The Eclipse Eclipsed and other stories

The partial eclipse of the Sun scheduled for this morning was sadly obscured by clouds here. We must take it on trust that it occured as predicted. While it might seem that one thing obscuring another should be as interesting as some other thing obscuring yet another, it isn't. The Moon partially or entirely blocking out the Sun is not only a rarity but demonstrates to us the geometries involved in astronomy, that we live in a real-life astrolabe. While it stretches our comprehension to grasp the vastness of space and how everything in it is tilted, spinning and whizzing about, we can do it a little bit at a time and appreciate that the Moon has come between the Earth and the Sun. Most remarkably, the Moon is just the right size at the distance from us it is to fit exactly over the Sun. It arranged itself there with the same precision attributed to the designers of the mathematically ingenious pyramids.

But, there we are, in England at least we are accustomed to clouds and disappointment but the Cloud Appreciation Society must take a battering in the polls on such days.

--

Gogol wasn't quite what I expected. The Overcoat possibly was but not so much the early stories, going back to the beginning. They are adapted folk tales with elements of the supernatural. I will go back to those stories and Dead Souls but there are bigger attractions piled up.

I went to Balzac instead, La Peau de Chagrin, The Wild Ass's Skin. What a joy that was. Balzac is exuberant even when describing decay, dissolution and despair. The novel is half Faust and half, in a way, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with other fractions added in. The achievement of writing quite as much as the total Human Comedy, 96 novels plus more stories, in a 20 year career, and so ravishingly makes the most prolific of composers - like Telemann or Vivaldi - seem frugal. It must have been much harder to produce novels like this than the admittedly hundreds of concertos that mostly sound very much like each other. There will be reason to enthuse about baroque concertos another time but at the moment it's all about Honoré de Balzac who always looks as if he dined well on the proceeds of his efforts. 

Among any number of eye-catching sentences,

Here I was, far from strong, undernourished, plainly dressed, pale and gaunt like an artist recovering from a recent bout of creativity.

And he would surely know. I noted it down as a possible epigram for a poem but I wouldn't know. It might, however, serve for ironic use if ever a poem arrived to put with it.

Also worthy of special attention towards the end was,

He guided his master, who walked with robot-like tread, into the vast gallery,

which caused an eyebrow to be raised. The Wild Ass's Skin is dated 1830-31. My old edition of the OED dates 'robot' to 1923, from the Czech, robota, from a play by Karel Capek. Balzac wouldn't have known what it meant but perhaps it does convey his French word into English best for us now. Perhaps it is permissable but it seems to strike the wrong note for me, as if St. Paul had put his Letter to the Corinthians on the internet. While I'm used to not believing in translations of poetry which can only exist properly in its original language, I've never been quite so concerned about novels in translation before although the same doubts must apply.

I did get a copy of Gide's Les Faux Monnayeurs with the intention of comparing  the translation with the original. The time has long passed for that esoteric exercise and so I won't add La Peau de Chagrin en Francais to my shopping list but while the reading of literature from other languages is essential we remain hostages of the translator, brilliant though I'm sure they are.

I'll save the next two Balzacs for later and thrive on variety. I wasn't surprised the postman couldn't get Anna Karenina through the postbox. For some reason, I had thought it was about 450-500 pages. It's not, it's 849. That will be something to look forward to but I was keen to read Laura Cumming's The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez. She is a brilliant writer and I like being shown round paintings by someone who knows what they're talking about. Reading about poetry, I bring my own prejudices and long-nurtured grievances to hold against anything I don't imagine myself to agree with and uncritically nod with enthusiasm at everything I do. With painting, I'm grateful to have it explained to me. I know so little that, I now realize, I have been calling him Velasquez and I didn't even check. I must write out Velázquez 100 times so that I remember in future.

I began Laura's book outside in the early afternoon. The cloud cleared and the Sun came through, two or three hours too late. Wouldn't you just know it.

--

But Anna Karenina is said to be The Greatest Novel in places on the internet and, no doubt, in editions of itself. As was Middlemarch in the repeat of the life of George Eliot repeated on telly last night. Last year I thought it must be Proust. I'm sure some say it's Ulysses. There will be War and Peace to add to the long list, Don Quixote, Jane Austen fans will be outraged if she's not listed and so it goes on. But it seems as if being enormous adds weight to one's case in the same way as, somehow, louder meant better in heavy metal music. That surely shouldn't be one of the criteria. If The Dead qualified as a novel it could easily be that. We will see but there's no need to come back here for a decision any time soon. The older one gets the less easy it is to be definitive about such diaphonous decisions. 

I've seen the word diaphonous more than once today, in Balzac or Laura if not both. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me.