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tarigwaemirAd Mundo Exteriore,
So I just finished Alphonse Daudet's Letters from My Windmill, which is sentimental but luckily not maudlin. In any case, proper appreciation requires a suspension of cynicism, especially city cynicism, since the running theme is Daudet's escape from Paris--I consider it to be analogous to the mentality of any large cosmopolitan city (being in my case New York).
(I think I'm typing in shorthand again, so please forgive me if I'm jumping from topic to topic.)
I probably should try to read it in the original French one day. Also apparently it's not just my hallucination and Mother's grievance that English translations for Daudet are so rare. He was extremely popular in his day, but his stories no longer fit in with the modern fads of the English-speaking literary world. They're more fables than typical short stories; I was constantly unnerved by the directness of the narration. I read in the editor's introduction that Daudet was a great conversationalist, which is why even his writing has that oral storytelling quality, and I understood why Daudet sounds more like he's writing fragments of memoirs or journals than compiling a collection of short stories. His style feels so improvisational, so rambling, which belies the underlying control. The stories are all carefully planned to reflect and support each other. Letters from My Windmill is a complete body of work and should not be read in sections. But you don't quite realize this until the end, and I still felt kind of taken aback as if a stranger on the subway had suddenly started talking to me.
He is sentimental, especially when it comes to describing his surroundings. Say, the written equivalent of upping the saturation by 50 in Photoshop. So now I have rather unrealistic images of picturesque, broken-down moulins, overgrown with sweet-smelling alpine perennials, with the red-orange dust that I always associate with Provence (the fault of Impressionist painters) and the spiraling mistral setting the ailes gently spinning. In other words, clichés that belong on those sappy nature cards or in a Hollywood movie about Mediterranean Europe. And the annoying thing is, it's completely effective in reducing me into a romantic. I'm in a "spring breeze" mood, and I want to go up somewhere in the Catskill mountains to wade in a clear stream and watch tiny silver fish pass between my toes.
Yes, it's true. I admit it. Despite eight years of living in New York, I'm still a sucker for pretty pictures.
...Tari
So I just finished Alphonse Daudet's Letters from My Windmill, which is sentimental but luckily not maudlin. In any case, proper appreciation requires a suspension of cynicism, especially city cynicism, since the running theme is Daudet's escape from Paris--I consider it to be analogous to the mentality of any large cosmopolitan city (being in my case New York).
(I think I'm typing in shorthand again, so please forgive me if I'm jumping from topic to topic.)
I probably should try to read it in the original French one day. Also apparently it's not just my hallucination and Mother's grievance that English translations for Daudet are so rare. He was extremely popular in his day, but his stories no longer fit in with the modern fads of the English-speaking literary world. They're more fables than typical short stories; I was constantly unnerved by the directness of the narration. I read in the editor's introduction that Daudet was a great conversationalist, which is why even his writing has that oral storytelling quality, and I understood why Daudet sounds more like he's writing fragments of memoirs or journals than compiling a collection of short stories. His style feels so improvisational, so rambling, which belies the underlying control. The stories are all carefully planned to reflect and support each other. Letters from My Windmill is a complete body of work and should not be read in sections. But you don't quite realize this until the end, and I still felt kind of taken aback as if a stranger on the subway had suddenly started talking to me.
He is sentimental, especially when it comes to describing his surroundings. Say, the written equivalent of upping the saturation by 50 in Photoshop. So now I have rather unrealistic images of picturesque, broken-down moulins, overgrown with sweet-smelling alpine perennials, with the red-orange dust that I always associate with Provence (the fault of Impressionist painters) and the spiraling mistral setting the ailes gently spinning. In other words, clichés that belong on those sappy nature cards or in a Hollywood movie about Mediterranean Europe. And the annoying thing is, it's completely effective in reducing me into a romantic. I'm in a "spring breeze" mood, and I want to go up somewhere in the Catskill mountains to wade in a clear stream and watch tiny silver fish pass between my toes.
Yes, it's true. I admit it. Despite eight years of living in New York, I'm still a sucker for pretty pictures.
...Tari
