This week is international book week. There is a game going round in internet:
take
the book nearest to you, open it at p.52 and post the 5th sentence,
without indicating author or title. (if you google international book
week 2012 you'll see)
I would add, can anyone guess what the books are?
I got:
He
gave himself utterly to whichever composer happened to have made the
most powerful impact on him at any given moment, sometimes getting under
the skin of his model to such an extent that it is virtually impossible
to distinguish the work of the pupil from that of the master.
Also, from my current story book:
Sometimes
the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of
dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing
occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.
My friends have guessed the first, but not the second (which is easier!)
Posts
5 comments:
The two books within equal centimetres of my left hand as I read the post - both pulled from the shelves and used to check quotes over the past week - give
"Our table that day, and the one which was also to become our usual table over the years, was at the back, and if there were too many of us two tables would be pushed together."
and
"It took such a calamity to bring matters to the point where Europeans seeking to change the obsolete order of their countries must agree, also contrary to the predictions of Marx, to submit to a nation which has never known how to rule itself, and which in all its history has never known prosperity or freedom"
The second is a translated edition.
I think your second is Robinson Crusoe ...
Treasure Island
"Monopolizing the use of force then, on this view, is itself immoral, as is redistribution through the compulsory tax apparatus of the state."
(though, like R, this is a book to hand because I was looking at something)
My storybook is:
"His mom and dad were straight out of Jalandhar, bethrothed to each other at some improbably early age, their childhoods played out in small villages against a backdrop of wheat and yellow mustard fields."
Your first is about Mozart, I would guess, M. I might reread your second.
Your first, R, sounds like Hemingway's first wife's account of their time in Paris.
Your second I do not recognise at all. Nor can I work out which European country, other than perhaps Russia - but that clashes with the tense of 'must agree' - it speaks of.
HG - They shared many tastes including champagne, an addiction to danger and a personality too large for their bodies, but not the most distinctive; the first was Dan Farson's Gilded Gutter Life on his friendship with Bacon ("What's that smell?" asked Farson as they entered the morphitic Soho basement Kismet Club; "Failure" replied Bacon)
The second was Czeslaw Milosz' 'The Captive Mind', first published in 1953, from his own, later, English translation. Far too obscure, I agree.
Mozart indeed, from Hermann Abert's unsurpassed biography (although you did have insider information). Specifically his first visit to Paris in 1763; imagine writing that about a 7 year old!
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