“I might as well tell you —– this affair of Emil’s was a great surprise to me.”
As part of the Children’s Classic Literature Event hosted by Amanda at Simpler Pastimes, the read-along for this year is Emil and The Detectives. I’ve been wanting to read this German translated children’s book for years, so I was very glad when it was chosen.
Publius Ovidius Naso was born in Sulmo, east of Rome in the year 43 B.C. As a son of an upper middle class family, his father sent him to be educated in Rome to distinguish himself in a career in law or government. Ovid was known as an exemplary rhetorician and worked at minor magisterial posts before quitting his public career to pursue poetry. Immediate success followed his first published elegy and by 8 A.D., the year in which Metamorphoses was published, he was one of the foremost poets of Rome.
“I have taken Caliban’s advice. I have stolen their books. I will have run of this isle.”
With the first sentence, in his allusion to Shakespeare’s, The Tempest, Richard Rodriguez sets the tone for his memoir, depicting his life as the son of Mexican immigrants. Is he a monster, an outcast who will use his adversaries’ own weapons to gain power, an identity, and a place in the kingdom?
“Begin here.”
Introducing Journal of a Solitude, another out-of-order book for my WEM Biographies Project. I’m finding the remaining biographies heavy on U.S. content, and being a Canadian I wasn’t at all familiar with May Sarton. Born in Belgium, when German troops invaded the country, Sarton’s family fled to England, then to Boston, Massachusetts. As a writer, she wrote a number of novels, poems and memoirs, mostly a commentary on her life and experiences on aging, friendship, depression, lesbianism, doubt, failure, the simple pleasures of life, and other personal musings.
My WEM Biographies Project has been thrown out of order by my library who doesn’t carry most of the other titles, so I’ve been forced to wait for them on inter-library loans. Which means that I have no idea when they are going to arrive or which is going to arrive first. After two months, the first book has arrived, Born Again by Charles W. Colson.
Colson occupied a position high-up in the United States government, serving as Special Counsel to Richard Nixon during Nixon’s years in the presidency. Named as one of the Watergate Seven, he was tried and sentenced to one to three years in prison. His autobiography is a story of his rise and fall, and finally his rise again to a higher calling.
“My godmother lived in a handsome house in the clean and ancient town of Bretton.”
What on earth have I just read? This book simply cannot be written by the same author who wrote Jane Eyre! The mind rebels! The heart rebels! It cannot be! Am I sounding very dramatic and flourishing and vocal? That’s because I’ve spent 572 pages being lulled catatonic. What happened …..??
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| The Return of Orestes (1785) Anton von Maron source Wikimedia Commons |
“No one who had ever seen Catherine Morland in her infancy would have supposed her born to be an heroine.”
While Northanger Abbey was the first novel written by Jane Austen and sold to a publisher by her brother, Henry, in fact it was repurchased by the author and not published until six months after her death in December 1817. Austen’s parody of 17th century Gothic novels is told with a good-natured humour, but a valuable lesson lies beneath the surface of its narrative.
My ninth choice for my Deal Me In Challenge comes from “diamonds,” my poetry section. I have completely avoided my short story section so far, not out of design, but out of fate. I just haven’t chosen a club yet. In any case, for this choice we move to France and the poetry of Victor Hugo.
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| The Sacrifice of Ipheginia by Agamemnon (1671) Jan Steen source |
Agamemnon is the first of a trilogy of plays called The Oresteia, the next two plays being The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides, all performed in 458 B.C., only two years before the death of Aeschylus. This surviving unified trilogy allows the reader to experience the development of these three-part stories and to observe the common strands of informatiion and enlightenment winding throughout. Each play would have built support and framework for the others. However, even though we have all three plays of this trilogy, the satyr play Proteus is lost, as it would have been a type of comic epilogue to finish The Oresteia.
