Evanston: flowers and smoke
Evanston: flowers and smoke
Over the long weekend, Carol added flowers to the planters on our balconies and decided on the color for the master bedroom, a blue-grey called ‘smoke’ by the paint manufacturer.
On Tuesday I smoked the bedroom.
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Often I read two books concurrently, usually one fiction and one non-fiction; but at present I am reading two novels: TESS OF THE D’UBERVILLES, downloaded from Project Gutenberg after finishing the Hardy biography; and A CAFE ON THE NILE, the second Bartle Bull novel.
I haven’t read TESS for so long that it is a new novel to me. ‘Genius’ is an overused word and is really nothing more than a term of extreme approbation. Mozart might have been a genius. And Bach. And Shakespeare. And Einstein. And perhaps other scientists and mathematicians of whom I do not know. I wouldn’t use the word for Thomas Hardy, but he was a very great writer, filled the English countryside with interest and created characters at odds with the sensibilities of his age.
The subtitle of TESS is “A pure woman”. It aroused great indignation because Tess is actually ‘a fallen woman’ who as a teenager was seduced by a man of a higher class.
Thus far A CAFE ON THE NILE has maintained the high standard of the beginning of THE WHITE RHINO HOTEL. I am rooting for Mr. Bull to make it all the way to the finish line this time.
The main characters of the earlier novel have been moved north to Egypt and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) and aged by more than a decade to 1935, when Mussolini invaded. I did not know that the Italians used mustard gas in this war, although it had been outlawed after WWI by a convention that Italy signed.
After reading this in the novel, I did some research online and verified that it is true. Additionally the fascists ‘accidentally’ dropped the gas on Red Cross medical facilities in an effort to eliminate European witnesses. Nineteen times.
Olivio Fonseca Alavedo is the proprietor of the Cataract Cafe in Cario, the cafe of the novel’s title. He is a dwarf of superior intelligence and ambition, who at age fifty has already lived beyond the usual span of a dwarf’s life, something else I did not know.
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Sudden rain just caused me to stop to close windows.
Thursday, May 31, 2007