From The Adorations:
And so began Stefanie’s life as a Viennese. Vienna, emotionally, became her deepest home, no matter where else she might reside: Wien, Wien, noch du allein! For the first four years she lived in the cozy mansion at No. 101 Johannesgasse, in a third-floor attic room with a mansard window and a view over the Stadtpark, famous for its autumn roses, a view that took on an indefinable melancholy on winter evenings when the lamps came on and the strollers were...

San Marcos Mercury: You were raised, I’ve read, in Ireland, France and Switzerland. How has that influenced your literary tastes?

Roger Boylan: I had the privilege of growing up in two languages, English and French, and, living in the cosmopolitan environment of Geneva, becoming somewhat familiar with others: German, Italian, and Russian, mainly....

Boston Review, that excellent publication based in that excellent city, has allowed me to vent and opinionate in its pages for over 13 years, and I’ve appreciated the opportunity more than I can say. And I’m happy to say our association continues, despite some stumbles on my part. One of their more generous gestures, among many, was to throw open their columns for me to blather on about my novel The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad, still my favorite of my (five) novels, and s...

     I was distressed to hear recently from my old friend Mark Halle, who lives near Geneva, that the house I grew up in there had been demolished and replaced by a hideous box-like structure. I was distressed, but not surprised; when my daughter and I visited in ’09, the house was vacant and condemned. You can see it in the photo above, behind my snarling visage. I’m lucky I got to see it one last time, for it occupies a precious place in my memories, a childhood idyll t...

He Digesteth Hard Yron

Although the aepyornis    ...

The first Instrument of Surrender was signed at Reims  at 02:41 Central European Time on 7 May 1945. The signing took place in a red brick schoolhouse that served as the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). It was to take effect at 23:01 CET on 8 May.

US diplomat Robert Murphy claims that EAC approved surrender documents were not signed on 7 May because an exhausted From Wikipedia: General Smith had thought that EAC had never approved a surrender agreement. He had filed awa...

It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the Dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy.

Oh...

From Flavorwire, a historical footnote to cherish:                                                                                                                                                                  " Immanuel Kant required an assistant to get out of bed each morning because he couldn’t sleep unless comprehensively mummified in blankets. This operation commenced precisely at 5:00 a.m. every morning, until the assistant was dismissed for having acquired a habit of excessive drin...

Joseph Mitchell came to New York from his native North Carolina on the day after the Wall Street crash, October 28, 1929, and died there in 1996. In the intervening years he never left it, except once in 1931 when, in what appears to have been a rare fit of spontaneity, he signed aboard a tramp steamer and sailed to Russia via Southampton and Cherbourg. He soon came back, though. New York was all the world he ever needed, and he became its voice at The New Yo...

V. S. Pritchett

If somebody writes a book and doesn’t care for the survival of that book, he’s an imbecile.     

Umberto Eco

The only end of writing is to enable the readers better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.   

Samuel Johnson

I was tickled to learn that the Irish Echo, America’s biggest Irish-American paper, is featuring an article on two of my novels, including one, Ohiowa Impromptu, that hasn’t been published yet, and another, The Adorations, that has, as an e-book available here. (You may encounter a pay wall on the Echo page.)

Page Turner

Edited By Peter McDermott

Rollicking adventures of reluctant visionary 

If you like the idea of a character who is a novelist from Yorkshire transl...

When I see a couple of kids

And guess he’s fucking her and she’s   

Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,   

I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—   

Bonds and gestures pushed to one side

Like an outdated combine harvester,

And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if   

Anyone...

"Sea-Fever"

I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face, and...

The Road South

There was a new poster on the corner of the boulevard and the Rue de Seine. It was another of the countless warnings issued by the ...

As World War II recedes into the past and takes its place in the mist alongside the Civil War and the Punic Wars, forgotten by all, let me stand athwart that rearward movement for a moment and shout "Stop!" The war is still with us, in the persons of the survivors, the heroes still living among us. Today is the 70th anniversary of the Telemark raid in Nazi-occupied Norway, sort of immortalized in the pretty good 1965 film with Kirk Douglas and Richard Harris. But the leader o...

A. J. Blake’s debut novel, Dust on the Nettles (the title comes from a sacramental poem by the First World War poet Edward Thomas), draws you from the first page into the life and world of one Nick Kellaway, hedge-fund gambler and City financier supreme, a chap with an eye on the main chance, a devious and self-centered near-genius in the Big Money world who makes pots of cash but comes a cropper in other ways: he’s not too good with human relationships. Especially with w...

                                                              Greece

                   There is, I believe, an incarnative function in the light of Greece.

           George Seferis   

    I glimpsed the wilderness again in Crete. This time it scared the shit out of me. I was at the foot of Mount Ida, after about two hours’ gut-churning trundle in an old bus from Knossos, the wrecked Minoan palace just outside Heraklion. It was a hot morning in September 1970, thirty-s...

I grew up in an “English” house in the suburbs of Geneva (shown above in 2009, shortly before its demolition). What made the house English was not so much the fact that an “artistic” Englishwoman had lived and died in it as its English-style garden, with gooseberry bushes, strawberries, raspberries, a couple of cherry trees, an apple tree producing wizened crab apples, and gravel walkways that meandered about and doubled back on themselves, like the ground plan of a m...

Oinsias O’Jaggery, better known as St. Oinsias, patron saint of Killoyle, was a domineering but controversial figure, and, some say, barking mad. First case in point: He circumnavigated the island of Ireland in a single day, rowing a coracle at incredibly high speed, returning home in time for supper leftovers (“It’s a miracle! Oh no, it’s you,” said his mum, Niamh). Second case in point: On one of his business trips South, St. (first-class) Patrick himself, CEO of all Christian ope...

                                    Old Ireland

In my dream of the wounded past, tyres swish on the road

And the woody pong of father’s pipe salts the rainy air.

My head throbs with the burden of recalling

The succulence of those rashers on a bell-loud Sunday 

And oh the scalding sweetness of undermilked tea

And the crumby crumbling of Mum’s soda bread

And fried eggs hot from the pan.

I loved them all then

But never knew.

Reca...

Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality by Bill Peters 

       Dans le Café du Dernier Espoir

O Rhône mon Rhône où les vues se mirent…

Mon verre est à demi-plein

D'une cervoise qui s’agite comme la mer(de)

            Terpsichore reckoned Marina was a better bet than the Rivera brothers.

            "OK. If you don't let me down on the mortgage and get me fired."

            "Fired, no way, dyevochka. No way. Hey, screw you. You my friend already. I gonna cheat my friend? Forget about it."

            Beneath the slightly ludicrous patois that sounded as if Marina had alternated taking English lessons from a Greek taxi driver and a member of the cast of The...

    Ah, the far-flourishing Pentlands, so bright across the city’s jolly old rooftops; and oh, the aching nastiness of days gone by, when on those now-golden slopes hairy reivers drove Scots cattle southwards to the land of the barbarous Sasun.

   Or so reflected Dr. Piers Antoine Oliphant, Werner Geselius Professor of Local and General Studies, as he gazed at the calming view through the mansarde window of h...

            Marina Yacht, recently arrived from Rostov-on-Don, Russia, via New York and Chicago, was Terpsichore’s first client of the day. She showed no hesitation in rushing into the office (the former kids' bedroom, with a view of the parking lot, ex-backyard, wooden privacy fence still in place) like, thought Terpsichore (who knew her cinematic cliches, and one or two literary ones, too), the thrusting babushka of lore, accustomed to waiting six hours in the snow for Bu...

Reading Joseph Roth: A Life in Letters is like sitting across a café table from Roth himself after he’s had a few. He holds nothing back. It’s a remarkably intimate experience. He rages, jokes, pleads, and sobs. “Don’t be upset,” he says—imagination supplies a wagging forefinger—“if my letters are full of impatience and even irritations. It so happens I live and write in a continual state of confusion.” These letters—superbly translated and edited by long...

            Maybe we didn't see enough of Terpsichore O'Hanlon in Ohiowa Impromptu. My German translator Harry Rowohlt told an interviewer that Terpischore, who stars in The Maladjusted Terrorist (published to date only in Harry's translation) was the sexiest fictional character he'd ever come across; and I will admit to harboring tender feelings toward her myself. Here's a bit more that might make its way into future iterations of Ohiowa.                                     ...

About The Adorations
     This book can't catch a break. It was scheduled to be published in German in 2007, and all systems were go. Translators were hired and handsomely remunerated, a sampler was distributed to the press, book tours scheduled . . . then bang! For reasons never entirely clear to me, the publisher cancelled. (German cover shown above). Apparently he thought at first that he liked it, then decided--or was persuaded--that he didn't. The presence in the dramati...

Writing premature obituaries of this and that–Culture, The Novel, Literary Fiction–has long been a cottage industry among the intelligentsia. Tom Wolfe, in his 1989 essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” thundered, “If fiction writers do not start facing the obvious"–i.e., stop confecting their precious little Po-Mo baubles and become two-fisted literary reporters–"the literary history of the second half of the twentieth century will record that journalists ...

"God, what a feckin' wanker."

            On a crisp, cold December morning, Terpischore O'Hanlon, Irish immigrant, former waitress, student of Italian verismo, consort of bikers and bargees and used-car salesmen, onetime car thief, and Killoyle City, Ireland's own femme fatale (and now, potentially, New Ur's too, if it would only sit up and take notice),[1] stood at her living-room window in a pose reminiscent of allegories of Liberty–breasts defiant, shoulders squared, ...

Being dead set against both extremes of religion and atheism, I consulted a sage of a previous age, Thomas Huxley, for his thoughts, as a Victorian man of reason, on the subject, and I found his reply eminently satisfactory:                                                                                                                        "I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest poss...

    Samuel Beckett lived much of his life among the intellectuals of Paris's Latin Quarter, almost all of whom were on the political left, and who for the most part assumed Beckett to be, too. Such is the myopia of the politically credulous. Not much effort would have been required to ascertain that in both his work and his life Beckett lived as if in a fortress, overlooking the world and apart from it. He observed, but did not emulate, those around him, and disdained their b...

Mark Twain was set to live the life of an expatriate in Italy. He studied the language and loved the country. He and his wife Olivia settled in Florence, tenants of the Villa Quarto, a handsome edifice outside the city owned by an Italian-American, the Countess Massiglia, with whom Twain failed to hit it off. relations only deteriorated from there. Twain was fairly sure of the rightness of his opinions in all cases, but on the subject of the Countess they were colored by espe...

 12.

  Interspersed with Arabic lessons and haddith seminars, buggery, and the occasional whipping--and once, the high point, the stoning of a wild dog--jihad training started in earnest over the three weeks. The course was called Jihad Systems Management for the Prophet, Peace be Upon His Name. It was designed and taught by Dr. Hafez Bin Mukhi Mama, formerly head of the psychology department at the University of Bône (Algeria), former existentialist resident of St. Germain...

   11.   As the sun spiraled into darkness over the incarnadined mountains the entire camp fell to its knees and the adhan was rendered in a whiny tenor by a gray-bearded muezzin in a white turban. Omar was tired and hungry; but first, he reminded himself (how long the road to true belief, O God) come the prayers. That day’s fourth round of expressing submission to the Most High.

   “Praise God.”

   The great Sheikh did not pray publicly. In a bluish-gray turban and lon...

     10.                                                                                                                                                                             The air of rebel-held Loonistan smelled of the stony mountains beyond, and of shit, cooking oil, cigarettes, opium, and diesel fumes. The hulks of burned-out buses and trucks littered the landscape like dead cattle in a drought. There were no trees, and the unpaved roads were deeply potholed. Fierc...

    9.

 In the depths of a Saudi August, the hottest month this side of the same season's South Texas, Wurraq gave Omar a plane ticket to Khafirabad, capital of Loonistan, and reminded him not to drink al Ko-hol or let his eyes stray over the contours of a woman’s body, or even to allow himself to imagine what a burqah might conceal (“do not imagine to yourself such things, Omar! Not at all! Please! God does not like this!”); to pay zakat; to pray five times daily; to ...

8

     Jim Yarrington, Resident Expert for the Marine Corps Intelligence Administration (MCIA) in the South Texas region, was 34, muscular, churchgoing, T-shirt-wearing on weekends, and abstemious but for an occasional Gold Label beer sipped manfully over a laugh-loud barbecue where the talk was of golf, the cost of living, guns, and the failures and illnesses of loved ones. Jim was married to Linda Yarrington, née Stuelpnagel (of the Dallas Stuelpnagels), his childhood swe...

8.

            “Hey, babe, I swore I’d never go back to that shithole.”   

            “Gotcha, Vic. I know. But it’s about Omar."

            "That crazy brother of yours? What's he done?"

            "Gone. Out there somewhere. First on a job in Saudi Arabia, then it was like he suddenly quit or got fired. We heard all kinds of weird rumors. Like, he was kidnapped. Or he just walked out one day. Then he phoned a couple friends of his in Weary and told them he...

         7.                                                                                                                                                                            “Sin mis abuelos, sin mis hijos, sin mi corazon,” crooned Vic in throaty imitation of Los Big Muchachos’ lead singer, Pepe Montoya. “You’re mine, all mine, whenever I close my eyes, Paloma-a-a-a....” The original wailed his heart’s desire on an aging and scratchy disc (recorded by V...

6

     Joe’s old Chevy truck wouldn’t start so on Friday he drove Josie and himself down to Paco’s Tacos in Josie’s Buick. They’d been eating Friday night dinner at Paco’s since Paco served his first taco, back in 1948. Paco’s son, Paco Jr., was at the door.

    “Hey, Pereiras. Que paso?”

    “OK, Paquito. Just OK.”

    They sat in the booth across from the kitchen, as usual, and had no need to order because they always had the same thing: sweetened...

      6.

    The lessons started the next day, three hours of drilling and repetition every morning, plus pauses for prayers; then another two hours in the afternoon, sometimes in the shisha café next door, where whisks kept away the flies and a toothless man smiled behind the counter. Sweet-smelling tobacco smoke filled the air. Omar was tempted to try one of the pipes, but thought better of it.

    “No, thank you, my brother. I quit smoking to please God, peace be upo...

   5

  In short order, Omar grew a straggly beard and put a shmagh, the local headdress, on his head and wore a long drooping ankle-length thobe, or Saudi robe, and, except for a hint of Mesoamerica in his broad nose and emphatic cheekbones, he looked like everybody else on the streets of Mecca. He sought deeper change, too, renouncing all thoughts of a few beers after a hard day’s work and a quick salami-slam before sleep. Instead, he discovered the austere beauties of Is...

   So Omar Pereira of Weary, Texas, shrank to near-nothingness in God’s mighty shadow, and Omar al-Am’riki came forth, chanting intimations of man’s humility. Islam, Omar realized, was something to really believe in. Spiritually, he was reborn–or perhaps just born, at last. His soul had long been on its knees, and he had long been searching his conscience for all evidence of sins, of omission or commission. One by one every pleasure, every recreation, every trifle fro...

3

So: Life in the Royal Jamshid Compound at Dhummum was OK, at first, with a company car (Nitsun Balkano LS, damn stick shift), a two-room condo, video room, and a TV with 38 non-porno channels. But he had no friends, and social life revolved around the canteen, where the other guys looked down on him as a) a lavatory specialist and b) a chicano nobody from Nowheresville, Texas. Problem was, both perceptions were correct. So the evenings, even over a bootleg bottle or two of...

2

         In fact, Omar Pereira was already under episodic surveillance for his name and inflammatory statements he’d made (trying to sound like one tough mofo) over burgers at the local Hole-Mart, regarding the ease with which a jetliner, say a Boeing 767, could be flown into that, or any, sprawling retail compound; or the even greater ease with which a guy loaded down with dynamite might drive up in a rusted pickup and detonate himself and dozens of Hole-Martians for th...

       ANYhow...In reaction to schoolyard rituals of humiliation, as well as to a generally unsatisfactory childhood, with baseball cap-wearing Dad, Joe, fired from 6 jobs and counting, and taking it out on hapless Omar with backhanded slaps, baseball mitts, etc.; and Mom, Josie, an on-and-off maid and housekeeper, wringing her hands and lofting pointed prayers towards a rotogravure of La Virgen de Guadalupe in which the holy subject looked like a 1920s movie actress (Mary Pi...

                                                 1

     Omar Pereira of Weary, Texas (just outside the San Patricio city limits), was painfully conscious of his name, especially after 9/11, when he started to be harassed as an “Ay-rab” at school (Pedro Ramirez High) by guys who’d known him all his life.

     “Hey, Ay-rab, got your prayer mat?”

     “Say hi to the Ayatollah, towelhead.”

     “Hey, Omar, where’s your magic carpet?”

     “Got virgi...

From The Adorations, Chapter One.                                                                                                                            Who, post-Auschwitz, loves God? Love was for calmer times, when news of horrors never traveled, or could be dismissed as myth, or the outlandish behavior of heathens...no, in my approach to the Almighty I was more of a Hebrew, fearful, respectful, admiring, humble before His works, yet detached and skeptical to the core, ...

From The Adorations, Chapter One

Papa was a kind of pocket Calvin, not perhaps so much an out-and-out nutter as a frustrated reformer, burning with an eternally frustrated zeal stemming from his orthodox Marxism that in turn grew out of his hatred of (in order of no importance), his parents Tancredo and Adua Termi, winegrowers, of Custoza in the Veneto (Custoza, by the way, is the only Italian town without a duplicated z in its name, its sole claim to distinction except for ...

From The Adorations:                                                                                                                                                            The best troops were stuck in Belgium. The lines north of Amiens had split like a rotten log, letting the German torrent through. The joint expeditionary force was bleeding a slow death at Dunkerque, and all the householders and farmers and respectable citizens of northern France were fleeing to the sti...

From The Adorations (http://amzn.to/MWwx05):                                                                                                                  Could Calvin, cursed by the visionary gift he didn’t want, have briefly wandered across time and the Place St. Pierre simultaneously, say, to the early twenty-first century? Might his vision have been of nothing more diabolical than the parked and departing cars of church- and (mostly) café-goers (those colors: too br...

I interrupt my daily broadcast of Ohiowa Impromptu with a brief tip of the hat to the great Russian poet Joseph Brodsky. A native of the Venice of the North, St. Petersburg, Brodsky, from 1972 an exile from Russia, spent a good deal of his all-too-short life in the other, original Venice, where he is now spending eternity, in the cemetery of San Michele. He was mesmerized by Venice, by what he called in his 1992 book Watermark his "version of Paradise." He never had anything resembling an iti...

I’ve written a short memoir, available here if anyone’s interested. It’s mostly true, and where memory is a little vague I’ve put together the most likely script, given the facts as I remember them.  But it won’t be popular, because a) I’m little-known and b) I had a pleasant childhood in beautiful surroundings. No abuse, no bullying bar the usual pushing around on the playground, and no drugs, either, or anything more sordid than the standard writer’s Bohemia of wine, women and...

In the aftermath of that kitschfest that is July 4th (like all celebrations mandated by the powers that be), I was musing on Milan Kundera's several definitions of kitsch. He is the great expert, along with his fellow Slav-in-exile Nabokov, who defined poshlost, a Russian take on kitsch, as "the obviously trashy, . . . the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive." But Kundera has boiled the real thing down to its essence. In his great comedy of man...

Last night I was browsing Molloy, as is my wont during the insomniac hours. The problem, in the wee hours of the night, is the occasional fits of laughter it still provokes..."She went by the peaceful name of Ruth, I think, but I can’t say for certain. Perhaps the name was Edith. She had a hole between her legs, oh not the bunghole I had always imagined, but a slit, and in this I put, or rather she put, my so-called virile member, not without difficulty, and I toiled and moiled until I disc...

The Texas heat has set in. Yesterday the mercury soared to 109 deg. F. (42 deg. C.). The sky is bleached white and blue, like the Greek flag. The heat, too, reminds me of Greece. I have fond memories, from longer ago than I care to admit, of sitting on a hotel balcony gazing at Heraklion’s Oriental rooftops incarnadined in the setting sun. And visiting the tomb of Nikos Kazantzakis on the city walls of Heraklion. The old wanderer’s epitaph is carved on his tombstone: : Δεν ελπίζω...

In advance of Ulster Yobbo Day, otherwise known as the Glorious Twelfth (of July), the yobboes, sure enough, are hard at work, just as they were when I was a resident of the Six Counties of Northern Ireland, lo these many years ago. Nothing better to do? Provoke the papists! (Or the prods! Turnabout's fair play.) In this case, putting up the banners of Protestant paramilitary groups outside a Catholic church and school. Oy veh. As Churchill observed, after World War II, in response to some co...

On 18 June 1940 Charles De Gaulle, a French general recently arrived in England made a speech in the studios of the BBC. He was grandly named but an obscure officer, ironically less well-known in his own army than in the Wehrmacht, whose tank commanders had studied his book Building a Career Army, in which he argued for a combination of tank and aircraft warfare that, had it been followed, might have pulled the French Army's chestnuts out of the fire. His speech, broadcast by the BBC but hear...

“In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.”

This and other passages in Julian Barnes’s ...

Barney Rosset, one-of-a-kind editor, publisher, and free-speech crusader, is dead at 89. He led the charge against obscurantism and puritanism in the Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer court cases, and was the first to publish Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Eugene Ionesco in this country. Without him, modern literature would have been very different. It was a signal honor for me to have a small part in his publishing history, via my recent submission to The Evergreen Review...

It's Armistice Day, or Veterans Day if you prefer, and time for a bit of schmaltz.

          From Ohiowa Impromptu:

           Nuala, his agent,  was sure a memoir was the right thing at this time.

            "Just don't write about drinking," she'd said that morning over the phone from the Costa Blanca, where she was spending bank holiday weekend with Tariq, the ...

Terpsichore O’Hanlon and Stan MacKnee lived together on a barge, the Rumpelstiltskin, under an enshading willow on the Mangan Canal, just down from the Slumbeg Bridge, a hop skip and jump across the lock from Moylan’s Canal Bar and Grocery, the ensemble (plus St. Thor’s R.C...

From Ohiowa Impromptu:

       Marina learned from the Nutlanders about odd weekend events called "yard sales," or "garage sales," at which American families flung open their front doors and garages and divested themselves for a price of unwanted belongings that would have furnis...

From Ohiowa Impromptu:

Truth to tell, Marina was proud of her yagoditsy and proud of being Russian, too. But she knew her country was doomed, so she busied herself with the task of building an outpost of Russian civilization here, in far America (also doomed, but not yet). She hung ...

More encouraging words for us stragglers at the lower end of the cognitive elite, from Charles Simic:

Writers and poets are only noticed in totalitarian regimes. They are either imprisoned and shot, or they become highly-privileged flunkies of the regime. In democracies, they are margi...

So much for the handicaps; what of the possibilities of service in Baghdad? A country in which man's selfishness and stupidity have ruined almost all natu...

Old Ireland

It seems a thousand years ago now: tires swish by on the road

And the woody pong of dad’s old pipe salts the rainy air.

My head throbs with the burden of recalling

The succulence of rashers on a bell-loud Sunday 

And the scalding sweetness of overmilked tea

And ...

A sneak preview from my current novel, Ohiowa Impromptu, in which Dr. Ramsultanajam, Head of Geriatric Medicine at Eisenbahn Memorial Hospital in New Ur of the Chaldees, Ohiowa, encounters a Hindu god in the Emergency Ward.

"My God."

The doctor's exclamation was prompted less by the visually certifiable fact of the divine apparition standing in the middle of the room, halfway between Mrs. Hillendale and Mrs. Gong–the elephant-god Ganesha, he of the elephant head, single tusk, and...

from The Adorations

Tristan always attracted a crowd, even at the matinee performance, and the conductor, young Bruno Walter, the late great Mahler’s understudy and second-in-command, was himself a powerful attraction, ramrod-straight, lithe and—paradoxically, in a mostly cl...

From The Adorations (cont'd):

The thought passed through Stefanie’s mind, otherwise aswim with pro-Adolf (or at least pro-artist) feelings (or at the very least responding favorably to the mating dance of the eager male), that young Herr Hitler could on occasion be quite over...

From The Adorations (Continued)

            They left the riverbank, crossed the nearby Hofgasse, and made their way to the Hauptplatz, the bustling heart of Linz. It was a little before eleven, and preparations were underway for the great day ahead. Banners stirred feebly in...

from The Adorations      

Linz on the Danube; Linz, third city of Austria; Linz, placid, contented, aloof; Linz, June 28, 1907. The city simmered in the heat of the summer morning. It was ten o’clock by the bells of t...

This review was written for the Texas Observer, which decided not to publish it on the provincial grounds that it wasn't Texan enough. Indeed, on close inspection, it isn't Texan at all. But it sure strikes a chord in this ex-Miamian. Good book, too.

His Man in Havana

King Bongo...

The Twelve Caesars

Suetonius

Satires

Juvenal

Hamlet/ Henry IV Part I / Julius Caesar

William Shakespeare

Confessions

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Candide

Voltaire

Gulliver's Travels

Jonathan Swift

Life of Johnson

James Boswell

Vanity Fair

William M. Thackeray

A Christmas Carol...

Back in '78, fed up with New York, I spent three months in Montréal, that self-styled Paris of North America, hoping for cultural epiphany, but through all my rambles up and down the boulevards of St. Denis and Outremont and Sherbrooke and Côte des Neiges, I found none. The city an...

From The Adorations:

He looked at the black-bordered picture of the dead Archduke, for whom he felt no pity (an increasingly alien emotion)—indeed, the anticipation of what was already rumored (mobilizations, ambassadors recalled, Austrian troops shelling Belgrade) tingled in his ...

From The Adorations:

Stefanie put down her pen, suddenly aware of distant noise, her attention distracted by a growing commotion outside. The even pitch of traffic sounds had been jarred into dissonance. A concentrated shouting rose from the busy street below, the knotted clamor of ...

Boston Review, which has been my refuge, my soapbox, and my part-time employer for the past 10 years, has published  an essay of mine on Arthur Koestler, here–or, more precisely, an essay of mine on Michael Scammell's biography of Koestler, the reading of which reignited my interest in the great Anglo-Hungarian polymath, whom I revered during my youth. The Scammell bio has been widely reviewed–here, by Christopher Hitchens–and none of the reviewers has failed to observe that Koestl...

Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability, or by commercial acceptability. The worse the author, the more he is known.

                                                                                                James Purdy (1914–2009)

  At Arthur Rubinstein’s farewell performance at the Usher Hall in Edinbu...

To jump ahead a year in my World War II time line, to June 22-23, 1941, the beginning of Operation Barbarossa, when 4.5 million German and Axis-allied troops  invaded the Soviet Union, Germany's erstwhile ally, with history's largest army. A direct descendant of Napoleon's invasion of ...

When my mother died in March 2002, I was living in Texas and had (and have) the dual responsibilities of family and job, so I was away from her side. But I went over for her funeral, and went back a year later to sell the old house in Ferney-Voltaire. Mother, thankfully, went like th...

            After Dad's funeral I returned temporarily to France and kept my mother company at her expense. Then, ever on the move, I headed back to New York via Reykjavik, Iceland, on Icelandair, in those days the airline of choice for penurious trans-Atlantic travelers. A bli...

 Not long after I moved to New York I renewed contact with my father in Delaware, at first to touch him for cash, then I started going down to visit him on weekends with increasing and more relaxed frequency as it became apparent that we were more or less congenial, especially if...

A useful caveat from the ever-useful Clive James (whose endlessly entertaining website is a panacea for those long dull afternoons at the office):

"The perpetual dimwit-left consensus will disgust any liberal eventually, but the trick is to reclaim the democratic centre, not to take re...

For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and ...

The 29th Infantry Division trained in Scotland and England for the crosschannel invasion, October 1942-June 1944. Teamed with the 1st Division, a regiment of the 29th Division (116th Infantry) was in the first assault wave to hit the beaches at Normandy on D-day, 6 June 1944. Landing on Omaha Beach on the same day in the face of intense enemy fire, the Division soon secur...

As part of my homage to the memory of fallen France, I'm posting this excerpt from my as-yet unpublished novel The Adorations, which deals, among many other things, with that cataclysmic event in June, 1940.

           Paying attention, are we, o influential editors and publishin...

As an Irish-American writer raised in Europe and currently living in Texas after many years in New York, I sometimes wonder if there's an ideal place for me anywhere, or if it matters at all. Any of the places I've lived in would suit me fine, if I moved back, but if destiny decrees...

My wife is a scholar; I, a novelist. Sometimes she seems amazed by the wandering indiscipline of my brain, with its tendency to free-associate and invent. I, on the other hand, can only admire the firm, steady discipline of her scholar's mind. But I find that, as always, others have been...

  Oh Great New York, Tomb of my Youth!

    It was a discouraging time. All I had to show for a lifetime’s literary ambitions were four clumsy short stories, a few translations, and the age-yellowed reams of juvenilia. Yet, having no choice, I remained a student, of life and the...

      Becoming a New Yorker was as close as I got to tailoring an Ameri...

I don't go to church except to admire the art, but I sympathize with this sentiment of G. K. Chesterton's:

"The Church is the one thing that prevents a man from the degrading servitude of being a child of his own time."

Actually, that's another reason to got to church: to leave the mode...

        I have no doubt about the veracity of climate change. It's been happening for as long as Earth has existed. And I have no doubt that the causes are various and changing, and that they include the toxic effects of human industry and manufacturing. But "climate change" is different from "global warming," which extends the debate from the scientific and climatological to the emotional, if not purely political: Bush vs. Gore; liberal vs. conservative; Republican vs. Democrat; First Worl...

          I was back in Paris for an interview for an interpreter’s job at the La Villette exhibition center. It was the sweaty, sagging fag-end of summer 1977. I was, as usual, nearly broke; notwithstanding which I booked a room at the swank Hotel Pierre 1er de Serbie on the elegant street of that name, off the Champs-Elysées. I planned a quiet evening, as usual (Dr. Jekyll firmly in charge): the hotel room, a frugal dinner and the train journey, sans plus. With cunning foresight, howev...

My daughter, senior class valedictorian, is graduating from her high school this Sunday, so The Snug will be closed until the festivities are over. I leave you with this observation by Elizabeth Taylor-NoNotThatOneTheWriter–the eminent English novelist, that is, who died too young (63) in 1975. "Writers are ruined people," she said. "As a person, you’re done for. Everywhere you go, all you see and do, you are working up into something unreal, something to go on to paper..."

Too true. M...

Gustave Flaubert read and thought a great deal; he was fortunate to have the leisure to do so, thanks to inherited money. Browsing his comments and observations is like sitting down with him in his parlor, over an aperitif. "A superhuman will is needed in order to write," he said, "and I am only a man." But not just a man: "I am a man-pen," he added. "I feel through the pen, because of the pen." But what he felt was hopelessly inadequate, for (he said, sighing), "Human language is like a cr...

        Then there was a week in October of '77 during which my search for employment took me to Germany. An advertisement in the International Herald Tribune announced an employment opportunity. It was not for the secretary-generalship of the United Nations or the command of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but rather—more appropriately for my qualifications, such as they were (and weren’t)—for an English teacher at the Opel car plant in Russelsheim, Germany, near Frankfurt/Main. Payment i...

Memories long unvisited can startle with their freshness and vividness–and their resuscitated aromas, the fastest time machine being, of course, the sense of smell. A recent visit on a rainy day to a local Austin coffee shop, for example, and its attendant mingled odors of roasted coffee and damp streets, and a whiff of diesel fumes from an adjacent parking lot, brought into ever-sharper mnemonic focus a) Europe; b) France; and c), with that precise olfactory combination, a visit to diese...

In that year (1977) I traveled as much as I could around France. Traveling was my escape from myself, as for most travelers. With what I saved from my teaching I went on a grand old vinous ramble down France’s Routes du Vin with the spirits of Gargantua and Pantagruel and enough varieties of Burgundy and Bourgeuil and Vouvray and sundry vins de table to make me ...

Of Logan Pearsall Smith (1865-1946), American-born English critic and essayist, author of the forgotten memoir Unforgotten Years and Trivia, a collection of aphorisms, the art historian Lord Clark waspishly wrote, "His tall frame, hunched up, with head thrust forward like a bird, was balanced unsteadily on vestigial legs." Vestigial they may have been, but those ...

  In my five-and-a-bit years in the British Isles I’d let my Frenchness (or Swiss-Frenchness) slip a bit. But the ferry that took me from the shores of Blighty docked in Calais on a windy day in March, under clouds whipped across patches of royal Artois blue. There must have been a stray whiff of Gauloise in the air, and there were Renaults and Citroens on quay...

A new John Banville novel is as great a pleasure as a new Nabokov once was. Banville is Nabokov's stylistic heir; he's the greatest living artist of English prose. I'm delightedly immersed in The Infinities, his latest, whose conceit is that the gods of Olympus have never gone away but watch over us yet; the novel is narrated by one of them, Hermes. In the hands of a lesser artist this would be an irritating affectation, but Banville is a greater, not a lesser, artist. It works.

I pop two ...

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) verged on–indeed, occasionally fell into–sentimentality in his work (Kidnapped, Treasure Island, The Master of Ballantrae. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde), but without him my experience of reading, as a boy, would have been much poorer, and his verse always sang to me.

My House

My house, I say. But hark to the sunny doves  

That make my roof the arena of their loves,  

That gyre about the gable all day long  

And fill the chimneys with their murm...

Thoughts and memories of England dominate. And where there's England, there's Thomas Hardy. God willing, there'll always be both.

The Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

H...

By the time I’d been down and nearly out in London for four or five months I was rejected everywhere I applied for employment. Indeed, my lifelong talent for harvesting rejections in the face of all odds took wing during my year in London. Job hunting went from ludicrous to impossible. When I complained, my landlord pointed out that I dressed like an out-of-work 1920s-era socialist: baggy corduroys, faded tunic, and scuffed boots, and that this would inevitably dim my luster, except possi...

Boston Review, which has been my refuge, my soapbox, and my part-time employer for the past 10 years, will publish next month an essay of mine on Arthur Koestler–or, more precisely, an essay of mine on Michael Scammell's biography of Koestler, the reading of which reignited my interest in the great Anglo-Hungarian polymath, whom I revered during my youth. The Scammell bio has been widely reviewed–here, by Christopher Hitchens–and none of the reviewers has failed to observe that Koestl...

       My first London lodging was in an attic in the far suburb of Friern Barnet, an hour’s tube ride north of Charing Cross on the Northern Line. The attic was in a redbrick semidetached house rented by three young men from Scotland, of whom only one, some kind of economist or higher accountant, was willing to put me up, he being the only one I knew. The other two were hash-smoking pop musicians and ungenerous chaps of decidedly narrow disposition. I was, therefore, enjoined to secrecy,...

To compliment yesterday's portrait of the Nabokovs, here's one of Aleksandr and Natalya Solzhenitsyn outside the general store in Cavendish, Vermont, in the late '70s. This photo gives the lie to the story that AS never mingled with the locals; in fact, during his 18 years in Cavendish, he was frequently seen at the general store or the post office, and took part in at least one town meeting. But his English was shaky, which restricted his sociability. Later on, his sons, who grew up as Ame...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

“Chairman Mao, WHO LED CHINA TO CHAOS AND GLORY, is Dead at 82.”

        So thunders The Thunderer. It is Wednesday, September 10, 1976. Imagine the calendar pages spinning backwards, as in a 1940s film noir. Your time machine deposits yo...

         Samuel Beckett lived much of his life among the intellectuals of Paris's Latin Quarter, almost all of whom were on the political left, and who for the most part assumed Beckett to be, too. Such is the myopia of the politically credulous. Not much effort would have been required to ascertain that in both his work and his life Beckett lived as if in a fortress, overlooking the world and apart from it. He observed, but did not emulate, those around him, and disdained their beliefs and...

             Back in Edinburgh for my final year, at first I avoided all pubs and spent a great deal of time in the university library and the National Library of Scotland, but instead of attending to my course books I was distracted by memories of a girl I'd met over the summer and disturbing reading like Gogol’s Nose and M. R. James’s ghost stories and the original London Times dispatches from Waterloo and other finds beyond measure, including Arthur Machen and Algernon Blackwood; I e...

There is only one admirable form of the imagination: the imagination that is so intense that it creates a new reality, that makes things happen.

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         When I went home from Edinburgh to visit my mother it was to a different room in a different house, and even a different country; for her home was no longer in Switzerland, but across the border, in France. Subsequent to a series of rent hikes by greedy landlords, she and old Pete Toy had at last moved out of the "English" villa on Chemin Bonvent in Geneva, with its sheep field and ambivalent neighbors and purple mountains’ majesty, and into an o...

My great ambition is to write a funny book; but, as you know, it’s the most difficult thing of all.

                                                         Alberto Moravia

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

    Greater fame than Dracula's crowned the career of another eccentric Edinburgh retailer, Madame Doubtfire, owner of a used-clothing shop on Great King Street in the New Town that doubled or tripled as a bookstore and general junk depot. Madame D., real name Annabella Coutts, was one of Edinburgh’s star turns. Bill and I laughed at her on our way home from the pub and she cackled back at us like an enormous dotty hen. She inspired the local writer A...

         "Trouble is, Kevin’s seen his fair share of movie air disasters."

         And not much else; but that's about to change. Kevin is Kevin Quinn, the protagonist of James Hynes's new novel Next. Kevin's nothing special. He's not a bad fellow, but not particularly good, either. He's bored with his life in Ann Arbor, Michigan, so he's flown down to Austin for a one-day job interview, but arrives hours early. Meanwhile we wander with him around Texas's capital which, in...

Philip Hensher reminds us of literature's advantages over film, with Bleak House as case in point:

"It isn't, moreover, just a question of leaving out wonderful little corners of plot, or irresistible characters. It's really a matter of not doing a tenth of the things a book does. A book can switch into historical narration, dense description, authorial comment. It can, as Bleak House does, alternate between past tense and present tense–it's an extraordinarily sinister moment when Richar...

I’ve been enjoying the rueful, humorous, and melancholy writing of Richard Ford. I first read The Sportswriter, whose title, evocative to me of hollow heartiness, low levels of culture, and rampant provincialism, had put me off for years, until I reminded myself that you can write about anything as long as you do it well—and I discovered that Ford does it very well, and that the fact of the main character’s being a sportswriter is of no more importance than is Leopold Bloom’s being an...

Another insight from the sage Czech in exile.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    The novelist destroys the house of h...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            Dracula’s was where–in the form of several out-of-print volumes in a box–I first came upon that most eccentric of immortals, John Cowper Powys, “Old Earth Man,” Prester John of the Welsh Mountains. The mere mention of the mad old bugger’s name brings peace to my soul. I'm devoted to the man now, but back then, like most people, I’d never heard of him. He’s an acquired taste, and for a minority at that, but once sampled he...

            Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         Dark and capacious as its namesake’s castle, Dracula's occupied two gloomy floors in a Georgian building across the street from Tariq’s Indo-Pak Restaurant and conveniently just down from the Meadow Bar, our local when on campus, and, less conveniently, the French Department, where most of the lectures I was supposed to attend (but usually didn’t) took place, finding myself distracted en route by Tariq’s or the M...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            At Edinburgh, like Boswell, we drank deep and now and then studied hard and even wrote a bit. We were indebted to politics, especially Scottish Nationalism and old-line Clydeside socialism, both primarily for romantic reasons—Rob Roy and The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists—but we were more receptive to culture and world affairs, so pub talk was relatively elevated when we were sober, and when we were drunk fights could and did b...

    Thanks to impending fiançailles between Victor, the Registrar at the University of Ulster (and fellow-member of the “Gaelic Club”) and Aisling, a young lady in the registrar’s office at the University of Edinburgh, as well as to some serious liquid bribery of Victor by me at the Harbour Bar and elsewhere, the formalities of transferring my files from one little-known brand-new institution of higher learning in the wilds of Ireland’s black North to one of the most august and an...

I am too firm in consciousness of the marvelous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural.

                                                                                                Joseph Conrad

Georges Haldas (b. 1917), a French-Swiss writer, has written more than sixty works of fiction, poetry, and criticism in his long life. His main subject has always been Geneva, his city (and once mine). I've read a number of his books, which are, unfortunately, unavailable in English, as far as I know. But if you can read French at all, you'll enjoy them. He brilliantly evokes the sounds and smells of the city: Boulevard des Philosophes; Chronique de la Rue Saint-Ours; La Légende des Cafés...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         So walking became my bond with the external, eternal, earth-redolent Ireland. But there was the other, the Ireland of people. Still the naïve outsider, when neither walking nor attending lectures I became an habitué of the few local bars of any distinction, less so now of the Harbour in Portrush, whose literary milieu was of no interest to my new, unliterary companions, and in some of these pubs I became so ill-advisedly outspoken, metamor...

Well into his maturity, the great English poet Robert Browning (1812-1889), for all his erudition, was unacquainted with vulgar slang. Under the impression that a "twat" was a nun’s headgear, he misused the word in a spectacularly naive fashion in his verse play  Pippa Passes (best known for the line "God's in His heaven, all's right with the world"):

Then, owls and bats,
Cowls and twats,
Monks and nuns, in a cloister’s moods
Adjourn to the oak-stump pantry!

When asked why, later ...

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

Marshal Ferdinand Foch, under whose dashing command the French and their Allies defeated the Germans in WWI, had panache. During the second battle of the Marne in 1918, in response to fear-mongering reports from the front, he sent the following telegram:

My center is giving way, my right is in retreat; situation excellent. I am attacking.

And, of course, like his fellow Gascons D’Artagnan and Cyrano de Bergerac, one quality he possessed in abundance was audacity: “L’audace, toujours l...

Of all the arts, sculpture is the most accessible but the least prized. Most people go right on by: oh, just another general on horseback or long-dead poet. But surely it's nothing short of miraculous to elicit from solid rock (or molten bronze) the myriad subtleties of human expression or the precise fall of a garment. I was reminded of this the other day when reading an article on Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741-1828), the great French sculptor whose life straddled France's greatest upheavals: ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's cont'd.

     That first term I lived in a narrow attic room in the Seaview Hotel in Portrush, Co. Antrim, about ten miles from the university campus, with a view through a tiny window of red-brick Victorian buttresses, the gray northern sea and, on clear days, of the long low shank of Inishowen Head in Co. Donegal. Portrush was then famous throughout Ireland as a slightly rundown family holiday resort, a smaller, second-rate version of Blackpool, if anything mor...

Kipling believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.

                                                Evelyn Waugh

Colour, old man, is what, au fond, clinches a creed. Colour and the light of God behind it.

                                                                          Rudyard Kipling, after visiting Chartres

As a writer, I am not of the minimalist school. On the contrary, I tend toward the prolix. But I hope I have enough of an innate sense of the structure and limitations of language to avoid overwhelming--or, worse, boring--my readers. A good writer needs an instinctive feel for honesty in his writing. John McGahern had this. He never overwhelmed; he was unsparingly spare, even austere, more of a word-painter, adding a daub here, wiping away a stroke there, than a word-musician orchestrating ...

The writer is driven by his own vocation to be a Protestant in a Catholic society, a Catholic in a Protestant one, to see the virtues of the Capitalist in a Communist society, of the Communist in a Capitalist State.

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else. It is a state of mind as well as an actual country.

                            Edna O'Brien

At last...Ireland! (How suitable to re-connect with the Ireland of my youth on St. Patrick's Day.) Well, technically, yes, but it was actually Northern Ireland I ended up in. I worked that out from the name of the institution that accepted me as a student: the University of Ulster....

Beannachtaí na Feile Pádraig oraibh go leir.

Warmest greetings to all on St. Patrick’s Day.

The harp that once through Tara’s hall

The sound of music shed,

Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls,

As if that soul were fled.

           Thomas Moore (1779-1852)

What with certain Middle Eastern rulers calling for holy war against Switzerland, and a general and quite unusual Swiss jitteriness about themselves and their future, I felt a nostalgic fondness for the place and turned to memories of my own Swiss past and French-Swiss scribblers largely unknown beyond the Confederation’s borders: the late Jacques Chessex (L’Ogre) and his predecessors, Guy de Pourtalès (La Peche Miraculeuse), and C. F. Ramuz (Derborance). The intensity of these Swiss w...

[Drink] unlocks secrets, bids hopes be fulfilled, thrusts the coward onto the battle-field, takes the load from anxious hearts. The flowing bowl — whom has it not made eloquent? Whom has it not made free even amidst pinching poverty? 

My task is to chronicle those little daily lacerations upon the spirit.                                      Anthony Trollope (1815-1882)

 Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

          White, blue; blue, white. Like her flag and the original cover of Ulysses. The prism-sharp light of Greece. Blindingly white, from the dark and increasingly fetid shelter of my train compartment, were the boxy houses, porcelain-blue the sky. Intimidated by the sudden foreignness of everything, exhausted from three days on the Yugoslav horror express, and homesick for our overgrown garden, old Stinko II, and Pete Toy, I lugged my steamer...

Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch.

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.                                                                                                                                   The train journey itself, which took three days and three nights from Lausanne to Athens (via Milan, Trieste, Zagreb, Belgrade, Skopje, and Salonika), and my subsequent sojourn in Greece, introduced me to the most extreme form of two sensations: loneliness and nost...

Beware the writer who sets himself or herself up as the voice of a nation. This includes nations of race, gender, sexual orientation, elective affinity. . . The New Behalfism demands uplift, accentuates the positive, offers stirring moral instruction. It abhors the tragic sense of life. Seeing literature as inescapably political, it substitutes political values for literary ones. It is the murderer of thought.

                                           ...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Crete had come as part of my all-in-one wanderjahr in Greece. A car trip with two schoolmates through Italy and Greece in the summer after graduation had revived my juvenile Hellenism and turned me into a proto-Hellene. I’d been immersing myself in the bleak and blistering books of Nikos Kazantzakis: Zorba, Report to Greco, The Last Temptation of Christ, Saint Francis, and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, later parsed for me in Athens by a friend of ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

            I glimpsed the wilderness again in Crete. I was at the foot of Mt. Ida, after about two hours’ gut-churning trundle in an old bus from Knossos, the restored Minoan palace just outside Heraklion. It was a hot morning in September 1970, forty summers and a thousand years ago. I was looking for the cave on Mt. Ida in which, it was said (by the D’Aulaires and others), Zeus was born to the goddess Rhea. Coincidentally, in that very sa...

As a young would-be writer and budding professional Irishman, I was infatuated with The Ginger Man, the comic masterpiece by Irish-American maestro J. P. Donleavy. I must have read it five times or more, enraptured by its picaresqueness and the absurd tenacity of the hero, Sebastian Dangerfield. Much of the book's influence trickled into my own Killoyle (which had several midwives: Donleavy, Flann O'Brien, Kingsley Amis, Laurence Sterne) ... I've always admired old J.P., not only for his ta...

While attending the University of Ulster I lived for a year in the pleasant seaside town of Portstewart on the northern coast of Northern Ireland, across from Co. Donegal in the Republic (placing the northernmost point of Ireland in the South: how very Irish). The Scottish islands of Eigg, Mull, and Rhum were visible on the horizon on clear days. The picture above shows the town in the 1960s; it had changed little when I arrived in 1971. I shared a bungalow with three Catholic rebels, one o...

Bohumil Hrabal used to say that he drew his worldview from a dry cleaner's slip he came across in Prague, which warned clients "Some stains can only be removed by the destruction of the material itself." Unknown until he was in his fifties, banned on and off by the Communists, Hrabal had ample opportunity to hone his sense of life's absurdity, a perspective on life specialized in by the Czechs and the Irish (or perhaps I should say the Slavs and the Celts). Another shrewd observation from ...

A new, humorless generation is now arising

It takes in deadly earnest all we received with laughter.

I imagine the earth when I am no more:

Nothing happens, no loss, it's still a strange pageant,

Women's dresses, dewy lilacs, a song in the valley.

Yet the books will be there on the shelves, well born,

Derived from people, but also from radiance, heights.

                                    Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004)

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.

Many a man may look respectable, and yet be able to hide at will behind a spiral staircase.

                        P. G. Wodehouse

        We had the fat years, and then Dad’s hubris caught up with him and we had the lean ones. And exactly what does the hubris of an itinerant electronic-bell salesman consist of? Well, I’ll tell you. It consists of not being satisfied with a job that takes you one week to Trondheim and the next to Venic...

To have the clarity of mind and wit of Voltaire, along with his wealth, and to live where and how he did, would be heaven enough for me.

After youth comes old age; after happiness, unhappiness, and vice versa; nobody can be healthy and cheerful all their lives... you have to be ready for anything. You just have to do your duty as best as you can.

                                                        Anton Chekhov (1860-1904)

Bruges la Morte, or Bruges the Dead, a novel published in 1892 by the Belgian Symbolist Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898; photo above), is the story of a grief-stricken widower, Hugues Viane, who travels to the then-decaying Belgian inland port city of Bruges (now a flourishing tourist attraction) and develops an obsession there with a local danseuse who is, he thinks, the spitting image of his dead wife. The narrative culminates in a deranged murder. Sound a bit familiar, Hitchcock fans? Well,...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         By way of contrast to Russia, it was two years later, in the sands of the Sahara, or at least in that desert’s gravelly outcroppings, where, as previously noted, I caught one of my periodic glimpses of true wilderness. I was traveling in the south of Tunisia with another school group, friends from Geneva. We were on a malodorous bus on a narrowing ill-paved road south of the dusty and dreary town of Sousse. The bus stopped for refueling ...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.    

Travels and friends were inextricably linked, in those early years. With Paul I took another trip, a few years later, when he was old enough to be driving his dad’s Citroen GS: we went to Zurich for a dirty weekend (yes! Zurich!!), but the less said about that the better. Paul went on to become a beacon and pundit, whereas my light has remained firmly hidden under many bushels.

     Around the same time, as a star member of the Ecolint Rus...

The Indian author G. V. Desani may be a footnote in the annals of world literature, but what a footnote! He was the author of All About H. Hatterr, one of the most original, rambunctious, incandescent, and just plain bizarre novels ever written, a delirious and startling debut–but his debut was his end, for he never again produced a novel. Salman Rushdie said of him, "If Narayan is India's [Samuel] Richardson, then Desani is his Shandean other. Hatterr's dazzling, puzzling, leaping prose ...

Among British Prime Ministers, Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881), who was also a novelist (Sybil, or The Two Nations; Vivian Grey; Tancred, or The New Crusade; etc.), ranks second only to Winston Churchill in the quality and variety of his wit. When ordered in the House [of Commons] to withdraw his declaration that half of the cabinet were asses, Disraeli replied, `Mr. Speaker, I withdraw. Half the cabinet are not asses.'" Assiduous in his attendance to the business of the House, he commented, ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

My first journey unsupervised by adults took place when I was 14, and it came about quite spontaneously. Early one ordinary Saturday morning I met Paul,[1] an Ecolint schoolmate, in downtown Geneva. We wandered about a bit, then took the F bus across the French border to Ferney-Voltaire, quondam home town of the eponymous philosophe, and wandered about there for awhile, enjoying the French-small-town feeling and having a tartine or thé citron. Then, after...

When Beethoven was in a bad mood and no one could go near him, a little girl named Katherina Fröhlich used to be sent to him with his favorite newspaper, the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. Cheerful by name ("fröhlich" = "cheerful"), cheerful by nature, young Kathie usually succeeded in placating the irascible genius. She later became quite prominent as the founder of the Schwestern-Fröhlich-Stiftung, an organization whose aim was to advance the arts and sciences (in those days, consider...

Shoplifting at Dracula’s, cont’d.        

    It occurred to me the other day while watching a TV program about the doomed 1845 Franklin expedition to the Arctic wilderness that I’d never actually been in the wilderness—now that, then, was true wilderness, as Franklin and those poor bastards found out soon enough—but that I’d been near it a few times: in Crete, in Canada, in Tunisia, in northern Scotland, and in Iceland. I then went to on to reflect, in my egotistical fashion, ho...

I always enjoy the bold, perceptive, and humorous ruminations of John Derbyshire, Anglo-American philosopher, novelist, essayist, and mathematician, affectionately known throughout the blogosphere as "Derb." Brought up in the dying light of once-great England and her once-great education system, undeterred by convention or political correctness, but inspired by the examples set by the likes of Dr. Johnson, Baruch Spinoza, and George Orwell, he looks at things sub specie aeternitatis, which ...

As Toyota stumbles through its worst patch ever, with new setbacks popping up every day–yesterday it was the brakes on the Prius, today it's the steering on Camrys–it's worth a look back at the early days of the Japanese giant's conquest of America's hearts, minds, and car lots, courtesy of John Updike's Rabbit is Rich (hat tip: Nigeness):

"Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Spring Motors display room watching the traffic go ...

Shoplifting at Dracula's, cont'd.

         Alone with M. Achkar in the sparsely-populated Ecolint Pantheon of Teaching Excellence we find my history teacher, Mr. McKean-Taylor, an Anglicized Scot. McKean-Taylor was no teacher, actually, but masqueraded as one. He was a raconteur who enjoyed the diversions of history and was stimulated by young minds, white Valais wine, and being on the Continent instead of at some damp comprehensive back home in Blighty. He was plump, and he dra...

Hans Koning, born Hans Koningsberger in Amsterdam in 1921, was a sergeant in the British Army during World War II. In 1951 he came to the United States from the chaos of ex-Dutch Indonesia and became an outstanding novelist and reporter. I reviewed one of his best novels, Zeeland, in 2002. Koning was always quirky, humorous, and observant, and he spent his life on that margin of respectability where a writer must dwell. He wrote me a courteous letter thanking me for my review, and hoped, ...