Thaw

Late on Saturday the temperature rose above freezing-point for the first time this year: it's so good to see water in its liquid state again. My spirits were beginning to feel somewhat frostbound too, so this thaw is a relief, like a long exhalation after holding ones breath a little too long.

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I've been dipping into the new & quite fascinating on-line edition of the diary of Samuel Pepys: well worth a look if you've not already seen it.

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I finished Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland last week. I can still say there's not a book of his I haven't enjoyed. The more of his novels one reads, the more they seem to be variations on a limited number of themes, drawing from a fixed troupe of characters. This recycling hardly ever lessens my appreciation of the tales he tells, however.

I've since begun reading José Saramago's The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis, whose atmospheric opening chapter relates, in the choicest prose, Dr. Reis' disembarkation in Lisbon on a rainy day in late December 1935. Reis, we soon gather, has returned from exile in Brazil after having learned of the death of his friend Fernando Pessoa. The twist here is that, in life, Pessoa was a poet famous for writing as a kind of literary split-personality under several distinct invented identities (which he called heteronyms), one of whom was a doctor called Ricardo Reis...

Posted by misteraitch at January 13, 2003 12:47 PM