A List: Maurice Baring--
Comfortless Memory.....................182/192
B List: Mikhail Sholokhov--
And Quiet Flows the Don........314/554
C List: Luis Alberto Urrea--
The Devil's Highway................153/220
Not the most celebrated group of authors this month. Mike Sholokhov did win the Nobel Prize
in 1965, though his current reputation is attended with much controversy, including the suggestion
that he did not actually write his most famous book. I will revisit this when I do my big report on him.
Baring was one of those prolific English authors of light social comedies set among the privileged classes, often in foreign locales, who flourished in the period between the world wars. I was hoping his book, published in that high-spirited year of 1928, would be a
Nightmare Abbey-ish work full of drolleries and inimitable upper class English bantering, but it is nothing much. It doesn't live.
The subject matter of
The Devil's Highway, which is about an expedition of Mexican would-be illegal migrants who got lost in the inhospitable Arizona desert after entering the United States on foot in 2001, resulting in the deaths of fourteen men, is one that interests me. Like most Americans I have always been curious to go out to the west and see the desert and check out what is going on out there, but besides that of course there is whole angle of the future being formed and playing out in the mass movements across the border. Urrea writes in a kind of pseudo hard-boiled, wearily knowing style that I find annoying, but evidently other people like it, so I guess it works for him...Maybe I will finish my thoughts on this book in a separate post. The continuous interruptions while trying to do what should take 30 minutes at most have defeated me for tonight...
Picture Gallery
Apparently there is a film of 'And Quiet Flows the Don'
Viktoria Federova, "the Sophia Loren of Soviet Cinema".
Is this real?
