B List--Hans Andersen--Fairy Tales ..........................................................283/418
C List--Rahul Bhattacharya--The Sly Company of People Who Care ..........79/278
Galsworthy has been much disparaged by top-tier intellectuals over the years, mostly for being the highly successful representative of the mainstream English literary establishment, even to the extent of winning the Nobel Prize, during the Heroic Era of Modernism, in comparison with which sensational and genius works his more conventional Forsyte books come off as uninspired, unimaginative, insipid, plain. Still, 138 pages in I find a not inconsiderable amount of literary skill and matter to hold my interest, which, as someone who has read a lot of English novels, particularly from this time period and in this general milieu, and has begun in my old age to increasingly find many of them indistinguishable from one another, is no longer a given. The establishment of the Forsyte mindset, basically that of seeing every event and interaction of life through a financial lens, is very thorough and convincing, moreso than other authors trying to depict such characters have been successful in conveying. This author's concerns and narrative choices strike me thus far as different, and in an interesting way. I also recently liked Dreiser's American Tragedy, another large, realistic, stylistically stodgy novel of the 20s (not to mention Alice Adams, Edward Bok's memoir, and several Eugene O'Neill plays), in spite of the contrast with the great Modernist works that influence's one's interaction with every more conventional work from that decade.
The Andersen is thus far a (mostly) pleasant interlude in the midst of series of longer and heavier books. I will do an extensive post on it here in a couple of weeks after I finish it.
The Bhattacharya book was published in 2011 and received broad acclaim. Its author is a native of Bombay (born 1979) and currently resides in New Delhi. His novel is set in the sparsely populated (around 700,000 people, or 2/3rds the number that lives in New Hampshire) tropical country of Guyana, which has a substantial East Indian-descended population, around 43%, which makes it the largest ethnic or racial group in that country, Africans coming in second at around 30%. I am not sure where the book itself is going quite yet--we have just finished an unsuccessful expedition deep into the swampy forest/jungle in quest of diamonds--but it has the definite flavor of the direction literature is heading in the future, or at least what a lot of people hope that future is going to look and sound like. I see on the internet that a lot of people are brought to mind of Naipaul. I thought of Naipaul too, because of the setting, and I suppose the language is somewhat reminiscent of The Mystic Masseur. It does not strike me as yet as being near that level of intelligence, humor, etc.
We had a little cold spell in October, but of course this week I have been reading on the porch every day, including today. 73 degrees. We still even have a little leaf color left, both on the trees and on the ground, though certainly we are well past peak. We have a huge copper beech tree in our yard which is always last to shed its leaves and is just getting around to doing that now.
Picture Gallery
The Forsytes (Irene and Soames) on television
Hans Christian Andersen Monument, Copenhagen
Picture of girl with nice hair that turned up in the Hans Christian Andersen search
Bhattacharya author photo
Another picture of a girl that I found to have sex appeal that came up in searching. This is from a Canadian movie called "Modra".
