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Aug. 7th, 2017
Sue Woolfe "Leaning Towards Infinity" (The Women's Press)
This is a novel which takes on the topic of maths and mathematician. It is a wonderful and at times challenging novel of mothers, mother guilt, mothering, mathematics, obsession, thwarted genius, the indifference and chauvinism of conservative academia, the earnest hopes, and at times sexual envy of the overlooked daughter seeking her mother's approval. In essence ,a demanding, but very rewarding exploration of the destructiveness of unrecognised genius, through the lives of three generations of women. The mother is on the verge of discovering a new form of mathematics, but is driven mad by social isolation and betrayal. The narrator, her daughter, attempts to piece together her work. I was transfixed.
This is a novel which takes on the topic of maths and mathematician. It is a wonderful and at times challenging novel of mothers, mother guilt, mothering, mathematics, obsession, thwarted genius, the indifference and chauvinism of conservative academia, the earnest hopes, and at times sexual envy of the overlooked daughter seeking her mother's approval. In essence ,a demanding, but very rewarding exploration of the destructiveness of unrecognised genius, through the lives of three generations of women. The mother is on the verge of discovering a new form of mathematics, but is driven mad by social isolation and betrayal. The narrator, her daughter, attempts to piece together her work. I was transfixed.
In The Bourne
Aug. 7th, 2017 02:49 pmIt is fairly sunny , a bit cloudy and humid though.Still,i did my covert charity shop visit locally.Picked up a DVD of House Season 2 and the soundtrack to Pulp Fiction.
I have also finished reading a couple of books, and almost another over the weekend plus two i have finally read after a good few months slogging through them.
I will do Whitstable tomorrow now, and do some along the North Kent coast such as Westgate on Sea and eventually Ramsgate.
I just had lunch at my local Spoons. They had beef lasagna with a side salad on special offer followed by a salted caramel cheesecake with vanilla ice cream.Yummy.
On Saturday i paid a visit to the micro pub The Paper Mill after i did my Medway visits. They had Black Sheep Imperial Russian Stout on tap (an 8.5 % very strong ale) and i had two pints of it.
A dark and delicious fine strong brew indeed!
I have also finished reading a couple of books, and almost another over the weekend plus two i have finally read after a good few months slogging through them.
I will do Whitstable tomorrow now, and do some along the North Kent coast such as Westgate on Sea and eventually Ramsgate.
I just had lunch at my local Spoons. They had beef lasagna with a side salad on special offer followed by a salted caramel cheesecake with vanilla ice cream.Yummy.
On Saturday i paid a visit to the micro pub The Paper Mill after i did my Medway visits. They had Black Sheep Imperial Russian Stout on tap (an 8.5 % very strong ale) and i had two pints of it.
A dark and delicious fine strong brew indeed!
Geogres Perec "Life :A User's Manual" (Vintage)
This took me over a three month period wading through this six hundred page novel, but it was one where each chapter could stand alone as a vignette or slice of time.
The book imagines what it would be like if we could take the front wall off a Paris apartment building (No.11 in the fictitious Rue Simon-Crubellier) and look simultaneously into each of its rooms to see what people are doing. Each of the 99 chapters presents a snapshot of a room, describing it and the objects and people that happen to be in it at a little before eight in the evening on the 23rd of June 1975. In most chapters Perec takes one or more objects or people associated with the room, and tells us a story about them.
This approach takes a bit of getting used to. For a start, no time passes between the first and the last chapter. We jump arbitrarily from one room to another, according to a rule Perec has imposed on himself, but we could equally-well read the chapters in any order. Perec provides an index, diagram, chronology and table of contents that would allow the reader to map out any desired course through the book.
The stories are sometimes about major characters - the people who live in the building - but sometimes about apparently irrelevant things (the story illustrated by a painting hanging in the room; the plot of a novel; the text of a pamphlet...). Sometimes there is no story at all, just a collection of lists. We get five straight pages out of a hardware catalogue at one point; at another an itemised list of the food in the Altamonts' cellar. This is a wonderful book for someone like me, whose knowledge of French has its limitations: Perec draws vocabulary from every conceivable realm of life. We get detective stories and medieval romance; escapes from the harem and Kafkaesque struggles against bureaucracy; cooking recipes and bicycle racing...
Set against all this apparent randomness there are various unifying themes that run through the book. Puzzles (especially jigsaws) are particularly important: Perec is clearly fascinated by the way that they bring together concepts of order and randomness. Puzzles feature heavily in the story of the eccentric Bartlebooth, who has links to a number of the other residents and provides the book with the nearest thing it has toa conventional plot line. Recursion is another big theme - over and over again we find stories within a story, books within a book, or pictures within a picture.
This is a remarkable book, entertaining and very accessible despite its experimental nature and highly-constrained formal structure. It's quite fun to have some idea how Perec's "novel-writing machine" worked, but you certainly don't need to: the text is enough to keep you absorbed without any scaffolding.
This took me over a three month period wading through this six hundred page novel, but it was one where each chapter could stand alone as a vignette or slice of time.
The book imagines what it would be like if we could take the front wall off a Paris apartment building (No.11 in the fictitious Rue Simon-Crubellier) and look simultaneously into each of its rooms to see what people are doing. Each of the 99 chapters presents a snapshot of a room, describing it and the objects and people that happen to be in it at a little before eight in the evening on the 23rd of June 1975. In most chapters Perec takes one or more objects or people associated with the room, and tells us a story about them.
This approach takes a bit of getting used to. For a start, no time passes between the first and the last chapter. We jump arbitrarily from one room to another, according to a rule Perec has imposed on himself, but we could equally-well read the chapters in any order. Perec provides an index, diagram, chronology and table of contents that would allow the reader to map out any desired course through the book.
The stories are sometimes about major characters - the people who live in the building - but sometimes about apparently irrelevant things (the story illustrated by a painting hanging in the room; the plot of a novel; the text of a pamphlet...). Sometimes there is no story at all, just a collection of lists. We get five straight pages out of a hardware catalogue at one point; at another an itemised list of the food in the Altamonts' cellar. This is a wonderful book for someone like me, whose knowledge of French has its limitations: Perec draws vocabulary from every conceivable realm of life. We get detective stories and medieval romance; escapes from the harem and Kafkaesque struggles against bureaucracy; cooking recipes and bicycle racing...
Set against all this apparent randomness there are various unifying themes that run through the book. Puzzles (especially jigsaws) are particularly important: Perec is clearly fascinated by the way that they bring together concepts of order and randomness. Puzzles feature heavily in the story of the eccentric Bartlebooth, who has links to a number of the other residents and provides the book with the nearest thing it has toa conventional plot line. Recursion is another big theme - over and over again we find stories within a story, books within a book, or pictures within a picture.
This is a remarkable book, entertaining and very accessible despite its experimental nature and highly-constrained formal structure. It's quite fun to have some idea how Perec's "novel-writing machine" worked, but you certainly don't need to: the text is enough to keep you absorbed without any scaffolding.
J.R.R Tolkein "The Monsters and the Critics:And Other Essays" (Harper Collins)
These lecture essays by Tolkien are thought-provoking and of the seven essays i found the ones on Beowulf the most fascinating,although the one on fairy stories is equally very informative.
Of Beowulf, it includes his very famous one, from which the title of this volume derives, and the one he wrote as an introduction to Clark Hall's translation. The first one is, of course, one of the first points of call for anyone studying Beowulf, and rightfully so. The volume also contains an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his famous essay 'On Fairy Stories', an essay on 'English and Welsh', an essay about the invention of languages, and his valedictory address, given when he left Oxford. All of them are well worth reading. They're not dry at all, but warm and passionate as Tolkien was warm and passionate, and of course, intelligent.
These lecture essays by Tolkien are thought-provoking and of the seven essays i found the ones on Beowulf the most fascinating,although the one on fairy stories is equally very informative.
Of Beowulf, it includes his very famous one, from which the title of this volume derives, and the one he wrote as an introduction to Clark Hall's translation. The first one is, of course, one of the first points of call for anyone studying Beowulf, and rightfully so. The volume also contains an essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, his famous essay 'On Fairy Stories', an essay on 'English and Welsh', an essay about the invention of languages, and his valedictory address, given when he left Oxford. All of them are well worth reading. They're not dry at all, but warm and passionate as Tolkien was warm and passionate, and of course, intelligent.
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