A quick post of the books I’ve read pre and post Covid; having dealt with my Covid reading (all Georgette Heyer) here. Not many but I want to deal with them before I embark on a Dostoevsky Odyssey!
Maigret and the Dead Girl, Georges Simenon
I bought and read this book because I saw the film of the same name, based on it, at this year’s French Film Festival. Starring Gérard Depardieu. I was anxious that Gérard would be okay in the role of Maigret because I love everything about the character, despite not being keen on detective stories at all. Maigret is different – his stories always (mostly) touch on the existential and this one was no different.
I was relieved to find Gérard fulfilled my expectations of the character. Despite spending much (all) of his time wearing a rather ridiculous hat – even at the cinema! He spent a lot of time wandering around looking soulful – which was okay because that is what Maigret does – observing and thinking. Getting into the heads of the people he interviews; seeking to understand the lives they lead, their hopes and disappointments and thereby their motives. The film was able to show this reasonably well. Gérard has such a presence! Here’s the trailer.
The script writers certainly added more colour and movement to the story of a girl from the country finding herself lost in Paris – and finally killed. The book had quite a complicated plot involving a missing father, mad mother and American gangsters trying to get hold of an inheritance. The film changed this to the girl being caught up in ruthless Parisian high society – a film set and some abusive sex thrown in. So not accurate in terms of those around the girl of the title but both book and film had the same emotional heft – the real killer here is loneliness, poverty and naivety. As Maigret’s intense sympathy recognises.
All this is apposite because we are currently enjoying the original BBC Maigret series, starring Rupert Davies – the boxed set of 14 CDs Joe’s gift to me for Christmas.
As it says on the cover, until these were released late last year the series had no been seen for over 50 years! I remember it from my childhood when it was screened during the very early days of television. You can certainly tell that – the production values are very amateurish indeed. You can see them improving over the course of the series. Simenon was alive to see these and said in Rupert Davies he had finally found his Maigret. He is terrific. I’m loving it and I like recognising the stories on which the episodes are based.
One was The Two-Penny Bar, which I have on my kindle because I bought about ten of the new Penguin editions when they were published a few years ago. The episodes all have different titles from the books on which they are based but I recognised the story in an episode.
It was interesting how they pared back the story but managed to be essentially quite true to it. The story of a group of Parisien friends who spend their week-ends having fun at the Two-Penny Bar of the title. But is it really fun for everyone. Sitting back and observing them all Maigret uncovers the reality – friendships, betrayal, loneliness. It’s about guilt really – a long unsolved crime, a man drinking himself to death, adultery, blackmail. Our wise detective susses it all out. Very good; if you like this sort of thing. Which I do. I’m not into detective stories at all but I love Maigret.
My Life With Wagner, Christian Thielemann
I can’t remember where I got this book; I suspect the Readings remainder table, because it is a handsomely produced hard cover. I’ve inscribed it to Joe recommending he read it before his third Ring Cycle. This would have been the second Melbourne Ring performed in 2016 which I’ve written about here. I didn’t know anything about the author but having read his book I’m pretty sure he would not have liked the Melbourne RIng! He is wary of the various concepts different directors of Wagner’s operas have attempted to impose. He quotes the film director Lars von Trier approvingly: It can be strikingly effetive to set Wagner’s very human gods in the British Industrial Revolution or the Third Reich, but it doesn’t improve the operas. We don’t need parallels; in fact they are downright distracting. If Fafner is meant to give the audience gooseflesh, then it is damn well the director’s duty to do his utmost to give them gooseflesh. If Siegfried was a hero, then he must be presented as a hero, however outdated, unrewarding and politically incorrect that may be. If we want Wagner, then Wagner is what we want … forcing Wagner’s Ring into the narrow confines of modern humanism would be wrong and misleading. A proposed Ring Cycle by von Trier didn’t eventuate. It would have been interesting!
He’s a musical conservative I’m now told in this review, which I hadn’t read until after I’d finished it. I googled the author. He’s obviously a serious chap and as the review says that haircut certainly proclaims his conservatism!
It’s a strange sort of book – as suggested in the review – assuming a deep knowledge of music and at the same time giving a potted outline of all the Wagner opera plots as though the reader doesn’t know anything about them. I thought at first it was going to be boring but eventually I liked it a lot.
He tells you a lot about the technical aspects of conducting and provides deep insights into why Wagner revolutionised music. He says: Boito (a composer I’ve never heard of) and Verdi are setting the words to music – Wagner is setting sound itself. Boito and Verdi are cutting, distilling, dramatizing – Wagner is letting the sound flow.
He talks about the tempi – the pace at which Wagner’s operas can be played – comparing the length of time taken by different conductors. Wagner, he says, often thought conductors took the tempi too slowly. In his view the correct approach as advised by Wolfgang Wagner is to keep the music flowing, always go just a little faster than your feelings tell you at first.
He quotes approvingly the famous Wagnerian conductor Wilhelm Fürtwangler saying Wagner was the first to indicate the slight but constant change in tempo that alone can make a piece of music not a rigid, classic example, played as if from the printed page but what it really is, growth and development, a living process.
He highlights all the judgements a conductor must make; about timing, about the level of sound and so on. And how what seems to be the best way to approach a scene may not work. He gives as an example the Annunciation scene in The Valkyrie – one of my favourite bits of The Ring. He describes it beautifully: the music almost stops and freezes …It is as if the hero Siegmund’s blood were congealing in his veins… (audience and musicians) all feel a lump in their throats. The music expresses what has been borne, and it is heavy with foreboding, indeed in the truest sense it expresses pathos (from Greek pathein, to suffer, to feel emotion), and there is a great temptation to take it too slowly and emotionally. One must not succumb to it, one must not interpret the feeling twice over and overload it, or the thread of tension will break. The solution, he says is to conduct with a fluid movement, slightly rubato, deepening the effect rather than piling it high.
The true interpreter of Wagner’s work must study it like a language: vocabulary, grammar, syntax, etymology, the choice of words, expression, idiom – they are all involved. He tells us that a deep knowledge of the German language is very important for Wagner operas given the importance of alliteration and the sound of the language for the overall effect.
I found all the ins and outs of conducting very illuminating, the different singers and instruments required for the different operas, the effect of different acoustics in opera houses – Bayreuth sounds especially difficult! – the impact of directors. He’s especially interesting on the Wagners and on experiences at Bayreuth. In Part 2 he then goes through each of the Wagner operas. Concluding each of those with recommendations about which recordings are best. That’s handy – we have some of his favoured recordings.
I found it all very interesting but it’s obviously a book for Wagner afficiandos.
Cold Enough For Snow, Jessica Au
This is receiving rave reviews all over the place. Helen Garner provides a blurb:-so calm and clear and deep, I wished it would flow on forever. It won the Novel prize which is a biennial award for book-length literary fiction in English, published or unpublished around the world. So I was pleased to be given it for my birthday.
Handsomely produced; very short at 98 pages. But, as with so much recent fiction, I was disappointed. Nicely written, about a woman travelling with her mother in Japan. She describes what they observe together along with her mother’s reactions, her thoughts, her memories of episodes from her past.
But I didn’t really get the resonant aesthetics and echoes, migration, the fraught relationship between intimacy and distance, language and art that others have found.
All okay – but what is the point? Perhaps I read too quickly. There’s no doubt I am at odds with the zeitgeist. Here’s one of the many recent reviews.
The Paris Apartment, Lucy Foley
This is a quick read – one to take your mind off covid really. I’m not a great afficiando of thrillers. This is set in Paris which was nice although not critical to the story. And there were enough ins and outs to keep you guessing to the end. It’s told from the viewpoints of the different characters. The ending was quite improbable. But there you go!
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