Continuing the Bentie Reads Aloud tradition, he read me:
Candide - Voltaire. COULD anything else happen to Candide? [To be read with Chandler Bing inflections!!!] A tale much like that told in The Merry Minuet - "They're rioting in Africa. They're starving in Spain. There's hurricanes in Florida. And Texas needs rain. The whole world is festering with unhappy souls. The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles. Italians hate Yugoslovs, South Africans hate the Dutch. And I don't like anybody very much." Some bemoaned their fate, others were oblivious. Some thought things could only get better, while others were convinced the worst was yet to come. Still others stoically soldiered on. Hmmm...
Wise Blood - Flannery O'Conner. Shew wee! Some strange peeps populated this one. Seemingly at odds (Or is it???) with someone who became obsessed with spreading the gospel of his Church Without Christ, Hazel Motes starts the practice of self-flagellation by walking in rock filled shoes at an early age and it just gets more intense from there. Then there is Enoch Emery, a young man filled with anger and angst, who believes his wise blood leads him where he needs to go - even if that is to steal a mummified dwarf and possibly kill a man (?) in order to obtain his gorilla suit. However, his outcome is never revealed. B's take on it all - "Thank goodness that's over." Me - "But, what happened to Emery? What about the man Motes killed? And what was with that policeman?" B - "I don't care!!!!"
From another of B's English/French short story collections there were also these:
The Beach - Alain Robbe-Grillet. French short story. Repetitive in the extreme. But, yes. I did see the three children, dressed alike, in blue shirts and shorts, walking in a straight line down the beach. Looking neither left to the sharp cliff nor right to the undulating sea, where the foam came and dissipated on the swells, while the the sea birds fluttered up only to settle down a few yards beyond. I saw and felt the scene through the sounds.
The Seven-League Boots - Marcel Ayme. (Author of The Passer-Through-Walls) With fantastic imagination, Ayme tells this story through the eyes of a boy (maybe aged ten) who lived and attended school on Montemarte with well-to-do classmates, though his mother worked as a domestic. Social injustices and the effect of bullies on others as a theme continues in this well crafted short story, much like his other.
Read (or be read to) chaotically! ~ les
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