I have not idea why the sudden surge, but I have a bad habit, courtesy of the ease Amazon offers of buying online in one swift keystroke, of buying loads of books and have stack of books to read.
Not least among these is George Eliot’s Middlemarch and a version of The Canterbury Tales in ‘modern’ verse, produced for cretins like me who can’t be doing with all that 14th-century apparently easily understood 
English ‘once you are used to reading it.
We’re always assured reading it in the original Chaucerian (© The Guardian) is ‘not really that hard’ but . . .
We’re always assured reading it in the original Chaucerian (© The Guardian) is ‘not really that hard’ but . . .
Maybe I’m not putting in enough effort.
To be on the safe side, I bought two copies, one in the original ‘easily understood English if you get your finger out’ and a modern version, which is the one I started reading.
Then there’s a stack of Raymond Chandler novels to get through, and most recently arrived have been Stick It Up Your Punter about the Sun (the tabloid, not the star) from its beginnings and Mail Men which does something similar for the Daily Mail.
Then there’s a stack of Raymond Chandler novels to get through, and most recently arrived have been Stick It Up Your Punter about the Sun (the tabloid, not the star) from its beginnings and Mail Men which does something similar for the Daily Mail.
Also jostling for space in my in-tray are three Flashman novels, the first three in a series of 12 which I’ve read are a good read.
NB That last sentence provides a useful example for non-native English speakers: ‘read’ and ‘read’. In my sentence above the first is pronounced to rhyme with reed and the second to rhyme with red. (OK, now get on with it – Ed)
Here is a review of A Hero For Our Time, by the Russian poet, dramatist and occasional painter Mikhail Lermontov. Not also a ‘novelist’? Well, no, not really. The thing is Lermontov died very young, at the age of 26 in a duel, so he didn’t have time to write any more novels after publishing A Hero For Our Time in 1839 and revising it for a new edition a year later.
Here I must be candid and tell you I’ve relied on various commentaries on Lermontov’s novel, not least an introduction to the novel by its translator, Natasha Randall. And speaking of translations, I’m pleased to report that, unlike the English version of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls which reviewed a while back, this translation of a Russian novel written at the same time, 186 years ago, is as fresh as a newly baked breakfast roll.
Maybe I had simply hit upon the wrong translation of Gogol, but I’m sure as hell not going back there with another English version, only to find I wasn’t wrong at all. (Gogol is said to be ‘hilarious’. Well, I’ll take their word for it. Perhaps it is in the original Russian and you are familiar with the society he is satirising.)
I first came across A Hero For Our Time when I was given me as a gift by a – rather unattractive, I’m bound to confess uncharitably – New Zealand woman in the late 1970s. I was working as the North Gwent district reporter for the South Wales Argus based in Ebbw Vale and she was working for, if I remember, the Gwent Gazette, a local weekly with an office in the same town.
I don’t remember much about the evening except that we’d been for a drink and went back to her bedsit where – this was 50 years ago – I made a pass at her / tried it on, choose your own phrase. But she wasn’t interested, so I left it at that, didn’t push my luck and we just carried on chatting for some time before I left to drive home to Crickhowell where I lived I right next to the bridge over the Usk, next to The Bridge End pub (which until a minute ago I always thought was called The Bridge).
However, the following day or the day after, she presented me with the novel with an inscription thanking me for ‘being a gentleman’. Make of that what you will. I can only assume she was commenting on the fact that I didn’t behave like a complete prick when she turned down ‘my advances’ and made life difficult for her. I understand it happens and many a lass has a tale to tell.
I’ve also assumed she had read the novel or was at least familiar with it, and that Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, the central protagonist, in the novel was indeed a ‘hero’ and a good guy and, given the lady’s inscription, ‘a gentleman’. Actually, he was nothing for the sort, though he wasn’t exactly a ‘bad guy’, either.
From the several commentaries I have read, I discovered in his novel Lermontov’s portrayal of Pechorin is in part autobiographical. More to the point, Lermontov was a rather complex soul as was Pechorin. For example (and his Wikipedia entry was useful), he was something of an odd-bod.
His upbringing was unusual and, born in 1814, he was very much taken with Lord Byron and what we might – in a broad-brush sense – regard as the romantic Byronic sensibility. This was the era of middle-class gals deciding to do a lot of ‘swooning’ and – I’m now busking a little perhaps – chaps might earnestly debate with themselves that given, as they saw it, life was essentially meaningless, would not suicide be the obvious conclusion?
In Western Europe the strict rationality of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the centrality and rigours of science began to give way to the world of ‘feelings’ and ‘sentiment’.
In Britain it produced Byron and in Germany – which was then not actually Germany, of course, but a myriad of small states, principalities, duchies and bishoprics, all with their own laws and tax systems – the Romantic movement grew and grew, the Sturm und Drang years, perhaps typified by Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) which has a lot of lasses swooning and falling in love and swains given the finger by said lasses wondering whether they shouldn’t drown themselves instead.
NB That last sentence provides a useful example for non-native English speakers: ‘read’ and ‘read’. In my sentence above the first is pronounced to rhyme with reed and the second to rhyme with red. (OK, now get on with it – Ed)
Here is a review of A Hero For Our Time, by the Russian poet, dramatist and occasional painter Mikhail Lermontov. Not also a ‘novelist’? Well, no, not really. The thing is Lermontov died very young, at the age of 26 in a duel, so he didn’t have time to write any more novels after publishing A Hero For Our Time in 1839 and revising it for a new edition a year later.
Here I must be candid and tell you I’ve relied on various commentaries on Lermontov’s novel, not least an introduction to the novel by its translator, Natasha Randall. And speaking of translations, I’m pleased to report that, unlike the English version of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls which reviewed a while back, this translation of a Russian novel written at the same time, 186 years ago, is as fresh as a newly baked breakfast roll.
Maybe I had simply hit upon the wrong translation of Gogol, but I’m sure as hell not going back there with another English version, only to find I wasn’t wrong at all. (Gogol is said to be ‘hilarious’. Well, I’ll take their word for it. Perhaps it is in the original Russian and you are familiar with the society he is satirising.)
I first came across A Hero For Our Time when I was given me as a gift by a – rather unattractive, I’m bound to confess uncharitably – New Zealand woman in the late 1970s. I was working as the North Gwent district reporter for the South Wales Argus based in Ebbw Vale and she was working for, if I remember, the Gwent Gazette, a local weekly with an office in the same town.
I don’t remember much about the evening except that we’d been for a drink and went back to her bedsit where – this was 50 years ago – I made a pass at her / tried it on, choose your own phrase. But she wasn’t interested, so I left it at that, didn’t push my luck and we just carried on chatting for some time before I left to drive home to Crickhowell where I lived I right next to the bridge over the Usk, next to The Bridge End pub (which until a minute ago I always thought was called The Bridge).
However, the following day or the day after, she presented me with the novel with an inscription thanking me for ‘being a gentleman’. Make of that what you will. I can only assume she was commenting on the fact that I didn’t behave like a complete prick when she turned down ‘my advances’ and made life difficult for her. I understand it happens and many a lass has a tale to tell.
I’ve also assumed she had read the novel or was at least familiar with it, and that Grigory Alexandrovich Pechorin, the central protagonist, in the novel was indeed a ‘hero’ and a good guy and, given the lady’s inscription, ‘a gentleman’. Actually, he was nothing for the sort, though he wasn’t exactly a ‘bad guy’, either.
From the several commentaries I have read, I discovered in his novel Lermontov’s portrayal of Pechorin is in part autobiographical. More to the point, Lermontov was a rather complex soul as was Pechorin. For example (and his Wikipedia entry was useful), he was something of an odd-bod.
His upbringing was unusual and, born in 1814, he was very much taken with Lord Byron and what we might – in a broad-brush sense – regard as the romantic Byronic sensibility. This was the era of middle-class gals deciding to do a lot of ‘swooning’ and – I’m now busking a little perhaps – chaps might earnestly debate with themselves that given, as they saw it, life was essentially meaningless, would not suicide be the obvious conclusion?
In Western Europe the strict rationality of the 18th-century Enlightenment and the centrality and rigours of science began to give way to the world of ‘feelings’ and ‘sentiment’.
In Britain it produced Byron and in Germany – which was then not actually Germany, of course, but a myriad of small states, principalities, duchies and bishoprics, all with their own laws and tax systems – the Romantic movement grew and grew, the Sturm und Drang years, perhaps typified by Wolfgang Goethe’s novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) which has a lot of lasses swooning and falling in love and swains given the finger by said lasses wondering whether they shouldn’t drown themselves instead.
NB As I have found a lot when coming across English translations of German, the standard translation in English of Sturm und Drang (or if you like here, but that’s just me showing off) Storm and Stress, is a certain kind of useless bollocks.
In German it unambiguously describes that period of late adolescence, early adulthood universal, desperate dissatisfaction with the world and wondering why it is such a shitty place when it could all be so, so simple! Storm and stress, on the other hand, could be from a handbook on marine engineering.
I have a similar gripe about the opening line sung in the fourth, choral, movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! The usual English translations I’ve come across – Oh friends, no more of these sounds! and O friends, not these tones – are milquetoast nonsense and come nowhere close to expressing the power, passion and emotion of the opening line of Schiller’s poem An die Freude (used by Beethoven).
Those English renderings sound more like a Portland, Oregon, hipster in Cafe Nervosa complaining that that his skinny latte has been served lukewarm.
In punk mode I would suggest, and only half-jokingly, that a better rendering of Schiller’s line would be ‘For fuck’s sake, guys, cheer up! Jeez!’ (though it doesn’t scan as well). However bad it is, it is not quite as bad as the more acceptable suggestions.
I haven’t read the Goethe’s novel, though it is one of the many books I’ve bought that are still waiting to be read. This one was bought a few years ago in a fit of enthusiasm and in German no less, but I don’t really fancy reading it as navel-gazing in myself and others brings out the impatient bitch in me.
Yes, I know it’s lit-tre-cher but fuck it. I do know it involves complicated love affairs, unrequited love and such, and Werther, the main man, heartbroken, eventually tops himself.
That hothouse of mid-18th century / early 19th century romanticism is entertainingly portrayed in Andrea Wulf’s Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self (which I have read but that was some years ago and I didn’t post review here and it is too long ago to do so now).
It takes a detailed look at a circle of friends in Jena, Germany, just south of Weimar, in the last decade of the 18th-cenury and first of the 19th-century.
Weimar is where Goethe, a little older than the rest of them and a kind of paterfamilias figure lived. In Jena itself were Schiller (pretty much always ill) and a group of other poets, journalists, scientists and philosophers – Fichte, Novalis, Schelling, Tieck, August Wilhelm and Caroline Schlegel, Friedrich and Dorothea Schlegel, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
They were all young aspirants of some kind and as such keen on the new ‘idealism’ which was becoming the rage as the world moved on.
Young Lermontov was very taken with all this sensibility and feeling and, though essentially artificial, nihilism, as is the ‘hero’ of his novel Pechorin himself. Like Lermontov, Pechorin could be something of a bastard, knowingly toying with the feelings of young and married women, getting them to fall in love with him, pretty much just because he could. Then dumping them.
Thus the novel’s title, A Hero Of Our Time, is ironic as Pechorin was no one’s idea of a hero and Lermontov certainly believed he was giving a picture of his generation. It’s said the Tsar of his day hated the novel for that reason, and the Russian Establishment took its revenge when Lermontov, who twice served in the Caucasus (where the novel is set) applied to resign his commission to take up literary life full-time. He was told he could not.
The novel itself is essentially not really ‘a novel’ as one might expect, but five related stories of varying lengths that are not even told chronologically. It also has three narrators: an unnamed and unidentified narrator, a middle-aged fellow officer friend of Pechorin’s and Pechorin himself, whose contribution to the narrative is excerpts from diaries.
Overall, A Hero For Our Time it is entertaining enough, but I shall be honest and admit that without the additional information I garnered from various commentaries, I might not have appreciated the work as much (and most certainly not when it first came my way as a gift – I do remember starting reading it but got no further than the first few pages).
I can’t say it is a riveting read but it does a job. Lermontov has an engagingly descriptive style and his painter's eye makes for lively descriptions of nature but do the reader the favour of not overdoing it.
Worth checking out once you have learned Middlemarch by heart.
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