Books

 

 

I have read two books lately that it was rather unlike me to read since each exhibited or delved into lifestyles that were not my own. I thought that you should know about them. The first of these books is "A House In Sicily" by Daphne Phelps.

Daphne Phelps had her degree in Social Work (from Oxford) in 1946 but no job or prospect of one when she learned that an uncle had left her a huge and ornate house in Taormina, Sicily furnished with a lifetime of collecting art and decorations in Mediterranean Europe and the Near East. So she went to see about selling it and its antiques. She couldn't sell it because her title was not perfected to the place and was in the complex Italian judicial system (It took 40 years to get the title straightened out). By this time anyway she had fallen in love with the place and didn't want to sell it. But she had to have some money - so she decided to rent out rooms as a high class guest lodge. The book is all about her life for fifty years with guests such as Bertrand Russell (who stayed two years and at ninety was always trying to get her in bed), Caitlyn Thomas, painter Henry Faulkner (who arrived with three dogs, three cats, a duck and a non-weaned goat and who went around her house saying "Klee would love this"), Tennessee Williams (who became a regular), Ronald Dahl. Daphne writes well with both humor and pathos. She had to get a Mafia Godfather named Carlo who turned out to be very protective and kept everyone off her back for a few bottles of wine.

It was even more unlike me to like to read Donald Keene's book "On Familiar Terms". Keene was, until about 1993, Chairman of the Department of Oriental Languages at Columbia University. Keene first learned his Japanese at the U.S. Navy Language School right after WWII began. He spent all of the war interrogating prisoners and translating captured Japanese documents. I bridled a bit at his statements that he liked the Japanese prisoners better than the GIs, and that he thought that Japan should really have won the war because their motivation was more "pure" (releasing Asia from the grasp of the American, British and Dutch Imperialists}. Despite these minor political differences, I did enjoy reading the book. Keene is almost painfully shy and sensitive. He never says so, but I think that he and nearly every one in the book is gay. He was interested only in men in the book. Incidentally, he noted his opinion of Truman Capote as the crudest and most boorish man he knew. Not my regular cup of tea , this book. It contains long dissertations on Haiku style and Heian Japanese period drama which I dutifully read but which failed to arouse me.

So,what have you read lately? Or done?

Love

dad,granpa,ami