdoba for a few months and returns to find José awaiting garrotting for his many crimes. In the third and major part, José supplies a death-cell narrative - this is the story corresponding to the opera - ending with Carmen's death and José giving himself up to the Cordoban authorities. The fourth part, with a kind of deliberate chilliness, makes no reference to the preceding material at all, but presents the narrator's (or author's?) researches into Romany culture and dubious speculations on Romany language. It's teasingly difficult to decide if this last section is still within the fictional frame or not. Its blank contrast with the sensations stirred by the preceding part is calculated and typically Mériméesque.   

(2007)

Xenophon: Anabasis

Old Khndzoresk, Armenia (Photo by Mher Ishkhanyan). Xenophon mentions seeing troglodytic villages like this.

[Image source: http://www.panoramio.com/photo/70883746]

Xenophon wrote the Anabasis some time around 370 BCE. The narrative covers spring 401 - spring 399.

The book I read was a Penguin Classic (The Persian Expedition) containing Rex Warner's translation of 1949 along with George Cawkwell's 1972 introduction.

Some readers have found George Cawkwell's introduction to The Persian Expedition too captious, because it's primarily concerned with weighing the accuracy of Xenophon's account; but after all that's the proper thing for a historian to do, rather than spend time eulogising the lucid prose. We do like, I know, a eulogistic introduction; it reassures us we are reading something great, and are spending our time wisely. (Just as, so I've heard, the main audience for car adverts on the TV is people who have just bought the model being advertised.)

Not everything Cawkwell says has the weight of consensus behind it, for instance his account of the battle of Cunaxa. He asks the right question, though: how on earth did Cyrus expect to win it? Once asked, Xenophon's account is plainly unsatisfying. And Cawkwell's scepticism about the young Xenophon keeping a travel-journal is persuasive.

I don't think it's a firm conclusion, either, that the Anabasis has a Panhellenic agenda. Still, few works of canonical literature are as straightforwardly militaristic. The book's former prominence in the education of our male elite is something to ponder.


Xenophon tells the story about himself in the third person: he makes himself the hero. That's what Caesar did too, but it isn't a form that attracts modern writers and it makes a poor impression on modern readers.

Yet in those days the first-person approach may not even have been a possibility. Herodotus didn't use it. Nor did Thucydides.

We are so used to the idea that an author can just break into his text and tell us about himself or his thoughts in the first person that it is hard to think back to a time when that wasn't the case.

But even today, there are literary forms in which the authorial "I" is not really a possibility. An epitaph on a gravestone.  The minutes of a team meeting (the minute-taker would annotate their own contributions in the third person).  A song-lyric:  because in the song "I" does not mean Jerry Leiber or Gerry Goffin but the role taken by the singer. All these analogies are helpful.

In more ancient times, literature was not, on the whole, a way of "saying" something. It was a way of recording something. And that isn't the same thing.

The ancient conception:

SPEECHES say things. They are attributable, because if you can hear the speech you can also see who's making it. "I" is therefore instantly meaningful.

WRITING records things. Writing is often not attributable; it travels in the absence of its author. The assumption that an author's own name would remain attached to her/his work wasn't really secure until the invention of printing. Writing was typically broadcast by being recited, so if the word "I" were to be used, it would mean the reciter, not the author.

The obvious exception to this knocked-up scheme of mine is the letter. Letters are attributable, because of the address ("Plato to Dionysius wishes well-doing.") Such being the case,  Plato feels free to use "I" in his letters.

... Plato, or pseudo-Plato. Because the further back you go, the more surviving letters tend to be outright forgeries. And even when a letter does happen to be by its putative author, it often looks, not so much like a "genuine" letter, as like a piece composed in the form of a letter. The literary letter should perhaps be considered as just another narrative genre.

Anyway, letters aside, the idea of the author as him/herself an implicit character within the literary text was not an automatic one. Even if Xenophon had contemplated writing in the first person he would have had to write "I, Xenophon, the author of this book ..." in order to make himself clear.

(I suppose I ought to have used the word "deictic" somewhere around here.)

Our distaste for the third-person form of memoir isn't automatic either. It seems quite an obvious way to write a memoir, and why should it be intrinsically any more prone to dishonesty than a first-person account? Perhaps we now feel that being written about in the third person is a rare tribute that ought to be earned by fame or infamy, not something you do for yourself. But there was no press in those days. Besides, Xenophon and Caesar were already famous when they wrote their accounts. The form doesn't entirely exclude Xenophon's thoughts, but they tend to be practical ones - "Xenophon realized that, if they left the hill which they had just taken unguarded, the enemy might reoccupy it..." Normally, of course, his thoughts are expressed by putting them into a speech (see above).

As for the author's emotions; well, here emotions tend to be communal rather than personal: "At this point the Greeks certainly felt very downhearted..." There's a lot of times when you feel that people must have felt furious towards other people, but it doesn't tend to get said.

Xenophon's account of the Persian Empire is two-edged. There is an element of "us and them". In his book Greek discipline can always beat superior Persian numbers. But there's no racism of the modern sort. And his book also testifies to the huge importance of the Persian Empire to Greek life, a background that tends to be absent when we think narrowly about Platonic dialogues or Athenian tragedy (The Persians aside).

The book certainly is apologia. Xenophon makes no bones about the numerous disputes within the army, and it's clear that neither he nor his actions were universally approved. The army itself was mercenary and doubtless brutal; he soldiered in a world with no Geneva conventions.

Cyrus may have mustered his troops somewhere near the present-day location of Baghdad International Airport (formerly Saddam International Airport).  

[Image source: http://www.iraq-businessnews.com/  . Info from Lee T. Pearcy et al, review of Robin Waterfield's Xenophon's Retreat: Greece, Persia and the End of the Golden Age (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2007) ]

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)

Honoré de Balzac, daguerréotype by Louis-Auguste Bisson, 1842 (Maison de Balzac)

[Image source: http://moniquespassions.com/the-words-that-make-sense-brilliant-writings-by-writers/balzac-narrow-minds/]

In the 1970s if you went to the shelves of a professional but not too literary British person you found novels in the Penguin Classics series. For instance Balzac, Zola, Turgenev and Tolstoy. (You also found Solzhenitsyn and probably Isaac Bashevis Singer.) There might be some Hardy and some Jane Austen, too, but the foreign-language novels, being translated into 1970s English, seemed more contemporary.

A few years later, these same persons “raved about” the French film Manon des Sources.

I mention this odd footnote of history (it’s in rather a Balzacian spirit, I think) because although the Penguin Classics list still exists, indeed is more numerous than ever, it has largely – and Balzac almost entirely – disappeared from the shelves of High Street bookshops. I suspect the main reason was the dramatically improved marketing of moderately substantial contemporary novels, which began in the 1980s and is indissolubly associated with the rise of Waterstones. Old Goriot and Lost Illusions didn’t have quite the same razzmatazz, and besides everyone was growing younger, especially middle-aged professionals. Channel 4 had something to do with it, and probably Thatcherism too, in a back-handed kind of way.

As I worked my way through those translations of Balzac, I became aware that I never seemed to remember them afterwards, though I remembered that they had absorbed me. I read A Murky Business (Une ténébreuse affaire) three times, and each time it was like reading a new book. A new and very wonderful book.       

I have a theory about this now. Balzac writes kinetically, by which I mean this: that the kind of book he is writing changes as it goes along. It therefore cancels its own past, so that if we get to the end and later go back to the beginning, it seems to be a different book. This is rather aridly put, but the point can be illustrated from Le Curé de Tours / The Abbé Birotteau (1832).

This is a comparatively brief work, about seventy pages. Perhaps for the reason outlined above, Balzac can be distinctively himself in works of any length, and there is no generic difference between works that we might, if it were a question of mere volume, differentiate as novels, contes and short stories.

One night in the year 1826, as autumn was setting in, the Abbé Birotteau, the chief character in this story, was overtaken by a shower as he was on his way back from the house where he had been spending the evening. So he hurried as quickly as the comfortable roundness of his figure permitted, across the deserted little square called the Close, which lies behind the east end of Saint-Gatien, in Tours.

You cannot call this misleading, since it sets the tone for the opening ten pages at least. We are led to collude with the abbé’s own complacency; he is his own world’s chief character, and if he is not precisely a hero he is at least comic and sympathetic. We always sympathize with a humble person’s pleasures; it reminds us of ourselves.

Birotteau thinks of his landlady as a benevolent machine, remembering his late friend Chapeloud’s remark: “‘That excellent woman has certainly a vocation for serving the clergy’”. Taken coldly, there is a good deal one might want to object to in that remark. But when you are reading a book you expect to have to accommodate a few unamiable points of view without too much quibbling. In Balzac’s work, however, the conventions we absorb often end up on the operating-table.

We hear about Mademoiselle Gamard as early as the third page; in fact, considering the mode in which the story is proceeding at this moment, we might almost say that “we know all about her”. Landladies, after all, supply a function; they are there and we don’t question them; they have the same invisibility as the servants in a country-house whodunnit by Agatha Christie, where they are never under suspicion and never turn out to be the murderer either. 

Birotteau’s own failure to identify Mademoiselle Gamard as a human being precipitates his crisis. The seriousness, indeed finality, of that crisis, becomes slowly clear to him. For us, it is a matter of continuous re-adjustment. We begin to realize that she is important, is indeed a person, a highly threatening presence, a person whose power vastly outweighs the “chief character in this story”. But it takes nearly thirty pages before she is thoroughly the centre of our attention.

Troubert, his fellow-lodger, takes even longer to assume much eminence. The first sentence we read about him is: “The Abbé Troubert was still alive.” It’s the most diminishing way possible of introducing someone; Birotteau, we understand, has mentally killed him off. Troubert is so subsidiary to anything of importance that he sits even lower in the novel's pecking order than Mademoiselle Gamard; for the lowest of all things is a priest who is under his landlady’s thumb. When, some forty pages later, Birotteau finally recognizes Troubert’s stature, he accidentally names him Chapeloud, the dead friend whom he had always regarded as the most significant person in the household (and his own forerunner). By the end Troubert has become Monseigneur Troubert, Bishop of Troyes, decisively the chief character, and the one on whom Balzac, pretending to philosophize, spends the last pages.

Birotteau is briefly glimpsed, even then, but he is a shell: “Over his eyes... illness cast a veil which simulated reflection.” We understand that he remains as empty-headed as ever, and we almost partake in the Bishop’s response; he “cast a look of contempt and pity at his victim, then deigned to forget him, and passed on”. The forgetting is now a gift.

Balzac’s prose resists the genre that seems to go along with the characters.

“Leave Tours?” exclaimed the Abbé in indescribable dismay.

For him that was a kind of death. Did it not mean breaking all the fibres by which he had taken root in the world? Bachelors live by their habits, as their powers of response decay. When to this rigidity of mind, which makes them rather travel through life than live, is joined a weak nature, external things take an astonishing hold on them. So Birotteau had grown to be rather like a plant: to transplant him was to endanger his innocent flowering and fruit. Like a tree, which in order to live has to imbibe the juices from the same soil unceasingly and spread its hair-roots always in the same ground, Birotteau must never cease trotting to and fro in Saint-Gatien, must always tread the earth in the vicinity of the Mail where he was accustomed to take his walks, constantly traverse the streets through which he normally passed, and continue to visit the three drawing-rooms where every evening he played whist or backgammon.

“Ah! I didn’t think of that,” replied Monsieur de Bourbonne, considering the priest with pitying eyes.

M. de Bourbonne may be pitying, but Balzac’s analysis cannot afford pity. We now see that while the first pages of the story seemed to invite our compliance in a convention of admiring the clergy, accepting their role and their celibacy, the analysis leads to quite opposite conclusions. We also see that the image of those first pages is an image not of just one walk across the square but of the whole unending routine without which Birotteau’s life is inevitably smashed.

The paragraph of analysis looks hastily written; it probably was. If Birotteau’s life is compared to a plant’s, isn’t it rather odd to call him, at the same time, a “traveller” and to insist on his movements through the streets? As often in Balzac, such stupid mistakes are actually the deepest insights he has to make. Birotteau both as plant and traveller is seen refusing to live, refusing in particular to accept the necessity of change, with its strong possibility of tragedy, that is implied in sexual and familial life.

L’Envers de l’Histoire Contemporaine (1842-1847)

Mis-filed in the Mills and Boon shelf of the charity shop I came upon The Seamy Side of History, by one Honoré de Balzac, NEL Signet Classics, 1969, complete with a criminally misleading cover – how could I refuse? Admittedly, when I saw the words: “This abridged translation...”, I was tempted to pass, but reason prevailed. I told myself that if I didn’t read this now, I was never likely to run across it again.

It certainly is a very odd volume of the Human Comedy. The story concerns a Royalist and Catholic secret organization, of apparently vast wealth, who are dedicated to relieving the sufferings of poverty, especially among the wealthy who have fallen on hard times. It’s divided into two episodes. The first shows Balzac as a master of dry exposition: hardly anything happens, except that it quotes at length the legal papers recounting a complicated Royalist plot during the Empire; the people who were punished include the lady who now masterminds the secret organization – twenty years in the hulks. This episode uncritically celebrates an unworldly religiousness of the most conservative kind (what happened to Balzac’s hatred of celibacy?) The second episode recounts Godefroid’s meeting with an old man and his grandson whose self-appointed task (at which they are failing, being dupes of a plot to fleece them) is to keep his bed-ridden daughter, who has a debilitating mystery illness, in total ignorance of the squalid poverty to which they have been reduced. They live in a slum, but her room, which she never leaves, is kept full of fresh-cut flowers and costly furnishings. Godefroid (an initiate in the secret organization) naturally begins to assist them. An extraordinary Polish doctor undertakes to cure the woman, whom he instantly recognizes as suffering from an extraordinary national illness, invented on the spot by Balzac. At this point, the well-handled plot speeds up, becoming increasingly complicated and indeed farcical. It turns out that the woman’s father is the judge who had condemned the charitable lady to twenty years in the hulks. In the mean time the grandson robs the doctor, for the best of reasons. Things seem to be spiralling toward disaster but at the same time the welcome chink of money is beginning to be insistently heard in the background. Everyone ends up rich, healthy, happy and forgiven. I forgot to add that the judge is just at the point of completing a multi-volume account of modern law which Godefroid assumes will be a money-making sensation.

All of this is wildly absurd, yet Balzac gives no indication that he thinks it so. His narrative control, through so many drastic changes of pace and dynamic switches of tack, is supremely, casually, confident; I had to read on, with no picture at all of where this was all going. He has a heroine with no teeth who barks like a dog; surely this is refreshing. At the same time he has a mean-spirited landlady, Madame Vauthier, whom he portrays with composed realism. Remarkably little distinguishes this absurdity from such great books as The History of the Thirteen and Colonel Chabert.

Balzac had learnt from the philosophes; he is – but in what a sense! – encyclopaedic and scientific. Yet who can call him their child? – a monster! Balzac’s position was not consistent, it just didn’t add up (or down). It’s unstable. A good state for a novelist of genius – we are lucky he existed. But it would take Marx and Baudelaire to form Balzac’s intuitions into something that changed epochs (in ways that he would have equally detested).

Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau (1837)

Another curious feature of Balzac, who is one of my favourite authors, is that he has often disappointed me - in general, these disappointments have been irrational. Looking back over the years, I have been variously disappointed by Ursule Mirouët, Eugenie Grandet, Le Père Goriot (yes, a little).... I enjoyed Splendeurs et Misères de Courtesanes the first time, but couldn't get through it a second time. And now, César Birotteau. In this case the disappointment descended very late on, in the third and final section. This is the part of the book in which the hero, now bankrupt, is restored, partly by the efforts of his friends, to a place of honour - a second shock, which this time he does not survive.

La Marâtre (1848)

This was Balzac's last completed work and is generally considered the best of his plays, but it does nothing for me. Balzac was interested in the theatre because he thought he could make serious money from it. In the end the timing was bad, Paris was in the middle of a revolution, but the critics liked it. They do not seem to have noticed - or rather, they accepted - the theatrical conventions that now seem so ridiculous, the absurd contrivances of the plot and the grotesque use of asides.

Gertrude: Well, thank God you're not in love with him. I was really alarmed for a moment, because, my dear, he's a married man.

Pauline: [calmly] He's married? But why does he hide it then? [Aside.] Married! It would be infamous! I must ask him this very night. I will make the usual signal.

Gertrude: [aside] She doesn't show the slightest sign. Either Godard is mistaken or the child is as strong as I am. [Aloud.] What on earth's the matter with you, my angel?

Pauline: With me? Nothing at all.

Gertrude: [putting her hand on Pauline's arm] You're very hot. [Aside.] She certainly loves him. . . . But does he love her? Oh, this is hell.

To our minds every one of these asides could be profitably eliminated; none of them tells us anything that we couldn't make out for ourselves, were the scene only to be played unimpeded.    

And how on earth can Gertrude, scrutinizing her stepdaughter closely, observe that "she doesn't show the slightest sign" when we have just heard Pauline explode "it would be infamous" ? Or rather, how could the audience hear this without laughter?

(2003, 2004, 2008)

*

My posts about Balzac:

Sarrasine (1830):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/01/libravoxcom.html

Le Colonel Chabert / Colonel Chabert (1832):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/12/honore-de-balzac-le-colonel-chabert.html

"Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu" / "The Unknown Masterpiece" (1832), "Les Marana" / "The Maranas" (1832), "Un drame au bord de la mer"  /  "A Seashore Drama"  (1834), "L'Auberge rouge" / "The Red Inn"  (1831), "Maître Cornélius" / "Master Cornelius"  (1831):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2019/03/minor-balzac.html

Le Curé de Tours / The Abbé Birotteau (1832), L’Envers de l’Histoire Contemporaine / The Seamy Side of History (1842-1847), Histoire de la Grandeur et de la Décadence de César Birotteau / The Rise and Fall of César Birotteau (1837), La Marâtre / The Stepmother (1848):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2015/03/honore-de-balzac-1799-1850.html

The Lily of the Valley (1835):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2020/03/honore-de-balzac-lily-of-valley-1835.html

Mémoires de deux jeunes mariées / Letters of Two Young Married Women (1842):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/02/memoires-de-deux-jeunes-mariees.html

Le Cousin Pons / Cousin Pons (1847):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2016/04/honore-de-balzac-le-cousin-pons-1847.html

Anon. The History of Poland (1831)

Bohdan Khmelytsky with Tuhai Bey at Lviv, painting by Jan Matejko (1885)

[Image source: Wikimedia]

This is a volume of “The Cabinet Cyclopaedia. Conducted by the Rev. Dionysius Lardner, LL.D etc, assisted by Eminent Literary and Scientific Men.”

I enjoy reading nineteenth-century historians. I have read most of Motley (The Dutch Republic and the United Netherlands) and thousands of pages of Lecky and Milman. This is not so good as those, but the author’s voice is one we are disposed to trust. In those days the historian made no secret of his beliefs, and judged accordingly. This historian is Protestant and enlightened, and so writes in a spirit of mordant condemnation about much of Poland’s history, especially the centuries of decline that made its demise as an independent nation seem (with hindsight, for now it was gone) inevitable. The other, apparently less partisan, value that has appealed to all historians since Thucydides is political savvy, the successful maintenance of power. Where religious difference is allowed for, the criterion of a supposedly common standard of morality is exercised. Thus, of the Catholic establishment yielding on an issue of clerical marriage: “This was a cowardly, we may add, a highly criminal subterfuge. Whether celibacy was right or wrong, they had sworn to enforce it.”  

But the reason for this note is the last six pages of the book: “to omit all mention of the Jews, a people more numerous here than in any other country of the same extent under heaven, and bearing so great a proportion to the whole population, would be unpardonable.”

What is surprising about these pages, which are written in just the same easy though uncompromising tone of voice as all the preceding, is their unemphatic outline of all the arguments that in due course would result in the Holocaust. There is no indication that the author thinks he is speaking out of turn; this material is uncontroversial, a reasonable inclusion in a work of general reference for English readers.

“... there can be no doubt that the hatred with which they were always regarded in Poland, as every where else, was to a certain extent deserved. By practising usury, and dealing in contraband commodities, - both forbidden by the ancient church of Poland, - by lending money on the most iniquitous terms to the heirs of the rich, they rendered themselves obnoxious to the people.”

“Nothing can more fully expose their exceptionable mode of dealing, than the fact, that by the Polish laws they have at all times been forbidden to keep wine shops, to sell brandy, or to traffic with the peasantry, lest they should not only impoverish, but corrupt that thoughtless class.”

(It is pointless to detail every objection I feel to the remarks I am quoting, but perhaps it is worth drawing attention to the form of the argument: “existence of discriminatory laws proves malevolence of those discriminated against” - the author admired the body of law as an expression of time-hallowed insights, and was not inhibited from drawing his logical conclusion. For us the premise is in need of modification.)

“The numerical increase of this people has long surprised the Poles; the ratio of that increase, compared with that of the Christians, being usually as two, or even three, to one.”

“.. the rapacious tyranny of the Jewish agents over the Cossacks of the Ukraine ... they appear to have been too formidable for punishment, at least by the state; but the Cossack chief massacred them wherever he found them. They were generally attached to the government which left them unmolested to the acquisition of wealth; but their feeling, when persecuted, was vindictive enough.”

(of a Jewish sect who are said to permit public profession of the dominant religion)  “The members of this sect are believed to be exceedingly numerous, and to fill important posts in the administration .... they assume so much mystery, that they have hitherto eluded the investigation of the police.” 

(of their litigiousness) “.. out of every ten cases brought before the courts, a Jew is said to be concerned in nine.”

“Almost all of the coin of the kingdom is in their hands...”

“There is no trade too vile, or even too dangerous, for a Polish Jew, if he can profit by it...”

(Examples of Jewish treachery, followed by two - clearly too well authenticated to be denied - of Jewish “patriotism”.)

“...the proportion they bear to the Christians is alarming. As they are not producers, but live on the produce raised by others, their existence in no state - at least in any considerable numbers - can be other than a national injury. That they have been a curse to Poland, is loudly proclaimed by all the native writers. Besides their usurious dealings and general unfairness, they are reproached with always contriving to fail when their children are full grown, and of previously consigning their property to them, to the prejudice of their creditors...”

What may justly be urged in defence of the eminent literary and scientific man is that he did not envisage circumstances in which the extermination of Jews would be possible. The thoughtless peasantry and spendthrift nobility of Poland were, in his eyes, no doubt impotent to execute such a commission.

*

Afterword:

The “conductor” Dionysius Lardner LL.D was doubtless a relation of Nathl. Lardner D.D., buried in Bunhill Fields. 

This was the 133-volume Cabinet Cyclopaedia that Sir Walter Scott inaugurated with his two-volume History of Scotland  (1829). Sir James Mackintosh wrote the History of England, Thomas Moore the History of Ireland. Other notable contributors included Robert Southey and Mary Shelley. 

I am not sure why my copy of  the History of Poland appeared to have no named author.

According to the useful Wikipedia article linked below, the author of the History of Poland was Samuel Astley Dunham ( ? - 1858). He made half a dozen contributions to the series. This one is the first, and the shortest. Best-known is the History of Spain and Portugal (five volumes, 1832-1833). 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_works_in_Lardner%27s_Cabinet_Cyclop%C3%A6dia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Astley_Dunham 

Appendix (2004)

When I wrote the previous pages I assumed, in an unduly relaxed spirit, that I could count on all readers to share my disgust at anti-Semitism and to take the same kind of mildly-concerned interest in this minor note from a distant past. But, even in the few years since I wrote, there has been a perceptible upsurge in the expression of anti-Jewish attitudes. Recent international events have of course provided a fertile soil. For most of my lifetime it has been possible (however foolishly) to dismiss anti-Semitism as a horror of the past that was now maintained only by a few ignorant thugs. The Internet, however, with its uncanny capacity for highlighting the ugly preoccupations of fellow human beings, has generated a flood of literate, confident fascistic writing.  Anti-Semitic websites are disturbingly popular. I owe my knowledge of the following current news article from a US white supremacist webzine (National Vanguard), for example, to a much-published Polish formalist poet who wholly subscribes to its assumptions.

An intra-Jewish media dispute has led to the jailing of Lew Rywin (pictured), who co-produced Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List. Lew Rywin was also a figure in The Piano, another anti-Polish and anti-White pro-Zionist production whose director was Jewish child molestor Roman Polanski...

The conviction highlights the ongoing legal, semi-legal and illegal operations of Jews in Eastern Europe, while also exposing the Spielberg "Holocaust" juggernaut which seeks to show Jews as blameless lambs at the mercy of White "anti-Semites." Gangsters have long been associated with Jewish "human rights" programs, not least the Lansky Syndicate's connections with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) in the USA.

The "victim" Adam Michnik remains unindicted despite having paid fellow Jew Rywin to bend the media policies of the emerging former Communist-occupied nation, which has historically stood as a major pillar and font of European civilization.

Michnik attached himself as a "crypto-Jew" to the anti-Communist Solidarity network in the 1980s, the Polish resistance which eventually defeated European Communism. Since liberation he has applied "neo-conservative" politics to undermine the gains of the Polish people and to distort the meaning and relevance of Solidarity. Interestingly, in paying off Rywin, the "anti-Communist" Michnik was seeking to influence the "post-Communist" heirs of the regime which repressed Solidarity.

Poles have long had disputes with Jews -- who have maintained what some observers call a psychotic hate for Poles. In the cultural sphere, one such hater was Jerzy Kosinski, who finally committed suicide after issuing "literary" fumings slandering the noble and heroic Polish people as mentally-retarded genocidal lunatics. In the USA "Polack" joins "redneck" as one of the few permissable ethnic slurs. The Polish-derived population is also one of the leading racially-conscious White communities in the United States.

I have abridged this and quote it only to emphasize the writer’s common ground with our literary gentleman of 1831; though the curiously disturbing way in which the style of the piece reads (in large part) just like The Economist, and not at all like an isolated mad prophet, is something well worth reflecting on.

It may not be so smugly easy, in the years to come, to maintain a critical distance from anti-Semitism. It may once again form the mainstream. To show that its dogmas are immemorial may be one step towards recognizing that its basis lies not in a reasonable analysis of current events but in poisonous folk-myth.

(2001, 2004)

Jane Austen: Emma (1816)

Jane Austen, pencil-and-watercolour sketch by Cassandra Austen, currently on display in the National Portrait Gallery

[Image source: http://austenblog.com/2010/05/09/a-closer-look-at-images-of-jane-austen/ . This is the only fully authenticated portrait of Jane Austen that shows her face; there is a painting by Cassandra that shows Jane, but from the back.]

Emma is an epic of class distinction, or what might be better named class definition. The class being defined is the upper-middle class gentry, not quite titled. The same class that Scott in Ivanhoe five years later would call the Franklins of Merry England.

Knightley, the novel's most skilful operator, is relaxed in his nuances. He behaves well to the lower orders, he does not imagine what is not the case. When he discusses class distinction he is talking about classes or sub-classes that are lower than his own: we don't hear Knightley on the nobility. He uses the terms "line" and "set", apparently interchangeably, to talk about the place that Harriet Smith inhabits: Mrs Goddard's. But his definitions are also nuanced by "situation" - Miss Bates is in a situation which is economically straitened. Though her "line" is comparatively high, she ought not to be made the butt of Emma's thoughtless wit. Knightley praises Robert Martin, though he does not pretend that the friendship is an equal one. The exact wording is: "He knows I have a thorough regard for him and all his family, and, I believe, considers me as one of his best friends." It is not this: "I have a thorough regard for him, and he is one of my best friends." The phrase "and all his family" qualifies the thorough regard: what he registers is not quite a personal affection, it is a regard for retainers. And the second half of the sentence is like an ethologist talking about a chimp. Emma is an imaginer, that is the source of her errors, but Knightley speaks up for sense. Yet he is not (his term for Harriet) artless, except that comically both he and Emma turn out to have their humanly artless sides too, when it comes to making love. 

*

Harriet is a little embarrassing: I mean, for Jane Austen. In a book that so relishes its expansive accounts of discussions, there's a significance to its suppressions, to the things that are not given to us. They include (in I, XVII) the painful interview between Emma and Harriet at Mrs Goddard's, in which the error over Mr Elton is revealed; this is reported to us, not word by word, but summarized into Harriet's tears and good behaviour. 

When the same situation recurs with regard to Mr Knightley, another supposed admirer of Harriet who is to be revealed as an admirer of Emma, this time it's decided to operate by letter.

You remember how, after Emma's crashing remark and Miss Bates' painful response, the Box Hill scene carries on as if it was blithely unaware of how our faces altered, of the shock and awkward silence that only we, apparently, have been conscious of. True, the scene gutters and fizzles, as if others beside ourselves might be feeling this tension, this awareness of some debt that remains unpaid, but not a word is said about it. When Knightley berates Emma, it comes upon us as a relief. 

We are not permitted to read Emma's letter (III, 14). And now, though this time we are really uncertain of the author's sanction, the tension of the Box Hill scene reappears. It persists throughout the following chapter, in which Emma and Knightley hugely enjoy reading Frank Churchill's letter and indulging in discussing the finer discriminations of someone else's behaviour. This comfortable scene is also courtship between the pair, a foretaste of married bliss. Yet all the time we a little distracted by waiting for, what will also be presented only in summary, Harriet's reply (III, 16). Of the latter, we are told:

Harriet expressed herself very much, as might be supposed, without reproaches, or apparent sense of ill usage; and yet Emma fancied there was a something of resentment, a something bordering on it in her style...

The "very much" has an odd effect, as if we feel it leading up to "very much injured" or "very much gratified", but instead it's left hanging in the air. We can uneasily attach it to "without reproaches", though since this is an absolute position the effect of "very much" is actually to weaken it, to convert it into  "mainly (but not altogether) without reproaches". Austen is, it seems, unwilling to put us through witnessing Emma's awkward delivery of difficult news; perhaps also, unwilling to contemplate Harriet's reaction in detail.

But in the crisis that led up to all this, she did allow us to hear a Harriet we might not have expected:

"I never should have presumed to think of it at first," said she, "but for you. You told me to observe him carefully, and let his behaviour be the rule of mine - and so I have. But now I seem to feel I may deserve him; and that if he does choose me, it will not be any thing so very wonderful."

Harriet commands this scene, and three times the word "she" (as in "said she") emphasizes that for a moment Harriet is stage-centre, no longer an appendage to Emma but the principal interlocutor. Surely it is hard to read this without being aware that in some way Harriet understands that Mr Knightley belongs to Emma, and takes a little revenge for the earlier episode with Mr Elton. Just for a moment she asserts herself against being "placed", however variously, by her social superiors.

*

The first scene of Emma is a wonder. The visitor, Mr Knightley, "a sensible man about seven or eight-and-thirty" appears, and at first this unassuming entry leaves us uncertain what kind of dramatic status the visitor has. Arriving as a messenger from London, the possibility is briefly present that he is precisely one of those utility characters who, rather than being important to the story in their own right, perform the miscellaneous dramatic duties of e.g. delivering messages. For a short time afterwards, we enjoy the always-fresh - because never long-lasting - pleasure of being allowed to observe someone who is a perfectly new character to us, though he is not at all a new acquaintance to the other persons present - though just how old and significant a friend he is to Emma and her father we are not yet fully aware. Mr Knightley takes, in fact, quite a modest line, is nothing like so dominant a force as we will come to know him.

"Not at all, sir. It is a beautiful, moonlight night; and so mild that I must draw back from your great fire."

These are his first quoted words. Weather, in Emma, is not a frequent topic, but it is always significant and superbly evoked: light snow in December, a July rainstorm. It's as if Austen already sees the whole book before her. Thus that light anticipation of Miss Bates on Box Hill, when Mr Woodhouse misconstrues Emma's teasing and says:

"I believe it is very true, my dear, indeed.. I am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome."

Emma is quite innocent of this implication, yet that she can be so misconstrued subtly reveals a potential in her for sharpness which, hundreds of pages later, springs into actuality.

And how naturally this conversation leads up to Emma's "innocent" pleasure in match-making, to which her father adds fuel:

"Ah! my dear, I wish you would not make matches and foretel things, for whatever you say always comes to pass."

*

The second volume of Emma verges on idling. Frank Churchill, we too easily understand, is of no particular importance to Emma. The other main introduction of this second volume is Mrs Elton, whom we are very glad to know, but a little of Mrs Elton goes a long way. No-one would wish this volume away, but it's remarkable how (thinking of those appraisals of Emma as "flawless" and  the "Parthenon of fiction") it's structured around an empty quarter.

(2009)

amazon reviewers

This is a stub list of interesting Amazon reviewers I've happened across. - reviewers that make you want to press the button that says "Read all my reviews". I'll update it as and when.

*

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A3RC4P274TIF94?ie=UTF8&display=public&page=1&sort_by=MostRecentReview

Steampunk "JS" Northern Ireland. 44 pages of reviews. 

His interests include razors and luxury eau de colognes and shaving creams, computer gaming, Christianity, painting and art history, Hebrew and classical Greek. He also does decent Vine reviews (these are solicited reviews where the reviewer gets the product for free).

There's pretty well no end to his talents: he paints, plays classical guitar, and runs Linux on his PC. He is 60ish and retired and in effect Amazon.co.uk is his blog - he's written lots and lots of reviews. He appears to be an Evangelical (believes John's Revelation to be a true account) but this leaves little trace on his reviews in general. He's theologically learned, yet enthusiastic about Transcendental Meditation and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A2BJAW5KECUBBM/ref=pdp_new

jacr100 (UK). 13 pages of reviews.

Reviews global modern novels, - Latin American, Polish, Armenian and anywhere else. Also books about private investing. Visits Africa. The approach is unacademic, impatient of any avant-gardism or obscurity. Opinions are unpredictable and mostly acute, though sometimes bizarre. (I came across jacr100 while writing about L'Etranger).

Seems now to have stopped publishing reviews. A pity.



http://www.amazon.com/gp/cdp/member-reviews/A22S7W04CDEFHZ?ie=UTF8&display=public&page=1&sort_by=MostRecentReview

VampireCowboy (Portland OR)

He uses it more as a "books I've read" list than the others. He went though and Aleister Crowley phase. He publishes books about vampire cowboys. He's a sceptical-minded person with an interest in philosophy and ideas. He's either a vegan or thinks veganism is where we're evolving. He doesn't think much of positive thinking.

 The wonder here is how many books that sound fascinating are read by just one person.


http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/pdp/profile/A7NSC373W0W01/ref=cm_cr_pr_pdp?ie=UTF8


A.R. Woollock. Highly postmodern. Uni teacher interested in educational philosophy. Lyotard-influenced. Reviews modern novels (Ballard, Coover, Koestler, Murakami, Rushdie) , philosophers and educational thinkers (in valuable depth, sometimes), snooker accessories, coffee-makers, watercolour materials, rice. Atheist. Lives in Belfast.

holiday reading

To start with:  two books that I didn't take.

In the checklist of things I had to do before leaving, one of the only unticked entries is "Buy Flora of Western Australia". This was my facetious term for a beginner's guide that would help me identify a few of the plants I might see as we walked about in this distant continent. It was a good idea, but I never got any further with it, or I might be able to tell you the names of the plants in these photos.

The second book that I didn't take was John Wilkinson's  book of essays The Lyric Touch. (I bought it primarily to read the piece about Andrea Brady; the one about Prynne is downloadable in the preview that you can find on Salt's website.) It was delivered a few hours before we left, and after skim-reading a few pages of Wilkinson's profoundly-considered but disputable prose I felt tempted to bring it along with me (plus I remembered reading his Lake Shore Drive while in Spain about ten years ago).  But I also knew that Wilkinson's text would try to make my brain work in a different way from the way it works on holiday. I need an emptier head than that.

As always I packed at the last minute, and books just got flung in. Here's what I took with me.

Xenophon, The Persian Expedition (Penguin Classic, Rex Warner's 1950 translation of the Anabasis). I don't know why. It was one of the treasure trove of mainly classic Penguiins that I had persuaded my pal Richard to give to me last September (instead of to the charity shop). I just remember having the thought that this was the only way I'd ever get round to reading it. It worked, too. I finished it in the departure lounge at Perth International. More thoughts about it here.

Tim Winton, Dirt Music. Laura's Lonely Planet guide to Australia had helpfully listed some authors from Western Australia. Of these, Tim Winton was the only one that showed up in the Swindon branch of Waterstones. Dirt Music is evidently a widely-admired modern classic in WA itself (I also found it on the bookshelf of the place we stayed in Fremantle). I was half-way through it by the end of the holiday, and when I read the rest it prolonged the sense of being there. As I later found out, Winton himself lives in Fremantle. Dirt Music is an epic of WA in which the backgrounds are huge, the foregrounds minimal; it centres on two main characters who for most of the novel are apart. Yet the book also strikes us foreigners as principally about this land, this life, and this language.

Marco Polo Map of Australia. This was the other thing I bought in Waterstones. (I had a cursory search for the "Flora of Western Australia" but you'd be pushed to find that sort of thing - i.e. field guides relating to countries other than the UK - even in the Piccadilly branch of Waterstones, never mind Swindon.) The map was totally impractical since our own rovings around Greater Perth occupied only about a centimeter in the bottom left-hand corner.  But it was fun to marvel at. Inevitably, my eye kept coming back to those huge empty bits like the Great Sandy Desert and the Nullarbor Plain. A couple of times while in Perth we chatted with people who had visited Kalgoorlie (the gold-mining town 600km inland). I got the impression that once was enough. One day we were briefly on the Great Eastern Highway ourselves (before turning off to Kalamunda); I saw some of the trucks with gigantic plant that was bound for Kalgoorlie. I got a breath, but only a breath, of the inhuman scale of the hinterlands.

Teach Yourself: Read and Write Arabic Script (John Mace). I bought this in Dubai and I take it with me every time we go back there (we book-ended our Perth trip with two short stays in Dubai; Laura's daughter lives there).  This time I didn't look at it for long enough to recover all that I'd learnt on previous trips. I did learn that the hamsa is implicit in the alif madda.

Berlitz Arabic for Travellers. Interestingly outdated phrasebook that I picked up in a charity shop somewhere.

Katrina Mazetti, Grabben i graven bredvid plus Swedish dictionary. I was in the middle of reading this when we set off. I think I read one dozy page while we were on the flight from Gatwick. Then I discovered that you could watch Wallander (in Swedish) on the Emirates In-Flight Entertainment system, so I did that instead.

John Donne's Selected Poems. Grabbed it because it was compact. I had time to read The Sunne Rising and Elegy on His Mistres Going to Bed before I accidentally left it propping up a wobbly table in Salty's at Quinn's Rocks.

Monica Rinck - Barque pamphlet containing a few of her poems, with Alistair Noon's translations. Packed at the last minute in response to a sudden feeling of guilt about not having taken any modern poetry. Never a good motive. Fittingly, I never opened it.

And a mini-volume of Shakespeare: Two Gentlemen of Verona. Designed to be carried with me at all times and resorted to in the absence of other books. It only emerged once, when Laura and I played a game of trying to read the tiny print upside down.

Inevitably, I also bought some books while I was on my travels. They are my favourite kind of souvenir.

Bram Stoker, Dracula. Bought at Borders Express in Dubai Marina Mall, because it was cheap. There wasn't a huge choice of literary stuff. The bookshop is notably strong on self-improvement books and books about how to succeed in business. It also has a whole section devoted to Sheikh Mo's publications (His Highness Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum), such as Flashes of Thought (thoughts on leadership - we did read some of this) and Flashes of Verse (poems). I've had it in mind to read Dracula ever since I admired the first few pages while at a boot sale last spring. The admiration fluctuated as I read more of it.

At the same time, Laura bought The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin S. Sharma and she read it every night before dropping asleep. (We called it The Monk for short, a title which seemed to go better with Dracula.)

Rex Warner, The Greek Philosophers. When we got to Fremantle I had to go to the library to do some internet stuff, and here there was a book sale, just like you'd expect to find in the UK. All libraries are falling over themselves to offload the books that no-one borrows any more. I was determined to find something, and I chose this (obviously to go along with the Xenophon). Laura got Louise L. Hay's Meditations to Heal Your Life. We read a Meditation each evening, until Laura could improvise them on any topic.  As for The Greek Philosophers (commentary with selected texts), I eagerly read the Epicurus section but I found the rest a bit dull and I ended up donating it to the bookshelf at our AirBnB place in Fremantle. I once read a lot of Plato and Aristotle - and Anselm and Abelard and Aquinas. That was for my PhD. Now I begin to think that it isn't only "theory" that bores me. it's philosophy in general. Perhaps that's wrong and perhaps one day it'll change.

Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild / A Voyage to Lisbon. This is a classic Everyman paperback that I've owned once before and have always meant to read, though I still haven't. (Desire re-ignited of course by a recent reading of Tom Jones.) Bought in Elizabeth's second-hand bookstore in Fremantle. Late-opening bookshops are a feature of Australian cafe strips that I admired very much.  

J.C. Ryle, Five English Reformers. Bought in a charity shop in Freo (they call them OpShops). Fiercely readable book with a mission of attacking the burgeoning Ritualist movement. This was the kind of controversy that C.S. Lewis tried to put behind him with his vision of "mere Christianity".

Dodie Smith, The Town in Bloom. A later novel (1965) by the author of 101 Dalmatians and I Capture The Castle. Bought from a newsagent in Mends Street, South Perth. Like the previous purchase, I bought it mainly because I was struck by ifinding it where I did, standing out from all the John Grisham and Stephenie Meyer. This was a reprint from 2012 by Constable & Robinson (Corsair). Who did they think would buy it? Smith's gentle London comedy is, however, very pleasing.

Robert Gray, Coast Road (selected poems). Almost at the end of my time in Oz, I returned to Crow Books in East Victoria Park (another late-opening bookstore) determined to buy some Australian poetry. The first time I'd gone in there, I'd goggled at, and felt dismayed by, the big books that I knew I ought to read if I had any pretensions at all to understanding modern poetry: Prynne's Collected (I didn't know then that it had a Fremantle connection) and Pierre Joris's Celan. Gray is by no means so essential, but he is an Australian poet and I liked reading his book very much, though of course it's distinctly mainstream and poetically conservative. There are always interesting reasons for taking any journey in poetry; poets are like other people, they are never normal.

At the last minute, while going to the departure gate to fly home from Dubai, I snatched up the free Dubai Pocket Guide published by the Department of Tourism and Commerce. This is actually pretty informative, for example about social etiquette and the region's flora and fauna.

There were some other things I read while I was away.

During our first stay in Dubai, Jazmin's boyfriend passed on to me a travel book called Hello Dubai by Joe Bennett. It was published in 2010 but is still a pretty good guide; the topic invites buffoonery but there's a lot of intelligence and information amid the comedy. Colin also wanted me to take away Ken Follett's World Without End (a massive medieval epic), and in a perfect world I'd have liked to, but I doubted I'd ever get round to reading it.

Bill Bryson, Down Under. This was on the Fremantle bookshelf and I read a couple of chapters while we were packing up to move on to our next AirBnB gaff. Clearly extremely readable and informative in the best Bryson manner.

The place we were going to was a beach-hut up at Quinn's Rocks, and there were some books on the shelves here too. I read as much as I could of Henning Mankell's The White Lioness, a Wallander novel; I had to leave it behind at the point where he was starting to fill in the South African background to the mystery.

[Well I know what those flowers are: Gazanias - maybe Gazania rigens. These are plants from southern Africa, naturalized here on coastal dunes, along with a low-growing Evening-Primrose (from America). There were actually a lot of other plants I recognized in the urban and coastal areas of Perth and Fremantle: pretty much the same sort of international collection that you'd also find in any Mediterranean resort - bougainvillea, oleander, palms, etc. However I did make some mistakes here. For instance elsewhere on the dunes I assumed I was seeing lots of another S. African plant, Hottentot Fig (Carpobrotus edulis); a plant you can also find in great quantity on Bexhill beach. Only when I got home did I realize that the plants I'd seen were Coastal Pigface (Carpobrotus virescens), which is endemic to Western Australia. And I hadn't even taken a photo!]

So as you can see, if you've been following closely, I only managed to finish three books in the four weeks I was on holiday (and two of those were on the flight home). Holiday reading is a scrappy experience, but that doesn't mean it isn't an intense one. With so many stimulated sensors, any few lines (even of the Dubai Pocket Guide) are enough to resonate hugely in these unfamiliar surroundings. There is a cross-current of thoughts from book to place. This can be pre-arranged (e.g. by choosing to read Tim Winton while in WA - his novel visits Perth several times)  but it's the unpredictable connections that are often most interesting. Mankell's South Africa matched the gazanias, obviously. I found the Persian Expedition of Xenophon seeming to pass ironic comment on my own oil-burning progress eastward. (The battle of Cunaxa took place somewhere near Baghdad International Airport.) As the Greek army threaded into Kurdestan, we chatted with a taxi-driver who was forced out of Iran by its theocracy. Count Dracula's ancestors fought the Turks while I ate Turkish food. J.C. Ryle's evangelicalism and combative martyrolatry provoked thoughts of present-day Salafism in Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Robert Gray's journalist's outlook asked probing questions about Dubai's free market. Reading Dodie Smith in South Perth inadvertently highlit all the ways in which Perth resembles a transformed London with a Thames swelling grandly like a black swan's plumage; full of pubs, colonial-terraced hotels, cricket and strong pots of English Breakfast Tea; all the ways,too, that London is insistently Australian.

Was this really thinking, or just a passive registering of flitting ironies and minor fortuities? Why does it look so much like columnism?

The books also chime off each other, as well as the world around us. For example:

The egret is shapely and tapering as an amulet
or a slim gourd
it's compact
as though smoothed between the hands
the neck
is kinked and finely drawn-out, which suggests a loose
length of vine
sharply trimmed-off, and it is seemingly ineffectual,
pensive.
One can imagine
as its claim that to pick the excess
from small life
is an honourable
scheme. It steps out of the stillness and stands
still again
and blue
like backyard smoke,
among the aimless insects of the sunlit rain.

(from Robert Gray, "The Creek").

We had seen white egrets around, but not blue ones. Gray's egret is, I suppose, the dark form of the Eastern Reef-egret (Egretta sacra). The gourd-shape is spot on, and the shaping between hands. "Amulet" is less obvious, as I'm not aware that amulets have any pre-defined shape - he might have had a specific one in mind.

Egretta sacra (dark form)

[Image source: http://ibc.lynxeds.com/photo/eastern-reef-egret-egretta-sacra/bird-sea]

But I also remembered that I'd just been reading this scene from Joe Bennett's Hello Dubai:

    Only a few yards from the ceaseless traffic a bird is bearing down on a flower bed, an egret. It is as white as a medieval virgin and shaped like a stretched Chianti bottle.
    The egret seems unfazed by the roaring vehicles, but when it spots me, the sole pedestrian in vehicle land, it stands still. I stand still. A few seconds and it resumes its progress, picking its deliberate way on huge splayed feet, reaches the edge of the bed and studies the ranks of plants, peering under leaves and flower heads and swaying its head like a charmed cobra. It freezes momentarily, then strikes. In its beak a lizard, gripped across the belly. From only a few yards away I can make out the tiny reptilian claws, grasping at the nothingness of air. The bird tosses the lizard twice to align it with its gullet, then points its beak at the sky and lets gravity do the rest. What started as just another day for the lizard has come to a drastic end. I can see the slight bulge in the bird's throat. The bird moves on and I cross the road. Perhaps five minutes later I've made it across all six lanes. I look back. The bird is hunting again.   

The Australian birds we saw were a joy. Australasian darters, giant moorhens, black swans, kookaburras, tiny doves, gulls with black beaks and birds like big terns with heavy heads. The crows (if that's what they were) were very tame. Their voices are not as harsh as British crows and the sound made us laugh because of the slow slide down in pitch at the end of a phrase.

The kind of openness to different kinds of book that I've tried to illustrate here can be put down to a healthy appetite for reading (though I don't myself think it's an adequate explanation).

Accordingly, you could argue that this consumption has nothing to say about the intrinsic quality of the books, nor about whether I myself really have any taste.

Kant said: "Hunger is the best sauce, and people with a healthy appetite relish everything, so long as it is something they can eat. Such delight, consequently, gives no indication of taste having anything to say to the choice. Only when men have got all they want can we tell who among the crowd has taste or not."

I'd rather trust my taste when I'm hungry, but there you go.

[I know this one, too. It's a Norfolk Island Pine (Araucaria heterophylla), a tree I'm familiar with from the Mediterranean (it's part of that international community I mentioned), but which is much more impressive here, rather closer to its small homeland (Norfolk Island lies between Oz and NZ). These mature trees are much less symmetrical than the younger ones I've seen in Spain. The growth of this one, above Fremantle South Beach, has clearly been influenced by the prevailing southerlies.

The northern-hemisphere eye may hesitate at that point. Is south on the right, then? Yes it is: down here the sun passes by to the north, and shadows fall to the south. I never stopped being childishly excited by this; nor by the moon changing phase from the "wrong" side;  nor by Orion being "upside-down". Late at night, under constantly clear skies, I marvelled at the three crosses in the southern sky.]