Sunday, 28 September 2008

After the exhilaration of yesterday’s walk, Jackie and I spent a very quiet day pottering around the house and reading. I recently read the very Welsh Mabinogion, and a very blokish book of the Strangest Football Games.

I am always disappointed when I read dramatised or “imagined” histories but I was seduced into reading Jorge Volpi’s In Search of Klingsor by the its heady mixture of detective story, history, quantum physics, love interest, and classical allusions. There were some clever references and some nice imagery but something was lost in translation (the writer was Mexican) for the characters were barely two dimensional, the plot creaked at the seams and no important questions were addressed. Unless the whole thing was a metaphor for the vain search for logic and moral purpose in the Nazi psyche. But a moral equivalence between the holocaust and Hiroshima? Humbug! Why did I fall for it again? Note to self: always avoid dramatised histories.