Book business

Lin Kiat gave me this book for Christmas last year. Since I am fairly enthusiastic about Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series, the AP Compendium is a wonderful addition to my collection. It contains lovely sections on Egypt and the characters in the books.

Of late, I've been occupying myself with the books I've to read for my imitation class this semester. We're reading some great classics, and doing writing exercises based on the styles of the studied writers. After reading Hemingway's "A Farewell To Arms," I wrote a page or so in his style describing my experience arriving in the Detroit airport very ill and having my picture and fingerprints taken for the new database that the US is hoping will catch terrorists when they enter the country. I imagine the database contains some 95% or so of terrible-looking passengers. After a day's travel and in great need of a shower and some sleep, I bet I could have looked the part of a terrorist myself.

This weekend, I'm reading Ford Maddox Ford's "The Good Soldier." Someone once remarked that this poor author had parents giving him the same first name as his last. Ford actually had his last name switched, for reasons unknown to me. At least he wasn't called Oldsmobile Maddox Oldsmobile, as my professor put it. Ford, I recall, was the one who made D.H. Lawrence famous. He had read the first paragraph of "The Odour of Chrysanthemums" and instinctively knew that he had in his hands the work of a genius and set about publishing the story in the journal of which he was editor. He also was a friend and collaborator of Joseph Conrad.

"The Good Soldier" is a difficult but engaging novel. The story is told by an arguably untrustworthy narrator and one of the key points in the tale is how you can never really tell a person's true character.

"For who in this world can give anyone a character? Who in this world knows anything of any other heart - or of his own? I don't mean to say that one cannot form an average estimate of the way a person will behave. But one cannot be certain of the way any man will behave in every case - and until one can do that a 'character' is of no use to anyone."

Posted by Monoceros at January 31, 2004 10:21 PM