book stack

Today the American International Women’s Club in Lausanne had a book sale. I came away with a wonderful stack of books:

 

• Martin Amis – The Rachel Papers
• Patrick Gale – Notes from an Exhibition
• William Trevor – The Story of Lucy Gault
• Bernard Malamud – The Fixer
• Saul Bellow – Herzog
• William Thackeray – Vanity Fair
• Frank O’Connor (ed.) – Classic Irish Short Stories
• Harry Levin (ed.) – The Essential James Joyce

 

Quite a masculine bookstack, isn’t it? Which is kind of ironic since I got the books at a woman’s club sale.

 

True to form, I also came home with two books I already own. Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection and Tim Winton’s Dirt Music. I saw the Grenville and thought – wait, you want that. No, wait, you have it already. Nah, you just think you have it because you just read The Secret River. So I happily put it in my bag. And then saw an identical copy on the shelf when I came home. And for some reason I thought I had Tim Winton’s Breathe already, not Dirt Music.

Oh well.

 

I started The Rachel Papers while waiting for a friend I met for lunch today and think I will enjoy this one. Such a snide, pretentious narrator. A little twerp about to turn twenty who thinks he’s all that and a bag of chips. This is Amis’s first novel (1973) and purportedly autobiographical so hopefully Amis can laugh at himself. If he can’t, I suspect the narrator will stop being amusing and end up annoying. But I think I remember hearing good things about this book, so will wait and see.

 

Finally, and slightly off subject, I started reading Pascal’s Pensées today for this month’s choice in the 10-year reading plan. I am hoping to find a copy in French before the end of the month but I haven’t had time to get to the library or the big bookshop in town and so started reading with the English version available online through Gutenburg. This one was published in 1958 and the introduction is written by T.S. Eliot.

 

Eliot writes a wonderful paragraph about why, although Pascal and his contribution to philosophy and mathematics has been thoroughly studied and examined in the 300 years since the man lived, we continue to find it necessary, generation after generation, to look at him again:

 

But Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change. It is not our knowledge of him that increases, but our world that alters and our attitudes towards it. The history of human opinions of Pascal and of men of his stature is a part of the history of humanity. That indicates his permanent importance.

 

I very much like the idea of the “the history of human opinions” about such and such philosopher or writer having just as much import on our relationship to the meaning of a text as the original, raw text itself. It’s a nice way to look at the symbiotic association of writer and reader.