Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Gross, John

Titel

Books of The Times; From Balzac's Cabbage to Paganini's Blue Glasses: Review

Ist Teil von

• New York Times, 1988

Auflage

Late Edition (East Coast)

Ort / Verlag

New York, N.Y: New York Times Company

Erscheinungsjahr

1988

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Nexis

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• For a start, Mr. [Rupert Christiansen] has a knack for storytelling. Once he has set down a scene, however briefly, you don't forget it - whether it is Wordsworth seeking natural piety in rural Dorset, and finding the local villagers were afraid his pocket telescope would cast the evil eye on their cattle; or [Harriet Shelley] as a boy devouring the lowest Gothic horror novels ''in cheap blue paperback editions''; or the elaborate suicide pact of Heinrich von Kleist; or Balzac being hit by a cabbage during the uproar at the first night of Victor Hugo's ''Hernani.'' How adroitly, too, he lets you hear his characters talking. Shelley, for example: ''You might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton as expect anything human or earthly from me'' (a statement that, in its down-to-earthness, rather contradicts what it is saying). Or Pushkin denouncing the public appetite for reading scandal about Byron and dragging him down to the common level: '' 'He is small like us; he is loathsome like us!' You are lying, you scoundrels: he's small and he's loathsome, but not the way you are - differently.'' This, in turn, is the cue for a sketch of Rossini (including some glimpses of the English tour during which he was compelled to sing a duet with George IV, ''desperately trying to accommodate the King's atrocious bass''). From here it is only a step to an appreciation of Stendhal's life of the composer, ''a ridiculous masterpiece,'' while a discussion of the Romantic fascination with the artist as a ''star'' ushers in Paganini, wearing dark blue spectacles to protect his deep-sunk eyes, and - as syphilis overtook him - ''smoking cigars to assuage the pain from his crumbling jaw.''