Ioana Pârvulescu, „În țara Miticilor”

 -ebook

Perioada lecturii: 29 decembrie 2021 – 2 ianuarie 2022

Votul meu: 

 

 Despre Caragiale s-a scris atît de mult, încît toate cărările păreau bătute. Cu toate acestea, micul și fermecătorul volum al Ioanei Pârvulescu, În țara Miticilor, reușește să fie original prin premisa, dezvăluită încă din titlu, că lumea caragialiană, oricît ar semăna de mult cu cea a scriitorului și cu cea a noastră, nu este o oglindă fidelă a ei, deși cititorii se simt adesea tentați să ignore acest lucru. În cele șapte eseuri se face deci drumul invers, de la lumea reală la cea ficțională, punînd în evidență, pour une fois, deosebirile și nu asemănările între cele două lumi.

Art Spiegelman, "Maus. A Survivor’s Tale

 

I : My Father bleeds History, New York 1986 ISBN 0-394-74723-2. – 160 p;

 

 

II And Here My Troubles Began, New York 1991, ISBN 0-679-72977-1 – 136 p.

Read from to September 9^th to 17^th to 24^th 2021

My Rating 

 

I haven’t read many graphic books until now, even though my own daughter is a quite well-known cartoonist. But even a neophyte like me can recognize a masterpiece, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus is definitely one, with its amazing way of developing the distressing theme of the Holocaust using a mixture of tools from different arts.

In fact, this is what fascinated me most, the way narrative conventions, like timeline fractures, narrative voices, styles mixtures (either collages or insertions of panels from other author’s books), transgress not only the boundary between fiction and reality, as it happens in any memoir, but also the boundary between drawing and writing.

Mary Beard, "SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome"

  – kindle

 

Read from December 24^th to March 4^th 2021

My Rating: 

 

 

In the Epilogue of her SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard confesses that the book is the result of about fifty years of history researching, archaeological sites visiting, Latin language learning, Latin literature reading and books with Roman subject studying, because for her “the Romans are a subject not just of history and inquiry but also of imagination and fantasy, horror and fun.”

Ancient civilizations, she says, do not teach direct lessons, either military or political, and are not necessarily models to follow. However, we are supposed to learn a lot by simply engaging with their history, which is our own:

We do not want to follow Cicero’s example, but his clash with the bankrupt aristocrat, or popular revolutionary, with which I started this book still underlies our views of the rights of the citizen and still provides a language for political dissent: ‘Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra?’ The idea of ‘desolation’ masquerading as ‘peace’, as Tacitus put into the mouths of Rome’s British enemies, still echoes in modern critiques of imperialism. And the lurid vices that are attributed to the most memorable Roman emperors have always raised the question of where autocratic excess ends and a reign of terror begins.

Gregor von Rezzori, “The Snows of Yesteryear”

– kindle 

Read from August 17^th to September 21^st 2020

My rating: 

 

The Snows of Yesteryear is one of the best memoirs I have ever read. Not only the characters portrayed are fascinating (the telluric Cassandra, the neurotic Mother, the burlesque Father, the fairylike Sister and the down-to-earth Bunchy) but also, but especially the reconstruction of a lost era and of a lost land are truly magical: an era of bygone sunny even-when-cloudy days lived in a town that, belonging first to an Austrian defunct empire, then to a Romanian ephemeral kingdom and finally to a dystopic Soviet Ukraina, changed its name accordingly “from Czernowitz to Cernăuţi to the present Chernovtsy”. The narrative voice tries and brilliantly succeeds to recapture the spirit of that era in which

We did not live our own lives. Our lives were being lived by our period.

Arthur Hoyle - "Mavericks, Mystics and Misfits. Americans against the grain"

– e-book

 

Read from February 17^th to March 12^th 2020

My rating: 

This review has been published by Across the Margin 


Bricks in the (foundation) wall 

I have known and read the biographer and the essayist Arthur Hoyle for several years now. His debut book, The Unknown Henry Miller A Seeker in Big Sur, impressed me with its thorough research, its ample information, its true passion for the chosen subject. Henry Miller is America’s voice, America’s iconic image, Arthur Hoyle kept reminding us, and he should not to be forgotten by his fellow Americans. 

In his second book, the author continues to look for the essential qualities of the American soul in the life and work of other personalities who refused to conform to the norm, drawing, with the same firm and gifted hand he accustomed us to, the complex portrait of that America rendered unique by its brilliant seekers, from one restless Henry Miller to other Mavericks, Mystics and Misfits. As he explains in the Introduction:

These individuals have been chosen because their life stories, though often at variance with the direction of the mainstream society around them, exhibit certain endur­ing qualities of the American character that persist despite the changing circumstances of time and place.

Lucian Boia, „Istorie și mit în conștiința românească”

- Humanitas 2017 ISBN 978-973-50-5395-6 ; 500p

Perioada lecturii 16 octombrie – 25 noiembrie 2019

Votul meu: 

Istoria aceasta cu români altfel decît ceilalți și supuși persecuției celorlalți, paradoxală combinație de superioritate iluzorie cu un obsedant complex de inferioritate, ilustrează o stare de spirit nepotrivită vremurilor de azi. Actualizarea insistentă a unui trecut glorificat și abandonarea în mrejele lui perpetuează confruntarea în raport cu ceilalți și imobilismul în raport cu noi înșine.

Cu aceste cuvinte se încheie extraordinarul eseu al lui Lucian Boia, Istorie și mit în conștiința românească, o sumbră meditație asupra istoriei ca instrument, ca labirint de oglinzi deformatoare după bunul plac al unei epoci, dar mai ales al unui regim care-și creează propria oglindă cu defect voit de fabricație pentru ca imaginea reflectată să-l avantajeze. Pentru ca apoi, „poporul suveran”, într-o maimuțăreală exemplară, să transforme această imagine în adevăr absolut. 

Așa că de ce ne-ar mira că diagnosticul pus de autor nației noastre acum 22 de ani este mereu valabil? 

Catherine Nixey, “The Darkening Age”

 – e-book

Read from May 26^th to June 26^th 2019

My rating: 

I don’t know whether the beautiful province of Quebec, which has been my home for about fifteen years, now, has got the most places with saints’ names in North America, but it is sure you will see them on almost any plate on the road. Yet, Québec is also one of the less religious places I know of, despite (or because of) the fact that, until just some fifty years ago, the Catholic Church was maybe the most powerful instance in the country. And if you ask the Quebecers about that period, their smile fade and they reluctantly acknowledge some of the rules they had to obey were positively medieval. 

Was it this constraint they experienced that have made them so adamant that religion have not part in their lives anymore? Probably, and I would like to believe they closed, thus, the long period of abuse and persecutions Christianity is guilty of, but I know it is only wishful thinking. At the end of the day, this is a period that few have dared to denounce, and at their own risk, from Celsus in the second century, who was the first Greek intellectual to contest the new religion and whose work was afterwards destroyed (and whom we know only because Origen, a Christian apologist, wrote Contra Celsum, in which he polemically quoted from his On the True Doctrine some 80 years later) to the eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon who, in his Decline and Fall, will blame the Christians’ indolence and disregard for the public welfare for the fall of the Roman Empire, and who will see his study banned by The Catholic Church and himself becoming a pariah in the English society.

Michelle Obama, “Becoming”

 – e-book

Genre: memoir 

Read from April 14^th to May 28^th 2019

My rating: 

“When they go low, we go high.”

How these Michelle Obama’s words, which I think are the quintessence of this amazing woman’s personality, sound truer and truer lately! I so needed her memoir (which was all I’ve expected it to be and more – the story of a proud, uncompromising woman), to restore even a little my confidence in a humanity that seems to have lost all its sense of value nowadays. 

Afua Hirsch, the “Guardian” journalist, says in her review,  with that English candour (I know she’s not born in UK, but still) that always makes you smile just a little bit exasperated, that if Michelle Obama were British hers would be a class tale. But isn’t it though? And not only a class tale, but also a race and a gender tale. For the message M. Obama sends, loud and clear, is that you can become anything you want not necessarily in spite of, but also because your modest origins, your skin colour and your, to use Simone de Beauvoir’s expression, second sex. 

Her astonishing parcourse, her majestic tenue, her exemplary story is yours to discover in a book that will help you become, too. Meanwhile, I leave you with some quotes that can better than any of my words illustrate the multiple facets, each one bright and shining, of her personality. The first one, dealing with the death of her father, helped me grieve somehow more peacefully the loss of my own, this spring:

It hurts to live after someone has died. It just does. It can hurt to walk down a hallway or open I the fridge. It hurts to put on a pair of socks, to brush your teeth. Food tastes like nothing. Colors go flat. Music hurts, and so do memories. You look at something you’d otherwise find beautiful —a purple sky at sunset or a playground full of kids—and it only somehow deepens the loss. Grief is so lonely this way.

The next ones show that you can erase or at least attenuate the negative connotation of difficulty, obstruction, ugliness and use them as steps in your becoming:

If I’d learned anything from the ugliness of the campaign, from the myriad ways people had sought to write me off as angry or unbecoming, it was that public judgment sweeps in to fill any void. If you don’t get out there and define yourself, you’ll be quickly and inaccurately defined by others.

*

There’s an age-old maxim in the black community: You’ve got to be twice as good to get half as far. As the first African American family in the White House, we were being viewed as representatives of our race. Any error or lapse in judgment, we knew, would be magnified, read as something more than what it was.

*

We understood that we represented the nation and were obligated to step forward and be present when there was tragedy, or hardship, or confusion. Part of our role, as we understood it, was to model reason, compassion, and consistency.

It is true that sometimes you may feel, together with her, that all her and her husband’s efforts, dictated by reason and compassion, have been futile, that mankind never learns:

Since Barack left office, I’ve read news stories that turn my stomach. I’ve lain awake at night, fuming over what’s come to pass. It’s been distressing to see how the behavior and the political agenda of the current president have caused many Americans to doubt themselves and to doubt and fear one another. It’s been hard to watch as carefully built, compassionate policies have been rolled back, as we’ve alienated some of our closest allies and left vulnerable members of our society exposed and dehumanized. I sometimes wonder where the bottom might be.

But she also gives you hope for change given that nothing has been built in one day, and makes you aware how a solid foundation stone Obama family put in place so that tomorrow have less the consistency of a dream and more the consistency of reality: 

There are portraits of me and Barack now hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, a fact that humbles us both. I doubt that anyone looking at our two childhoods, our circumstances, would ever have predicted we’d land in those halls. The paintings are lovely, but what matters most is that they’re there for young people to see—that our faces help dismantle the perception that in order to be enshrined in history, you have to look a certain way. If we belong, then so, too, can many others.

Because in the end, and this is one lesson everybody should learn thoroughly,

It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others.

Yuval Noah Harari, "Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow"

 – Signal 2017. ISBN 978-0-7710-3870-9; 514p.

Read from May 3^rd to June 30^th 2018

My rating : 

“Today having power means knowing what to ignore.”

The portrait of mankind I was left with after finishing Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity was so gloomy that I have to admit I am ready to believe, with some dark, twisted satisfaction, in the prophecy of its extinction made by the same author in his equally disturbing sequel, Homo Deus – A Brief History of Tomorrow.

As the title suggests, Harari makes some predictions concerning the future of humanity, based on social, psychological, economical and biological facts, all which seem to point to the same direction – the end of mankind as we know it.

Lewis Carroll, "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland"

-  Djvu Editions, Copyright 2002 by Global Language Resources, Inc. Illustrations by John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham. Tenniel illustrations scanned by Michael Richter.

Read from June 5^th to 20^th 2018

My Rating: 

‘I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.’

When my daughter asked me about the role of the Cheshire cat in the narrative and all I could remember was (you bet) her smile lingering long after she was gone, I suddenly realized how long a time ago (pleonastically speaking) I had read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Therefore, I decided it was time for a re-acquaintance with the famous book, and here I am, even more mesmerized than the first time – because I had read Alice then as in Romanian, so it is only now that I can truly and delightedly savour every single pun and other linguistic joke the best of translators could not transpose from one language to another, for it is only in English you can say a lesson is called a lesson because it will lessen in time, or tell a sad tale in the form of a tail (here goes, Apollinaire, the originality of your Calligrammes J), or draw treacle from a treacle-well even though you are in the well – that is, well-in.

Jasper Fforde, "The Eyre Affair"

 –e-book

Read from April 20^th to May 3^rd 2018

My rating:

I’ve often told, to whoever wanted to listen to, the story of a lawyer friend of mine who, in the process of redecorating his apartment, put all his books in three or four huge plastic bags and left them in the (not quite secure) hall of the building. When I asked him how come he was not afraid someone would be tempted to take them, he answered: “Whenever have you heard about book theft? I, in my ten years or so of law practice, I have never encountered such a case.” And this happened almost twenty years ago, when e-books were still a dream of the future and folks like me were spending long hours in old bookstores in search of cheaper paperbacks, so the obvious moral of the tale is that for most people books are not valuable objects; even those who occasionally read don’t have the urge to be surrounded by books, nor to invest in them.

But how do you imagine life in a world in which not having books would be inconceivable, where they are the most coveted items, so that all human beings cherish, fight, steal and often die for them? What a dream world would that be, don’t you agree with me? Well, this is the world that generously opens for you in Jasper Fforde’s novel, The Eyre Affair. It may not be Borges’s paradise (it is not, for sure!) but man, how I would like to live there, if only for a while! In the circumstances, following the Literary Detective Thursday’s adventures it’s the best next, pun intended, of course.

Yuval Noah Harari, "Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity"

 – Kindle Edition, Vintage Digital, 2014, 466 p. ASIN B00K7ED54M

Read from October 26^th to November 15^th 2017

My rating:

The amazing book of Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity, could be summed up in two images: the one that reminds us, from the very first pages, of our not-so-noble origins:

Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters. One became the ancestor of all chimpanzees, the other is our own grandmother.

And the one that ends the book with the not-so-flattering description of a petulant, overbearing humanity:

Is there anything more dangerous than dissatisfied and irresponsible gods who don’t know what they want?

In between, our not-so-glorious (hi)story, built solely on cruelty and destruction.

Vladimir Propp, "Morphologie du conte"

 suivi de « Les transformations des contes merveilleux » et de E. Mélétinski « L’étude structurale et typologie du conte ». Traductions de Marguerite Derrida, Tzvetan Todorov et Claude Kahn. – Éditions du Seuil 1973 ISBN 2-02-000587-5 254 p.

Lu du 8 juillet au 13 août 2017

Mon vote :

Parue en 1927, mais devenue célèbre seulement environ trente ans plus tard, la Morphologie du conte de Vladimir Propp a été pendant longtemps, et continue de l’être malgré certaines contestations et modifications, une vraie Bible du folkloriste. Je me rappelle même aujourd’hui les fréquentes références que notre professeur de folklore faisait, en 1985, à cet ouvrage, aussi qu’il était une lecture absolument obligatoire pour tous les étudiants de la faculté de philologie.

Je l’ai relu avec un grand plaisir, surtout parce que sa rigueur convient à ma pensée, et aussi parce que, bien que je ne sois jamais devenue spécialiste en folklore (loin de ça), je continue à être fascinée par les contes merveilleux dans lesquels je cherche, moi aussi, les traces des mythes.