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Random Reads

In 1927, H G Wells published these…

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HG

1st June 2016: I’ve just had the great pleasure of reading and finishing my copy of H. G. Wells’ 1927 (20) SELECTED SHORT STORIES.

So much could be said about this great author’s futuristic soothsaying allied with his insightfulness about our human condition which he displays in these short stories. Penguin Books’ cover note on this edition expresses what I’d want to say: “These twenty stories … represent the variety of his imagination and reveal his power to evoke both scene and atmosphere… He had an interest in many diverse subjects and was able to apply a fresh and unspecialized mind to them.” And that’s putting it mildly.

THE TIME MACHINE: many have seen movie versions of this astounding story. We see and hear a version of it. If it’s the only version/ presentation of the story to have been seen, it’s a lightning-bolt of a realisation to read HG’s story with its lyricism, invocation and descriptions of thoughts and emotions. He uses words as an artist would use paint: “The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses”.

Very much in the times, at that time, HG has his characters discussing time and space; it’s to set us up to believe in a further dimension to thickness, length, breadth and time: our consciousness, as relevant and important, HG’s character tells us, to our existing at any time;  there is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along with it. Which is, I offer, what writers are intending to do when seeking to provide credibility and gain empathy with their readers when they use the vehicle of consciousness, of ourselves, others and the world around us to create the literary world they would have us inhabit.

THE LAND IRONCLADS: 

What an opening sentence this is: The young lieutenant lay beside the war correspondent and admired the idyllic calm of the enemy’s lines through his field-glass. We are immediately transported into the sense of impending danger.

(To be continued, AR ©2016)

books and other things, Donna Leon, Random Reads, regiswrites

The passionate need for personal advantage

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AQuestionofBelief

A Question of Belief;  Donna Leon.

As usual, Donna Leon paints a familiar picture of my beloved Venice.

Her books set in the Veneto, present its exotic lifestyle; wonderful food; wonderful architecture, so thronged with enthusiastic tourists; their impact on Venetians Leon sympathises with.

Why is it that many writers who set their stories in Italy and Sicily use the image of ongoing corruption amongst Venetians and Sicilians of influence and power, spiced with their dishonesty and driven by their passionate need for personal advantage?

Leon uses that vehicle to explain why her policeman, Commissario Brunetti, is so very often deflected in his investigations by characters with vested interests in doing so.

His boss Patta, for example, “As so often happened when Brunetti dealt with Patta, he was forced to admire the skill with which his superior could transmute his own worst failings —in this case blind ambition and an absolute refusal to perform any action that did not benefit him directly — into the appearance of probity.”

Brunetti’s rest from that negativity comes from the food he enjoys in his favoured eateries and that his wife Paola prepares for him ready for his homecoming; also, from the joy his children’s personalities bring him.

Ironically, it is the protection of family or other loved ones that drives some characters’ behaviours; behaviours which Brunetti must investigate and confront.

ISBN: 978-0-8021-1942-1

©Adrian Regis 2015

books and other things

I’ve, only now, found Virginia Woolf’s writing

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After years of thinking that Virginia Woolf’s books/ stories/ works weren’t for me, finding her Complete Works on Amazon, my attitude is changed.

The CW begin with her non-fiction A Room of One’s Own.
I humbly offer my summation of this as an instruction wrapped within Woolf’s immaculately erudite insights of how not to undervalue any woman. It is inspiring.

At the moment, reading The Voyage Out, having reached the part in this fiction when Rachel is physically well-enough to acknowledge Terence and to speak to him after her near death illness, I’m struck by the implication of VW’s experience of life and people. How she so well describes the experience of delirium, fragility and physical weakness. The voices far off though actually speaking in the same room as the patient. The nightmare characters and ingredients that a raging temperature can conjure. And of the effect the whole distressing matter of some one close dying.
How Terence, Rachel’s intended, consciously removes himself from being overwhelmed by his fears and helplessness about his loved-one, by tuning that out and tuning in on the normal and pleasant of his surroundings just outside the sick room.
How others of the group variously embrace or dismiss the trauma they are all experiencing. This, a real and challenging one, compared to the trivial and out of proportion theatrical distresses they previously enjoyed sharing with one another.
All this realised and described and I’m only at chapter twenty five of Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out. I’m really enjoying this and am learning from it at the same time.