07:00 – Thank the Book Gods! My reading seems to have returned to its former state, and my neurons are zinging with delight as my eyes skim across the page. It’s been a strange couple of reading days, no doubt the a side effect of a frazzled brain, but all seems well again.
Revitalised and raring to go, the first thing I wanted to do this morning was to check off the last story I had to read in the Maupassant collection from Capuchin Classics – On Horseback and Other Stories. The story was Madame Tellier’s Establishment, the longest in this collection, and not surprisingly for me I rather enjoyed it. In his foreword to this collection Anthony Guise makes reference to De Maupassant’s ‘wild oats days’, and that he was probably no stranger to the bordello. After reading this story I’ve got to agree with Guise. De Maupassant appears to be suspiciously well-informed on the inner workings of a brothel, and more shockingly seems to get rather titillated when talking about anything brothel-esque – “Lastly, Madame Tellier herself put out her leg, a handsome Norman leg, and in his surprise and pleasure, the commercial traveller gallantly too off his hat to salute that master calf, like a true French cavalier.” Saucy stuff and writing which was sure to have ruffled a few Victorian feathers, back in the day [edit: afterthoughts on Madame Tellier’s Establishment]
10:00 – True to my word of ticking off at least one story from the Ox-Tales collection per day, I’ve just read the second story from Ox-Tales-Earth – The Nettle Pit by Johnathon Coe. Sorry but I’ve got to be straight about this. If I had the choice between reading this story, and being dragged through a real pit of nettles, than I’d have to go with the latter. Ok, that’s definitely a bit harsh . The story, which centres on two life-long pals who are now married with children, isn’t particularly bad, it’s just wasn’t my kind of story. With such a wide range of writers contributing to this collection, I did anticipate that not everything is going to be for everyone, and I think I’ve found one that definitely isn’t for me. That’s fine, provided it doesn’t turn into a trend.
21:00 – My oh my oh my! I may have shown myself to be weak by launching into a new novel that was way down on my reading pile, but I’m so glad I did. Fifty pages into Shusaku Endo’s Silence (Peter Owen) and already it’s revealing itself to be an incredible piece of literature. Powerful, profound and utterly readable, Endo presents his narrative in the form of a continuous letter, as if written by the principle character Father Sebastian Rodrigues, and it’s a form that seems to be really working.
Oh and a little aside (because I figured it out for myself and I’m quite proud of it 
)). In the prologue for Silence is a reprint of a seventeenth-century letter allegedly from the head of the Jesuit mission in Japan – Father Christovao Ferreira (the novel is based around him but you’ll need to read it to find out how), in which he describes the persecution and torture of Christians in Japan. He mentions how a group of Christians were ladled with boiling water from the lakes of Unzen (nice eh? A taste of things to come?). Unzen?!? That’s a volcano. I’ve heard of that before. Wasn’t that……?……Yep I’m right. Same volcano that killed the famous French volcanologists, Katia and Maurice Krafft in the 1990’s
About Rob
