Tarquin

Some of the analysis is weak.

Revisado: 06-27-20

True, the story ends nearly 20 years ago. We cannot comment on the analysis as it applies to4 South Asian countries other than Ceylon (sri lanka). Here are the faults in the books as they apply to Ceylon.

What the author calls the 'Neruvian' model has no relevance in Ceylon for a long time. Unlike all the other countries he mentions, Ceylon was a part of the British Commonwealth until 1972 with H. M. the Queen as its head of state.

Until 1956, Royal Navy was stationed in Trincomalee; the government until then was conservative and its relationship with Neru was distant. In fact, during the so-called Bang Dung (unsure of the spelling) conference in Indonesia, prime ministers of Ceylon and India came to blows! An excellent way of resolving international crises without using any military force which we highly recommend to all the world leaders.

In 1972, the Ceylonese constitution was changed introducing a president to head the country. At the same time, the corrupt government try to become popular by playing a childish version of the nationalist card. It demanded that everybody should call the country by its vernacular name i.e. Shri Lanka; this is like the German government insisting that everybody should call Germany Deutschland! Well, this piece of priceless stupidity has ben accepted by all except a few.

There are three ethnic groups in Ceylong; the Singhalese, Tamils and the so-called Moors who are descended from the Arab spice and gem traders who settled in the country. Majority of the Tamils are Hindoos while the Moors are Mohommadans. Meanwhile, the majority of Singhalese are Buddists, hence their culture is very different from that in India. There is only one very small tribal group i.e., Veddas who are a stone-age ethnic group akin to those who live in Nicobar islands.

One of the fellows the author mentions bandara-naike began what might be called tepid and confused 'sosialisation' of the country. He also made Singhalese the official language which led to ethnic riots between the Singhalese and Tamils. His widow sirimawathie often wrongly called sirimavo was the PM in 1972 when English education was banished from the universities and technical schools. Hence, the monolingual youth. Of course, this did not affect the leaders' broods in anyway.

The author should have investigated the inflammatory speech mrs. gandi made in Fiji which led to the Fijian military taking over political power. He should also have checked on the 'sons of the land' laws in Malasia whose rationale cannot be dismissed lightly. Tamil insurrection was brewing long before 1977 as we know through personal communication, and it began with the Tamils killing their own main stream politicians so that they could claim that they are not represented! Their 'leaders' whose name I cannot spell or pronounce had the giant intellect of one who had successfully completed 5th grade. This is a fact that may be checked.

So, nationalist fervour, near total political incompetence coupled with world class hypocrisy and mendacity are the prime causes of the misery in the region. This can be easily seen in the gandi saga; until late he went in full morning dress in South Africa and became humble in dress when the fellow was old and business as a lawyer not too good. We don't know whether the man ever acknowledged his debt to Henry David of Walden. We doubt it. Perhaps, it would have been helpful if the author recalled what Reginald the Bishop of Calcuttas said more than a century ago, "if you should ask ten Indians the same question, you are sure to get ten different answers."

The reason we did not give 5 points to the reader is that we noticed a few mispronunciations. 'Nourish' was not pronounced as NUt-RISH and 'quixotic wasn't pronounced as QUICK-So-TIC. We would have happily given 4.5, but it seems to be impossible here.

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A brilliant linking of great events.

Revisado: 08-22-19

Crimean War unfortunately remains unknown even to some of the modern theory bound historians. With his usual vigourous and insightful holistic analysis of a local historical event, Orlando Figes links it to the shattering global changes the Great War brought about. As usual when it comes to all so-called great events, it was precipitated by the hypocrisy, gross incompetence and the pusillanimity of the 'Great Powers'. Documentary evidence of this has not been forthcoming largely because most historians were all too keen to explain historical events in terms of some putative intensions of the decision-makers involved and dragging in the unpredictability of its outcome when an event has been initiated. Professor Figes illumines the past by drawing our attention to the foibles and frailties of the historial 'greats', and one sees clearly how unwise it is to expect integrity and competence either from the democratic or the autocratic unless those two qualities are embodied in our 'leaders'. Alas! Then as now, we can be depended on to make wrong choices, going for the packing and wrapping rather than the content. The only difference being that the buffoons of yore often had impeccable manners while their modern counterparts are mere cunning yokels.

The reading is good, and I am delighted to recommend this wonderful book to anyone who would care to see how today is shaped by the past events. It is nothing short of a revealation to anyone with a modicum of curiosity, and such an illumination
cannot be achieved in a few pages, nor without offering the reader ample background material. I am very happy I bought this book, and shall read it many times.

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Intellect vs. Aphrodite.

Revisado: 03-30-19

Some may conceive of this marvellous work as an in-depth study of the narrator's navel, but an unrepentant heathen like me see as its main theme the clash between the ancient but living man as Zobra amply personifies and the vapid and utilitarian existence of the narrator. The subdued figures of the lovely widow and Madame Hortense are symbolic of the glorious Aphrodite in her many manifestation.

Her devotees like Zobra, though unlettered are fully aware of the beauty in every aspect of living, its magical poetry, and real generosity. He is far from the clownish Zobra of the film whose gallivantings filled me with disgust. You may paint him in harsh colours, but not on the screen or stage.

Modernisation comes as a tradesman, the scholarly narrator. He is a member of the hoard that now swamps this once beautiful world as a cloud of suited locusts be he a street hawker or a peddlar of shares. In that raving new world, man is merely an ant secure in its ant-hill chock-full of ludicrous rights, enjoying the secure greyness of its life.

Recall their visit to the monastery a hive of unnatural living pandering to some putative after-life, ugh! A monk toys with a figurine of Aphrodite, but he is merely interested in something valuable it hides. The abysmal fool cannot grasp that what is priceless is what it symbolises. What a difference between the priesthood of yore that venerated beauty, and the modern rascals who abhor it at least in public.

The twain shall not meet. Contrast Zobra's virile reaction when the locals are about to murder the widow and the pathetic impotence of the narrator to it. Zobra admired her in an abstract way while the narrator had made love to her. The ant in him can feed, but can hardly feel for what it had fed on. In short, a modern man and an intellectual to boot!

The symbolic collapse of the 'project' hastens Zobra's parting from the narrator. In the latter's mind, it is something abstract to be remembered with perhaps a tinge of pleasure, but mostly for subsequent study and analysis. Father Zeus protect us from such folly!

So, a right to happiness decided by vote, by thunder, can only kill the very possibility of it. The modern way leads to a blind end, while the ancient path may not always lead to it, but as close to it as we could hope. It may not be much, but it is a hell of a lot better than being an ant.

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Love and friendship in a dying world.

Revisado: 03-18-19

Central Europe just seems to have gathered its breath to live again when clouds of barbarity, incompetence and pusillanimity clash drowning it in a rain of ruined lives,culture, hope and common decency that once thrived there. Focusing how these thematic interplay shows itself in a small German city, one sees how such changes affect the lives of four people, a young beautiful consumptive woman and three friends.

Their display of love and friendship in a disintergrating world is contrasted with the surging barbarity which kills one of the friends, and world's age-old indifference to everything except gold (with a few rainbow-bright exceptions that makes one not ashamed to be human). Meanwhile, T.B of the girl Patricia Hollmann gets worse and she has to go to a sanatorium in the mountains and her lover Robert and his remaining friend Otto are in desperate need of money to let the girl stay in the sanatorium. To raise money, Otto sells his racing car that he has practically rebuilt from a wreck and christened Karl, and it is more a friend than a piece of machinery. Indeed, it brought Robert and Patricia together in the first place.

Loss of Karl is soon followed by Patricia's death while Robert stays by her side; so the book ends a trifle abruptly leaving the reader to wonder what became of Otto and Robert, the remaining two of the four friends, young, decent Europeans in whose hearts once gleamed hopes of happiness.

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A Kaleidescopic panorama of an enigmatic culture.

Revisado: 02-13-19

There's something very attractive and repulsive about the Russian culture in its Malinowskian sense. One senses even in Tolstoy at his best as an artist. But, this feeling is something vague, and when one tries to find out why, nothing tangible comes out of it. Orlando Figes has filled this large gap with brilliant work in breadth and depth. It is magnificeint.

The reader is splendid, and I cannot recommend this book more highly. Many thanks to the author and the reader for the great pleasure they have afforded me.

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A spiral rainbow in a florescent crystal.

Revisado: 01-18-19

Here's Nabokov once again at his scintillating best. I read the print edition many and many a moon ago and I tried the audio book with mixed feelings. The reader is generally good, but somehow he fails to inject the voice magic richly deserved by this literary masterpiece put together with flashes of memory polished by Nabokov's pearly prose and scholarship.
As the author writes in his preface to "The Gift", ..."gone is Bunin, Aldanov and Remizov. Gone is Alexandre Khodasevitch, the greatest Russian poet the 20th century has yet produced. ".... their wanderings seem like those of some mythical tribe, whose moon signs and bird signs I now retrieve from the desert dust." Indeed, in this book, he has done it to himself and more, sprinkled it with the gleam of sunshine on raindrops gliding down the leaves after a summer cloud burst, flash of a butterfly wing vaguely seen disappearing around the blooming Lilacs, in short, bits of childhood, youth and manhood seem through the kaleidoscope of our yearning to remake our past. What I find wonderous is the author knows it and instead of trying to 'rationalise his past using the tools of mental mechanics of every ilk and turning the tale into an abysmal argosy of cloying coyness, he moulds it into a literary treasure trove of great beauty one never tires of going back to gloat over one's own favourite passage.

My only regret is Nabokov did not make this book at least twice as long as it is, but this is a complaint I have often made against him and a few of my favourite writers. Fortunately for me, their number is small, otherwise, I might have turned out to dislike literary enjoyment altogether.
This may be what some minor wise man meant by saying that one should be greatful for small mercies.

I cannot recommend "Speak Memory" highly enough.

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Excellent book, brilliantly read.

Revisado: 01-12-19

I'm delighted with the marvellous presentation of a very complex subject whose range and scope one seldom finds in a history book. It especially heartening to see the use of foreign terms to describe central European institutions without giving the reader som tame English equivalent, which is often misleading.

Mr. Napoleon Ryan is a splendid reader, and he displays just the right degree of gravitas one would expect when listening to a work of this high calibre. His pronunciation of German terms is very good, and this makes it easy to understand what the author has in his mind. Unfortunately, this is not always the case as I found to my disgust in listening to a Bismarck biography. I am happy to recommend this book to any reader interested in his European heritage.

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Another sad smile from the poet of dispair.

Revisado: 12-14-18

I'd like to correct another reviewer first. Erich Maria Remarque never wrote in English but only in German. The German original is as haunting if not more so than the splendid English translation of the novel by J. Maxwell Brownjohn, who incidentally translated many other of his works. Besides, the protagonist is a German surgeon, but he is certainly not jewish. This is important for a full appreciation of the book.

This novel even surpasses his "Drei Kamaraden" translated as "Three Comrades" in helpless tenderness and poitless loss, the inevitable legacy of every war irrespective of what some power-hungry brute says, be he a dictator or a 'democratically' elected ruffian, specimens of whom are all too common today.
Remarque's break-through came with his "All Quiet on Western Front" in the wake of the Great War, in which Europe committed cultural suicide at an intellectual level, and just over two decades later, started her material end with the rampage initiated by Hitler, the Bolshevik dictator and totally incompetent political nincompoops who led the allied nations.
This story is thus set in a Europe that still remembered her cultural shared heritage where many of her priceless cultural artifacts were still intact but soon to be bombed into smithereens. Human suffering the characters in this book endure seems to look like a last farewell to something priceless, never to reappear, for we forget, and forget.

I have unpardonably overlooked to say anything about the literary merits of this wonderful book. Obviously, its main themes are love and friendship as one often sees in Remarques other works. In spite of the world that's crumbling down around him, Ravic finds both, but the love he finds is not conventional; it is something that illumines the man from within but without what is now called a 'relationship'. This awareness comes to him on a park bench not far from where Joan now lives with her new 'lover' soon after Ravic's return to Paris after his expulsion.

Once he realises this, things happen fast. His successful use of the unexpected chance to kill his tormentor von Hake, he is reconciled with his tortured past, and the moving scence at Joan's death bed, reconciles him to his new notion of love. And so, now in harmony with himself, he could face life with a tinge of optimism without resorting to lies, hence his return to Hotel Internationale and telling the police who he really is. Interplay among these themes and the rapidly collapsing world around him, is iridescent and haunting indeed.

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A fairly good account, but not well read.

Revisado: 11-26-18

Bismarck's role in fashioning modern Europe is undisputed, and in hindsight, it seems inevitable that Kaiser Wilhelm II's neglect of one of the crucial pillars in Bismarckian foreign policy, viz., cooperation with the Russian empire should begin the end of European civilisation as one knew it. I am happy to see that the book brings out this point. The author's put just a little too much emphasis on the 'personal' aspects of Bismarck's life, but in this age of 'packaged politicians' and other 'celebrities' devoid of intelligence and sincerity, nobody would assume Bismark to be anything but a human being with some frailities. Being a Junker of the old school, you can hardly expect the old boy to go around oozing wit and joie de vivre. At a time most European politicians were as busy as now to promote themselves than people's real interests, the venerable rascal stands towering above them in his grasp of foreign policy. I think the authors should have talked a bit more about that.

I think the reader should have checked the pronunciation of German words before reading the book. Sometimes, his mispronunciation of German words makes the reading not just irritating, but sometimes ludicrous. For example, he pronounces the word 'Rat' to rhyme with rat the rhodent. So, 'Landrat' becomes a land rat! Rat in German by the way, means something like 'council' 'councillor', 'adviser', etc. Moreover, in some places, the reading is very unclear, and it may be a technical defect.

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