So, here is a selection:
1) “No Comfort” by Fintan O’Toole
I read O’Toole quite often, mostly about politics, but this (even though it starts about Elon Musk) is not about politics. It’s about the inescapable cliche that Shakespeare wrote about “heroes” who were brought down by “tragic flaws.”
To offer a brief quote:
The most obvious problem with all that is, even if it were true, it would be crushingly dull. Moral tales in which people do bad things because they have wicked instincts and then get their comeuppance are ten a penny. The clichés shrink Shakespeare to the level of Miss Prism in The Importance of Being Earnest, the author of a three-volume novel of “more than usually revolting sentimentality” who explains that in her book “the good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means.”
Well worth reading.
2) Shelley Duvall (1949 – 2024)
Here are two good obituaries of Shelley Duvall:
This article is good, too: “The slim but powerful movie career of Shelley Duvall emerged from a Robert Altman crowd“
It’s really too bad that so many people these days know her, if they know her at all, from her (excellent) work in The Shining. She was consistently good, in a variety of roles, in all the movies she made with Robert Altman.
Speaking of Altman, this was interesting: “The 10 Best Robert Altman Movies, Ranked.” I don’t entirely agree with the ranking (if I made a Altman Top Ten list today, I would undoubtedly disagree with it by tomorrow), but it enough in sync with my own preferences that I’m tempted to re-watch 3 Women, which I haven’t seen in ages and which I’ve never reviewed (and which stars Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek).
Also:
I’ve still been dipping in and out of Across the River and into the Trees, from time to time, but my opinions haven’t changed. And now there are no more Hemingway novels for me to read for the first time (I have no interest in the posthumous ones). Oh, well, the short stories are generally better anyway.
I’ve also been re-reading parts of A. E. Hotchner’s book Papa Hemingway, which is about the years they were friends (and collaborators, since Hotchner adapted quite a few Hemingway stories for the screen). And during that time, they (and several other people) traveled around Spain following a season of bullfighting, partly because of a very intense rivalry between two great matadors, both of whom Hemingway was friends with.
Hemingway wrote a book about that summer, called The Dangerous Season. I’ve never read any of his non-fiction writing, but I decided to try this one.
(Weirdly, I do have to report that I felt a wisp of an obligation to insert a caveat explaining that I don’t approve of bullfighting. Looking at this objectively, this is odd, since I frequently read — and write — murder mysteries and I have never felt that I should clarify that I’m not in favor of murder.)
It is difficult to describe how much I enjoyed The Dangerous Season. Unlike Across the River, this is not Hemingway attempting “calculus” in prose (and did Hemingway even know what calculus was? — I doubt it) — this is Hemingway writing simply and well about people he knew and a sport he had studied for a lot of his life. It has humor, too, which the novel mostly doesn’t. (Orson Welles said that Hemingway could be really funny in life, but he obviously thought that humor had no place in serious fiction.) His humor can be rather dry and subtle, but it’s there.
In fiction, there are fairly predictable ways that this story could have ended (see the Lady Bracknell quote above), but these are real events and so they end as they ended.
One thing particularly amused me after reading this book and the Hotchner book referred to above. The two matadors whose rivalry is at the center of the book were Antonio Ordóñez and Luis Miguel Dominguín. Dominguin’s sister Carmen was married to Ordóñez. Hemingway clearly liked Carmen, and writes about her with admiration, but what he never mentions (and Hotchner does) is that she had been a matador herself, and a very good one. Hotchner makes it clear that no woman could succeed in the macho world of bullfighting unless she had undeniable skills.
Why is this book so much better than Across the River (apart from the “calculus” question referred to above)? Frankly, one reason is that it was edited, and heavily (I think partly by Hotchner). As far as I can tell, Across the River was never even proofread, let alone edited.
