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ke that of most people my life has been shaped misshaped by covid 19 living in italy i was among the first to feel the practical effects of the pandemic with a lockdown that began on 8 march you can read about my reactions to the first month or so here my mood then was stoical as you can see a little too stoical for one friend who rather snippily said that i should try living in a real jail etc hmm it has remained so although the conditions since then have changed after four months in rome we moved back to our house further south a move that meant leaving our rome flat along with all the objects we d managed to accumulate in the previous four years of officially temporary part time residence there see photo during those four months in which i taught online and edited reports and watched television until 3 am and read and read and thanked god for kindle i d failed to write a single word as soon as i was back in my own home with teaching behind me and a physical space that simply hadn t been available to me in rome i revised a novel that i d been working on for more than two years and in a burst of creative energy that still leaves me gasping wrote another novel in just under six weeks i hope to be able to tell you more about both of these before too long but the relative freedom brought with it a sense of frustration that many other people have felt i ve since discovered as though the more the restrictions were relaxed the more we were obliged to replace them with our own sense of what was required and to apply that sense will power in other words took the place of external coercion and will power is both a more flexible and a more forgiving master or so we like to think until the final reckoning is made choice is a gift and a hard gift to manage and a choice that protects others at the cost of one s own pleasure isn t always as straightforward as it ought to be in sardinia where we went for ten days in the false security of post lockdown august we found deserted beaches but teeming streets intermittently worn masks and variable social distancing as tourists edged their way along crowded alleys in the marina district of cagliari there was a kind of devil may care euphoria and an underlying constant buzz of anxiety and suspicion that none of this should really be happening a suspicion that turned out to be well founded we left the island on one of the last ferries before a second lockdown was imposed we left and remain unscathed by covid 19 we were careful and we were lucky and we know it so what have i been reading i ve had a whale of a time forgive me re reading moby dick after fifty years reading pinocchio in italian i m ashamed to say for the first time and finding a stranger and more wonderful book than i d ever have imagined and this was preparation for edward carey s extraordinary novel both addendum and homage to the pinocchio story the swallowed man i discovered thanks to that always reliable book blog his futile preoccupations the three tom aragon novels of the classic crime writer margaret millar unjustly overshadowed by her husband ross macdonald i was moved beyond measure by james baldwin s giovanni s room jenny offill s deeply prescient weather was eagerly awaited and didn t disappoint at the time i wrote funny dark hopeless and then not hopeless profoundly human and i stand by that three months later i re read dr jekyll and mr hyde still creepy as ever and a lot of conan doyle for reasons that may become clearer when i share news about my latest work with far more pleasure than i d expected although i shouldn t have been surprised i know i greatly enjoyed smoked meat and its cast of artists would be artists and piss artists set in a totally convincing bohemian montreal by rowena macdonald i was blown away by the wit and the rawness of the first three novels in chester himes harlem cycle and i sincerely hope that canongate bring the other novels back into print forthwith other novels i ve greatly enjoyed include whiplash river by lou berney shadowplay by joseph o connor the fall guy by james lasdun a long way off by a favourite of mine pascal garnier i don t want to go to the taj mahal by charlie hill mordew by alex pheby soul tourists by bernardine evaristo and the ghost rider by ismail kadare and here we are at the start of a new year so i ll leave you with this suitably disastrous but perversely optimistic image because we all know that tintin and of course milou will survive whatever adverse fate can throw at them as it so often does in bucketfuls posted in fondi reading travel travelling uncategorized tagged chester himes covid 19 edward carey jenny offill sardinia leave a comment by the way posted on august 24 2018 by charles lambert my latest novel prodigal was published yesterday and is now available from all the usual outlets on and off line you can see what i have to say about it and about loss and love here it s been described as dark and comic and insightful and alluring and er uncomfortable and if that isn t enough to entice you to read it i really don t know what is here s a picture of the cover so that you ll know what to look for posted in uncategorized tagged lgbt loss love novel paris prodigal siblings leave a comment concrete and steel posted on august 24 2018 by charles lambert the apartment we re renting in the landstrasse district of vienna is more or less halfway between an immense drum like tower and the wittgenstein house the tower forms part of a reinforced concrete fortress which we can see looking left from the entrance to our building it rises in a small park behind a block of social housing that bridges the road and bears the name kurt steyrer hof i thought kurt steyrer might be the architect but he turns out to have been a minister of health with unusually in these expert wary days an actual degree in medicine and the unsuccessful rival in the presidential elections of 1986 of kurt waldheim he survived waldheim by a month dying in 2007 although the building appears to predate this by several decades the fortress itself i discover when i walk under the arch of the k s h and into the park to look at it more closely is an almost windowless rectangular building 187 feet square unadorned by graffiti with not one but four round squat drums rising from a jutting out tray like structure to tower above the surrounding trees to a height of 137 feet it s the kind of thing an unimaginative child might erect on a beach for the pleasure of seeing it later washed away the fortress was built i discover on the internet there is zero information at the site by the nazis as one of six flak towers in the city flak is short for fliegerabwehrkanone and means anti aircraft gun although the purpose of this building and the other five like it was surely not to protect the city so much as to intimidate its people and to instil the fear required by an occupying force it s a mixture of brutalism and not just in terms of an architectural volumes but as a way of coercing the space around it and some hellish castle mervyn peake or george martin might have imagined as the place where all hopes go to die you imagine birds avoiding it swerving in flight one quarter of it i read has recently been restyled as an exhibition space mak tower but is currently closed for repair restyled or not repaired or not it can t be removed it s too large to be demolished by explosives in the confined spaces of the residential district around it it s simply there a reminder as kurt waldheim was a reminder we visit haus wittgenstein three days after our arrival after a generous frühstück of eggs and cheese seated outside a café in the unrelenting heat tripadvisor while including the house in its list of things to do in vienna is unenthusiastic with a handful of actually four average reviews that are less about the house itself than about its current role as home to the cultural department of the bulgarian embassy the house is surrounded and partly concealed by a high white wall we come to an ironwork gate with a bulgarian flag above it which is open and walk through and then up some steps until we reach a closed door there is nothing to indicate that the building before us actually is the building part designed by wittgenstein little more than a dozen years before hitler his classmate in vienna ordered the construction of the flak towers no sign no plaque the place as anonymous in its way as the looming fortress just half a mile to our backs but where that is grey and seems to absorb what light there is this is brilliant in the sun a game of shadows and glass there is a small bell which we ring we re ready to leave when the door opens onto a large hall at the far end of which is what looks like a galley kitchen where a middle aged man in a singlet his hair just out of beddish is eating a plate of pasta he jumps up in a confused way as though he s been caught out grins wildly and waves his fork towards a thin woman approaching from the right i ask her in english if this is the wittgenstein house and assuming it is if we can visit it she nods a surly nod if such a thing is possible and silently produces a small tin cashbox from a drawer in the only piece of furniture in the room five euros and forty cents each she says and detaches two tickets from a paper clipped wad when i give her a twenty euro note she shakes her head we manage to find the correct amount no photographs allowed inside she says information there she says and points to a rack with some photocopied sheets of information and a faded ground plan can we just walk round wherever we want i ask she shrugs slides the money into a small plastic envelope locks the cashbox and puts it back in the drawer thank you i say but she has already moved away only to stop at the door into the kitchen with the still grinning man behind her from which point she turns to watch us as we start to explore the spaces are large as perfectly proportioned as one would expect from a philosopher architect a series of interlocking volumes filled with light freed of such fripperies as skirting or cornice the double doors between each room are engineered from steel and glass they seem to have been made for giants or the gods wittgenstein s sister once remarked were the only suitable occupants of the house their handles like the handles of the windows are minimalist works of art although some of them i notice are missing giuseppe is enchanted by the radiators which wittgenstein apparently spent a year designing we move from room to room the woman following us at a distance we go upstairs and find a sloping glass roof creating a sort of greenhouse to one side of the first floor landing with some straggling houseplants beneath it there is a library with no one in it the shelves filled with the sort of books one might find in a rundown second hand bookshop but in bulgarian battered and spineless dusty reeking of neglect a woman s handbag lies open on the desk and i wonder if the ticket seller cum surveillance operative also moonlights as librarian or vice versa and there she is suddenly at the door her expression unchanged we smile and move past her into another room and then another apart from the library only one room is furnished a long table a second woman at one end of it keying into a laptop ignoring us as we look at the paintings that decorate the walls outside a terrace with the inner wall almost hidden by stacked boxes that held or still hold bananas wittgenstein once said i am not interested in constructing a building so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings he didn t much like the house in any case accusing it of lacking primordial life but i think he d have ordered its demolition if he could have seen it as it is now uncared for abandoned with its travesty of a library in the hands of bulgaria s equivalent of the stasi and i d love to know what happened to the missing door handles we re wandering around the centre when we find ourselves in judenplatz rachel whiteread s memorial to the holocaust at the far end of it it s one of those works of art with no aesthetic merit to speak of that once understood say something that can be said in no other form and are therefore art all works of art require context memorials perhaps more than any other and the context of this both external and intrinsic is relentlessly to the purpose it s a concrete block as closed to the world as the windowless flak towers as luminous and contained in the august sun as the wittgenstein house approaching it the evenly rippled surface of the concrete reveals itself as hundreds maybe thousands of books turned inwards and therefore unreadable more than that unidentifiable untitled unauthored a library as lost as the library that might have graced the philosopher s house if it hadn t also in its way been condemned to silence a library of ruthlessly organised shelves in which the philosopher himself three quarters jewish and gay might easily have been included each nameless book the monument contains without which it could not exist is both text and person story and object each text is both unique and of equal inestimable worth each text and what it might tell us is closed to us and will remain so for ever the library has doors or what look like doors but here they are handleless by design there are no windows the monument like the other two monuments we ve seen is made of those archetypically twentieth century materials concrete and steel the latter the source of the immense wealth of the wittgenstein family posted in uncategorized vienna tagged concrete flak holocaust mak tower memorial rachel whiteread steel travel vienna waldheim wittgenstein 1 comment prodigal posted on august 1 2018 by charles lambert my new novel prodigal is published on 23 august if you d like to read the first chapter learn a little more about the book or listen to me talking about it try clicking here posted in uncategorized leave a comment promotion posted on september 15 2017 by charles lambert two years ago i was at the mantova literary festival to promote the italian translation of the view from the tower occasioni di morte published by voland i was talking with marcello fois the sardinian novelist and journalist carlo annese and i was struck as ever by the gap between writing a book and having to talk about it or even worse talk about issues that relate in some distant way to the perceived themes of the book you have a female narrator so what s your view on women in modern society generally part of the book deals with the red brigades so what do you think about the threat of daesh and so on at the end of the event the audience was told that copies of our latest books were on sale and that both authors would be delighted to sign them a line immediately formed in front of marcello fois a considerably shorter one in front of me when i d finished signing and marcello still had a score or so to deal wi...