Sunday Salon: Remembering the Classical Parrot

I've been reading a fair bit this week, more than I've managed lately, at least. I finished one book several days and have a first draft of a review written, but I haven't yet had time to write up the review. Perhaps today. The book is Ask the Parrot, by Richard Stark (who = Donald E. Westlake). I enjoyed the book a lot, and I was happy to discover that it's but the latest in a long line of books in the series--going back to the early 1960s. I feel I should have heard of the series before, but I confess I never had. The series features professional thief Parker, who appeals because he's so very smart about his work, and because Stark/Westlake shows us Parker's thought processes as we go along. Never hackneyed. I was delighted to discover the series.

At the same time I've been slowly reading David Grene's memoir Of Farming & Classics. David Grene was a classicist who taught at the University of Chicago and died in 2002. He's most known to me via his translation of Herodotus but he published as well a great deal more. He was also a farmer, and he divided his time between Chicago and his native Ireland. Anyway, the memoir is not personal, exactly. He does write about his familial history and his childhood, as well as the relationship between man and beast, but in very...exact and proper, almost old-fashioned prose. Here's a sample:

"That spring there were twenty men employed in Grenepark; the farm was and is over four hundred acres, and very little mechanization was then to be had and almost no system of contracting. Today I doubt if it needs more than five or six men to run it. The laborers in 1929 had, for years, earned twenty-five shillings a week--one pound five. The tram drivers in Dublin made two pounds, but the country workers usually got grass for a cow as well, and they sold a lot of eggs and chickens from their own households. Nicholas decided that, at the rate he was paying, the place would go bankrupt. So he did a most unusual thing then; he called the men together, explained the situation, and told them that if they could all take ten shillings he'd be very glad to keep them. The alternative was to reduce the total staff to ten men at a pound a week. They were to decide. They unanimously decided to take the cut and stay."

Finally, I'm now reading for fiction Sam Taylor's The Amnesiac. It's a...bad dream of a book, in a way. That is, it's about a guy, James Purdew, who's just turned 30 and he sort of realizes in a vague, post-dreamlike way that he's forgotten things. He starts having flashbacks--or perhaps he's had them all along--of things he otherwise doesn't remember. There are several years of his life he can't account for in any clear way. He kept journals during that time but for some reason locked them in a safe that can only be opened by explosive, and of course he doesn't have the key. He starts to investigate his past, haltingly because sometimes time just slips away from him. And various clues start to coalesce. Not clear yet where all this is heading. Certainly an interesting book.

Comments

[Clare D]

1.

That sounds quite a selection! I'm glad to see someone else keeps several books on the go at once. I always feel somehow decadent when I do this - like I'm trying to ram my first course and pudding into my mouth all at once. Or maybe that's just my brain creaking at its hinges.

[Debra Hamel]

2.

I usually don't like to read more than one at once. I find it too...complicated. But in this case, the David Grene memoir, while interesting, isn't keeping me up late. If I do read more than one at once, it's usually fiction and nonfiction.

[Joanne]

3.

The Amnesiac sounds like a very interesting book, I'll have to take a look for it.

[Debra Hamel]

4.

I'm nearing the end of The Amnesiac now and hoping that the payoff will have been worth the read. It's been interesting, mostly, but it's one of those books--as I think Clare wrote recently--that seems to take a long time to get through. We shall see....