In Search of Lost Books by Giorgio van Straten (2016)

I suspect that this may have more clout in the original Italian. It strikes me that there are attempts here to render little bursts of poetic prose into English, alongside a majority which feels in English a bit ordinary. I don't know Italian, but my feeling is that there is perhaps a simple strain in it which retains poetry, but whose terms are not replicable, or not easily anyway. The subject matter is always of interest - the 'lost' novels of major writers, whose manuscripts were left on a train / burnt in a house fire / got rid of by a vicious ex, etc etc. The examples here are largely the obvious ones: Hemingway's juvenilia, Lowry's second novel, Plath's last, and so on. The likelihood is that a couple of them still exist; Bruno Schulz's is probably in old KGB files somewhere, or has been 'moved on' through various owners post the Soviet breakup; Plath's may well be amongst the papers Ted Hughes left to the University of Georgia, which cannot be looked at until 2022. The quality of these essays varies wildly, from a repellently flippant one on Hemingway, and a really silly one on Byron, to the tender one on Schulz, and a revealing stab at Walter Benjamin. On the whole it feels a bit too much on the light side, almost like it's a capitalisation on the books-on-books craze which seems to be current, which appears to have its monuments, but also a lot of dross. Perhaps, if I could read Italian, I would find here much more than this translation advertises.

Commonplace Book

'"And that's not the worst," she went on, rummaging in a small desk which stood open and seemed to be full of old newspapers. "Read this." She handed me a cutting headed OWL BITES WOMAN, from which I read that an owl had flown in through a cottage window one evening and bitten a woman on the chin. "And this," she went on, handing me another cutting which told how a swan had knocked a girl off her bicycle. "What do you think of that?"

"Oh, I suppose they were just accidents," I said.

"Accidents! Even Miss Jessop agrees that they are rather more than accidents, don't you, Miss Jessop?"

Miss Jessop made a quavering sound which might have been "Yes" or "No" but it was not allowed to develop into speech, for Mrs. Bone broke in by telling Everard that Miss Jessop wouldn't want any sherry.

"The Dominion of the Birds," she went on. "I very much fear it may come to that."'

from Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (Chapter Sixteen)

Commonplace Book

'...She had her own way of doing all that she did, and this is the simplest description of a character which, although by no means without liberal motions, rarely succeeded in giving an impression of suavity. Mrs Touchett might do a great deal of good, but she never pleased. This way of her own, of which she was so fond, was not intrinsically offensive - it was just unmistakably distinguished from the way of others...'

from The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (Chapter 3)