Cat, Soutine, Feeling, Happiness, Conservative, Enigma

Some recent reading

The Cat, George Simenon

I gave this forty pages and then gave up. Everything that makes Simenon great when he writes detective novels becomes boring in this study of a married couple who hate each other. Perhaps it is simply because this genre is now exhausted, and because the sort of International Style in which Simenon wrote is now exhausted, but I found this book to be very slow and lacking in suspense. Newly translated from Penguin.

Chaim Soutine, Celeste Marcus

This is excellent. I spent a weekend in Gettysburg and North Virginia—driving, eating, walking, driving—and as soon as I sat down in the evening I went straight back to this book. Vivid, properly researched, immersive, full of period interest, lovely clean prose. A fascinating account of a truly individual artist. Don’t sleep on it. It reminded me a little of Savage Messiah by Jim Ede.

The Man of Feeling, Henry MacKenzie

Unlikely to hold anything other than period interest, especially for those not looking to learn about the history of the novel and its relationship to the idea of sympathy, but if you do happen to be interested in those topics, or in the sentimental novel more generally, this short work is essential reading.

The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell

Egad this is a let down. Russell is quite entitled to be journalistic or polemical as he wishes, but the high-minded tone of the philosopher’s enquiry is constantly let down by the sweeping generalisations and proud assumptions. There’s too much “It is well known today that if you ask any man…” type stuff, and the whole thing has a bar stool feel. The good bits are pure common sense. Not one of his best.

Why I, Too, Am Not a Conservative

Buchanan’s statement of classical liberal principles is less read than some of the other classics, but is a brisk, robust statement of the key ideas. Probably the best chapter is “The Soul of Classical Liberalism”, which you can read online. I wrote about this book at The Pursuit of Liberalism.

The Enigma of Arrival, V.S. Naipaul

The Enigma of Arrival is such a beautiful book I keep putting it down so I could read it over a longer period. So few books insist on being lived with like this. As with The Golden Bowl, I read a small amount every day. A masterpiece.