I imagine that the slaughtered beasts which had to die to give us the raw material for the feast that we had this lunchtime could have stretched to the end of the road!
It was the sort of meal where (afterwards) you contemplate vegetarianism with something approaching enthusiasm. It was of course, delicious: chunks of various animals mixed together with prepared meats all barbecued and dripping with fat. But it was all OK because we were eating vegetables as well.
The calçots were cooked on a second barbecue fed with the trees that were felled earlier in the week to give that special tang to the finished articles. I love calçots in all their messy glory. There is no clean way in which you can eat them if they are cooked as they should be – which is being burnt with live flames so that the outside of these appetizing onions are carbonized, and your fingers become progressively blackened as the meal progresses.
The sauce which goes with the calçots is also delicious and I thoroughly enjoy my participation in this Catalan orgy of food.
But the aftermath is a feeling that you cannot justify the sheer mountain of flesh that you are called on to consume and then there were the cakes for the god children which also had to be consumed the whole lot being washed down by semi-skilled use of the poron: the traditional Catalan drinking vessel which can be shared because there is no contact between glass and mouth. In theory. I must admit that I am getting quite good at using this implement – but delight in skill does mean that you don’t judge exactly how much you are taking in!
The others worked off the meal by going for a walk on the beach – I took to the sun bed on the third floor!
And finally read the rest of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (“Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis”) by Vicente Blasco Ibanez in my newly recharged e-book reader. It is the sort of novel which makes me wonder how many people my age have read the thing!
The first film version may have been a vehicle for the young Valentino, but the narrative seems dates and moralistic. The portrayal of the conflicts which brought about the First World War are more than slightly embarrassing and the book only really comes alive in some of the descriptions of the horrors of the battlefields. The book was first published in 1918 and the shocked response to the things that were seen is sometimes very effectively displayed. Desnoyers had “been accustomed to speak of (War) as those in robust health speak of death, knowing that it exists and is horrible” but he is forced to confront it in reality and immediacy and sees through the wounded soldiers just what explosive shells can do. He sees “wounded objects just beginning to recover their vital force who were but rough skeletons of men, frightful caricatures, human rags, saved from the tomb by the audacities of science.” You can think of First World War poets who also noted the dehumanizing effect of injury on returning soldiers who discovered that they were not returning to a Land Fit for Heroes but to a country which seemed to regard them with embarrassment and disgust.
I was particularly taken with the phrase “audacities of science” which has strong resonances in the present day discussions (if they ever reach that stage of informed debate) which centre of euthanasia and abortion, where the “not struggle officiously to keep alive” brigade meets in head-on clash with the born-again simplistic fascists who have obviously not looked at Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” and particularly at the sketch “Every Sperm is Sacred” to see how ridiculous their position is.
“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” ends with an almost indecent affirmation of life as Chichi invites her war damaged husband to join her at the top of a grassy knoll in a field of rough graves where her brother lies: “As soon as he approached her, she flung her arms around his neck, pressed him against the warm softness of her breast, exhaling a perfume of life and love, and kissed him passionately without a thought of her brother, without seeing her aged parents grieving below them and longing to die . . . And her skirts, freed by the breeze, molded her figure in the superb sweep of the curves of a Grecian vase.”
The End.
I suppose that it is one way to end a novel which has stretched in a staggering panorama from the plains of South America to the battlefields of France and where people have found redemption in death in war. I love the image of “a Grecian vase” as life and culture are linked to the winning side!
Not a book that I would recommend, but one that I am glad that I have now read as it is one of those titles that you come up against in second hand bookshops and in surveys of popular literature through the ages.
A refusal to buy books for inclusion in the library of one’s electronic book do encourage you to look again at titles that in their shabby editions in shops never tempt one but, newly downloaded have a reborn vitality that encourages exploration.
One of my free books is “Best British Stories of 1922” – who can resist?
Certainly not I.
So Stacy Aumonier, Elinor Mordaunt, Max Pemberton, Roland Pertwee, Parry Truscott and Major Wilbraham are about to be read by a reader who has no preconceptions about these authors as he has never heard of them.
To be fair this collection also includes stories by Algernon Blackwood, Harold Brighouse, William Crane, A. E. Coppard, Richmal Crompton and Hugh Walpole of whom I have heard and indeed read.
This sort of reading is what holidays are supposed to be about!
It was the sort of meal where (afterwards) you contemplate vegetarianism with something approaching enthusiasm. It was of course, delicious: chunks of various animals mixed together with prepared meats all barbecued and dripping with fat. But it was all OK because we were eating vegetables as well.
The calçots were cooked on a second barbecue fed with the trees that were felled earlier in the week to give that special tang to the finished articles. I love calçots in all their messy glory. There is no clean way in which you can eat them if they are cooked as they should be – which is being burnt with live flames so that the outside of these appetizing onions are carbonized, and your fingers become progressively blackened as the meal progresses.
The sauce which goes with the calçots is also delicious and I thoroughly enjoy my participation in this Catalan orgy of food.
But the aftermath is a feeling that you cannot justify the sheer mountain of flesh that you are called on to consume and then there were the cakes for the god children which also had to be consumed the whole lot being washed down by semi-skilled use of the poron: the traditional Catalan drinking vessel which can be shared because there is no contact between glass and mouth. In theory. I must admit that I am getting quite good at using this implement – but delight in skill does mean that you don’t judge exactly how much you are taking in!
The others worked off the meal by going for a walk on the beach – I took to the sun bed on the third floor!
And finally read the rest of “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” (“Los Cuatro Jinetes del Apocalipsis”) by Vicente Blasco Ibanez in my newly recharged e-book reader. It is the sort of novel which makes me wonder how many people my age have read the thing!
The first film version may have been a vehicle for the young Valentino, but the narrative seems dates and moralistic. The portrayal of the conflicts which brought about the First World War are more than slightly embarrassing and the book only really comes alive in some of the descriptions of the horrors of the battlefields. The book was first published in 1918 and the shocked response to the things that were seen is sometimes very effectively displayed. Desnoyers had “been accustomed to speak of (War) as those in robust health speak of death, knowing that it exists and is horrible” but he is forced to confront it in reality and immediacy and sees through the wounded soldiers just what explosive shells can do. He sees “wounded objects just beginning to recover their vital force who were but rough skeletons of men, frightful caricatures, human rags, saved from the tomb by the audacities of science.” You can think of First World War poets who also noted the dehumanizing effect of injury on returning soldiers who discovered that they were not returning to a Land Fit for Heroes but to a country which seemed to regard them with embarrassment and disgust.
I was particularly taken with the phrase “audacities of science” which has strong resonances in the present day discussions (if they ever reach that stage of informed debate) which centre of euthanasia and abortion, where the “not struggle officiously to keep alive” brigade meets in head-on clash with the born-again simplistic fascists who have obviously not looked at Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life” and particularly at the sketch “Every Sperm is Sacred” to see how ridiculous their position is.
“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse” ends with an almost indecent affirmation of life as Chichi invites her war damaged husband to join her at the top of a grassy knoll in a field of rough graves where her brother lies: “As soon as he approached her, she flung her arms around his neck, pressed him against the warm softness of her breast, exhaling a perfume of life and love, and kissed him passionately without a thought of her brother, without seeing her aged parents grieving below them and longing to die . . . And her skirts, freed by the breeze, molded her figure in the superb sweep of the curves of a Grecian vase.”
The End.
I suppose that it is one way to end a novel which has stretched in a staggering panorama from the plains of South America to the battlefields of France and where people have found redemption in death in war. I love the image of “a Grecian vase” as life and culture are linked to the winning side!
Not a book that I would recommend, but one that I am glad that I have now read as it is one of those titles that you come up against in second hand bookshops and in surveys of popular literature through the ages.
A refusal to buy books for inclusion in the library of one’s electronic book do encourage you to look again at titles that in their shabby editions in shops never tempt one but, newly downloaded have a reborn vitality that encourages exploration.
One of my free books is “Best British Stories of 1922” – who can resist?
Certainly not I.
So Stacy Aumonier, Elinor Mordaunt, Max Pemberton, Roland Pertwee, Parry Truscott and Major Wilbraham are about to be read by a reader who has no preconceptions about these authors as he has never heard of them.
To be fair this collection also includes stories by Algernon Blackwood, Harold Brighouse, William Crane, A. E. Coppard, Richmal Crompton and Hugh Walpole of whom I have heard and indeed read.
This sort of reading is what holidays are supposed to be about!
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