Benedict Sangster

Penguin Modern European Poets - Anna Akhmatova, Selected Poems H. E. Bates, Fair Stood the Wind for France Two volumes side by side on a decidedly plush throw

Two not-so-new acquisitions:

Selected Poems - Anna Akhmatova, tr. Richard McKane, with a 1964 introductory essay by Andrei Sinyavsky

Fair Stood the Wind for France - H. E. Bates

Colette - The Pure and the Impure

'The veiled face of a woman, refined, disillusioned, is a suitable preface to this book which will treat sadly of sensual pleasure.'

From Colette's The Pure and the Impure, tr. Herma Briffault; an 'unforgettable gallery of eccentrics'

'When he reached the first floor, he paused. All painful paths have their stations.'

Faulkner lights his pipe

Remembering William Faulkner on his birthday 🎂
📷 Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1962

"The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure & prevail."
- from his Nobel Prize speech, 1950

Later years From 1960, and for the rest of her life, Rhys lived in Cheriton Fitzpaine in Devon, once described by her as "a dull spot which even drink can't enliven much." Characteristically, she remained unimpressed by her belated ascent to literary fame, commenting, "It has come too late." In an interview shortly before her death she questioned whether any novelist, not least herself, could ever be happy for any length of time: "If I could choose I would rather be happy than write... if I could live my life all over again, and choose...."

"It has come too late."

Jean Rhys on her rediscovery and subsequent literary acclaim after decades of obscurity.

#booksky

'Nothing resembles an awakening so much as a return.'

'"The world is nothing in the face of the cross. Martin, eleventh general of the Carthusians, gave his order his motto: Stat crux dum volvitur orbis [The world turns; the cross stands]."

"Amen," said Fauchelevent, who stuck imperturbably to this way of extricating himself whenever he heard Latin.'

🌓 HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT by Olga Tokarczuk, tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones publishes today 🌓

A ‘constellation novel’, HOUSE OF DAY, HOUSE OF NIGHT is a brilliantly imaginative story of a small place by one of the most ambitious novelists of our time.
🌓
fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/house-...

'He saw nothing of all this: People who are overwhelmed with troubles never do look back. They know only too well that misfortune follows in their wake.'

Absoputely agree re the wealth disparities. The ending is so good too (no spoilers!)

Such a good book! A real epic.

'True or false, what is said about people often has as much bearing on their lives and especially on their destinies as what they do.'

Loved Paradise Lost - that Samuel Johnson quote is very funny

As long as social damnation exists, through laws and customs, artificially creating hell at the heart of civilization and muddying a destiny that is divine with human calamity; as long as the three problems of the century - man's debasement through the proletariat, woman's demoralization through hunger, the wasting of the child through darkness - are not resolved; as long as social suffocation is possible in certain areas; in other words, and to take an even broader view, as long as ignorance and misery exist in this world, books like the one you are about to read are, perhaps, not entirely useless. -- Victor Hugo, Hauteville House, January 1, 1862

Fragment from the incomplete epigraph to Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, in a superb translation by Julie Rose

Midsummer Morning is what made me want to read Cider with Rosie because of how much I enjoyed it!

I'm not either, and I feel the same (having just started it). Even though his childhood was very different from mine, the scenes with his siblings are very affecting

Cider With Rosie - Laurie Lee Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, tr. Julie Rose Arranged artlessly on a wooden table with a candle and well-worn Pusheen flask as backdrop

Some new acquisitions:

A not-so-new Cider with Rosie - Laurie Lee
Tender Buttons - Gertrude Stein
Les Misérables - Victor Hugo, tr. Julie Rose

#booksky

I can't recommend it enough! Very sad & unflinching. I love everything I've read by Morrison, a true Faulknerian inheritor

'Love is never any better than the lover.'

'As in the case of many misanthropes, his disdain for people led him into a profession designed to serve them.'

'If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.'

From the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

And Quiet Flows the Don - Mikhail Sholokhov Featuring a Don Cossack on horseback wielding a saber against a mountainous backdrop.

'A light pleasant void was in Gregor's heart, life was good and free from care. The red-tailed dawn was pecking up the starry grain from the dove-coloured floor of heaven.'

From Mikhail Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don, tr. Stephen Garry

The whole book is so powerful, like all of her works. I really can't recommend her enough (esp. for those interested in Soviet/post-Soviet life), though all make for very sobering reading

—The Germans didn't take women soldiers prisoner ... They shot them at once. Or led them before their lined-up soldiers and showed them off: look, they're not women, they're monsters. We always kept two bullets for ourselves, two—in case one misfired. One of our nurses was captured ... A day later we took back that village. There were dead horses lying about, motorcycles, armored vehicles. We found her: eyes put out, breasts cut off. They had impaled her on a stake ... It was freezing cold, and she was white as could be, and her hair was all gray ... She was nineteen years old. In her knapsack we found letters from home and a green rubber bird. A child's toy ...

'We always kept two bullets for ourselves, two—in case one misfired.'

Irreconcileable horror in the untold stories of the women who fought in WWII, from Nobel laureate (and huge personal favourite) Svetlana Alexievich's The Unwomanly Face of War, tr. Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

Sanin and Gemma were in love for the first time, and all the miracles of first love were happening for them. First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments; youth stands at the barricade, its banner raised high in the air, and sends its ecstatic greetings to the future, whatever it may hold - death or a new life, no matter.

'First love is exactly like a revolution: the regular and established order of life is in an instant smashed to fragments [...]'

Six book covers with Art Deco style images in black and white or with simple colour additions, images depict flowers, waves or various shapes

Book cover designs by Virginia Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell (c.1930) #WomensArt

An old Penguin Classics edition of Ivan Turgenev's Spring Torrents, with a reproduction of 'Giudetta e Oloferne' by Cristofano Allori on the cover, set against a wooden background featuring several knots, (a term I will profess to having had to google.)

Those happy years, Those days so gay, Like the rush of spring torrents Have vanished away. [From a very old song]

A very beautiful cover of Spring Torrents by Ivan Turgenev, translated by Leonard Schapiro; and the epigraph from which the novel takes its title

'The summer passed away, and autumn, with its infinite suite of tints, came creeping on. Darker grew the evenings, tearfuller the moonlights, and heavier the dews.'

'His parted lips were lips which spoke, not of love, but of millions of miles [...]'

Two on a Tower - Thomas Hardy

A pre-owned Penguin Modern Classics edition of André Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale/Isabelle, with an illustration of a monastery, which is curious since neither story is set in one.

'[...] and I thought to myself that nothing can make a face more impenetrable than a mask of kindliness.'

From André Gide's doomed romance Isabelle, tr. Dorothy Bussy