If Berlusconi is the pits for Italians in Britain, then Enoteca Turi on Putney High Street must be the road to salvation for any Italian nostalgic or English Epicurean.
It is easily – at least for me and Elisabetta – the best Italian restaurant in London. I have been going there for years, and I have got to know Mr Turi a bit. He is from Apulia, like Elisabetta (and his cuisine is philologically accurate about the greatest food from that region), and I was happy today to discover he's also an anti-Berlusconian.
Today he told me a joke that has been going round on the internet about Berlusconi, Obama and Bin Laden. It's more or less like this:
Barack Obama, bin Laden and Berlusconi are summoned by God.
God says: "I am not happy at all about what's happening on Earth – and you are not helping at all. If you don't get your act together, you and your people will be condemned to shovel dung for eternity!"
On their return on Earth, the three leaders call up a press conference.
Obama says: "People of America. I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that God does exist." Here Americans cheer. "The bad news is that, if we don't get our act together, we'll be shovelling dung for eternity!" Americans try their best and work hard to improve things.
Then bin Laden says: "I have two pieces of bad news for you, my people: the first one is that Allah does not exist." Here everybody moans and boos. "The second one is that, if we don't get our act together, we'll be shovelling dung for eternity!" His followers start to work hard to improve things.
Finally Berlusconi says: "Italians! I have some wonderful news for you! First of all, my dad is sending His best wishes to you. . . And secondly, it looks like there will be a lot of work for everybody soon!"
Good night!
AG
Saturday, 4 April 2009
Friday, 3 April 2009
The Queen doesn't find Berlusconi funny
Well, who does?
The Queen, apparently, showed signs of mild, cool, English irritation when Mr Bee(g) shouted at the top of his voice: "Mr Obbbama-a". She turned round, rolled her eyes and – oh! – was caught on camera.
Have they ever polled how popular B. is with Italian expatriates? He is no more popular than teflon B was in England three years ago and Gordon B is now. Il Berlusca lost an election a few years ago because he was reckoning on pizza and mandolino votes from Italian emigrants in UK, US and Australia. How badly did he read that.
If I am here, it's partly thanks to Berlusconi. I am a Berlusconi exile.
And I am toasting to his painful death tonight.
Cheers,
AG
The Queen, apparently, showed signs of mild, cool, English irritation when Mr Bee(g) shouted at the top of his voice: "Mr Obbbama-a". She turned round, rolled her eyes and – oh! – was caught on camera.
Have they ever polled how popular B. is with Italian expatriates? He is no more popular than teflon B was in England three years ago and Gordon B is now. Il Berlusca lost an election a few years ago because he was reckoning on pizza and mandolino votes from Italian emigrants in UK, US and Australia. How badly did he read that.
If I am here, it's partly thanks to Berlusconi. I am a Berlusconi exile.
And I am toasting to his painful death tonight.
Cheers,
AG
The Art of Sinking in Literature
This is a title asking to be written.
After yet another inspiring Thursday evening at the Calder Bookshop – tonight’s fare was a reading from Graham Greene’s most famous novels, introduced by a tired-looking but anecdotal John Calder – I had dinner with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder.
We had a long chat about the pitiful state of contemporary British literature. He argues that most people interested in ideas are emigrating to the visual arts or conceptual art, and that the celebrated writers of the day are the most mediocre and boring scribblers we’ve had for decades. We tried to think of one or two literary titles that made it into the top-ten or even top-fifty charts in the last twenty or thirty years. He couldn’t think of any book – neither could I.
I then told him I am currently editing this extraordinary book by Alexander Pope – another of my favourite authors – called Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry. Pope, with his friends Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell and Swift, created a literary group, nicknamed the Scriblerus Club, with the intent of ridiculing “all the false tastes in learning”. The Club left behind a number of co-operative works, mostly satires, the most important of which – which I published at Hesperus a few years ago – is The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a hilarious account of the life and works of a pretentious scholar.
I am not even half way through the editing of Peri Bathous, but I have already found a number of passages that are as true and applicable today as they were almost three hundred years ago, when Pope wrote them. I will give you three examples below, hoping that this will whet your appetite and you will want to read the whole thing when we publish the book next month.
“We come now to prove that there is an art of sinking in poetry. Is there not an architecture of vaults and cellars as well as of lofty domes and pyramids? Is there not as much skill and labour in making of dykes as in raising of mounts? Is there not an art of diving as well as of flying? And will any sober practitioner affirm that a diving engine is not of singular use in making him long-winded, assisting his sight and furnishing him with other ingenious means of keeping underwater?”
“It is affirmed by Quintilian that the same genius which made Germanicus so great a general would with equal application have made him an excellent heroic poet. In like manner, reasoning from the affinity there appears between arts and sciences, I doubt not but an active catcher of butterflies, a careful and fanciful pattern-drawer, an industrious collector of shells, a laborious and tuneful bagpiper or a diligent breeder of tame rabbits might severally excel in their respective parts of the bathos.”
“The physician, by the study and inspection of urine and ordure, approves himself in the science; and in like sort should our author accustom and exercise his imagination upon the dregs of nature. This will render his thoughts truly and fundamentally low, and carry him many fathoms beyond mediocrity.”
AG
After yet another inspiring Thursday evening at the Calder Bookshop – tonight’s fare was a reading from Graham Greene’s most famous novels, introduced by a tired-looking but anecdotal John Calder – I had dinner with Tom McCarthy, author of Remainder.
We had a long chat about the pitiful state of contemporary British literature. He argues that most people interested in ideas are emigrating to the visual arts or conceptual art, and that the celebrated writers of the day are the most mediocre and boring scribblers we’ve had for decades. We tried to think of one or two literary titles that made it into the top-ten or even top-fifty charts in the last twenty or thirty years. He couldn’t think of any book – neither could I.
I then told him I am currently editing this extraordinary book by Alexander Pope – another of my favourite authors – called Peri Bathous, or The Art of Sinking in Poetry. Pope, with his friends Arbuthnot, Gay, Parnell and Swift, created a literary group, nicknamed the Scriblerus Club, with the intent of ridiculing “all the false tastes in learning”. The Club left behind a number of co-operative works, mostly satires, the most important of which – which I published at Hesperus a few years ago – is The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, a hilarious account of the life and works of a pretentious scholar.
I am not even half way through the editing of Peri Bathous, but I have already found a number of passages that are as true and applicable today as they were almost three hundred years ago, when Pope wrote them. I will give you three examples below, hoping that this will whet your appetite and you will want to read the whole thing when we publish the book next month.
“We come now to prove that there is an art of sinking in poetry. Is there not an architecture of vaults and cellars as well as of lofty domes and pyramids? Is there not as much skill and labour in making of dykes as in raising of mounts? Is there not an art of diving as well as of flying? And will any sober practitioner affirm that a diving engine is not of singular use in making him long-winded, assisting his sight and furnishing him with other ingenious means of keeping underwater?”
“It is affirmed by Quintilian that the same genius which made Germanicus so great a general would with equal application have made him an excellent heroic poet. In like manner, reasoning from the affinity there appears between arts and sciences, I doubt not but an active catcher of butterflies, a careful and fanciful pattern-drawer, an industrious collector of shells, a laborious and tuneful bagpiper or a diligent breeder of tame rabbits might severally excel in their respective parts of the bathos.”
“The physician, by the study and inspection of urine and ordure, approves himself in the science; and in like sort should our author accustom and exercise his imagination upon the dregs of nature. This will render his thoughts truly and fundamentally low, and carry him many fathoms beyond mediocrity.”
AG
Thursday, 2 April 2009
A Dark Stranger
A dark stranger… Un beau ténébreux… the very title of Julien Gracq’s second novel symbolizes the complexity and startling obliqueness of a book that, on its publication in 1945, was described by Edmond Jaloux, writing in Psyché, as “a black diamond” whose dark brilliance set it apart from the literature of its time.
Gracq got the idea for the book while a prisoner of war in a camp near Hoyerswerda in what was then German Silesia. It was inspired by an obscure poem of Vigny’s, “Les amants de Montmorency”, in which two lovers make a suicide pact. In Carnets du grand chemin he describes how he wrote it in bed in the prison hut, not just for lack of a table; they were so ill-fed they only got up for a few hours a day so as to save energy. It was his job to divide up the daily ration of black bread. Never had the Lord’s Prayer – “give us this day our daily bread” – seemed so relevant.
A Dark Stranger is the product of this period of captivity, its ascetic routines. Arresting, prescient, it rises from the forest plains of Silesia only to be transposed onto the thundering tides of Brittany. Much influenced by Ernst Jünger and German Romantic literature, Gracq sets the story in another place where poetic traditions are strong. It resembles both the wild Breton coastline and the Silesian plain: sombre, unceasing, moving in cool sensual waves, sometimes calm, always unsettling.
Hence the inter-war setting assumes particular significance. The 1920s were a time of insouciance, conspicuous wealth; the jazz age epitomized by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But in A Dark Stranger – as for Fitzgerald in other ways – the period has something of a lament. Its wealthy, neurotic characters seem to be in mourning: but is this for the past horrors of 1914-18 – which perhaps significantly are never mentioned – or for those to come in 1939-45, so real and immediate to the author?
The era is nonetheless determined by the tone: the then-fashionable Anglophilia is also evident in the protagonist, the repellent and equivocally chivalrous Allan Murchison: his glamorous Anglo-French parentage, his quotes from Wilde, his monocle, Eton bow ties and English suits. Englishness plays a particular role in the novel that that operates on several levels. Allan’s parentage gives him cachet, explains his icy, derisive elegance, perhaps even his supposed superiority over his hot-blooded Latin acolytes. Yet the situation is not without irony. Although the other characters fall short of the ideal he sets, it is their failings that ultimately put them on a higher level than him; something they, even he, perhaps realize but are unwilling to admit.
Gracq also seems to have had Anglo-Saxon leanings – not least his reserve. Yet his brand of Anglophilia is atypical. He admired English coolness while recognizing that its emotional detachment is often accompanied by a lack of intellectual acuity. Widely read in English literature, he first visited the country in 1929. His observations, not published until 1992, draw interesting comparisons. He disliked the cynicism, the destructive criticism prevalent in France after 1918, admiring the British for still having “Victorian values” – something that would stand them in good stead in 1940. He felt this was what accounted for the very different national responses to the outbreak of war. But after a visit in the 1990s he felt the English had become “more like the French …”
In Allan, Gracq creates with incisive irony a modern figure, one familiar to us. Allan is godless, supremely logical, preoccupied with the impression he makes. Materially successful, for him people are as interesting as the treasures he collects—no more, no less. While protecting his privacy, beneath the mask – the “permanent look of Werther” as Irène describes it – his aim is to provoke reaction. In Gregory’s words he “burns life at both ends” according to his own existential code of perfection. Then, like the meteor Christel sees from the train, he makes a spectacular exit, destroys the self he has created, believing in it to the last.
Gracq’s message might be: “don’t live your life like this”. Allan’s gifts are squandered in a quest for an ideal that has no more substance than his reflection in the mirror. Ultimately he is a study in failure.
At times Allan seems to be playing a vast game of chess, not only with the other characters but with the literary and surrealist themes which, through him, exert their influence on the narrative: Poe, Rimbaud, keywords, magnetic fields, vanishing points, planetary orbits. At others – although the shift in roles is barely perceptible – he acts as a form of external siphon that feeds a series of communicating vessels, an image used by Gérard in his diary. This, the interrelation of our waking and dreaming lives, how they cross-fertilize, is arguably the book’s predominant surrealist element, one that draws on Breton’s work Les vases communicants. The part played by dreams is substantial yet understated; it is often hard to distinguish dream from reality. And although none of the characters dream about Allan specifically, it is apparent that he inspires, even dictates, the content of their dreams. He inhabits both worlds, blurring the already porous boundary between them.
To French and English readers alike, Gracq’s work can seem impenetrable. Yet in a world where communication is becoming homogeneous, the clarity of his language is a reminder of the purifying power of the word; that it can reveal without blinding. In an interview with Gracq in 1986, Jean Carrière commented that his work sometimes gives the impression of being translated from another language. Gracq replied that, on the contrary, his (unfulfillable) wish was that it should remain so close to its French roots as to be “untranslatable”.
Gracq’s avoidance of the literary scene – he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951 – seems more justified than ever today, when the self-promotion encouraged by publishers and authors alike has such a corrosive effect on the integrity of literature. The work of many contemporary writers is obscured by their public profile. Gracq, by contrast, effaces himself. It is his work that shines, not him. When he died in 2007 at the age of ninety-seven, one of the few to be published in the Pléiade in his lifetime, the press described his passing as “discreet”. It is perhaps the most fitting tribute for an author.
Michel Tournier, the well-known French novelist, once spoke about influences on his own work. Prominent among them was Julien Gracq. When asked to elaborate he had only this to say: “Gracq… read all of him”.
Christopher Moncrieff
Harz Mountains
September, 2008
Gracq got the idea for the book while a prisoner of war in a camp near Hoyerswerda in what was then German Silesia. It was inspired by an obscure poem of Vigny’s, “Les amants de Montmorency”, in which two lovers make a suicide pact. In Carnets du grand chemin he describes how he wrote it in bed in the prison hut, not just for lack of a table; they were so ill-fed they only got up for a few hours a day so as to save energy. It was his job to divide up the daily ration of black bread. Never had the Lord’s Prayer – “give us this day our daily bread” – seemed so relevant.
A Dark Stranger is the product of this period of captivity, its ascetic routines. Arresting, prescient, it rises from the forest plains of Silesia only to be transposed onto the thundering tides of Brittany. Much influenced by Ernst Jünger and German Romantic literature, Gracq sets the story in another place where poetic traditions are strong. It resembles both the wild Breton coastline and the Silesian plain: sombre, unceasing, moving in cool sensual waves, sometimes calm, always unsettling.
Hence the inter-war setting assumes particular significance. The 1920s were a time of insouciance, conspicuous wealth; the jazz age epitomized by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But in A Dark Stranger – as for Fitzgerald in other ways – the period has something of a lament. Its wealthy, neurotic characters seem to be in mourning: but is this for the past horrors of 1914-18 – which perhaps significantly are never mentioned – or for those to come in 1939-45, so real and immediate to the author?
The era is nonetheless determined by the tone: the then-fashionable Anglophilia is also evident in the protagonist, the repellent and equivocally chivalrous Allan Murchison: his glamorous Anglo-French parentage, his quotes from Wilde, his monocle, Eton bow ties and English suits. Englishness plays a particular role in the novel that that operates on several levels. Allan’s parentage gives him cachet, explains his icy, derisive elegance, perhaps even his supposed superiority over his hot-blooded Latin acolytes. Yet the situation is not without irony. Although the other characters fall short of the ideal he sets, it is their failings that ultimately put them on a higher level than him; something they, even he, perhaps realize but are unwilling to admit.
Gracq also seems to have had Anglo-Saxon leanings – not least his reserve. Yet his brand of Anglophilia is atypical. He admired English coolness while recognizing that its emotional detachment is often accompanied by a lack of intellectual acuity. Widely read in English literature, he first visited the country in 1929. His observations, not published until 1992, draw interesting comparisons. He disliked the cynicism, the destructive criticism prevalent in France after 1918, admiring the British for still having “Victorian values” – something that would stand them in good stead in 1940. He felt this was what accounted for the very different national responses to the outbreak of war. But after a visit in the 1990s he felt the English had become “more like the French …”
In Allan, Gracq creates with incisive irony a modern figure, one familiar to us. Allan is godless, supremely logical, preoccupied with the impression he makes. Materially successful, for him people are as interesting as the treasures he collects—no more, no less. While protecting his privacy, beneath the mask – the “permanent look of Werther” as Irène describes it – his aim is to provoke reaction. In Gregory’s words he “burns life at both ends” according to his own existential code of perfection. Then, like the meteor Christel sees from the train, he makes a spectacular exit, destroys the self he has created, believing in it to the last.
Gracq’s message might be: “don’t live your life like this”. Allan’s gifts are squandered in a quest for an ideal that has no more substance than his reflection in the mirror. Ultimately he is a study in failure.
At times Allan seems to be playing a vast game of chess, not only with the other characters but with the literary and surrealist themes which, through him, exert their influence on the narrative: Poe, Rimbaud, keywords, magnetic fields, vanishing points, planetary orbits. At others – although the shift in roles is barely perceptible – he acts as a form of external siphon that feeds a series of communicating vessels, an image used by Gérard in his diary. This, the interrelation of our waking and dreaming lives, how they cross-fertilize, is arguably the book’s predominant surrealist element, one that draws on Breton’s work Les vases communicants. The part played by dreams is substantial yet understated; it is often hard to distinguish dream from reality. And although none of the characters dream about Allan specifically, it is apparent that he inspires, even dictates, the content of their dreams. He inhabits both worlds, blurring the already porous boundary between them.
To French and English readers alike, Gracq’s work can seem impenetrable. Yet in a world where communication is becoming homogeneous, the clarity of his language is a reminder of the purifying power of the word; that it can reveal without blinding. In an interview with Gracq in 1986, Jean Carrière commented that his work sometimes gives the impression of being translated from another language. Gracq replied that, on the contrary, his (unfulfillable) wish was that it should remain so close to its French roots as to be “untranslatable”.
Gracq’s avoidance of the literary scene – he refused the Prix Goncourt in 1951 – seems more justified than ever today, when the self-promotion encouraged by publishers and authors alike has such a corrosive effect on the integrity of literature. The work of many contemporary writers is obscured by their public profile. Gracq, by contrast, effaces himself. It is his work that shines, not him. When he died in 2007 at the age of ninety-seven, one of the few to be published in the Pléiade in his lifetime, the press described his passing as “discreet”. It is perhaps the most fitting tribute for an author.
Michel Tournier, the well-known French novelist, once spoke about influences on his own work. Prominent among them was Julien Gracq. When asked to elaborate he had only this to say: “Gracq… read all of him”.
Christopher Moncrieff
Harz Mountains
September, 2008
Wednesday, 1 April 2009
Gogol Celebrations: Part 2
Gogol is one of my favourite authors. I have published his Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Fell Out with Ivan Nikiforovich (under the title The Squabble) and other stories at Hesperus, and my greatest ambition is to publish a new translation of Dead Souls and his Petersburg Stories.
I think he is one of the greatest and most influential geniuses in the world of letters. He should be as widely read as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky or Bulgakov. Still, his works are very little known in this country. Perhaps it’s because he’s a humorous writer, and humour must be of a particular kind to appeal to English and American readers.
But another reason why Gogol is so dear to me – apart from the fact that he was stark raving mad – is that he has a strong connection with Rome. He commented on and praised the poetry of Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli, and even talked about my hometown Genzano in one of his letters:
I want to tell you about a feast that took place over the past few days in Genzano, a small village not far from Rome. It is called the Infiorata. Just imagine: all the streets are strewn and adorned with flowers – but don't think that the flowers are simply scattered around. Not at all! You wouldn’t even guess they are flowers: imagine some sort of carpets depicting a variety of things, and these all made of petals: baskets, vases, patterns and even a portrait of the Pope – simply extraordinary. The streets, the windows, the door frames were crowded with people…And he goes on to describe the Infiorata procession.
Our Oneworld Classics edition of Dead Souls should be coming out in the Spring of 2010. For the time being, dear Nikolai, a happy two-hundredth anniversary, with many returns!
AG
Gogol Celebrations: Part 1
Today is the bicentenary of the birth of Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852), who was one of greatest and strangest writers to come out of Russia or Ukraine, and deserves considerably more fame than he has in Britain. Gogol was born in the town of Poltava in present-day Ukraine, and many of his earlier stories were based on gobbets of Ukrainian folklore supplied by his mother along with financial support. Naturally, there has been a lot of wrangling between Ukraine and Russia over his true nationality since he wrote in Russian and lived for a considerable while in St Petersburg.
I was first put off reading Gogol at the age of 17 by a nasty Penguin cover for Dead Souls depicting a bunch of peasants grubbing around in filth (at least that’s how my memory has repainted something by Repin), and didn’t actually start reading his work until several years later. That picture was wholly inappropriate to Gogol, whose genius lies in his humour, his ability to get hopelessly and wonderfully distracted by details, and his utterly bizarre vision of the world.
Take The Nose, for instance, one of the celebrated Petersburg stories: Major Kovalyov wakes up one morning to find that, instead of a nose, he has simply “an extremely uncouth, smooth, and uniform patch” slap-bang in the middle of his newly egglike face. Later, on Nevsky Prospekt, he recognises the nose leaping into a carriage, “clad in a gold-braided, high-collared uniform, buckskin breeches, and cockaded hat”. Аfter pursuing it into a building he then has an awkward social encounter with the nose, unsure of how to conduct himself because the nose is wearing a uniform of a higher rank and regards the Major with evident disdain…
One day during a visit to St Petersburg, I decided to locate a memorial to Major Kovalyov's nose which had been installed in 2002 on the wall of Prospekt Rimskovo-Korsakova, peering over a set of traffic lights. I was galled to find that the organ in question – which weighed in at a good six poods and was positioned several metres above the ground – was simply absent. I checked and rechecked the address – it was correct. I approached a somnolent security guard working in a nearby bank and explained everything to him; his look was as blank as the wall. I didn’t know what to do, I’d walked a long way to get to that nose, I hesitated. And then, abruptly and unpleasantly, before turning back to the little TV flickering in the plastic booth: no, he had no recollection of any nose, there’s no nose here.
The fact was, the nose simply vanished one morning. Perhaps it was taken by thieves, perhaps it sauntered off to a cushy job in GazProm where it was something of a hit with the ladies and liked to read trashy magazines.
I was first put off reading Gogol at the age of 17 by a nasty Penguin cover for Dead Souls depicting a bunch of peasants grubbing around in filth (at least that’s how my memory has repainted something by Repin), and didn’t actually start reading his work until several years later. That picture was wholly inappropriate to Gogol, whose genius lies in his humour, his ability to get hopelessly and wonderfully distracted by details, and his utterly bizarre vision of the world.
Take The Nose, for instance, one of the celebrated Petersburg stories: Major Kovalyov wakes up one morning to find that, instead of a nose, he has simply “an extremely uncouth, smooth, and uniform patch” slap-bang in the middle of his newly egglike face. Later, on Nevsky Prospekt, he recognises the nose leaping into a carriage, “clad in a gold-braided, high-collared uniform, buckskin breeches, and cockaded hat”. Аfter pursuing it into a building he then has an awkward social encounter with the nose, unsure of how to conduct himself because the nose is wearing a uniform of a higher rank and regards the Major with evident disdain…
One day during a visit to St Petersburg, I decided to locate a memorial to Major Kovalyov's nose which had been installed in 2002 on the wall of Prospekt Rimskovo-Korsakova, peering over a set of traffic lights. I was galled to find that the organ in question – which weighed in at a good six poods and was positioned several metres above the ground – was simply absent. I checked and rechecked the address – it was correct. I approached a somnolent security guard working in a nearby bank and explained everything to him; his look was as blank as the wall. I didn’t know what to do, I’d walked a long way to get to that nose, I hesitated. And then, abruptly and unpleasantly, before turning back to the little TV flickering in the plastic booth: no, he had no recollection of any nose, there’s no nose here.
The fact was, the nose simply vanished one morning. Perhaps it was taken by thieves, perhaps it sauntered off to a cushy job in GazProm where it was something of a hit with the ladies and liked to read trashy magazines.
Guardian to switch from printed edition to Twitter!
The winner for the best April Fool's gag is certainly the Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology
Assuming this is not a serious piece of news. . . You never know.
AG
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology
Assuming this is not a serious piece of news. . . You never know.
AG
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