Friday, January 26, 2018

La belle nature

Walking in the Parc Monceau:


Guy de Maupassant, Like Death, trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2017).

Yes, an artificial and charming place. Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, the park’s designer:

The true art is to know how to keep the visitors there, through a variety of objects, otherwise they will go to the real countryside to find what should be found in this garden; the image of liberty.
The marble boy must be a reproduction of Boy with Thorn.

Elaine and I picked up two copies of this novel last summer. It’s yet another work we’d probably never have discovered without New York Review Books. More passages soon.

comments: 2

brownstudy said...

I used to revere Penguin books. Now, I revere the New York Review line for surfacing books I've not heard of.

By the way, HOW do you format those extended passages? I'd like to do the same thing.

Michael Leddy said...

I think I could probably live on NYRB books. They meet all recommended daily allowances.

I type in Pages (the Mac app) with a narrow text area, take a screenshot, and crop it, leaving just a pixel or two on each side. Then I make a blank image file (in Acorn or Seashore) with added pixels on all sides and drop the screenshot in.

You can imagine the fun when I realize I’ve made a typo. But I like the idea of fiction and poetry looking different on the screen.