Booknotes 4.4

The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka (translated by Ian Johnston), published 1915 (translated 2003), fiction. Picked this up on a whim. I’d heard of the premise, but beyond that I knew nothing. It’s short and weird and I liked it.

Lent: A Novel of Many Returns, by Jo Walton, published 2019, fantasy. Oh, I really liked this, especially in the second half when Things Start Happening. Over the past year or so I’ve realized I really, really love reading about 1400s/1500s Florence, and this delivered. Also enjoyed the religious aspects (the theology, the Catholicism, the prophecies, the demons) and the historical figures (Girolamo Savonarola, Pico della Mirandola, Lorenzo de Medici). I’d be remiss here not to mention that I very much look forward each month to Walton’s reading list posts.

In Search of Lost Time volume 3: The Guermantes Way, by Marcel Proust (translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff), published 1920, fiction. Another volume, another infatuation. (Though less central than the first two were.) The part with the grandmother — unrelated to the infatuation, to be very clear — was disturbing and tragic and anthropologically fascinating. Until now, by the way, I had (to my knowledge) never before read a novella’s worth of pages dedicated to a single dinner party. Good writing and interesting characters as usual, though this volume turned out to be my least favorite of the three so far.

The Acharnians, by Aristophanes, 425 BC, play. (The edition I read left the translator uncredited, sadly.) Medea got me hooked on Greek drama and hungry for more. This one is a commentary on the Peloponnesian War, six years in. Enjoyed the shattering of the fourth wall in the parabasis. And the shade thrown at Euripides, which I hope was lighthearted and not cruel. The writing wasn’t nearly as poetic as Medea was, though.