Reading list for September 2005

Currently reading
Colin McCarthy, Cities of the Plain
Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann - in French!

Recently read
Paulo Coelho, Auf dem Jakobsweg
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex
Walter Jens, Das Testament des Odysseus
Ian MacEwan, The Child in Time
David Sedaris, Me talk pretty one day

I will probably not finish reading Proust, it's too difficult. A great pity: I've left it too late. There was a time when my French was good enough to have read it well, to have appreciated the puns and alliterations and understood the nuances, but that time is long past. The English translation that I'm reading as a "cheat sheet" parallel to the French, is more alive in my eyes than the original.

Colin McCarthy is a fine storyteller with an annoying habit. There are pages of dialogue in Cities of the Plain which are in Spanish, without translation or clues from context. You don't speak Spanish? tough mierda. A good tale nonetheless, though I fear that it will end very unpleasantly for most of the characters. (Not nearly as violent as Blood Meridian, but also not as gripping.)

Auf dem Jakobsweg is the story of a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, written so that it isn't clear whether it is autobiography, fiction or self-improvement primer. Coelho is a member of a never-specified mystical association, and as the book begins has just stumbled at the last hurdle of a peculiar quasi-religious education. His penance, his re-education, is to make this pilgrimage under the guidance of a fellow mystic. The book explains some spiritual and physical exercises which he learns en route, which is where my suspension of disbelief breaks a spring: The exercises are trivially simple, it is not credible that one could have risen so high in such a system without having encountered them. A strangely unsatisfying book, but well written - the descriptions of landscape and people are charming. (If you are new to Coelho, start with Veronika decides to die instead of this.)

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