Archipelago Books

If you are thinking of joining the Read-a-Book Challenge but are wondering what to tackle, here's an idea. I wandered over to campus this morning--during the one-hour-a-day window when the post office is currently open--in order to pick up my mail, which I hadn't done in a week.

And what should I find but the latest shipment from Archipelago Books, a wonderful independent press that I discovered by accident about a year ago. They print lovely editions of foreign works in English translation. For $15/month you can become a member, which not only supports the work of this independent publisher but also means that they will send you a copy of each new title as it appears, about 10-12 times per year.

This time I actually received two new titles, the ones pictured above:

Jean Giono, Occupation Journal, from the French by Jody Gladding
José Eduardo Agualusa, The Society of Reluctant Dreamers (what a great title), from the Portuguese by Daniel Hahn

These both look wonderful. I unfortunately have a rather long list of things to read, so we'll see when I actually get to them. But they look great here on the desk in front of me!

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Chinese Painting

The Wall Street Journal has been running some interesting articles under the heading of "The Staying Inside Guide," offering suggestions for artistic or cultural resources to view online during the pandemic. Yesterday I came across an interesting one entitled "Immersive Painted Worlds," on Chinese painting, about which I know virtually nothing. (The article may be behind a subscription firewall.) The article has an impressive number of links to various things online, and I watched the first couple, a pair of 15-minute videos from a former BBC program called "The Culture Show," which together form an episode on "The Art of Chinese Painting." I thought they were quite interesting. The first episode introduced me to the Mogao Caves of Dunhuang , which I had never heard of before. Located in the Gobi Desert, they contain a wealth of wall paintings and statues that are well over 1000 years old and were unknown to the outside world for cen...

Dursli

Back to Gotthelf! I have already mentioned that I re-read Gotthelf's novella about the five young women who were ruined by drink. Last week I also re-read the second of his two early novellas tackling the problem of rural alcoholism, Dursli, der Brannteweinsäufer, oder Das heilige Weihnachtsabend ( Dursli the Brandy Drinker, or The Holy Christmas Eve ). This story also warns against the pubs springing up all over the Emmentaler countryside and their consequences for the rural poor. But it is also--even more than I had remembered, in fact--set in the broader political context of the times. Gotthelf begins the novella, in fact, before he ever even introduces the main characters, with about a 10-page discourse on the problematic reception in Switzerland of the ideas of the French Revolution. Its call for equality and freedom, he says, is naturally interpreted by the poorer classes not in terms of true Christian equality and freedom, but rather as a ...

Alias, or Real Life

I mentioned yesterday that I'd managed to read several things over the past week. And believe it or not, not all of them were by Gotthelf! On Saturday I decided I should give myself a break and read something else for a change, so that morning I decided to finish off a book I'd been in the middle of for a while, Alias, oder Das wahre leben ( Alias, or Real Life ), by Felix Philipp Ingold . Ingold is a Swiss author, editor, translator, and journalist; there isn't much about him in English, and I don't think any of his books have been translated, but you can read a one-paragraph summary of him here . It was an interesting book, partly because of the premise. It purports to tell the life story of one Kirill Beregow, alias Carl Berger, a Volga Russian of German descent. The hook is that Beregow/Berger is a real person, an acquaintance of Ingold's, and the book is supposedly based upon conversations with him and papers that he left behind, fictionaliz...

Plague Time

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