Arts ancient and modern, some sight-seeing and two great writers’ beds

I can’t claim to have been overwhelmed in the same way as Proust was, but I was flooded with memories of reading the whole of his wonderful novel, the longest ever written, at around 1.3 million words, one of my life ambitions fulfilled around ten years ago. Here’s that passage in French and English:

“And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray… my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane.

No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me.

And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me  the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me.”

Mais à l’instant même où la gorgée mêlée des miettes du gâteau toucha mon palais, un frisson me parcourut, attentif à ce qui se passait d’extraordinaire en moi.

Il m’avait aussitôt rendu les vicissitudes de la vie indifférentes, ses désastres inoffensifs, sa brièveté illusoire, de la même façon qu’opère l’amour, en me remplissant d’une essence précieuse : ou plutôt cette essence n’était pas en moi, elle était moi.”

Nadar’s son, Paul, accompanied his father to take this photograph and, in 1928, he gave this eye-witness report to the film-director Carlo Rim (1902 – 1989):

“Hugo laid out on his great big four-poster bed, his nightshirt and pillow all wrinkled, his hair on end, his rather large nose not yet emaciated by death. An old worker sleeping peacefully after an honest day’s work. My father had not wished to carry a lot of material. Victor Hugo’s deathbed photo was taken by nothing but daylight and lamplight… The last time his face was lit was by the sun… This shot, taken by my weeping father, may well be his masterpiece… ”

The post Wolfie in Paris 2025 – 2026 Part Eight – au revoir. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-rome-part-one/ I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been to the Sistine Chapel (unforgettable, of course) to St Peter’s, also for work, and to a number of art museums and I’ve had a lot of good Roman meals, but I wanted to spend a longer time here and let it get under my skin. I think I succeeded.

I’ll begin the second part of these blogs about my Roman trip at one its most famous monuments, the Colosseum, Il Colosseo (AD 80), the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built, and a place with a bloody history familiar to us all from stories and films about the gladiators. It is an extraordinary place and, for all the gruesome stories about blood-thirsty massacres of slaves, prisoners and the early Christian martyrs, it’s also the site of mass picnics and other less sadistic entertainments. But, and it’s a big but, you can’t avoid feeling a scary, even shocked, connection to all those slaughtered victims in what was in reality a blood sport. Would we have cheered too, I wonder, if we were in those massive audiences for what were highly dramatised public executions? We don’t know the answer. I had only been past it before in taxis or buses before this, and, of course, when I finally got here, it had to do more than just rain, it deluged. You get weather in Rome during January.

It’s an amazingly well-preserved ruin and there’s more than enough here of its remains to get the feeling of dread and excitement that was felt here two thousand years ago.

It’s just a short walk from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, Il Foro Romano, another expansive set of classical ruins, once the centre of the Roman Empire. Roman citizens those days called it simply the Forum Magnum, or the Forum.

How the mighty have fallen, I thought, looking at the remains of Ancient Roman glory. I was here on the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, for the second time, as American president in Washington’s Roman-inspired Capitol building. Seeing the ruins in the rain with those broken statues of some of the Caesars, added to my despair at the American election, but then I thought that those broken statues should be seen as symbols for what will happen one day to the latest world tyrant. Is there hope for us all in the Fall of Rome? Yes! Nothing lasts forever, not even in the Eternal City.

I had brought my writer’s jotting book with me and, here in Rome, I wrote some Fibonacci Poems, Fibs, on the subject of Rome and would-be emperors. They were published in the February 2025 issue of The Fib Review. https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell2.html

Feeling less depressed, I couldn’t resist giving my tai-chi practice a go here at the Forum Magnum, thinking that we would have had to learn how to defend ourselves in Ancient Rome.

I visited another famous Roman landmark, known as the Spanish Steps, (La Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti), (built in 1725). The Trinità die Monti is its Italian name. These 135 steps lead to the church of It comes from the church of Trinità die Monti the top, but the steps also lead down to the Spanish embassy to the Holy See, the Palazzo Monaldeschi. So thus the Spanish Steps, familiar from books (Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1933 and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams, 1950), and movies (mostly famously, Roman Holiday directed by William Wyler, with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, 1953). It is one of the most visited parts of the city. As with the Trevi Fountain, this is a place for lovers, romantics and/or just whimsical selfies. We all have our own internal movies, so why not indulge our imagination here for a moment when we can.

I hadn’t realised was the the Spanish Steps are also right next to the house where the tubercular English Romantic poet, John Keats (1795 – 1821), came for his health but really to die, at the tragically young age of just 25.

Here, in one of the most crowded parts of Rome, the poet’s house was practically empty of visitors which was excellent for me, a dedicated Keats lover since school days.

The room where Keats died can’t help but invoke the tragedy of the young genius’ death, even though the contents of the room itself all had to be burnt because of the health regulations in Rome at the time.

As a museum, it’s a splendid reminder of how much we still have of Keats’ work but, sadly, also how much we might have had if he’d lived to a full age.  Standing in the room where he died, can turn us all into Romantics.

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

 To take into the air my quiet breath;

 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

 In such an ecstasy!

(John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale.)

One of the poet’s last letters is preserved here. It’s a brief and matter-of-fact epistle to his friend about the local doctor’s advice for the now rapidly ailing poet to go out. It was note to the English painter, Joseph Severn (1793 – 1879), who looked after Keats until his death a short time later. Looking down on the Spanish Steps from John Keats’ window, means that I will always associate the poet with this otherwise joyful place.

After Keats, yes, let’s think poetic, but also, maybe go for a refreshing and very Italian glass of Campari.

Just off the Campo Marzio, another of those grand Roman squares, is one of Rome’s many churches, the Basilica Santa Maria del Popolo (Basilica of Holy Mary of the People). It might not look that special from outside, but inside, on permanent display, are two masterpieces by the great Italian painter Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). This was one of three emergency ecclesiastical stops that I planned on my essential Caravaggio tour when I wanted to see all the Caravaggio paintings in Rome. It will surprises me that you can just walk into one of these churches and, yes, here’s another Caravaggio.

At this Basilica are two of the artist’s most dramatic paintings, The Conversion of St Paul (1601) and The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601).

At the Basilica Sant’Agostino, behind another discrete exterior, is another of his masterpieces, Madonna di Loreto (1606)

Here on one of the nave’s pillars, it is easy to miss this mural by Raphael, The Prophet Isaiah (1512). If you’re not careful in Rome, you practically trip over great Italian Renaissance or Baroque paintings everywhere you turn.

In the French church of San Luigi dei Francesi, (St Louis of the French), there are three more Caravaggios, commissioned works on theme of St Matthew, and painted between 1599 and 1602.

The centre piece, with St Matthew and an angel, is known as The Inspiration of St Matthew.

On a moody January day, it was pleasant getting to the Museum of Modern Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) without having to get involved in the motor traffic. Walking through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, even at this time of year, is a breath of fresh air, literally, after all those albeit beautiful Baroque churches.

Here there is a permanent collection of mostly Italian paintings and sculpture from the late 19th century until the present. The late 19th century and early 20th century works are crammed together on the walls, 19th century style, but they are mostly visible to more than just a glancing eye. It was tempting to spend more time than I had in this section, but there was more room on the gallery’s walls than I have space for in this blog.

I discovered Italian artists that I wasn’t familiar with in the gallery’s current exhibition, Il Tempo di Futurismo (The Time of Futurism) exhibition, marking the 80th anniversary of the death of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism’s founder, which ran at the gallery until the end of April this year.

I was drawn to the works by Sardinian modernist, Mario Sironi (1885 – 1961), whose reputation, like those of other Futurist artists have been clouded by their association with Mussolini’s Italian Fascist movement. Maybe now, after nearly a century, we should try to see the good things in the art of this period without always dwelling on the negative and disturbing trappings of history.

The exhibition was far from being only brutal and alarming, as in this room devoted to the sparkling light-saturated work of Piero Durazzo, or the photographic section on cinematic photographs of Luca Campigotto.

The relationship in the first half of the 20th century between man and machine, is shown in the most challenging and exciting exhibits in this show, which also includes some of the machines themselves – early aeroplanes and racing cars appealing to anyone who has ever liked making model aeroplanes or cars. Aeroplanes, for good or for ill, have a significant place in this exhibition, none less than a number paintings imagined from the pilot’s view of view from his cockpit, presumably on bombing raids. I haven’t seen anything like this before, that mix of Futurism, art deco abstraction, a touch of daring, and, I have to say, 1930s Fascist agitprop. This is a show that definitely made think and re-think about some of the artists, like the American poet, Ezra Pound, who working and even inspired under the shadow of Italian fascism.

Another quite different exhibition was showing at the same time, but across the Borghese gardens at the Galleria Borghese. It was quite a distance from 20th century The Time of Futurism to Poetry and Painting in the 17th Century. Giovan Battista Marino and the Marvellous Passion.

The ‘Marvelous Passion’ in the title was felt by the greatest Italian poet of the 17th century, Giovan Battista Marino (1569 – 1625), the author of an epic poem Adone (1623) about the love between Venus and Adonis. Marino also wrote an encyclopaedic poetry collection of 624 poems dedicated to, and paired with, an equal number of Baroque works of art, La Galeria (1619). The book is a series of reflections on the relationship between poetry and art. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that this show was, at least on first glance, more my kind of thing than Italian Futurism. Call me old-fashioned, no, I won’t admit to that, I’ve learnt to love some of those Futurist pictures, and I’m certainly not anti-Modernist. But, I write poetry, maybe not as well as Marino, but I’ve even tried to write a few poems in the Italian language. I’m learning to speak the language and I have had a life-long fascination with Italian epic poetry, Taso, Ariosto and Boccaccio in particular. Add to that my enthusiasm for Italian art from the 14th to the 17th century, then I was always going to be drawn to this show. The exhibition includes paintings and sculptures from Titian to Tintoretto, Correggio to Carracci, from Rubens to Poussin, with Marino’s poems side-by-side. ‘Marvelous’ indeed, and, because of the subject matter, it is sexy too.

The exhibition places quotes from Marino’s work next to the art that he admired on the same subject matter. Here the story of Venus, the goddess of Love and her young lover Adonis, are shown in the sculpture by Cristoforo Stati and in the painting by Jacopo Palma next to apt quotes from Marino’s epic, La Galeria.

Next, and in pride of place, is Bernini’s wonderful Apollo and Daphne, seen from all angles because it is not just so beautiful, but well frightening too. Daphne, the beautiful naiad, a water nymph, from Roman poet Ovid’s story, is desired, maybe loved, by Apollo, but she has been cursed by a jealous Eros to loath sex. She tries to escape from Apollo advances and saved by being turned into a laurel tree by her father, Peneas, a river god. The metamorphosis, to use Ovid’s word for it, is an unforgettable mix of the shocking and the erotic, also caught in a moment when stone is turned into movement.

After so much passion on display here in these rooms at the Galleria Borghese, I moved on to another part of the gallery, the Silenus Room for a display of the gallery’s Caravaggio collection which matches the Marino exhibition perfectly. My epic walking tour of Rome’s Caravaggios continues.

After the famous Galleria Borghese, I wasn’t expecting to find another major art gallery on Rome’s busiest shopping street, the Via Corso, the Doria Pamphili Gallery which have three more Caravaggio paintings. I had to interrupt a trip around the bargain-laden clothes shops that line this bustling boulevard with every store declaring that there was 70% off everything – the ultimate January sales. sales. I didn’t buy anything here, it was time to look inside this relatively unsung palazzo.

Sure enough, the three Caravaggio paintings were here, in their own room, far from the shopping crowds outside. They are early works that already show the artist’s fascination with awkward poses, radical perspective, and ambiguous facial expressions.

Interesting as it was to see these three early Caravaggio works, geniuses are never boring, but, I have to admit that the star work here is definitely not a Caravaggio, but the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (Cardinal Pamphili) by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Portraitist supreme, Velázquez shows us a far from saintly pope, so sinister in fact, that I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark Roman alleyway, or even in the great cathedral church of St Peter’s.

A much brighter and bigger alley leads to the St Peter’s….well, they say all roads lead to Rome, and it was out of the question, while I am here, not to go back to the big church at the centre of Christendom. Before I go in, just one last reference to Caravaggio. I wasn’t visiting the Vatican Museum on this trip, but if I had, I could have seen one last Caravaggio that is here in Rome, one of his greatest too. It’s always good to leave something special for another day. The Entombment of Christ (1603), with its figure of the dead Christ, shares the pose and the tragic pathos of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture much admired by Caravaggio. It is one of the greatest of paintings. The Michelangelo Pietà, housed next-door, was one of my main reasons for returning to St Peter’s.

And so to St Peter’s itself. It was a clear January day with a perfect blue sky. Pope Francis wasn’t here, he had been unwell, and in a month he would begin his long stint in hospital being treated for pneumonia, I hadn’t been inside the Vatican since the time of Pope John Paul II, and I didn’t realise that very soon there was to be another new pope, Leo XIV.

The scale of it all is still overwhelming, St Peter’s Square is truly vast when seen from the cathedral steps, and the interior is impressive beyond my words. Leo XIV must have gasped when he walked out onto the balcony just a week ago from when I am writing this. There was hope and a relief for us all to see a modest and caring American becoming a world leader

For all the magnificence of the cathedral, nothing can be compete with the human-sized statue in a side chapel – one of the wonders of the world.

It had been a long walk from my apartment near The Pantheon, and I needed to sit for a while before the return journey. Looking for a seat, I found this chapel not far from the exit. I admired the altar’s painting of St Sebastian by Domenichino (1631) and sat here as people, in groups or alone, came in to kneel at the altar. I didn’t realise until later that under the altar here is the tomb of Pope John Paul II (1920 -2005), but I could see that this was obviously a pilgrim’s destination. A statue of the sainted pope sits watching from on his throne to the side. I am not a Roman Catholic, I wasn’t always impressed by Pope John Paul II’s announcements, but I could also admire his courage and charisma. Whatever I feel about catholicism, I felt something here, more than just being rested and refreshed.

Outside, the sky was red, a shepherd’s delight, an awe-inspiring sight in an awesome place.

Impressive too was the flood-lit Castel Sant’Angelo on the other side of the River Tiber, across from St Peter’s. It was originally built by the Emperor Hadrian for his own mausoleum. It is another Rotunda in a more brutal style than the Pantheon, and it has served as a forbidding symbol of Imperial and Vatican power over the centuries. The ashes of Emperor Hadrian and all his successors were all buried here until the year 217. The last urn belonged to the assassinated Emperor Caracalla, one of the most tyrannical of all Roman Emperors. He set the bar so high that none of his successors could compete whit his reputation for cruelty. After the Fall of Rome, the castle/mausoleum became a papal prison a carrying on the tradition of cruelty, you might think. Executions were carried out there in a small inner courtyard, as in the last act of Puccini’s opera, Tosca. The opera that had begun its story down the road from here at the Basilica Sant’Andrea di Valle, as I described in part one of this blog. The tragic heroine, Floria Tosca, jumps to her death from the tower after her lover Mario Cavaradossi was tortured and then executed there by firing squad. Before he is shot, he sings another, his second, famous aria from up there, ‘È lucevan le stelle’ (‘The stars were shining’). Knowing he will die, he sings that he has never loved life so much. The second tenor aria in the opera, and the second of the two greatest of some of Puccini’s greatest arias for tenor. I couldn’t help humming it on my way back to the Pantheon. Here is Jonas Kaufmann again from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

E muoio disperato!

E non ho amato mai tanto la vita,

I die in desperation

and have never loved life so much!

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/e-lucevan-le-stelle-stars-were-shining.html

It wouldn’t be fair to Rome, if I didn’t finish this blog with a record of all the fun I’ve had in Roman restaurants over these two weeks. Rome has the most extraordinary history, often bloody and tyrannical. It has a genius culture beyond compare, often in spite of the bloody history and an architectural history that has defined in some way almost every building that has been designed since. All of that makes it an unmissable city, but one of the main reasons why anyone should think of coming here is what it is like today. The food, the wine, the good humour and the sheer fizz of eating out in this city, makes it party town. I can’t wait until I am lucky enough to return.

After dinner, there will be a final leisurely stroll, known as a passeggiata, back via a floodlit Pantheon, to the apartment and bed. Arriverderci Roma!

The post Two weeks in Rome – part two. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

My first sighting of Finland, land of lakes, forests, saunas and music, seen from the air on a scheduled flight to Helsinki.

It all started six months earlier, in the Runaway Cafe on platform two at Lewes Station, UK, my home town. I am not talking about my journey to catch the plane to Finland. It was March 2022, I was having a coffee before the London train arrived and the radio behind the counter was playing Sibelius’ most well-known piece, Finlandia. I was going to London for a day at the British Museum for The Stonehenge exhibition, which I truly enjoyed. The only trouble was that tune. I could not get rid of Finlandia all day.

In all honesty, I was wishing I could hear the whole piece on my home sound system and I didn’t want to wait until I got back, but I had to. Of course, being an obsessive kind of man, it wasn’t good enough just to listen to Finlandia, love it though I do, especially as played by an orchestra called The Lahti Symphony Orchestra (Sinfonia Lahti), conducted by Osmo Vänskä. No, I decided that I had to listen to all seven of Sibelius’ symphonies again, in numerical order, of course. It had to be the versions by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra too. If you don’t know these recordings, please find them somewhere, they are truly inspiring and, I thought, without any proof or even any knowledge what that actually means, they are very Finnish.

I hadn’t given the orchestra’s name a lot of thought, but it had occurred to me that Lahti was a strange sort of word and, of course, I couldn’t speak Finnish. I didn’t know what a Lahti was, maybe a type of milky coffee, or who Lahti was, or where Lahti was. So, with Sibelius fully enthroned in his rightful place back in my brain, I decided to google Lahti. Ah, yes, it’s a relatively small town in Finland which has its own symphony orchestra, famous for its recordings of Sibelius’ music. They had a state of the art orchestral hall too, by a lake, The Sibelius Hall, which, I now read, had first class, world class, acoustics. And then the big moment. Drum-roll, please Lahti Symphony Orchestra: every year Lahti holds a Sibelius Festival with its resident orchestra, in the Sibelius Hall and playing only Sibelius’ music.

So there I was, heading North, sitting on a Norwegian Airways flight from London Gatwick to Helsinki Airport at the end of August 2022. It was my first visit to any of the Nordic countries and, for someone who had been going on holiday every year to Italy, this was definitely going to be something different.

Helsinki from the air and, beyond it, the Baltic Sea.

This is the impressive modern building that is the Sibelius Hall in Lahti. I was truly excited to get here, but I was knocked out by the architecture and its setting.

The Lahti Symphony Orchestra (Lahti Sinfonia) with its principal conductor Dalia Stasevska, who is also the festival director, gave three concerts of Sibelius’ music. His Symphonies Nos. 4 and 7 and the great late work, Tapiola, a tone poem that some people call his 8th symphony. There were also a number of the composer’s other tone poems and two rare performances of his music for narrator and orchestra, The Wood-Nymph and Snöfrid.

The Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska is already known for her passionate, dramatic and rhythmically exciting interpretations of a whole range of composers’ works – including many contemporary Finnish composers. As well as being the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor, from 2021 until 2025, her first principal conductor’s post, she is also the principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra where she became better known to British audiences after she conducted the Last Night of The Proms in 2020.

Now she is even on the cover. of this month’s Gramophone Magazine (April 2024), and it is, by now, patently obvious that she will soon be taking a giant, and well-deserved, leap into the top ranks of international conductors.

I will remember particularly her emotional commitment and her ability to transmit that feeling to us in the audience, especially in profoundly serious performances of Sibelius’ great twin other-worldly masterpieces, Symphony No 7 and Tapiola. Look carefully, if you can be bothered, I am sitting, transfixed, four rows back, on the left, feeling privileged and moved to have been there.

The opening concert of the festival was impressive too, with the Estonian Festival Orchestra conducted by the Estonian-American conductor, Paavo Järvi, the orchestra’s chief conductor and founder, but also chief conductor of the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra, Tokyo. They played Sibelius’ thrillingly late Romantic Symphony No. 2 and his dramatic quasi-symphony, Lemminkäinen, setting some episodes from the life of Lemminkäinen, the reckless, flawed and deeply human hero from Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, with its mystical Isle of the Dead guarded by the black swan of Tuonela.

 Lemminkäinen : Thus became a mighty hero. In his veins the blood of ages, 
Read erect and form commanding, Growth of mind and body perfect 
But alas! he had his failings, Bad indeed his heart and morals, 
Roaming in unworthy places, Staying days and nights in sequences 
At the homes of merry maidens, At the dances of the virgins, 
With the maids of braided tresses (Rune IX, The Kalevala)

During the intervals to the concerts, the audience retreated to enjoy the appropriately inspiring architecture of the Sibelius Hall (Sibeliustalo), completed in 2000, it is the work of Finnish architects, Kimmo Lintula and Hannu Tikka, continuing what is by now Finland’s international reputation for great architecture.

The concert hall’s acoustics are, as I had read, as good as you get, and its pin-drop clarity encouraged the audience to sit silently and it also allowed the orchestras to play to their full range – from fortissimo to pianissimo with no loss of detail. In the interval, we could also catch those famous Finnish sunsets over the lake. I know that Sibelius is much more than just a Finnish composer, he’s one of the greatest masters of music, and his works are not really ‘about’ Finland, but the Sibelius Hall in this setting, after some great performances of his music, can’t help but remind us that his inspiration wherever it came from, can’t have been unaffected by the Nordic beauty of his homeland.

Up these intriguing musical stairs, on the other side of town, is the Lahti Conservatory of Music, (Lahden konservatorio), where there was also a piano recital given as part of the festival and, this year, focusing on Sibelius’ less well-known genre, piano music.

The young Danish pianist, David Munk-Nielsen (born 1998), still studying for his master’s degree at Helsinki’s Sibelius Academy, and was already an award-winning pianist He won first prize in the Tampere Piano Competition as well as the Tallinn Piano Competition – and in both competitions he played Brahms 2nd Piano Concerto, not for the faint-hearted, in the finals. In his Lahti Sibelius recital, he played three sets of piano pieces from the beginning and the towards the end of the composer’s creative life. Ten Pieces, Op 24, are examples of Sibelius’ early, Liszt-inspired virtuoso works; Five Pieces, Op. 75, The Trees, and Five Pieces, Op. 85, The Flowers, are sets of often gnomic miniatures, each title the name of a tree or a flower, and the music is, well this is Sibelius, a lot more interesting than their names suggest. David Munk-Nielsen played them with the seriousness they deserve and, where necessary, the virtuosity that says much for his future.

You have to take trees seriously in Finland, it is the most forested country in Europe, the great northern forest. A small piece of this forest, in southern Finland they are a mix of deciduous and evergreen, spreads down almost as far as the Sibelius Hall in Lahti in what is called Kariniemi Park, which also contains the Lanu Sculpture Park, featuring the work of Finnish sculptor Olavi Lanu (1925 – 2015), who took trees seriously too. His works are often made in concrete but disguised as if they are growing in the forest – which in Kariniemi Park, they are, if you see what I mean.

Walking in the park, I felt that I had a real if small-scale taste of what that the Finnish forest, further north, is truly like. A desire was born to explore further into Finland’s natural landscape while I walking down wooded paths to the equally Finnish landscape of lakes.

Also bordering onto trees in the centre of Lahti is the Lahti Museum of Visual Arts Malva – mostly known simply as Marva. It was obvious from my first visit that the people who run it have just the right attitude to the modern and the historic and that they have very good taste too. Their main exhibition, when I was there, was by the Dutch conceptual artist, Maarten Baas.

Dutch artist, Maarten Baas’ exhibition, Hide and Seek, was full of surprises, jokes and insights into what we sometimes call, wrongly, the everyday.

Maarten Baas does some amazing things with smoke and mirrors too. His burnt objects, many of them of iconic pieces, was truly dramatic and not a little disturbing….I can still smell the burning.

Lahti is not just a place for great music and art, forested walks and lakes, it is also, yes, a nice town. I suspect it is also a very Finnish town – orderly, organised, efficient and modern – an extremely pleasant place. I like its understated charm a lot. Finland feels like a modern place to me, and I really like the way that the oldest buildings in Lahti all seem to be 20th century. It feels like Lahti lives in the present and the future – that gives me hope. It is also a great place for a coffee or a drink in civilised surroundings.

Lahti’s main church, the Church of the Cross (Ristinkirkkko), was built in 1978. Another piece of fine modern architecture. Today, it was holding a wedding. So simple but so effective this display of sunflowers – no happy couple could help. but me moved by its simple but profund statement of hope and good wishes. The church, by the way, has been the location for a lot of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra’s highly-regarded Sibelius recordings.

Home for this week, was a modern apartment in a modern apartment block, in a modern apartment estate, right in the middle of town and a short walk from Sibelius Hall.

I know that the Finnish winter is harsh but the Finns are ready for that. They are natural designers. The doors fit, the locks lock with a delightful clunk, they stay shut too in a gale. Here, in my temporary home, the obsessive in me loved the way everything worked and looked smart as well as functional. This lift, for example, nicely lit, smoothly opening and closing doors and a purring swish gave me great pleasure every time I used it.

A lot of Lahti citizens live in these type of developments and, unlike many other apartment blocks I’ve seen in other countries, here I think , you are lucky citizens to live here.

There was even a place for me at the back, in that nicely designed communal garden, so I began each day, as I try to wherever I go, doing my kungfu and tai-chi practice – overlooked by some curious residents who only registered their surprise with a slight flicker of a smile and a friendly Hei.

After tai-chi, what better, most Finns would agree, than a hot sauna back in the apartment. Sauna is the only Finnish word to enter the international vocabulary. It means, yes, sauna and it is genuinely a part of every day life in Finland. You feel great afterwards, believe me.

Down the street, turn right and five minutes away is another world. Well, as you can see below, a themed restaurant that isn’t into the idea of hiding its ideas. Viking Restaurant Harald (Viikinkinkiravintola Harald) is just what it says the moment you see it. At first I was reluctant to go in. I suspected it would be all embarrassing theme park entertainment with terrible theme park food, but I was wrong. The decor has a sense of humour. I know that Vikings were not exactly what the comic books portray. My father’s family came from the Scottish Hebrides and some of our ancestors have Viking names, so I am a softy for my Viking heritage, even if I do know for a fact that Viking never wore two-horned helmets, and I certainly never thought I would wear one, but….

…never say never. When in Lahti’s Viikinkinkiravintola Harald, after a few Viking beers, and a very good meal (honestly, the food is first class), almost anything can happen. But, before I go, let me leave you with members of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, who have given me so much pleasure here in Lahti. They are performing their Covid lockdown version of Sibelius’ Finlandia, each musician in his or her own home studio. Kiitos ja kippis! I shall be back!

The post Flying to Lahti in Finland for Sibelius appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I’m looking back at some of the photographs I have taken on my Italian holidays over recent years for blogs that I am only just getting down to now. In the summer of 2017, the year before I went to Puglia (see previous blogs), I spent two weeks in a tiny fishing village of Marina del Cantone, in the region of Massa Lubrense, near the small town of Nerano, on the Amalfi Coast, one of the most beautiful part of southern Italy, over-looking the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Gulf of Salerno.

During my time there, I went on a bus excursion on the small vertiginous road to Sorrento and then by train to Naples. I’ll write about this trip another time, for now, just let me say, I was perfectly happy to linger, lazily languorous in Marina del Cantone, either on the small beach-facing balcony, in the excellent restaurant, no more than six steps from my front door, or a few more steps to the beach where there was always a spare lounger and sunshade and the very welcoming sea. Mostly, I let my eyes do the walking around the spectacular coastline I could enjoy lying on my back.

I could get used to living with a Mediterranean beach outside my front door with an outstanding, open-air restaurant, not even blocking the view. Dinner every evening was fish, caught locally that day, cooked with real imagination served with a bottle of Chianti Classico. I love Italy.

I found my own space for my morning martial arts practice, sharing the spot with a few local fishermen, who probably thought I was just another eccentric Englishman in the long tradition, going back to the 18th Century, when the English considered this part of Italy, the nearest an of us get to a worldy paradise.

My fisherman friend took a couple of days to suss me out, but he soon accepted me as an entertaining diversion. He didn’t speak English, like most of the people here, so my morning sessions were great practise for my Italian and my tai-chi. I was soon greeted a shout of ‘buongiorno signor Kung-fu’.

After kung-fu, I was always ready for a cup of espresso, in the little cafe along the beach.

Then it was time for a walk before the midday sun made it too hot for exercise. On both sides of the little fishing port, there were paths that lead high up to where you can, quite literally, see for miles.

The mountain paths were a test for my vertigo, but I. went on until I passed a man who was sitting on a rock who told me not to go any further if I didn’t like heights. He said he was going back down before his falling sickness made him want to jump off the rock face. I went on for as far as I could, before I too began to feel the pull of the precipitous drop into the sea once the rickety fencing ended. It wasn’t so bad if, instead of looking down from the cliff, I concentrated on the wayside flowers.

With the Tyrrhenian Sea calling me every day, I knew that I just had to find a boat if I was ever going to appreciate this wonderful coastline.

I could see many little boats out there, so I set out to find one with a captain for hire. Of course, in this little village, there was a boat for hire, across the path from my front door. So the next time, Luca, the brother of the apartment owner, agreed a price, and we were off for a couple of hours at sea. Needless to say, I loved it.

We sailed in grottoes where it was possible to swim from the boat in the clear turquoise water, before going further out to sea looking at rocking islands, like this one, known as the turtle – la tartaruga – a word that seemed unnecessary when I first learnt it. Luca doesn’t speak English, so I was delighted to understand what he was saying and to see why the rock is called tartaruga.

We travelled further out, far enough to see the island of Capri, before returning to port, home, Marina del Cantone. I felt like true resident, a sailor coming home, seeing my apartment waiting as we got closer to shore.

After dinner in our local restaurant, there was still time for a glass of wine as the sun set and the lights of the village illuminated the sea.

The post On the Amalfi Coast appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Nicola, or simply, Nic, was my effervescent driver and guide for a day trip from Polignano across southern Puglia in June 2018 and, as well as being fun, he was informative and good company. The idea was to head to two famous towns, both beautiful and also, in their own ways, unique. Everyone I met in Puglia said they were both must-see places, Alberobello and Matera. They weren’t wrong.

Before we got to the first destination, we stopped off near the town of Monopoli to get a view of this distinctive area of southern Italy, where the hills make way for a flat plain that heads back to the Adriatic Sea.

This is area is obviously dedicated to cultivating productive trees, in appealingly orderly orchards, orderliness is the Pugliese way. I assumed, wrongly, that the trees were olives.

Walking up the hill, on a moodily cloudy day, I was drawn to the prominent Calvary-inspired hill-top crucifix. Italy, at almost every turn as a habit of looking like a shot from a film.

Up close now, I could see that these were not olive trees, the branches were laden with what looked like runner beans. Bean trees, I thought, only grew in fairy tales. These are not beans, but carobs, the name coming from the Arabic, kharrūb, Locust Bean Pod. The Carob tree, or Locust Tree (Ceratonia siliqua) is part of the legume family. The seed pods are edible and are cultivated, mostly, in Portugal, Morocco and southern Italy. They are dried and used as a sweet culinary powder, best known as a chocolate substitute, or as animal fodder.

Alberobello – the beautiful tax-avoiding hobbit village.

Alberobello is unique, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, famous for its extraordinarily cute houses, known as trulli. The place is officially known as one of i borghi più belli d’Italia, (one of the most beautiful villages of Italy).

The little houses were first built in the early sixteenth century and the style has a highly practical basis – tax avoidance. In those days of cynical feudalism, the land around here was owned by Count Giangirolamo II (1600 – 1665), who only allowed around forty peasant families to settle here and cultivate the land. They had to pay their lord with a tenth of their crops. When there was a need to expand the number of houses, after the establishment of an inn, the Count decided that they could be built only if they were constructed without the use of mortar, so that he could avoid paying taxes to the Spanish viceroy of the Kingdom of Naples who was pacified by the thought that they were only temporary dwellings that could be easily dismantled. The easiest way of building houses with dry stone walls was to make them circular and small. The result is, of course, really cute but they have also proven to be anything but temporary in the four hundred years of Alberobello’s existence.

The little trulli houses are still very habitable and comfortable as I saw when I visited this hospitable Alberobello resident’s home to look round.

There were trulli here and trulli there and there was even a trullo church.

Simple and unpretentious, it was built in 1927 in a simple style that blends in perfectly with the over-all plan. If hobbits went to church, I suspect they would have gone somewhere just like this.

Alberobello deserves its reputation as one of Puglia’s must-see locations – I enjoyed my chance to wander round its little winding streets and to catch the many charming views of little conical roofs nestling together on the hillside. Hobbits would be save here, it seems. I felt safe too and I took the opportunity to practise my tai-chi and to earth my energy in a unique setting.

Matera – three thousand years of continual occupation

After Hobbit-town, we crossed the border between Puglia and Basilicata to visit the astonishing town of Matera which is considered one of the oldest sites of continual occupation in the world. People have lived here, in the town’s extraordinary cave dwellings, carved out of the rock since the 10th millennium BC. Some of these cave dwellings, known as Sassi, are still lived in today.

On my trip to Matera, I didn’t make it to the sassi caves, but I had time enough to walk up the precipitous lanes through the medieval city where houses cling to the rock-face in a similar way to the ancient sassi. It’s a matter of perseverance for anyone climbing up through the different levels and stopping, often, to take in the increasingly distant townscape views from each level. I felt like I was ascending an out-of service escalator, to the hill top where the grandest views awaited anyone fit enough for the climb.

Half-way there, I came across this man, a Matera resident, he’d retired here from the big city, and was restoring his walls in the time honoured way – as he was happy to demonstrate. Using traditional materials is a requirement in this World Heritage Site which the following year was to be named a 2019 European Capital of Culture.

On I went, upwards and upwards, then up even more steps, in streets where every space is used and every corner has its surprises.

I was heading for Matera Cathedral (built between 1268 – 1270) up there at the top of the hill.

I made it to the summit, and, looking down, I was amazed by how far I had climbed. I was pleased too to arrive at Matera Cathedral, a handsome 12th century building with elegant romanesque external decorations.

If the cathedral was impressive, especially the rose window in the west front, the views of surroundings wa even more interesting with the ancient sassi caves and the rolling Basilicata landscape making the trip worth it.

The cathedral interior was certainly a dramatic and possibly a jarring contrast to its exterior. To my eye, the original Romanesque architecture has been spoiled by the lashings of gold from the 18th century’s gaudy redecoration.

I prefer the little cave dwellings that I could glimpse from outside the cathedral. What must those sassi dwellers have thought if they ever came up here to see the cathedral all dressed up in its pomp and swank.

As with all long climbs up, I was now faced with the great climb down and the journey back to Polignano. When we finally arrived at the apartment I was happy to see the lift waiting to take me upstairs for a well-earned siesta.

The post On the road from Polignano to Matera, via Alberobello appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I was based in Polignano in Puglia, South East Italy, for two weeks in June 2018, see previous blog, and, from there, I could travel to a number of other interesting Pugliese town and cities.

Lecce – Baroque or not.

on a particularly hot day, I travelled to the city of Lecce, famous for its Baroque architecture txtravagantly cared out of the local limestone, Lecce stone, which is very soft and highly workable – especially in the hands of Lo Zingarello (Tiny Gypsy), the architect and sculptor Giuseppe Zimbalo (1620 – 1710), who undertook much of the restoration work in the new Baroque style when working on many of the earlier buildings of this beautiful city. I had come to see the celebrate Baroque cathedral, the Basilica of Santa Croce, before I got there I was distracted by a poster for an exhibition about one of my operatic heroes, the early 20th century Lecce tenor, Tito Schipa (1888 – 1965) – one of the greatest of all lyric tenors, in my less than humble opinion.

The exhibition was fascinating to anyone like me who has always loved this man’s exceptionally beautiful voice and his highly musical and never vulgar style. The exhibition was also thrilling for anyone who is, let’s face it, a bit of an opera geek. Here were recordings, photographs and costumes from one of the truly golden ages of opera. People don’t remember Tito Schipa was much as he deserves, so it was wonderful to see this tribute here in his home town. They really don’t make tenors like this any more.

With Tito Schipa’s voice ringing in my head, I made my way down the streets of this lovely city known as the Florence of the South, and soon found the Basilica di Santa Croce with its sensational display of Baroque sculpture. Tito Schipa’s elegance and taste might have turned me into a puritan, but I was impressed but not overwhelmed by the extravagance of Lecce’s Baroque. Wasn’t it just a bit too much, a bit over the top? Maybe. Or maybe it was just too hot that day to take it Giuseppe Zimballo’s extrovert mannerisms. Forgive me.

The interior was certainly extraordinary, but here too I kept think of graffiti and wondered what the place would look like if the baroque additions were stripped away. I had my answer when I went down some Romanesque steps into the very not Baroque crypt. Ah yes, this was more to my taste.

Barletta – a city of understated magnificence

After the Baroque fantasies of Lecce, I was happy to visit the more solid attractions of another Puglia city, Barletta. I might not have even come here, but I have a friend who lives here. I’d been having Italian lessons on-line on Skype with Enzo who had become more than an excellent teacher, he had become a friend. He lives in Barletta and, when he knew I was visiting Puglia, he was more than happy to drive me round some places of interest. We met at Barletta station where I also met his friend Ruggiero, who has to become another on-line friend when we met up to practise his English and my Italian. They had thought through a precise itinerary for today, so, as they are both teachers, I let me tell me what we should do. We didn’t have enough time to see all of the attractions of Barletta, but I did manage to visit the magnificently brutalist 12th Gothic basilica. – in front of which stand the so-called Barletta Colossus, an 5th century or maybe early 6th century bronze Roman statue with, I assume, a later addition of the hand held cross that is a tactful blend of the pagan with the Christian.

We were on our way to lunch.

We found the fish restaurant, Enzo’s favourite, and a spirited discussion ensued over the menu, while Enzo and Ruggiero debated what was the perfect meal for a Barletta new-comer. Unsurprisingly, the meal was superb.

and he crab was delicioso.

Trani with its ice-cream and its cathedral by the sea

After Barletta, Enzo drove us to Trani, another of his favourite places, especially for a regular Sunday stroll. It has, he told me with Ruggiero’s enthusiastic agreement, the best ice-cream bar in the region. Where else should we go after our Barletta lunch, but here for ice-cream and espresso. So we sat outside watching the boats in the little harbour before taking a leisurely walk round the town on way to the cathedral.

The luminous seaside 12th century Trani cathedral of San Nicola Pellegrino (Saint Nicholas the Pilgrim) is unusual for a number of reasons. First of all it gleams with an almost pink colour due to its construction from the local calcareous tuff stone, Puglia’s distinctive Tufa Stone, that was quarried locally. It is also one of very few cathedrals worldwide to be built so close to the sea.

Trani is also unusual for being built, (between 1099 – 1143) on several levels, with its main floor being raised high above sea-level, on the site of an older church (Santa Maria della Scala). It is also notable for the unusual gateway beneath its 13th century bell tower.

The cathedral’s arched transept is one of the masterpieces of Italian Romanesque architecture – made all the more beautiful by the bright sea-light shining through the high altar window and reflected onto its bright tufa stone.

A fifteenth century mural in the 12th Century crypt beneath the main cathedral. Virgin and Child with Saint James and Saint Anthony attributed to Giovanni di Francia (1420 -1467). The Virgin Mary is crowned queen of Heaven and she raises a veil, presumably, to reveal the sleeping baby Jesus, who lies on her lap where the painting is now irreparably damaged.

Beneath the main cathedral is the highly atmospheric 12th century crypt dedicated to San Nicola Pellegrino, the young Greek shepherd boy turned pilgrim, the apparently highly charismatic patron saint of Trani, who was buried here within his custom-made crypt just four years of his death, aged nineteen, in 1094. He was canonised at the same time as the cathedral was dedicated to him.

My thanks to Enzo and Ruggiero for an unforgettable day.

The post Some other towns on my journey through Puglia in Southern Italy appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I take too many photographs, I know. I have too many of them on my computer these days too and, during the last ten years, I have fallen behind in publishing the photographs I have taken on my foreign travels during what has been for me quite a turbulent time.

I have finally got round to sorting them out and here, today, is the first of a new series about the places I have visited and what I saw there.

In June 2018, I spent a couple of weeks in the lively little town of Polignano a Mare, in south east Italy, which as the label says is a mare, by the sea. I had rented a lovely modernist apartment with a terrace over-looking, the Adriatic ocean, the rocks, the remains of a thousand year old wall system and, it seemed, the world.

It was tempting just to stay at home here in this roomy and elegant apartment and just send out for a Dominos pizza. Well, maybe not Dominos.

Food is important in Italy and even a simple plate of tomatoes, olives and sausage, salsiccia, from the local market, tasted and looked like a banquet.

There was, of course, the need to find a space for my daily martial arts training, White Crane kung-fu and tai-chi. It is not just my way of trying to keep fit, but it’s also the way of laying claim to a small piece of the world, everywhere I go. Earthing my energy in the ancient Chinese way, has allowed me to put down just a few roots in many places home and abroad. For a time, everywhere I do my practice, I feel I am at home.

Polignano is a cliff-top town – some of the cliffs are rock and other cliff-like spaces are human habitations – seabirds don’t see the difference and the Italians might not either.

Below the apartment there are historic remains of the old town with walls and arches to remind us that Italian and Greco-Roman culture has been around for a long time. This part of Italy was one of the earliest ancient Greek colonies and its legacy is still around today.

Beyond the ruins, is the town itself, bustling, relaxed, in love with the sea, but also with shopping, eating and drinking. Polignano, to me, seemed like a place where fun is top of the agenda. Oh yes, it is beautiful too.

Italy is good at old town centres where shops, restaurants and bars thrive in even the narrowest of alleys and where old buildings wear their history with a nonchalance that says no big deal, just relax here.

And, naturally, all roads lead to the sea.

I arrived here, purely by accident, on the feast day of Saint Vitus, the patron saint of dancers and entertainers – a showbiz kinda saint – who also happens to be the patron saint of Polignano, also a showbiz kinda town. Before I had even unpacked, I was thrown into the middle of the celebrations and even got to see the rather boyish Saint Vitus himself as he was processed with religious ceremony through the street to cheers and applause before the local population carried on with the dancing and singing into the early hours of the morning. Legend has it, as they say, that if you dance in front of a statue of St Vitus he might just possibly heal you from diseases like cholera. Dancing makes you feel good anyway.

There were, I guess, more than a few hangovers on Polignano’s beach the next day. The beach, rocky and surrounded on three sides by cliffs, is a special place, even if it’s not ideal if you want to be alone. Why would anyone want to be unsociable in Polignano? It’s not the local style.

It is less crowded if you get down there early enough and before the sun disperses the early morning shadows. Then it is possible to imagine this ancient landing place for wandering Greeks, sailors, smugglers and, most likely, fishermen. The cliffs have earned the place a more modern celebrity. It is a centre of the annual international rock diving competition.

I was brave enough to stand up there and admire the view, but if I was forced to dive from up there into the sea, I think I would be dead on arrival.

When the diving if over, the clifftop scenery draws romantics and dreamers. I just stood and watched the play of light on on the Adriatic and held on tight to the railings.

There are numerous little coves along the coast here and those in the know can find less precipitous bathing spots. Cala Fetente is one of the best and least crowded beaches in these parts.

There was a good place to take holiday photos by the carpark and I’m sure the result of this shot looked like this family was on a paradise island.

I mentioned St Vitus being the patron saint of dancers and entertainers, and, sure enough, Polignano was the birthplace of one of Italy’s most popular singers, Domenico Modugno (1928 – 1994). He is commemorated in Polignano with this most showbiz of statues. Nevermind St Vitus, I wanted to dance round this exuberant image.

Here he is singing his most famous song, and, be warned, if you listen to it, you will be humming his signature song for the rest of the day. Nel blue, dipinto di blu, is better known as Volare, and you will know it, even if you didn’t realize that you’ve ever heard it.

Humming Volare, or trying not to hum it, you can just wander round this most sociable of towns, admiring the architecture and, yes, the sense of being in the kind of place that you had always imagined as Italy.

You don’t have to talk to people, of course, but, if like me, you are tying to speak Italian, it is really easy to make friends in the shops, restaurants and bars.

I still have a beautiful ceramic bowl made by this surprisingly shy woman who was, at first, a reluctant model. She is a true artist.

Elsewhere, I indulged my temptations, and lingered in the streets that call out for you to stop as you pass, or try to pass, each bar.

The reataurants were, as you’d expect, excellent here, but the most famous, and most spectacular, is the Grotta Palazzese, which is quite literally set in a grotto where you can sit almost in the sea, under the rocky ceiling, and marvel at the ingenuity of the person who thought let’s make a restaurant here. Yes, you can watch the sunset over the Adriatic and it is worth the booking just for the location.

The post Two weeks in Puglia : Polignano a Mare appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I first worked with my friend, the Serbian artist Nikola Stanković, in 2018, when I opened a virtual art gallery, Glinka Gallery, in the virtual world of Second Life: http://maps.secondlife.com/secondlife/Seaforth/85/198/29

Nikola Stanković’s outstanding paintings formed our first exhibition there, where I was impressed by the variety of techniques he uses, from drawing to classical oil painting, to achieve inspirational, passionate and ecstatic work on spiritual, erotic, wild life and primeval themes.

Glinka Gallery has now held four shows of his work and the latest one, Animal Instinct, currently running, includes his picture, Fight, above, an enigmatic portrayal of two stags in deadly but seemingly nervous conflict. When we were hanging the pictures at the gallery, there was a space next to this work and Nikola asked me if I had a suitable poem to put there – one that reflected some of the themes of his show. I thought about this for a moment or two but had to say no, I had written nothing that could do that job and then, after another moment or two, I said I would try to write him a poem to hang there. The result was a new Fibonacci poem, a Fib, entitled Rutting which I dedicated to him and subsequently submitted to the excellent online poetry journal The Fib Review, https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/ a specialist in Fibonacci poetry and a great supporter of my syllable-based work in this form.

I was particularly happy to write a poem for Nikola and I saw it as a kind of reciprocal act as a few years ago, he painted a picture for me called Remembering Blue, the title of my poetry collection and a quote from the opening poem there, my Haiku. https://www.bookdepository.com/Remembering-Blue-Colin-Bell/9781908742704

Unsurprisingly, Nikola came up with a picture that was totally unexpected, but which penetrated behind some of the things I was trying to say in my collection. It was a kind of artistic tit for tat. I hope we will work like this more often.

The post A new Fibonacci poem inspired by the art of a friend. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Tony, a French friend, recently sent me an illustrated French novel by a novelist that I was embarrassed to admit that I had never heard of, Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894 – 1961). I googled him, as you do, and discovered that he is not only regarded as one of the greatest French novelists of the 20th Century, but also the most reviled. I was plunged, yet again, into that dangerous territory where I had to decide how to regard a great artist, like Ezra Pound or Richard Wagner, who held unacceptable and shocking anti-semitic opinions, even if, in Céline’s case, they are not expressed in this, his first novel, Voyage au bout de la nuit (Journey to the end of the night), published in 1931. I am pleased that I have read it.

Later he wrote two anti-semitic polemics which I will never read but which, I am told are very different to his first novel which is a truly revolutionary work of fiction where, in scenes of dark cartoonish horror and humour, the author writes in vivid working class French, almost dialect, about life in and after the 1914 – 1918 war, as well as about the degrading living conditions of the poor in society, in France, Africa and the USA. Conditions he witnessed first hand as a soldier and later as a doctor. The story is told in the liveliest of language by the narrator, the much put-upon and unfortunate Ferdinand Bardamu, a semi-autobiographical caricature of Céline himself. This great novel must not be ignored even if that is not the case for Céline’s later work.

Bardamu, with his sinister and ultimately tragic friend, or even enemy, Robinson, experiences a series of picaresque adventures at war in Flanders, where human life has no value for the generals, and in peacetime, where life is still harsh and unfair. In French colonial Africa native Africans endure hardships every bit as harsh as those in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and French colonial officials live abandoned lives of poverty and disease.

Bardamu and Robinson meet up again in New York where rampant capitalism has gone wild in a frenzy of sex and materialism and when or if, inhumane industrial conditions allow for any remission, poor workers like Bardamu find their only comfort in flea-pit cinemas and in the arms of affordable sex-workers.

Back in Paris, Bardamu sees the same harsh realities of life where money is everything and most people never have enough. There is no hope in this world, wherever Bardamu and Robinson go, life is only a preparation for death, which will be as good as your courage allows. That is the journey to the end of the night.

My absorption in this extraordinary novel (reading in French but with a parallel English translation on my Kindle), was made all the more gripping by the wonderful and appropriately cartoonish illustrations by the great French artist, Jacques Tardi. Those haunted faces and lives will stay with me forever.

So many of the issues of inhumanity and existentialist uncertainty tackled so powerfully in this novel remain with us today that it is a double tragedy that someone of Céline’s genius should, like Ezra Pound, poison their profundity of thought with the unforgivable and still threatening evils of anti-semitism. It will also be a tragedy if this book’s insights are missed by anyone put off reading it by the author’s reputation.

Many thanks, again, to my friend Tony for giving me this magnificent and thought-provoking book.

The post An extraordinary novel by a shocking man. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I bought my first laptop last year as a luxurious add-on to the desktop computer that sits in the office room where I spend most of my writing days here at home in Lewes, UK. I suppose I should confess that I have been envious of all those lucky people that I’ve seen over the years who have these marvellous portable machines and who manage to work with them wherever they go. I went to Scotland for a long weekend last autumn and took my lovely new computer with me in a rucksack on my back – it was my first time away from home with my very own portable machine and, because it lives inside there too, the new novel, my fifth, that I am working on these days. Forgive my naive enthusiasm, but I still can’t believe how wonderful it felt to be working on my book on a train speeding up from London to Glasgow. I was amazed how much work I got done. And, yes, while my novel is in my laptop, my laptop is now a character in my novel.

My laptop has travelled with me around town too when I wanted a change of scene or even when fancied a cup of coffee in the coffeeshop across the road, so I am still excited by my new found mobility when I need to be working. Well, I have recently had a bout of the current ‘flu and I have been confined indoors in the warm and out of the winter rain. It’s an ill-wind, as they say , that blows nobody any good, so, looking on the bright side of my imprisonment, I have discovered the joys of moving around the house with my laptop. How cosy and tranquil to be away from my desk, to stay in my pyjamas all day, to keep the flu symptoms down with paracetamol, but feeling too ill to concentrate much on writing, I am free to play frivolously on the web, to listen to music and watch movies or just to surf the internet. It actually feels like a holiday.

The post Staying in with my laptop appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.