Отрывок из книги
Dorothy Canfield Fisher
Published by Good Press, 2021
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You will probably read it as I did, laying it down from time to time, to look up at the ceiling, pondering, "Is it of Cervantes' leisurely, by-path-following style that it reminds me? Or perhaps just R. L. Stevenson's more mannered--no, no, it is more like a Romantic School German narrator's way of telling a story. Or is that only because the grotesque and occasionally gruesome touches remind one of Hoffman? Perhaps it is because a foreigner, writing English, often falls as it were by accident on inimitably fresh ways of using our battered old words. Perhaps, quite simply, the style seems so original and strange because the personality using it is original and strange." And having come to no conclusion at all, you will turn back to read until you are again stopped by some passage for which you can't find a comparison in the writing you know. Like this one, in "The Supper at Elsinore" at the end of the party. The two middle-aged but still brilliant sisters "were happy to get rid of their guests; but a little silent bitter minute accompanied the pleasure. For they could still make people fall in love with them; they had the radiance in them which could refract little rainbow effects on the atmosphere of Copenhagen existence. But who could make them feel in love? At this moment, the tristesse of the eternal hostess stiffened them a little."
Or this beginning of "Roads Around Pisa." "Count Augustus von Schimmelmann, a young Danish nobleman of a melancholy disposition, who would have been very good-looking if he had not been a little too fat, was writing a letter on a table made out of a millstone, in the garden of an osteria near Pisa, on a fine May evening of 1823."
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