Today is Françoise Sagan Day at Never Yet Melted.

In the New Yorker recently, on the basis of no particular occasion, Rachel Cusk remembered Françoise Sagan, the French teenage gamin who produced a short novel that meteorically became an international best-seller in the late 1950s.

The obituaries that followed Françoise Sagan’s death, in 2004, were full of the sense of… failure. She had become, we were told, a tragic figure: destitute, isolated, tainted by scandal and alcoholism. She had, of course, produced many books, but none as successful and hence as troubling to history as her first, which was published when she was just nineteen. In that book, “Bonjour Tristesse,” she described the hedonism and amorality of youth, the hedonism and amorality of well-heeled French intellectuals, the hedonism and amorality of postwar Europe on the cusp of the sixties. Not surprisingly, it was the hedonism and amorality of her life that interested the obituary writers. For there it was, her fetter, her fate: from this slender, misunderstood novel, and from its young heroine, Cécile, Françoise Sagan never escaped. “Bonjour Tristesse” concludes with a fatal car accident, and three years after its publication Sagan, whose love of dangerous driving forms part of the legend of her life, sustained severe head injuries when her Aston Martin crashed at high speed. The disappointment among the obituary writers that the author did not submit then and there to her fictional destiny was palpable.

The hedonism and amorality of “Bonjour Tristesse” is of a most artistically proper kind. Morality, and its absence, is the novel’s defining theme: in this sense, Sagan is far more of a classicist than others of her existentialist brethren, such as Sartre and Camus. Certainly, she concerns herself with the twentieth-century problem of personal reality, of the self and its interaction with behavioral norms, but in “Bonjour Tristesse” those norms are as much psychic as they are societal. Cécile, a motherless seventeen-year-old whose permissive, feckless father has provided the only yardstick for her personal conduct, offers Sagan a particularly naked example of the human sensibility taking shape. Cécile’s encounters with questions of right and wrong, and with the way those questions cut across her physical and emotional desires, constitute an interrogation of morality that is difficult to credit as the work of an eighteen-year-old author. What is the moral sense? Where does it come from? Is it intrinsic? If not, does that discredit morality itself? These are the questions that lie at the heart of Sagan’s brief and disturbing novel.

RTWT

I read “Bonjour Tristesse” when I was young and remember it with affection for delivering a glimpse, startling and alarming to straight-laced, petite bourgeois, provincial Americans like myself, into a far more glamorous and sophisticated upper class French world of hyper-refined sensibilities and sin.

The New Yorker’s unexpected blast from the past brought back such memories that I had to blog it, and when I went looking for a suitable image, I found both a long article (in French) on Sagan’s passion for automotive speed and her delightfully colorful Telegraph obituary, both of which demanded quotation. So the irresistible Françoise Sagan is getting three blog postings, not one.

What can I say? She was indubitably the sort of girl that Conrad’s Marlow would describe as “one of us.”

Gwyneth Paltrow’s home library in Los Angeles curated by Thatcher Wine.

Ben Sixsmith, at the Spectator, is bemused by Town and Country reporting that Gwyneth Paltrow had her home library “curated” by a fellow named “Thatcher Wine.”

‘Books do furnish a room’ is the thesis Thatcher Wine has built his career around (yes, that is his name, not the special vintage of some kind of hideous Young Tory club.) Wine is Gwyneth Paltrow’s ‘book curator’, as an interview in Town & Country Magazine describes. …

‘…there was a delightful, if unexpected, realization. Book lovers remembered that books aren’t just for reading, they can also be beautiful objects in and of themselves.’

Well, sure. You don’t have to tell me about the romance of the musty old doorstopper and the well-thumbed paperback. But where does the curiously named Mr Wine come in? His ‘philosophy’, he claims:

‘…is that the books we keep on our shelves reflect who we are.’

What a weltanschauung. But what does this mean in practice? Well, for example, Mr Wine creates custom book jackets to ensure that books fit the décor of a room:

‘People have invested in how their home looks: They chose the cabinets, the carpets, the paint, and the window coverings. Why settle for books that a publisher designed?’

You know, I’ve been thinking that my dog might not suit my living room’s color scheme. Could I spray paint her a darker brown? Why settle for the dogs that nature designed.

Mr Wine is asked what books are fashionable currently. ‘The Stoic philosophers are having a moment now,’ he says. Great to hear that stoicism is having a moment. This year’s top trends: velvet capes, Billie Eilish and Zeno of Citium.

Wine is fascinating on the subject of the curation he has done for Ms Paltrow:

‘In the family room we integrated the books into her existing collection so that it felt very light, inviting, and easy to grab off the shelves. In the dining room, we stuck to a more rigid color palette of black, white, and gray since it was less of a space where one might hang out and read.’

———-

More:

Ok, give us the details: What is on Gwyneth’s bookshelf?

Gwyneth remodeled her L.A. home a few years ago and when she moved in she realized she needed about five or six hundred more books to complete the shelves. I looked at books she already owned, which focused on fashion, art, culture, photography, and architecture, as well as books that her kids liked. We expanded on those topics, and for the kids, we included a selection of classics that we thought they might like as they got older.

In the family room we integrated the books into her existing collection so that it felt very light, inviting, and easy to grab off the shelves. In the dining room, we stuck to a more rigid color palette of black, white, and gray since it was less of a space where one might hang out and read.

What are three things a person can do to curate their own home library?

First, think about what you are trying to accomplish. Is there a story you are trying to tell? A color palette you want to achieve? Then think about how that might work within the context of your home and available space. Second, acquire the books. Depending on how important the style and binding of the cover is to you, buy them intentionally either at your local bookstore or through online listings. Third, arrange your books in a way that makes you feel comfortable and looks inviting. It may take a few hours to get it just right.

Or you could just sort them by category and author, or leave them in large, disorderly piles everywhere the way I do.

Power-line’s Steve Hayward has an important new book recommendation.

This week’s mail brought me Anthony Kronman’s new book, The Assault on American Excellence, which begins with a chronicle of the follies of Yale University, where Kronman teaches and once served as dean of Yale Law. … I got to meet Prof. Kronman at a terrific colloquium about Max Weber last year at UCLA, where he told me some about his new book, which arose out of his rising disgust with identity politics and what it is doing to higher education. In one sentence, it is bringing “higher education” quite low.

Kronman is significant because, like Columbia’s Mark Lilla, he considers himself to be a liberal/progressive in his general political views. As such, he represents perhaps a last gasp of an older liberalism what was generally liberal. And sure enough, like Mark Lilla, Kronman has drawn some early attacks for the book, such as this disgraceful review in the Washington Post by Wesleyan University president Michael Roth, who I thought might be part of the resistance to the nihilism of identity politics, but turns out instead now to be a fraud.

I suspect Kronman is going to get a frosty reception in the Yale faculty lounges and faculty meetings. But all hope is not lost. Last summer we reported on the campaign of journalist Jamie Kirchick to be elected as the Alumni Fellow to the board of the Yale Corporation, with the intentions of trying to argue at the board level about Yale’s moral and intellectual dereliction. To be a candidate in the board election requires a lot of Yale alumni signatures within a short window of time, and Kirchick’s drive fell short.

This year Nicholas Quinn Rosencranz, a Yale Law grad and currently professor of law at Georgetown, is running an insurgent campaign. (The Rosencranz family has been very generous to Yale over the years; there’s a building named for them.) See this statement of the Alumni for Excellence at Yale about the myriad reasons for his candidacy, but most important, if you are a Yale alum (undergraduate or graduate school), scroll to the bottom and click on the button to sign Nick’s petition to be put on the board ballot. He needs to get 4,266 alumni signatures by October 1, at which point a full-fledged campaign can begin to win the alumni vote.

Left: Rachel DeLoache Williams; right: “Anna Delvey,” really Anna Sorokin in Marrakech.

She posed as a German heiress planning to lease for her own foundation a Manhattan building for a visual-arts center dedicated to contemporary art, which would also house a lounge, bar, art galleries, studio space, restaurants, and a members-only club.

She met fashionable young New York professionals at chic restaurants and bars where, Ooops! her phone failed to work when trying to charge the check, and she hadn’t bothered carrying a credit card. So her new friends obliging picked up the tab this time.

She took the dazzled Rachel DeLoache Williams, who worked at Vanity Fair, on a little outing to a [£5,485 a night] villa she’d booked at Marrakech. But it did not work quite the way Rachel was expecting.

Stylist:

On the morning we were supposed to leave, she asked for my help booking the flights because there was a problem with her card. I didn’t think too much of it; this was just the way she was: disorganised. I’d seen her book things last minute so many times and I knew she would reimburse me.

From there, it was a trickle effect. At the airport, Anna ‘accidentally’ checked her wallet, which meant I had to pay for everyone’s dinner (she brought a photographer and her personal trainer, too). Her card still wasn’t working for the rest of the trip, so I began adding things to a tab (dinners, kaftans). I had presumed our villa was pre-paid, but at some point the hotel manager began asking to speak with Anna.
The penny drops

On the third day of the trip, I walked into our villa and the hotel managers were standing in the doorway. Anna was sitting with her phone on the table in front of her, like she was waiting for something. A call, apparently. One of the managers turned to me and asked if I had a credit card. They were firm. I looked to Anna and she said ‘use it for now’. My stomach sank. It would have felt weirdly ungrateful to show my annoyance, so I gave it to them. I was told the charge was only temporary – it wasn’t – and I left the next morning, a day before she did.

This is when everything started to unravel. Every day I asked her for the money back and every day she promised it would arrive. I thought she was just doing a characteristically bad job of following through with logistical things. It was $62,000 [about £48,800] in total.

This went on for an excruciatingly long time – two months – and my life started falling apart. I was having panic attacks constantly, not sleeping. It took me a strikingly long time to even ask myself the question: what if she never pays you back? Because that would mean I’d have to look at how that would impact my life, and I knew if I did that, I would’ve lost it. I already wasn’t saving any money – New York is expensive, and I was barely breaking even – so to be set back 60-something thousand dollars? It felt like, ‘I am never going to get out of this hole. This is where it ends for me. I’m not going to get to buy a house, I’m not going to get to be a real adult, I’m never going to have kids.’

——————-

More book excerpts at Crime Reads.

But, cheer up, Rachel wrote up the story of her misfortunes as a book, My Friend Anna: The True Story of a Fake Heiress, and she will probably come out ahead in the end.

Stanislas Gosse, a low-paid teacher from a Strasburg engineering school, successfully removed the most valuable treasures from the collection of the Abbey of Sainte Odile over a period of years. He didn’t try selling them. He was just a connoisseur of books.

Pocket Worthy:

On May 19, near 7 p.m., Stanislas Gosse drove his Citroën to Mont Sainte-Odile. He brought ropes, three suitcases, gray plastic bags and a flashlight. Once inside the main courtyard, he headed straight to the second floor of the Sainte-Odile aisle of the guesthouse. He walked down a corridor, opened a door using a key pinched during a previous trip, and found himself in the church’s bell tower.

He tied the ropes to a wooden beam above a trapdoor in the floor and climbed down into a dark, windowless room of about 10 feet by 10 feet with a short 7-foot ceiling. Through an opening in the wall, he slipped into a second, narrow room. A dim light filtered through cracks in the lower part of a wall. The thief gently slid two wooden panels open, revealing rows of neatly lined up books on two shelves inside a cupboard. He took the books off, then one shelf, before sneaking inside the library. At the library in Strasbourg, he had found what he had been looking for in an article from a local history journal that mentioned a secret passage, unknown to anyone currently working at the abbey, except Dietrich, the janitor. It had probably once been used as a hiding place for the monks or as an ossuary — a place to store bones.

Gosse selected a few books, wrapped them in plastic bags, then crawled back inside the cupboard. In the second room, he flipped a wooden crate, climbed on it and hauled the bags through the hatch onto the attic. He climbed up the rope, moved the books to a nearby table to clear the hatch, and climbed back down. He repeated the operation eight times throughout the evening. By the time he was done, more than a hundred books were stacked up in the attic. Around 2 a.m., he stuffed the suitcases with books and left them behind, planning to pick them up later.

RTWT

The Guardian reports on the discovery of a bibliophilic treasure house.

[A] huge volume containing thousands of summaries of books from 500 years ago, many of which no longer exist… has been found in Copenhagen, where it has lain untouched for more than 350 years.

The Libro de los Epítomes manuscript, which is more than a foot thick, contains more than 2,000 pages and summaries from the library of Hernando Colón, the illegitimate son of Christopher Columbus who made it his life’s work to create the biggest library the world had ever known in the early part of the 16th century. Running to around 15,000 volumes, the library was put together during Colón’s extensive travels. Today, only around a quarter of the books in the collection survive and have been housed in Seville Cathedral since 1552.

The discovery in the Arnamagnæan Collection in Copenhagen is “extraordinary”, and a window into a “lost world of 16th-century books”, said Cambridge academic Dr Edward Wilson-Lee, author of the recent biography of Colón, The Catalogue of Shipwrecked Books.

“It’s a discovery of immense importance, not only because it contains so much information about how people read 500 years ago, but also, because it contains summaries of books that no longer exist, lost in every other form than these summaries,” said Wilson-Lee. “The idea that this object which was so central to this extraordinary early 16th-century project and which one always thought of with this great sense of loss, of what could have been if this had been preserved, for it then to just show up in Copenhagen perfectly preserved, at least 350 years after its last mention in Spain …”

The manuscript was found in the collection of Árni Magnússon, an Icelandic scholar born in 1663, who donated his books to the University of Copenhagen on his death in 1730. The majority of the some 3,000 items are in Icelandic or Scandinavian languages, with only around 20 Spanish manuscripts, which is probably why the Libro de los Epítomes went unnoticed for hundreds of years…

After amassing his collection, Colón employed a team of writers to read every book in the library and distill each into a little summary in Libro de los Epítomes, ranging from a couple of lines long for very short texts to about 30 pages for the complete works of Plato…

Because Colón collected everything he could lay his hands on, the catalogue is a real record of what people were reading 500 years ago, rather than just the classics. “The important part of Hernando’s library is it’s not just Plato and Cortez, he’s summarising everything from almanacs to news pamphlets. This is really giving us a window into the entirety of early print, much of which has gone missing, and how people read it – a world that is largely lost to us,” said Wilson-Lee.

Wilson-Lee and Pérez Fernández are currently working on a comprehensive account of the library, which will be published in 2020.

RTWT

HT: Karen L. Myers.

Perigold has very nice, and quite expensive lamps, and it also sells books for entirely decorative purposes, grouped by color and style of binding.

Above we see 50 book (five linear feet of them) in green. You can get red and blue and beige and even colorful dust jacketed books! Perfect for morons who do not read.

Merlin’s name appears in recently discovered MSS. text.

Atlas Obscura:

Medieval fragments of Arthurian legend have been sitting in the Bristol Central Library for hundreds of years and no one noticed—until now. The newly discovered text—hidden in a later book—tells of a battle in which Merlin leads a charge using a dragon banner that actually breathes fire.

The 13th-century manuscript pages were tucked away in the binding of a later, printed book, a four-volume set of the works of Jean Gerson, a French scholar and theologian. The Gerson text was printed in Strasbourg, on the French-German border, sometime between 1494 and 1502, before making its way to England. ”The [Gerson] text would have come to England unbound, without covers—it’s lighter and easier to travel that way,” explains Leah Tether, a librarian and president of the British branch of the International Arthurian Society. “In England, whoever ordered them would then have taken them to a local bookbinder, and he would have added the covers.” That’s where the much earlier Arthurian pages came into play.

Paper-making and bookbinding weren’t yet codified crafts in 16th-century England, and piecing together fragments of old manuscripts to hide unsightly binding features of new books was a trick of the bookbinding trade. Vellum pages like those of the Arthurian fragments were written on painstakingly prepared calfskin. Too precious to be thrown out, vellum, regardless of what was already on it, would have been kept in a workshop to be used again in a pinch. In this case, they had been repurposed as pastedowns, or the endpapers covering the boards of the Gerson book’s inside cover.

Then, sometime in the 19th century, a Bristol book conservator carefully lifted these pages off the hard inside cover of the book and rebound them as flyleaves, those extra blank pages at the beginnings and ends of books. “Sometimes things that don’t have value to one person might have some value to someone else,” says Tether. “Maybe they thought, ‘Let’s turn them into flyleaves so someone who wants to can read them one day.’” …

The Arthurian manuscript is written in Old French, the first language in which the tales were recorded. “We can tell immediately by the handwriting style that it’s from the 13th century,” says Tether. While library scientists are still working to pinpoint its age, they believe it dates from some time between 1250 and 1270. The earliest known Arthurian texts are from 1220, so this is a remarkably early version. Tales of King Arthur were passed along orally long before they were written down. It would still be at least a hundred years from this French text’s time before they were written down in English.

The librarians have determined that the newly discovered pages tell the story of the Battle of Trèbes, in which Merlin, King Arthur’s advisor, exhorts Arthur and his worn-out troops to persist in their fight against King Claudas, after which he leads the charge with the fire-breathing magical banner. There are some minor differences between how the battle is described in these pages and the version commonly accepted today. For instance, the story usually states that King Claudas suffered a thigh wound in this battle, considered a metaphor for castration or impotence. In the newly discovered version, the type of wound isn’t specified. These early details may change our understanding of the familiar tale, and tell us more about how the story changed as it went from oral renderings to French to English—and to modern versions.

RTWT

“The Gashlycrumb Tinies: or, After the Outing,” an abecedarian book by Edward Gorey, published in 1963.

The New Republic pays tribute to the late Edward Gorey, who made a career out of eccentricity and tongue-in-cheek morbidity on the occasion of a new biography: Born to be Posthumous by Mark Dery.

Although he played up his eccentricities in public, Gorey was fundamentally a shy, private man who seemed to take a perverse pride in the dullness of his own existence. “My life is as near not being one as is possible I think,” he wrote to a friend in 1951, and things didn’t pick up much from there. He had relatively few friends, and virtually no close ones. He lived alone (or, rather, with cats) for decades, first in Manhattan and later in a Federal-style house on Cape Cod. He had no sexual or romantic relationships that we know of, and his rise to relative fame in the 1970s and ’80s changed his lifestyle very little.

Born in Chicago in 1925, the only child of middle-class parents, Gorey taught himself to read at three and a half, and was soon consuming Victorian and Edwardian classics in copious doses, including Dickens and Dracula, as well as the then-new detective novels of Agatha Christie. (All of these left a permanent impress on his imagination: Though Gorey never visited England, he was a lifelong Anglophile; many of his more casual fans still assume he was British.) In 1942, he won a scholarship to Harvard, but the draft delayed his matriculation. He spent the duration of World War II doing clerical work at an Army base in Utah, and amused himself by writing closet dramas under the pseudonym “Stephen Crest.” In these plays, Dery reports, “the characters have names like Piglet Rossetti and Basil Prawn and dress more or less the way you’d imagine people named Piglet Rossetti and Basil Prawn would dress—in purple espadrilles and ‘mauve satin ribbons [that] cling like bedraggled birds to bosom, thigh, and wrist.’” His fellow recruits were, presumably, baffled.

Gorey’s aesthetic idiosyncrasies blossomed when he finally arrived at Harvard in 1946. It was during this period that he adopted the extravagant costume he would later be famous for: Dery describes him “swanning around campus in his signature getup of sneakers and a long canvas coat with a sheepskin collar, fingers heavy with rings.” (Later on Gorey would favor raccoon coats, but he never ditched the tennis shoes.) He also grew a full beard that made him resemble the solemn Edwardian patriarchs who would soon populate his books. He roomed with the poet Frank O’Hara (they shared a fondness for Marlene Dietrich, and had a tombstone for a coffee table) and befriended other future literary luminaries like John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Barbara Epstein, and Alison Lurie.

After college, Gorey moved to New York to take a job at a new paperback imprint called Anchor Books. There he designed book covers for reprints of classic novels by Herman Melville, Henry James, and others, and crucial elements of his style evolved, including his distinctive hand-lettering, which arose from his frustration working with type. It was also around this time that he developed a quasi-religious devotion to the choreographer George Balanchine, the artistic director of the New York City Ballet, where Gorey maintained an almost perfect attendance record between 1956 and 1979; he would later call Balanchine “the great, important figure in my life … sort of like God.” (Dery observes that “Gorey’s characters often strike balletic poses and tend to stand with their feet turned out, in ballet positions,” as Gorey often did himself.)

Gorey’s reputation built gradually. From the start his works were prominently displayed at the counter in the Gotham Book Mart, a legendary independent bookstore in midtown Manhattan, which brought him to the attention of literary tastemakers. His first book, The Unstrung Harp, was published in 1953. It told the story of Mr. Clavius Frederick Earbrass, an author afflicted by writer’s block; Graham Greene called it “the best novel ever written about a novelist.” His small cult following expanded considerably when Edmund Wilson devoted a column to “the albums of edward gorey” in the pages of The New Yorker in 1959. In 1972, Amphigorey, a mass-market omnibus reprinting 15 of Gorey’s little books, became a surprise best-seller. Other milestones were the 1977 Broadway production of Dracula, starring Frank Langella, for which Gorey designed the sets and costumes, and the 1980 premiere of the PBS television series Mystery!, featuring an animated credit sequence based on images from Gorey’s books.

By the time he died in 2000, Gorey was a minor celebrity, much sought after both as a freelance illustrator and as a profile subject. He devoted his last years on Cape Cod, touchingly, to writing, designing, and directing avant-garde plays for a local theater troupe called Le Théatricule Stoïque. One of them, Omlet, or Poopies Dallying, was a collage of garbled texts from early versions of Hamlet, performed with handmade papier-mâché puppets. From Dery’s descriptions, these shows, few of which ever made it off the Cape, were as strange as anything in the Gorey oeuvre, and proof of the strong streak of perversity that never deserted him.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was so influential a philosopher that, back when I was in college, Philosophy instructors on both sides of the Atlantic were notoriously prone to imitate his very mannerisms.

I’d say myself that Wittgenstein’s fame, influence, and popularity were ultimately based not so much on either the logical force of his arguments or his definitive contributions to Philosophy, but rather upon his eccentric personality, his striking good looks, and the literary appeal of his aphoristic statements.

Wittgenstein was a tremendously Romantic figure, who wrote the Tractatus, the work he asserted at the time that resolved all the questions of Philosophy, while fighting as an artillery officer in the trenches of WWI.

Born to a fabulously wealthy and conspicuously talented noble family (of Jewish origin), Ludwig Wittgenstein renounced all his inherited wealth and lived a famously tormented, eremitical life of the greatest simplicity and abstemiousness. (He was presumably simultaneously battling against his homosexuality and atoning for his rare and reluctant surrenders to those impulses.)

Having, in his own view, solved all the main issues of Philosophy, he simply walked away from a prestigious teaching position at Cambridge, and the comradeship of Bertrand Russell and G.E Moore, to work as a primary schoolteacher in a primitive rural village.

He concluded that he had been mistaken, and that he had not actually solved all of Philosophy’s problems, so he returned reluctantly to Cambridge, where he endeavored to “cure” people of Philosophy, trying to persuade his students to do something useful instead.

His engagement with ideas was intense and passionate, and he could be seen to be struggling passionately with his own thoughts as he conducted his classes. However ultimately inconclusive his results, his prose was poetical and aphoristic, yet also compelling, and attempts to follow, or merely imitate, his mode of philosophizing became the dominant academical approach throughout the English-speaking world.

I like Wittgenstein myself every bit as much as the next fellow, and I normally buy any book about him at all, but I was dismayed last night to come upon (Gawd help us!) the abridged reprint edition of F.A. Flowers III and Ian Ground’s Portraits of Wittgenstein, a collection of 50 portraits of, and reflections upon, dear old Ludwig, going for $255 in hardcover and $37 in stinking paperback.

The 2016 original two-volume hardcover edition (obviously the one you want) goes these days at the lowest for around 500 clams.

You can picture Wittgenstein shaking his head, and launching into a condemnatory rant.

———————————

Frank Freeman’s review here.

Wittgenstein took philosophy personally; it was a struggle of intellectual integrity, clear thinking, sincerity. And because Wittgenstein was such a charismatic figure, this meant that his philosophy was inextricable from his life. It was as if he was all alone in the world and everyone else witnesses of his struggle.

This is why a book such as Portraits of Wittgenstein makes such compelling reading. First published in 2016 in two volumes (1138 pages), the book has now been cut in half by its editors, making it more accessible. It is a collection of essays written by people who knew or came into contact with Wittgenstein over the years. Most people who did so either hated him or loved him; almost all feared him. John Maynard Keynes, a friend, wrote about Wittgenstein, “God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.” Even someone, such as this writer, who thinks there are philosophical problems, can find himself fascinated by, even rapt in this kaleidoscopic portrait of a genius, a saint-like holy fool of philosophy who lived his philosophy to the uttermost.

Nigerian-born Bim Adewunmi fell in love as a teenager with the characters and California milieu of the (My god! there were nowhere nearly that many Hardy boys books.) 181-volume young adult series Sweet Valley High.

Last night I dreamt I went to Sweet Valley again.

I dreamt I went to high school with Bruce Patman, Lila Fowler, Todd Wilkins, and of course, the most important fictional twins of my young life, Jessica and Elizabeth Wakefield. I dreamt I knew those twins — identical in every way, right down to their perfect size-six figures, honey-blonde hair, and aquamarine eyes. At one point in my life, I thought about these twins and the assorted all-American boys and girls that made up their high school class as often as I did anything of significance in life. The novelistic tales of the Wakefields and their frenemies, pals, and rivals were interwoven with the fabric of my own real life in a way that felt close to irreversible. My school transcripts might suggest otherwise, but I know in my heart that I attended Sweet Valley High.

For those who weren’t there, or choose not to remember, Sweet Valley was the fictional town created by New York author Francine Pascal (now 80), and the setting for a series of young adult books that shook the world for generations of readers. The first of what would go on to expand to 181 books was published when I was barely a year old, in 1983, but I know that when I first got my hands on them, a decade later, everything still felt fresh, exciting, and, oddly enough, very relatable.

In the Wakefield twins — perpetually 16 years old or thereabouts — I found a sort of kinship. These blondes were as familiar to me as any single one of my friends at my all-girls boarding school in the southern Nigerian city of Sagamu, one state over from our home in Lagos. I knew them intimately and could probably have picked them out in a crowd of similarly blonde and peppy Californian teenagers with no difficulty. The sun beating over my head was a few time zones and thousands of miles away, but it was the same sun. And most days that was enough.

RTWT

I can understand. When I was in elementary school, I absolutely loved the Rick Brant Science Adventure series. Who would not, as a small boy, want to live on an island, have access to a laboratory, get to help adult scientists, and own his own airplane?

Bim Adewunmi.

This must be the European edition dust jacket.

Hugo Drochon, reviewing Sue Prideaux’s new Nietzsche biography, I Am Dynamite in the Irish Times, explains that this one is a revolutionary revisionist bio that fans of Fred will have to read. I bought mine.

On the morning of January 3rd, 1889 a half-blind German professor, sporting a luxurious moustache, left his lodgings on the third floor of Via Carlo Alberto 6 in Turin. He was used to taking his daily walk through the famous arcades of the city, which shielded him from the light, and along the banks of the river Po. He would walk up to five hours a day, which explained his muscular frame: somewhat in dire contrast to the various illnesses that notoriously plagued his life.

But that day he did not get very far. He walked less than 200m to the Piazza Carignano, and what happened next is the stuff of legend: seeing an old recalcitrant horse being flogged mercilessly by its owner, the professor threw his arms around the horse to protect it – perhaps even whispering “Mother, I have been stupid” in its ear (how can anyone have heard that?) – and collapsing. He was saved from being escorted by two policemen to the asylum by his landlord, Davide Fino, who brought him home. We might never know exactly what happened on that fateful day, but one thing is certain: the productive and intellectual life of the great philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had come to an end.

In her wonderfully gripping new biography of Nietzsche – the type you stay in bed all Sunday just to finish – Sue Prideaux casts doubt on this story. Indeed, the horse only makes an appearance in the legend 11 years later – in 1900, the year of Nietzsche’s death – when a journalist interviewed Fino, the landlord, about the events of the day. And only in the 1930s – more than 40 years later – do we hear about the horse being beaten and Nietzsche breaking down in tears; this time in an interview with Fino’s son, Ernesto, who would have been about 14 at the time.

Despite no corroboration on the German side – from neither his sister nor his friend Overbeck, who brought him back to Basle – the “Nietzsche horse meme”, to put it in today’s terms, has proved hugely popular. It features in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and the horse itself has got its own biopic in the form of an 2011 film The Turin Horse by Hungarian film-makers Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, which proposes a storyline of what happened to the horse after the event. To make things even stranger, the story of a horse being flogged to death appears in Nietzsche’s favourite author Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, written when the latter was 44: exactly Nietzsche’s age when he broke down.

Prideaux casts even more doubt on the cause usually attributed to this insanity: syphilis. Popularised by Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus, which has a Nietzsche-like character contract syphilis in a brothel, the evidence simply doesn’t stack up. Although diagnosed as such when admitted to the asylum in Basle, Nietzsche showed none of symptoms now associated with it: no tremor, faceless expression or slurred speech. If he was at an advanced stage of dementia caused by syphilis, Nietzsche should have died within the next two years; five max. He lived for another 11. The two infections he told the doctors about were for gonorrhoea, contracted when he was a medical orderly during the Franco-Prussian War.

Instead Prideaux puts forward the – correct – view that Nietzsche probably died of a brain tumour, the same “softening of the brain” that had taken away his father, a rural pastor, when Nietzsche was a boy. Indeed both sides of the family showed signs of neurological problems, or of suffering of “nerves”, as one put it at the time. Nietzsche’s younger sister Elisabeth certainly seemed prone, in posthumously making him palatable to the Nazis in her Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, to a degree of megalomania herself (she had herself buried in the middle of the Nietzsche family burial ground, on the spot originally reserved for her brother).

At stake is whether Nietzsche’s writings, and especially his theory of the Übermensch, should just be dismissed as the ravings of a madman. Here the story of the horse takes on particular importance: if true it would mean Nietzsche repented his views, asking for forgiveness for having demanded that modern man should “overcome” himself, to become “hard” by eschewing pity. This is certainly Kundera’s view, and it makes for a much nicer, more docile Nietzsche. But if there is no horse, or at least if there is no sobbing and protecting a flogged horse – that there is a mental breakdown is beyond doubt – then Nietzsche means what he says and his thinking is, in the words of Prideaux, dynamite.

RTWT