Breaking the silence
I haven’t
posted anything on this site for a while, partly because we have had a long, lingering spring which started back in
what should have been the dark cold days of January and February. It is hard to stay inside at the computer when the
temperature is in the 70’s, the sky is blue, and the breezes are blowing away the humidity. Consequently, when I haven’t
been reading, much of my time is spent outdoors puttering in the herb garden, or just soaking up the sunshine. However,
I do want to mention two notable, and discussion provoking, novels that I have read recently:
Night Train to Lisbon by Pascal Mercier and The Shadow
of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon.
Both belong to a genre which might be called book books.
In both novels, the more or less chance discovery of a book sends the protagonist on a quest, one in Portrugal and the
other in Spain. In Night Train, the main character, Gregorius, is a Swiss teacher who stumbles on a book written by
a Lisbon doctor who lived during the time of the Salazar dictatorshop. In an effort to understand the man who wrote
the book, Gregorius searches out the people who knew him. To do this, he must uncover past secrets of this mysterious
and beautiful city. In Shadow, the main character, Daniel, the son of an antiquarian book dealer in Barcelona, chooses
from the Cemetery of Lost Books The Shadow of the Wind by Julian Carax. This leads him nto a world of forbidden
love, dark obsession and cruel power. Although Mercier’s book is more philosophical and Ruiz Zafon’s is
darker in tone, both take the protagonists and the readers on a spellbinding journey of discovery against a backdrop of political
unrest.
Comments:
"Against a backdrop
of political unrest." The backdrop is also very Iberian - it's like people are rediscovering Hemingway's setting through
native writers.
I read Surely Your Joking by R.
Feynman and found it was not just physics but a lot more about how Feynman did not let anything go by with out thinking about
it thoroughly. Great book and read. Thanks Faimon
