what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Desperado

I have been reading “The Long Shadows” (1997) which is almost a book within several books as it alternates between three if not four narratives – that of the English biographer of a writer whose last work was a novel about a young Romanian woman who visits England in the 1980s. Her character is clearly that of the young translator who was assigned to the writer when he visited Romania in the 1980s on a British Council scheme. A good atmosphere of the place and period is established.
After completing I googled author Alan Brownjohn’s name since this is the first thing I have read of his  - and discover that the most substantial material on him has been written – at book length - by ……….a Romanian Professor of English whose elegant, downloadable and highly readable book has the marvelous title - Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado AgeHer commentary on The Long Shadows is at pp67-88

And the book is only part of a much wider “British Desperado” project which has yielded two other titles from the Contemporary Literature Press of the University of Bucharest - first The Desperado Age – British literature at the start of the new millenium - another downloadable book (with more than 300 pages) which explains her term “desperado”, locates it in the literary constellation and then assesses the work of 15 writers
and then, the third title, Desperado Interviews is 400 pages long and consists of interviews with about 50 writers from different countries. Highly appropriate given the focus of the previous post!!

A real treasure trove of reading! Just the thing as the carpathian mist continues to envelope the house.......

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