It’s time for my November contribution to the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop. This month I varied from the recommended topic to discuss my recent marketing ventures.  Be sure to click on the #IWSG icon at the end of my post and check out the responses from dozens of interesting, experienced writers.

Being a self-published author is like running your own business. There’s a lot about writing books that I like, or else I wouldn’t do it.  But there are many activities I’m not that crazy about.

I like that I set my own schedule.  I don’t have a publisher or agent looking over my shoulder checking on the content and status of my next book.  Most of what I do is at my own pace.  Don’t get me wrong. If an agent or publisher would take me on, I’d be glad to crank out books on their…

Empathy by Roman Krznaric is what I call ‘pop-philosophy’. Like the popular works of Bertrand Russell and Alain de Botton it’s easy to read, and it tackles the sort of every day philosophical issues that ordinary people think about it even if they don’t necessarily identify these preoccupations as philosophy.  

But whereas Russell wrestles with big picture issues e.g. as in Authority and the Individual where he explored the importance of balancing freedom with a well-ordered society, de Botton and Krznaric are more in the ‘lifestyle philosophers’ camp.   De Botton has written about everything from travel to status anxiety (and I’ve browsed his books but never really engaged with them) while others in this camp are Damon Young whose Philosophy in the Garden is a booklover’s delight: it explores the gardens of great authors and how these gardens provided a refuge for thought and creativity.

Krznaric is a prolific author too.  According…

How Proust Can Change Your Life is another book that’s been languishing too long on the NF TBR and rediscovered in the annual Tidy the Bookshelves marathon chez moi.   Did I buy it back in 1998 when this edition was published, barely a year after its debut?  It must have been a bestseller, (and it claims to be so on the front cover) which is interesting because, well,  we know that not a lot of people have actually read Proust.  I certainly hadn’t back in 1998… I didn’t actually read Proust until the Penguin translation came out and I read the entire thing over about eighteen months in 2004-5, twenty minutes a day on the exercise bike before I went to work.  It took me ages to read, yes, because it’s long, but also because I used to drift off into Proustian reveries (which is not a bad way to stave…

I feel I’ve had a privileged insight into the birth of this book.  Back in April, it was my good fortune to attend a Celebration of French Literature hosted by AALITRA (the national association for literary translators) at which notable French translators Julie Rose and Brian Nelson spoke about the translation of their latest works. Julie spoke about translating Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables, and Brian read from and talked about his new translation of Proust’s Swann in Love for Oxford World’s Classics, 2017.

Now I have read Proust, the 2002 Penguin edition published in six volumes, which I read over many months back in 2004-5.  The Penguin translation was notable for having had different translators for each volume, which serves to highlight the monumental achievement of C.K. Scott Moncrieff in translating the whole thing between 1922 and 1930.  (Du Côte de chez Swann was first published in 1913, with the last…

The Last Summer is only 90-odd pages long in my Penguin Modern Classics edition of 1960, but it’s more than a short story.  Titled Povest (A Tale) when first published in 1934, it’s not listed among Boris Pasternak’s works in the Russian edition of Wikipedia, suggesting that perhaps the original was never published in the USSR as a separate title. (As far as I can tell, that is, using Google Translate’s word сказка meaning fairy tale, fable or story).  Maybe Povest was published in a journal or a collection, and only published separately as a book when it was translated in 1959 by George Reavey and published by Peter Owen in the afterglow of Pasternak’s Nobel Prize in 1959.

The first thing to say about the introduction by Pasternak’s sister Lydia Slater is that it’s more about legacy-building than about clarifying the story.  There are a great many superlatives, and…

Fish rising at sunset

She let her memories escape, yesterday’s dreams

Broken pieces of her life, scattered, tattered

Pressed between the pages, sheltered only

By the pale ivory lace, of a faded parasol

This, her only regret, leaving this treasure

Far behind, knowing, it was the last connection

To a life, she no longer cherished, wilted petals

Pressed between pages, the broken pieces of her life

November Writing Prompt – Petals and parasols – Day 6/30

©2018 Dorinda Duclos All Rights Reserved
Photo via Pixabay CC0

Along with Dagny a.k.a Madame Vauquer from the Vauquer Boarding House and Jonathan from  Intermittencies of the Mind  I am reading The Leopard (1958) by Sicilian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, so I thought I’d take a look at another VSI.  But it’s not really surprising that Italian Literature, a Very Short Introduction doesn’t mention Lampedusa because he was so very much out of step with postwar developments in Italy.  In the wake of fascism, Italian literature was generally brutally realist, while Lampedusa’s book is a nostalgic novel set in pre-unification Italy.  It doesn’t fit into the characteristics of Italian literature in this period at all.

This VSI is not like the mostly chronological structure of the French VSI which I read a little while ago.  After a useful four-page introduction, the book is framed as general discussions of problematic trends and issues:

• History
• Tradition
• Theory
• Politics
• Secularism
• Women

(Women get a chapter…