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Brexit is back on the agenda

Dear readers of my blog,

having been reminded of my silence online by some readers, I must say that I don't regret to have read, written, and translated – in the dark, so to speak – for the past two months or so. Of course, it is not that I have forgotten to speak up about things, though, seriously, with so much change in the air owing to the virus crisis, it has not been easy to reconcile the restart of complete school populations in Lower Saxony with free time activities such as running a blog and website concerned with Oscar Wilde and anything under the sun that can possibly be related to him and his works.

 

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Blog Post July: The Covid-19 crisis covered in books

Dear readers of my blog,

once again there is a moment of time to spare which I would like to devote to reporting on books bought, read and re-read in the past few months. Some such acquisitions relate in more senses than one to the current crisis. First, their acquisition was the result of our being allowed to browse in the shops once more. Second, they all relate to the problems of mankind to adapt to health crises, whether in the 19th or the 21st century. In parenthesis, before I begin in earnest, and it is important to be earnest now, let me say that this sentence is the only one alluding to Oscar Wilde this time. Perhaps you can point out a link after having read this post. Thank you in advance. As ever, I will acknowledge such help.

To give you an overview, I first list the titles with all the bibliographical details:

On 6 May 2020 I bought several books at Weener, a little town, still in East Frisia, but on the western side of the River Ems where I had a moment to spend in the local bookstore. Earlier, I had been wandering round the old port or talking to a dear friend on the mobile for in early April everything was closed and the streets were deserted.

Paolo Giordano, In Zeiten der Ansteckung, translated from the Italian by Barbara Kleiner, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2020, 80 pp., 8.00 €.

 

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Addendum in English only: Oscar Wilde and Graham Swift: illusionists of literature

Dear readers of my blog,

certainly it is not a very convincing move to announce a few days ago I would not write on Graham Swift again for some time to come and to do so within less than a week. It might have been otherwise in a study with piles of work undone and lots of papers lost for the time being in files difficult to find because of being in no order whatsoever.

At the moment, though, owing to a refurbishment of my study that I had been thinking of for some time and which was realized, delivered and mounted by a local company of joiners according to my plans last week, I for once see through many angles of my work that normally seem to be hidden away. As a result, I also looked through newspaper articles kept during the period when the schools were completely closed, and there was one article I came across just after having uploaded the last blog post which dealt with Mothering Sunday as well as with Here We Are by Graham Swift.

While rereading this good article I recalled my first perusal and a silent wish on my part not to allow myself to fall under the spell of the reviewer's drift. In fact, this did not happen, though I still agree with most of his observations on both novels. Lothar Müller from the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, based in Munich, insists on Swift's view of all people being “secret agents”, both in the literal sense of following Joseph Conrad's novel of that title, which is an influence on Jane Fairchild, the narrator in Mothering Sunday, and in the figurative sense of living with their secrets all their lives.

 

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Wildes Hauptwerk

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"Das Bildnis des Dorian Gray"

Über mich

Jörg W. Rademacher (*1962), born and bred in Westphalia. Attended university at Münster, Dundee and Lille. State exam in 1988. Ph.D. In 1993. Scholar, language teacher as well as writer and translator at Münster until 2002. Since 2002 secondary school teacher, writer and translator in East Frisia. Working on Wilde since 1988. Publishing on Wilde since 2000 as biographer and editor and translator, on a regular basis with Elsinor Verlag since 2012, since 2015 also editor and translator of Oscar Wilde calendars.

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