… and I don’t think I’ll be bothering with a third. Does anyone else feel guilty when they read books by prize-winning authors and just don’t get what the big deal is? It’s like the emperor’s new clothes: you feel as if you should agree with everyone else or you’ll look stupid.
The first one, Baltasar & Blimunda, wasn’t *too* bad. It was set just after the War of the Spanish Succession, which was a good start because that’s a pet topic of mine. Baltasar had lost an arm fighting for Portugal in the war. Blimunda was on her own because her mother had been transported to Angola for alleged heresy. They got together and … er, got mixed up with a priest, who was apparently a real person, who wanted to invent a flying machine. I’m not quite sure what the point of it all was, but at least it was genuine historical stuff, with a lot of references to the Royal Family and the building of the Convent of Mafra. Even if there was a lack of punctuation, and some of the paragraphs went on for several pages.
The second one, The History of the Siege of Lisbon, sounded as if it should be set in 1147. Only it wasn’t. It was set in the 1980s, and was about a Portuguese proof-reader who inserted the word “not” into a book about the Siege of Lisbon, to change the meaning. I have no idea why. Well, I think it was something to do with history only being what we think it is. But we know what happened at the Siege of Lisbon, so it was all a bit pointless. The “not” bit made it read as if crusaders from other countries didn’t join in. But they did. One of them was Henry II’s illegitimate son, William Longsword, who features in some of Elizabeth Chadwick’s books. Then he (the proof-reader, not William) got together with an attractive doctor. And he ate a lot of tins of tuna. Ditto the point about long paragraphs and lack of punctuation.
It’s the same with the Oscars. Sometimes they go to films which we are apparently meant to think are wonderful, but which some of us just don’t get. And then you wonder whether you’re genuinely missing something, or whether the people who give the awards are just being pretentious …