In case I have not complained about it before, our apartment was wired by someone who understood electricity but not, say, circuit load capacity, so it regularly blows out lights like we just presented it with a birthday cake. The living room for the last two weeks has been stupidly dim. ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
spatch just heroically replaced the bulbs in the ceiling fixture, so I curled up on the well-illuminated couch and read Jérôme Ferrari's The Principle (2015), Henry Green's Party Going (1939), and Barbara Comyns' The Juniper Tree (1985). The first is essentially a ghost poem for Werner Heisenberg, complete with second-person address and the same haunting, central metaphor that applies so irresistibly to the indeterminacy of human motivations; the second is a comedy of going nowhere, a round-robin of romances and misapprehensions around a fog-bound train station and hotel; the third is a retelling of the Grimm fairy tale à la Pamela Dean, where all of a sudden the pattern of the story springs out of what heretofore could be mistaken for ordinary, only slightly allusive life. I liked all three of them and feel vaguely envious of the ghost novel, since Heisenberg is one of the historical figures I think about periodically, but it's never come to anything. I am three and a half out of four with Green so far, so will continue appreciating that the recent NYRB reprints regularly fetch up in my local used book stores. Comyns seems to be rarer and I may resort to libraries like a person with my actual income level. Autolycus dozed on my lap throughout.
spatch just heroically replaced the bulbs in the ceiling fixture, so I curled up on the well-illuminated couch and read Jérôme Ferrari's The Principle (2015), Henry Green's Party Going (1939), and Barbara Comyns' The Juniper Tree (1985). The first is essentially a ghost poem for Werner Heisenberg, complete with second-person address and the same haunting, central metaphor that applies so irresistibly to the indeterminacy of human motivations; the second is a comedy of going nowhere, a round-robin of romances and misapprehensions around a fog-bound train station and hotel; the third is a retelling of the Grimm fairy tale à la Pamela Dean, where all of a sudden the pattern of the story springs out of what heretofore could be mistaken for ordinary, only slightly allusive life. I liked all three of them and feel vaguely envious of the ghost novel, since Heisenberg is one of the historical figures I think about periodically, but it's never come to anything. I am three and a half out of four with Green so far, so will continue appreciating that the recent NYRB reprints regularly fetch up in my local used book stores. Comyns seems to be rarer and I may resort to libraries like a person with my actual income level. Autolycus dozed on my lap throughout.
