March Reading List

Following a new tradition, begun in January and carried over to February, I'm posting today a list of the novels I've read during the previous month.

For the first three months of this year, I've read, on average, nine books a month. In March, I read books by four different writers - Stendhal, Ernest Hemingway, Christopher Morley, and Grazia Deledda. Of the four, Grazia Deledda is my leading favorite.

The books are as follows:

The Red and the Black                Stendhal (Henri Beyle)
After the Divorce                         Grazia Deledda
Ashes                                            Grazia Deledda
Nostalgia                                      Grazia Deledda
The Woman & the Priest            Grazia Deledda
A Farewell to Arms                     Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls             Ernest Hemingway
The Haunted Bookshop              Christopher Morley
Parnassus on Wheels                  Christopher Morley

For those who may have read yesterday's blog post, I finished reading Memoirs Found in a Bathtub on April, 01.

A Farewell to Arms

Having finished reading a 4th novel by Grazia Deledda , I decided to choose a novel from Dr. Jordan Peterson's list of the Great Novels. On the list are three works by Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and The Old Man and the Sea. I have a memory of reading the first two - along with The Sun Also Rises - in the late 1970's. Although I can't recall much of those three novels - it has been more than forty years ago, after all - I didn't feel, at first, that those novels should be included in a "Greatest Novels of all times" list.

Still, Hemingway is on Dr. Peterson's list, so I'd pick up there. Just having finished four wonderful novels from an Italian/Sardinian writer, it seemed appropriate to reread Hemingway's World War I novel (which takes place in Italy) A Farewell to Arms.

I immediately concluded that my memory of having read this novel is, perhaps, a false memory. There is absolutely nothing in the novel that I remember. True, it has been more than 40 years ago, but I first read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment during the same time period, and most of that novel is recognizable when I reread it.

As for A Farewell to Arms, I can understand now why it is on Dr. Peterson's list. I did not, however, find anything about the relationship between Frederic Henry and Catherine Barkley worthy of the rest of the novel. I especially did not care for the ending. According to the wikipedia article on the novel,"Hemingway struggled with the ending. By his count, he wrote 39 of them 'before I was satisfied.' However, a 2012 edition of the book included no less than 47 alternate endings".

Unfortunately, I do not have access to that 2012 edition, so I will remain ignorant of those alternate endings.

I've gone on now to read For Whom the Bell Tolls. It is slightly more memorable to me. From there, I will go on to the third Hemingway work on the list, and finally round it out with one that didn't make the cut - The Sun Also Rises - this will be a continuation of my new habit of reading writers in clusters of "fours" - as I have this year with Vicente Blasco Ibáñez, Edith Wharton, and Grazia Deledda.

This could very well lead to my rereading Yukio Mishima's tetralogy of novels, The Sea of Fertility later this year.

After the Divorce - Grazia Deledda

I recently came upon the name of the Italian writer Grazia Deledda. She was the first Italian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1926 and only the second woman in general after Selma Lagerlöf was awarded hers in 1909.

Deledda was highly regarded in her day, although her name is little known in the English speaking world today. Fortunately for me , four of her novels were translated into English years ago and are available for downloading at Project Gutenberg.
Dopo il divorzio (After the Divorce)
Cenere (Ashes)
La Madre (The Woman & the Priest)
Nostalgie (Nostalgia)

Of these four novels, the only one of which I could find a description was After the Divorce. The one paragraph long synopsis from Wikipedia follows:

"This tragedy is set in Sardinia. Constantino Ledda is convicted on charges for murdering his wicked uncle. Constantino is innocent, but he accepts the verdict because of his wife, Giovanna. After Constantino is convicted, Giovanna has no economic means to support her family, so she divorces her husband and remarries, this time to a wealthy but cruel landowner. Constantino is released after the real killer confesses, and he and Giovanna start a forbidden romance".

That short synopsis was enough to interest me in reading the novel, although the description doesn't really do justice to the novel. There are, quite naturally, heavy Catholic overtones, especially on the subject of marriage and divorce.

This is something a little odd about the novel and it's translation. The original Italian was published in 1902, but the story begins in 1904. The English translation was published in 1905 with the story beginning in 1907. I have no idea why the later dates were used in the story.

I'll be going next to Cenere (Ashes).

As an aside - in the last three novels that I've read, Crime and Punishment, The Red and the Black, and After the Divorce, the protagonist is imprisoned after being convicted of murder, although the end result is very different for each one.