Further Reading

Under the occasionally splendid Melaka sky (see above) I managed to get more reading done than I accounted for in last Wednesday's entry. I also completed my first read-through of Archie Ammons's long poem Glare. I deliberately spread out my reading as it's that kind of book. The short sections (poems?) have a stand alone quality, though obviously sharing the same themes. The bitty-ness seems deliberate, in a casual and utterly engaging kind of way, which sums up the whole book really: eccentrically, quirkily, precise. Glare came across as looser than the long poem preceding it, Garbage, which I'd thought of as being wonderfully improvisational in nature. I'm looking forward to reading both again.

The book I occupied myself most with once home from Vietnam was Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou. Recently it struck me that I've not been reading that much in connection with history and I suppose I thought Ladurie's portrait of a fourteenth century French village was a good place to start. I first read it some twenty years ago and it popped into my mind in a drama session a few weeks back when I mentioned to Ferdinand the detail about the villagers spending their leisure hours picking nits out of each others' hair (which was exactly what one of the groups in the session were doing in an improvisation based on the idea of life in the stone age.) At the time I mentioned the nit-picking I realised that was just about the only thing I did remember from a book which I had enjoyed, so I was keen to pick it off the shelf again. I wasn't disappointed. It gives you the enormously privileged position of being an eavesdropper on the concerns of almost an entire village. I think when I first read it I had enjoyed the villagers for what I thought of as their colourfully vigorous lives - a sort of Chaucerian zest. I didn't feel that way at all on this reading. This time the villagers seemed to me pretty much like people are always in all times: scheming, selfish, duplicitous, warm, hard, clever, forgiving, gossipy, naïve, silly, likable, shrewd. A bit like you and me, I suppose.

When I first read Montaillou I was more interested in the ordinary daily lives of the villagers than the stuff about the Cathar heresy that underlies the whole text. (The book is based on the details of the confessions made to a particularly assiduous inquisitorial bishop the village had to endure in the 1320's.) This time round I found myself warming to the sheer bloody-mindedness of the heretics (most of the village) and their determination to stick to their ideas of salvation and their stories rather than those of Mother Church. These were people to whom ideas and stories, and the right to have them, meant a lot - almost everything. Oh, and they didn't see any need to work more than was strictly necessary, so let's add 'sensible' to the inadequate list of adjectives above.