Reviews for Reminiscences

The average rating for Reminiscences based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-03-22 00:00:00 Ryan Lepore March, 2014 In Orlando, Virginia Woolf creates a scene in which Jonathan Swift pays a call on Lady Orlando in London around 1711. This is what Lady O has to say about her visitor: and when Mr Addison has had his say, there is a terrific rap at the door, and Mr Swift, who had these arbitrary ways about him, walks in unannounced...Nothing can be plainer than that violent man. He is so coarse and yet so clean; so brutal, yet so kind; scorns the whole world, yet talks baby language to a girl, and will die, can we doubt it? in a mad house. The girl is, of course, Stella, and the baby talk is a reference to the letters he wrote her and which make up The Journal to Stella. Though Swift didn't become insane but probably had some kind of dementia in his final years. February 10th 2019 I took this book from my 'ongoing' shelf today because I came across a reference to it (among many other references to Swift) in Gabriel Josipovici's Moo Pak. The reference occurs as Josipovici's narrator and main character are having coffee in a café near the pond in one of London's parks. The narrator recounts the exchange/monologue : In 1711, he said, the ponds in the London Parks froze over and Londoners spent their days skating. Swift wrote to Stella about it, in between giving her his tedious and boring news about the political machinations of the time and what grandee he had dined with and what minister he had supped with. Swift, he said, was the most interesting as well as the most boring man who ever lived. The most vain and the most humble. The most whimsical and the most heavy-handed. The most closed and the most open....In these letters back to Stella from London, he said, where he was spending his time hobnobbing with Prime Ministers and Secretaries of State, he had to tread a careful line between a silence that would have offended and too frequent a mention of Vanessa, which would have roused Stella's suspicions... I have to agree with Josipovici about the tediousness of these letters which is why I finally shelved the book as 'ongoing' back in 2014. But there were interesting parts too (his day to day comments and the Vanessa affair in particular. He mentions the many times he dines at Vanessa's mother's house but hardly mentions Vanessa herself at all. I'm sure Stella must have guessed that he didn't call so often just for the sake of the mother). Transcribing the Josipovici passage has caused me to notice an odd echo of Woolf's description of Swift in Josipovici's description. He must have read Orlando... I'm glad I started reading the Journal again. It's easier now since I've started thinking of it as a kind of 'book companion' that never needs to be finished. Swift is really not a bad 'book companion' at all.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-11-28 00:00:00 Eric Thompson Samuel Pepys was a fairly prominent civil servant concerned with the construction of the ships of the royal navy. His diary has long been an interesting account of life in London in roughly the 1660s. This book tells how he gots caught up in the Popish Plot against Charles II, & a related personal vendetta against him by one John Scott, but manages to survive (only to be removed a 2nd time from the Navy when William [as in William and Mary College:] becomes king).