Hugo Williams, No Particular Place to Go (1981)
Gitta Sereny, Albert Speer: His Battle With Truth (1995)
Kenneth Grahame, The Golden Age (1895)
Kenneth Grahame, Dream Days (1898)
Rudyard Kipling, The Mark of the Beast and other Fantastical Tales (2007)
Ginette Vincendeau, Film / Literature / Heritage (2001)
John Hooper, The New Spaniards (2nd edition, 1995)
Christopher Ricks, Tennyson (1972)
Tom Bissell, God Lives in St. Petersburg (2005)
"Boris Akunin", Special Assignments (1999, trans. Andrew Bromfield 2007)
Pu Songling, Strange Tales From a Chinese Studio (1679, trans. John Minford 2006)
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
Daniel Kalder, Lost Cosmonaut (2006)
Milan Kundera, The Curtain (2005, trans. Linda Asher 2007)
The books I had thought would be good were disappointing. The books I had thought would be a bit of a struggle, especially Hugo Williams and Gitta Sereny, were great. The books I knew would be good, were good.
One query. "The Tomb of his Ancestors", an excellent story by Kipling from The Day's Work (1898), has a character who is worshipped as a god by some tribesmen in Central India. One of the clues to his godhood is 'The dull-red birth-mark on his shoulder, something like a conventionalised Tartar cloud' - I'm having trouble visualising this. Any ideas?
Sunday, April 01, 2007
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2 comments:
If you've consulted Google, then you'll perhaps already be up to speed on this, but here's the gory detail anyway. Notes and Queries, 1899. 'AMICUS' writes:
THE CONVENTIONALIZED TARTAR CLOUD. - The inquirer's tentative explanation ['M. C. L.' of New York City speculated that the 'conventionalized Tartar cloud' might 'symbolize the Tartars with reference to their vast hordes'] of an obscure passage in R. Kipling is ingenious, but incorrect. The following extract is from the Allahabad Pioneer of 3 Jan., 1882. The writer describes a carpet on view at the Lahore Exhibition of Industrial Art. The fabric was copied from a Central Asian original:
"The copyists seem to have misunderstood the meaning of the wavy lines in the middle ground; these wavy lines being a variation of what is known as the 'Tartar Cloud,' a conventional representation of clouds in the sky. The Byzantine and other clouds are different."
The inquirer should study the cloud-effects in Chinese and Persian landscapes, and Mr. Kipling should refrain from obscurities which necessitate a reference to 'N. & Q.'
Thanks a lot, Mr Baines. I suppose it's an example of Kipling being deliberately obscure, like he got better at being later in "The Gardener" and suchlike.
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