The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles spoke this at the beginning of Bertolucci's
The Sheltering SkyBecause we don't know when we will die,
we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well.
Yet everything happens only a certain number of times,
and a very small number really.
How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it.
Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that.
How many more times will you watch the full moon rise?
Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.'
It came up in another context, but in my mind it connects perfectly with the sudden realisation a couple of days ago, the heart rate of de Mille, my cat, was almost twice as fast as mine. Try it! Just put your hand on the rib cage of your dog, cat, rabbit, hamster.
The Man in The white Suit
This much I can remember : a clever man recently discovered airless water will wash as well as detergent: even removes vaseline, he proudly announced. After saying, "I knew it", I recollected my little experiments - inevitable with a science training - with separate buckets (shirt + detergent) , (shirt + hot water) , finding the 'dirty' water in both looked surprisingly similar. Wondering - I have what an evolutionary biologist might call a 'useful paranoia' - if the detergent we use did a clever chemical reaction which made the water look dirty even if the clothes immersed in them were clean.
Who had asked this question over the 50 odd years we have used detergents, pouring them down drains in unimaginable quantities? I then wondered how this poor, clever man was going to get the washing machines, dishwashers - house-person's minds - arranged in order to create and pump airless water - without a scrap of detergent - through clothes. Arranged, both in the sense of technically sorted, but also as in: persuading the various manufacturers that detergent was a thing of the past. We all know the machines are sold with recommendations for this or that washing powder or liquid. Dastardly symbioses.
The next thing I remembered was Alec Guiness in the film "
The Man in the White Suit"{
2}: how, despite the brilliance of the new fabric which dirt simply rolled off, keeping it pristine,sparkling white, no matter what was thrown at it, the 'powers that be' decided to put a systemmatic kibosh on the whole project to make sure they kept selling cotton.
Then I remembered a
blog litteraire marvelling at the way a quote from his hero Benjamin Franklin, segued imperceptibly in the space of twenty lines, from an astute observation about nature and its workings, to the technicalities of the introduction of narrative and dialogue into writing, starting with Bunyan's, 'Pilgrim's Progress', running through Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe', John Cleland's 'Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure' better known as 'Fanny Hill', et al, without the reader feeling anything untowards.
The Balkan Trilogy - Book 2 - The spoilt City
Twenty pages into book II we are being re-introduced, in a rather basic way, to characters already well known from book I - making me doubt I would finish it. But there is a way of looking at this: see (or pretend) Manning is filming these characters and situations from a slightly different position. The cinematographer forgot to mark the ground for the next days shoot......anyway, what you might lose in excellence of writing, you gain in historical sweep (and many interesting facts you didn't know.)
The author may have intended each book to stand alone. Have to finish to see if this is true! Although only 30 pages into the
Spoilt City, I can't see that they are to be judged as separate books: the historical facts, scene setting and character building, over nearly 300 pages of
The Great Fortune, don't look as if they are going to be repeated, just brief re-capitulations, which actually seem poor technique: it is mystifying why the author should feel the necessity to add a few sentances here and there such as:
That evening Guy Pringle, lecturer in English at the University......
Prince Yakimov, an Englishman of Russian origin.......
in the first 2-3 pages, when we all know perfectly well who is who, who did what, and what they believed and thought about things and each other from vol I. More to the point, if you were reading book II first [they first published separately,1960,1962,1965], you would not understand much without what went on in Book I: if the beginning of book II is anything to go by. Even though I have only just started book II, you can see it might have been written such that you could read them in any order, but you had to read them all. This doesn't seem likely because the protagonists shift countries several times as the war intensifies.
Serependipitously, I came across this extract of a 1937 speech by
Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the leader of the Iron Guard, called
A few remarks on democracyIt is only after reading this, and some of other bits from the home site
European History at the University of Pittburgh you realise how well she describes what was happening. Manning, of course, is writing her own story.
N.B. This course uses film associated with each country dealt with. Wajda [
Kanal (1956) with excerpt from the Introduction by Boleslaw Sulik to Andrzej Wajda: 3 Films (pp. 15-18)] for Poland, etc, which makes it quite interesting as a reminder of what great films there out there if only they would put them on TV. I can't remember whether it was Wajda's or
Kieslowski's that dealt with a romance between a train guard and a girl at one of his stations. Loved that. Check the name later.
In
TBT Bucharest sits there - the ex-pats and recently incoming western journalists in the clubs and cafes swapping gossip - wondering whether the Germans or the Russian will invade, and what it will mean. Various political positions are taken up and debated as the map in the window of the German Legation - which everyone repeatedly visits because there is a little real news - shows the Blitzkrieg, and the eventual fall of Paris, in ever extending red lines.
The Fascist leader is not mentioned directly in the book so far, but the Iron Guard play a prominent part in the background politics. So it is interesting to see this speech, which you could almost add bits to the book from.
I keep on thinking of
The Roads to Freedom when I am reading this. Sartre's book is far superior, of course, making
The Balkan Trilogy seem like an airport novel by comparison. It is an easy read, unlike
Roads but it is not a trivial work. The nearest comparision might be Waugh's
Sword of Honour trilogy: no one can beat Waugh's war writing, Second World War category, in my opinion. Those you could read in any order.
Which reminds me; I ought, as a duty, finish off
Capt. Corelli, which despite being a best-seller, I have come to a halt with, half way through, because I saw the film first, and will not skip on. I saw
The Fortunes of War, the BBCTV adaptation of TBT, too, but it was so very cut-down, I recognise now reading it, so no pleasure lost.
Cemetery of Forgotten Books
This FromBeautiful AtrocitiesCEMETERY OF FORGOTTEN BOOKS
SHADOW OF THE WIND is international sensation by Spanish writer Carlos Ruiz Zafón, set in Barcelona in 1945. 11-year-old Diego finds a lost novel (also called ) in an antiquarian shop called the Cemetery of Forgotten Books. Enchanted, he sets out to find the author's other works, only to discover that someone has been methodically destroying all copies of the writer's work, & that Diego may have the last copy, putting himself in danger.
Louise Jury writes in the Independent that the novel has spread largely by word of mouth. In interview with author, Independent wonders "What if we try to get the grand scale of Dickens & Tolstoy novels using all these new devices to enhance the reading experience? It may sound pretentious, but that's what I was trying to do with The Shadow of the Wind. It's a cathedral of stories with many subplots and elements, & everything converges."
Won't explain where I came across this, but of all the books I have read about in Blits [
Blog litteraire] recently, this is the one I want to read - simply because tried the same thing, except my book shop had a much less interesting name and involved poor man finding shopping lists, rashers of bacon, and margin scribblings which he violently disagreed with in the books that were to be his inspiration.
Should everyone try a "Novelist goes into a book shop...." novel before they die?
Also, on similar tack, came across this novel when looking up litrary/artistic stuff on Ronda, An'dalus:
The Forgetting Room by Nick Bantock
“Armon Hurt, a lonely bookbinder, has just learned that his grandfather, the surrealist artist Rafael Hurtago, has died and left him his house in Ronda, Spain, with the enigmatic blessing, "May he discover his belonging."
Instead of books in a store, he has a Spanish town house and a mystery box.....so you are too late if that had been your idea. However, you could include the book itself in your novel, and a sub-plot quest to discover why the author wrote it, involving trip to Andalucia, where you meet a bored and beautiful English as a foreign language teacher, who takes you on a turns obsessive and finds a way to prevent you from leaving.
The reviews are not too complimentary, but might be worth reading for any number of reasons, including wanting to guess whether the author ever went to Ronda, and how well he creates the atmosphere of the town, especially if you know it yourself. I can tell you there is an extract of the book out there which does the bus journey from Malaga, up that windy A376 between the two sets of white villages. If you really Google hard you will find several travel pieces describing the same journey which are quite like the book description. So you might really be left guessing whether this is based on experience or not.
Anyone who knows any fiction which describes the journey, please let me know.
Five Walking Tours of Proust's Paris
There are now several links up for potential Proustians like me. The
tours look good fun: another excuse to enjoy Proust without actually getting round to reading him.
BBC Radio 4 are running an adaptation: part 4 next sunday. Don't know if on the Web, but probably a good way in. The dialogue is pin-sharp, well spoken by a set of well-known British actors. A bit present-day colloquial in parts.
Neville Jason, the British actor, has himself done a talking book [Naxos? I won't bother till it comes out on CD] which has been well spoken of. He does all the voices. Remember seeing him up here at his holiday home walking around with great wads of paper, which I had no idea at the time were part of the great work which he was preparing for recording. Whether it is abridged or complete, Je n'est ce pas, mais il peut-etre une way in to Swann's way, as they say in Franglais.
Once I have re-read
Le Grande Meaulnes, this might be the time to start. Getting a lot of the background from Stuart Hughes'
Consciousness and Society is also having the desired effect. It is a ready useful book, easy to read and virtually jargon free.
Opening lines
Came across a yellowing Sunday Times cutting by Philip Norman, the author and journalist, titled "I've started, so you'll finish":
It can be the best of phrases. It can be the worst of phrases: but your opening sentance is the most important thing you will ever write.
In a side panel titled
Opening Lines he gives what he considers examples of the best and the worst opening lines in novels. As an experiment I thought I would jumble them up and leaving out the title and author. Of course most people will recognise where some if not all of them come from and and use this knowledge rather than an assessment of quality. Surprising how many "It was.."s there are! My immediate response is to ask: what question does the reader ask after reading them? 'Who? What? Where? When?' is the journalistic dictum. The only ones left out Why? and How?
(1)
"It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen...."
(2)
"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they eleoctrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn't even know what I was doing in New York."
(3)
"It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet."
(4)
"It was the afternoon of my 81 st. birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me."
(5)
"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there..."
(6)
" 124 was spiteful."
(7)
"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...."
(8)
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man, in possession of a large fortune, must be in want of a wife."
(9)
"Call me Ishmael..."
(10)
"Scarlett o'Hara was not beautiful, but men seldom realised it when caught by her charm as the Tarlaton twins were...."
Norman relates the Thurber story of when he was a trainee reporter in the 1920s. He was given this advice on how to write news: "Compose a really colourful and interesting opening paragraph. Then say what happened. Then compose another colourful, interesting closing paragraph. Then cross out your first and last paragraphs." Quoting Norman: Thurber obediently turned in a report with what he considered maximum impact upfront: " Dead. That was what the man was when the police pulled him from the Ohio river...."
Check who wrote them:
The Best; The Worst
Breathing in Air, Breathing out Light
Late September 2004Although nearly October, this is pretty hot to those used to more northern climes. We have decided on a day-trip to
Seville. The traffic slows to a crawl as we enter the city on the east-west radial off the A92. It should be possible to get to a cark park right in the middle of where we want to be, by going straight on. There is pandemonium at the critical junction: a police-manned road block - cars stationary at every angle - forces a right onto an inner circular road. The rows of parked police vans are an ominous sign, but of what we are totally ignorant. Entry to the centre is impossible, blocked roads forcing traffic round Seville in circles, at the same time preventing it from getting back to the outskirts. They seem to want us to keep moving until the demo is over.
Surly traffic-police at the diversions refuse to answer our questions, shrugging and waving us on. Grid-lock and car-fumes. Tapas bars in your dreams: there are said to be a thousand - Seville is where they originated. Hopes of ever getting inside one for a cool cerveza are dimming by the minute.
After a desperate detour through side streets, a parking place is found on a orange tree lined street - we walk the kilometre or so back to the
Paza de Triufo passing the ancient Jewish quarter and a group of protesters in their white union T-shirts. It is a national dockers strike: the authorities seem bent on protecting government buildings. This is the country of the Basque separatist terrorists, ETA.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, wrote: "A pleasant city famous for its oranges and women.." Even today, lungs full of exhaust fumes, difficult to disagree with, though after a day trip taking in the Gothic Cathedral and the Alacazar, this is not the outstanding impression left from an all-to-short visit to a vast city, viewed to perfection from the viewing gallery high up in the 96 - some say 98 - metre high Giralda tower. This works out at roughly 290 feet, though the viewing galley is at just over 200 feet above a low-rise city spread across the Rio Guadalquivir, which tips itself into the Atlantic at Salucar, into the very same waters Nelson's fleet patrolled three hundred years ago. 80 kilometres south is Cabo de Trafalgar. A similar distance further on, Gibralter,a port he probably used, ceded to Britain at The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht.
But this is not an encomium to British naval achievements: rather a paeon of praise to cultures learnt about in detail, on the ground, for the first time. It is not oranges or beautiful girls that an experience of Spain's once capital leaves in the mind and heart, but rich, diverse, complex, intermeshed sets of cultural influences. Even sitting back home, later, with maps, guide books, photographs, notes and those special recent memories that are still more perception than cognition, the heart-stopping grandeur, power, majesty of the two Spanish cultures - Islam and Christianity - are there in the minds' eye: represented by the cathedral, with the famous Geralda Tower once minaret, and the Alcazar with its dazzling courtyards and gardens.
The cathedral was visited first. A demonstration of the resurgent power of Christian Spain if ever there was one: Fernando III reconquered Seville in 1248. The Almohad mosque, which stood there before it, reconsecrated and used as a Christian church, surviving as such till 1402, then demolished to be replaced by the largest Gothic church in the world. The guide books tell us the outline of the two superimpose quite closely.
The minaret was originally crowned with four large golden balls which were said to be seen from more than 40 Kilometres away. When the Muslims surrended the city they asked for permission to destroy the tower. Prince Don Alfonso replied with the now famous: "If only one brick were removed from the tower they would all be stabbed to death."
The top of the Giralda is reached by a 35 ramps rather than steps: it is said the muezzin in charge of calling the people to prayer climbed to the top on his horse. I'd like to have seen him on the descent! The tower as it stands today is higher than it stood as a minaret: between 1558-68, as the city became rich with American gold, the church authorities decided to build a new top as a symbol of christian power. A Renaissance-style belfy was added to the Islamic body. Finally, a weather vane in the shape of a woman, the Giraldillo, was added, symbolising faith.
Inside the cathedral: a pair of central pillars, nearest the entrance, clad in massive, circular steel clamps running from tip to toe. A modern engineering feat few of the tourists even looked at as they shuffled into the darkness to marvel at the height of the ceiling. Was the building weakening because of lack of flying butresses? From the top of the Geralda, later, it was possible to look down on the complex set of interwoven butresses running off each side of what amounts to an equal-sided cross. A careful examination of an aerial-view postcard of the cathedral showed buttresses crossing one or two others at 90 degrees, while others at the edges stood alone.
This is a very big church. Its proper title is
Catedral Santa Maria de la Sede. Its size is trumpeted with impressive dimensions: 126 metres (413 feet) long , by 83 metres ( 272 feet) wide by 30 metres (100 feet) high. Santa Maria has the largest interior in the world and is the third largest cathedral behind St. Peter's in Rome and St. Paul's in London.
I like going into Churches, but they don't hold me for long. This interior - with its massive golden altar screen, 19 century all-wood mausoleum where the remains of
Christopher Columbus are said to rest (startling as you stand there even if not true), and galleries of important Renaissance religious art - is no exception. The dark oppressiveness gets to the non-believer. No Reformation stained-glass window smashing here, to shed light on the matter. But then none of these artifacts would look good in bright light.
A short walk across the square to the Alcazar: a journey from darkness to light. I remembered a writer about East Africa who said the experience of a particular tribe was like '
breathing in air and breathing out light'.
Abd Al Raman ordered the construction of this fortified palace in 931 AD. In the space of minutes and a few hundred paces, a miraculous emotional and psychological transformation: entering the first courtyard an immediate feeling of something extra-special. The claustrophobic gloom of the Cathedral has been completely forgotten, replaced by a 'lightness of being': openness and optimism, a realisation there will not be enough time to appreciate it all; promises, before it has been properly seen, to come back for a better look.
The cathedral: power and majesty; the Alaczar: power and intimacy.
A living space, this, not a worshipping one. Its design, in gross terms, reflects the requirements of life in a very hot country: water, coolth and shade. Walking through corridors or vestibules - often following right-angles to hide the view into inner courtyards that they lead to - it is obvious the whole edifice has been cleverly arranged to create cool air currents: hot air from outside sucked cunningly through passages into shady rooms, puffed out, still cool, into
sunny open spaces: a system a physics teacher would delight in explaining. The Islamic architectural embellishments are impressive, but as nothing compared to the irremovable impression that these people, a thousand years ago, whoever they were, knew how to build a perfect living-place.
Seville:wiki
Punctuation
You'll see the quote from The Balkan Trilogy down below with the last sentance In the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte.I keep on re-reading that and wanting to rewrite it. Should the first comma go? Does it need radical overhaul? Should that 'that' come out? If so, it might seem to refer to the bow of the window rather than the window, sure. But and -ing for the -ed. In the bow of the window overlooking the park, stood a grand pianofortewould keep the window and the park together in a wayIn the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte.Am I just finicking?
David Lodge's Consciousness and the Novel
Found Maude Newton's posts {
1 } {
2 } on David Lodge's book very useful. Been mulling this film-novel business for most of this year, trying to pick up my
Grand Project.
Everything I have tried to write has been channelled through the film-maker's eye. This is easier to understand reading about Graham Greene. Perhaps no one trying to write a novel now can avoid seeing it cinematographically. Have been writing a piece on that very subject of the novel/film mind-flip: an overactive toddler of an essay at present, who will keep on dribbling his food down his front and throwing it down on the floor to make you pick it up.
Many of the
Blits are talking about what's new. Really should be looking at some of this stuff, but feel more urge to write than read. Never going to read most of it now anyway. Seem to be taking old books off my shelves which were my post-graduate autodictactive education 30 years ago. A science degree is no education ! This time it is better: everything is so much clearer in my mind, let alone in the books. That's one of the joys of getting older: one's own thinking intermeshes so much more with that of the great minds, making the whole re-reading process quicker.
From Alain-Fournier, I have gone back to
Stuart Hughes'
Consciousness and Society: The reorientation of European Social Thought, 1890-1930, which covers Alain-Fournier, Gide, Proust, Mann, Hesse an Pirandello as a diversion into the imaginative writers from the "intellectual giants" Freud, Croce, Bergson, Jung, Sorel, et al.
Stuart Hughes Hughes on JFK :
A Most Unstuffy Man, The Nation, 14 December 1963.
Dipping into Hughes shows the connection between A-F and Peguy (so often mentioned by Robert Gibson in the Harrap Meaulnes) and his circle. Peguy, who was slightly older than A-F , died in similar circumstances to him right within a month of the outbreak of the First World War.
Lay awake last night, thinking how sad and miraculous that
Meaulnes was published just in the nick of time. The French, apparently, are very keen on honouring writers such as these who die for their country. It can never fail to bring a sense of wonderment, and an odd tear to the eye, because you come to know so much about their lives and their thoughts from their notes and letters. A-F sister wrote two books on her brother, which I would love to read, but bet are only in French editions. Having read every dot and comma about how A-F wrote his book - for any aspiring writer, a confidence builder, consoler and motivator - it makes it fifty times more poignant, especially since he died so very young and must have many more books in him. The one advantage, perhaps, was not having the years to mull over the completed work, thinking he could do it better. John Fowles re-did part of the
Magus many years later.
Not much time left to create
my masterpiece! When you get to a certain age, there is not this diffuse, unformed life ahead with which you can play the sometimes pleasurable games of avoidance, procrastination and self-deception. Either you write and finish or you've run out of time.
Moleskine Modality IV
Through someone writing to me about his recent purchase of a Moleskine notebook, which he proposed to use to draw for his beloved, I have clarified (after more than one attempt) what this Moleskine modality is about: It's not the Muse, though that comes into it; it's not a Talisman, though that plays a part; it's more an incantation. Don't knock each other over in your rush to your dictionaries to prove this is the wrong word. It is about inspiration and motivation to write.
Take a man walking across a swath of mown grass. He sees mole-hills. Walking up to them, with a view to seeing if there is a fresh one - and whether he can detect a pattern which will tell him in which direction the mole is digging - he notices something sticking out of the finely minced earth of one of the excavations. He bends down for a closer look. To his surprise it is the tip of a notebook. Gently pulling it out of the soft soil, he brushes it down, recognising it is a Moleskine.
Opening the cover, he sees some writing (shall we say in soft pencil?). Turning the pages, he realises it has many pages full of writing. He pockets the book and takes it home. In the comfort of his study, he sits to read the notebook......
In the 1963, Harrap edition of
Le Grand Meaulnes, with its lengthy introductory biography and analysis, is the claim that Henri Fournier carried around in his pocket notes he had scribbled the evening of the day he dared to speak to Yvonne de Quievrecourt (she of the famous, "A quoi bon?")in a Paris street, to act as an 'incantation'. He considered Yvonne his Muse, but it was the fantasy he began to write about her which kept him focused on the idea of writing his famous novel. It took him 8 years all told, finally being published in 1913. Before the end of 1914 he was dead: swallowed up like Hans Castorp in the last two or three pages of
The Magic Mountain.
Saul Bellow
Brian Appleyard, writing about Saul Bellow in The Sunday Times, 21 May, 1995:
In all his writing Bellow has been closing in on the deep sense that the modern world is not good enough for people, for real human people.
"A serious human life? This? You've got to be kidding!" cries critic Charlie Citrine in Humbolt's Gift. What is on offer is just not good enough, because the dominant scientific consumer ethos is simply wrong, one of the most deficient definitions of the human self that history has ever produced. "It is quite obvious to me" he says,"that the generally accepted account of the real world is not a true account. Just by listening to people and reading them and watching them you can see they don't understand even the obvious thing: that what we call reality is a set of conventions referring to phenomena - and it is very inexact and very subject to disorder and derangement".
[ ]....argument at the heart of his faith in writing. In many, modern civilised people, he believes, the "core of the self" is missing - "They've got a kind of restlessness or distraction but they don't identify themselves as human beings."
Novelists, by writing novels at all, are working against this loss of self, traditionally conceived, and so the very act of writing becomes an assertion of conservatism.
DISCUSS
Radio Goo-Goo, Radio Gaa-Gaa
Wonderful! Wonderful!
(A third wonderful might be too wonderful, perhaps.)
Inordinate pleasure to recommend a listen to Radio 4's [Thursday, 17 February 2005] 'With Great Pleasure' with John Seargent, former BBC political correspondent, now famous for reporting in Paris [1979?], during the putch-removal of Thatcher from power. Seargent, unaware Maggie was coming down the stairs behind him...
Readings among others:
* Alan Bennett's: 40 Years on (the T E Lawrence bit)
* Waugh's: Scoop (Boot gets it...)
* A Simenon "Maigret" (A very good description involving Maigret et, par fois ( une fois n'est pas une costume...), Madame Maigret walking and observing.)
* Heller's Catch-22 (Yos[s]arian death-bead scene)(Good in the film, too.)
So he says
When I heard, listening to Radio 4 on Thursday, there would be an interview with Kurt Vonnegut at 7pm, I got excited: he is one of my heroes. It was not - as it soon became apparent as I switched on again at 7pm - on the radio but TV. When I turned on the TV, the interview had just finished! Luckily, they repeat the BBC 2 Culture Show later in the evening, so eventually got to see him. Only 10 minutes or so: worth it to hear the plain talking, not dissimilar to recently deceased playwrite Arthur Miller, whose TV interview has been repeated in spippets.
Marek Vit has compiled student essays on Vonnegut, which might be interesting, as one looks back to what one read and thought about him. Would have liked to have been at some of his lectures - - wonder if there are any transcripts.
A flavour of him in
Address to Graduating class Bennington College 1970
.
..the majority of the people who rule us, who have our money and power, are lawyers or military men. The lawyers want to talk our problems out of existence. The military men want us to find the bad guys and put bullets through their brains. These are not always the best solutions - particularly in the fields of sewage disposal and birth control.
In his TV interview he said "Human beings are chimpanzees..." which is in May 10 2004 In Our Times
Cold Turkey piece: comments at the bottom.
Kurt Vonnegut Wiki - pretty comprehensive for someone coming to his for the first time
Kurt Vonnegut Links gallore
Kurt Vonnegut interviewed online about Mothernight 22 November 1996
Mothernight the movie - never read this: the review of the film provides a good Dummie
The Balkan Trilogy Part 2 Chapter 8 -The Centre of Things
The room was very large. Despite its size, it appeared over-full of massive mahogany furniture and hemmed in by walls of so dark a red they were almost black. Hung on the walls, darker than the paper, were portraits heavily framed in gold. A vast red and blue Turkey carpet covered the floor. In the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte.
In the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte.
In the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte.
In the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte.
In the bow of the window, that overlooked the park, stood a grand pianoforte.
