Back after an enforced break. The telephone line went down, and stayed down (I think I have said before that technology doesn’t like me! ).
In the interim, Dane Law designed a striking cover of Aleks Sager’s Daemon, just exactly what I wanted, and it’s now up and going cheap on Amazon (the cover and the ebook, I mean).
‘Links, Lucinda: those things that don’t come out for you.’
Oh yes. Ahem. Watch these go wrong…
And also on Amazon.co.uk, but if I put in the link another huge advertisement appears – and while I love the cover, one can have too much of a good thing…
In the interim, minus telephone, I watched Ralph Fiennes in ‘Onegin’ (again). This rambling is related to ‘Aleks Sager’s Daemon’ because in my story the haunted writer is obsessed by Pushkin’s achievement in ‘Eugene Onegin’ (don’t look at me!) and
having created a character who is a second or third cousin of Pushkin’s – I’m bad at working out these family relationships; if people share great-grandparents what exactly is their extent of cousinship? – he comes to be haunted by this individual, who thinks that the author is acting as a sort of parasite, battening of his life and romantic misfortunes.
I wouldn’t say I was especially tender hearted about characters in films. I am notorious for chuckling about the tragic endings for characters in bad epics – but not with a film as well acted as this; I snivelled. While in the poem it came across to me as tragi comic that Eugene Onegin calls upon his loved one and ‘walks in looking like a corpse’ and after their impassioned meeting, stumbles out to run into her husband – at which point Pushkin teasingly ends the story – in the film it is purely tragic.
I love that picture of Eugene Onegin; I know I put it in the last post, but here it is again, complete with skeletal fingers.
I have also been doing things like trying to read the second half of ‘Rob Roy’ as part of my project of reading the early
‘Disgraced Aristocrat Turns Brigand’ theme later so beloved of historical novelists (my next, ‘Ravensdale’ is a spoof of this theme).
It’s been hard going, and not through lack of interest in the plot or characters, but because Walter Scott got carried away with the notion of putting lots of Scots dialect in the novel, so that you end up looking up literally one fifth of the text in the second part of the book in the glossary at the back of the book, which becomes wearisome.
I could easily guess what was meant in the Yorkshire dialect in ‘Wuthering Heights’ and also in a certain Yorkshire based novel by Elizabeth Gaskell I am always talking about, but this is a different matter.
But I shall plough on, as I completely agree with Lauryn April’s comments in her blog post on writing good reviews
http://laurynapril.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/10-tips-to-writing-excellent-book-review.html
that you must finish reading a book to be in a position to express a worthwhile opinion, and as I do want to do that about ‘Rob Roy’ and other early robber novels, so it is back to the glossary for me…
This ends this somewhat disjointed post.
One Response
Congratulations, Lucinda! I’m really looking forward to reading the book (and writing a review when I’ve finished, of course, all in line with Lauryn April’s advice). Love the cover, by the way!