No, don’t expect the more common rabbit out of the hat this time, but marvel at that far more spectacular crocodile – and even an elephant! – b[image]
No, don’t expect the more common rabbit out of the hat this time, but marvel at that far more spectacular crocodile – and even an elephant! – being pulled out of a magic pocket: Quentin Blake’s miss Angelica Sprocket whips up umbrellas, a sink, mice, cheese and different delights from her overcoat’s plentiful pockets to offer them to the children of the neighbourhood.
Sweet and imaginative, I was pointed to this charming book by the one I love – who knew how much I would enjoy it, because he is ever amazing me and making me laugh by wearing coats which might not be as shockingly pink as Angelica Sprocket’s, but have magic pockets galore stuffed with incredible things too (books, nut bars, tote bags and mysterious things I will not name).
You don’t see any children or grandchildren around to read it with? Just plunge into it yourself for ten minutes, Angelica Sprocket will probably make you smile awhile....more
"Perhaps our existence is nothing more than an open and then closed parenthesis with a bit of unfathomable space in between?""Perhaps our existence is nothing more than an open and then closed parenthesis with a bit of unfathomable space in between?"...more
Birth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.
Birth, death, war, grief, abortion, trauma, abuse, bottled-up violence, domestic cBirth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.
Birth, death, war, grief, abortion, trauma, abuse, bottled-up violence, domestic claustrophobia. The emotional landscapes Louise Glück explores in in her 1968 debut collection are grim and desolate. Her poems evoke a dark and inhospitable world in which tension, friction, absence, loss, hopelessness define life and relationships . Raw, stern, often angry and unheimlich, Firstborn is a collection on which she herself tried to look back “with embarrassed tenderness”. Nonetheless, thinking of what I remember from reading some of her later collections (Meadowlands, Averno, Winter Recipes from the Collective), I have the impression some of those later themes, motifs (flowers, stars, mythology, the natural world) and moods are incipient in these early poems, which lean more on the use of rhyme than the later poems. Many lines of the poems didn’t disclose themselves yet when reading them for a first time. Hopefully, when continuing to read my way chronologically through her oeuvre this year, more light will shine through their opacity and further insights will grow.
Some of the poems that spoke to me most: .
[image]
Late snow Seven years I watched the next-door Lady stroll her empty mate. One May he turned his head to see A chrysalis give forth its kleenex creature:
He’d forgotten what they were. But pleasant days she Walked him up and down. And crooned to him. He gurgled from his wheelchair, finally
Dying last Fall. I think the birds came Back too soon this year. The slugs Have been extinguished by a snow. Still, all the same,
She wasn’t young herself. It must have hurt her legs To push his weight that way. A late snow hugs The robins’ tree. I saw it come. The mama withers on her eggs.
[image]
Cottonmouth Country
Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras. And there were other signs That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us By land: among the pines An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss Reared in the polluted air. Birth, not death, is the hard loss. I know. I also left a skin there.
[image]
Firstborn The weeks go by. I shelve them, They are all the same, like peeled soup cans… Beans sour in their pot. I watch the lone onion Floating like Ophelia, caked with grease: You listless, fidget with the spoon. What now? You miss my care? Your yard ripens To a ward of roses, like a year ago when staff nuns Wheeled me down the aisle… You couldn’t look. I saw Converted love, your son, Drooling under glass, starving... We are eating well. Today my meatman turns his trained knife On veal, your favorite. I pay with my life....more
While I am not exactly horse-mad nor prone to the romantic cult of Sis(s)i, aka Elizabeth, empress of Austria & queen of Hungary (18Equus optimus
While I am not exactly horse-mad nor prone to the romantic cult of Sis(s)i, aka Elizabeth, empress of Austria & queen of Hungary (1837-1898), I cannot deny that I was pleasantly surprised by Karen Duve’s playful historical novel Sisi - superiorly entertaining, witty and delightfully irreverent, it offered a couple of hours of breezy reading pleasure, the perfect choice at a time I am not at my best health-wise.
In 48 brief chapters, mostly chronologically presented scenes give a assiduously detailed view into this life that has been amply mythologised, the subject of countless films, series and books and on which the city of Vienna is still capitalizing, having turned the empress into big tourist business, which is quite ironical because she spent most of her imperial life elsewhere and often abroad (in Bad Ischl, the Palace of Gödöllő(Hungary), Engeland, Korfu) and because Elisabeth loathed Vienna and the entire court as vehemently as they hated her.
Largely based on the diary her confidante and favourite Hungarian lady in waiting Countess Marie Festetics von Tolna kept between 1871 and 1898 and an impressive list of historical sources and documents, the portrait of the Austro-Hungarian empress and her entourage that Duve sketches in this novel is sobering as well as compelling, nuanced and exhilarating.
The novel focusses on Sisi’s life between 1876 and 1877 and kicks off in Althorp, England, where Sisi will participate in the fox hunt, meeting the Scotsman Bay Middleton, an attractive redhaired and freckled horseman as much hippophile, skilful and dare-devilish like herself who will accompany her as her pilot, revealing from the beginning the true passion of Duve’s Sisi: horse-riding. Duve’s writing craft and gift for storytelling show at their best in the breathtaking riding scenes which despite abhorring hunting (trigger warning: Duve pretty graphically evokes the cruelty of ‘sport hunting’) had me on the edge of my chair, the galloping through the woods and dangerous manoeuvres making the adrenaline rush by proxy. Like her son Rudolf seems to feel the need to kill to feel alive, Sisi turns to horses to breathe freely, as an escape and a consolation.
[image]
(This painting by Karl Theodor von Piloty and Franz Adam is mentioned in the novel as Franz Joseph’s favourite painting of his wife Sisi. It depicts the 15-year-old Duchess Elisabeth of Bavaria on horseback against the backdrop of the Lake Starnberg and Possenhofen castle, the summer residence of her parents. The painting hung in the emperor’s bedroom at the Hofburg, the winter Habsburg residence in Vienna for 60 years — until the death of Franz Joseph.)
Keen on hunting, grotesquely obsessed by the care for her extremely slender body and wasp waist and her incredibly long hair, forever seeking to escape the boredom of the stiffening etiquette and monotony of court life, Sisi is essentially lonely and aloof, unable to connect to human beings in the same way as to horses, even almost indifferent to her own son Rudolf simply because the young man is not a skilful horseman – almost unmatched as a skilled horsewoman, she can only respect her equestrian equals. Fickle, vain, quirky, headstrong, manipulative, requiring absolute and exclusive dedication from anyone near to her – her husband, the loyal and self-sacrificing Marie Festetics, her purported lover Bay Middleton, her ingenue and admiring niece Marie Louise baroness of Wallersee, her children – whom she doesn’t all love indiscriminately - the empress plays with people as a listless puppeteer to distract herself from her consuming fear of aging and losing her principal asset, her blinding beauty, dropping people or instrumentalising them whenever and how she sees fit.
While the copiousness of details, the searing emptiness of the everyday imperial routines and Duve’s detached and laconic writing style at first rather keep the reader at bay, slowly Duve manages to entice if not the reader’s empathy, at least a certain sympathy for Sisi, that brave little horse – after all, she is no more or less than another flawed human being, like all of us.
Having picked this novel also because we hope to visit Vienna once more in September and apart from a visit to the Kapuzinergruft have thoughtlessly neglected exploring imperial Vienna and Schönbrunn the previous time for the sake of Schiele and Klimt and the stunning museum collections, Duve’s intriguing novel both strengthened my desire to read more about the Habsburgs and rekindled some long forgotten details on Sisi's life drawn from reading six volumes from a series pivoting around Sisi which an aunt gifted me when I was a child – saccharine and romantic books for young girls translated from the French Hachette collection Idéal Bibilothèque (written by Odette Ferry, Suzanne Pairault and Marcel d’Isard).
For in-depth reviews and more background information, see the excellent reviews of Alexandra and Steffi....more
There is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading. (Paul Theroux, from the introduction)
[image]
When I started browsiThere is always something luminous in the face of a person in the act of reading. (Paul Theroux, from the introduction)
[image]
When I started browsing through this book with photographs from people caught in the act of reading at the local library, it struck me as a marvellous counterpart in colour of the gorgeous black and white photographs of readers from the Hungarian photographer André Kertész, collected in his book On Reading(1971) which a friend brought to my attention some years ago. Reading on, it made me smile that Steve McCurry qualifies his own collection as his homage to André Kertész - “his talent, his influence, and his genius”.
Picturing people over the world absorbed in books, comics, newspapers, study material, Steve McCurry evokes what humankind unites by showing what readers have in common, hooked they all are to the magic spell of the written or printed word, regardless of age, culture or place.
[image]
[image]
The introduction by Paul Theroux failed to warm me. Looking at other readers reading however enabled this devoted reader to thankfully forget about these cold and rainy April days for a moment. Even if photography in colour usually speaks less to me than photography in black and white, many of these photographs impressed me with their magnificent composition, their luminosity and opulent, intense colour palette, having a painterly quality.
[image]
[image]
The photographs reminded me of a picture of a man sitting in front of a temple reading the newspaper, that I am keeping in a box with pictures of long bygone days, taken in Kathmandu (or Bhaktapur, or Patan? I don’t remember anymore) by my first spouse who dreamt about working as a photographer himself and to whom Steve McCurry’s photographic portrait Afghan Girl from 1984 was a beacon of inspiration, although he mostly chose to shoot photographs in black and white.
Loading...
