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| 3.96
| 1,002
| 1978
| 1978
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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2
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May 07, 2024
not set
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May 22, 2024
not set
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May 07, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0500400296
| 9780500400296
| 0500400296
| 3.56
| 48
| Jan 01, 1976
| Jan 01, 1976
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 03, 2024
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Apr 05, 2024
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Apr 03, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 160945569X
| B07QPWPGMV
| 3.73
| 223
| Sep 28, 2017
| Feb 04, 2020
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 05, 2023
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Dec 06, 2023
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Dec 05, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 1789543533
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| 1789543533
| 4.41
| 7,130
| Sep 02, 2021
| Sep 02, 2021
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 09, 2022
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Sep 19, 2022
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Aug 09, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 1609453360
| 9781609453367
| 1609453360
| 3.62
| 215
| Nov 05, 2015
| Jul 19, 2016
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 15, 2021
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Aug 17, 2021
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Aug 15, 2021
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| 1609451147
| 9781609451141
| 1609451147
| 3.75
| 412
| 2011
| May 07, 2013
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 08, 2021
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Feb 09, 2021
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Feb 08, 2021
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Paperback
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| 0151904723
| 9780151904723
| 0151904723
| 3.63
| 1,801
| Mar 21, 1991
| Jan 01, 1993
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 28, 2021
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Jan 29, 2021
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Jan 28, 2021
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| 1933372052
| 9781933372051
| 1933372052
| 3.67
| 824
| 2001
| Jan 01, 2006
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really liked it
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”As I sucked a lobster claw, I thought about how to do them. Always pick the easiest, quickest and cleanest method. In this case, a shot in the head w
”As I sucked a lobster claw, I thought about how to do them. Always pick the easiest, quickest and cleanest method. In this case, a shot in the head was the best solution. The bullet rips apart the brain, and the victim doesn’t even have time to kiss tomorrow goodbye. The muck--blood, bone fragments, brain matter--sprays from the side opposite the entry wound. I’d sit in the back seat of their car and smoke them. First the driver. Then the guy beside him. With a silencer. When I executed Luca in Central America, the blast was deafening. Almost ruined the sense of wonder and power you feel when you pull a trigger and take somebody’s life.” Giorgio Pellegrini is a psychopath, and like all well functioning psychopaths, he understands morals; he’s just completely devoid of morals. They get in the way. They hinder living life the way he wants to live it. He likes older women. Well, he doesn’t like them all that much; he just lusts them. He likes them best in their forties, starting to show the first crumbling signs of aging, cellulite, crows feet, and the slackening of what was once firm flesh. He likes them feeling insecure and feeling special that this man ten years younger still wants to sex them up. He lets them pay for things. He cheats on them without regret. He’s moving through life, riding a storm of violent crime, but he likes to come home to a comfortable, pliable woman. As he gets older, he starts to realize that all the dirty dealing with crooked cops, criminals, and revolutionaries is leading him right back to prison. It is time to go straight. It is time to open a restaurant and settle down with an upscale woman. He finds the right lawyer to help him make this happen, but he soon discovers that the lawyer needs little favors done for his friends. The type of little favors that Giorgio is oh so good at. He doesn’t really mind as long as at the end of the road he gets what he wants; otherwise, the lawyer better watch his ass. One should never renege on a psychopath. Massimo Carlotto is the grand master of Italian noir. He has a series called his Alligator series that I’ve really enjoyed, but Giorgio Pellegrini is his first creation. A psychopath who cuts a new slice through the serial killer genre. In Gang of Lovers that I read and reviewed recently, he intersects with the Alligator crew, and that is when I decided it was time to circle back and read the books that focus on his lurid adventures. There is lots to enjoy here. The rampant sex, the crimes, the violence, and the hardboiled talk... Italian style. The next Giorgio Pellegrini book arrived at my house yesterday, At the End of a Dull Day, so I will be cuing up his next psychopathic tendencies very soon. I have a feeling that going straight is going to prove impossible for Giorgio. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten and an Instagram account https://www.instagram.com/jeffreykeeten/ ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 14, 2020
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Jun 15, 2020
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Jun 14, 2020
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Paperback
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| 1609452682
| 9781609452681
| 1609452682
| 3.57
| 295
| Mar 18, 2015
| Jun 02, 2015
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really liked it
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”I’ve never been able to stand it when other people waste my time. Especially when it comes to sex. Absolutely unacceptable. The time that belongs to
”I’ve never been able to stand it when other people waste my time. Especially when it comes to sex. Absolutely unacceptable. The time that belongs to lovers is always stolen from lives built on other affections, passions, and routines. Structures that are at once exceedingly complex and yet so delicate that a clandestine affair can destroy them merely by announcing its existence.” [image] It’s been ten years since I read a Massimo Carlotto book. There have been long droughts between his Alligator books being translated into English, which certainly contributed to why it has taken so long for me to read another book by my favorite hardboiled Italian author. This is actually the seventh Alligator book, but the fourth to be translated into English. I’m not sure what the story is with the first Alligator books. Are they just not very good? This is also, interestingly enough, the third book in the Giorgio Pellegrini series and the first book I’ve read in that series. Marco “The Alligator” Buratti is about to meet Carlotto’s other major character, the Dapper Dan of crime... Giorgio Pellegrini. So, I’m already thinking to myself, is Carlotto about to eliminate one or the other of his important characters? Is this going to be a Reichenbach Falls situation? This book parachutes me into the end of a gang war that Buratti and his associates, Max The Memory and Beniamino Rossini, have been caught up in for a while. Fortunately, that wraps up fairly quickly because what I really want is for the guys to get back to what they do best...investigate crimes that the police struggle to solve. Someone is extorting money from people who are conducting secret, adulterous love affairs. Even those who have been the most discrete, the most careful, are being targeted by what has been referred to as The Gang of Lovers. One of those blackmailed people, a woman who refused to play ball even when they kidnapped her lover, years later wants answers. Her lover never returned, and she wants to know what happened to him. She wants a salve for her guilt, but the truth is rarely the bearer of happiness in situations like this. Thus begins a game, and oh does Giorgio Pellegrini, the King of Hearts, like to play games. Marco is still recovering from the death of a friend and is just beginning to reclaim his relationship with music. ”The blues can be cruel; without you even noticing, the blues will dig a hole inside you, will slap you in the face with memories, or push you into a pit of nostalgia.” Max the Memory is more worried about stuffing himself with the local cuisine of Padua than dealing with his own feelings of loss. Beniamino Rossini is brooding and suffering over the dramatic suicide of his wife. Needless to say, the guys are not on the top of their game. They need to be tough, but also clever, if they are going to trap a man like Pellegrini. Massimo Carlotto made a mistake as a young man of 25. He came upon a murder victim, and instead of reporting the crime, he fled the scene. By fleeing he looked guilty of murder. He was acquitted of all charges for lack of evidence at his first trial, but when he was tried again, he was sentenced to 18 years. He became a fugitive and fled to France and later Mexico. After three years of running and looking over his shoulder, he was captured and extradited back to Italy. The court of public opinion was on his side, even as the criminal courts were not. Despite the lack of evidence, he was re-tried and sentenced to 16 years. Fortunately, in 1993, President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro pardoned him. [image] Massimo Carlotto Carlotto pulled his life back together and became a writer, publishing his first book in 1995, and man, did he have some real life experiences to draw upon to produce gritty, real characters, who are a confusing blend of cruelty and kindness with an evolving sense of morality and honor. The Italian influence on the hardboiled genre definitely adds some kinks to old established formulas in the same way that Italian directors did on the western genre with their spaghetti westerns. When I next feel the itch for a Carlotto book, I’m going to backtrack a bit and read the first Giorgio Pellegrini novel, The Goodbye Kiss. There is also a 2005 movie adaptation of the book that should prove interesting as well. For those interested in adding some gritty, sexy, and fiesty reading to the queue, start with the first book in the series translated into English, The Colombian Mule. If any of my Italian friends have read the first three Alligator books, please let me know if you have any idea why they have not been published in English. Thanks. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 16, 2020
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Feb 18, 2020
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Feb 16, 2020
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Paperback
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| 0679433139
| 9780679433132
| 0679433139
| 4.08
| 155,257
| 1320
| Aug 01, 1995
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it was amazing
| ”THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY, ”THROUGH ME THE WAY INTO THE SUFFERING CITY, [image] Botticelli’s vision of Satan. There are 92 illustrations by Botticelli, inspired by The Divine Comedy, of which this edition contains a selection. I read Inferno while in college and had always intended to go back and read Purgatorio and Paradiso, but somehow the years passed and I never returned to Dante’s masterpiece. When my son went off to college and asked to borrow some classics to read, I sent him, along with my copy of The Divine Comedy, Canterbury Tales, Utopia, Paradise Lost, and several other important works of literature. The rule with books, of course, is that there is no such thing as lending and returning. The lending part goes fine, but the returning is usually the tricky part. When I decided it was time to return to Dante, I didn’t ask for my copy back from my son, though he would be one of the few people who would return a book. I feel that giving a book to either of my children is an investment in all of our futures. Since I decided to descend into hell with Dante, I was frequently glad to have Virgil as our guide. He explained the explainable. He provided a protective wing from the many monstrosities that we encounter. ”Gross hailstones, water gray with filth, and snow Come streaking down across the shadowed air; The earth, as it receives that shower, stinks. Over the souls of those submerged beneath That mess, is an outlandish, vicious beast, His three throats barking, doglike: Cerberus. His eyes are bloodred; greasy, black, his beard; His belly bugles, and his hands are claws; His talons tear and flay and rend the shades.” As I was reading Dante’s descriptions of various horrendous beasts, it reminded me of the fantastical medieval expressions of imagination that I’ve encountered numerous times in the margins of holy books. These early monk illustrators displayed such a vivid creativity in how they depicted their fears. I can only wonder how terrifying their nightmares were and for them to believe that these terrors were real would only add wings and claws to their trepidation. They were infected with these fears by Christianity, while being dangled the balm and possibility of heaven. How about this for a living nightmare? ”As I kept my eyes fixed upon those sinners, A serpent with six feet springs out against One of the three, and clutches him completely. It gripped his belly with its middle feet, And with its forefeet grappled his two arms; And then it sank its teeth in both his cheeks; It stretched its rear feet out along his thighs And ran its tail along between the two, Then straightened it again behind his loins. No ivy ever gripped a tree so fast As when that horrifying monster clasped And intertwined the other’s limbs with its. Then just as if their substance were warm wax, They stuck together and they mixed their colors, So neither seemed what he had been before.” After seeing some of the horrors awaiting us in hell, which has proved to be a much better scare tactic for considering improving my heavenly resume than Death on the Highway or Red Asphalt II were for improving my driving skills, we encountered the pantheon of classical writers Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. Dante was so proud (we will deal with pride in Purgatory) that they accepted him as a member of their club. I was starting to wonder if Dante may have already resigning himself to a life in hell. Are great writers who don’t use their gifts glorifying God doomed to hell? One of the wonderful things about writing, to paraphrase Chaucer, is that you can eviscerate your enemies forever in print, and certainly the people who had most offended Dante in life were experiencing the tortures of everlasting hell. Writers do play God. Because of the fame of The Divine Comedy, their names will always be associated with a list of famous sinners. I would say that Dante’s revenge was served cold, but really it was rather warmly given. We also meet some sinners who led pious lives worthy of heaven, but because they were never baptised for the reason they lived before Christianity existed, or fell under the catchall phrase ”did not worship God in fitting ways,” and were all, every one of them, consigned to hell. God does seem to be very particular about all of his children fearing him, loving him above all else, and most importantly of all worshipping him. So it wasn’t about whether these people were good people, but that they showed proper reverence to his worshipness. Later, when I visited heaven, I didn’t see any issues with overcrowding, so I’m not sure why a few get out of hell free cards couldn’t have been surreptitiously handed out to those bereft of sin who didn’t completely conform to his will. How about even just a leg up to purgatory, where eventually one might after thousands of years of suffering earn a pair of wings? It was with some relief, my deodorant was starting to give way, we ascended to Purgatory and confronted the seven terraced mountain, representing the seven deadly sins. For those in need of a recap, there are the malicious uses of love, such as wrath, envy, and pride, and those where love is too strong, such as lust, gluttony, and greed. Sloth is the only sin not based on excesses, but on a lack of enough self-love or energy to be a contributing member of society. As I weigh myself on these scales, I can honestly say that sloth and greed have never been sins of mine. Pride, I will admit, was a struggle when I was younger, but life has a way of knocking the piss out of us and reminding us constantly that we are only half as smart as we think we are. I’ve had a few wrathful moments in my life, but being around human beings for too long will test the patience of the most sainted among us. Lust I will plead the fifth, and gluttony . . well, food has never been an issue, but one could make a case that I do suffer from a serious case of book gluttony. I did check out some of the real estate pricing while in Purgatory. *sigh* It was with some relief that we discovered some angels in purgatory, bedraggled ones to be sure, but still ones doing what we want angels to do, which is protect us from marauding beasts. ”I saw the company of noble spirits, silent and looking upward, pale and humble, as if in expectation; and I saw, emerging and descending from above, two angels bearing flaming swords, of which the blades were broken off, without their tips.” Angels are badass warriors, and there have been several television shows in recent years that has depicted them as soft and warm cuddle buddies, but really angels aren’t for clinking beers with, but for us to stand behind when winged, fire spitting beasts are attempting to turn us into crispy critters. Dante shared an epiphany with me while in Purgatory that left me thinking about the creation of dreams and how important it is for all of us to continue to build new dreams as we leap the final hurdles of achieving a dream or find that other dreams may no longer suit us. ”A new thought arose inside of me and, from that thought, still others--many and diverse-- were born: I was so drawn from random thought to thought that, wandering in mind, I shut my eyes, transforming thought on thought to dream.” Virgil was replaced as our guide by Beatrice as we were about three-quarters of the way through Purgatory. I was sorry to see Virgil go, but I must admit I’ve always wanted to meet Beatrice, just to see what type of woman would inspire such a lifetime of devotion from a man like Dante. She was the daughter of a banker, married a banker, and with her premature death at 25 remained forever the very vision of beauty. According to Dante, he only met her twice, but those sightings must have been magical because they left him with a permanent love hangover. I wanted to ask Dante if he had ever even talked to the lass or if he just projected all of his visions of her from glimpses of her outer beauty, but then the fact that she is here in Paradise may answer that question for me. ”In ascent, her eyes-- All beauty’s living seals--gain force, and notes that I had not yet turned to them in Mars, can then excuse me--just as I accuse myself , thus to excuse myself--and see that I speak truly: here her holy beauty is not denied--ascent makes it more perfect.” Heaven light, as it turns out, is even better than bar light. We all look our best. If you are considering reading Dante, I would recommend for sure reading Inferno. Most likely when you encounter Dante references appearing in your reading, they will probably be from the Inferno. This Allen Mandelbaum translation is wonderful and so easy to read, and there are copious notes in the back to help guide you if Virgil loses you in a flaming forest. This is one of the classic works which I have felt for some time I’ve needed to read. There will be many more this year, including but not limited to War and Peace, Magic Mountain, and Les Miserables. If a bit of flayed skin flies out from between the pages once in a while, don’t be afraid; it’s just part of the adventure. A word of caution though, be sure to buy some SPF1000 before you take this scenic walk with Dante. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 22, 2019
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Jul 06, 2019
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Jun 22, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 4.03
| 829
| Nov 2018
| 2018
|
really liked it
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”’From the info we have so far the virus kills between forty-eight and seventy-two hours after infection, and its R naught number is 16-20.’ Marchiori ”’From the info we have so far the virus kills between forty-eight and seventy-two hours after infection, and its R naught number is 16-20.’ Marchiori’s brows knitted. ‘R naught?’ ‘Basic reproduction number. It shows how many people a single infected individual can contaminate. Basically how fast it spreads.’ ‘And I’m assuming this is a bad number.’ ‘Well, if you think back in 1918--when they didn’t have all the highways and skyways to travel on in a matter of hours from one part of the planet to the other--there was a worldwide outbreak of the swine flu that killed nearly fifty million people, and the R naught number was 1.4-2.8, then yes, I’d say it’s beyond bad. Probably closer to end-of-the-world plague, rotting corpses in the streets, death of civilization as we know it.’” [image] This isn’t a virus you can run from. If let loose on the world, it will eventually find every nook and cranny of the earth, every mountain cabin, island retreat, and Arctic station. Even the rich who cocoon themselves from the world will find themselves equally susceptible. Possibly it could reach them when their maid brings their 5 o’clock martini sprinkled with a sneeze she could not contain as she plunked a fat green olive in the vodka. So the point is, you can’t hide from it. The only solution is to stop it before it can jump on a horse of the apocalypse and ride across the curve of the Earth with the scythe of death flung wide. Of course, you might be fine. Maybe. If you have a very special gene, the G Gene. Which if you say it really fast, it sounds a bit like the ratcheting of a shotgun or the ringing of a sale on an old fashioned cash register. The Cha-ching of the G Gene. Who would develop a dangerous virus like this? The Americans, the Russians, the Israelis, Muslim terrorists? Or how about Marvin, the chubby pimple faced twenty-seven year old, living in his mom’s basement, a proud member of the involuntary celibate group INCEL (yes, it really does exist.), who dug out the chemistry set that Uncle Ted gave him for his twelfth birthday and began experimenting on the neighborhood cats and his nieces and nephews until he had the superbug that would separate the population chaff from the plump kernels. That boy was just never quite right, but no, it wasn’t Marvin, nor was it any of the other potential government/terrorists entities who might be looking for a break-glass-only-in-case-of-emergence Z solution to world domination. It is something much more insidious, a billionaire who knows he has the G Gene with immunity from the virus. He is deluded and arrogant enough to believe that he is Thanos, about to save the world from overpopulation inspired starvation. ( I never really thought of Thanos as an environmentalist until Infinity Wars. Batshit crazy environmentalist, but still technically a Planet First kind of guy.) Yes, Von Eckstein is a super villain, and who do you call when you need to fight a super villain? Well, I call Bond, James Bond, with a shaken not stirred martini cocktail in hand, ready to point him to the epicenter of this fiendish plot in a bunker in Verona. [image] Juliet’s Balcony. Photo supplied by Diane May. (photo credit: www.ricwebdesign.com) Wait? What? Verona? The home of Romeo and Juliet? The center of passion and unrequited love? It can’t be. It is such an endearingly cute, damn town. How could something so horrible be created in such a place? It is dastardly clever, in my opinion, to hide something hideous among the lovely architecture and beaming tourist trade. [image] Piazza Brà. Photo supplied by Diane May (photo credit: www.ricwebdesign.com). So the author, Diane May, does not call Bond, but she does bring in the American Alexander O’Neal, who works for some agency so secret that I wonder if he even knows really who he works for, and my favorite character of the book Verona Police Detective Livio Marchiori. I do have hopes that he will prove to be a replacement for my beloved Italian Detective Aurelio Zen, created by Michael Dibdon. (If you have not seen the trilogy called Zen starring Rufus Sewell, give it a look. It is fantastic.) Now Marchiori is plagued by more than the threat of a life changing/ending superbug. He has a new partner who is more annoying than useful at this point. He has an American dark ops agent who is frankly out of control. He has a woman he must protect because she inadvertently stumbled into the virus plot who also seems intent on self-destruction. He has a crazed psycho killer who seems to be able to use hypnosis to induce people to kill themselves. WTF? ”I can’t control it, she realized and a crushing wave of panic stormed over her. He was controlling her, controlling her own brain, telling her body what to do. It felt as though two entities lived inside her skull. Hers and his. A dark presence that she just couldn’t fight against.” I give that a double *shiver*. This is the perfect book for a long plane ride, or an afternoon on the beach. It pairs well with a chilled white wine or with a more robust merlot. Smoke them if you got them, but I wouldn’t recommend a funny cigarette of the “joint” variety as the natural paranoia induced by such a repast could be increased exponentially by the treacherous weavings of this insidious plot. I did dance with the book a few times, but when I did finally settle into the cadence of the writing I finished it in a single afternoon. There are original concepts, Q-esque gadgets, and a plot that will keep the pages turning. There is a hit the brakes with both feet plot twist that may leave even the most jaded among us feeling good about humanity. Oh yes, and there is unrequited love. How could a novel largely set in Verona be written without a dash of love? [image] Picture supplied by Diane May. (photo credit: www.ricwebdesign.com) Diane May lives in Verona and after plying her with all the charm I possess I convinced her to let me fly to Verona to sit down with her for an interview. (Some of this statement is a lie.) Jeffrey Keeten: Excuse the pun, but where/when/how did this "germ" of an idea of a plot come together for you? What got you started writing? Diane May: What got me started writing was Isaac Asimov’s The Naked Sun. I read it when I was 13 years old and loved it so much that I didn’t want it to end. So when it inevitably did, I decided to continue the story because I couldn’t bear the thought of having to leave the amazing world he had created. I soon discovered that my words didn’t seem to hold the same magical power though, as my characters seemed adamant on remaining lifeless stick figures and they didn’t jump off the page the way his did. But I kept at it, I read and wrote, I even won writing contests in school (because my literature teacher made me write stories when she discovered I was good at this), but I never actually considered writing for readers. I only wanted to write for myself, to create worlds and characters and, more often than not, I would do this in my mind without even putting it down on paper. Until one day when my husband found a novel I had written while I was at university and he loved it so much that I started writing for him. He’s always been an avid reader, just like me, and from that moment on he also became my critic, editor and motivator. And… the rest is history. As for the idea for this story… well, I’ve always been fascinated by two things: genetics and the universe. I watch documentaries and Ted Talks about them, and one day, after watching an amazing BBC documentary about genetic engineering, I started picturing in my mind the scenario in Evo, more specifically the part at the end. And then I did some research and found out that we’re actually not that far from this scenario and that there are already scientists who are officially working on extending our current lifespan. And then I started thinking about illegal genetic experiments and what happens when we play with things that are beyond our understanding. Because no matter how much medicine has advanced, we still don’t understand how a tiny change in our DNA will affect human evolution in the long run. And so Evo was born. [image] Diane May (photo credit: www.ricwebdesign.com) Jeffrey Keeten: I could tell you are a military brat because you are very comfortable with your descriptions of weapons and military/spy gadgets. I particularly liked the cell phone sized gadget that messed with cameras for 60 seconds. I could use one of those walking around in the States given all the camera lens trained on us wherever we go. Can you share a bit of your background while being a military family? Did the government move you around a bit? Diane May: Yes, it did… a lot. The first time it happened I was eight years old and I cried and cried because I didn’t want to leave my friends. The second time it happened I was eleven and I promised myself I would never make friends again. And so I started reading more – I was already in love with reading – and never left the house, except when I had to go to school or my mum told me to take out the garbage. My parents got worried because I would read between one and three books a day, depending on the length of the book, and I completely refused to go out and make friends. But I was happy because books never left you and they were portals to magical, wonderful worlds. However, there’s much more to life as a military brat than just the pain of constantly making friends and then losing them. I lived on military bases at times, I became interested in guns and military technology, I even learnt the Morse Code when I was 15 and most of my friends were either like me or soldiers… And you know what’s interesting? That even now as an adult who hasn’t lived on a military base for over twenty years, I still see army as a home and men and women in uniform as completely trustworthy. The gadget you mention is purely my invention, as is the black bag O’Neal uses to destroy evidence during his mission in Moscow. And by the way, if the army is interested in making them they can go right ahead and do it, I hereby give them permission. :)) JK: You take us to America and also give us a peek of Transylvania. Have you had a chance to visit the other places besides Verona that are featured in your novel? DM: Actually, I was born in Transylvania and I still go back there every few years. I also visited Germany and other countries in Europe, but I’ve never been to Africa. Sibiu, the city I mention in Transylvania, is the city I was born in and it’s close to Dracula’s Castle, which I visit quite often as Dracula is my uncle and he can get really grumpy if I don’t go and see him. Kidding! But here’s an interesting fact about me: I was born at two am on a full moon night in a town shrouded in a fog so dense that it looked like an impenetrable gray wall, and wolves were howling in the dark forest at the edge of the town. There was a terrible wind that night and when I came into the world and cried, like all babies do, a gust of wind opened the window and swept through the room so violently that the small white blanket the nurse was about to cover me with flew out of her hands and into the darkness outside, never to be found again. My grandma crossed herself and told my mom to always keep a crucifix by my head in the cot so the strigoi (vampires) can’t take me. Vampires apart, Transylvania is an amazing place with breathtaking scenery, superb cities (see Sibiu, Brasov, Sighisoara), delicious food and wonderful people. [image] Picture taken by Diane May. (photo credit: www.ricwebdesign.com) JK: You mentioned to me when we were corresponding about your book that you worked as a Juliet secretary which I found fascinating. Could you explain to my friends and followers what that job is exactly? DM: If you’ve seen the movie Letters to Juliet, you might remember this quote: “There is a place in Verona where people who suffer can leave a message to ask Juliet for help.” That place is called Juliet Club, it’s real and it receives tens of thousands of letters and emails every year from people from all over the world. The story of the Dear Juliet letters started in the 1930s when Ettore Solimani, Juliet’s Tomb keeper, began gathering the letters people left at her grave. Moved by their stories and wanting to help them, he started replying and signed as Juliet’s Secretary and, in doing so, created this decades-old tradition. Now there’s an army of volunteers who do this, and although you’d be tempted to think that since we’re living in a highly technological era the number of emails the Club receives far exceeds that of the letters written by hand, the truth is that when writing about the matters of the heart people still prefer to use good old-fashioned pen and paper. When you’re there and you see all those letters written in so many different languages and coming from the four corners of the Earth, as Shakespeare would say, you understand that the one thing all human beings have in common, no matter their age, nationality and social status, is the need to love and be loved. Some write because they seek advice, others need hope and reassurance that they will sooner or later find their soulmate, and a few just want to say thank you for having met the one they want to spend the rest of their lives with. When you sit down at that table, open a letter and start reading it you fully understand why Ettore Solimani couldn’t throw them away and felt compelled to write back. Reading something which comes straight from the heart and soul of another human being is so powerful and so moving that it tears down all your walls and defenses and settles in your heart, and you find yourself unable to ignore it; it becomes your problem, your priority. And the answer you send back has a piece of your heart in it. What Juliet’s Secretaries do is not just simply answer letters, but send out hope; hope that time and obstacles don’t matter, that one day we will meet the one we’re destined to be with for the rest of our lives. JK: One of your villains, the enhanced ability Hypnotist, was a guy that the X-Men might find themselves fighting, yet the way you presented his abilities it seemed so plausible. I can't think of anything more frightening than having someone who can control our actions and be able to take over our minds. Did/do you have nightmares about this guy? DM: Ah, this is a tough question. When I first started thinking about him, picturing what he does and how he does it I tried to look at it clinically, like a scientist merely observing what happens in an experiment. This helped me to become somewhat immune to him, but writing those scenes still sent shivers down my spine and made my heart beat faster. The very idea of hypnosis scares me because we don’t fully understand how the mind works, yet we are arrogant enough to claim we can control it. Believe it or not, what gave me nightmares while writing the book was not his ability to take over our minds, but the reasons behind it, the thirst to kill and the fact that he’s completely devoid of any positive human emotions. And when I wrote the scene where you find out why he is the way he is, you know what kept me up at night? The fact that I could understand him, I could actually see that tortured little boy shedding his humanity and crossing over to the dark side. And I felt sorry for him. [image] Diane May (photo credit: www.ricwebdesign.com) JK: So what are you working on next? Is this a first of a series or do you intend to write stand alone novels? DM: When I wrote Evo I intended it to be a stand alone novel but after receiving reviews and messages where people told me how they loved Livio Marchiori, the homicide detective in the book, and how they would like to meet him again, I’m now thinking about writing a series with him as the main character. I already have some ideas in mind so that’s definitely a possibility, but the book I am currently working on is another stand alone novel, a crime thriller called Till Death Do Us Part. And trust me when I say it, there’s a new serial killer in town and he's looking forward to meeting you. ;) JK: Yes! I’m so glad to hear that you will be bringing Livio Marchiori even more to life in a future novel! If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 07, 2018
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Oct 10, 2018
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Oct 07, 2018
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ebook
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| 1416556281
| 9781416556282
| 1416556281
| 4.14
| 319
| Jun 14, 2011
| Jun 14, 2011
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really liked it
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”Leaving the woods, I go to a spring, and then to one of the spots where I hang my bird nets. In my arms I carry a book: Dante, Petrarch, or one of th
”Leaving the woods, I go to a spring, and then to one of the spots where I hang my bird nets. In my arms I carry a book: Dante, Petrarch, or one of those minor poets like Tibullus, Ovid. I read of their amorous passions and their loves and recall my own, and lose myself for a while in these happy thoughts.” [image] Machiavelli Niccolo Machiavelli lived in an exciting and tumultuous time in Florentine history. The city state was fraught with invasion, regime change, political intrigue, the crazed monk Savonarola, the Medicis, an explosion of art from Da Vinci, Michelangelo, and many other amazing artists. It was an enthralling time to be alive. What Miles J. Unger did with this book was attempt to bring to life a more vivid image of Machiavelli. He had been cast as the Finger of Satan, as well as credited with being the father of political science. Was he a great philosopher, or was he a man giving credence to the very worst impulses of those trying to hold onto power? Dictators, such as Hitler and Stalin, routinely used his writing to justify their own crimes against humanity. ”All Machiavell’s experience told him that life was unpredictable, and politics--which is merely life played out on a greater stage and for higher stakes--even more so; that well-meaning rulers (like Piero Soderini) might forfeit the confidence of their citizens while ruthless tyrants (like Valentino) could win the loyalty of theirs.” Valentino was of course Cesare Borgia, the infamous son of Pope Alexander VI, who came down through history as one of the most notorious tyrants. When young, Borgia was a handsome man. Later, after syphilis ravaged his body, he was an object lesson in beauty becoming the beast. His father, always an unrepentant fornicator as a cardinal, continued his wayward ways even as pope. He would have scores of whores brought into the Vatican for epic orgies that would have rivaled any spectacle conceived by the Roman emperors. Let’s just say that Cesare was raised in an environment conducive to bad behavior. Machiavelli was frequently sent on foreign missions on behalf of Florence to foreign courts, and on one trip he spent a considerable amount of time in the company of Cesare Borgia. He became the basis for his most famous book,The Prince. Now Valentino was only able to stay in power as long as his father was pope, but once Alexander VI died, he was unable to hold onto the kingdom he had carved out for himself. In theory, Valentino may have fit the profile that Machiavelli believed was the best avenue to hold onto power, but in reality his methods were useless without the power of the papacy. [image] Cesare Borgia Duke of Valentinois. After one of the regime changes in Florence, Machiavelli found himself out of work. He was thrown out of office: ”’Casssaverunt, privaverant et totaliter amoverunt’ (Dismissed, deprived, and totally removed).” A year later, he was brought up on conspiracy charges and tortured. He was subjected to the rope drop where the subjects hands were tied behind his back and he was dropped by a rope tied to his hands that dislocated his shoulders. This induced excruciating pain. Machiavelli considered these unfortunate circumstances a character building opportunity. He did not confess to the crimes he was accused of and was released three weeks later. This would be the first of many close shaves he would have up until his death. He was a man blunt in his opinions, which made him enemies that he could ill afford. He saw himself as apolitical and thought that he should be allowed to serve the state no matter who was in charge. He wanted to be the best public servant he could be to his city. He stated how he felt very simply:”I love my city more than my soul.” [image] It doesn’t matter how smart or useful or experienced you are, as we routinely see in the United States. What is important is whether you have a D or an R after your name, and how well you do in the political system has to do with which party is in power at the time. A man like Machiavelli, who would be honest in his opinions and would base those opinions on historical knowledge, would be invaluable to any government. He had brief flurries of getting back into politics after his dismissal, but he spent the majority of he rest of his life on his family farm writing plays, essays, and books, siring children he could ill afford to feed, and leading a rather free, devious existence in the taverns and bordellos. The amorous passions he sighed over in the quote that I started this review with were not regarding his wife, but the many lovely whores he had known throughout his life. He certainly still visited the bedsheets of his wife, given the children that kept arriving, but when he thought with nostalgia of the lovely attributes of women, he was remembering the visits he had made to experience the exquisite charms of those women of lost virtue. Machiavelli loved books almost as much as he loved women. If only he could have propped a book in the cleft of a plump whore’s bottom, he probably would have been as close to heaven as he would ever reach on earth. How bad can a guy be who loves books that much? He was not a virtuous role model, but I couldn’t help appreciating his devil may care attitude and his belief that man can only rise so far above his baser instincts. He was well aware that civilization had not tamed the beast in men, but only caged it. If any weakness or deviation was shown by those in power that inspired fear or perceived opportunity, men became a mob of unprincipled creatures. Despite his own personal failings and the uses his bolder ascertains in The Prince have been put to in the name of cruelty, I couldn’t help but like him, or maybe more accurately appreciate him. He was in search of truth through honesty, and that always kept him in the crosshairs of his detractors. It has been decades since I read The Prince, but I remember the good advice in the book on how to be a ruler/manager that didn’t involve the more ruthless elements for which Machiavelli was best known. He was only advocating the more extreme responses in the face of grave danger to an administration. His books were banned at various times throughout history. He was nearly relegated to the dustbin at numerous times as well, but in the end he was immortalized as the ultimate villain to many, but to scholars he had proven to be an infinite source of delight. He had a quintessential mind that is impossible to ignore. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 08, 2018
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Sep 19, 2018
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Sep 08, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 0385537840
| 9780385537841
| 0385537840
| 4.15
| 5,254
| Sep 03, 2015
| Oct 20, 2015
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it was amazing
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[image]
Octavian the man. Augustus the God. ”When people think of imperial Rome, it is the city of the first Caesars that is most likely to come int [image] Octavian the man. Augustus the God. ”When people think of imperial Rome, it is the city of the first Caesars that is most likely to come into their minds. There is no other period of ancient history that can compare for sheer unsettling fascination with its gallery of leading characters. Their lurid glamour has resulted in them becoming the archetypes of feuding and murderous dynasts.” The women are schemers, and the men are ruthless. Even Augustus and Claudius, who are considered the more humane and least insane of the Caesars, also wade through the blood of their enemies, those confirmed and those suspected, to maintain their always tenuous hold on power. ”Tiberius, grim, paranoid, and with a taste for having his testicles licked by young boys in swimming pools. Caligula, lamenting that Roman people did not have a single neck, so that he might cut it through. Agrippina, the mother of Nero, scheming to bring to power the son who would end up having her murdered. Nero himself, kicking his pregnant wife to death, marrying a eunuch, and raising a pleasure palace over the fire-gutted centre of Rome.” ”The first Caesars, more than any comparable dynasty, remain to this day household names. Their celebrity holds.” I discovered Tom Holland when I picked up his first book Lord of the Dead, which was a novel about Lord Byron as a vampire. Of course, Lord Byron would make a perfect vampire. I then started hunting down his other horror novels as assiduously as Van Helsing, and in many cases I had to order them from England to be able to read them. Then he disappeared. Or so I thought. Then I discovered his book Rubicon, which ends where this book begins. At first, I thought it must be a different Tom Holland, but after some research, I discovered it was the same man, a horror scrivner remade into a writer of the horrors of history. He doesn’t list his novels in the first few nonfiction works; after all, he has become a serious writer of history and doesn’t want to muddy the waters with claiming those rather lurid novels that I found to be delicious fun. (As I’m writing about them, I’m getting the itch to go read one again.) In this book, listed along with his nonfiction work, are those early horror novels. He must have reached a point in his career where he no longer had to think of those books as orphaned children, written by another man who was lost in the fetid, murky waters of pulp fiction. [image] There is a vampire horror novelist still lurking behind those eyes. The significance of this for you, dear reader, is that his nonfiction books are written to entertain you. That does not mean they are not serious in nature for it is obvious he has done his research. He has a practiced eye, from writing to fiction, to know what readers want to know. For instance, Augustus saves the empire twice from complete destruction, which is actually fascinating with all the power struggles that the death of Julius Caesar causes. What is equally fascinating is that as Augustus grows older and becomes a God (the wheels might have started to come off the chariot), he becomes more conservative. He imposes those views on a traditionally hedonistic Roman population. The problem is the only child of his loins, Julia, doesn’t get the message, or she feels that being the child of a god that she is beyond reproach. [image] Julia, one of history's most famous adulterers. The stories regarding her infidelities are numerous and legendary, but for me, the following statement attributed to her actually makes me gasp. ”Far from dismissing the rumours of adultery, she dared to mock the censoriousness of those who spread them. How could the stories that she had cheated on Agrippa possibly be true, she was once asked, when Gaius and Lucius look so very like him. ‘Why,’ she answered, ‘because I only ever take on passengers after the cargo-hold has been loaded.’” There are plenty of people to scurry back to her father and relate these outrageous statements to him. Whether there is truth in all the allegations that land at her sandals, who can say? She certainly does not quell those rumors, but merely breathes more life into them. The end result is that Julia is exiled to an island by her dictorial father. Ovid, the poet concerned with the artistry of the bedroom, in particular seducing married women, is another thorn in the godly backside of Augustus. He too pushes things too far and is exiled, which is worse than death to a man obsessed with culture. It is hard to like Augustus in his later years simply because he becomes more concerned about his own immortality, even more than preserving the few remaining members of his family. His heirs have been dropping like flies, and the rumors of his wife Livia poisoning them to clear the way for her son by her first marriage, Tiberius, are becoming harder to ignore. [image] Germanicus and Agrippina by Rubens, the power couple of the Roman Empire representing all that Rome believed themselves capable of. Germanicus and his wife Agrippina are the apple of the eye of the Roman Empire. They are not only a beautiful power couple (bigger than Benniffer or Brangelina), but they are also proving very capable quelling any uprisings across the wide expanse of the reach of Rome. She, unlike most Roman wives, travels with her husband on his military campaign so his successes are more their mutual achievements, and that makes the people of Rome love them even more. When Germanicus dies under rather odd circumstances, that clears the way for Tiberius. Tiberius is so stiff necked and puckered assed that he was must have squeaked like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz when he walked. Holland sums him up very well. ”Bloodstained pervert and philosopher-king: it took a man of rare paradox to end up being seen as both.” We focus on his perversions, but he is actually very capable. Before succeeding Augustus, he wins several critical military campaigns. He just is horrible at promoting himself. He feels above it all and winning is just what he is supposed to do. Why should it be a surprise to anyone? He spends a good deal of time on his pleasure island of Capri and basically tells the world to go screw itself. He has a peaceful reign but, like all the Caesars, certainly becomes ruled by rampant paranoia. [image] Tiberius It isn’t paranoia if people are really trying to kill you. The problem with the House of Caesar is that they don’t always target the right people or, in the course of suppressing conspiracies, bring death to such a broad sweep of people, who may or may not have been involved in a conspiracy, that they leave their friends about as equally depleted as their enemies. Next in line is the infamous Caligula, who kills just about everyone who could possibly be considered a legitimate heir. He is the son of Germanicus, and any empathy that he was born with must have been burned out of him in the course of watching his family members die one by one. Tiberius’s comment was: ”I am rearing them a viper.”When Caligula is killed by his own Praetorian Guard, well mostly for being a psychopathic asshole, the only real option as his successor is his gibbering fool of an uncle. Claudius survives numerous purges of his family by acting like a simple minded, helpless imbecile. The senators that bring him to power probably have it in mind that he will be easy to control. He is not. He is a student of history and natural science. He is infinitely smarter than anyone could comprehend. Because of his infirmities, he mostly has to travel through the eyes of others. Ambassadors knowing his interest in the arcane bring him specimens from all over the world. (If you have not watched the miniseries I, Claudius starring Derek Jacobi, it is excellent.) [image] Claudius When Claudius breathes his last, the empire is left with Claudius’s great nephew Nero. His mother is Agrippina the Younger, daughter of Germanicus. The rumors of imperial incest between mother and son run rampant throughout Rome. Instead of denouncing those rumors, much like Julia, he embraces them. ”It was noted that he kept as one of his concubines a woman who looked exactly like Agrippina. And that whenever he fondled her, or showed off her charms to others, he would declare that he was sleeping with his mother.” When Rome burns and Nero is one of the main suspects (after all his main concern is beautifying Rome, and how better to do that than to have a clean canvas to start from), he blames those pesky, noisy, obnoxious Christians. Between 900 and 1000 are killed and murdered (St. Jerome calls them martyrs.) in various creative ways. We don’t know for sure if the Christians had anything to do with the burning of Rome, but given the Sodom and Gomorrah events being sponsored and encouraged by Nero, I can see them convince themselves that burning Rome would be doing God’s work. [image] Nero was a cheeky looking bastard. Nero believes strongly in applying pageantry to all aspects of his life, including executions. ”Spectacle, illusion, drama: these were the dimensions of rule that truly mattered. Attentive though Nero might be to the grind of business, his true obsession was with a project that he felt to be altogether worthier of his time and talents: to fashion reality anew.” Augustus dies in bouts of blood, possibly from a poisoned fig. Tiberius may have been smothered by a pillow. Caligula is hacked to pieces by his own guard. Claudius may have been poisoned, but the wily, old bastard might have just died from old age. Nero commits suicide moments before a sentence of death is to descend upon him. The women don’t fare any better. They are starved to death, exiled, beheaded, run through with swords, and poisoned. What a family! Despite their best efforts to destroy themselves they manage to hang onto power from 27BC to 68AD. It isn’t long after their passing, despite the bloody uncertainty of their reigns, that Rome misses them. They must have missed the flair, the pageantry, and the insanity. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 04, 2018
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Aug 14, 2018
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Aug 04, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1590171470
| 9781590171479
| 1590171470
| 4.15
| 2,844
| 1944
| Apr 10, 2005
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it was amazing
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”Naked Germans are wonderfully defenseless. They are bereft of secrecy. They are no longer frightening. The secret of their strength is not in their s
”Naked Germans are wonderfully defenseless. They are bereft of secrecy. They are no longer frightening. The secret of their strength is not in their skin or in their bones, or in their blood, it is in their uniforms. Their real skin is their uniform. If the peoples of Europe were aware of the flabby, defenseless, and dead nudity concealed by the Feldgrau of the German uniform, the German Army could not frighten even the weakest and most defenseless people.” [image] If you have ever worn a costume, you will have experienced some of the freedom of being someone else. Masquerade balls and the famous Carnevale di Venezia are fun because people feel released from their normal lives, their personas, and even in some cases their morals. Adolf Hitler liked the pageantry of those impressive uniforms, many of which he designed personally. He was a starving artist before he decided to become an evil dictator. (The film Max with John Cusack explores the life of Hitler when he was still a normal mensch.) A man in a uniform becomes a different person. They can be emboldened and dehumanized and capable of committing great atrocities. It is almost as if the crimes against humanity are perpetrated by the uniform. Curzio Malaparte was born Kurt Erich Suckert, but changed his name to Malaparte as a pun on Buonaparte, meaning ”he of the bad place.” As you read this book, he is going to take you to some very bad places. You will see through his eyes the ghettos in Poland, a close encounter with Heinrich Himmler, firing squads, and dinner parties with people out of their frilling minds. His descriptions of scenes of destruction and horror are vivid. ”By the roadside, and here and there in the cornfields, were overturned cars, burned trucks, disemboweled armored cars, abandoned guns, all twisted by explosions. But nowhere a man, nothing living, not even a corpse, not even any carrion. For miles and miles around there was only dead iron. Dead bodies of machines, hundreds upon hundreds of miserable steel carcasses. The stench of putrefying iron rose from the fields and the lagoons. The smell of rotting iron won over the smell of men and horses--that smell of old wars, even the smell of grain and the penetrating, sweet scent of sunflowers vanished amid the sour stench of scorched iron, rotting steel, and dead machinery.” This book was published in 1944 while the war was still going on. It is a tribute to his charm and ability to make friends in high places that he was not shot long before this book was ever published. The odyssey of this manuscript actually making it to print is harrowing and related in the intro to this edition. Malaparte was a fascist, and then he wasn’t. He disagreed with Il Duce on tactics that he found abhorrent. In 1933, he was stripped of his membership and exiled to the island of Lipari. I would say it is a mystery why he wasn’t shot, hanged, and drawn and quartered at this point; the vitriol of his pen was very annoying to Mussolini, but then I discovered that he was friends with Galeazzo Ciano, the son-in-law and heir apparent of Mussolini. Ciano eventually saved him from his island of exile, and he came back to the mainland of Italy in 1938. He was then jailed in 1938, 1939, 1941, and 1943. He refused to be quiet. [image] Two boys playing dress up. It would be cute if they weren’t psychopaths! Mussolini should have had him shipped out to the nearest war zone with a target painted on his face, but instead, I can only believe with the intercession of Ciano, he was assigned to the diplomatic corp as a correspondent and sent to cover the action in the Ukraine. In the course of his new duties, he visited all of the central European countries as he chased down stories and observed with such a discerning eye the very worst of war. His perspectives of the conflict are unlike anything I’ve ever read before. ”Kaputt does something unique in the literature of the war; it crosses the lines of battle. Malaparte’s essentially treacherous mentality enabled him imaginatively and at times even physically to look at conflict simultaneously from the vantage points of opposing camps.” And he shares scenes like this: ”The lake looked like a vast sheet of white marble on which rested hundreds upon hundreds of horses’ heads. They appeared to have been chopped off cleanly with an ax. Only the heads stuck out of the crust of ice. And they were all facing the shore. The white flame of terror still burnt in their wide-open eyes. Close to the shore a tangle of wildly rearing horses rose from the prison of ice.” These Soviet horses were stampeded by a barrage of artillery fire into the water at the very moment the water was beginning to freeze. A tragic scene, but at the same time, how can we not be struck by the beauty of it? Ice sculptures of hundreds of the most exquisite creatures on the planet, preserved until the spring thaw as works of art. There are dinner scenes where friends of the Axis Alliance were gorging themselves on a rich banquet of food while postulating about the Jews living like rats, starving to death mere miles from their table. Malaparte visited the Jewish girls who have been forced into whore houses for the pleasure of German soldiers. He was sitting and holding one girl’s hand as she told him that she had to submit to forty-three soldiers and six officers that day. Why she distinguished the officers from the regular enlistment was a bit baffling? She was counting down the days when she would be released. They only used them for twenty some days, then fresh girls were brought in. She was looking forward to when she would be allowed to go home, but what Malaparte did not have the heart to tell her was that she would not be going home. [image] Malaparte in uniform, not looking very menacing in THAT hat! I’ve always heard good things about Curzio Malaparte’s writing, but I had no idea how compelling his writing was going to be. I would pick this book up intending to read a chapter or two, and the next thing I know, I’ve blown through 100 pages. Even when he is relating tragedy, he does so with alluring and, at times, stunning prose. For those who feel they know all there is to know about World War II, you are still missing some insights if you haven’t seen the war through Curzio Malaparte’s eyes. I’ve been accused of being an intellectual before, so I particularly enjoyed this exchange. ”’I often ask myself,’ said de Foxa, ‘what the function of the intellectuals will be in a new medieval period. I bet they would take advantage of the opportunity to try again to save European civilization.’” Yes, yes, we will! If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jun 10, 2018
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Jun 17, 2018
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Jun 10, 2018
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Paperback
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| 1786482576
| 9781786482570
| 1786482576
| 3.66
| 7,512
| Feb 20, 2018
| Feb 20, 2018
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really liked it
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”How amazing my mother and father were! All those years, all their bullying doubts, all in the paltry hope that strangers might someday stand before t
”How amazing my mother and father were! All those years, all their bullying doubts, all in the paltry hope that strangers might someday stand before their work and look, probably no longer than a few seconds. That’s all they were fighting for. What driven lives!” Charles “Pinch” Bavinsky is the Roman spawn of a Canadian sculptor and a celebrated American artist. Bear Bavinsky achieved his reputation in the 1950s by painting body parts, never faces. His canvases are masculine and virile to match his Hemingwayesque personality. He is a charmer. Woman become weak in the knees around him, gallery owners froth at the mouth, collectors beg to be allowed to buy his art, and even those who meet him that don’t know who he is find themselves seduced by his magnetic, larger than life personality. Can you imagine being his son? Pinch worships his father and spends a lifetime trying to get his attention. Bear is rather indifferent to his offspring, almost calloused, but when he does share the warmth of his attention with one of them, it is like they have inhaled a drug they can’t get enough of. So his kids end up loathing him and loving him in wildly changing measures. Bear likes his kids more when they are small and cute. By the time they get older, he doesn’t have to deal with them because he has already moved on to the next woman. Sometimes the next woman overlaps with the current woman. Bear is a self-indulgent, egotistical, domineering nightmare to be involved with, but every one of his past conquests would drop everything to be with him again. Did I mention he has seventeen kids? Out of all of his wives, girlfriends, flings, we get to know Pinch’s mother Natalie the best, the woman who inspired some of his best paintings. As any woman would be, she is overwhelmed by him. Her attempt at an artist’s career is floundering and drowning in the wake of his successes. As Pinch gets older, he becomes more reflective about his mother, less embarrassed by her, and more understanding of the sacrifices she made to her own aspirations to be Bear’s muse and to raise a child by herself. ”None of her works will sit in a museum, he knows. Natalie, toiling through the night, or building slow pieces at her solicary workshop, or looking at him from her potter’s wheel in Rome---she was disregarded, and will remain so forever, among the billions whose inner lives clamor, then expire, never to earn the slightest notice. It is not enough to be good. The world churns on personalities. By Bear being a larger than life figure, how good was his art? Are even the critics capable of evaluating him properly if they are caught like moth in the glow of his flame? Bear is hyper critical of his own art, and few of his pieces ever survive from a blank canvas to a finished painting. He keeps a barrel in the back alley that he can burn the paintings that are deemed imperfect. So we follow Pinch through his trials of trying to become a painter only to see him slapped down by a single damning sentence from his father. The Bear God has spoken so there is no point in continuing. Pinch becomes an academic, intent on becoming known well enough to write his father’s biography in yet another attempt to prove himself worthy of his father’s respect. Sometimes we give away lifetimes trying to impress the wrong person. Pinch meets a few women in the course of his life, but he is not very successful with any of them. His marriage to Julie is a disaster. ”She must be around his age, perhaps a tad older, with caramel-brown curls framing confectionary eyes, a wide strong frame, soft without being curvaceous. Julie M. is not beautiful. He experiences a rush of need for her.” This reminds me of Marcel Proust’s great quote: ”Let us leave pretty women to men with no imagination.” I applaud Pinch for finding Julie attractive for not being beautiful. I personally find women who are perfectly beautiful rather unappealing. There is something unreal about them. I’d rather see a woman with a gap between her teeth or with features slightly out of balance or, better yet, to be attractive because she is passionate about something or wickedly intelligent. My only concern is that, after reading about the descriptions of the legions of women that Bear found attractive, I feel this sinking suspicion that Pinch’s interest in Julie is based more on his father’s ideal of a mate than his own. The plot moves us from Italy to the United States, mixed with several desperate trips by Pinch to his father’s estate in France to try and insure his father’s legacy continues to grow. The lengths that Pinch is willing to go are really beyond the pale. The payoff for me in this novel is that Pinch does finally assert himself in a BRAVO! hand clapping style that had me grinning to myself. There are all kinds of ways to win, and Pinch finds a sneaky way to become almost as famous as his father. It is a secret. I enjoyed Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists so it was no surprise to find myself absorbed in this new cast of characters. Of course, Bear takes center stage even when he isn’t on stage, but the supporting characters to his largeness, like Natalie and Pinch, are much more real than he could ever be. It is so hard to have a good life or the right life. By the time we have figured out what we’ve done or not done, twenty years, forty years have passed, and we are looking in a mirror at a stranger. The fire in the belly has dampened and regret can be a shroud that covers us til we expire. Pinch may have given up too many years standing in the shadow of his father and chasing a vision of himself shaped by his obsession with his father, but I do hope in the end he understood that his life, though far removed from his expectations, was still a good life. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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Mar 31, 2018
not set
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Apr 2018
not set
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Mar 31, 2018
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Hardcover
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| 1501139150
| 9781501139154
| 1501139150
| 4.20
| 108,629
| Oct 17, 2017
| Oct 17, 2017
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it was amazing
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”Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings ar
”Although generally considered by his contemporaries to be friendly and gentle, Leonardo was at times dark and troubled. His notebooks and drawings are a window into his fevered, imaginative, manic, and sometimes elated mind. Had he been a student at the outset of the twenty-first century, he may have been put on a pharmaceutical regimen to alleviate his mood swings and attention-deficit disorder. One need not subscribe to the artist-as-troubled-genius trope to believe we are fortunate that Leonardo was left to his own devices to slay his demons while conjuring up his dragons.” [image] This paragraph made my blood run cold, not because I thought about how different the world would have been if Leonardo da Vinci had not been Leonardo da Vinci (tragic for sure), but because it made me wonder how many potential geniuses we are drugging into “normalcy.” Are some of the great artists and innovators of the 21st century hidden beneath the layers of a cornucopia of drugs? I remember, as a child, reading a biography of Leonardo da Vinci. I thought that he had the coolest name I’d ever heard. My name seemed so pedestrian in comparison. I was even more struck by the term that still best defines him…Renaissance man. I wanted to be a Renaissance man. Unfortunately, I have fallen woefully short of that title, but the eclectic books I choose to read still show that that original desire to be a well rounded person is alive and well. In an age of specialisation, I find myself to be an outlier. I am asked so many times a year...how do you know that? <I read. I ponder. I am gifted with infinite curiosity. I want to know things just for the sake of knowing them. ”’Talent hits a target that no one else can hit,’ wrote the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. ‘Genius hits a target no one else can see.’” Whenever I read anything about Leonardo or gaze upon his paintings/drawings, I feel that same pang felt by Antonio Salieri whenever he would read that latest music composed by Mozart. I am awed by Vitruvian Man and Mona Lisa, but I am enamored with Lady with an Ermine, the portrait of Cecilia Gallerani, mistress of the Duke Ludovico of Milan. Ludovico commissioned the painting after Cecilia gave him a son. There are so many things about this painting that arrest my attention. The alert, coiled energy of the ermine, looking as if it will jump out of the frame of the picture into my arms any second. The slight upward tilt of her lips, implying the hint of a smile. The enormous limpid eyes. The long elegant fingers that would have been a gift to a concert pianist. I can imagine the Duke coming to see her and just sitting in her rooms and watch her do...anything. [image] While in Milan, Leonardo was also working on the famous bronze horse that was going to be three times bigger than any sculpture existing at the time. Unfortunately, this is one of the many great pieces of art by Da Vinci that was never finished, but in this case war was at fault. The bronze for his horse was used to make cannons, to no avail. The French take Milan, and troops used the clay model he had made, a masterpiece in itself, for target practice. Da Vinci left many unfinished paintings in his wake: The Adoration of the Magi, Battle of Anghiari, and Saint Jerome Praying in the Wilderness, just to name a few. Despite being unfinished, these paintings rocked the art world, and students flocked to see them. We have about 7,200 pages of Da Vinci’s notebooks, about a quarter of what he wrote. These notebooks are filled with sketches of inventions, few realized and most centuries ahead of their time, scribbles of ideas, doodles, and detailed drawings of his research into anatomy. Walter Isaacson absolutely loaded this volume with plates of Leonardo’s artwork, but also of pages of his notebooks. One, in particular, was very moving. I know I’ve seen this very image before, but life creates changes in all of us; something seen at 20 may not have near the impact on the same person who sees it at 50. [image] There is something just so fragile, so human, so perfect about it that I felt overcome by the beauty of...us. He worked for a variety of powerful, diverse men, from Ludovico Sforza to Cesare Borgia to Francis the 1st of France. Leonardo was a sensitive man, but also had a very astute interest in war. He offered many times in his life to make machines of war for various patrons. ”The brutality of war didn’t repulse him as much as it seemed to mesmerize him, and the goriness he described would be reflected in the drawings he made for his battle mural: ”You must make the dead covered with dust, which is changed into So vivid, without him even picking up a brush, we know this mural would have been unsettling and would not at all idealize the splendors or nobility of war. It might have even given a psychopath like Cesare Borgia pause. [image] Peter Paul Rubens reimagining of what Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari would have looked like. I’ve read other books by Isaacson so I knew that the genius of Leonardo da Vinci was safe in the hands of the writer who has specialized in writing about some of the greatest minds in history. Da Vinci comes vividly to life in this biography and the magnificent plates scattered throughout the text of his life’s work. This is a beautiful, heavy book, printed on high grade paper, and will make the perfect gift for those of infinite curiosity. [image] If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 22, 2017
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Nov 04, 2017
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Oct 22, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0151011788
| 9780151011780
| 0151011788
| 3.59
| 97
| Mar 20, 2006
| Jan 01, 2006
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it was amazing
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”One has to pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.” ---Nietzsche [image] Self-Portrait 1919 And die he did from a ”One has to pay dearly for immortality: one has to die several times while still alive.” ---Nietzsche [image] Self-Portrait 1919 And die he did from a thousand cuts of disappointments. From the moment he left his home town of Livorno, Italy, to move to Paris, he had found the only place he was supposed to be. The world took too long to find him. Thora Klinckowstrom modeled for him in 1919. Modi was near death at that point in time, less than a year away from his ultimate demise, but her description gives you some idea of the allure he had with women. ”Thora found him ‘quite small, with a weather-beaten complexion, black untidy hair and the most wonderful hot dark eyes…. In he marched wearing a black velvet suit with a red scarf knotted carelessly around his neck…. You had only to look at him to see that he was dangerous.’” By 1919, Modi was already ruined by drink, disease, and hard living; regardless, he still exuded such charming intensity that he beguiled the beautiful, Swedish, twenty year old girl. [image] Modigliani The invention of the camera had a huge impact on art. The need for true likenesses by painters was no longer necessary. Painters could change their style to more interpretative portraits. ”By 1914 Modi had abandoned his naturalistic, presculptural portraits, a legacy of his training in nineteenth-century Italy, for a more individualistic style. Influenced by Freudian psychology, he rejected the limitations of the ‘retinal’ tradition and felt free to use, distort or ignore visible reality.” [image] Modigliani’s portrait of Picasso, as you can see his style was still transitioning. Pablo Picasso was the most famous of the modernist painters. He was not only a talented, temperamental (or you could say edgy), groundbreaking painter, but he was also gifted in the art of self promotion. In the early 1900s, Paris, specifically the Montmartre/Montparnasse districts, was the best place in the world to come for inspiration. Chagall had a studio next door to where Modigliani lived. Soutine, Pascin, Cezanne, Schiele, Matisse, and Kisling, just to name a few, all made their way to Paris to experience the synergy that was inspiring so much amazingly progressive art. The smell of paint, spilled wine, and sex stained sheets saturated the air of the cafes and bars of the Montmartre. Picasso and Modigliani were frenemies. Picasso was famous and on his way to becoming rich, while Modigliani was still giving away his paintings, that would be worth millions within a few years, to pay for meals or rent. His clothes were shabby. His health unstable. When he ran out of money for canvas he would paint on doors and walls. The contrast between their two lives was stark. Modigliani was convinced his art was as interesting and as important as Picasso’s work, but while collectors started to drive up the prices of a Picasso, Modigliani paintings languished unknown. Despite the fact that Picasso was already successful and really did not need to engage in banter with someone like Modigliani, he was fascinated by Modi and his art. This friction filled relationship was best illustrated in the 2004 Modigliani movie, starring Andy Garcia. That film made a wonderful companion piece to this biography. I’ve always admired Modi’s paintings: the long necks, the distortions, the strange eyes. Despite all of those manipulations, you can still recognize the subject. The fussy homosexual poet Jean Cocteau was so disturbed by Modi’s painting of him that he refused to pay for it. Cocteau was not alone; many of Modi’s subjects were upset by his interpretations of who they were. That just confirms for me that Modi was tapping into something real, too real, certainly not idealized. [image] Jean Cocteau Modi’s nudes are spectacular. [image] ”Unlike such modern masters as Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, whose nude figures suggest anguish and stir anxiety, Modi sought, like Renoir and Matisse, to convey aesthetic pleasure, and his women are among the most erotic and desirable nudes in the history of painting. He created his characteristic nude in a variety of ways: by imitating the poses of great paintings, by using a sensuous line to define the form of the body; by stripping his nude of virtually all context and attributes in order to focus on the essential female; by following Gauguin, in using a darker, more realistic skin color and frankly showing pubic hair; and by establishing intimacy with, rather than creating distance from, his nudes.” Girls, girls, and more girls were attracted to the artists of the Montparnasse district. They served as models, bed warmers, financial supporters, and ultimately, most of them were eventually replaced by someone new. Modi had his share of lovers. The famous Russian poet Anna Akhmatova even briefly became involved with him. The woman that became most caught up in the final tragedy of Modi’s life was Jeanne Hébuterne. Jeanne, Jeanne, poor Jeanne. [image] Jeanne Hebuterne She took care of him as best she could, but really what Modi needed to do was quit drinking and eat three squares a day, and even though Jeanne basically stood on the tracks in front of the careening carriage of death, she could not stop the inevitable. Modi died at the age of 35 from tubercular meningitis. Jeanne, devoted to the end, (view spoiler)[hurled herself out of a fifth story window, killing herself and her unborn infant, two days after the death of Modi. The baby would have been the second child she had with Modigliani. (hide spoiler)] [image] Portrait of Jeanne If Modigliani had lived even a few years longer, he would have been a very rich man. The 1920s brought a flood or rich speculators to Paris who bought art and took it back to the US, which fueled even more interest in the art coming out of Paris. With his death, the price for Modigliani’s work soared, and he is now considered one of the most important modernist painters. He was so close, so wretchedly close, to realizing his dream of financial success and being recognized as an important artist. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at:https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 09, 2017
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Aug 13, 2017
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Aug 09, 2017
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Hardcover
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| 0679731210
| 9780679731214
| 0679731210
| 4.01
| 38,223
| 1958
| Jul 23, 1991
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Dec 28, 2016
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Paperback
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| 159017061X
| 9781590170618
| 159017061X
| 3.73
| 14,977
| 1961
| Sep 30, 2003
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liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 26, 2016
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Dec 26, 2016
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Dec 26, 2016
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Paperback
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| 0547577532
| 9780547577531
| 0547577532
| 3.50
| 28,114
| Oct 25, 2010
| Nov 08, 2011
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really liked it
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In the 1980s I read The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum and came away from those books knowing that I had been exposed to a brilliant mind. T
In the 1980s I read The Name of the Rose and Foucault's Pendulum and came away from those books knowing that I had been exposed to a brilliant mind. The complexity of the writing and the layers of plot turned many readers away, but I found it so refreshing to have a writer that demanded more from his readers and more importantly had faith in his readership. These are books that need to be read many times and each time the reader will develop a better understanding of the writer's intentions. [image] This brings me to The Prague Cemetery. Typical of an Eco book it took me a little while to settle in and fine tune my thoughts to pay proper attention and to relax so that Eco could take me where he wanted me to go. This book is set in 19th century Europe and explores the underlying conspiracies that surround a series of wars/conflicts that instead of being the work of a group is the nefarious dealings of one man. This man is Simone Simonini. He is a murderer, double agent, triple agent, but more importantly he is the man that can provide the documentation that proves that one side of a conflict is justified in their quest for power. In other words he is a master forger. He finds his calling while apprenticed to a lawyer named Rebaudengo. He learns the fine art of providing the "missing" paperwork for a baptismal record that would allow an inheritance to be obtained or the "missing" will of a family patriarch who may have perished unexpectedly. Rebaudengo explained. "What I produce are not forgeries but new copies of genuine documents that have been lost or, by simple oversight, have never been produced, and that could and should have been produced." Simone becomes so good at the craft that he realizes that the only person between him and a very lucrative income is his mentor Rebaudengo. The proper paperwork miraculously is produced that exposes a "fraud" perpetrated by Rebaudengo and he is swiftly convicted and sent to prison. Simone is the type of gentleman that governments find uses for and he is greedy enough not to be worried about the consequences of his actions. He becomes a forger, mercenary for hire. He provides documents that fan the flames of racism and cultism that leads to genocide and in one case the temporary toppling of a foreign government. He steals from his employers and from his agents working both sides of the equation to net as much money as possible for himself. He is a man without a moral compass except in the case of Abbe Dalla Piccola. Piccola became an inconvenience for Simone during one of his clandestine missions and Simone as he tended to do when cleaning up a problem, killed him. Simone becomes, unknowingly to himself, so out of sorts over the murder of Piccola that Piccola is actually resurrected in his own mind creating for a time a split personality. Simone becomes more aware of the Abbe as they begin sharing a diary and the missing time that Simone is experience is revealed in the dairy entries made by the Piccola personality. The book is liberally sprinkled with sketches of the characters involved really evoking a Victorian Dickens feel to the novel. I found this book much more accessible than other Eco novels and actually laughed out loud a couple of times. Back in 2000 I had planned to meet Umberto Eco. He was touring for Baudolino and was planning to come to the West Coast. Unfortunately due to health reasons he only finished his East Coast engagements and did not come to California. I had spent my last lira appropriating a copy of The Name of the Rose for him to sign, which now would be worth around $800 signed by the author. Well I may not have an $800 copy, but I am still glad that I bought Rose when I did, as even unsigned, The Name of the Rose is going for a couple of hundred dollars. I did pick up a copy of Baudolino from an East Coast bookseller flat signed by Dr. Eco. [image] Flat signed is preferred by collectors because the book was actually in the hands of the author. A book plate, signed by the author, does not have the same value to collectors. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 23, 2011
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Dec 17, 2011
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Nov 23, 2011
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Hardcover
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