Elsewhere
I’m hopping on a plane tomorrow for Egypt. I’ll be off for two weeks swimming in the Red Sea, reading a few books and trying not to get a sun burn. I decided I really need to refresh my French so I picked up three books, the first being The Last Days by Raymond Queuneau. His Exercices in Style is a brilliant piece of literary technique and in a way a very educational book that I’ve always loved. I can’t speak for the translation but give it a read and I’m sure you’ll see what I mean. I’m rather optimistic that Queneau will perform as well in the novel format.
My second pick was the tried and true Guy de Maupassant with The Horla, and other short stories. Maupassant is without a doubt my favorite author, his short stories can be as chilling as humorous and the good thing is that he has written many of them. However, every compilation I’ve owned includes a different set of nouvelles and rereading them doesn’t bother me one bit, so I bought a copy with several unfamiliar titles. I’ll probably end up recommending his stories again as I have a true love for the format and am thinking of juxtaposing my favorite writers (Dahl, Poe, Buzzati, Gogol…) in a new entry someday. Get reading if you want to be fashionable at my next party (cough).
I barely moved to the next shelf for my third pick, The Venus of Ille, Mateo Falcone and Colomba by Prosper Merimée. That’s three stories by the way, two shorts and a novella. I had read The Venus of Ille in high school and loved it, very much a continuation of my fascination for short stories, and one that seemed to flow directly into his “grander” work that I never explored until now.
To sum up, that’s my next two weeks on the literary front, hope you have fun with your fortnight.
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