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Post by casimira on Aug 20, 2020 12:42:26 GMT
As I was reading the previous posts about two books mentioned and recommended here I realized that there was/is some confusion about the book I am about to embark on reading and another book also discussed. The book I am buying is The Florios of Sicily.Now, (where my confusion came to light), it appears that Island of the Mad is the book I think I gave the impression I was buying. Now with that being clear, I have two books to look forward to reading as I am going to the bookstore today to pick up the Florios book and am going to inquire about the availability of the other. Phew! Obviously I wasn't paying close enough attention to what was posted. (it wouldn't be the first time)
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 20, 2020 16:15:02 GMT
I very rarely read US literature so am not so negative about it. If the subject or theme has been done to death, I was not aware of it, so was able to enjoy the book. Although indeed there are some of the things you mention in it, even though there is very little of the young woman's reactions to the old woman's stuff. It really is much more the story of the old woman. So if you have read other books like it, I won't tell you to, unless you can get it from a library. But I know what you mean about 3-named authors. Sorry ~ I didn't mean to imply that I'm negative about all US literature. But there is now a monster part of publishing marketed as "women's literature" -- or sometimes not so labeled, thus no warning for the wary. All of the authors of that genre are not American, of course, but in trolling through Amazon's offerings, I get exposed to lots of it. Many of the books sound appealing because of the historical backgrounds, but clicking on the descriptions is what alerted me to this crowded trend. Thank you for getting what I mean about the three-named authors! Most people either give a snort of laughter or look blank when I mention it. I am going to the bookstore today to pick up the Florios book and am going to inquire about the availability of the other. Well, before you ask for the Island of the Mad, be sure you have the right one. Look back at the post to see about possible confusion on the author's name.
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Post by rikita on Aug 21, 2020 21:39:55 GMT
what is the problem with authors with three names? (i guess i fall into the blank look category)
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Post by rikita on Aug 21, 2020 21:41:18 GMT
still not much time to read, but now listening to the audio book of the original book behind the tv show orange is the new black (because i recently finished watching the show and was interested to see how much in it was from the book and how much was invented for the show)
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 21, 2020 22:00:49 GMT
Rikita, it often seems that women authors with three names (first name, maiden name, & last name) write sentimental or "cozy" sorts of books and men authors with three names (first name, full middle name, last name) seem to be more likely to write stuffy books or to take themselves way too seriously.
There are of course exceptions to this "rule".
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Post by Kimby on Aug 21, 2020 23:28:05 GMT
Men with three names tend to be killers: John Wayne Gacy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Mark David Chapman, Robert Lee Yates, James Earl Ray...
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2020 1:10:11 GMT
Actually, that's not true, since almost everyone -- in our culture, anyway -- has three names. I can't remember the exact quote, but I think it was in his novel Libra that Don Delillo says something on the order of you have get famous for something in order to be granted all of your names.
Lee Oswald only became universally known as Lee Harvey Oswald after the assassination of famous president John Fitzgerald Kennedy. James Earl Ray was known as James before allegedly killing the man known to his friends as Mike King.
The three-name thing for the famous isn't universal either, as some names have sticking power without the pomp of the middle name -- Gary Gilmore, for instance.
Bonus factoid: Leonardo DiCaprio's middle name is Wilhelm.
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Post by Kimby on Aug 22, 2020 4:41:10 GMT
Bixa, it was said somewhat tongue in cheek.
Most of us have two names that are used. It’s only when we get in trouble that all our names are used.
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Post by patricklondon on Aug 22, 2020 11:34:24 GMT
Most of us have two names that are used. It’s only when we get in trouble that all our names are used. That reminds me that one of my great-aunts used to tease her bossy older sister off her high horse by using all her names: 'Now then, Theodora Sarah Violet!"
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Post by casimira on Aug 22, 2020 12:28:33 GMT
The three name topic reminds me of a time in the 1990's when our City Council had three women representing the different districts where each of them resided. All three women had three names and a lot of people used to get them mixed up. At one point, when a friend of ours corrected someone that they had the wrong council members name he threw up his hands and said "dammit, they're all hyphenates, I can't keep them straight in my head!"
Moving along here. I picked up my copy of The Florios of Sicily and ordered Island of the Mad (making sure I ordered the correct one). I am looking forward to the reading of both these tomes. My husband in the meantime has embarked upon reading The Decameron. So, between the two of us, we should both be well versed in the historic details of different regions and different eras in Italian culture etc.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 22, 2020 16:42:28 GMT
T. is reading The Decameron! That's ambitious. You may enjoy this article. He might as well, although probably more after he's read the book: www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/11/11/renaissance-man-4Casimira, I finally finished Island of the Mad last night and am very much looking forward to discussing it with you whenever you read it. It sort of ended abruptly, but not in a way I can fault. It is so strange and dreamlike that I know the ending makes sense, but I simply haven't grasped it yet. You should like The Florios, which combines excellent story telling with history.
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Post by casimira on Aug 22, 2020 18:44:25 GMT
COOL , I will bring it to his attention. And, I look forward to my new reads and thank you again for your recommendations.
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Post by whatagain on Aug 25, 2020 11:59:02 GMT
Reading the bible.
The main character gets angry quite fast and destroys his job several times in the beginning, hoping He gets nicer with time ...
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 25, 2020 17:07:00 GMT
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Post by cheerypeabrain on Aug 25, 2020 17:14:18 GMT
The Black Song by Anthony Ryan
Also reading the Sarah Raven Autumn catalogue.....lots of tempting plants to buy...
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Post by kerouac2 on Aug 25, 2020 18:47:47 GMT
They mentioned on the news tonight that thanks to covid-19, sales in bookstores have increased 20% (in spite of internet sales). People started reading again during confinement, and they are continuing to do so.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 26, 2020 17:13:36 GMT
We have discussed Elena Ferrante and her books so much on here that I thought she had her own thread, but no. Anyway, the reason I'm bringing her up (like a hairball) is that I thought this profile of the woman who translates her books was well-written and fascinating: www.nytimes.com/2020/08/21/books/elena-ferrante-lying-life-of-adults-ann-goldstein-translator.htmlIf the NYTimes paywall prevents you from opening the link, here is the story ~ {Spoiler}Reading Elena Ferrante in English? You’re Also Reading Ann Goldstein
The self-effacing translator worked with the “My Brilliant Friend” author again for her latest book, “The Lying Life of Adults.”
By Joumana Khatib Aug. 21, 2020
Millions of readers in thrall to Elena Ferrante, the secretive and wildly popular Italian novelist, must accept certain conditions.
They won’t be meeting her, virtually or in-person, at any sort of book signing or literary festival. Her stories will be rooted in Italy, and often focus on women trying to tame the chaos of their lives through writing.
And if they are reading Ferrante’s books in English, they are absorbing, whether they realize it or not, the nimble translation work of Ann Goldstein.
Goldstein has never met Ferrante and communicates with her through her publisher, but she has become one of the best known and most celebrated literary translators in the world as a result of her work on “My Brilliant Friend” and the rest of the author’s Neapolitan quartet. In many ways, their relationship is reciprocal: While Italian readers have known Ferrante for years, it was the translation of her books into English and other languages that catapulted her to international fame.
Their collaboration will come into view again next month when Ferrante’s latest novel, “The Lying Life of Adults,” is released across the world on Sept. 1. It was previously slated for June 9, but the publishers delayed it because of the coronavirus pandemic. (Netflix is planning to adapt the novel into an original series.)
ImageElena Ferrante’s book, “The Lying Life of Adults,” comes out in English and other languages next month. Elena Ferrante’s book, “The Lying Life of Adults,” comes out in English and other languages next month.Credit...Europa Editions Like several of Ferrante’s other books, “The Lying Life of Adults” is set in Naples. It follows the unraveling of an adolescent, Giovanna, after she overhears her father say that she is becoming ugly like her fearsome aunt, Vittoria. Giovanna’s quest to meet her aunt leads her through a grittier part of the city, revealing unsavory family truths along the way.
“It was a surprising book,” Goldstein said in a Zoom interview from her downtown Manhattan home. “It was such a different view of Naples, from such a different point of view both in terms of class and social life, and of having a teenage narrator.”
She added: “I just hope that I got it right.”
That humility was a hallmark of her approach as the head of The New Yorker’s copy desk. Goldstein worked at the magazine for over 40 years, steadfastly defending its diereses, “which” and “that” rules and other grammatical diktats that “writers get cranky about,” she said.
But the most essential part of the job was to make a writer sound as much like him or herself as possible, she said. “The writers I edited were the great writers. I was really lucky.”
After Janet Malcolm’s husband and editor, Gardner Botsford, died in 2004, Goldstein took over as her editor. “I could not have wished for a better successor,” Malcolm wrote in an email. “Ann’s most outstanding trait — apart from her beautiful work — is her modesty. She is known for her reticence and self-effacement.”
In the mid-1980s, Goldstein and a few New Yorker colleagues formed an evening class to learn Italian. (“Enlightened employers used to pay for classes,” she said.) Goldstein had been enchanted by Dante in college and wanted to read him in his original language. The group spent a year each on “Inferno,” “Purgatory” and “Paradise.”
“Normally people read ‘Inferno’ and that’s all, but it’s worth seeing it through to ‘Paradise,’” Goldstein said. “You deserve it.”
She began translating a few years later, starting with Aldo Buzzi’s short story “Chekhov in Sondrio,” and moving on to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Petrolio,” “a totally crazy book” with complicated Italian that, according to her, hardly anyone has read in either language. Before retiring from The New Yorker in 2017, Goldstein did all her translations at night or over weekends and vacations.
“I’m willing to try anything,” she said of the work she’s drawn to. “I don’t think it’s necessary to have an affinity for the writer, but with Ferrante, I do.”
Image “It was a surprising book,” Ann Goldstein said of “The Lying Life of Adults.” “It was such a different view of Naples, from such a different point of view both in terms of class and social life, and of having a teenage narrator.” “It was a surprising book,” Ann Goldstein said of “The Lying Life of Adults.” “It was such a different view of Naples, from such a different point of view both in terms of class and social life, and of having a teenage narrator.”Credit...September Dawn Bottoms/The New York Times Europa Editions, Ferrante’s U.S. publisher, declined to make the author available for an interview. “Elena Ferrante” is a pseudonym, and while there has been speculation about her identity, she has never revealed herself publicly. Ferrante’s Italian publisher, Edizioni E/O, mediates her correspondence with Goldstein.
Their working relationship goes back to 2004, before “My Brilliant Friend,” when Goldstein translated “The Days of Abandonment,” Ferrante’s first book with Europa. Goldstein, one of a handful of people invited to submit a sample translation, got the job over — among others — Europa’s editor in chief, Michael Reynolds.
Goldstein describes herself as a highly literal translator, an approach that serves Ferrante’s idiosyncratic prose well, Reynolds said. “It takes a great deal of humility and a great deal of courage to represent so closely what an author wrote in the original language.”
One of the reasons for Ferrante’s success in English “is the degree to which the reader feels involved and engaged,” he added. “Ann’s style of translation helps that.”
Ferrante is known for her long, emotive sentences, and in Goldstein’s translation of “The Lying Life of Adults,” that comes through even in the first paragraph: “Everything — the spaces of Naples, the blue light of a frigid February, those words — remained fixed. But I slipped away, and am still slipping away, within these lines that are intended to give me a story, while in fact I am nothing, nothing of my own, nothing that has really begun or really been brought to completion.”
Mary Norris, a former longtime copy editor at The New Yorker, worked with Goldstein for decades. “The virtues of a copy editor served her well as a translator,” Norris said. “She disappears, in a sense. In the way that a copy editor is a sieve for the writer and the language, the same is true of a translator.”
But Norris came to see later that “translating is not just like copy editing,” she said. “It also involves being a writer. Ann gives that part of herself to it.”
While she is most closely associated with Ferrante, Goldstein has translated books by Elsa Morante and Giacomo Leopardi, as well as Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2017 collection of essays, “In Other Words,” which the author wrote in Italian. Goldstein also edited and contributed to the 2015 translation of “The Complete Works of Primo Levi,” an enormous project involving translations by several writers, including Jenny McPhee.
“She’d always say, ‘I’m not a writer, I’m not creative,’ but there’s a certain creativity you really need, and she has it even if she doesn’t own it,” McPhee said.
Of the Ferrante novels, McPhee added: “Ann is all over those books … If somebody else had done it, it may have never taken off.”
The relationship between Goldstein and Ferrante resembles the one between Lenù and Lila, the main characters of the Neapolitan quartet. “Those are books about who’s doing the narrating and the dichotomous relationship between two women — who’s out front and who’s behind, who’s left and who’s stayed, who’s the brilliant friend and who isn’t — and I think that has repeated itself in the relationship between author and translator,” Reynolds said.
For Goldstein, who has remained in New York City through the pandemic, it has been a strange time to be promoting a book. She is keeping busy with more translation work and still meeting with her fellow Italian students, after all these years, over Zoom.
“The idea was to read Dante,” she said, “and here we are, reading Dante again.”
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Post by htmb on Aug 26, 2020 23:42:22 GMT
Thanks for this, Bixa. I found the article very interesting.
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Post by bixaorellana on Aug 27, 2020 3:14:56 GMT
Thanks! I was so pleased to find such a graceful, well-done piece in the daily newspaper.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 9, 2020 4:39:51 GMT
I finished reading Lighthouse Island last night. When I saw I only had three pages left I was tempted to stop, just so I would have a little bit more of this marvelous, brilliant book to look forward to. My introduction to Jiles was Enemy Women, a book with a plot that pulled me in and immersed me in a fully realized world while eventually amping up the emotional suspense almost to the breaking point. Later, I was drawn to News of the World because I'd just taken a trip with my sister along the same route followed by the characters in that book. As with Enemy Women, it was a book I shared and pressed on other readers. And now I'm frustrated as all get-out because I loved, absolutely loved Lighthouse Island so much, but realize, especially after reading other reviews, that it is not everyones cup of tea. I do hope that those who love good writing and who are willing to go where an excellent author takes them will give this book a chance even if they claim they don't like futuristic or dystopian novels. All novels are fantasy to a degree, so if a proven writer of boundless imagination and exquisitely balanced prose offers us something different, it is surely worth at least using the "look inside" feature on Amazon before spurning the book. I am usually a fast reader, but I slowed myself down in order to savor how completely the world of the novel was created, in order to get inside the main character, and also because I was caught again and again by a turn of phrase, a description, or the simple beauty of a sentence. This is now in that short list of all-time favorites that I can look forward to reading and enjoying again.
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Post by bjd on Sept 9, 2020 6:07:05 GMT
I just finished a re-read of Bill Bryson's The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,about growing up in Iowa in the 1950s. Even though there were huge differences in Des Moines, Iowa and Toronto, I could immediately identify with lots of what he said. Plus he is an amusing writer.
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Post by bjd on Sept 24, 2020 19:08:00 GMT
Our new library opened 10 days ago -- nice new building, much longer opening hours, comfortable chairs, different areas for different ages and activities. I actually even found a few books in English, a couple of which I donated last year.
Among the English-language books, I took A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. Black and white photo on the cover, a "NY Times bestseller"... Well, it's awful. I just find it totally unreadable. It is supposed to start in 1922 and talks about an aristocrat so the language is pretentious. I read a few chapters, hoping it would improve, but it hasn't so it will soon return to the library.
I just had a look on goodreads and just about everybody was absolutely ecstatic about it -- except for a few curmudgeons like me.
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Post by bixaorellana on Sept 24, 2020 19:35:06 GMT
Thank you, Bjd!! I have looked at that book on Amazon over and over again, thinking to either get it for my mother &/or read it myself. Relying on my method of going directly to the 3-star reviews in tandem with the look-inside feature, I concluded that I would hate it. I do appreciate the corroboration from a trusted source!
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 7, 2020 17:11:45 GMT
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Post by bjd on Oct 22, 2020 17:13:01 GMT
Just finishing Middle England by Jonathan Coe. Since he uses contemporary political facts, it almost doesn't feel like a novel, but it is. Set mostly near Birmingham in the years 2012 to 2018. The split in ideas leading to Brexit.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 22, 2020 18:40:09 GMT
I'm reading The Mirror and the Light, the third in Hilary Mantel's trilogy on Thomas Cromwell. Obviously I like the other two a great deal, but I adore this one. It is the most magically immersive experience in that it takes you into a distant time, into the mind of the protagonist, and also carries you away with Mantel's flights of prose which are so good that I've re-read some of them two and three times.
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Post by casimira on Oct 23, 2020 13:54:51 GMT
I finished The Florios of Sicily and really, really loved it. Thank you Bixa! I have yet to start reading Island of the Mad but, it's on the list.
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Post by bixaorellana on Oct 23, 2020 14:29:12 GMT
Oh, good! It's a relief when someone likes a book I've recommended. Island of the Mad is one of those books you may have to be in the right mood to enjoy. It's different.
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Post by casimira on Oct 23, 2020 14:49:31 GMT
I somehow got that indication from you in your posts about it. That may be the reason I haven't launched into it yet. Literary intuition in some weird kind of way.
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Post by whatagain on Oct 24, 2020 8:36:02 GMT
I am rereading Vol de nuit, by Antoine de St Exupery. What a great book.
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