Books – Page 3 – derrickjknight

There Always Comes The Reckoning After 4.50 To Paddington

Unfortunately my recently prescribed antibiotics have not dismissed my UTI so I rang the GP surgery to report this. Within ten minutes I was called back and prescribed an alternative, this time being asked for a sample which I furnished this afternoon and collected the medication at the pharmacy.

Opening with a bustling description of the rush to catch a train, described as an uneven race to keep track of a porter who “turned the corner at the end of the platform whilst Mrs McGillicuddy was still coming up the straight.” is an example of the writer’s ability to engage attention and the dry humour which pervades Agatha Christie’s novel “4.50 From Paddington” – the first by her that I have read.

The story is very well crafted, with various leads, false and incidental, followed without any real suggestion of the final conclusion. Much is told by skilled dialogue of which the author is a master. She amplifies the words with description of tones, as in ” “Well?” she said. It was a small insignificant word, but it acquired full significance from Mrs. McGillicuddy’s tone, and Miss Marple understood its meaning perfectly.” Sometimes sentences are left unfinished, as in “You don’t think……..” for the reader or indeed the conversationalist to complete. The mood of each person was indicated by such as a raised eyebrow or slumped body language.

Mrs Christie makes good use of short sentences to increase the pace of the narrative, and has an ability to create the essence of person and place with simple, telling, statements, as in “Her eyes were like windows in an empty house.” and “He unpropped himself from the dresser.”

There are hints at romance and less than subtle match-making.

It is hardly surprising that this story has been filmed on a number of occasions.

My 1959 edition of The Book Club was in a collection bequeathed to me by my Auntie Ivy some 50 years ago.

It is protected by two copies of the same book jacket very well designed by Taylor, about whom I have found no information. This featured copy is the top one; the second, even less blemished, is pristine. Anyone lacking a jacket should apply for a replacement in writing enclosing a large cheque.

Clinging to the top of the closed pages was a desiccated spider complete with clustered cobweb.

After starting on my next antibiotics I turned back to Maria de Zayas and the penultimate story in my Folio Society selection.

Very reminiscent of the Whitehall farces of the 1950s and ’60s presented by Brian Rix involving unlikely scenarios, although lacking their humour, this offering by Maria involves her usual themes of love, honour, deception, treachery, bed-hopping, and murder designed to demonstrate “that, in the end, no crime goes unpunished”.

Here is Eric Fraser’s illustration to this narrative.

This evening we dined on Hordle Chinese Take Away’s excellent fare, taken on our knees in front of the TV catching up on episodes of Freddie Flintoff’s Field of Dreams, a truly inspirational series which I will review when I have seen them all.

No Good Comes From Marrying Foreigners

Lat night before bed I watched the highlights of the fourth day of the third Test Match between England and Sri Lanka. The match finished early.

I completed my reading of this, the sixth story in the Folio Society selection by Maria de Zayas.

To my mind, the fact that disaster came to each of three sisters in other parts of Europe is actually incidental to the usual theme of men’s deceptions. Each of their stories could have taken place in the author’s own home country.

One sister delayed her marriage by delaying it for year on condition that he should woo her “with music and gifts and other such attentions… [she] wanted to grow to love her husband for the way he treated her, and to to find out something about his character and habits.” She thought: “Can they really believe that it would be better for a woman to marry a man she has never seen or spoken to, and who may be ugly, stupid, disagreeable and bad-tempered, so that later on she finds out that he hates her and ends up in despair at having thrown herself away on a man, because she did not find out first what he was really like?”

The main different consequence of the moves were “the grief at being separated from [their] own beloved homeland” which their husbands did not appreciate, yet, in other ways treated them with similar treachery to that they would have experienced in Spain.

Here is Eric Fraser’s faithful illustration to this story.

Seeking a little light relief from Maria de Zayas and prompted by FALL IS TAPPING ON OUR SHOULDERS; READING AGATHA CHRISTIE

SEPTEMBER 9, 2024 LAURIE GRAVES

I read most of Agatha Christie’s 4.50 From Paddington, and should be able to review it tomorrow.

This evening we dined on Hordle Chinese Take Away’s excellent fare.

A Traitor To His Own Flesh And Blood

In this, the fifth tale from my Folio Society collection of stories from the seventeenth century forward thinking Spanish writer, Maria de Zayas (introduced in https://derrickjknight.com/2024/09/02/the-ravages-of-vice/ ) we revert to the author’s usual themes of love, honour, self-interest and retribution meted out by the male sex.

“I would rather my son were beheaded than badly married” states a rich and powerful gentleman who opposed his daughter’s suit by another whose “ancestors had been peasants. Although, in compensation, they had been Christians for many generations and were also rich, it was not surprising that such a stigma should have been kept secret.”

A father and brother contrive to bring about an execution in which a priest is forced to hear the victim’s confession before it is carried out. Saving a soul is seen as more important than a life. As usual, despite the deception involved, this is presented as a matter of honour. A further similar murder is carried out on account of a friend’s persuasion.

Here is Eric Fraser’s powerful illustration to this story.

Forewarned But Forestalled

This fourth tale in The Folio Society selection of stories of Maria de Zayas, introduced in https://derrickjknight.com/2024/09/02/the-ravages-of-vice/, has a change of mood, of power; and a humorous theme.

This time clever women are the tricksters and men the victims of their jokes and deceit. The first fool was “so chastened by his experiences that he now scorned all women without exception, a sentiment quite contrary to reason, because for each wicked woman there are a hundred good ones. Not all women are wicked and it is not just to blame all for the crimes of a few. But he maintained once and for all that there was no trusting them, especially the clever ones, because they, from having ben calm and sensible, suddenly became flighty and vicious and took men in with their cunning wiles.”

The author closes with “I can now bring to an end this amazing story, which was intended as a warning to those ignorant people who condemn brains in a woman…..and if a woman is going to be bad, she will be bad whether she is clever or stupid, though in the first case she is more likely to b able to control herself.”

Here is Eric Fraser’s faithful illustration to this story.

A Shameful Revenge

On another day of relentless rain I stayed indoors and occupied myself with reading, including this third story in my Folio Society Maria de Zayas collection.

De Zayas writes that it is not acceptable for a man of good society and wealth to marry a woman, even of the same background, without similar riches; it is, however, satisfactory to win such a prey by any means possible as long as the affair is kept secret in order to preserve her reputation and his honour. In such a situation “the moment he saw her, or so he maintained, he lost his heart to her. (The worst thing about men to my mind [says the author] is that they profess to feel much more than they really do.)”

Persistence and false promises are preferable to force, although any method may be employed to break down honourable resistance to a dishonourable suit. Once satisfied the lover eventually tires of his love. When “unable to consummate his lust [he] had been in despair…now he regretted it. And the worst of it is that there are many men like him; there always have been and there still are today. There are many [such women] too, and neither one nor the other regret what they are doing until they have plunged into the same abyss as engulfed all their predecessors.”

“Who but a man could be guilty of such a betrayal!” Nevertheless our author says “You will surely allow me, gentlemen, in this tale of mine about a man’s deceit, to express my admiration for a woman’s wrath, for you will recognise that a woman’s fury often springs from a man’s duplicity.” Our author would have agreed with William Congreve that “Hell hath no fury than a woman scorned.”

Revenge is acceptable if in defence of honour; one of the schemes in this story is less shameful than the other.

As so often in these stories a shamed woman has recourse to “taking the veil” in order to preserve her life. Shakespeare’s Hamlet enjoins Ophelia to “get thee to a nunnery”.

Here is Eric Fraser’s engraving for this story.

This evening I dined on Jackie’s penne pasta arrabbiata sprinkled with Parmesan cheese, while she opted for a plateful of vegetables, including carrots, cauliflower, green and runner beans. I drank more of the Fleurie.

An Innocent Punished

Maria de Zayas y Sotomayor is introduced in https://derrickjknight.com/2024/09/02/the-ravages-of-vice/

This outspoken woman, centuries ahead of her time, on the very first page of this second story in my Folio Society selection, gives her view of the subservient position of women with “His will was always her will, and she loved and obeyed him as a father, so she accepted the offer [of marriage]”.

Maria has this to say about love, honour, and retribution: “despite the kindness she received at first from her husband”, the bride discovers that “Men are very accomplished at showing this in the early days of marriage, indeed it is my opinion that they are so generous with it then that they spend it all in the first year, after which, the springs of charity having dried up, they drive their wives to their graves from very lack of it. And….this is certainly the reason why wives, finding themselves disliked, become involved in infidelities which dishonour their husbands and cost they themselves their lives. What can a husband, or a father or a brother or, at its lowest level, a lover, expect from a woman except disaster if she finds herself disliked and deprived of the one thing she craves?”. Retribution is meted out by the nearest and dearest mentioned in this last sentence.

The author’s staunch Catholicism is featured several times in the story, and probably is the reason for “a great wizard and necromancer” being a Moor of the Muslim faith.

Deception, extreme cruelty, and torture, all play their typical parts in this fast moving story from an author who knows how to engage her readership.

Here is Eric Fraser’s faithful illustration to the tale.

The Ravages Of Vice

María de Zayas y Sotomayor (born Sept. 12, 1590, Madrid [Spain]—died c. 1661) was one of the most important of the minor 17th-century Spanish novelists and one of the first women to publish prose fiction in the Castilian dialect.

Little is known of Zayas’ life except that she was born into a noble family in Madrid and may have lived in Zaragoza, where her work was published. It is not known whether she married or when and where she died.

Her novels about love and intrigue, which used melodramatic and frequently horrific elements, were widely read and very popular. Novelas amorosas y ejemplares (1637; “Novels of Romance and Exemplary Tales”) is a collection of short novels about the romantic complications of married life, ostensibly told one evening to amuse a sick woman. The stories are mostly about women who are mistreated by husbands or seducers. Novelas y saraos (1647; “Novels and Soirees”) and Parte segunda del sarao y entretenimientos honestos (1649; “Soiree Part Two and Decorous Amusements”) are sequels. In many of her stories Zayas accused Spanish society of leaving women without the information or emotional strength to resist seduction and abuse. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Maria-de-Zayas-y-Sotomayor

In his introduction to

John Sturrock tells us that the author “was, by the standards of the time, an educated woman, and since women then received very little formal education she was presumably self-taught. She is very ready with an apt classical reference in her stories…..”

“There are two great motive forces [in these] – love and honour. Love is seen, conventionally enough, as a blind and irresistible force which drives women to destruction, while honour is its severe and apparently inevitable concomitant; the second exists as the only way to check the ravages of the first. But it is in her attitude to the concept of sexual honour that Maria shows originality. The concept is essentially a masculine one of course. Men alone have honour; women have their chastity, a reputation even, but should they succumb and lose them then there is nothing they can do about it except wait for punishment. It is the husband, the brother or the father who is dishonoured when a wife, a sister or a daughter is seduced, and it is up to them to wipe out the stain with the blood of the guilty parties. Thus it is that a woman is quite liable to meet her death at the hands of her nearest and dearest. Maria … [says] that men are deceitful, they wreak their nefarious purposes on the weaker sex by duplicity, by making promises they have no intention of fulfilling. Then they subscribe to a double standard of morality, whereby their own infidelities are considered very dashing while those of their womenfolk are punishable by death.” (Sturrock)

As translator Sturrock claims that de Zayas’ prose style “would be impossible and probably undesirable to attempt to reproduce that too faithfully. She writes like a woman in a hurry, impatient often of the niceties of structure and balance. The translation then aims at simplification as much as fidelity, avoiding, at opposite ends of the spectrum, deliberate archaisms and obtrusive modern idioms.” One can only trust that he has been successful in his work.

There are stories in this Folio Society collection. I will feature these one at a time with minimal comment on the prose.

The first is “The Ravages of Vice”, in which we are told of carnage consequent upon deceitfully contrived alleged infidelity. The story races along with good action sequences and the occasional didactic element, such as parenthood where the step-child is loved at least equally as children of a couple: “This is how good married couples ought to behave if they want to live in peace, because a thousand quarrels and upsets arise out of the dislike husbands often feel for their wives’ children, and wives for their husbands’ children.”

Love, honour, deception, and retribution are all Maria de Sayas’s major themes featured in the tale.

Here is Eric Fraser’s faithful and powerful illustration to this story.

Sintram And His Companions

Friedrich Heinrich Karl de la Motte, Baron Fouqué (born February 12, 1777, Brandenburg—died January 23, 1843, Berlin) was a German novelist and playwright remembered chiefly as the author of the popular fairy tale Undine (1811).

Fouqué was a descendant of French aristocrats, an eager reader of English and Scandinavian literature and Greek and Norse myths, and a military officer. He became a serious writer after he met scholar and critic August Wilhelm Schlegel. In his writings Fouqué expressed heroic ideals of chivalry designed to arouse a sense of German tradition and national character in his contemporaries during the Napoleonic era. His ideas, based on the view of linguistic development first conceived by the philosopher J.G. Fichte, stressed the influence of the mother tongue in shaping the mind.

(Read Sir Walter Scott’s 1824 Britannica essay on chivalry.)

A prolific writer, Fouqué gathered much of his material from Scandinavian sagas and myths. His dramatic trilogy, Der Held des Nordens (1808–10; “Hero of the North”), is the first modern dramatic treatment of the Nibelung story and a precedent for the later dramas of Friedrich Hebbel and the operas of Richard Wagner. His most lasting success, however, has been the story of Undine, a water sprite who marries the knight Huldbrand to acquire a soul and thus become human but who later loses this love to the treacheries of her uncle Kuhleborn and the lady Berthulda. Although Fouqué’s works were at first enthusiastically received, after 1820 they rapidly passed out of fashion. Fouqué died in poverty after belated recognition by Frederick William IV. (Brittanica.com)

I spent the day finishing my reading of

and preparing this review.

In his preface dated December 5, 1914 to the 1915 edition Fouqué discusses thoughts on the sources of a poet’s inspiration, focussing on the Durer drawing which was his source for this work: “A few years ago I found a fine copperplate engraving by Albrecht Durer among my birthday gifts< A knight in armour, with an old, worn face, riding a great horse and followed by his dog, is passing through a dreadful valley, where the clefts of rock and the tree roots distort themselves into hideous forms. The ground is thickly carpeted with poisonous toadstools, and evil serpents crawl in and out among them. Close beside the knight, on a small, lean horse, rides Death; behind, a demonlike shape claws after him with its long arm. Horse and dog look strange and unnatural, as though transformed by the ghastly surroundings, but the knight rides calmly onwards, carrying on his lance-point a transfixed salamander. In the far distance a fortress can. be seen, its fair hospitable ramparts looking down into the valley, whose contrasting desolation seems to sink all the more deeply into the soul.” D. E. Schober, in 1769 suggested “Durer must have taken the idea from some special event, or else he meant it to express figuratively a soldier’s career”.

Fouqué took a good number of years to respond to his friend’s wish that he should write a romance on the theme. Rather than a romance he has written a novel set in his favourite Norwegian period reflecting the sagas of that era in a distinctly magical and satanic mood displaying all he has taken from Durer’s engraving.

His fine descriptive language, as in “the torchlight flickered drearily among the shadows of the vaulted roof” contains much alliteration, for example “still the silence continues. Single voices, in low uncertain tones, tried to renew their interrupted speech of a while since…..strange singing and sighing….”

He makes full use of the weather to set a scene and reflect a mood, harshly dramatic or softly calm.

The quality of the prose is further exemplified below.

I have paired these pages of prose with the exquisite engravings by E. J. Sullivan, demonstrating that both the artist and the author adhere faithfully to Durer’s work. All images can be enlarged in the gallery.

A. C. Farquharson, the translator, has produced a very readable version.

This evening we dined on belly of pork baked in chillis and peppers, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, and cauliflower leaves.

Undine is featured in https://derrickjknight.com/2016/05/17/undine/

Tapster’s Tapestry

Early this morning we attended Lymington Hospital for the removal of my catheter which was executed swiftly and painlessly. It took me so long to produce an adequate flow to confirm all was in order that I was sent off to the café downstairs for a mug of tea to add the necessary liquid fuel. I surprised myself by adding a Full English breakfast eaten with such relish matched only by yesterday’s Chinese takeaway – gusto I have not experienced since the first cystoscopy.

This afternoon I dozed over

the third of my A.E. Coppard’s Golden Cockerel Cockerel books.

This work tilts at windmills as applicable today as they were in Coppard’s time of the first quarter of the twentieth century; bureaucracy, international relations, warfare, politics, and people management are all lampooned in this blend of satirical satire and realism, following in the steps of Jonathan Swift – the difference being that our author managed the feat in just 58 pages.

Three adventurous adolescents unite on a trip to discover whether the earth is flat or round. In all their perambulations they establish no certainty about this or anything else, eventually returning home. Perhaps with all life it is the journey that counts. They encounter a strange variety of peoples and their countries, briefly engaging in relationships with them. The writer’s insightful knowledge of people is apparent from the desire of all the freed captive humans to return to their cages.

In his title Coppard indulges his poet’s taste for alliteration, as along with rhyme, simile, and metaphor he does throughout the story. “It was the sort of poetry that dazed the mind; it crackled like elastic and smelt of the roll of a drum”; “Time, however, had drooled heavily by”.

His dry humour is also constantly evident, as in this piece of well executed dialogue: “‘Not a soul of them is caring about this grand question of the contour of the earth!’ / ‘They don’t seem to take an all-round view, that’s flat'”.

Further evidence of the fluent prose is given with these scans of Gwenda Morgan’s faithful engravings in the 1930s style. They can be enlarged in the gallery.

This evening I dined on left-overs from last night’s Chinese takeaway, while Jackie chose a bowl of mixed vegetables.

Count Stefan

I had begun reading

before going into hospital on 21st, and needed a little revision before continuing with it today. The frontispiece is by Robert Gibbings.

Here are the boards and spine; and the jacket which has protected them from two years short of a century. Perhaps the fact that four of the last few pages were partially uncut suggests the book has not been opened very often.

This tale, set in an Austrian guest house, during which one of the guests is writing a novel “all about an adventuress whom Miss James had invented, but whom she disliked with a fierce unpleasantness” and for whom she found a perfect model in one of the other residents. Coppard traces the interrelationships of the group brought together in this establishment as they jostle for position in the house; especially as they await the arrival of the constantly delayed eponymous Count. His absence fosters speculation, and consequent rivalry over his anticipated attractions, which, in the event, bear no relation to reality.

He is man with a problem at last arriving into the house with a doctor charged with curing him. Carinthia James, despite her better judgement, finds herself persuaded into becoming a key supporter and part of a similar group of recruits. There is a question of madness, eventually settling on one of the original residents. Couples pair off into their own exclusive relationships.

I have chosen to scan one particular page of Coppard’s descriptive scene-setting prose with clever little details.

Others are attached to illustrations by Robert Gibbings.

This evening we dined on small portions of chop suey and chow mein from Hordle Chinese Take Away.