Good evening!
I hope everyone is well -- updates from me this week are that my podcast with David Hering about French New Wave director Eric Rohmer and writing about film for both academic and public audiences is live here and I am one of the many journalists who signed this open letter asking for the protection of reporters and civilians in Gaza, which you can read here.
If you’d like to buy me a coffee, on Ko-Fi, you can do here 🙂 (Thank you for the recent donations, these truly are appreciated and let me work in the perfect and ideal environment - coffeeshops).
What I’ve been reading this week and what I think about it
I took my time with Giusseppe Tomasi Lampedusa’s The Leopard, translated by Archibald Colquhoun (1958) -- much more than I usually would for a 200 and some change page novel. This is such an incredibly rich narrative, with really beautifully rendered prose. It’s about a Prince called Fabrizio in Sicily in the 1860s, who must deal with the unification of Italy by Garibaldi by allowing for change so that he is not punished by revolutionaries, but also standing firm on his aristocratic heritage so that he can retain its benefits as much as possible. I actually learned about the unification of Italy and Garibaldi at A-Level, so I went into this novel with a base knowledge that helped how I received the novel a lot. I love learning about historical eras through fiction, but it is nice not having to look up timelines and information on certain individuals while I read. This is also why I refer to raisin biscuits as Garibaldi biscuits, something I learned that not everyone is aware of when I said in work, “Can I have one of those Garibaldi biscuits” and everyone asked who Gary Baldy was, and why he was a biscuit.
The main crux of the novel is that the Prince’s enigmatic and charming nephew Tancredi would like to marry a young woman that he is very attracted to, who comes from a nouveau riche family. Tancredi formerly fought with Garibaldi but is somewhat loose in who and what he shows alliance with, which is pretty much what the novel is getting at -- that social advancement is often in the hands of people who let themselves be malleable to what might benefit them. The Prince does this, but through his point of view we see what is being lost, which Lampedusa allows us to make our minds up on whether this is a good thing or not. There is a lot of room throughout for us to make our own assessments, something I always think takes great skill, especially when the novel is rich in other details.
These details are largely in the settings that the novel takes place in, especially the landscape of Sicily. This is shown to be something that is both beautiful and something to be feared in how sparse it can be, the further inland it is. The heat is palpable as the Prince surveys the people that make up the way of life that he is accustomed to, and will do previously unfathomable things to upkeep. For example:
That solar hue, that variegation of gleam and shade, made Don Fabrizio’s heart ache as he stood back and stiff in a doorway: this eminently patrician room reminded him of country thighs; the chromatic scale was the same as that of the vast wheat fields around Donnafugata, rapt, begging for pity from the tyrannous sun; in this room, too, as on his estates in mid August, the harvest had been gathered long ago and stacked elsewhere, leaving, as here now, a sole reminder in the colour of burnt up useless stubble. The notes of the waltz in the warm air seemed to him but a stylisation of the incessant winds harping their own sorrows on those parched surfaces, today, yesterday, tomorrow, for ever and for ever.
Readers with keen eyes may note something about the above passage -- it is only two sentences long. I talked last week about how I loved that Philip Roth fought against the ‘robot voice’ that Rachel wrote about in her newsletter, and this is another example of that. Not having the ‘robot voice’ doesn’t necessarily mean short sentences, but it does mean having detail, having fun with word use, being evocative, and so on. This novel is practically perfumed in how evocative it is, which is to its credit.
I’m now reading an advanced copy of Sasha Salzmann’s Glorious People, translated by Imogen Taylor, which is out in February next year with Pushkin Press who kindly gifted it to me. I’m very much enjoying it so far -- it is about a family living in Ukraine as the Soviet Union comes to an end, and is very much concerned with the breaking down of ideals and how those ideals come to be in the first place. More next week!
Books on my radar
Practically too many to count -- I’m currently collecting titles for next year for listicles that are being pitched to publications and, as ever, PRs have been very charitable with their time in telling me what I can look forward to from them. I’m currently looking for more novels in translation, so if you are working on one that I need to know about, get in touch!
I also visited the library this week and took out another Roth, this time The Human Stain (2000), which has been recommended to me a million times over whenever I’ve mentioned to someone that I loved American Pastoral.