Sten Maulsby > Recent Status Updates

He has this trick of wrapping the tragedy of the events in so many layers of absurdity that you're still laughing while you are you recognizing the tragedy. And this is all underpinned by the basic humanity and compassion of the main character.

This is at least my fourth time reading it. I've just moved it to my read about every five years shelf. Not necessarily the best of his books, but loads of fun.

Three parts out of the eight.

This is my third time reading it in about twenty years. as good as ever.

I've read the first 65 poems. Now digging into the first few. The first is fascinating. Around 700 CE, one of the founding poems in the tradition, it goes out if its way to concretize the image of "sleeves wet with dew", a trope which refers to tears, giving a well developed setting where it would be perfectly expected that "one clothes" would literally be "drenched with dew". Already commenting on a central trope.

I just downloaded it this morning (isn't that a crude verb to be linked with poetry?) so I've only read a few, but I'm loving it. The first poem is magnificent. So is Lime. None have disappointed.

8 plays in, out of 24. Range of tone, structure, theme is impressive. Like reading the rest of the surviving Greek Drama, not just the ones Aristotle approved of, in this book we are shown not just the most formal, the most classical plays but also the ones that are daring in their play with form and theme ( or would they have thought of it as daring, or just expected development using the standard materials?)

Four plays in, plus the introductory matter. I bought this originally to have a good translation of Atsumori, a play that has fascinated my for a few years, even though I came across it in a very inadequate translation. Over the years, I had come to trust Royall Tyler's translations, and I'm not disappointed.

This is a reread. I'd forgotten how funny this was. Since I read this, I've read two earlier books about Archie Roylance. I recognized in the first chapter that I was reading about Archie Roylance the flying ace and war hero (Mr. Standfast,). And now he's a besotted schoolboy with a crush on his enemy. You just can't beat this for marvelous silliness.

I like that he can spend 80 pages convincing me to buy into, commit to, what I believe to be an utterly unreal situation, and care about the characters, and at the height of the crisis have one of the characters make me laugh without undermining the weight of the crisis.

I like that he can spend 80 pages convincing me to buy into, commit to, what I believe to be an utterly unreal situation, and care about the characters, and at the height of the crisis have one of the characters make me laugh without undermining the weight of the crisis.