Au Soleil by Guy de Maupassant (1884)

This is a strange compendium in terms of content. Its main part is concerned with the author's travels in Algeria, but tucked away at the end are three things: a short story-sketch called At the Seashore about a typical French late nineteenth century gent taking a demi-mondaine along on a journey masquerading as his wife, for whom he falls (and she for him), but not quite enough not to let her go when they return to Paris; a long piece on travelling in Brittany; and a final short piece on a tour of the Creusot Ironworks, with strong, fiery, piston-pumping, hell-like imagery. These extras have nothing to do with the sun, rather they are reasonably often set in cool temperatures and cloudy conditions, so why they were incorporated in a volume of this name is anyone's guess. The best one would probably be proximity of production, this presumably being "the latest collection of Maupassant's works" at the time, despite the disparity of subject matter. Or perhaps they are included in this collected edition volume, but were not originally. Anyway, the dominating factor, slathered on in this instance, in the major part of the book on Algeria, is the author's stance. A seasoned Maupassant reader gets to know this well. It is a pulsing, intense stare at the darknesses and uglinesses in human character. It could be called a fascination with those aspects, undertowed by a one-eyed conviction that there is a kind of extra-reality about that vision - almost as though a more balanced view, incorporating a broader conception, is a traduction of that supremo-reality. Red-in-tooth-and-clawedness as the only real truth. The impression that one ultimately gets is of a kind of selective blindness, where the author feels dunderheaded and lacking in perspicacity. The implied insight and the paraded lack of it are occasionally very difficult bedfellows. The lifebuoy thrown out to the reader drowning is the stark intensity of that aforementioned stare; it can't but claim the attention. Thus the dirty, violent, immoral Arabs, the corrupt or stupid colonial officials, the universal criminality and, most of all, the suffocating, endlessly parching, interminable, ever-lonely, death-ridden heat have a species of compromised but compulsive muscle in their writing that keeps the dumb show going.

Commonplace Book

'"Yes, but are we not, just that - all of us at the mercy of the wrong-doing of others? - The courageous forever suffering for the cowardly, the wise for the ignorant and brutish, the just for the unjust?..."'

from The History of Sir Richard Calmady by Lucas Malet (Book I, Chapter V)

Commonplace Book

'...Espied by some timid man-of-war or blundering discovery-vessel from afar, when the distance obscuring the swarming fowls nevertheless still shows the white mass floating in the sun, and the white spray heaving high against it; straightway the whale's unharming corpse, with trembling fingers is set down in the log - shoals, rocks, and breakers hereabouts: beware! And for years afterwards, perhaps, ships shun the place; leaping over it as silly sheep leap over a vacuum, because their leader originally leaped there when a stick was held. There's your law of precedents, there's your utility of traditions; there's the story of your obstinate survival of old beliefs never bottomed on the earth, and now not even hovering in the air! There's orthodoxy!'

from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville (Chapter 69)

Green Willow and other Japanese fairy tales by Grace James (1910)

Some of these read beautifully, some are a little more awkward, in a way that I'm coming to expect from volumes like this. James apparently grew up in Japan, and her family was in some way reasonably well-established there. This was her first book, and as far as I can tell, she later moved back to Britain, and became better known for her series of educational stories for children based around the characters John and Mary. There does though seem to be some biographical and bibliographical confusion, so much so that I'm assuming there were two Grace Jameses, one born in 1864 and dying in 1930 that I'm less sure about, and the one who wrote this book and the John and Mary books who didn't die until the early 60s. It will require some extra research to untangle them. Anyway, this one did occasionally revisit her Japanese specialty - a non-fictional summary in the 30s and a volume or two of the series where the children were touched by Japanese subjects. But the handsomeness and pre-war beauty of this volume seems never to have been repeated in her career. The central concerns of many of these tales (very few of which involve fairies by the way, much more often gods and demigods) are lost love, retribution, quests, talismans and the toll of human weakness. The awkward ones are so because the story either seems just to get going and then stops suddenly, or perhaps to threaten a conclusion of note and provide instead somewhat more of a whimper. The final element to mention are the magnificent illustrations by Warwick Goble, which are misty, detailed and tender in exactly the proportion required to adorn these often melancholy, occasionally savage pieces.

Comedies and Errors by Henry Harland (1898)

Harland is one of those who always seem to sit in the second rank of Aesthetic/Decadent era literature. He was literary editor of The Yellow Book, very well respected in his time, but somehow, when faced with Wilde, Beerbohm and others, he fades a little. This collection of eight novellas and four stories, many of which first appeared in The Yellow Book, confirms this analysis. Most are middling and pleasant enough; a couple are better. Many are stories of intrigues of identity and playful mischief between men and women, circling one another in the dance of love. But The Friend of Man, a novella about an obsessed ascetic social theorist whose monomania affects atrociously not only his own life, but that of those who succour him in admiration, is a stage more involving. The Invisible Prince, one of the novellas of mischievous love, twists the skeins a little more skilfully in its playful double-story of twinned deceptions. P'tit-Bleu, a novella of a demi-mondaine cursed with the love of a dissolute, brings more to the heart than Harland can usually manage. Flower o' the Clove, a novella about an altruistic heir to a fortune falling for someone she regards as its true inheritor, travels through its territory with a shade more subtlety, playfulness and awkward truth. So, yet again, Harland is becalmed in trite waters in some cases, and blows a greater headwind in others; the mixed story continues. His most famous books are looming on the horizon; I wonder...