Where’s the grammy?

Come now… Pocket Penguin is doing a great job, bringing classic authours in pocket classics, making ‘quality writing available for the price of a packet of cigarettes’, but can anything in paperback be called a book?

Summer in Algiers (ISBN 0-141-02214-0) is of course, a collection of essays – Summer in Algiers, The Minotaur and Return to Tipasa, and in so much as it qualifies as a “set of written, printed, or blank pages fastened along one side and encased between protective covers” it is a book. In as much as these essays are another insight into a the understanding of a literary genius, that Summer in Algiers is poetically imagistic and in as much as the his views on lucidity and of a “way of life” are a peek through the looking glass to The Stranger and his other works, this is more than a book.

“Near the villa there is a funicular railway, and we take a car down the hill into the working-class district of Belcourt, where Albert Camus, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was brought up, and about which he wrote in an unfinished autobiographical novel, Le Premier Homme (The First Man).

The Camus family apartment at 93, Rue Mohammed Belouizdad (formerly the Rue de Lyon) is still there, above a photographer’s shop. There is nothing to commemorate the fact that a Nobel prize-winner lived here, but then Camus was a French Algerian, one of the European settlers they called the pieds noirs, and he was as critical of the Marxist revolutionaries of the FLN as he was of the French colonialists. But it does mean that the room in which he worked is very little changed, apart from a sticker in Arabic on the door, which reads ‘In the name of God and Mohammed his messenger’. It’s small, maybe 15 by 18 feet, with grey-blue French windows opening onto the street with its neatly clipped shady trees. It faces west and even now, in November, I can feel the force of a midday sun that must have made life unbearable in the long hot summers.” – Michael Palin

One can see that the style and stage setting was the basis for many contemporary theatre techniques. The duality of the characters is exhibited only as the play draws to a close, and yet one cannot help feeling that the characters are often unidimensional, and seen from a third person’s perspective. Of course, one can easily attribute that to the lifestyle and nature of the family unit in America when the play was set. All in all, a good read, even if not enthralling. Much is left to the peformances of course, and I would love to see it on stage.

One of the reasons I set out to read it was to draw analogies to a play I had abandoned last year, “The Death of an MBA”. Yet, after reading Miller, one feels that the whole capitalist-world-is-actually-inhibitive-to-individualism has been done to death and a more personal angle needs to be developed to make the audience relate to the characters at a deeper level. Not that I dare to take anything away from Miller’s work, for in itself it is a brillant piece – “nobody dast blame this man”. One hopes though, that there are more buckets in life where one can dwell.

Scandinavian, I think. Brilliant!

Yum!

Ah… and I figured out why I didn’t like ‘Parinda’.

I’d seen the movie before, and technically it was a break from my decision to finish with the imdb top 100 before I start other movies, but this was with a specific purpose. I’ve been trying to figure out who Sally is. I think I’m on the beginning of an exciting journey…