A Momentary Taste of Being

While I liked Wolf Hall , I was not nearly so enthusiastic as Frank is in this review.   I found her use of third person at times extremely thorny and confusing, and felt that we lingered a trifle in places where I would have preferred to speed on.  On the other hand, I enjoyed it greatly while I read it.  I must say though, that it has no lingering power with me.  Nothing from it sticks in my head as particularly provocative or evocative after having read it nearly a year ago.  This is, ultimately, how I judge the value of what I have read.

Hmm--Sharpe's creator on the Revolution: An Interview I guess I'm liking both Cornwell and the specifics of the history.  Hope it's good.

Via Books INQ.: My Favorite Historical Novel Limits--American Historical Fiction

Well, I have to say after a very long slog, I am through Wolf Hall and am glad to have finished it. I have very mixed feelings about the book--ambitious, long, convoluted, by turns annoying and confusing, but with deep and interesting insights and speculations, thoughts about the characters and their times. Let's start with one of the least successful aspects of the book.  I have read in other reviews and other places that her limited third person narration that amounts to a curious twist on a first person narration in which "he" much of the time refers to Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cromwell is almost always referred to as he--this literary trick is supposed to bring me into sympathy with Cromwell.  I am supposed to derive from it some sort of closeness.  Truth is, it made the book more difficult to read without offering a lot in the way of perspective or closeness.  Indeed, if anything, I found myself kicking against the goad and more often than not furious at Cr...

Through the eyes of Cardinal Wolsey from Wolf Hall Hilary Mantel Who is advising Katherine? John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester. "Do you know what I can't endure about that man?" the Cardinal says. "He's all skin and bone. I abhor your skeletal prelate. It makes the rest of us look bad. One looks . . . corporeal." He is in his corporeal pomp, his finest scarlet, when the King and Queen are summoned before the two Cardinals at Blackfriars. Evereyone had supposed the Katherine would send a proxy, but instead she appears in person.

from Guardian.co.uk Hillary Mantel The past is not dead ground, and to traverse it is not a sterile exercise. History is always changing behind us, and the past changes a little every time we retell it. The most scrupulous historian is an unreliable narrator; he brings to the enterprise the biases of his training and the vagaries of his personal temperament, and he is often obliged, in order to make his name, to murder his forefathers by coming up with a different take on events from the one that held sway when he himself learned the discipline; he must make the old new, because his department's academic standing depends on it. Read the entire thing here .   Sincere thanks to Books, Inq. for the lead.