I usually try to do errands before the weekends so I don't have to be out when the working world, school world, and others are loose in the city traffic and shopping areas. So it's probably odd to categorize my weekends on a scale when they're usually safely indoors. But I can tell you what a good weekend is.
Four weekends ago I finished three books and watched three Netflix DVDs and happily started the PBS tripartite showings yet again of what I consider the very best historical novel filmed to this time, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth and the rest of the splendid cast with equally glorious settings, costumes, score. I saw its first showing in 1995, a collaboration of BBC America and A&E, and have watched it every time I've found it on since then. Its quality prevents any boredom, produces purring pleasure. And, yes, I've seen the 1940 version with Greer Garson and Sir Laurence Olivier three or four times and the so-called gritty 1995 version with Keira Knightley and Matthew Macfadyen twice, even the 1938 version once, I think. I'll stick with whom I think the perfect leads as Lizzie Bennett and Mr. Darcy, Ehle and Firth.
The three DVDs were the two-part Sir David Attenborough's Life in the Undergrowth and the first Creature Comforts disc of Season 2. I don't know where BBC America finds them, but Alistair Cooke and Attenborough are my choices as the best TV hosts, chatty grandfatherly figures quietly talking about their subjects, Cooke's most famous stint on Masterpiece Theatre and naturalist Attenborough's ongoing appearances on science and nature series like The Living Planet, The Life of Birds, The Life of Mammals. Not only is the photography among the best of nature in Attenborough's series, but he's intelligently informative as when he's explaining that bees and ants evolved from an ancient wasp as termites evolved from cockroaches. Created by the team responsible for the Wallace and Gromit movies, under Nick Park of Aardman Animation, Creature Comforts is the hands-down winner of clay animation, short thematic segments (eating, bad habits, fears, Christmas) featuring talking creatures in comic conversations, dogs, horses, snails on a sidewalk, a bowl of mussels, pigs, birds, zebras, bats, individualized personalities with exaggeratedly expressive faces and gestures, rattling away in a variety of voices for a variety of genders and ages, mocking us, of course. So I had plenty to watch and delight in.
Then first I finished Roberto Bolano's The Savage Detectives: A Novel, which admittedly I'd been working on for a couple of weeks. It's 577 pages of densely packed pages and only for the absolutely devoted reader, though definitely worth its reputation and apparently a stunning work of translation. The beginning and ending are narrated by a 17-year-old who meets the two main characters, Arturo Belano (based on the author) and Ulises Lima (based on Mario Santiago but meant to be a tribute to James Joyce and the Cuban Joyce, Jose Lezema Lima, in the name) and their particular literary clique and goes off with them to find the female founder. As a NYT reviewer noted, the huge central section covers 20 years in 15 cities in eight countries, 38 different characters talking about the two main characters over time to form a mosaic for the reader to fit together of their lives. If ever there was a novel elaboration on T.S. Eliot's "He do the police in different voices," this middle section is it, haughty, obscene, pedantic (a lawyer persists in littering his conversation with classic Latin phrases), erotic, somber, giddy, people going mad, all kinds of anecdotes, stories within stories. A short section at the Madrid Book Fair has the same last line altered successively by different speakers to represent them: "Everything that begins as comedy ends as tragedy," Everything that begins as comedy inevitably ends as comedy," " Everything that begins as comedy ends as a horror movie," etc.
The next book I got through by Sunday early was Timothy Brook's Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (Bloomsbury Press, 2008), this Chinese specialist taking his cue from items in various Vermeer paintings to theorize about the first age of globalization. (The International History Channel's motto is "Globalize yourself," and there is no one cultured who does not understand Indra's Web and the meaning now of the Internet.) I had ordered it from the History Book Club because I venerate Vermeer, supreme painter of light. And the book turned out to be relevant to the new Joslyn Art Museum show, "Elegance of the Qing Court: Reflections of a Dynasty Through Its Art," that being the most famous period of Chinese cultural history when the Mongols crossed the Great Wall and took over as the Manchu, ruling from 1644 to 1912. Actually, recognizing that China and India are the two Superpowers to come with their populations of billions makes the book as relevant background as a love of Vermeer and the Dutch, the first successful European entrepreneurs, who got along in Asia better than the murderous Spanish and Portuguese:
". . . Corcuera had been locked in a battle with the entire ecclesiastical establishment of the Philippines, and with none more fiercely than the archbishop of Manila, whom the governor regularly banished and by whom he was just as regularly excommunicated. At the heart of the struggle was the silver trade. . . . The problem . . . was the enormous financial privileges that the Catholic Church enjoyed in the Philippines. Reducing these privileges, Corcuera reasoned, would reduce his deficit. King Philip warned him against making any changes--possibly recalling that a previous governor had been assassinated by the priests for meddling with the Church's expectations for income." [P. 225, "Endings: No Man is an Island."]
The third book was much easier and faster than either of these two, Matt Haig's startling The Dead Fathers Club: A Novel, told by one of those precocious youngsters like the autistic 15-year-old Christopher John Francis Boone of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and the stammering 13-year-old Jason Taylor of David Mitchell's Black Swan Green: A Novel. Philip Noble is 11, his obscene nickname by school bullies is Helmet, and the title might tell you that this is Hamlet--Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, died at 11--though several necessary clues help beyond Dad's ghost inciting Philip to kill his uncle for allegedly murdering Dad. But I'll save that for another entry.
At least I've explained why I failed to write here that weekend. And why is it writers think they have to tell us we are reading their novels??
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