belgianwaffle

Archives for November 2007

Odd


Posted in: Princess, Reading etc.

The Princess has two sources, broadly speaking, for her spoken English, me and the stories I read to her. This makes for a slightly odd speaking style which my mother calls quaint.

She is never scared of the dark, always the darkness (she wasn’t scared of the darkness either until recently and it’s probably just a ploy to delay bedtime).

The other day, when I was on the phone, she said to me: To whom are you speaking? Yet irregular verb endings can still sometimes stump her: “I felled down”.

Today she asked that for her school trip we give her wet raisins (that’s grapes to you) in her lunch box.

In unrelated Princess news, I find myself a victim of my own success in trying to instill a love of art in my daughter. We went to the current Rubens exhibition during the week and I was quite disappointed as it doesn’t really have much beyond the very extensive collection the gallery already had on display. I moved along smartly. The Princess, however, wanted to look at everything in great detail and I only finally managed to lure her away by promising to buy her a postcard.

NaBloPoMo – S is for Saki, Seth, Shields, Saramago, Shriver, Sassoon and possibly Scott Fitzgerald.

Saki is my favourite short story writer. I first came across him in school. “The Lumber Room” and “Sredni Vashtar” were in our book of short stories, I think when I was about 12 or 13.  Despite our English teacher’s rather dauntingly detailed analysis of the text, I was taken enough with them to have a look at my parents’ copy of his collected short stories at home.  I am very glad I did.  I have read them many, many, many times since and they have never failed to entertain me.  Due to the fact that Saki is out of copyright, his works abound on the internet.  Try this one.  It is, somehow, deeply appropriate that Saki’s last words before he was shot by a sniper in the First World War were “Put out that damned cigarette”.
I loved Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”.  I read it over one summer holiday (clearly, before I had children).  There is nothing as delightful as a long book that you love.  It’s a long book.  I enjoyed “The Golden Gate” very much also.  I was deeply disappointed by “An Equal Music” but I can’t help feeling that I will rather like his story about his uncle the one handed dentist.

I read a lot of Carol Shields at one point.  When she did a brief Jane Austen biography, I nearly swooned with happiness.  I’ve gone off her though.  I bought a new one recently and plan to give it a go, if you’re curious, I’ll get back to you.

“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by Jose Saramago may be the most difficult book I have ever read.  Requiring a full appreciation of Portuguese history and literature, it is not for the faint hearted.  I would never have read anything of his again had the heart surgeon not insisted that “Blindness” was brilliant.  With deep reluctance, I took it up.  It was fantastic, a creepy, realistic fable about a world where everyone goes blind. I can’t believe it hasn’t been made into a Hollywood film.  It says a lot of very clever things about the human condition in a sickening yet page turning way.

I’ve only read Lionel Shriver’s “We need to talk about Kevin”.  It is very good in a slightly daft way.  I was completely fooled by the twist in the tale.  Entertaining in a miserable way but, I feel, unconvincing.

I came across Siegfried Sassoon as a war poet and, being at an impressionable age was very taken with him, so much so that I read “Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man”.  I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but it does what it says on the tin.  There is something curiously comforting and appealing in reading about a year where nothing much happens.  Except, I suppose for the brutal demise of a lot of foxes, if that upsets you.  If it’s any comfort, they’ve all been dead for a long time now.

I’m not sure if Scott Fitzgerald should be under S or F – somebody please put me right, it would be a great comfort to me.  I read “The Great Gatsby” in school and though I didn’t like it (I don’t like any Scott Fitzgerald I’ve tried) it has stayed with me in a disturbing way.  I think it is an exceptionally well written book and quite scary.  Maybe I read it an impressionable age but  I do find that it haunts me.  I tend to remember it in shades of white and paler white (I’m afraid that makes no sense, but there it is, it’s my blog, I can write what I want).

Prepare to waste a great deal of time


Posted in: Reading etc.

A while back Heather mentioned a word game on the internet. You guess what a word means and you donate a grain of rice. Do good while wasting time. I meant to look at it. Then I saw Yogamum said that she got a score of 48 and I went to check it out determined to beat 48 (competitive, moi?). Though I donated over a 1000 grains of rice I always hovered round the 46 mark. I could not beat Yogamum. I was very bitter. I got my husband to have a go. He was annoyingly brilliant at it but he couldn’t get beyond 50. We had a look round the site and discovered that the maximum possible was 50. You think that I was bitter earlier? All I can say is that it’s good to see that his parents are finally getting some value from the money they forked out to send him to that private fee paying school where ancient Greek was on the curriculum.

Do you want to give it a go? Try here. Please don’t tell me if you get more than 46.

NaBloPoMo – T is for Townsend, Tomalin, Tillyard, Trollope, Tyler and Trapido.

I have a fondness for Sue Townsend. I loved “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole” when I read it first. I have followed his life over the years and he has always kept me gently amused. The fact that Adrian and I are almost exactly the same age has, perhaps, whetted my interest. I think I have read most of Sue Townsend’s stuff, even the dreadful collected articles she shamelessly published as “Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman aged 55 3/4“. This was essentially a series of columns she’d done for Sainsbury’s magazine or something like that. And if you ask me, she wasn’t concentrating very hard when she produced them either. Almost all of her stuff is gentle satire. A notable exception is “Ghost Children” which is about abortion and unwanted children and really quite a distressing book. I feel it is her best book after the first couple of Adrian Moles but I bet it didn’t sell particularly well.

I like Claire Tomalin’s biographies and I’ve read quite a few of them. I think she is much, much better than Antonia Fraser (I thought “Marie Antoinette” was very tedious though, I suppose, I did enjoy “Mary, Queen of Scots”). I found “Mrs. Jordan’s Profession” really interesting and it provided an excellent explanation of why Queen Victoria was so buttoned up. Her Jane Austen biography was great and I found her biography on Mary Wollstonecraft so fascinating that I, very briefly, actually contemplated reading “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”.

Stella Tillyard wrote a great book called “Aristocrats” which tells the story of four 18th century sisters who were extraordinarily well connected. It’s a great read and it uses the texts of the sisters’ letters to each other extensively. Everyone loves it. I do too.

My parents are great fans of the Barsetshire novels and they have a great devotion to Mrs. Proudie. I tried “The Warden” on the strength of this and didn’t like it much and there the matter rested until a good friend gave me “The Eustace Diamonds” for Christmas years ago. I loved it and started in on the Palliser novels. I stopped at “Phineas Redux” but I think I’ll finish them off eventually. I was distracted by his Irish novels which I thought were great though it was a little odd to have the Famine feature as a mere background detail given its weighty place in Irish history.

I got given an Anne Tyler book for my 35th birthday and I didn’t like it much. It was “The Amateur Marriage”. It was good but so dreadfully depressing. “Saint Maybe” was on sale for a euro so I bought it because I cannot resist a bargain. I liked it very much. It has its depressing side, worry not, but I think it’s better because less happens. Anne Tyler is good at small things. I bought “Digging to America” on the strength of the rave reviews all of which were entirely merited. I am thinking of trying some of her back catalogue but I’m a bit nervous. Any suggestions?

Barbara Trapido is great. Very funny, very readable, very interesting novels. I thought that she was English but she’s not she’s South African. Her latest offering “Frankie and Stankie” is semi-autobiographical and gives an alarming insight into apartheid South Africa but also, incidentally the way the world used to be. The narrator flees the regime to England. When she goes to sign up at the local police station (South Africa having been expelled from the Commonwealth) in London in 1964 the police are extremely sympathetic. Consider the extract below:

‘It’s a crying shame, nice white people like you having to register as aliens,’ says the police constable. ‘When these nig-nogs and all sorts, with names we can’t pronounce, can come swanning in here just as they please.’

It’s at time like this that Dinah feels impelled to get on her personal soapbox. She feels the same at the greengrocer’s when she refuses to buy South African fruit.

‘Quite right. I agree with you,’ the greengrocer says. ‘When you think of all those dirty black hands that go crawling all over the fruit -‘

Interesting


Posted in: Family, Reading etc.

My sister-in-law drew my attention to this sentence from a review in the Irish Times by Mary Russell:

“When I removed my IUD – a state-of-the-art contraceptive device which served me faithfully – I sprayed it gold and wore it as an earring: an icon in its own right.”

She tells me that she and Ms. Russell did a bit of the camino together. I just thought you should know.
NaBloPoMo – U is for Updike. Which is a pity because I don’t like Updike. I cannot empathise with Rabbit. So there.

However, I now realise that I skipped John McGahern, so I will slot him in here. In my early 20s I read a lot of John McGahern and really enjoyed books like “The Dark” and “The Barracks”. Let’s remember that I was in my early 20s, shall we? I found “Amongst Women” very depressing but rather brilliant. His last novel “That They May Face the Rising Sun” is just weird. It’s a year in Leitrim (distant part of Ireland where almost no one lives). It is immensely evocative and at the end of it, you do really feel as though you’ve spent a year in Leitrim- particularly, if you take as long as I did to read it. My problem with this is I didn’t particularly want to spend a year in Leitrim. There is no plot to speak of. It was published about ten years after his previous novel. My friend C says that it was not that it took him a long time to write it but that he was holding off publishing until all the locals described in the book had died and would therefore be unable to sue him for publishing their stories (or local gossip, if you prefer). For me that rings true. The people in this book (other than the English blow-ins) seem like real people and the I bet all the stories are real.

And, imagine, I forgot Tolkien as well. I read my mother’s version of “The Lord of the Rings” in three volumes when I was 12 or 13. I had read “The Hobbit” earlier and I think it’s possible that my mother had even read it aloud to us when we were smaller. I was absolutely entranced by “The Lord of the Rings”. The year I read “The Lord of the Rings”, my family drove to the North of Italy on holidays and my mother bitterly regretted introducing me to the tome. “Look up, Anne” she would say “it’s the Place de la Concorde; fountains to wash away the blood”. My mother has a taste for the dramatic. I would briefly glance up from Frodo’s trek and then get back to reading. “Anne, please look up, it’s the Alps”. Another brief glance before getting back to business. I reread them all when the films came out and book 2 is a complete dud. Otherwise still a good read, particularly, if you are fond of elves. You may already be familiar with this anecdote in relation to same, but I have included a link, just in case because I am a good and kind person.

Wrong place, wrong time


Posted in: Reading etc.

Me: Why has your colleague gone on holidays to Israel?

Mr. Waffle: I suppose he has family there.

Me: He’s English; are there a lot of English people living in Isreal?

Him: Yes, he is English but his parents weren’t. They moved to England before he was born; they were Czech, German speaking Jews from the Sudatenland.

That is unlucky.  I suppose at least they got out.

NaBloPoMo – V is for Vidal, Vonnegut and Voltaire.   I was shocked by Myra Breckinridge. I  was young. “Slaughterhouse Five” left me baffled.  I just couldn’t see what everyone else saw in it.  Of this trio, who would have thought Voltaire would come out best?  I’ve only read “Candide” but it’s an easy and quite entertaining and, best of all, short read. I must say that none of these would have featured under a better letter like M or T but needs must.

A happy Thanksgiving to the Americans out there.  We had mushrooms on toast for dinner.  I thought you would like to know as you struggle with mountains of leftover turkey.

In praise of gender stereotyping


Posted in: Mr. Waffle, Reading etc.

Him: We should get the car serviced and check the tyre pressure.

Me:Mmm.
Him: You’re only agreeing because you know that I’m the one who’s going to do it.

Me: Yes.

NaBloPoMo – I’m going to save W for tomorrow.  Because I can.  There are 30 days in November but only 26 letters of the alphabet.  Ha.

However, forgot to mention David Sedaris under S.  He is excruciatingly funny.  Since it is the season for it, here is a link for a funny Christmas story by Mr. Sedaris.  I cannot say how he feels about it being on the interweb but doubtless he will be much happier if it makes you go out and buy his books.

Christmas belongs to the Germans


Posted in: Belgium, Family, Reading etc.

Everything that we associate with Christmas was, essentially, imported by Queen Victoria from her German relatives and exported from there to a waiting world. I was forcibly reminded of this today when I went to the Saxony-Anhalt Christmas market in Brussels. It was absolutely beautiful. They had lovely things for the children, singers in odd costumes who sang to them, not a single tacky stall and the most wonderful wooden toys and decorations. It was without doubt the most perfect Christmas market I have ever been to. It helped that the whole thing seemed to be fairly uncommercial. They were selling things but in a very relaxed way. We were all enchanted. There is absolutely no way I am taking my children to meet Santa after they have seen his workshop at head height in the Saxony Anhalt Christmas market.

I think we can take it that the festivities have begun.

NaBloPoMo – OK, W tomorrow, no really.