Professor X, "In the Basement of the Ivory Tower"

 – Viking Penguin 2011, ISBN 978-0-670-02256-4

Read from: December 1^st 2015 till January 14^th 2016

My rating:

The Elitism of Learning

When I left Romania, about eleven years ago, I decided to give up on teaching as well. After sixteen years of doing only this, it was not an easy decision to make, but I was so fed up with the corrupt system I was leaving behind that I had lost all faith in the generosity of my profession.

Of course, once a teacher always a teacher and although I’ve generally stuck to my decision and now I’m working full time in an office (finding my work interesting and challenging enough even after a decade or so) I couldn’t sever all the ties, so not only I have been teaching part time in various private language schools, but I’ve also shared my knowledge with my friends and my friends’ children whenever they needed to improve their French, English or even Italian skills. And, as a funny parenthesis, even today I say sometimes that I’m going to school instead of the office and now and then I dream I’m in front of a class again. Moreover, I asked for and obtained my teaching permit six years ago (I don’t know whether as a sort of back-up or simply because I am still a teacher at heart) and in order to renew it I followed five courses (3 credits each) last year, which made me better acquainted with the educational system here in Québec – and this is where I wanted to get, really, in order to discuss Professor X’s book, In the Basement of the Ivory Tower.

Martin Amis, "The Pregnant Widow"

- Vintage International, New York, May 2011

    ISBN 978-1-4000-9598-8

Read from December 6^th 2015 until January 2^nd 2016

My Rating:

Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow is the first book I’ve finished in 2016 (I wanted to write “this year” then I remembered that once I had started a review with “this summer” and later, while re-reading it I had to investigate to learn what summer I was talking about J ) and what a good beginning it was indeed!

Maybe this is not Martin Amis at his best, but it was fun, despite the somehow gloomy title, inspired by Alexander Herzen’s dooming prophecy used as the first motto of the novel:

“The death of the contemporary form of social order ought to gladden rather than trouble the soul. Yet what is frightening is that the departing world leaves behind it, not a heir, but a pregnant widow. Between the death of the one and the birth of the other much water will flow by, a long night of chaos and desolation will pass.”

Minunatul meu an în lecturi mai mult sau mai puţin minunate

O prietenă a mea întru cărţi mi-a atras atenţia că nu se face să ai un blog de cititor fără o dare de seamă anuală despre cărţile citite, asa că m-am conformat, gîndindu-mă că un bilanţ n-are ce să strice, în ciuda faptului (sau poate tocmai pentru) că mi-am creat blogul strict ca pe un jurnal de disciplinare a lecturii, în contextul în care  începusem de la o vreme să înghit cărţile ca pe pufuleţi, fără să-mi mai notez nici impresii, nici citate. Evident că asta nu înseamnă că m-am vindecat definitiv de lenea intelectuală, ceea ce se poate vedea dealtfel din notele lejer dezlînate pe care m-am obişnuit să le numesc pretenţios şi impropriu recenzii, note care, mă amăgesc uneori, îmi vor servi cîndva la o analiză critică profundă şi orbitoare şi memorabilă şi uimitoare (mă rog, vă las pe voi să completaţi cu toate epitetele pe care negreşit o să le merit cîndva J).

Dar să revenim la oile noastre că nu de alta, dar risc să fac o introducere mai lungă decît cuprinsul, eu care i-am pisat pe elevii mei atîţia ani de zile cu această primă regulă de aur a compoziţiei – respectarea proporţiilor fiecărei părţi a unui eseu. (Gata, mă opresc :D)

Dan Lungu, "Fetiţa care se juca de-a Dumnezeu"

 – e-book

Perioada lecturii: 27 noiembrie – 14 decembrie 2015

Votul meu:

Ce au în comun Martin Amis şi Dan Lungu? Ei, vedeţi că nu ştiţi? Vă spun eu: două romane cu titluri inspirate, The Pregnant Widow şi Fetiţa care se juca de-a Dumnezeu (despre al doilea Alex Ştefănescu e de părere că e un titlu de premiu Nobel – dacă o exista aşa ceva – titluri care să ia premiul Nobel, vreau să spun), a căror acţiune se petrece parţial în Italia şi, cireaşa de pe tort (sau bomboana de pe colivă dacă vreţi) în care personajele au impresia că n-au păşit în Italia, ci într-o carte poştală sau într-un tablou:

Pe fereastră, peisaje de-ţi taie răsuflarea. Senzaţia e că te afli într-o ilustrată. Tu, personaj într-un tren, într-o vedere, aşa, încremenită în timp… Senzaţie de moarte frumoasă. N-o să uit clipele acelea de confuzie… Nu eram în rai, ci într-un album de artă…

(Pentru citatul din Amis, în care personajelor li se pare că fac parte dintr-o pictură tre’ să mă credeţi pe cuvînt că nu-l am la îndemînă)

Richard Adams, "Watership Down"

 – Viking 2012 ISBN: 0241953235; ISBN 13: 9780241953235

Read from November 10^th to December 5^th 2015

My rating :

One of my dearest nostalgic books has always been Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, for whenever I’ve felt sad and blue I returned to leaf through it and recapture some of the innocence of my childhood thinking. I’ve had the same feeling while reading Richard Adams’ Watership Down, with its enthralling story about animals which is much more than a fable or an allegory, even though the characters have some human qualities.

Julian Barnes, "The Sense of an Ending"

– Vintage Canada, 2012 ISBN 978-0-307-36082-3 ; 150 p.

Read from November 19^th to 30^th 2015

My rating:

“How far do the limits of responsibility extend?”

How often are we found guilty (not necessarily by the others but even by ourselves) of not getting it? Of sleep-walking through our life and others’? Of not stopping to think then and conveniently forgetting afterwards? The drama of Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’ amazing novella The Sense of an Ending, the drama of the auto sufficiency in mediocrity and of mild regrets of what-could-have-been-if-onlys, is so familiar that it could easily be ours. As so could his hic jacet(s):

I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: ‘Tony Webster – He Never Got It’. But that would be too melodramatic, even self-pitying. How about ‘He’s On His Own Now’? That would be better, truer. Or maybe I’ll stick with: ‘Every Day Is Sunday’.

Like any essential reading, Julian Barnes’ book dares us to search not only for the truths hidden in the writing itself, but also for the truth hidden in ourselves and in the world, for the novella raises at least three questions: a moral one: to what extent are we responsible for the others’ destiny? a philosophical one: to what extent is memory able to beat time? and an aesthetical one: to what extent life imitates art? Every one of the three subsequent to Adrian’s question I entitled my review with: “How far do the limits of responsibility extend?”

Jane Austen, "Sense and Sensibility"

 – e-book (project Gutenberg)

(Re-)Read from November 18^th to 25^th 2015

My rating:

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always found reading the classics sort of comforting. Could it be because it is always reassuring to enjoy an oeuvre whose value has already been confirmed by time? Or maybe the comfort lies in some subconscious pride for humanity who found a way to steal from gods a bit of eternity? Whatever the explanation, one thing is obvious: Jane Austen did not disappoint me this time neither, on the contrary, made me want to re-read more of her. 

A friend of mine said, during a discussion about Sense and Sensibility, that her books are repetitive in pattern and feel sometimes like excessively romantic. I beg to differ – I appreciated every one of her novels for entirely different reasons and their only thing in common I could find was the witty depiction of the society at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth’. Her novels might seem at first only charming love stories that end more or less with a happily ever after, although never in a syrupy way. But love is often only a pretext for the analysis of a more prosaic subject – the institution of matrimony and its importance in the society of those times. 

Petru Popescu, "Prins"

– Curtea veche, 2009

(Re-)Citit de pe 28 ianuarie pe 18 februarie 2014

Votul meu:

Eram studentă cînd am citit prima dată Prins. Era o ediție veche și obosită, de prin 1970, mi-amintesc și acum, pentru că la sfârșitul anilor 80 nu mai găseai cărțile lui în librării. M-am întrebat mereu de ce mi-a rămas imaginea acelui volum mult mai vie în minte decît conținutul ? Am înțeles acum, recitindu-l, de ce. In ciuda unor merite literare incontestabile, Prins are și destule minusuri. Eu mă voi opri la două : unul de formă și celălalt de conținut.

In multe recenzii pe care le-am citit, romanul e comparat cu Love Story al lui Erich Segal. Comparație pe care eu o găsesc destul de justă, deși nu din motivul evident – tema iubirii curmate tragic de boală. Nu. Ambele romane exploatează la maximum potențialul emotiv al cititorului, care termină de citit cu lacrimile curgîndu-i șiroaie pe obraji:

Corina, iubirea mea cea mare, nu-ți pot lăsa prea multe cuvinte. Tu mă vei trăi pe mine mult mai adînc și mai înalt decît am putut eu însumi să mă trăiesc.

Arthur Rimbaud, "Poésies"

– e-book

Lu du 10 au 21 avril 2014

Mon vote :

L’atrocité de la Lune, l’amertume du Soleil

En relisant ce petit volume de Poésies, m’est venue à l’esprit l’affirmation de Roland Barthes, que le langage poétique moderne commence en effet avec Arthur Rimbaud et non avec Baudelaire et mon fort esprit de contradiction m’a fait penser, dans un premier temps, qu’on peut ramasser assez d’arguments pour démontrer quand même la modernité de ce dernier. Mais je me suis rendu compte par après que, en effet, l’innovation baudelairienne porte particulièrement sur l’image artistique pendant que celle rimbaldienne est centrée aussi sur la technique et le langage poétique. Et que, même si on ne peut vraiment contester au poète des fleurs du mal le rôle du précurseur du modernisme, Rimbaud ouvre une voie encore plus large, car son œuvre contient in nuce plusieurs traits de la poésie postmoderne : la dépersonnalisation du « je », la dépoétisation du langage, l’introduction des passages narratifs, l’accent mis sur le lecteur, les effets cathartiques mais aussi désacralisants de l’ironie, l’esprit ludique – dans une polémique tendre avec toute une imagerie confortablement installée dans des critères esthétique jusqu’alors incontestables :

Tels que les excréments chauds d’un vieux colombier
Mille Rêves en moi font de douces brûlures :
(…)
Doux comme le Seigneur du cèdre et des hysopes,
Je pisse vers les cieux bruns, très haut et très loin,
Avec l’assentiment des grands héliotropes. (Oraison du soir)

Doris Lessing, "The Golden Notebook"

– e-book

Read from November 18^th to December 13^th 2012

My rating:

While living under Ceausescu's regime, in those days that even today I'm not able to remember without a combination of sadness and irritation, I used to be very angry with Western Socialist and Communist Parties that dared to continue to exist in spite of the big revelations of the Gulags and the murders and the terror. I was thinking then that the persistence of such organizations could be explained either by a naive and blind idealism nurtured under the wing of a comfortable capitalist democracy, or else by a pragmatic acknowledgment of such horrors (errors happen!), since to protest against them would signify to deny the success of this ideology – meaning that the famous phrase, "The Party is never wrong" had the same power outside the communist countries it had inside them.

Both my assumptions were, unfortunately, true, and are widely illustrated in Doris Lessing’s remarkable novel, The Golden Notebook; in a particularly significant scene, Michael, learning that three friends of him were hanged in  Czechoslovakia,

... explained, with much political subtlety, why it was impossible that the Party should frame and hang innocent people; and that these three had perhaps got themselves, without meaning to, into 'objectively' anti-revolutionary positions.

Wu Ming, "54"

 – e-book

Letto dal 5 ottobre al 2 novembre 2015

Il mio voto:

54 è il secondo romanzo di Wu Ming che ho letto, dopo Q, e devo dire che mi sono spesso divertita, durante le entrambi letture, a immaginarmi le discussioni hot tra gli autori che l’hanno scritto, mentre si attribuivano le storie, cercavano ganci narrativi appropriati oppure facevano delle ricerche sugli eventi storici da distorcere oppure contradire come si addice a ogni opera postmodernista degna del suo nome.

Un’amica mia, nella sua eccellente recensione su GoodReads, aveva paragonato la struttura di questo romanzo a uno stile particolare di mischiare le carte da gioco, da quale risulta un miscuglio così ordinato che aspira alla perfezione. Comparazione molto adatta per un romanzo in cui i tre fili narrativi intrecciano senza confondersi quasi mai, in una rappezzatura creata così artificialmente che ogni ingrediente si può separare senza problemi. Risulta che il lettore sia capace di seguire, se lo vuole, solo una di tre storie (sia quella di Robespierre, di Salvatore Lucani o di Cary Grant) e ignorare quelle che non gli piacciono, senza nessuna paura di perdere dettagli importanti saltando le pagine.

Tatiana Niculescu Bran, "Povestea domniței Marina și a basarabeanului necunoscut"

– e-book

Perioada lecturii: 22 iulie – 28 octombrie 2015

Votul meu:

Încerc să înțeleg, de ieri încoace, adică de cînd am terminat-o, de ce mi-au trebuit mai bine de trei luni să citesc Povestea domniței Marina și a basarabeanului necunoscut, de Tatiana Niculescu Bran, în contextul în care nu este o carte groasă și nu este o carte plicticoasă. De ce adică, în ciuda faptului că îmi plăcea cu adevărat în timpul lecturii, putea trece și săptămînă pînă să o deschid din nou, lucru oarecum bizar dat fiind că nu sînt o cititoare leneșă și nici prea răbdătoare.

Julio Cortazar, "Hopscotch"

(Rayuela), translated from the Spanish by Gregory Rabassa – Pantheon Books, New York 1986 ISBN 0-394-75284-8

Read from September 8^th to October 26^th 2015

My rating:

Every move you make Every page you take – I’ll be watching you

A few nights ago I dreamt one of those bizarre dreams in which I was literally jumping from one page to another depending on the falling of the pebble-pen I kept throwing on a giant book opened at my feet. I often dream I’m reading or, if it happens to be a nightmare, trying very hard to make sense of an illegible page, but this time I paid no attention to the words I was seeing, so focused I was on the game itself.

When I woke up, I realized on one hand that I subconsciously associated a short story I read a long time ago about two characters literally living in a bookland with Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, and on the other hand that for the first time ever I didn’t consider looking at the narrative technique as “work” and following the story as “play”; moreover, I was having such a wonderful time playing by the rules enunciated by the author that I didn’t care much for the story, so that I could happily contradict one of the characters’ belief that:

…no real revolution has ever been made against form. What counts is content, man, content.

Richard Lederer, "Anguished English. An anthology of Accidental Assaults upon English Language"

– Gibbs Smith 2006

Read from: February 10^th to 17^th 2014

My rating:

As a teacher, I have stumbled upon linguistic jewels for many years, in my students compositions and tests.  Sometimes I happened to hear them at TV or in the street, or read them in the press.

I intended, just like Richard Lederer, to make someday a book out of them, but I never imagined this book as a mere anthology – at the end of the day, how long can you laugh while reading page after page of jokes? How many spoons of honey can you eat before becoming sick? In other words, the real challenge is to seek a certain approach, either stylistic, philosophic and/ or linguistic, around which to organize the material.

These are my two main complaints regarding Anguished English: the careless organization of the contents (in spite of its chapters and subchapters, which could have been regrouped more efficiently to avoid repetition anyway)  and the hybrid character: it could have been either an anthology or a linguistic study but it’s both and finally neither.

John Dos Passos, "Manhattan Transfer"

 – Mariner Books 2003

Read from February 19^th to March 16^th 2014

My rating:

 

How can be explained the complicated and fascinating relationship between the city and the narrator in all major Modernist works whose theme is urbanity? Think of James Joyce’s Dublin, dull and suffocating, with its Evelyns forever clued on the shore they dare not leave. Think of Henry Miller’s Paris, with its siren song that entangles the artists to better devour them. Think of Virginia Woolf’s London, collecting thoughts and fates in the glimpse of a park, the rush of a street, the passing of a tram. Think of John Dos Passos’s New York glowing with promises that it never keeps.

David Lodge, "Cît să-ntindem coarda"

– Editura Polirom, 2004

Perioada lecturii: 6 – 23 august 2012

Votul meu:

A-l citi pe Lodge nu e niciodată atît de simplu pe cît pare la prima vedere. Ironia şi verva povestirii te pot impiedica uneori să treci de primele niveluri de lectură şi te pot face să uiţi, mult mai uşor decît în cazul altor scriitori dublaţi de critici literari, că autorul ştie să mînuiască toate uneltele narative, că un artificiu literar nu e niciodată folosit empiric sau inocent, că există nişte sfori care manevrează personajele şi un subtil deus ex machina care împinge inexorabil acţiunea spre un deznodămînt.

Numai că de data aceasta Marele Păpuşar s-a hotărît să se deconspire, să iasă la lumina reflectoarelor conform bunului obicei postmodernist, transformîndu-se în narator-personaj-romancier-critic literar, într-o polemică indulgentă cu sine şi cu cititorul, care are ca rezultat o ludică reinterpretare a metaromanului ca gen.

Neagu Djuvara, "O scurtă istorie a românilor povestită celor tineri"

– Humanitas 2010

Citită de pe 10 pe 23 noiembrie 2013

Votul meu:

Știați că :

Decebal se pronunță de fapt Dechebal?

Barbar însemna inițial străin?

Nu se știe unde s-a dat de fapt bătălia de la Posada, nici lupta de la Rovine?

Numele țigan vine din grecește și înseamnă „a nu se atinge”, iar cel de rom de la o provincie care se numea Romania (pe undeva prin sudul Bulgariei și partea europeană a Turciei) unde s-au stabilit aceștia după ce au fugit din India, acum multe secole?

Margaret Atwood, "Survival – A Thematical Guide To Canadian Literature"

- Anansi Toronto 1972 ISBN 088784-613-0

Read from September 16^th to October 2^nd 2015

My rating:

I think this is the first time ever I’ve read a book of literary criticism without being familiar with the name of at least some of the writers it was talking about (in fact I know of two of them, Alice Munro and Leonard Cohen, but theses ones are too little discussed to really count).

It was a strange feeling, as when familiar ground becomes suddenly unfamiliar, however, it did not stir any inferiority complex, since I’m fully aware my “Calit” knowledge is very limited. In fact, this is one of the reasons I decided to read it – to guide me through a culture I’ve been curious about since I came here, ten years ago. Another reason is of course, the author – not only I am a big fan of Margaret Atwood but I’ve also been always interested in the iconic writers’ attitude towards the literature of their native country.