Italy and writers are synonymous in the minds of many who read English fiction. There were many references to Hemingway in Venice when we visited, but my enthusiasm for his writing was a short-lived affair when I was a teenager. I found him morbid, unlike Henry James whose ability to move more subtly through human motivation invites re-reading. The shooting expeditions of the bull-slinging extrovert hunter are still famous in the region. I found little mention of Henry James or of Proust, and it seems that Ruskin is no longer remembered for his "Stones of Venice" in the official tourist literature.
I don't know if there are many writers associated with Lake Garda, but it looks like a place that could inspire some poetic outpourings.
(Some more photos of Venice and the Veneto if you hit the title bar.)
A bit more research and I found that Gabriele D'Annunzio is the poet most associated with Lake Garda. istrianet.org have an informative site about his career.
5 comments:
That gondola was really stunning.
I'm more a James fan than a Hemingway fan myself. Although I have to admit it's been quite a long time since I've read any Hemingway, and I think I've only read him in class, which isn't really a fair vantage point for judgement.
Twentieth Century literature cannot escape the reality of war, but I found Martha Gellhorn and George Orwell more helpful as analysts. This probably reflects my own temperament, as the hard-boiled machismo in Hemingway which was obviously much admired in Italy, is not to my taste.
"The Pearl" and "The Old Man and the Sea" were held up as models of human endeavour in the face of great hardship. I found them exhausting.
"Death in the Afternoon" is a very finely written book, but it has also had the interesting effect of making a visit to Spain almost physically impossible, as the bullfight is so central to the official culture there.
Prejudice, I know...
I ended up in Arles, France once on an Easter weekend. We had the age-old cathedral and the bullfight all in one weekend. Not that I went to the bullfight--I'm not enough of a cultural anthropologist for that. But we somehow ended up seeing the running of the bulls, which was scary, not thrilling.
We went to the medieval cathedral for midnight mass, and it was somewhat disconcerting to hear a raucous band winding through the streets, playing, of all things, Mack the Knife.
Oh yeah--I've been reading some Orwell essays lately. He's great.
Had to read Old Man and the Sea for school. It's not a long book. But not exactly an exciting one either.
The French relationship with bulls and horses is very much more lyrical, but again that might be just my superficial view.
I'm a great fan of "Le Grand Batre", a TV saga set in a family in the Camargue starting in the early 20th century. For years I have meant to get the book (books?) by Frédérique Hébrard on which the series was based.
fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Le_Grand_Batre
As for the choice of music you mentioned, I think that Europe is such a combination of neurosis and bellicose endeavour that it must scare visitors a lot.
Some time back, I had to leave a German restaurant as soon as I had eaten as the Weimer Republic refrains howling through the dining room made me think I was stuck in some Brechtian nightmare.
"Die Moritat von Mackie Messer",Kurt Weill's little ditty, is a great favourite around these parts, however.
Post a Comment