The Italian Connection

At long last! Have you missed me? Sorry for the extraordinary delay. My computer’s been in cyber hospital for ages (as those of you attending the meetings have heard!) and I’m sorry to say was consigned to the great big server in the sky last week. So here I am with a snappy little model, sitting in the Café Brutus on the High Street and taking advantage of some wonderful wireless technology whilst sipping on my favourite triple bean latte. Who ever thought that Wednesdays could be so…bohemian!

There’ll be lots to catch up on too – in particular the meal we all enjoyed in town and the subsequent night on the tiles. I haven’t stayed up that late for years! It was a superb little Italian, chosen by Jasmine (sans Prof H fyi[1]) and came with the full package: a genuine Italian family presided over by a proper, well-proportioned Italian momma who pinched the cheeks of the men and bossed her innumerable (handsome) sons around. It was interesting being as we got to talking about Italian Literature, or a lack of knowledge on that front apart from the likes of Petrarch and Dante and practically no one at all from contemporary times apart from Italo Calvino and Primo Levi. Jasmine talked about Calvino’s Italian Folktales though – a wonderful collection of stories from around the country that he collected himself. All the usual stuff you’d expect is here but the breadth of the tome (available in a delightful edition) gives one more of the culture than general folktale anthologies can ever do, providing that is that one donates the time to read them all and doesn’t just dip in and out like I would!
Then Clem chipped in with a few words on Levi’s The Wrench. A wonderful tale of a man’s relationship with a rigger, an everyman of sorts, a hero of the modern era, confident, ambitious, talkative and immodest in the extreme yet imbued with the essence of what it is to be a true grafter; an artist engineer. Most of us of course know Levi from his memoirs of his Holocaust experience, and indeed of genius collections such as The Periodic Table which fuses the chemist and the writer in a series of remarkable stories linked into the elements, and I’d never heard of The Wrench at all. Clem description of its main character Faussone really conjured up his indomitable spirit and he talked about the speaker’s quiet observation that made, for him, for one of the most memorable characters in modern fiction.
There was soon talk about a new collection of short stories by Levi (A Tranquil Star we think it’s called) one story from which appearing in the Guardian Review not so long ago so perhaps that’s one to look out for.

We’ve been reading Tomorrow by Graham Swift of late and it’s had a mixed reception. Many bought into its depiction of familial tension – an emotional build up and miniature saga told on the eve of a revelation that is set to throw a family into disarray. And yet others found they lost interest the moment the secret was revealed to the reader (and a secret many thought could be spotted a mile off although it took yours truly by surprise!). Swift’s prose is ever so engaging and terribly authentic and there were moments of insight that cast Swift’s narrator Paula as a remarkably three-dimensional character. Her tale told through the night to her sleeping teenage children slowly built up the picture of her life, but what struck readers was the way each chapter seemed to have its own theme or trope, like capsules of thought and suggestive nuance within a wider narrative arc.

Jasmine, whilst leaning back with her glass of Chianti, thought it ‘a meditation on truth and becoming, where the later is governed by the former and where what one thought was the truth is in fact an illusion.’
Well, yes, I suppose I agree (although I think our Jas has spent a night too many in Pseud’s Corner, no? Sounding like the elusive Professor Harry methinks! Only kidding Jas – you now what I mean). Clem was (as usual) a little harder to persuade. He felt ‘this secret business is just a blatant narrative technique to make you plod through a book with essentially nothing to it. So they bought a cat. So they lost the cat. So the cat came back. So she fancied the vet. And so on. And more to the point, so what? Yes, he can write. It’s well written. But I was bored by it and I guessed the secret almost immediately. I mean, the cover tells you everything you need to know.’
I’ll agree with that too. It’s bloody obvious when you think about it. But I didn’t, so I suppose it worked for me.
And that, with regard to reading, was that. We settled into the usual BBP social mode and the bottles of wine emptied with a rate of knots! We moved on from the restaurant to one of the quayside bars but it was too noisy so we ended up in the The Crown. Darling Mary read another of her poems which this time it addressed the plight of dear Donald who still keeps his vigil in the tree. It’s called ‘The Library Watcher’ and finishes with some beautiful lines: ‘Can you still watch / What is not there?’[2]
And it went down hill from there. I only just remember the karaoke, and Stella still denies singing ‘Smoke on the Water’ despite there being photographic evidence knocking about somewhere!

See you at the next meeting, My house – Thursday.

[1] For your information, for your information
[2] Speaking of things not being there – Jake, who goes for late night/early morning jogs around Bullman Hill says he couldn’t see Donald in his tree last Tuesday. I do hope the stalwart isn’t wavering…