• About
  • Book Reviews
  • Movies and Miscellanea
  • The Harvard Classics

Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews

~ Well-read. Well-versed. Well-grounded. Essays and Reviews.

Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews: Third Anniversary

15 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

me talking about me, reading list

Three years now I’ve been at this, so here is the annual commemorative post. As well as being the day I decided to start blogging in earnest, April 15 is also Tax Day. That’s not fun so here are four people who were born this day in history:

1452: Leonardo da Vinci was born on April 15 (Old Style) and the world still stands in awe. Incidentally, until it was stolen by Vincenzo Peruggia in 1911 (subsequently earning plenty of publicity) the Mona Lisa was not actually all that famous or well-known.

Mona-Lisa-is-Missing

The Washington Post dutifully reported the theft.

 

1843: Henry James was born. A powerhouse man of letters from an intellectual family, James is considered in some circles one of the greatest writers in English – in others merely an anemic waste of space. Among many other works, he wrote The Turn of the Screw (1898), one of the greatest skin-crawling ghost stories ever made and certainly the most ambiguous.

1916: Helene Hanff was born. She went on to write a series of letters to a British bookseller which, when published as 84 Charing Cross Road (1970), earned her an adoring audience. To connect with a stranger through a shared affection for the written word is doubtless a dream held by many book lovers as the slim volume of correspondence is still widely read today.

1960: Susanne Bier was born. A notable Danish filmmaker whose titles include After the Wedding (2006) and In a Better World (2010). Of the two, In a Better World won the Oscar. While it was a deeply disturbing film about parental weakness, violence among children and the “friend” mentality, it was also a melodrama with a falsely positive ending whereas the earlier After the Wedding did all it could to subvert the expectations of melodrama and came across to me as the more mature work.

after the wedding

There you go! That’s your April 15 trivia for this year.

So here are the books I am currently on file to review:

Last Words from Montmartre by Qiu Miaojin
The Balkan Trilogy & The Levant Trilogy by Olivia Manning
An African in Greenland by Tete-Michel Kpomassie
The Assault by Harry Mulisch

And here are ten books somewhere near the top of my to-be-read pile:

Suspended Sentences by Patrick Modiano
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
The Three Leaps of Wang Lun by Alfred Doblin
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
The Symposium by Plato
Essays, Civil and Moral by Francis Bacon
Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
The Tragedy of Fidel Castro by Joao Cerqueira
Georgian Poetry edited by Lyn Coffin
Voyage in the Dark by Jean Rhys

girl reading

My Year in Books: 2014

31 Wednesday Dec 2014

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

literature, me talking about me, reading list

Escha van den Bogerd - Lady with cat reading at the windowAmong those things that derail one’s reading habits, moving ranks right up near the top for me. From Minnesota to Maine: new people, new experiences, new habits = less of a mind for reading. When the new becomes familiar (as has eventually happened) I settle back down.

In overview, this year impresses me even though I didn’t read much. I was hired to write for Media Snobs in January and though the site was liquidated by May it gave me my first job experience. I worked with editors (nice guys, I miss them), I changed my reading habits to focus more on world literature/contemporary writers and my reviews were always on time in spite of every obstacle. More than anything it gave me a sense of legitimacy in what I do.

Lost the job, moved to Maine and reading ground almost to a halt while I processed everything. One, maybe two posts a month. Not at all impressive, though life experience is all to the good. Now I’m taking stock before moving on to next year, which I’m planning to make more productive.

So here’s the recap of 2014:

Classic literature: The Old English Baron hardly constitutes a “classic,” all notoriety hailing from it being the first Gothic novel written in answer to Horace Walpole. Hopelessly bad though also short and I only read it as research, so no loss. Much later in the year I read Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and was convinced of its excellence.

Literature in general: A friend recommended me Knut Hamsun, leading me to buyDreamers (New Directions) and read the remarkably pleasant village idyll Dreamers. And I finally revisited John Hawkes’ The Lime Twig for blogging purposes, finding it even better than I remembered.

Three Latin American story collections: Strange Pilgrims, read in honour of Gabriel García Márquez, Piano Stories by the Uruguayan writer’s writer Felisberto Hernández and a set of rather exhausting novellas by Carlos Fuentes called Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins. While only Strange Pilgrims was flawless, all three of these writers beat the stuffing out of Spain’s own Camilo José Cela, whose The Family of Pascual Duarte is one of the most crushing disappointments on my 2014 reading list.

I finally got around to The Lover, an ambiguous little book which I am likely to reread in the coming year (I’ve seen other Marguerite Duras in bookstores and have hesitated, a clear sign I’m not done with it yet) and also Flannery O’Connor’s novel Wise Blood. The Assault (Pantheon)Most recently I finished the tremendous achievement that is The Balkan Trilogy and was hypnotized by The Assault (and read it in four days). Reviews for these books are pending.

Modern literature: My short-lived stay at Media Snobs got me reading genuinely contemporary publications. I started with The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide, marketed as an uplifting story for cat lovers but in actual fact inexpressibly sad – which is what you might expect from Japanese literature. Also read Alejandro Zambra’s remarkably complex Ways of Going Home and Aka Morchiladze’s unsung Journey to Karabakh. Then there was Karate Chop, the Danish story collection that took everyone by storm – everyone except for me, by the looks of it. All of these books contain sorrow and pessimism, making Budapest by Chico Buarque all the more enjoyable as a quirky tale of ghostwriting, language learning and insufferable self-absorption.

The English-language writers I sampled were sketchier. Peter Ackroyd’s new novel Three Brothers felt like a waste of time and I’m left undecided about him, being as I did enjoy (within limits) his earlier narrative The Plato Papers. I made House of Splendid Isolation my first Edna O’Brien and enjoyed the writing more than the story. Happily Angela Carter, who I’ve long looked forward to, did not disappoint and I was truly impressed with The Bloody Chamber.

The Bloody Chamber (Penguin)

Plays: Considering how short they are, you’d think I’d have fit at least one in… Was not the case. However I have plans to return to the Greeks in 2015, remembering how impressed I was by Sophocles a couple of years back.

Poetry: I was offered a copy of Anna Akhmatova’s White Flock in exchange for a Poems of Akmatovareview and in preparation read the selection of her work Stanley Kunitz translated with Max Hayward. Other poets read (all female this year, though not by design) were Anna Swir and Louise Labé with Building the Barricade (review pending) and Love Sonnets and Elegies, respectively.

Non-fiction: Got bogged down in an endless Simon Schama tome, so all I made it through this year were a couple of Harvard entries revisited for the sake of this blog: Plato’s Apology, Crito and Phaedo, followed by The Golden Sayings of Epictetus. Quite a drought compared to last year.

Light reading: One token 70s Gothic (House of Many Shadows by Barbara Michaels, so the writing was actually competent). Otherwise I somehow ended up reading an awful lot of crime fiction. Two gloomy Scandinavian novels: the literary crossover Before I Burn and the first Wallander, Faceless Killers, for a quick comparison.

Three hardboiled classics, the results of which were mixed. From James M. Cain I The Postman Always Rings Twice (Murder Mystery Monthly)found The Postman Always Rings Twice full-blooded, mean and totally satisfying while Double Indemnity, on the other hand, felt like he’d watered down his style for the sake of prudish Bostonians everywhere while also attempting an ill-thought “artsy” ending.

The Continental Op (Vintage Black Lizard)The winner in this category is Dashiell Hammett, without a doubt. The Continental Op towered above all competition. Sure, some stories were duds, but the rest were pure hardboiled goodness, and funnier than I expected. The narrator was a remarkable creation, full of personality despite no personal information being given. A fantastic way to kick back. I might be done with Cain, but I am not done with Hammett.

——————-

The resulting tally (33) isn’t much of a falloff from last year (37) and I have 19 linked reviews to show for it (as opposed to the 15 from last year) so all in all I’m quite pleased with how 2014 shaped out.

Happy New Year to all who read this blog!

I’m going back to my book now…

Jacquelyn Bischak

Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews: Second Anniversary

15 Tuesday Apr 2014

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

me talking about me, reading list

Today I celebrate two years of my blog’s existence. Big changes have come to Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews since I began, most of them since the new year and the latest, tragically, just yesterday. In February I was hired to the website Media Snobs. burning paperThat line of work is no more. The site has been taken down by an outside force and everyone involved is now out of a job. The staff are showing great solidarity through this reviewer’s apocalypse and the possibility of a new site rising from the ashes is very real.

The five reviews I contributed are safe (I had backed them up on Wordpad previously) and last night I added their complete texts to Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews, since they now have no other place to reside on the web.

Victorian MourningI am now at loose ends, as before, only somewhat sadder. However, even though I was only able to work there for a few short months, the experience has changed me deeply. For a moment I was able to call myself a professional and my writing was vetted by a talented and helpful editor. The work I did there has fired up all of my hitherto dormant ambitions.

I was previously content as a hobbyist, drifting through life and maybe reviewing a book every few weeks. I paid no attention to the literary world and would stumble upon new books by accident – usually by reading the blog of someone more in-the-know, like John Self over on Asylum. Now everything has changed. I’ve shed my apathy and am keeping up on the new and forthcoming. The bi-weekly posting that was required of me has done a lot to help me learn the rhythm of reviewing, how to pick up the pace, strategize and organize.

I don’t feel in a celebratory mood, frankly, but I have to be. My blog is still here and my stuff still has a home on the web. Compared to others, I’ve lost very little and have much to be grateful for. However, this is also one hell of a spur to BACK UP ALL MY REVIEWS in about five separate locations.

Gibson Girl does some writing

So, what does this really entail for me? The wind is thoroughly out of my sails but I can’t allow that to last. I must rally and continue to forge ahead toward an ideal upgrade in my blog’s content. The casual approach is to take each month as it comes, reviewing whatever seems like a good idea at the time. The professional approach is to step away from the month and focus on the quarter (right now is the middle of the spring quarter), planning for an ideal spread of reviews to appear over the course of that time.

The subtitle of this blog has always said “Essays and Reviews.” I’m going to step up to the plate and actually deliver the former, as well as the latter. One essay per quarter will allow me to get through my Harvard Project at a slightly faster pace and spur me on to the launch of some shorter projects that have long been on my radar.

My main focus at this time will mostly be to plan ahead and build up a backlog of reviews. With such a store, I would be able to stop worrying about a dearth of content and occasionally read long books again (right now, Ada deserves my complete attention and how will I ever read Ulysses or Mason & Dixon if I’m always stressing over my next review?). I’m only one person, of course, but I will do the best I can.

Other things you can expect:

I am now on GoodReads, though mostly to use its to-be-read feature. You can socialize with me if you want. I doubt I’ll post my reviews there, unless specially requested. On that note, I recently got my first ever request for a review, by a self-published translator of Russian poets. I am now brushing up on my Anna Akhmatova in preparation.

The majority of reviews here will always be of fiction but I enjoy reading poetry and will aim to review at least one volume of it in each quarterly period. I’d like to do the same with literary criticism. These things add a little diversity to my obsession with literature.

Upcoming reviews:
Karate Chop by Dorthe Nors, a story collection that only occasionally impressed me.
The Plato Papers by Peter Ackroyd, which turns out to be rather better than I expected.
Three Brothers by Peter Ackroyd.
Journey to Karabakh by Aka Morchiladze. I hope to acquire and review the other three books in Dalkey Archive’s Georgian Literature Series as well, provided I can scrape the cash together.
The Lime Twig by John Hawkes. I read it just before starting this blog and remember being staggered. I would like to revisit it and put it on the site.
The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes. The most popular post on Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews? Aura. One of my least favorite reviews, incidentally. I think its popularity has something to do with flummoxed students and reading assignments…
Constancia and Other Stories for Virgins by Carlos Fuentes.
The Wanderer by Knut Hamsun. One of the perils of secondhand bookshopping is getting introduced to great writers by their minor works. I already read the incredibly slight and cheerful (???) Dreamers and this is the only other Hamsun I have at hand…

Things are up in the air at this dour point in time. What the future brings I do not know. I will forge ahead to the extent possible and see where things go. It’s most important not to lose momentum. Thank you to all my readers on this second anniversary.

I’ve Been Hired

03 Monday Feb 2014

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

me talking about me

Lubna by José Luis MuñozBig news on the blogging front. I have been hired to write reviews for the multimedia website Media Snobs. The requirement for my work is that I write on books that are newly published or forthcoming and since there is a plethora of new and forthcoming literature in the world (all of which is too expensive to justify buying when you don’t have a job) I have accepted the offer. The people there will aid me in getting the books I need, which is a pretty nice benefit by itself. I won’t be paid, but I will get the opportunity to have my reviews published on a site with way more traffic than mine. This is a huge upturn in my fortunes. It calls for exclamation marks and pictures of cake and balloons but that will have to wait until my first review is up and I lose the white knuckles.

This will naturally herald some changes to Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews. I certainly have no intention of neglecting the place.

I will be posting a new book review every two weeks for Media Snobs. I will repost them here in an abbreviated form of my accustomed style, providing a snapshot description, a link to the full review and the usual book cover/author pic duo. These will be located under the “MS originals” tag as well as my usual means.

The first review will surely be murder but I hope to learn the rhythm rather quickly. After all, I have made it my habit to post every single month for Pseudo-Intellectual Reviews so being forced to post two reviews a month will not be a big change to my ordinary productivity. Continuing to produce original material for this blog while working for a professional website is in some ways my greater worry.

Even so, I have faith in my ability to swing this. I’m working on my next Harvard Classics essay (which will probably appear in the first half of this month, give or take the tedium of Phaedo) while waiting for the post office to deliver the book I intend as my first Media Snobs review. Hopefully that will arrive tomorrow. I’ll be burning the midnight oil (and possibly the five-in-the-morning oil) until Wednesday. Wish me luck.

My Year in Books: 2013

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

literature, me talking about me, reading list

Girl Reading - Guy CambierMy New Year’s Eve tradition continues with the new list, divided by category, of all the books I read this past year. I have added links for each one I reviewed. As always is the case, I was unable to read all I had planned and produced fewer reviews than I would have liked (though more than last year, so I’m on the right track).

I shall be following it up with two new posts after New Year’s: The Ten Best and Five Worst Films I saw in 2013. So, watch for those if you’re curious and enjoy!

Classic literature: I only managed a small set of “cornerstone” fiction this year. Read Women in Love (to correspond with last year’s Rainbow) and finally got around to Therese Raquin. Both were good, if somewhat flawed, but Dubliners was a singularly underwhelming experience.

Also, beginning a long-term study of the gothic novel’s evolution, I revisited The Castle of Otranto and found a close read greatly enhanced my enjoyment of it. Immediately followed with The Sorrows of Young Werther, a mannered but strangely disconcerting Romantic novella.

Literature in general: I finished The Alexandria Quartet: Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea. Oddly enough, not much else for this category. Began book cover - VidalGore Vidal’s American Chronicles with Washington, D.C. – a novel a bit too close to what I hear on the news to qualify for escapism, but major props for cynicism and not dating an inch from the 60s to today. Won’t be my last Vidal.

Modern literature: Last year I struck out completely and resolved to do better. To my surprise, I actually did so. The results were…mixed. Tried Infinite Jest but it overwhelmed me with its showoffy non-communication and I gave up. The Russian Vladimir Sorokin’s minor dystopic novel Day of the Oprichnik didn’t do much for me either and A Reliable Wife by Robert Goolrick just waffled in a lukewarm middle between seperate types of excellence. I did enjoy revisiting Joyce Carol Oates and being newly convinced of her talent by Will You Always Love Me? and I Lock My Door Upon Myself. The greatest find was unquestionably Elfriede Jelinek’s The Piano Teacher (review pending).

Plays: Not a blessed one. Mostly owing to their fate of being boxed up until shelving is built for them.

A Coney Island of the MindPoetry: Actually managed rather well this year. Further Beat exploration with Ferlinghetti’s A Coney Island of the Mind; The Poems of Jean Toomer, subtle, spiritual and highly modernist in style; Cliff Burns’ New and Selected Poems – a truly staggering work of modern poetry; and the Polish poets Anna Swir (Happy as a Dog’s Tail) and Czeslaw Milosz (Bells in Winter). Really, not a lame duck in the batch.

Non-fiction: My desire to be a “serious” reader has at last paid off in spades. I have embarked upon the too-long-intimidating challenge of reviewing The Harvard Classics and to that end read The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin side by side with Benjamin Franklin: An American Life. Moved along to the less well-known and rather less entertaining Journal of John Woolman and William Penn’s maxims Fruits of Solitude.

An interest in history piqued, I spent a great deal of time on McCullough’s mammothSatan: The Early Christian Tradition character study John Adams, well worth the read. Equally perfect was Christopher Hibbert’s King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780. Then there was The King’s Speech, which was too bland to justify its existence, and Satan: The Early Christian Tradition, which led to the shocking discovery that theology makes for fun reading.

On the lighter literary side, nothing is lighter than 84, Charing Cross Road. There was also Mike Evans’ coffeetable book The Beats (good rundown with a side helping of photographs). Joan Didion’s of-its-time classic Slouching Towards Bethlehem proved to have a very troubling effect on me as I read but I also kicked back with more books by and about Henry Miller: His memoir of Greece The Colossus of Maroussi and Brassai’s memoir of him Henry Miller: The Paris Years. Clive Bloom’s Gothic Histories (research material) promised more than it delivered, mostly thanks to some really shoddy editing.

Finally, a textbook labeled Evolutionary Psychiatry, which I read in a fit of melancholy. It was actually quite excellent, combining compassionate Darwinism with Jungian theory.

Conan the Barbarian (Del Rey)Light reading: The shameful end of the list! This year I acquainted myself with Conan the Barbarian of all things and to my great embarrasment, very much enjoyed the stories I read. I’m really gaining a taste for the legends of pulp…

Also, another of Charlotte Armstrong’s thrillers (The Gift Shop), this one way too implausible in the second half for my taste so it may be a while before I pick up another. The Terror Trap was a rather lame effort at 70s romantic suspense, where the heroine puts up less fight than a little old lady. On a tonier level, reading The Einstein Intersection by Samuel R. Delany really helped me change my opinion on science fiction and has left me seeking further into the field. And no one can go wrong with Jeeves and the Feudal Spirit…

———————-

I haven’t been very active with my blog lately for rather banal reasons, but as always, the New Year’s Resolution remains firmly to read more, more widely and to sharpen my writing skills for future productions. I love this little blog of mine dearly and have no intention of ever giving it up. Happy New Year!

Girl Reading - Scott Harding

Anniversary Post

15 Monday Apr 2013

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

me talking about me, reading list

Pensive lady photographed by Marianne BreslauerI need not always stay on topic. So here is a post for no other purpose than to pat myself on the back for having the self-discipline to carry on this way. I came up with the idea for this blog having written only a few book reviews, most of them not very good. Liable as I am to be derailed from projects through what can basically be labeled a mixture of melancholy and ennui, my main fear in starting it was simply that I would desist and leave it as a monument to ‘what could have been.’ I do not post as regularly as I would like but I have been absolutely determined to never let a month go by without something new. That I have succeeded in my main goal for a whole year is a good enough cause to break out the champagne.

I have strived from the beginning to appear professional in this hobby, reading over every single review literally ten times or more, running spellcheck, looking up definitions, reworking sentences, reading out loud three times in a row and only when I can find nothing further to add, subtract or change do I finally, reluctantly (sometimes with eyes shut in dread) press the Publish button. It is hard work despite all appearances to the contrary but I would not have it any other way.

I’m driven by enthusiasm to write and my hope has always been to make it as interesting and entertaining for others to read my thoughts as it is for me to think them. Poncy literature is fun! That’s what it comes down to for me. If anyone ever picks up a book or tracks down a film because of what I’ve written here I’ll take it as the compliment of a lifetime.

So, on that note, a round of thanks to everyone who has ever visited this blog and especially to the ones who have shown signs of appreciation. And since I now wax maudlin, I’ll conclude more simply with a list of the stuff I’m currently reading:

The Journal of John Woolman (for review)
John Adams by David McCullough
Will You Always Love Me? and Other Stories by Joyce Carol Oates
Mountolive by Lawrence Durrell (for review)

And some stuff I’m planning to read, though what among these I’ll review is entirely open to debate:

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace (started and currently backburnered due to the above)
The Old Gringo by Carlos Fuentes
Moon Palace by Paul Auster
Therese Raquin by Emile Zola
The Pleasure of the Text by Roland Barthes
Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson
A Place on Earth by Wendell Berry
Clea by Lawrence Durrell (okay, this one’s not open to debate)
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
1776 by David McCullough
Essential Writings by Thomas Paine
King Mob by Christopher Hibbert
Confessions of a Mask by Yukio Mishima
Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
Venus in Furs by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
Dubliners by James Joyce
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel
Collected Poems of Jean Toomer
Fruits of Solitude
by William Penn (for the Harvard reviews)

My actual list is far longer but these are the ones near the top. Feel free to vote!

(sound of crickets)

bookish girl

Saturday Shorts presents…Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland

19 Saturday Jan 2013

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

Carson McCullers, short story review, weird fiction

When thinking of Carson McCullers, one thinks of sad grotesques populating southern gothic towns or of plain old despair. One does not think of weird fiction. Weird fiction being a landscape in which seeming impossibilities go unexplained, it’s exactly the sort of loosely defined genre that anyone could stumble upon by accident since the only real criteria is that it must be “weird.” These days people seem to use the term as a synonym for Horror but I think that’s too limiting as I can find no better genre to capture the not-supernatural but subtle bizarreness of ‘Madame Zilensky and the King of Finland.’

The story sets out to describe the interactions between the plain and competent loner Mr. Brook and the exotic foreign composer Madame Zilensky when she comes to America to teach music at his college. He appears dull, but tolerant of others while she is presented as at once dignified and scatterbrained. She loses her luggage on the journey but brings with her three boys, all blond, blank-eyed and beautiful. The boys give Mr. Brook the creeps from the outset. For example, something about the Zilensky children subconsciously bothered him when they were in a house, and finally he realized that what troubled him was the fact that the Zilensky boys never walked on a rug; they skirted it single file on the bare floor, and if a room was carpeted, they stood in the doorway and did not go inside.

You don’t read McCullers for the prose, of course. One thing I wish she’d done with this story was to have employed a first-person narration. Every enigma in the text, once described, is followed by a variation of “suddenly he realized that…” A dull linkage that would have worked better in monologue, perhaps. She usually gets paired with Flannery O’Connor but to judge from their short stories, O’Connor had far sharper style.

Spoilers beyond. Can you spoil a fiction that makes no sense?

The rest of the story concerns itself with the oddness and inapproachability of the hardworking Madame Zilensky who, for all her stories of foreign climes and strange people, is quite alone in the world. Mr. Brook discovers soon enough that she’s a pathological liar in any case and worse, one without any possible motivation. The point is made that the lady’s inventions, such as meeting the King of Finland (which is a democracy) are more to please herself than others.

Mr. Brook might pity her but his tolerance of the peculiarities of others ends with liars apparently, so he confronts her with the facts. She obstinately sticks to her story but with such an edge of panic that, not surprisingly, he relents, feeling suddenly like a murderer. The essence of the tale (it’s very short, by the way) thus becomes that of tolerance and understanding toward the lost, confused souls in this world. The Sane should pity the Deluded, if you wanted to make a parable out of it.

And so it is the final paragraph that makes this story deliciously wrong and is the reason I’m writing about it at all. It’s a casual addendum that changes the meaning of what you just read without even referring to it. Having returned to his paperwork Mr. Brook sat looking out of the window of his office. The trees along the quiet Westbridge street were almost bare, and the gray buildings of the college had a calm, sad look. As he idly took in the familiar scene, he noticed the Drakes’ old Airedale waddling along down the street. It was thing he had watched a hundred times before, so what was it that stuck him as strange? Then he realized with a kind of cold surprise that the old dog was running along backward. Mr. Brook does not make further note of the incident and it is not explained in the text. It serves only as a kicker for the audience.

The story is about truth. Mr. Brook believes that he has the monopoly on truth but the enigma of the Zilensky family is not solved in the end, nor can it be dismissed as a pack of lies. The world is strange and things happen that just can’t be reasonably explained. After all, if Mr. Brook can see a dog walking backwards along a street, than why can’t Madame Zilensky have seen the King of Finland?

Airedale terrier on a country road

My Year in Books: 2012

31 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

literature, me talking about me, reading list

Jessie Wilcox Smith - Woman Reading by WindowOn my previous blog often the only post I ever made each year was a booklist counting up the books I’d read in the course of the twelve preceding months. Perhaps it served no real purpose.

However, I see no reason to be rid of the habit and rather than abolish it, I resolve to change its form into something a little more practical in nature. This list shall go by genre. A study of what I’ve read (I’ll be honest; it wasn’t much). A study to see what I accomplished, to see how far afield I did wander in my armchair travels…

I have provided links to the books I’ve reviewed.

Classic literature: For a start, I finished off Les Miserables from 2011. A genuine accomplishment since it’s over a thousand hefty pages of misery, suspense and author filibustering. Worth every page though.

A choice between Zola and Voltaire for my next French author after Hugo and I chose the latter. Candide of course. As Enlightenment philosophy it was superb and I’ll probably never forget it. As literature it was greatly lacking.

Elsewhere, D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, which had been on my reading list for the past two years and made me an instant Lawrence fan. The Overcoat and The Nose, a Evelyn WaughPenguin two-in-one and my first ambivalent experience of Gogol. Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall for some much-needed laughter. Siddhartha but don’t get me started on that one…

Great Expectations as an audiobook, Frank Muller as narrator. So good it converted me to the format. Always nice when that happens.

Literature in general: My exploration of Beat culture proceeded with On the Road (a pleasant experience) and Burroughs in his realist phase – Junky and Queer. Burroughs was the better of the two.

Several extravagantly artistic novels with beautiful writing and strange, unnerving images – Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, John Hawkes’ An Irish Eye, Lawrence Durrell’s Justine and Carlos Fuentes’ Aura.

Yukio MishimaYukio Mishima’s The Sound of Waves, an exercise in family friendliness from a surprising source. Dylan Thomas reading A Child’s Christmas in Wales for the holiday season. Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Cafe and Other Stories.

Two catch-all compilations: The Houghton-Mifflin Anthology of Short Fiction, well over a thousand pages of widely selected authors and The Grove Press Reader 1951-2001, read in honour of Barney Rosset.

Modern literature: Nothing. My blind spot. I shall have to make more of an effort in 2013.

Plays: My intention had been to step back from the too easy plays of the 20th Century and get back to the basics. Shakespeare and Marlowe, I’d thought. It turned out to be Shakespeare and Sophocles in the end.Sophocles I read The Theban Plays and then I read Sophocles II for his other works. I even read the script of The Gospel at Colonus by Lee Breuer. Marlowe will have to wait but I did read Hamlet.

Poetry: The five poems that Dylan Thomas recited alongside A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Goblin Market in a Chronicle Books binding with Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s paintings to grace the text.

The Harvard this year was supposed to be John Milton’s Complete Poems in English. I read all the pre-Paradise Lost material but got derailed halfway through the greatest poem in the English language (at the same time as I was derailed from The Alexandria Quartet) and rather than complete it, I have opted to turn around and begin from the beginning with Volume 1 in the series.

Non-fiction: As always, a lot of literary material. Oscar Wilde’s long-awaited De Profundis finally made it to the top of my reading list. Surely the best thing he ever wrote. The William H. Gass essay collection Finding a Form, which made for some excellent mental exercise. Henry Miller’s houseguest-from-hell memoir A Devil in Paradise. Reminds me again to either learn French or stop reading Francophiles…

NietzscheNietzsche’s first work, The Birth of Tragedy, which may have been flawed in argument but was a blast to read nonetheless. Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography, flawed but worth the read.

A couple of music-related books: White Christmas: The Story of an American Song, documenting through Irving Berlin and his greatest hit the rise and fall of Tin Pan Alley (amazingly compelling stuff), and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume One. Worth the read just for Dylan’s evocations of the early sixties folk scene and his prodigious memory of books once perused.

As usual, heavyweight history suffers…

Light reading: The shameful end of my list. Fessing up time! Agatha Christie’s masterpiece of totally illogical suspense And Then There Were None. Sax Rohmer’s The book cover - Fu ManchuReturn of Dr. Fu Manchu, every bit as good as the first installment and leaving me hungry for more. Two 70s gothics, both coincidentally involving mansions stranded in the midst of dangerous bayous: The Master of Blue Mire and Amberleigh. The latter was not very good.

Speaking of not very good, I read The Alchemist. Made good on it by reading Jonathan Livingstone Seagull and the aforementioned Hesse. Put together the trio made for modest entertainment. None would have stood a chance alone.

———-

That’s all I read, barring an occasional book dipped into briefly. And so my New Year’s tradition continues.

Resolutions? Just the obvious ones: To read more and to write more. I had no expectation when I began this past spring that my blog would get any traffic at all and since it is graced with visitors I must continue to post as regularly as I can. The cold weather does offer ample time for the project. Happy New Year!

Magazine Ogonek 1978

An Appreciation of Frank Muller’s Great Expectations

19 Friday Oct 2012

Posted by nymith in Book Reviews, Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

audiobook review, British literature, Charles Dickens, Frank Muller, gothic novels, literature, Simon Callow

While it is a great thing (so I feel) to pay homage to authors neglected by the public at large, still one cannot do so always. Sometimes you just have to acknowledge a work of recognised genius and such is that of Great Expectations. This will not be a “review” per say – because of its popularity and because of the format I chose to hear it in, I shall not be recapping the plot but only discussing the elements I find especially praiseworthy. Proceed with caution.

Two things of whose value I always was uncertain: audiobooks and Charles Dickens (1812-1870). In the former there was always an earnest distrust. Listening to a book prevents close reading, skipping back to savour a passage or forward to see if the chapter’s nearly through. A hands-off approach not at all to my style.

As for Dickens…I once tried Oliver Twist and was rather enjoying it until the introduction of the heavenly Rose Maylie, at which point the narrative became so bathetic and bogged down that I despaired of further criminal doings and forgot to finish the book. A Christmas Carol was charming but I found that it didn’t retain its freshness upon rereading (quite unlike the Alastair Sim film). Therefore Dickens, to me, meant an excess of sentimentality, broad caricatures with silly names, villains black as night, heroes invisible beneath their virtues and the famed unlikely coincidences (crutch of bad writers everywhere and Paul Auster). Give me Thomas Hardy any day.

So when Dickens’ bi-centenary rolled around I wasn’t thrilled. I was figuring to read Hard Times (three guesses why) when my mother told me to try Great Expectations and moreover in a Barnes and Noble audio edition narrated by Frank Muller.

I knew what most know of the plot: the little boy who meets the convict, meets the crazy old lady and then grows up to long for cruel-hearted Estella. This simple meme goes around endlessly and quite fails to convey the genius at the heart of this novel.

Part of Great Expectations‘ success lies in the fact that this is, in some sense, a gothic novel. Perhaps the gothic traits are only used to highlight a coming-of-age tale, but they so strongly colour the narrative that the overall impression is disquieting. The gothic imagery is also the most powerful: the lonely limekiln out on the marsh, Jaggers’ housekeeper, the hallucinations, and (of course) everything that occurs in Satis House. Pip’s first sight of Miss Havisham is only the most famous of many. An early example:

It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes – a little dimmed by looking up at the frosty light – towards a great wooden beam in a low nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white with but one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was Miss Havisham’s, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment before, I at first ran from it, and then ran toward it. And my terror was greatest of all when I found no figure there.

There are also some events that do not quite fit the gothic mold but serve to aid the atmosphere, such as the hilariously random and baffling encounter with “the pale young gentleman” that is dropped into the narrative, seemingly forgotten and only picked up again much later in the book. That is really the way of it: Dickens threads a needle with some enticing event, be it convicts or an attack on Mrs. Joe, and then lays it aside for later. Plots and subplots enough for ten books within this narrative, and oh yes, there are many coincidences but the lion’s share of them are cleverly handled. And why is that but by the inclusion of Mr. Jaggers?

Jaggers isn’t what most people think of when they think of Great Expectations but he’s a pivotal character in that he’s the reason those famed coincidences actually work. Several characters are tied together with Jaggers as the lynchpin but since he’s a high-profile lawyer it is not so difficult to believe that his separate clients could sometimes overlap – specifically with Dickens emphasising the imagery of crime (convicts, law and prisons permeate) and secrets (the boarded up Satis House). It is surprisingly dark in tone with even the “happy ending” striking me as bittersweet.

Continuing from there, I also maintain that the characters are fantastic, Jaggers being the most successful as a good man who happens not to be especially likable (in the ordinary sense of the word; I liked him just fine). There’s a casual sharpness to him, a fierce and sardonic manner that keeps him from being approachable in all but a business capacity and hence he’s the only important character who disappears from the narrative without closure. He manages to float over the London landscape despite having relatively few scenes in the book and his best showcase is certainly at the dinner he gives to Pip and some of Pip’s friends from the club. Two separate dramatic points are made in the scene, one with the introduction of Jaggers’ housekeeper (and their highly suggestive relationship) and the other with the cringe-inducing behaviour of Pip and his comrades. Dinner went off gaily, and, although my guardian seemed to follow rather than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of our dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was expressing my tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronise Herbert, and to boast of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips. It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle; the development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious way at the rest was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off. Later on, Jaggers having toasted Drummle: If his object in singling out Drummle were to bring him out still more, it perfectly succeeded. In a sulky triumph, Drummle showed his morose depreciation of the rest of us, in a more and more offensive degree, until he became downright intolerable. Through all his stages, Mr. Jaggers followed him with the same strange interest. He actually seemed to serve as a zest to Mr. Jaggers’s wine.

A minor character like Drummle seems to me not so much a caricature (in the negative sense) as a pointed study in type (think of the caricatures of Evelyn Waugh). Dickens was a great people-watcher and his cast is populated with characters who reflect that. Pumblechook might be over-the-top but who can fail to recognise his bloviating, thoughtless hypocrisy? Herbert, the modest and true friend, also strikes only one note throughout the book but Dickens gets away with that too, based on Herbert’s own incredible likability. About the only misstep he makes in the novel is one scene of excessive sentimentality with the Pocket family and their army of babies. Luckily, they only dominate one chapter. Elsewhere, so sentimental a character as Biddy is held in check by both Pip’s lack of appreciation of her and by the counterweight of Estella. The same really holds true of all lightness herein – there is an equal and opposite sorrow to go along with every good fortune: against Wemmick’s family life there is his grim office work; against Provis’ dignity there is Pip’s horror and shame of him; against Pumblechook there is Joe Gargery…the variations of this theme are endless and show it for an exceptionally well-balanced work of art.

And now leaving aside Dickens himself, I sincerely advise you to try the audiobook rendition. After all, Dickens was famed for his public readings – he wrote his books to be read aloud, to be dramatized. The one thing that ties together Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol and Great Expectations in my mind is a shared flamboyance, nowadays called Dickensian, which lends them beautifully to an auditory format. As an aside, my understanding of this aspect of his work came from the Peter Ackroyd docu-play The Mystery of Charles Dickens, which I would recommend both for its illuminating qualities and for Simon Callow’s bravura performance as the author/host.

Frank Muller (1951-2008) was an extremely gifted and sadly missed narrator and what he brings to proceedings is a liveliness. The ideal reader is an actor, one who has to be able to inhabit and give voice to an entire cast and all their moods without benefit of visual aid – a staggering task, if you think of it. Frank Muller was capable of this. As Pip his narration is crystal clear but not colourless, tinged in places with regret and in others with bemusement. Pip, in spite of his shallowness, his tendency to run up debts and otherwise make a hash of his life, is a very likable fellow – he wants to do the right thing, he just hardly ever does so. If the candour of his narration is Dickens’ doing, the warmth of it is certainly Muller’s. The love Pip has for Estella is also aided by Muller, in that his farewell to her, the ecstasy of unhappiness in which he confesses his feelings, is heartbreaking to listen to.

In many respects this is more like viewing a miniseries without benefit of music and visuals than it is to reading a book. “Who’s the spider?” says Jaggers. “The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow.” A short sentence made real by Muller pausing over “blotchy” as if hunting for Drummle’s other attributes. Drummle’s voice, muffled and slurred, is Muller’s most masterfully outrageous accent but he acquits himself beautifully with all of the exceedingly large cast. As for the women? Well, unless a man has pipes like Tim Buckley he can’t really mimic women’s voices with ‘accuracy’ but Muller manages by softening his voice for the gentle women such as Biddy and, yes, Estella, whose voice is as untouched as her heart but nevertheless delicate and persuasive. For such a fishwife as Mrs. Joe there’s a shrill note that works just fine. No problems, no wrong notes.

Miss Havisham’s voice is wonderful – he plays her as someone kept alive by bitterness and as someone tragic, not as a crazy old lady. Her slow and gruff voice is held in check so thoroughly that it truly is a shock when she gets herself into a passion, ranting and wheezing, vicious and pathetic. Yet there’s also a good sense of her awakening conscience during those key later scenes, her arguments with Estella and Pip’s leavetaking paving the way for her agonized repentance; which in turn is what makes her story a tragic one, not merely grotesque.

Then of course there is humour and Muller is adept at bringing out the dry variety. Pip’s first naive conversation with Wemmick had me laughing outright at not only the pithy cynicism of Wemmick but also at the dry and precise manner that Muller equipped him with. As a story on the page, I might often have smiled through the text but as an acted audiobook I often found myself laughing.

To wrap this appreciation I must simply confess myself converted to the audiobook as, at its height, a genuine form of creative interpretation. Frank Muller appeared early on the audiobook scene (1979) and is one of its most noteworthy narrators, but I knew nothing of that until I looked him up after completing this book – at the time he was simply an incredibly gifted narrator (as I said, an actor) and I was greatly saddened to learn that he’d died. Thus, my post is as much an enthusiastic recommendation of his work as it is of Dickens’ novel. Try it out and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Saturday Shorts presents….I’m Your Horse in the Night

23 Saturday Jun 2012

Posted by nymith in Uncategorized

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Argentinian fiction, literature, Luisa Valenzuela, short story review, South American literature

Is it just me, or does everything penned south of the United States border get the “magical realism” tag slapped on it? It seems a particularly unhelpful definition, second only to “postmodernism” in its vagueness – hence I won’t be using it as a crutch in discussing the writings of South America. “Magical realism” this ain’t.

Luisa Valenzuela (born 1938) is an Argentinian novelist whose writings crossed to America at the end of the 70s. She became one of the first South American women writers to gain a reputation over here, though Isabel Allende became far more popular. From what precious little I’ve read of her work, I’m going to guess that Valenzuela’s status as a minor writer is more due to bad luck and (perhaps) a darker and more hardened angle on the world than any technical inefficiencies in her style. Her works are difficult to find – I’ve only read two of her comical stories and the extraordinary ‘I’m Your Horse in the Night.’

‘I’m Your Horse in the Night’ is political in nature, set during the Argentinian military regime of the 70s (the story apparently first came out in 1982 and my translation is by Deborah Bonner). It is, however, spared the traps of moral stridency and telegraphed messaging through the counterpoint of a love story (this technique doesn’t always work, but Valenzuela pulls it off without any difficulty). Told briskly and with a restraint  that is in complimentary opposition to the passionate nature of the events which unfold, the story becomes even more impressive when you realise she tells it in a bare three pages.

The doorbell rang: three short rings and one long one. That was the signal, and I got up, annoyed and a little frightened; it could be them, and then again, maybe not; at these ungodly hours of the night it could be a trap. I opened the door expecting anything except him, face to face, at last.

The love affair between the narrator and a revolutionary in a police state – with all the trappings: long separation, secrecy, romance, uncertainty, danger, a bottle of cachaca and a Gal Costa record. It’s a beautiful work of written theater. The characters are locked into their roles of the mysterious revolutionary with an assumed name (Beto) and the woman who waits for him. Few words are exchanged, the scene is brief and the only moment the lovers escape their roles and become ordinary people is in their argument over what Gal Costa means by the titular phrase. The woman carried away with esoteric meanings and witchcraft takes it in a shamanic sense as the result of a trance state, the spirit and the possessed. The man takes it more literally as the interplay between lovers, an interpretation the woman is happy to accept.

Part two.

And then, abruptly, the scene shifts. It’s the morning after, the woman is alone, the phone rings and a man announces they’ve found Beto six days drowned. This is a shock tactic, to make her say something incriminating, which she does. She says it can’t be Beto. “Who is this?” Only then did I think to ask. But that very moment they hung up.

The police arrive, search the house and take her into custody. What’s going to happen to her? Nothing good. But at this point events become even more vague than they’d been previously as the narration shuts down and excludes all but the essentials. The woman attempts to preserve what matters most to her and to protect Beto in the only way she can – by willing him out of existence. My dream the night before, when Beto was there with me and we loved each other. I’d dreamed it, dreamed every bit of it, I was deeply convinced that I’d dreamed it all in the richest detail, even in full color. And dreams are none of the cops’ business.

They want reality, tangible facts, the kind I couldn’t even begin to give them.

At this point a stylistic change occurs. Quotation marks vanish as neither the police interrogation nor her answers escape her in-head narration. The horror of the situation is grimly denied and the reality of the night before dissolves as she forces it to become the product of a dream.

Where is he, you saw him, he was here with you, where did he go? Speak up, or you’ll be sorry. Let’s hear you sing, bitch, we know he came to see you, where is he, where is he holed up? He’s in the city, come on, spill it, we know he came to get you.

I haven’t heard a word from him in months. He abandoned me, I haven’t heard from him in months. He ran away, went underground. What do I know, he ran off with someone else, he’s in another country. What do I know, he abandoned me, I hate him, I know nothing.

(Go ahead, burn me with your cigarettes, kick me all you wish, threaten, go ahead, stick a mouse in me so it’ll eat my insides out, pull my nails out, do as you please. Would I make something up for that? Would I tell you he was here when a thousand years ago he left me forever?)

I’m not about to tell them my dreams. Why should they care? I haven’t seen that so-called Beto in more than six months, and I loved him. The man simply vanished. I only run into him in my dreams, and they’re bad dreams that often become nightmares.

The story ends with her in jail, thinking of that night, remembering that phrase of Gal Costa’s and now accepting her own unbounded interpretation of it. Beto, dead or alive as he may be, is now a spirit and she behind bars is his possession – and where this is concerned, the real world can go to hell.

So this is a story in which an alleged imaginary encounter, which as I pointed out was built from theatrical trappings regardless of its in-text reality, faces off against a true and inescapable reality and comes across as the more vivid of the two. The narration may be unreliable but every word of it seems to come from the soul. It is a love story told with grace. I have read it many times and it hasn’t lost its power yet. And finally, ‘I’m Your Horse in the Night’ could almost be shorter than this review praising it. It is an unsung masterpiece.

A Note on Editions: Unfortunately, sorting out the Luisa Valenzuela bibliography is next to impossible. I came upon this story in The Houghton Mifflin Anthology of Short Fiction, edited by Patricia Hampl in 1989…which credits it to The Art of the Tale, edited by Daniel Halpern in 1986. Her novels and short stories have been published by High Risk Books and The Dalkey Archive Press, at least, but I have no way of knowing which volume (if any) includes this one.

I now leave you with Gal Costa. Any expert who knows which tune it was that the story referenced, feel free to step forward. In the meantime, a random one:

Update, August 2013. Amazingly, someone did come forward with the correct information. It wasn’t Gal Costa at all, it was Maria Bethânia and the song’s actual title is Sem Açúcar (it was written by Chico Buarque). So here is a rendition of the real deal, “eu de noite sou seu cavalo,” or “I’m your horse in the night.” Many thanks to Museredux1.

← Older posts

Recent Posts

  • The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
  • The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
  • Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
  • Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
  • The Return of the Soldier – Rebecca West

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 171 other followers

Email

For questions, comments, appreciation, etc. I am available at rahina.mcwethy(at)gmail dot com
December 2019
S M T W T F S
« Aug    
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  

Archives

  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • April 2017
  • July 2016
  • April 2016
  • February 2016
  • January 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • August 2015
  • July 2015
  • June 2015
  • May 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • December 2014
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
  • May 2014
  • April 2014
  • March 2014
  • February 2014
  • January 2014
  • December 2013
  • November 2013
  • October 2013
  • September 2013
  • August 2013
  • July 2013
  • June 2013
  • May 2013
  • April 2013
  • March 2013
  • February 2013
  • January 2013
  • December 2012
  • November 2012
  • October 2012
  • September 2012
  • August 2012
  • July 2012
  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012

Categories

  • Book Reviews
  • Calling a Spade a Spade: Movie Reviews
  • Family Friendly
  • The Harvard Classics
  • Uncategorized

Stuff I’ve Discussed

Alexandria Quartet American literature Anna Swir autobiography Beat Generation British literature Calypso Editions Canadian literature Carlos Fuentes Carson McCullers children's books Chilean literature Christianity Classical Antiquity comparison crime fiction crime novel definitions dialogues Djuna Barnes enlightenment fables French literature Graywolf Press Grove Press Harlem Renaissance Harvard Classics Hermann Hesse historical fiction horror fiction Jack Kerouac Jane Austen Jean Toomer John Hawkes Johnny Depp Joyce Carol Oates Lawrence Durrell literary criticism literature me talking about me Mexican fiction modernist modern literary fiction movie review MS originals mystics nihilism Nobel winners Paul Auster Paulo Coelho Peter Ackroyd philosophy poetry Polish literature Prosper Merimee publishers Raymond Chandler reading list review Richard Bach Russian literature Scandinavian crime short story review social critique South American literature southern gothic Stoicism traditionalist W. Somerset Maugham writing

Facebook News Feed

Facebook News Feed

My Worksites

  • LibraryThing (My Profile)
  • The Benefits of Cold Coffee

Places I Haunt

  • A Year of Reading the World
  • Asylum
  • Bookslut
  • Caustic Cover Critic
  • Context
  • Conversational Reading
  • HiLo Heroes
  • Letters of Note
  • Pechorin's Journal
  • Peter Galen Massey's Book Blog
  • The Complete Review
  • The Neglected Books Page
  • The Quarterly Conversation
  • The Rumpus (Books Division)
  • This Space
  • Three Percent
  • Tomcat in the Red Room

Meta

  • Register
  • Log in
  • Entries feed
  • Comments feed
  • WordPress.com

Blog at WordPress.com.

Cancel
Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy