Unsuitable subject for a blog

This is going to be a very unsuitable subject for a blog.

While I was on holiday I read only one book, taken almost at random from the pile that arrives each day at the TLS.

Well, perhaps not quite at random because the Puskin Press edition of Adalbert Stifter's The Bachelors, is a pretty postcard-sized paperback, with a cover illustration of a mountain lake.

For a week ahead on Lake Como it looked promising or, at least, unburdensome.

A quick stab into page 101 (reminding me how many books are chosen, like tests for cancer, by a snatch of flesh from one of its inner organs) produced an extraordinary description of a 'water hall', a boathouse, which for someone who loves boathouses, as I do, was maybe the decisive factor.   

But The Bachelors was to be my single object of holiday reading.

The idea of having just one book - of reading as though it were one's only book - was drummed into me as a Latin-student child.

It is hard to concentrate on Horace or Tacitus if you are simultaneously conscious of the latest James Bond whose pages would turn so much faster.

So, imagining that the book in my hand was my 'Desert Island book', the one left behind when everything else is washed away, was long a useful discipline.

That one-book rule has been relaxed and often abandoned  in a working life of 'quick study'.

And everyone wants a 'page turner' now.

This year the Booker Prize, once the award for the finest fiction of all kinds, was given with deliberate pride to a book that knocked the chairman's 'socks off' page by page.

It is hard, even as editor of the TLS, to respond equally to books whose pages turn slowly and sometimes hardly turn at all.

But slowly turned pages have long been as important as those turned quickly.

And, in a web-world of 'page views', even the speeches of Roman senators and the most slavish encomia by Horace may win more hits than the precise, descriptive landscape-prose of my new friend, the nineteenth century Austrian novelist, Adalbert Stifter.

He is an author whose work is mentioned in the TLS from time to time.

Earlier this year we published a report of how modern life in Austria seemed increasingly to be competing with its literature.

"Since late April, we have been learning with horror and fascination how Josef Fritzl lured his daughter Elisabeth into a carefully designed, soundproofed cellar (for which he had secured planning permission), kept her there for twenty-four years, and sired seven children on her; of these, one died, three lived in the cellar, and three, still more incredibly, appear to have been deposited on the family's doorstep in Amstetten and adopted by Fritzl and his wife as foundlings."

To anyone familiar with Austrian literature, our critic, Ritchie Robertson, wrote, this called up a host of literary reminiscences.

"Tourmaline is dark, and this story is very dark", begins the story "Turmalin" (1852, revised 1853) by the great prose writer Adalbert Stifter. The porter in a semi-ruinous city mansion dies by falling off a ladder; the neighbours enter the cellar where he has lived, and find it inhabited by a tame jackdaw and a teenage girl with a swollen head and a barely intelligible manner of speaking. It emerges that the porter was none other than a wealthy rentier who had vanished, together with his baby daughter, many years before. Apparently deranged by the discovery of his wife's unfaithfulness and her subsequent disappearance, he kept his daughter in the cellar, locking her in when he went out. By climbing the ladder she could peep through a narrow aperture into the street, but could only see the feet of the passers-by. The girl is taken into care and eventually restored to something like normal life. Stifter's story is doubly dark: not only gloomy, but obscure. His art consists in giving us enigmatic, indirect glimpses into the interior life of the rentier. But how his life fell apart so drastically, and how he came to sacrifice his daughter to his obsessive grief, remains ultimately mysterious."

I had not then read Turmalin.

After my week with David Bryer's beautiful slow translation of The Bachelors for the Pushkin Press, I am now looking for a future holiday week to read Turmalin and other Stifter too.

Only time and the discipline of the 'desert island book' will make that happen.

I knew that this was an unsuitable subject for a hit-seeking blog.

P.S.

The edition of my holiday book, as featured on the web and thus, I presume, as finally published, has a different cover, with no mountain lake. If it had arrived at the TLS in that form, I might never have read it. A toast now to publisher's first thoughts.    

Comments

[James Ruscoe]

The six volume John Murray first edition of Monypenny and Buckle's Life of Disraeli well sustains a single book vacation. As a page turner, the pace mirrors that of its subject and his times. From hectic to idyllic. Moreover it lives up to the chiding quotation carried on each title page: Read no history, nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.

[Dion Per Sona]

The tapeworm's trust is all his boast,
Burrowed deep inside his host,
He feeds and seeds his mindless life
And over eons avoids the knife.

A hundred million years and more
Bathed in food and shedding spore
Segment after fertile segment,
From the safest niche in the firmament.

With apologies to Mr Burns for more nonsense.

[Clayton Burns]

NYRB's "Rock Crystal" by Stifter is a powerful text, even if the author was nailed in a far better story, "Old Masters," by Thomas Bernhard, in the superior translation by Ewald Osers (see pp. 34-49 for an introduction to Bernhard's treatment of Stifter).

Dion Per Sona's point about French and English, the mirror languages, is interesting. We should have intensive immersion programs merging knowledge of the two languages, but in Canada we have failed to do so. We should have literature courses in which the students would study Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw" and its French translation by Jean Pavans so as to be able to reason about the texts equally well in either language.

"Old Masters" would be an excellent text for a TLS reading group and recording. I am sure that Sir Peter will find it a cut above Stifter.

[I'M NOT STILLER]

Into any exile I would lug the 30 volumes of Anatole France's collected works, published by Gabriel Wells in 1924. It is hard to imagine a more friendly, wiser companion.

[Jantar]

I think the most perfect desert island book would be Robert Burton's 'The Anatomy of Melancholy'.

[Dion Per Sona]

Are we invited to name a 'desert-island' book? Mine would be Cau xueqin's Story of the Stone in the French translation: 'Le reve dans le pavillon rouge'.

The most popular English translation made a 200 page naughty-bits stab at this classic, betraying writer and reader with equal disdain.

[Susan Balée]

I appreciate this blog post very much -- sounds like a great book. I'm going to put it on my list. And in an odd coincidence, I had been trying to remember the author of one of my favorite Romantic tales, "Undine." Your post reminded me: Adalbert von Chamisso. French, I think, despite that German name. It's a great story, as is another by him, "Peter Schlemiel," the story of a man who sells his shadow.

[Clayton Burns]

Lacustrine is the mind. The reference to page 101 reminds me of page 261 in the wonderful book by Claude Combes, "The Art of Being a Parasite": "I chose this example because such adaptations lead us to think, with Louis Euzet, that tapeworms may be the oldest metazoan parasites and have existed for hundreds of millions of years." (...) "... bird songs are transmitted partly in Lamarckian fashion." (...) "... Lewis Carroll's Red Queen said not only that to stay in the same place, one must run very fast, but also that 'if you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!'" (...) "William D. Hamilton, one of the great evolutionists of our age, whom I have mentioned several times in this book, died in February 2000 from complications of malaria contracted in Africa and resistant to all treatments."

In what kind of world does the tapeworm quietly spend hundreds of millions of years elaborating its evolutionary niches without most people seeing much to marvel at?

Sir Peter should practice reading Stifter out loud before bedtime to take advantage of the unconscious cerebration of sleep. There is a line in "Paradise Lost" Keats imitates in "Ode to a Nightingale": "Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown/ Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways."

If we remember line 579 in Book IX of "P.L." ("When from the boughs a savoury odour blown,") we will note the crisscross (chiasmus) of "boughs... blown" surrounding the "r" vowels of "savoury odour."

Keats resorts it so that "Save" and "ways" bracket "breezes blown," still a beautiful Miltonic chiasmus. If it had not come to me in sleep, I would never have realized it.