Intersections

I'm always thrilled when the disparate threads of my life come together in unexpected ways.  One of the puzzles for me in Vargas Llosa's book, La Guerra del Fin del Mundo,  was his choice of a phrenologist to be a principal character.  Some light was shed on that choice for me today when I read the latest posting at a favorite blog, Genealogy of Religion, about Franz Joseph Gall who founded the discipline of phrenology.  While his association of head bumps with brain functions did not hold up to scrutiny, he was nevertheless a pioneer of scientific thought in relation to the conception of the mind as a product of physical structure rather than evidence of another dimension as posited by religions.  The path started by Gall led directly to the scientific revolution epitomized by Darwin, as well as a questioning of social and political systems by the 19th Century revolutionary thinkers like Karl Marx.  The Church, of course, recognized quite early on that the Gall's course would lead to a dissolution of the magical thinking that held it all together and therefore promoted the persecution of phrenology wherever it raised its head.  Vargas Llosa, in his book, does a marvelous job of illuminating this complicated historical conflict, which is one of the things that make him a great novelist.

Life's Clutter

While my interest in photography with old cameras has taken up much of my time over the past ten years, I haven't been able to resist looking into other subjects, a few of which are illustrated here.

My longest-running hobby is actually reading novels, mostly by Spanish and Latin American writers.  I never had patience for English and American literature, and always felt fiction something of a waste of time.  Reading in Spanish always seemed less self-indulgent as I could tell myself I was also building some language proficiency.

I'm not quite half-way through 2666 by Roberto Bolaño.  The endless digressions and philosophizing get a bit tiresome, but he was an accomplished storyteller, and I'm working at withholding judgment on the book until I'm done with it.  The story has a lot in common with the trilogy by Stieg Larsson, though the swede's style was more nimble.

Another writer with a lot in common with those two is Mario Vargas Llosa.  I've read most of his novels, including most recently La tía Julia y el escribidor and La guerra del fin del mundo. Vargas Llosa is often slow in starting his stories; I was about eighty pages into La guerra before I felt I knew where the plot was headed.  The peruano's strength is in developing interesting characters, something that has been helped along considerably by his having lived with a succession of interesting women.

In the past few years I've been reading more non-English-speaking writers in Spanish translation.  I enjoyed the exotic stories told by Orhan Pamuk, and reading him in Spanish seems appropriate as Turkish and Spanish have some grammatical similarity in their use of a familiar tense.

Bolaño's novel is probably going to last me a couple more weeks at the rate I'm going.  After that, I'm hoping to read a bit of Tolstoy, possibly Anna Karenina.  I started to read it on line, but digesting a novel with my desktop is tiresome.  If anyone out there has a dog-eared copy of the Spanish edition, I would be happy to pay a reasonable price for it.