What Julian has been reading

I have read some brilliant books lately. The Heather Blazing by Colm Toibin was quiet, delicate yet full of suppressed emotion. I found a kindred spirit on this wonderful writer. She lives in Maine across the great pond and I discovered her blog online. We both swooned over this giant Irish talent.

Also read Clear Light of Day by Anita Desai - the mother of Kiran who recently won the Man Booker Prize. Very fine writing in this quite short novel. Beautiful descriptive work. Where was the beauty in Sophie Hannah's Little Face - nowhere to be seen.

Zoe Heller's Notes on a Scandal was a wonderful suprise for me. It is very down to earth and also an intimate work. Plenty of humour and engages the reader from beginning to end. Its true she doesnt seem to be overly fond of men, nevertheless the women characters are extremely subtly realised.

I tried one of Italo Calvino's works - Invisible Cities - could not get in to this - perhaps it suffers in translation. Maybe its the postmodernism that puts me off. Julian has always been a traditionalist at heart. This for me applies to all the arts. Ok I do like Virginia Woolf very much and she was something of a modernist - however most of her works do preserve narrative sense and character interest - I only found The Waves impossible - could give it another go as that was a long time ago and people change. Mainly I do go for realism in literature, melody in music
and figurative or landscape work in painting


Now reading One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

This is also posing problems as it is "magical realist". However there are some stunning passages in it and I am keeping going.

I have been doing some background reading on Marquez and this has helped a bit. He has one hell of a life story. Colombia where he grew up is enough to make anyones writing a bit weird. What a terrible history the country has. No wonder Marquez now spends most of his time in Mexico or Europe. He isnt very popular as a person in the USA because of his Communist sympathies although actually he doesnt write a blank cheque for people like Castro.