Spiralling Out of Control

Just as I suspected, Jeremy Mercer's book Books, Bedbugs and Baguettes was a bit Meh! (how can a book successfully be both self-deprecating and self-regarding at the same time? Dunno, but it is!) but being in Paris, I read it anyway and enjoyed my pilgrimage to Shakespeare and Co. Would that it could have been a longer visit, but it was not to be, for reasons documented in one of my other blogs parablepsis.

Arriving home, I tucked into the remaining chapters of Crime and Punishment and, having finished, scratched my head as to its overall message. Did Raskolnikov really consider himself to be a man apart, above the law and punishment? Was he testing out this theory when he bludgeoned the old pawnbroker and her sister, or was he intent on digging himself out of debt and providing for his studies so that he could help mankind? Was he just deranged? Sick (he spent a lot of time in delirium)? Laden with moral qualms or totally amoral? He seemed to dance around the possibilities in turn, without settling on an answer, and his decision to hand himself in to the police (when he patently didn't feel guilty and had the opportunity to totally get away with the crime) was bizarre and in the end seemed to have less to do with the flaky transparent Sonya than his own perverse nature. He didn't actually seem sorry he committed murder. Naturally he hated Siberia, and seemed to hate the faithful girl who tagged along with him. Nasty piece of work.
I was in the Oxfam shop the other day and stumbled across the second part of Karen Armstrong's autobiography The Spiral Staircase that documents her difficulty in re-engaging with the world on leaving the convent that she had entered aged just seventeen and the various trials (suspected mental health problems) that she underwent before being finally diagnosed as an epileptic. She is one of my favourite biblical scholars (her work is a model of clarity and interesting insight) and I was vaguely aware that she had been in holy orders, but unaware of the whole story, or what she had been through. It is fascinating, and I recognise much of what she writes about (especially the ordeal of producing a doctoral thesis - the descrition of its failure at viva stage is gut-churning to read) and I have ordered online her Through the Narrow Gate to pad out her past as a nun. I picked up The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macauley, also from the Oxfam theological book shelf. I've been looking for a copy of this out-of-print book for ages, having heard it nominated as the 'best travel book of all time' and appearing to have a bit in common with Sisters of Sinai, which I read with interest last year. Happily it's just the sort of weather (wet, cold and windy) to snuggle up with a book. Since the Husband and Bright-Eyed Boy are out tonight, I shall do just that!

Sur le Continent

Looking forward to our trip to Paris via the Eurostar: just got fingers crossed that the industrial action against the proposed retirement age doesn't obstruct us too much!
To that end I have bought Jeremy Mercer's Books, Bedbugs and Baguettes set in Paris's legendary Shakespeare & Co. book shop. If I'm honest, I'm not expecting too much from it, just a warm, fuzzy, French sort of ambiance. I don't think it'll last me so I'm taking the Husband's copy of Neither Here nor There: travels in Europeby Bill Bryson, which had me crying with laughter (a rare occurrence) when I read a snippet on parking in Rome. The Husband is just moving on to BB's A Walk in the Wood which is good holiday fare. Daughter #3 has finished The Bell Jar so I got a copy of Dodie Smith's I Capture the Castle which provides a good contrast with Plath's angsty novel, a real feel-good book. the Bright-Eyed Boy still really hasn't found his comfort-level bookwise. Having tried Darren Shan's Demonata series, he still seems to prefer fact-based books and has made a diversion into Jeremy Clarkson and, most recently, Charlie Booker's Screen Burn. I guess he'll come round to literature-proper in the end - the important thing is to keep on reading.

I've gone a bit crazy on Amazon recently, purchasing a lot of commentaries and scholarly stuff for my studies. Most don't really rate a mention, but one that does - on account of its sheer loveliness is the third edition of Michael Holmes' Apostolic Fathers: Greek Texts and English Translations. It's been produced in the style of a Bible, with leather-cloth cover and onion-skin paper and is a quite delightful thing to possess. As luck would have it, it arrived just as I needed to look up Clement of Rome's familiarity with the Corinthian correspondence, so out of the packet and onto the desk.
I'm currently making my way slowly through Crime and Punishment and, although I occasionally skim over a page or so, I'm actually rather enjoying it - if that's the word. It's quite uncompromisingly brutal in places and reveals well the psychological agonies of a sick mind. But what I could really do with is a glossary of characters and names - you lose track eventually as the cast increases in number, and even share patronymics!

The Idiot and a Potentially Evil (Buying) Eye

The close of one of my thesis chapters means the opening of another: another text to pull apart and examine with an eye on the grammatical issues that constitute my PhD. One of the comments that my supervisor made was that I 'didn't seem to use many commentaries'. Well, that's true, because (a) I wanted the ideas that came out of my writing to be mine and not some rewarmed opinions of another and (b) most of the ones I have to hand are quite elderly and (literally) fusty. I am quite pernickety when it comes to commentaries - I have to be, as it MUST nod towards the Greek text. Some are much better than others: the old International Critical Commentary series is superb, and I have been lucky enough to pick up a number of these from my local theological second-hand bookshop (The Barbican Bookshop in York).
They do look rather wonderful and serious on the bookshelf (uniformly dark green with gold titles) and are a tribute to the 'steeped-in-learning scholarship' of the late 19th/early 20th century. I also have Bishop Lightfoot's 19th century commentaries on the Pauline epistles - it's a real pity he didn't complete the set - which are a bedrock of any serious textual work, often referred back to in the ICC books. I've borrowed a few from the uni. library too. I don't have much time for the overtly devotional commentaries whose only intent is to bedazzle the faithful with praising and the party-line (mostly American, evangelical and conservative) without bothering to pick up on the serious historical and critical issues......let's be frank, PROBLEMS, belittering the texts.

Confronted by the need to update my academic wardrobe, er, bookshelf, I bit the bullet and bought the volumes in the New International Commentary on the New Testament that deal with the 'authentic' Pauline epistles. They cost a fair bit, but now my commentary work has been dragged into the late 1990's rather than the 1890's, and in truth, that's what my bursary money is for. They are the product of some serious scholarship and although you do glimpse the occasional flash of devotional petticoat, the detailed attention to the Greek text is exemplary.
Trouble is, I am running out of shelf-space - again! I may have to sell some of my old Classics stuff.

Tackling a new epistle is rather daunting, so I was going to spend a week boning up on the Corinthian background (revisiting some stuff tackled in my final undergrad year), but on reading introductory material to 2 Corinthians, I realise that this is going to be no walk in the park: the Greek text looks like a bag of spanners, like someone has dropped a stack of papers on the way to the Xerox, picked them up and duplicated them without regard for order or coherence.
Oh dear! I've certainly got my work cut out!

The Husband is s-l-o-w-l-y making his way through the latest Bill Bryson (he can't seem to stay awake for more than two pages per night). I've just finished Beryl Bainbridge's According to Queeney, a fictional account of the relationship between Samuel Johnson (he of the dictionary) and his 'patrons' the Thrale family, as recounted by the oldest daughter Hester (or Queeney as she is known to differentiate her from her mother). I really enjoyed it and will keep an eye out for more Bainbridges in the charity shops.
I've moved onto Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, partly because Daughter #1 recommended The Idiot to me (although I think she's stopped reading it now for some reason). Serious Russian literature is a bit of a lacuna for me, although I did actually read War and Peace once (meandering and quite dull, I seem to remember) and 'enjoyed' Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward and A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (I didn't actually get that the former was a satire on Communism). I am quite surprised at how easy C & P is to read - kudos to the translator - but sometimes I find the narrative arc of older literature unsatisfying and I end up scratching my head as to what's supposed to have happened. Or stop caring if it's too digressive. We'll see.

However, the point of this post was that I bought the Bainbridge book as a result of seeing a documentary on her fascinating and eccentric life: she had died just a week or so before. Daughter #1 was very impressed by the job the translator (Alan Myers) had done on The Idiot (I was looking out for a C & P by him), but I found myself reading his obituary in the papers within the same week.
More spookily, I ordered, through AbeBooks, a 2-volume set of Margaret Thrall's ('magisterial') commentary on 2 Corinthians and.......no sooner had I submitted my order than I read on a theological website that she had just died! Perhaps I should lay off buying stuff for a while!