/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.18477899]

Did you like or do you plan on reading it ?

[Anonymous No.18478420]

Yeah, i'll get to it eventually

[Anonymous No.18478670]

I finished it last month, I managed to read the whole thing outdoors in nice weather, that may have influenced my opinion on it, but it was very good. The philosophy of the child Bert and the Mayor Wollop is the best way to engage with reality imho.

[Anonymous No.18478752]

>>18477899
I'm going to read Wolf Solent over the summer.

[Anonymous No.18478785]

>>18478670
his paragraphs are too long for 4chan, so I'll have to split it into two posts
>Mr. Wollop had neither wife nor children. His servants were kept at such a respectful distance that they may be said to have been non-existent. They were the hands that kept his house clean and warm and that brought him his moderate meals at reasonable hours. Had they been the Ravens that fed Elisha, or the invisible attendants who waited upon the Prince in the fairy story, they could not have been more dehumanised. Mr. Timothy Wollop lived to himself. To say that because he was lonely he was unhappy would have been to utter the extreme opposite of the truth. Mr. Wollop was one of the happiest men in Somersetshire. He neither smoked, nor drank, nor whored. He never gave way, even in the solitarywatches of the night, to the feverish pricks of sensual desire. As soon as his head touched the pillow he fell asleep. Of what did Mayor Wollop dream? He never dreamed; or, if he did, he forgot his dream so completely on awakening, that for a man to say, “I dreamed like Mayor Wollop,” would be tantamount to saying “My sleep was dreamless.” Of what did Mayor Wollop think as he walked from his house in Wells Road to his shop in High Street? He thought of what he saw. In truth it may be said that with the exception of Bert Cole no one in Glastonbury regarded the Panorama of Things and Persons with more absorbing interest than did its Mayor. Not a stink or a stone, not a bit of orange-peel in any gutter, not a sparrow upon any roof, not a crack in any window, not any aspect of the weather, wet or fine, not any old face or any new face, not any familiar suit of clothes or any unexpected suit of clothes, not any dog, or cat, or canary, or pigeon, or,horse, or bicycle or motor car, not any new leaf on an old branch, not any old leaf on a new roof—but Timothy Wollop noted it, liked to see it there, and thought about its being there. The Mayor was one of those rare beings who really liked the world we all have been born into. More than that; oh, much more than that! The Mayor was obsessed with a trance-like absorption of interest, by the appearance of our world exactly as it appeared. What worries some, disconcerts others, agitates others, saddens others, torments others, makes others feel responsibility, sympathy, shame, remorse, had no effect upon the duck's back of Mr. Wollop beyond the peaceful titillation of surface-interest.

[Anonymous No.18478787]

>>18478785
>Below appearances Mr. Wollop never went. Below the surfaces of appearances he never went! If the unbearable crotchets of his father had been confined to the old man's thoughts, Mr. Wollop would never have been ruffled. People's thoughts were non-existent to the Mayor of Glastonbury; and if there is a level of possibility more non-existent than non-existence itself, such a level was filled (for him) by people's instincts, feelings, impulses, aspirations, intuitions. The servants in his house, as far as any interior personality was concerned, might have been labelled A. B. C. and the assistants in his shop, in the same sense, might have been named D. E. F. When B. (shall we say?), a female servant in a fit of hysterics, put on her cap back to front, Mr. Wollop was as interested as when on his walk to his shop he mildly observed that a well-known tabby-cat's ear had been bitten off. When E. (shall we say?), a male shop-assistant, appeared one morning tricked up for a funeral, Mr. Wollop enjoyed the same quiet stir as when on his walk down High Street he noticed that a black frost had killed all thepetunias in old Mrs. Cole's window-box. Mr. Wollop had once overheard one of his younger shop-assistants—a young man in whose sleek black hair he had come to take a quiet interest, wondering what hair-wash the lad patronised—refer to something called “Neetchky.” From the context Mr. Wollop gathered that “Neetchky” could hardly be the name of a hair-wash. It seemed rather to be some pious formula used by the young man, by which he threw off responsibility for having got some young woman into trouble. At that point Mr. Wollop's interest ceased, just as it had ceased when the question arose as to hoiv the tabby-cat had lost its ear. Mr. Wollop had no quarrel with young men who had formulas for dodging responsibility, as long as they did their work in the shop. What he was conscious of was a certain puzzled contempt for anyone whose selfishness was so weak and shaky that it required a pious formula! Mr. Wollop needed no formula, pious or otherwise. The appearance of things was the nature of things; and all things, as they presented themselves to his attention, in his house, in the street, and in his shop, fed his mind with slow, agreeable, unruffled ponderings. Mr. Wollop was not greedy at his meals, though he frequently thought of his meals; and, as I have hinted, he was totally devoid of specialised sensuality. No man, nowoman, no child could ever have said, if they spoke the truth, that they had caught the Mayor of Glastonbury fixing upon them a lecherous eye. The truth seems to be that the Mayor was exactly like young Bert Cole. Bert and Mayor Wollop diffused the projection of their amorous propensities over the whole surface of their world; and their world was what they saw.

[Anonymous No.18478910]

>>18477899
Powys sounds more Welsh than English.

[Anonymous No.18478946]

>>18478785
>>18478787
Did Susanna Clarke reference Powys when writing Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell?