I'd read other novels by Camus and enjoyed them, so when I saw that book peering at me from the dining room book shelf in the hotel on Lac Rose, I was reassured that it would make guaranteed quality reading, but for the simple fact it was such an unmissable trove, it would leave me dissatisfied in my desire to discover a new author.
Besides, the back cover review presented the novel as an unfinished work by the author, who died before reviewing the manuscript and well before giving it to print. The writing had been so rushed that there was practically no punctuation, which had to be added to make the contents intelligible.
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I can feel it in full force when I'm watching disconsolately the landscape unfold under the wings of a plane that'a about to land at Milan airport, but not only there… Beautiful as the Alpine backdrop may still be, I'm overwhelmed by the feeling that nature has been irremediably spoilt by a massive presence of man, colonising the most accessible and convenient places, but also the remotest ones, slopping tons of concrete over what were once fields or forests, unrolling kilometers of tarmac to connect these settlements, spanning rivers, taming the environment. Nature loses its pristine charm, becomes apparently slave to her domineering master that not only takes without giving, exploits without paying, depletes without refilling, but also arrogantly believes he's in his full right to do so.
Up that steep street was the house of D, a schoolmate whose family was acquainted with a relative of mine, a grand aunt who‘d got married to a veterinary doctor, and without any children had the leisure to devote herself to charity works in a prim, well-meaning Catholic milieu. D was the daughter of quite rich parents and lived in a large villa surrounded by a huge, perfectly tended sloping garden at the foot of the ramparts around the ancient city, in a position commanding over the whole neighbourhood. D was always the school mistress’s sweetheart. It will by pure chance but, looking back, I wonder if this attachment wasn’t enhanced by the personal gifts that her mother never failed to present the mistress with at Christmas and on a couple of other occasions during the school year.
I met him in Prague. It was at the hostel reception desk at the exact moment I was checking in, probably he was in front of me because I remember him asking the clerk to repeat the directions to the room that had been spoken in an English too fast for him to follow. Then I got engaged in the process of registering and lost sight of him, trundling away his enormous black suitcase that might well have contained half his wardrobe.
I don’t know how many people would be able to pinpoint a precise moment in time for the start of a liking, but I can do that for at least what I consider my greatest passion. I can set a starting point to my enthusiasm for languages and world cultures – and also say the exact moment I began being interested in particular ones, but that’s another story, so let’s talk general first.