Having finishing Svev's ZENO'S CONSCIOUS, I picked up 2 or 3 books. I stared one on Grammar -Woe is I, easy to read a chapter then go back. What is not an easy read is My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority by Philip Rieff. Egghead is an understatement, the writing is incredible, the ideas way way out there. YOU NEED a relief between chapters. a provocative anachronism . . .
So I read from cover to cover Anthony Burgess's ONE HAND CLAPPING. A funny quick read. Like Muriel Sparks in storyline (He would die again if he saw that comparison, he did not take too seriously little old lady at home typing literature). But then I guess he evolved. ONE HAND CLAPPING is about a married couple in a small English town muddling through life. The quirk: the husband has a photographic memory, they get rich, then . . . There are a lot of literary references, more than references they are so in your face in the book. A lot of nostalgia, an anti TV, anti Newspaper, anti pop culture (1961 ok) sentiments. AND SOME hilarity, some affection, some cheating, and even, even MURDER.
What to read next . . . .
and now a line from the NYT, to help you sleep easier (as the Polaris missile threat that popped up now and then in ONE HAND CLAPPING has abated leaving us but promised joy, right mousie?)
“The great problem is that Al Qaeda has moved far beyond being a terrorist
organization to being almost a state of mind,” said Simon Reeve, author of a
1999 book on Osama
bin Laden and his associates. “That’s terribly significant because it gives
the movement a scope and longevity it didn’t have before 9/11.”
(NYT 11Aug06 by Scott Shane)
now think along an old verse:
But, mousie, thou art not alane,
In proving foresight may be in vain,
The best laid schemes of mice and men,
Go oft astray,
And leave us nought but grief and pain,
To rend our day.
(Robert Burns, 1759 - 1796, TO TO A MOUSE On turning her up in her nest, with the plough, November, 1785)HAVE A GREAT WKND!!
