Bad habit #1: Procrastination. Some day there won't be a tomorrow.
Bad habit #2 (though of much less impact than #1): Start another book to read before finishing the ones I am already reading.
I had picked up 6-7 short novellas the last time I was at the public library and so this morning, I started with another one although I have read just the first few pages of both Making Love and The Man of Feeling, both very excellent books. Today's novella, Mogador by the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sanchez (wow..all three books currently being read are in translation. In fact, two other books that are next on the list are also translations - Marguerite Yourcenar's A Blue Tale and Other Stories and White Walls - Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya, who is the great-grandniece of the Tolstoy we all know.
Anyways, Mogador, which as the book-flap says combines elements of Latin American magic realism with geometric and mystical imagery of Arabic literature is written in a style the author calls a "prose of intensities."
When a book starts with the following sentence that captures you right away... how could I resist? :)
Bad habit #2 (though of much less impact than #1): Start another book to read before finishing the ones I am already reading.
I had picked up 6-7 short novellas the last time I was at the public library and so this morning, I started with another one although I have read just the first few pages of both Making Love and The Man of Feeling, both very excellent books. Today's novella, Mogador by the Mexican writer Alberto Ruy Sanchez (wow..all three books currently being read are in translation. In fact, two other books that are next on the list are also translations - Marguerite Yourcenar's A Blue Tale and Other Stories and White Walls - Collected Stories by Tatyana Tolstaya, who is the great-grandniece of the Tolstoy we all know.
Anyways, Mogador, which as the book-flap says combines elements of Latin American magic realism with geometric and mystical imagery of Arabic literature is written in a style the author calls a "prose of intensities."
When a book starts with the following sentence that captures you right away... how could I resist? :)
Seen this way, the horizon does not exist; it is placed there by the gaze, a thread snapping with each blink of the eye.
From the little I have read so far I can tell that this book is losing a lot in translation. I wish I knew two languages: Spanish and French. The former to read great Spanish literature, especially poetry by Pablo Neruda and Octavio Paz, both of which I have enjoyed immensely in English translations and the latter to enjoy French movies.
I am usually not a fan of magic realism -- blame it on my lack of creativity and imagination -- though some day I hope to read more of Gabriel Marquez (I have tried to read three of his novels - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Of Love And Other Demons, and Love in the Time of Cholera at various points in the past decade or so but not really read them enough to enjoy these masterpieces. I also kinda read his latest novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores though I definitely did not do this short novella justice either by reading bits and pieces here and there!)
However, that said, I do think I will read the book Mogador in its entirety as it is a real short one.
Also, coincidentally, though I had never heard of Alberto Ruy Sanchez nor of Marguerite Yourcenar before I picked up this latest set of books at the library, Sanchez' book starts with a quote by Yourcenar.
I am usually not a fan of magic realism -- blame it on my lack of creativity and imagination -- though some day I hope to read more of Gabriel Marquez (I have tried to read three of his novels - One Hundred Years of Solitude, Of Love And Other Demons, and Love in the Time of Cholera at various points in the past decade or so but not really read them enough to enjoy these masterpieces. I also kinda read his latest novella Memories of My Melancholy Whores though I definitely did not do this short novella justice either by reading bits and pieces here and there!)
However, that said, I do think I will read the book Mogador in its entirety as it is a real short one.
Also, coincidentally, though I had never heard of Alberto Ruy Sanchez nor of Marguerite Yourcenar before I picked up this latest set of books at the library, Sanchez' book starts with a quote by Yourcenar.
"Unaware, we all enter the amorous dreams of those who cross our path or surround us. And this despite the ugliness, poverty, age, or misery of the person desiring, and despite the modesty or timidity of the one being coveted, without regard to that person's own desires, wich may be focused on someone else. Thus we each open our body to all and surrender it to all." - MY
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