Pitched as ‘perfect gifts for curious minds’, I have been curious about the Little People, Big Dreams series since their bright and colourful c[image]
Pitched as ‘perfect gifts for curious minds’, I have been curious about the Little People, Big Dreams series since their bright and colourful covers caught my eye in the bookshop. The series aims to introduce young readers to inspiring people in history, politics, music, arts, design, science, and sports, each one bringing forth the message that every exceptional achievement once started from a childhood dream.
Coincidentally the one I happened to pick up was the mini-biography on Frida Kahlo, simply because it was on eye level in the children’s corner of the local library when I was crouching down to stroke and play with the library cat (who thanked me with a purr and a good scratch).
Five minutes later I found myself scratching my head, unsure what to make of this book and somewhat troubled by the mixed feelings it left me with. I realised I am definitely don’t belong to the target audience of the series and I can only wonder how the actual audience (four to eight year old children) responds to it. Will this warm children to look out for Kahlo’s paintings? I honestly couldn’t say. I am not sure either if it is such a good idea to bring Frida Kahlo’s story to little ones gently by presenting her life in sweetly smiling pictures, adding a layer of sugar to it that almost turns that life into a fairy-tale (even if the bus accident is mentioned). Even if only slightly conscious about the untold back story behind these pictures (turbulent marriage, depressions and pain) which evidently is carefully simplified here as the content has to be appropriate for the age and the book wishes to show her resilience, strength and determination to overcome her physical predicament and explore her creativity to the fullest, I assume it would make me uncomfortable to read it together with a little one (probably because I lack the ability to apply the right filter for children). Is it wise to tell children half of a story so they can discover the not so sunny sides later themselves? As Frida Kahlo was a real person and not a fictional character, is there a risk that they would feel fooled, just like my daughter the moment we told her that Sinterklaas didn’t really exist?
In short, aware I am in the minority on a book lots of people seem to love, I am sorry to say this picture book was too cutesy to my taste to convince me and bearing in mind the wise words of George Bernard Shaw to make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read yourself, I rather would start from a picture book showing Frida Kahlo’s paintings themselves.
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Still one can hope that when this book ends up in the right hands, Kahlo’s outpouring Viva la Vida will strike a chord....more
The Preludes were dated January, 1839. They are among the masterpieces of the romantic period. Written, apparently, at one sitting, they have the fastThe Preludes were dated January, 1839. They are among the masterpieces of the romantic period. Written, apparently, at one sitting, they have the fast-winged pace of a work of genius, Liszt wrote. Perfect in their brevity, they are pure Chopin. They reveal the whole gamut of his creative genius, his ability to convey the happiness and sorrow of life, to capture a moment of joy or grief. Some of the Preludes are solemn, majestic , grandiloquent ; others are gently melodic or elegiac . They are a series of emotional snapshots : passion , despair, hope , illusion . In Schumann' s words, “He is here recognizable even in the pauses and the silences.”
But this talking of oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumferencExploring verbal self-portraiture
But this talking of oneself, following one’s own vagaries, giving the whole map, weight, colour, and circumference of the soul in its confusion, its variety, its imperfection – this art belonged to one man only: to Montaigne…These essays are an attempt to communicate a soul. So wrote Virginia Woolf on Montaigne in 1924, and for readers who are still on the fence whether to dedicate their time to him, similar laudations can be found by Voltaire, Hazlitt, Nietzsche, T.S. Eliot, Gide, Zweig - all tumbling over each other basking in eloquent superlatives about Montaigne’s essays.
When I read Mark’s wonderful and enthusiast review about this very short introduction to Montaigne’s life and work, I promptly hunted down a copy; now I finally started reading the essays in the wake of Goodreads friends who started a group read on them, reading this entry exceeded my already high expectations. I marked so many sentences that I had stop myself from quoting the entire book in updates and would recommend it heartily to everyone aspiring to dip into Montaigne’s essays.
After highlighting some key moments in Montaigne’s life (his education in Latin, his acting in plays written by a teacher at school, his crucial friendship with Etienne de la Boétie and mourning of his death (because it was he, because it was I), his political career, the historical background, his friendship with Marie de Gournay), William Hamlin elucidates the nature of Montaignan essay in which he will contemplate himself and social and ethical questions, sketching the different phases of their genesis and the subsequent, supplemented text editions of the Essays. Taking the reader through Montaigne’s thoughts, pointing at his exemplary models, the whetstones of his thoughts (Seneca, Plutarch, Erasmus, Sextus Empiricus) he selects some of the topics Montaigne treats in his essays to convey the wide array of his themes (family, love, friendship, solitude, America, providential diversity, scepticism, death and the good life) and to illustrate Montaigne’s method. He quotes amply from the essays, which comes across as a wise choice, as paraphrasing would probably only dwindle Montaigne’s precise expression.
[image] (This painting from 1847 by Eduard Hamman evokes one of the wonderful anecdotes from Montaigne’s life that Hamlin sketches, how Montaigne’s father arranged for the young Michel to be gently awakened each morning by the sound of a musical instrument – most likely a harpsichord – for he held that ‘it troubles the tender brains of children…to snatch them suddenly and violently from sleep’).
From the wide range of Montaignan reflections Hamlin explores, besides the characterisation of Montaigne’s philosophical scepticism as both epistemological as well as inspired by his own temperament and intellectual disposition, equipping him with a cognitive freedom making him question the habitual and the customary, one aspect that particularly struck and moved me is Montaigne’s remarkable questioning of anthropocentrism, his sensitive take on animals , which reflects an ecologic consciousness that one would rather imagine having come to the fore more recently– a holistic sense of interconnectedness of life forms, human and otherwise that comes across as even more extraordinary when linked to Montaigne’s abhorrence of cruelty - an ethical imperative preceding contemporary theories on the expanding circle of empathy throughout history (as coined by Peter Singer).
Montaigne’s view on animals strikes me particularly in contrast with what I remember about Descartes seeing animals as mere machines, a contrast in views that also occurs their different approach of the philosophical mind-body problem, of which Montaigne takes the stance that interrelations of body and mind are central to every aspect of his thought about human existence, where Descartes’ dualism of body and mind saw the mind as separate from the body (an issue having my attention since reading Siri Hustvedt’s thought-provoking two-hundred page exploration of the mind-body problem in philosophy and science through history The Delusions of Certainty, the central essay in her collection A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind – I forgot if she mentions Montaigne in this essay, though I vividly remember being pleasantly surprised at her debunking of a facile equalling of the brain to a computer in neuroscience).
Showing the lasting relevance of Montaigne’s essays, Hamlin doesn’t shy away from pointing at the intrinsic contradictions in the vastness of his work, the unsystematic, idiosyncratic, self-indulgent and incoherent nature of the scepticism permeating the Essays, the gaps and inconsistencies, while simultaneously showing the validity of Montaigne’s dialectical method of adding rather than rewriting his views, bringing into the open how understanding is a work in progress.
Denoting Montaigne’s religious views and connecting them to the turbulent historical context of religious warfare in which he lived, Hamlin points at some his ‘blind spots’ in which he was, as every human being, the product of his times operating within certain prevailing conceptual paradigms as a no-go zone for his inquisitive and sceptical mind (gender, the Bible).
Reading this introduction, Stefan Zweig’s unfinished biographical essay Montaigne, having made a start with the essays and last but not least, learning a lot from the profound comments in the group read of the essays , 2023 for me will be the year devoted to Montaigne – he seems to offer a companionship for life which renders Zweig’s lofty sentiments relatable: Page after page, I have the impression when I turn to Montaigne that here has been thought , with far more clarity than I could ever muster, all that occupies the most profound recesses of my soul at this moment. Here is a ‘you’ in which my ‘I’ is reflected, here the distance between one epoch and another is expunged. This is not a book I hold in my hands, this is not literature or philosophy, but a man whom I understand and who understands me.
Who wouldn’t be pleased with a friend who is exposing our pretensions without stirring our self-hatred, bruising and healing our self-esteem in quite the same way, encouraging us to live our lives honestly, openly and mindfully, alert to social standards without according them undue reverence?
I cannot vouch for other instalments of the Very Short Introductions as this was my first, but if they are all of this quality, I look forward to dive into a next one. I was amused that precisely this first volume I read reminded me of another collection of short volumes published since 1941 by the Presses Universitaires de France (PUF), bringing the knowledge of the best specialists, the analyses of leading thinkers and the insight of experts within everyone's reach because this collection Que sais-je was named Montaigne’s famous motto (What do I know?) – - reminding me of the couple of dozens musty copies I collected during my student days which are stacked up in the garden shed, mostly still unread. Isn’t that another fitting memento mori, monsieur de Montaigne?
As an occluding track, here is a link to the ten greatest essays ever, listed by Siri Hustvedt – guess which essayist is her number one?
Thank you very much Mark, Kalliope and Fionnuala - for showing me the way to Montaigne....more
'If I were asked to name the chief’s benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house all'If I were asked to name the chief’s benefit of the house, I should say: the house shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.' (Gaston Bachelard, The poetics of Space (1964)
Bachelard’s quote encapsulates the central theme of this third instalment of Deborah Levy’s ‘Living Autobiography’ trilogy: our endless capacity of longing, even when one seems to have everything one’s heart desire: ‘So what was I going to do with all this wanting?'
While in Things I Don't Want to Know she reflected on her childhood in South-Africa and motherhood and The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography dealt with rebuilding her life at fifty after having divorced and losing her mother, in Real Estate she writes about a new phase in her life now she soon will be sixty and living alone. Struggling with what very much seems like the (almost) empty nest syndrome, moving between New York, London, Paris, Mumbai and Greece she questions her life, friendships, her writing, motherhood, her longing for a room of her own which takes on the somewhat comical form of her yearning for a grand old house (with an oval fireplace in the form of an ostrich egg) in the Mediterranean with a pomegranate tree in the garden, fountains and wells and mimosa trees.[image] Pierre Bonnard - The studio at Le Cannet with mimosa
Gradually it dawns to her that more than collecting objects for her imaginary dream house, she is collecting objects and dreams for a parallel life, a life that yet has to be created, an unreal estate much like her writing, in tune with Katherine Mansfield’s observation ‘Would you not like to try all sort of lives – one is so very small – but that is the satisfaction of writing – one can impersonate so many people’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she comes to the conclusion that her books are what she will leave behind, not bricks - unlike real estate accessible to all her readers - reminiscent of the words of the Dutch poet Jan J. Slauerhoff Only in my poems can I make my home.
Although she goes through some darker times too, her voice is so impetuous and inspiring she almost made the thought of possibly reaching that turning point within about a decade myself sound appealing, if only for her admirable freedom and wildness of mind (not that I look forward to the moment my youngest leaves the house like Levy’s daughter at the start of the book). Levy generously shares kernels of wisdom with the reader, coming up for instance with this beneficial and liberating thought useful to keep in mind on quite a few occasions in our lives: 'It seemed to me all over again that in every phase of living we do not have to conform to the way our life has been written for us, especially by those who are less imaginative than ourselves'.
For this generosity she seems to take inspiration from a thought of Georgia O’Keeffe which seems to run as a leitmotif through Levy’s own actions and observations: ‘When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world for the moment, I want to give that world to someone else’. (Georgia O’keeffe, 1946)
Having prior read the first two instalments of Deborah Levy’s ‘Living Autobiography’, I was elated finally finding the third part of it in the local library, gobbling it up already half before arriving back home. This beautiful bright red book turned out the most voluminous of the three and for me also the most enjoyable one – certainly for the first three fifths of it. The tone of it is more gentle and perhaps even more life-embracing than The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography. Again I was particularly charmed by her sense of humour (The story in this book is about a woman wo has gifted her life to a man. This is not something to be tried at home but it is usually where it happens.So far, I could only speak a few lines from the Paul Éluard poems I was still translating – the dark heart of my stare, the windows deep with shadows flowing – but where is departure gate F26? Almodovar explains ‘To be like a cow without a bell means being lost, without anyone taking notice of you’. I thought I was a bit like a cow without a bell.
Flipping through this book and my notes again, trying to recapitulate impressions and thoughts two months after finishing it and re-reading large chunks of it, I was surprised going through a similar reading experience: from initial rapture on to slight scepticism. The book contains so many brilliant passages and stimulating references I could fill pages and pages with quotations. Levy’s writing is delectably elegant, sprightly and witty and many turns of phrases just ask for a second and third reading to savour them again.
[image] Georgia O’Keeffe, Red Poppy 1927
Tumbling from Woolf (again), Kundera over Borges to Sartre, Walter Benjamin, Duras (again) Marquez, Gertrude Stein, Jane Eyre, Alice in Wonderland, Robert Desnos, Katherine Mansfield, Tagore, Simone de Beauvoir, Éluard, Perec, Apollinaire, Leonora Carrington , Annie Ernaux, Ezra Pound, Gloria Steinem, Elisabeth Hardwick and Rilke, mixing in some art, (Bonnard, Egon Schiele) and film (BB, Bergman) the seamless way Levy intertwines the thoughts of an astounding number of voices in literature and art with her own reflections doesn’t come across as namedropping but as an inspiring responsiveness and sensitivity of the woman’s mind to this company of fine minds and their creations , resulting in a brilliant synthesis of the personal and the vastness of culture that LEE explains marvellously in his magnificently perceptive review.
Almost casually she weaves their words into her life, toying in style with her own frivolity and diva allures(Shoes, bed sheets of turmeric coloured silk with a flippant touch reminding me of Absolutely Fabulous: I made the spritz with Prosecco, Campari , a dash of tonic and a slice of orange. It was a summer drink, but as Camus said to himself, there was an eternal summer inside me, even when a storm was threatening to topple my building.
However mostly entertaining and amusing, proceeding through the book the marking of memorable or refreshing insights became more rare until almost drying up until the closure of the book – I noticed losing interest reading through her rather rambling musings on the love affairs of friends and her party life. Just like in The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography, I was not entirely comfortable with her more polemical side and her (imho at times slightly facile) take on patriarchy and feminism (for reasons I am still trying to figure out).
Those minor disagreements and quibbles are part and parcel of what makes Levy such a fascinating and beautiful writer. Reading her feels as real and affecting as encountering an old friend of who you easily accept the quirks of, at times a little annoying, making you laugh and irritating you the next moment and who you wouldn’t miss for the world....more
A very lengthy, detailed, thoroughly documentated account of the fascinating and often surprisingly unconventional life of Marguerite Yourcenar, née MA very lengthy, detailed, thoroughly documentated account of the fascinating and often surprisingly unconventional life of Marguerite Yourcenar, née Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour (Brussels, 1903- Bar Harbor, Maine 1987)- a passionate, freedom-loving writer far removed from the image of the incredibly erudite, secular nun I had of hers.
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