Posted on: March 10, 2009
The original French edition of Muriel Barbery’s novel
The Elegance of the Hedgehog is a wonderful novel. Moving, thoughtful, highly observant. I didn’t want to put it down. Unusual for a literary work, it is also a page-turner. I really wanted to keep going, to follow the story, to know how things turn out for the two main characters and at least a couple of the secondary ones. I wanted to spend more time in their company.
Barbery, a professor of philosophy in France, born in Casablanca, creates a very accessible world, with a light touch, even though some of the subject matter is heavy. She sets her novel on the Left Bank in Paris, in an upper-middle-class apartment building, filled with the well-to-do, with intellectual and political heavy weights. She paints the picture by alternating two voices, one who speaks directly to us, the other via her diary.…
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Posted on: March 7, 2009
Days of Sappho, by John William Godward. 1904
Before I die, I will sleep in a temple in Greece, a temple dedicated to Aphrodite. I will wake transformed, and wander the hills and valleys once seen by Achilles, Diomedes, Perseus and Heracles. I will find the place where Odysseus came ashore after his exile. I will find the treasures of Mycenae and walk where Agamemnon walked. Athena will watch over me. I will not let a moment pass without finding the ancients in the air.
Before Nietzsche, Greece was sunlight and the shining power of rational thought. After Nietzsche, Greece was Dionysian as well as Apollonian. Today, for those who live there or travel there, there must be a new complexity, a new set of variables that destroys dichotomies.
Velma Jean Reeb has been there and offers us poetry in celebration of her travels. We welcome her to Spinozablue.…
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Posted on: March 6, 2009
The Party’s Over
Athens
four o’clock in the morning…
Early white
bright sunlight
creeping over the
Parthenon: the city
asleep, the ancients
awake, as always,
mentally sinewed,
nodding knowingly
at their modern counterparts
whose muscle only
has softened--
hard cunning, irresistible
charm adamantine--
taxiing home
from Plaka
Ah, Greece!
As though looking for the Nativity beneath the neon lights of Christmas hawkers, we searched Greece and found sicca flourishing beneath the bare-boned ruins of our own beginnings. If Odysseus’ shores are now thick with bikinied beautiful people, the sun that bakes their flesh is the same as the one poor Elpenor saw before his fated, foolish fall. And if the yachts, flying the brilliant flags of too much diversity, leave no room now for Odysseus’ single-purposed craft, well, that cave — the one we scanned at Aegina, the cool waters echoing its secret chambers — that cave was always there. We said the shriek of Western rock was harsh, yet knew it did not drown the softer strains of weeping native instruments — of Hecuba bemoaning sons and grandson torn at Troy. And it was enough — oh, yes, enough! — to find but one perfect, surf-smoothed shard„ frail black etching speaking still of dark-haired youths and maidens tending musky casks for Dionysus’ sake.…
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Posted on: March 3, 2009
The Elegance of the Hedgehog, by Muriel Barbery
I’m currently about 120 pages into to this marvelous novel, translated from the French by Alison Anderson. A most enjoyable reflection on the human condition, class, Art, sickness, death and how we all seek our own raison d’être. More on this wonderful book later this week …
Wanted to welcome Ann Applegarth to Spinozablue. We have one of her fine poems on display here, and hope to present more of her visions from the southwest in the future.…
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