From Wales To Armenia In A Day. That's What Reading Can Do

Hello there. Hope you're feeling well today.

It's three forty five pm yesterday. I'm in the car waiting for my daughter's school bus to arrive. The weather is cliché Welsh. Cold, grey and pouring down with rain. No matter that this band of rain is going to sweep across most of Britain it's obviously "Welsh" weather. To sprinkle the cliché off you remind yourself that it's a Monday. I want to go home and have a cup of tea.

For this day I'm abandoning my normal reading schedule. Having hardly read anything for the last few days from being unwell I decided to concentrate on finishing one book of the current four I've got on the go at the moment. And, as it's the one, closest to the end that was An Armenian Sketchbook by Vasily Grossman.

This book is an account of his time in Armenia helping to translate a work by an Armenian writer into Russian. It's in the nineteen sixties so, Armenia as an independent nation doesn't exist (part of the then USSR). Interestingly Grossman does refer to Armenia as a nation often in this book. I'd wondered whether at that time it was rather like what Wales, Scotland are like now.

I've no idea whether calling it a Sketchbook comes from the Russian, but it's really a perfect title. There seems to be an organised randomness where he would explain something that happened to him and then go off on a tangent on something else only to return to the original event. The point though is that it's done effortlessly, and you the reader are not lost as he does so.

It's exactly what Twilight In Italy by D H Lawrence should have been but wasn't.

You can guess from the above that not only did I finish this book but I loved it. A book about a country (now) that I know little about in a time I can barely remember and yet (early days I know) it's the best book I've read this year so far. When I eventually move towards his novel Life and Fate it will encourage me.

Would it also encourage me to visit Armenia? No. Simply because I'd suspect that most of "the Armenia" that's in the book has long since gone. A few years ago I'd decided to visit the village of Gilfach Goch as it was apparently where Richard Llewellyn based his novel How Green Was My Valley. I knew that the coal mine was no more (interestingly there's now a wind farm there - quiet as well) but the building that the Inn/hotel was based on in the book was a ruin bordering on rubble.

One final point that I've mentioned in an earlier post. Not exactly a spoiler but the introduction might mention a fact about Grossman that will affect how you read the text. I can't go into any further details but you have been warned and not read it until you've finished the rest of it.

So the next book amongst the great eunread is Welcome To Kington by Miles Kington. A collection of this humourist's columns. I got it as I was wondering who else to read in this vein aside from Alan Coren and he came to mind.

From Wales To Armenia in a day.....that's what reading can do.

Until the next time.