May. 2nd, 2011 03:31 pm
A dismal April
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
muckefuckAh, hubris--never waste time in catching up to me, do you? April turned out to be as unsuccessful a month for reading as March was brilliant. The blame belongs to Gombrowicz; I knew Ferdydurke would be a challenge, but I thought it would be for slightly different reasons. It's one of those deliberately irritating novels, one that doesn't seem to have aged as well as its boosters claim, but I thought the humour would carry me through. It didn't, but I still carried the damn thing around a couple weeks longer in the hopes my bloody-mindedness would kick in.
In the meantime, I slipped a book of short stories from Maupassant into my bag, "just for those times" when I felt I needed a break. Then I brought along a book of Peter Carey's short stories for those times when I didn't feel like dealing with French. Needless to say, Carey's The fat man in history remains the only work I started and finished within the month; I still have more than a third of the Maupassant to go. I'm used to thinking of his language as relatively easy since he was the first French writer I ever tackled, but really it's not.
So I started on another compilation of French short stories and novellas, one bringing together works by Nodier, Balzac, Gautier, and Mérimée. Pretty much all of them are easier to read than crazy old Guy. I'm about halfway through that volume--I'd read the Nodier ("Inès de Las Sierras") ages ago and dealt with the first Mérimée ("La Vénus d'Ille") and the Balzac ("Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu") in fairly short order, but the purpleness of Gautier's "La morte amoureuse" is less compelling. To be fair, they're all pretty over the top in that 19th-century-Romantic sort of way. (The title of the collection is Récits fantastiques, after all.)
So in order to save my list of accomplishments from absolute patheticness, I pushed through the last story remaining in a collection by obscure Valencian author Ernest Martínez Ferrando. I'll admit it, he drew me in with his title, La botiga de llibres vells ("The used bookstore"). He can get a bit carried away himself, but his social realism tends to get the upper hand over his sentimentality and melodrama. In any case, I've been in no hurry to finish the book, which I've been keeping around for the better part of two years.
This month should be better. I hit the bookstore and came back with Sciascia, Soseki, and Flaubert--all in translation. It pains me in the last case, but I figure if I can't get through two hundred pages of Maupassant in month, I'm not going to make it to the end of four hundred pages of Flaubert in two. And I'd rather know what all the fuss is about Bovary sooner rather than later.
In the meantime, I slipped a book of short stories from Maupassant into my bag, "just for those times" when I felt I needed a break. Then I brought along a book of Peter Carey's short stories for those times when I didn't feel like dealing with French. Needless to say, Carey's The fat man in history remains the only work I started and finished within the month; I still have more than a third of the Maupassant to go. I'm used to thinking of his language as relatively easy since he was the first French writer I ever tackled, but really it's not.
So I started on another compilation of French short stories and novellas, one bringing together works by Nodier, Balzac, Gautier, and Mérimée. Pretty much all of them are easier to read than crazy old Guy. I'm about halfway through that volume--I'd read the Nodier ("Inès de Las Sierras") ages ago and dealt with the first Mérimée ("La Vénus d'Ille") and the Balzac ("Le chef-d'œuvre inconnu") in fairly short order, but the purpleness of Gautier's "La morte amoureuse" is less compelling. To be fair, they're all pretty over the top in that 19th-century-Romantic sort of way. (The title of the collection is Récits fantastiques, after all.)
So in order to save my list of accomplishments from absolute patheticness, I pushed through the last story remaining in a collection by obscure Valencian author Ernest Martínez Ferrando. I'll admit it, he drew me in with his title, La botiga de llibres vells ("The used bookstore"). He can get a bit carried away himself, but his social realism tends to get the upper hand over his sentimentality and melodrama. In any case, I've been in no hurry to finish the book, which I've been keeping around for the better part of two years.
This month should be better. I hit the bookstore and came back with Sciascia, Soseki, and Flaubert--all in translation. It pains me in the last case, but I figure if I can't get through two hundred pages of Maupassant in month, I'm not going to make it to the end of four hundred pages of Flaubert in two. And I'd rather know what all the fuss is about Bovary sooner rather than later.
Tags: