Feb. 3rd, 2014 12:18 pm
Je suis bequem
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muckefuckOver the weekend I finished La Maison du Chat-qui-pelote and found it a bit disappointing. It ends up being merely a cautionary tale: Young ladies of the bourgeoisie, don't even think about trying to snag an aristocratic husband! Still, even Balzac on an off day is better than most writers at their best, so it was time well spent, even if I persist in thinking it shouldn't take me a couple weeks for a hundred pages of literary French. I also question whether my French is really to the stage that I benefit more from reading in the original than I would from reading a first-class translation. Of course, the only way to reach that stage is...to read more literature in French. (Plus how do you tell if your translation is "first-class" anyway?)
I also lost interest in Albanian extraordinarily quickly, so I've laid aside the short story collection and picked up Lodge's Out of the shelter again. I'm what, 70 pages or so in, so it seems a shame not to finish it. So far it doesn't have the humour of his later works, but it seems very well-observed. The vignette of the mother running after a departing train to give her son a fruit pie he didn't really want in the first place was rather touching (and makes me ponder that I recall basically nothing at all of my own departure for Germany).
Meanwhile, I've been missing German, but I waited to see that my Asian kick was spent before turning back to it. Of the three Fontane novellas on my shelf, Mathilde Möhring seemed the most promising. It's a work so mature it's posthumous, which seemed a better place to start than with his first society novel. So far, some fun new words (notably Budiker) but nothing which has frustrated my ready resources--yet.
I also lost interest in Albanian extraordinarily quickly, so I've laid aside the short story collection and picked up Lodge's Out of the shelter again. I'm what, 70 pages or so in, so it seems a shame not to finish it. So far it doesn't have the humour of his later works, but it seems very well-observed. The vignette of the mother running after a departing train to give her son a fruit pie he didn't really want in the first place was rather touching (and makes me ponder that I recall basically nothing at all of my own departure for Germany).
Meanwhile, I've been missing German, but I waited to see that my Asian kick was spent before turning back to it. Of the three Fontane novellas on my shelf, Mathilde Möhring seemed the most promising. It's a work so mature it's posthumous, which seemed a better place to start than with his first society novel. So far, some fun new words (notably Budiker) but nothing which has frustrated my ready resources--yet.