penwithlit

For many years I have wanted to write about the Finzi-Continis — about Micòl and Alberto, Professor Ermanno and Signora Olga — and about the many others who lived at, or like me frequented, the house in Corso Ercole I d’Este, Ferrara, just before the last war broke out. But the impulse, the prompt, really to do so only occurred for me a year ago, one April Sunday in 1957.

So begins the prologue of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis. The event that prompted the narrator was a visit to some Etruscan tombs and an innocent remark from a little girl about why the old tombs are considered less sad than modern tombs. This makes the narrator think about the Finzi-Continis’ tomb, built about a hundred years before but now nearly completely overgrown with weeds. A tomb that does not hold the more recent Finzi-Continis as most of them…

Afternoon Men was Anthony Powell’s first novel and was published in 1931 when Powell was only 26 years old. I found this copy in a secondhand bookshop when I was reading his twelve-volume series of novels, A Dance to the Music of Time. It’s a fun book and will certainly be of interest to anyone that has read Dance as the style and structure of the book is so similar to his later work. The book has little plot and instead concentrates on characters and the dialogue between the many characters, who are all from the same jaded semi-aristocratic, intellectual milieu as in Dance.

The main character is William Atwater who has an unsatisfying job at a museum. The book opens with Atwater in a bar discussing with his friend, Pringle, Pringle’s current medication regime. We are then introduced to several other characters who enter the bar and…

More about George Bellows HERE.

Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916).

Below: Sculpture destroyed.

Below: Sculpture destroyed.

Kaliningrad Oblast is a federal state of the Russian Federation that is located on the coast of the Baltic Sea and has the city of Kaliningrad as its administrative center.

Until 1945, Kaliningrad was known as Königsberg, the former capital of East Prussia,  but after its World War II victory over Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union annexed the city and the surrounding area.

Kaliningrad’s ultimate strategic value to Russia is that it functions as a warm-water port as well as a staging area for military exercises. Russia has held frequent exercises in the region and Moscow has often threatened to place nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, which borders multiple NATO states.

Strange, isn’t it?

Just recently, a dear friend of mine said to me that Jews always travel with the Holocaust in their suitcase, which is why, I think, I understand what Goldie Goldbloom is trying to do in her most recent novel, Gwen.  It’s a fictionalisation of the complicated life of Gwen Johns, (1876-1939) the Welsh artist overshadowed by her flamboyant brother Augustus John, and the novel is set mostly in Paris at the turn of the twentieth century.  But there are some surreal elements of the novel that will baffle readers unless they know something of the dark history of Paris under the Nazis.

These days, Paris has marketed itself as the city of love, and tourists flock there in droves to enjoy its light-hearted ambience.  I’ve done that too, and will again, I hope.  But I’ve never forgotten the shock of seeing this plaque on a wall in…