07:00 – Back on track with my reading, and over muesli and orange juice this morning I read the next story in line from OX-Tales: Water (Profile Books), Bethany-next-the-Sea by William Boyd. This was an interesting story, and by no means a bad one. It concerns a minor actress, Bethany Mellmoth, sitting out time on location by the sea, in a lonely and not too active caravan park. Bethany’s situation is made all the more unbearable by the constant changes being made to the film being shot, leaving Bethany with even more time than she really knows what to do with, and the feeling that her acting skills are not being exploited to their full potential.
19:00 – It’s been a while since I’ve strolled the Parisian walkways and alleyways with city-lit Paris (Oxygen Books) as my guide. So I made the concerted effort earlier this evening to read through the next section of the book, entitled High Hopes…and hard times. As its title may suggest this section focuses on those people, both real and fictional, who have come to Paris with high hopes, but often found something very different instead. For some, such as recounted in the teenage letters of journalist Walter Schwarz, those expectations seem to have been met. But for others, such as Adam Thorpe’s American character in his short story Shifts, the high hopes are soon dashed, as the character bears witness to the more destitute side of Parisian life. Within Thorpe’s short story extract is contained one of the most incredible pieces of writing I’ve read in city-lit Paris so far:
I remember that legless guy blowing his flute through his nose…[...]…he’d jerk his head like a maniac and I couldn’t stand the sound that first time, the guy looked like a grub, he was completely bald, all you could see was the top of his glistening head. They were washing the street and the soapy water sailed past his stumps, making a stream between us. There was the damp, soapy smell of a Sunday morning in Paris…[...]…and this jerky head with a flute stuck in one nostril, [was] wailing and whistling over alien shouts down the street.
Isn’t that a magnificent piece of descriptive writing? There’s more literary magnificence in this section too, from the master George Orwell. In an extract from his ethnographic study of the poor – Down and Out in Paris and London (a book which still languishes lonely and unread on my shelves), Orwell so eloquently describes the narrow street in which he stayed as – “a ravine of tall, leprous houses, lurching towards one another in queer attitudes, as though they had all been frozen in the act of collapse”. Pure genius Mr. Orwell, pure genius!
Bolt on a short, but exceptional passage by Julian Green on the poorer parts of Paris (among others), and High Hopes…and hard times is definitely the highlight of city-lit Paris for me so far.
23:00 – Blog posts are finished so I’m heading back into Mark T. Sullivan’s snow-dusted thriller, Triple Cross (St. Martin’s Press). Judging by the 95 entries I received in my recent giveaway competition for this novel, this is one that a lot of people are interested in, and reading it I can see why. It’s been a real thrill-a-minute so far, but I wonder if Mr. Sullivan can keep up the pace until the end. We’ll see!
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