books II

This is the second part of a series about some of the books I forgot I had or thought I had lost, but was pleased to rediscover when I cleaned out a cupboard of old books. They are in no particular order. 

Cousin Bette by Honoré De Balzac

As with some of the titles in part 1, this is just good literature. I have the whole set of Balzac's series of novels, The Human Comedy, on kindle, and it contains a staggering number of novels, but it's good to have at least one of them in physical book form. 

Thus Spake Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche 

I've never been that interested in or drawn to Nietzsche. I found his ideology unappealing. But this book sounded interesting because it's mystical and literary. 

The English Translation of the Glorious Qur'an Translated by Mohammad Marmaduke Pickthall

Including this, I have 4 different English translations of the Qur'an, and 1 in the original Arabic, which I can't read, but it's good to have it because, actually, that's the real Qur'an. Islam isn't as accepting of translation as Christianity is. For a Christian, the Bible translated into English is still essentially the word of God. Yes, it's very worthwhile to study and learn the original languages - Hebrew, Greek, Latin - but it's not essential. But the Arabic words are an essential part of Islamic practice and teaching. 

I want to learn them all...Hebrew, Greek, Latin and Arabic, as well as modern languages, but I would probably prioritise Greek and Hebrew over Arabic, because the Bible is what I'm really interested in. 

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles

again - good literature. 

A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani 

This is a really well-written and respected account of Arabic civilisation from the earliest times until 2012. I haven't read the whole thing yet. I think I made it to about half way. 

The Untouchable by John Banville

Great literature. 

Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time by Joseph Frank (edited by Mary Petrusewicz) 

Even though this is an abridgement of Frank's 5 volume biography of Dostoevsky, it's still nearly a thousand pages long. It's one of the rare times that I think abridgement is a useful and valuable thing, because....it's still long. Also, Frank himself oversaw the process of abridgement, so it's kind of like a 6th book made by reconfiguring and condensing (in a good way) the other 5. Something I just discovered is that Frank writes in his preface that David Foster Wallace was the most perceptive reader of the first four volumes, and then he quotes from what Wallace said about them. 

The Words to Say It: An Autobiographical Novel by Marie Cardinal (tranlsated from French by Pat Goodheart) 

This is the true story of Marie Cardinal's traumatic childhood, then institutionalisation, then her escape after which she made her way to the home of her analyst. Then, over a period of years, with the help of her analyst - who used Freudian analysis - she was able to recover. 

....I've never really flipped through this book and read bits here and there but just now I did, and there was something very surprising....I had expected that Marie Cardinal would feel a kind of reverence for the analyst who helped her, and for his part he would treat her with compassion and sensitivity, but no....he's kind of harsh, and the way she talks about him is almost with a kind of contempt. Their arrangement is business-like. She doesn't seem to really admire him or feel any special bond. 

it's going to be interesting to read....psychoanalysis always seems kind of crude to me in both the sense of being rather crass and also lacking in rigour and precision....just not being a very bright idea. but then, I'm probably misjudging it. My favourite literary critics hold Freud in high regard, and after all, Freud is purportedly one of the most influential figures of the 20th century...one among a very few who decisively shaped human thought. Julia Kristeva is a practicing psychoanalyst and refers to or alludes to Freud's work frequently. Freud is central to Harold Bloom's theory of influence. He posits a link between the tropes writers use to evade literality (which, to a writer represents death) and Freud's mental mechanisms by which we evade death. And he goes into detail. It's not a general idea. He links particular tropes (irony, metonymy, etc) to particular psychic defences (repression, sublimation, etc) to particular 'revisionary ratios' (the six ways that Bloom devised to explain how writers revise/ misread/ overcome their precursors) to particular images (high and low, presence and absence, etc) in what he calls his 'map of misreading'. 

I will end this now and continue in part III, which will probably be the last part.