I am still running through my collection of Penguin paperbacks. The past week or so, my luck has been mixed. I have started four books, but finished only two of them. The other two I dropped about a third of the way through – for two very different reasons.

First, the successes.

(1) Andre Maurois was a very important French intellectual and writer of the early twentieth century. According to Wikipedia, he wrote 57 books and at least that many short stories over his career. What you probably don’t know about him is that his birth name was Emile Salomon Herzog, and was born into a Jewish family in Alsace. Surprise!

The book I read was “Ariel”, his biography of Percy Bysshe Shelley. He only lived to age 30, when he and a friend drowned off the coast of Italy in a small boat in a storm. Shelley was born to a wealthy family, but was never on good terms with his father, who wasn’t a fan of a life dedicated to atheism, poetry and literature and a sort of philosophy. Shelley ran off at a young age with the daughter of a pub keeper, had a child and then abandoned her in favor of Mary Wollstonecraft, the future author of “Frankenstein”. Their life was one of poverty, uncertainty, and movement. Maurois depicts Shelley as sort of a luftmensch, a man with his two feet planted firmly in the air. One of Shelley’s good friends was Lord Byron – who comes out even worse, not as a luftmensch, but as a unsympathetic cad, looking only to seduce women. Both Shelley and Byron were very attractive.

The book worth reading? Sure. The best possible biography of Shelley? Probably not. But very well written, as you would expect.

(2) Next, I read Thomas Mann’s final book, “Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man”. Like Schubert’s 9th Symphony, the book was not finished when the author died. The Penguin version is about 350 pages – the first person narrator is just beginning his round the world tour, year long journey, so who knows? This book could have been longer than “War and Peace”. I don’t know what Mann had in mind – maybe the narrator would have stopped in Lisbon (that’s where he was at the end of the unfinished manuscript) and never crossed the seas.

Felix Krull, the narrator, was born in a small town in Germany. His father made sparkling wine and was a big man in town, but then went bankrupt and died. Felix, his sister and mother were left to their own devices, and a family friend arranged for Felix to get a job in a Parisian hotel.

Now Felix, if you ask Felix, was the most attractive youth ever, and also the smartest, most clever and luckiest person alive. He is also the best linguist. And the book shows it, as he excels at his hotel work (starting out as an elevator operator, but quickly transitioning to a dining room waiter). He meets a young aristocrat who is in love with a lady of the night, and whose parents want him to take a trip around the world to rid him of his infatuation. Felix and the young man decide to change identities and Felix, now a marquis, travels to Lisbon, where he falls in love with the daughter of a scholar he met on the train. Her name is Zouzou, not to be confused with the love interest of the real marquis, who is Zaza.

The first half of the book, I think, is terrific, but after Felix starts on his journey, the narrative falls apart, starting with a long talk on the train about the nature of man and the universe. Without knowing, I would expect that, had Mann lived past 80, this part of the book would have been edited and extensively shortened. I would expect. But I still recommend the book – for some extraordinary scenes, such as Felix convincing the German army doctor that he is totally unfit for military service.

(3) I couldn’t get through Stevie Smith’s “Novel on Yellow Paper”, a stream of consciousness novel that I couldn’t understand at all. Maybe I would have in 1936, but maybe not. At any rate, about a third through, I decided I was really wasting my time.

Smith was basically a poet, and she took, when she was a young woman, a book of poems to a publisher, who said “No, thanks. Why don’t you come back with a novel?” She did just that, and when he saw the novel, he said “No thanks”. I and that publisher see eye to eye. Another publisher thought differently, and apparently the book was a success.

(4) The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila. The introduction of this book says it was the second most read book of the 16th century in Spain. OK, and it does have some interesting.

Teresa, born in Avila in 1515, less than 25 years since the expulsion of the Jews, was the daughter of a “formerly” Jewish father and a Christian mother. Clearly, there was some Jewishy stuff going on in her house, and she was close to her father, who she describes as quite religious (in a Christian sense, to be sure).

She was the youngest of a large family and her father’s favorite. She was a self-described sinner (although her sins seem to be limited to wearing nice clothes and looking in the mirror) and wound up in a convent. Her story is interesting – she was very sick, she was miraculously healed by St. Joseph, she became very contemplative and mystically oriented and wound up reforming the Carmelite order, creating new convents all through Spain.

But her book reads like a Christian Marcus Aurelius. Every line is advice on how to live a good and godly life. That’s ok, and of interest, I thought – I agreed with some things, not with others, and still others I had to think about.

Why didn’t I finish the book? It was Ground Hog Day. Page 265 was just like page 43. Too much repetition. Probably not meant to be read straight through.

That’s all for now.