Jonah’s Gulp of Truth, All Our Specks of Self Included

And this anthology duly starts with a famous work by Nemonymous…in case its author jeopardises the whole anthology that follows it?

THE BOOK OF JONAH

“But Jonah rose up to flee unto Tarshish from the presence of the LORD,…”

Whatever your own interpretation of it, whether Jungian-based or not, it does seem a significant, if risky, work with which to start a gestalt within which it forms a part, a gestalt that is swallowed by another gestalt ad infinitum, ad absurdum, Tarshishim….

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GEORGE MOORE: A Novel in a Nutshell

“…he had chambers in Norman’s Inn, where he wrote waltzes, received his friends, and practised wood-carving.”

…this being Mr Bryant of Bryanston Square who employed as servant…
“…Clara Tompson, from King Edward’s School, a young girl just turned seventeen, pale-complexioned, delicate features, and blue eyes, which seemed to tell of a delicate, sentimental nature.”

Whatever the significance of the black shawl he brought back from France for her and her complaints of other men pestering her with spiked drinks and my sense in her of an unrequited younger love for an older man especially when Mr B starts ‘seeing’ a supposed widow, with much toing and froin of letters between him and that woman, as taken between them by Clara’s fair hand….
I was more interested in the rougher or cruder servant girls (“coarse girls romped to a tune played on a concertina by a shoe-boy sitting on the dresser.”) with whom she seemed to mix. Did they work for Mr B, too? Or were they other specks of herself that she tried to clean off her soul? And who really ‘waltzed’ to that tune, and with whose ‘idol’?

I once had similar quandaries during quarantine in my review of another George Moore story, linked here: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2021/05/14/priscilla-and-emily-lofft/

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The full context of above reviews, both of which appeared today…

That Glimpse of Truth

Penguin Books of British Short Stories (2)