This summer I've had an excessive amount of spare time for reading but a dearth of new reading material; the only shop in town that sells English literature offers a very limited selection of books that I've already read and a somewhat larger number of authors who I have no desire to read, so I've had to fall back on a small stock of books I brought from Britain many years ago and select from those an even smaller number that I decided were worth re-reading. My choice:
"In Parenthesis" by David Jones. First published in 1937, it was probably the last, and one of the very best, of the books by men who'd fought and suffered in what for them was The Great War (1914 - 1918). Jones was Welsh and a poet, a potent mixture. I'd had some difficulty locating my copy about twenty years ago, although I knew it had recently been republished, but that was because I was looking in the fiction and war sections, and it was shelved in the poetry department. Jones described cockney as the language of the army, and much of the dialogue is in the accent of Whitechapel-on-Somme, but some of the narrative passages are pure poesy. The book pulls no punches in its graphic account of the horrors of war, but Jones was more objective and less bitter than many of the traumatised authors who relived the hell of the Western Front in their books.
"Quiet Flows the Don" by Mikhail Sholokhov. This is the first full English translation and was published in the 1980s after Sholokhov's death. The original, much abridged translation got Stalin's approval, but I doubt he'd have given Sholokhov the Stalin Prize for Literature if he'd read the complete text in the original Russian. The 1930s edition concedes that some of the Red Army's requisitioning tactics antagonised the Cossacks, but generally it set the Red/White conflict as a struggle between good and evil. The unexpurgated edition is much more equivocal, and Grigory (the main character)appears to view both sides with equal distaste and to be saying "A pox o' both your houses".
"White Teeth" by Zadie Smith. This could be said to be the first 21st century novel, and it got the new era off to a rollicking start. The author is of mixed race and her writing is enriched by the mixture of cultures she grew up in.
"Zorba the Greek" by Nikos Kazantzakis. I first saw the 1950s film and then read the book. After that I read every book that Kazantzakis wrote. Unfortunately I only brought one of his books, Zorba, with me, and, although I've enjoyed re-reading it, I can think of at least four other Kazantzakis works I'd have preferred. One of those, the autobiographical "Homage to Greco", introduces the eponymous Zorba: in real life George Zorbas was his partner in an unsuccessful mining venture, and obviously a seminal influence on his life.
"The Story of San Michele" by Axel Munthe. This has been a favourite with me since I first read it as a teenager, and I do tend to be rather proselytising about it. I found a Russian translation and gave it to my wife but, alas! she wasn't impressed.
As summer still had a few weeks to run after I finished the above, I went to the aforementioned bookstore and bought half a dozen of the Wordsworth classics. I'd read most of them before (Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the Durbervilles", Conrad's "Lord Jim", Kipling's "Kim", Dumas's "Three Musketeers"), but I was quite pleasantly surprised how readable Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone" and "The Woman in White" are. Victorian melodrama could be really dreadful, but Collins was a master of the genre.
If next summer sees me still deprived of something to read I may have to bite the bullet and buy electronic books, but I couldn't derive from them anything like the blissful pleasure that old fashioned printed paper gives me. Perhaps I should go to london for a week, taking six empty suitcases with me, and return with them tightly packed with books.