version

Well-known member
It sounds a bit like that Ancient Evenings book of Mailer's he's constantly recommending.

Salammbô (1862) is a historical novel by Gustave Flaubert.[1] It is set in Carthage during the 3rd century BC,[1] immediately before and during the Mercenary Revolt which took place shortly after the First Punic War. Flaubert's main source was Book I of Polybius's Histories. The novel jumpstarted a renewed interest in the history of the Roman Republic's conflict with the North African Phoenician colony of Carthage.[citation needed]

Contemporary readers familiar with Flaubert's previous realistic work, Madame Bovary, were shocked and in some instances appalled by the indiscriminate violence and sensuality prevalent throughout the novel,
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Sounds good.
@version, why don't you read the Conversions, I keep mentioning it on here but no-one (except Woops) picks up on it, but it's kinda like a weirder version of The Crying of Lot 49.
 

woops

is not like other people
Egypt was like an erotic wonderland for Flaubert, he used to go there to get his kicks. I want a copy of this Conversions
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Never heard of it. Who's it by?
Guy called Harry Matthews, he was one of the relatively few (I think) Americans who joined Oulipo and then if I remember correctly he became the leader. He wrote a number of very odd books. The Conversions in particular was a lot of fun I think.
At the outset of his first novel, The Conversions, the narrator is invited to an evening's social gathering at the home of a wealthy and powerful eccentric named Grent Wayl. During the course of the evening he is invited to take part in an elaborately staged party game, involving, among other things, a race between several small worms. The race having apparently been rigged by Wayl, the narrator is declared the victor and takes home his prize, an adze with curious designs, apparently of a ritual nature, engraved on it. Not long after the party, Wayl dies, and the bulk of his vast estate is left to whomever possesses the adze, providing that he or she can answer three riddling questions relating to its nature. The balance of the book is concerned with the narrator's attempts to answer the three questions, attempts that lead him through a series of digressions and stories-within-a-story, many of them quite diverting in themselves. The book has some superficial affinities with Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49; the reader, like the narrator, is never sure to what extent he has fallen victim to a hoax. Much of the material dealing with the ritual adze, and the underground cult that it is related to, borrows from Robert Graves's The White Goddess. Mathews's novel concludes with two appendices, one being in German.
 

jenks

thread death
Anyone read Salammbô by Flaubert? I'd never even heard of it, but Binet says it's one of his ten favourite novels and the one that sold him on Flaubert.
Yes. It’s rather florid - certainly very different from nearly all other Flauberts. Closest thing would the two stories Trois Contes that no one ever mentions. They only ever talk about Une Couer Simple. I wonder if we just don’t have a decent translation of them yet in English?
 

version

Well-known member
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
Woops said to me "No I've not read the Corrections, I've never read Gaddis"
In fact didn't we have an hour long misunderstanding with Martin about the Recognitions and the Corrections?
 

version

Well-known member
Woops said to me "No I've not read the Corrections, I've never read Gaddis"
In fact didn't we have an hour long misunderstanding with Martin about the Recognitions and the Corrections?
Yes, that was the discussion Tea said was like something you'd hear in a nursing home.
 

woops

is not like other people
it was a metatextual conversational gambit designed to make Rich provide the "Corrections"
 

STN

sou'wester
I think Lord Jim is a masterpiece (though he lets the ending get away from him), and only an ‘outsider’ could have written it - that obsession with the idea that ‘he was one of us, you know’ is (probably accidentally) extremely revealing. He was captivated by this idea of being an English gentleman, but of course he wasn’t allowed to be one.
Incidentally, his first registered address in this country is (judging by the photo from your window thread) very close to where woops lives.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
I think Lord Jim is a masterpiece (though he lets the ending get away from him), and only an ‘outsider’ could have written it - that obsession with the idea that ‘he was one of us, you know’ is (probably accidentally) extremely revealing. He was captivated by this idea of being an English gentleman, but of course he wasn’t allowed to be one.
Incidentally, his first registered address in this country is (judging by the photo from your window thread) very close to where woops lives.
Hello!
I always think Lord Jim is a bit like Heart of Darkness... I dunno why cos HofD is the one I haven't read.
 
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