Six Degrees of Separation Jan 2019

It’s time for #6degrees Well, it was time at the weekend, but I left it a bit late. Start with the same book as other wonderful readers, add six books, and see where you end up! With thanks as always to Kate from Books Are My Favourite and My Best for hosting.

The starting point this month is The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles. Although it came out in 1969, it was hugely popular two decades later with my colleagues studying English at university. We had only just discovered postmodernism and were vying with each other who could come up with the strangest reads. I personally was never a huge fan of Fowles and felt maybe I was somehow deficient compared to my classmates.

Another historical metafiction type of book that I did enjoy at about that time was A.S. Byatt’s Possession. I’m not sure if it will bear rereading, but at the time the dual narrative and obsession with both research and love fitted my lifestyle extremely well!

A book about literal possession, by demons, is The Exorcist by William Peter Blatty. The film is of course now far more famous than the book, but I was forbidden to watch the film as a child, so I read this instead (in a cheap version with a still from the film as a cover, I seem to remember).

Cheap nasty editions abounded in my childhood, since I got a lot of my books at bring and buy sales at school or at my father’s workplace. Another book that I read in a particularly flimsy edition, with almost transparent pages, was The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. It made a profound impression on my youthful mind as to how unfair and hypocritical society was back then. Little did I know…

One author I keep confusing with Hawthorne is Washington Irving, so I had to double check to see which one of them wrote the rather lovely Tales of the Alhambra, which I bought at the Alhambra in Granada when I was visiting there with my parents at the age of 10.

Staying in Spain for the moment, and that memorable road trip with my parents, I haven’t read the next book, but it looks fascinating: an account of that brief period of collaboration between the three major monotheistic religions on Spanish soil. Bit of a mouthful of a title, but it says it all really: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal.

Another road trip that I undertook with my then adventurous parents was to Germany, weaving easily between East and West (relatively speaking, because my father had a diplomatic Romanian passport). I was completely bowled over by Sanssouci, Frederick the Great’s extravaganza and beloved palace, even more so than by Versailles. A writer associated with both the Prussian and the French kings was of course Voltaire (and he ended up in disgrace with both). Depressed after discovering that Frederick the Great was not so great after all, Voltaire wrote his famous Candide, a cynic’s cry against the world of mindless optimism. Where is Voltaire to write about Brexit now?

So a bit of a nostalgia fest this month, delving into my childhood and youth, from Lyme Regis to the London Library, the United States to Spain and Germany by way of France. Where will your random mental connections take you?