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Scribblings

Category Archives: Books

Beginnings and Ends

04 Thursday Feb 2021

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Scribbling

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Captain Fracasse, endings, R. L. Stevenson, Théophile Gautier, Weir of Hermiston

Would you object very much to some more slight gloominess? Or perhaps it won’t be so terribly gloomy by the time we’re done – but let us talk of endings and beginnings, and Stevenson. I’ve always liked this thing that Stevenson wrote in a letter written from Samoa to J.M. Barrie:

If you are going tho make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.

Continue reading →

Book Club? No, thanks

22 Thursday Oct 2020

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book-club, Books, Reading

Book clubs, now…

I know that they’re all the rage, I know that no library worth its salt can go without one, I know that they are enough of a phenomenon to have made it to women’s fiction and movies, and I know, more to the point, that lots of people enjoy them immensely. Continue reading →

Shirley and the loss of Story-Innocence

15 Thursday Oct 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Scribbling

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Charlotte Brontë, Shirley, writing, writing and reading

Once upon a time – not long after our shared College years, I believe – my friend Fenella and I discovered a mutual liking for Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley. Now I’m sure you know how Shirley is rather the Cinderella among Charlotte’s novels – her one historical, written, at least in part, as a form of escapism while her siblings died one after another, and generally regarded as a lesser oddity.

Still, what can I say? I like it, with its background of faraway Napoleonic wars, and of Luddite unrest at home. I even like the unevenness of the whole. And I like the characters – even more than the eponymous girl (a heavily fictionalised portrait of Charlotte’s sister Emily), the quieter Caroline Helstone, and half-Belgian businessman Robert Moore. Continue reading →

Where are the elephants?

13 Thursday Aug 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books, History, Stories

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elephants, Frederick II, Hannibal, Jean de Brunhoff, Mark Shand, Rudyard Kipling

Don’t you think that literature has far too few elephants?

I mean elephant characters, with a central place in the story and a definite personality. You see, yesterday I was discussing Elephant World Day with some friends, and at one point the conversation veered on the literary aspect of the subject – and there was surprisingly little. Surprisingly, when you consider what wonderful, intelligent and meaningful creatures they are – and yet, when you discount those elephants that are merely extras or window dressing, that have nothing to say for themselves, that just walk through the forests, crash into gardens and are hunted, I can think of only a handful of literary elephants. Continue reading →

The Tale of the Lost Book

18 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Stories

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Books, Poetry, serendipity

This story was told to me years ago, one summer afternoon, in a centuries-old library in Mantua. It was whispered by an elderly scholar, as we took a short break after hours of patient, careful philological work…

It begins with a boy of eighteen, the shy, bookish sort, with the kind of passion for Ancient Greece that makes one court girls by lending them books of Greek poetry. Continue reading →

Lord Jim for kids…

04 Thursday Jun 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books

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childrens literature, Italian publishing, joseph conrad, Lord Jim

When I found out that there was an Italian edition of Conrad’s Lord Jim for children, reading age 10+, I couldn’t rest until I saw it with my own eyes.

Because, really: from age ten? Ten?! And I wondered because, on first reading it at the slightly more mature age of sixteen, I’d found LJ such hard going. I’d also eventually fallen in love with it in several fundamental ways – but, heavens above, it had been hard. And mind, I don’t mean technically difficult to read – although both language and structure are definitely not easy – but emotionally exhausting. And here was this children’s publisher, springing it on ten-year-old kids? Continue reading →

The Raven’s Seal, by Andrei Baltakmens

16 Thursday Apr 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books

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Andrei Baltakmens, Historical fiction, The Raven's Seal

The 18th century is lazily going by in the fictional English town of Airenchester, when we meet hour hero, Thaddeus Grainger, the type of young gentleman of means and taste. A bright, clever, careless boy in the words of his doting housekeeper, Thaddeus is in equal parts bored and disillusioned when it comes to the fine society he confidently belongs to, but that is the way of things, and what is a fellow to do – except navigate the currents, and keep apart from the worst of it? In fact, Thaddeus’s only rebellion is to cultivate the close friendship of reasonably genteel but penniless William Quilby, a vicar’s son and journalist… Continue reading →

Matthew Plampin’s Will and Tom

20 Thursday Feb 2020

Posted by la Clarina in Books

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historical novel, Matthew Plampin, Thomas Girtin, Will and Tom, William Turner

I remember picking up Matthew Plampin’s Will and Tom in the bookshop at the Tate Britain – and then putting it back, just as I’d put back half a dozen other hardbacks in the last day. In truth, after lugging many and many and many pounds of books across Europe over the years, I’ve learned, when I’m travelling, to only buy the ones that can’t conceivably be procured through the Net – either digitally or physically. So I jotted down the title in my notebook’s dedicated page, and in time the novel found its way to my Kindle. Then, for some reason, it took me a few years to get round to actually read it. If you have a To Read List of any length, you know how these things happen… Continue reading →

Pirates?

03 Thursday Oct 2019

Posted by la Clarina in Books, Stories

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John Steinbeckhine Tey, Josephine Tey, Pirates, R. L. Stevenson, Rafael Sabatini

A couple of weeks ago my mother discovered, with considerable amusement, the existence of Talk Like a Pirate Day, and asked why I didn’t post about it.

“Never have,” I said. “I don’t even like pirate stories.”

“Nonsense,” was the answer. “You’ve read lots of them.”

And I protested that no, really – in fact, I rather dislike pirate stories… And I was thinking of Jack Sparrow and company, but even more of Salgari’s insufferable Sandokan and multi-coloured corsairs, without which no Italian childhood is considered complete… Continue reading →

The Saga’s Little Saga

29 Thursday Nov 2018

Posted by la Clarina in Books

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Books, Gösta Berling's Saga, Pavia, second-hand books, Selma Lagerloff

How my father happened to lose his own old copy of Gösta Berling’s Saga, I have no idea. When it came to books, the Colonel was an odd  mix of jealous worship and carelessness… But somehow or other the book was lost.

What I know for sure is that, many years later, I found an old copy of the Saga in a second-hand bookshop in Pavia – an old, tiny and delightful place named Il Parnaso, the kind of place where one can while away a rainy afternoon making discovery after wonderful discovery… oh, you know what I mean. Now, my found Saga was not the same edition my father had lost – but it was old, a little worse for wear, and bore an ex-libris explaining how it had been saved during some flooding or other of the Ticino, Pavia’s river. Continue reading →

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