Books & Authors

This is a list of other books and authors mentioned in G. with a note of reference.

... she interested herself in the theories of Nietzsche.

I know little of Mallarme: I do not read poetry, but is the thought of Mallarme's which Madame was so good to quote to us really so confused?

... Hölderlin was a German poet who loved Greece and wrote an epic about a Greek patriot, a great hero, who took part in a rising against the Turks, like the Serbs had done, but that Hölderlin lived too long and had gone mad

Do you remember the summer when I came home, he said, and we read Preseren together and you declared you would like to live like he wrote?  Your soul, he said, can't have changed, but then you lived in a village; now you live in a city - this city without a soul, this city with a German mind and an Italian stomach - and here you question everything you do if you want to live in a way we once aspired to, which is the only way worthy of modern men and of women who are the equals of men.  To be found laughing with an Italian who has accosted you in a public garden is a long way from Preseren, he added.

The principal speaker at Genoa was Gabriele d'Annunzio, self-elected poet of Italian nationalism.  He looked like an old hungry fox - but a fox mounted on an invisible horse, a fox so charismatic that he could ride to hounds and lead the hunt.

Tomorrow morning G. will meet Dr. Donato and Raffaele .... He will suggest a walk along the sea front.  They will stroll along the aborted canal until they reach Molo.  All the time Dr. Donato will be talking.  He will talk about Voltaire. 

Do you remember Anna Karenina?  I have never been able to believe that Karenin was the successful statesman Tolstoy wanted us to believe he was. 

In the centre was a statue of a gigantic man sitting comfortably in a chair shaded by trees.  On the plinth was written VERDI.  These letters spelt the name of the man who wrote Rigoletto; but in Trieste they also meant Vittorio Emmanuele Re d'Italia.