Leo Paris, France

Well I first read Foucault's pendulum when I was 14 or 15 and at the time I really liked the story and the fact that it was a page-turner. I wanted to know how it ended. Then I re-read it many times, probably around 15-20, and I appreciated the amount of notions you get to learn from it. It relates about an alchemical view of history that was only popularized (in a bad way) by Dan Brown very recently, but that in 1988 was rather new. When I was at Imperial College I spent many happy afternoons at the top floor of the Science Museum Library building (which is part of the Imperial College Library) where I found a lot of the books that gave rise to the epigraphs introducing each chapter. I read some of these books and remarked how uninspiring, boring, dull and idiotic they were; and I told myself that only a genius writer could turn all that crap into a story that was so pleasant to read and whose roots were all based on published literature. Eco never invents much; he wrote a critique to Dan Brown's book where he says that the idea of Jesus being married to Mary Magdalene was a recursive theme in medieval and renaissance alchemical/theological philosophy; he just nicked it and put it in his book, but in such a way that it was credible. Dan Brown gave up credibility, and just nicked it full stop. In a way, I like Foucault's pendulum because the things it says are all documented; it is a veritable bibliography. This is very different from Dan Brown and the legion of other writers that followed.

One other thing I liked about it is much more personal. It relates about Milan in a way that makes this city sound alive, interesting, like a cultural beehive. When I was 14, this is how I dreamt I would live Milan as an adult. University politics, enlightened friends with whom you could debate all night long about a fantastic academy where courses names were oxymora de re and de facto. Things like ``avunculogratular mechanics" being the art of building machines to say hi to your aunt had me rolling on the floor laughing for hours. Same goes for ``tetrapiloctomy", the art of splitting hairs (in four, as the Italian version of the saying goes). This was not invented by Eco alone. He was part of a cultural elite group called the ``'63 group", where he and some of his contemporaries experimented with words and concepts. I wanted to have friends like that when I grew up. Jacopo Belbo and Casaubon meet one day at a left-wing demonstration that turns nasty because some fascists from Piazza San Babila start some riots. A shot is heard in Via Laghetto, and the demonstration disbands in an unorderly way. Belbo and Casaubon run away and stop in Piazza del Duomo, where they start feeding the pigeons to melt in the crowd, under a bright sun and a dry wind, one of those clear days when even Milan appears beautiful. I crossed Piazza San Babila every day to go to the Conservatoire. A friend of mine lived close Via Laghetto, and I skateboarded in Piazza del Duomo. I not only knew those places, I lived in them daily. It was too intriguing to think that a millenia-old mystery had scattered its hints all around Europe, and that the people who investigated them were --- fictionally --- right there under my nose. When my father went to London and took us all with him, I was against this. I was just starting to make close friends, and I was plunged in a hostile environment that provided me with 2 years of pure hell. Of course I am now very glad of how things turned out for me, but at the time I could only cry over my lost love for Milan as it was just flourishing. When I finally went back to Milan in 2003, thirteen years later, I found virtually nothing of what I'd left. I never really found the time to go see Milan under a bright sun and a dry wind. I never again sat in the safe, covered Galleria Vittorio Emanuele a summer storm was raging all around. My skateboard is still with me but I never used it again in Milan (I used it a couple of times in Paris). No cultural debate with enlightened friends ensued, as everyone was frantically trying to make ends meet in today's ``temporary and badly paid work to youth" setting. I saw my old friends even more rarely than when I lived in London, paradoxically. At least when I was in London, when a friend came to see me, we spent a few days together. In Milan, the Urgent never left time to deal with the Important. Even University life in Milan was rather awful. Now I don't want to go into details here, suffice it to say that --- from a crooked point of view --- the bad experience ad Politecnico di Milano was beneficial because it finally told me that ``my" Milan only existed in my mind; I then felt free to pursue my career elsewhere, and now I would not go back to Milan for the world.

The final thing I like about the book is Casaubon's job. Chasing up old philological trails, historical information, a cultural detective so to speak, would have been my next best thing after mathematics. Back when I chose maths, in 1992, I actually thought about reading philology for a minute. Casaubon hunts for information halfway through Europe, and I followed him with envy every time I read the book, as he hid himself in the Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM) in Paris for the conclusive scene. This inspired me to take up a BSc thesis in history of mathematics, about an Italian physicist called Fabrizio Mossotti, that forced me to go read up old manuscripts and letters from the 1800s all over Europe: London, Milan, Vienna... (you can read about this in http://liberti.dhs.org/liberti/maths-history/mossotti/m… if you're interested) I felt a bit like Casaubon and was extremely proud of myself and very happy. Mossotti was involved in some secret societies, and I hunted their trails much like Casaubon. I must say that my search did not yield the conclusive piece of evidence I was after, to my dismay. But such is the difference between reality and fiction. You might be aware that the CNAM hosts both a museum and a university, and I had applied to an assistant professorship at the CNAM university last year. I did not make it, but during the interview I could not refrain from declaring that one of my strong motivation to apply there was Eco's Foucault's pendulum. The commission burst out laughing, and maybe that's why I wasn't offered the position. But I wouldn't have been able NOT to say that! I was even re-reading the book (in French) at the time, and really just by chance I had brought it with me to the interview, making myself look more like a head case than is really true.

This is the book I read most translations of. My father bought me a copy in 1988. Well in fact it might have been as early as 1986. I'll check my copy, it's sure to be earlier than the ISBN I registered here. I ploughed halfway through, starting with a lot of enthusiasm. I'd just read Heart of a Dog in Italian and was crazy about Bulgakov. The Master and Margarita somehow fell short of expectations. We were in Livorno, just coming from the Elba island and headed towards Corsica. My father took me trekking for three or four days across northern Corsica; before the ferry sailed, he bought me this book. After a while I really could not go on reading it, so bored I was. I guess this is also the book about which I've changed my opinion most radically in the course of time, for if I really had to save a book, one book and only one, this would be it. I don't remember the first time I read it and really enjoyed it, but I do remember buying a different Italian translation (Rizzoli) at a certain point: I'd already read the book a zillion times by then. I wanted to re-read it but I was on holiday and didn't have it with me, so I just grabbed a copy at a second-hand bookshop. It was terribly disappointing. I came to realize that Vera Dridso's translation (for Einaudi) is the most brilliant translation of all. I can't read Russian, but I'm starting to wonder whether Dridso's translation would actually beat the original. Furthermore, some bits were missing from the Rizzoli edition. I then also bought another Italian edition, it might have been Mondadori but I can't be sure, and that was also missing some parts, and the translation was not exceptional. I read three English translations: an old, battered paperback that belonged to my father and must have been in the house for centuries, looking at the pitiful state of its binding (bits missing and average translation); the Everyman's hardback edition (bits missing and average translation) and lately the new Penguin Classics edition (ISBN 0141180145 --- no missing parts and surprisingly good translation). I only read one French edition, the new critical Pleiade (ISBN 2070113892 --- no missing parts and good translation as far as I can ascertain but my French lit crit abilities leave much to be desired). Well Dridso's first translation was the absolute best: it has more pizzazz, I don't know how else to express this. The character descriptions are more ironic. With this translation, I can picture Bulgakov taking the mickey out of Stalin-period bureaucrats by simply describing their dignified behaviours in a strident way, which is kind of missing from the other editions. Furthermore, this very copy followed me across Europe through my 1992 inter-railing and cycling adventures. I read it while resting on a tree in a Cote d'Azur youth hostel; I read it in a tent whilst in Amsterdam for the first time ever; I read it on trains and cars and roads and bycicles. I wrote some half-baked diaries from the days in Prague in its back cover. After Vienna, I clothed it with a city map, which was gloriously born until a couple of years ago, when it fell apart. A film was shot based on this book. I am very curious but I don't know whether I really want to watch it. Whenever I see a film made from a book I read, I get a bad deal. Either the film is bad, or the film is good and its images replace the images I had made in my head, and I'd rather stay with my own images than someone else's. Besides, this is the only book that makes me wish I was a film director. I have many scenes impressed visually on my mind, which does not often happen to me. One of the clearest is Varenucha the vampire; when Rimski finds him out, I imagine his demeanour, his countenance, the grimace of his skew lips just transformed, very red onto very white. I imagine Rimski become more and more aware that something is wrong; I see Rimski looking at the missing shadow in horror, whilst all his hair turns white; I see Varenucha following Rimski's gaze and realizing his cover is blown, and proffering terribly, ``You guessed, damn you, you've always been the smart one!'', and as the scene transforms into a rotting underground tomb, with Hella sliding a slimy, inhumanly flexible cadaverous arm into a grid window to attempt to click it open from the inside, I see the vampire starting to jump up and down, innaturally floating in the air, knees up, nails out and long canine teeth, for seconds at a time, laughing with hellish sounds. I also smell the putrid odour emanating from Hella transformed into a corpse, and the panic-stricken fear immobilizing Rimski's body as in a nightmare when you can't move but you just know that if you don't move you are going to die within seconds. And finally, I hear the first cock crow: a flash of reality lights the scene for a split second and leaves vampire and witch temporarily blind; Varenucha, floating in the air, suddenly falls with a painful grunt. Hella shudders and looks around left and right, alarmed. As they are re-gaining strength, the second and then third crows resound, at which point Hella flies away and Varenucha, still up in the air, extends his knees, lies flat in mid-air, perfectly dressed in a tuxedo, head towards the window, front towards the ceiling, arms along the body and void, expressionless eyes, and starts sliding out of the windows and into nothingness in slow motion, as if towed on invisible rails. I have many such scenes in mind, each filled with incredibly vivid details. I'd say my brain built visual representations for almost any page in the book. I once dreamt Satan's full moon ball: the Jazz monkeys and the champagne turned cognac pool, for Christ's sake. A writer's wife out on the Griboedov's veranda restaurant, as she impatiently fiddles with her spoon and looks around as if to say, ``what's happening? why aren't we being served?'' The police team shooting Behemoth with machine guns in the Number 50 apartment in Sadovaja street and the cat emptying a whole cartridge onto the policemen, without anything actually happening: I see the cat's expression, a sort of cowboy swinging on the 1950's fake diamond chandelier. I know the room: in my head, it's my grandmother's bedroom in her Milan apartment: Lychodeev's room when he wakes up with the grandest hangover in literary history, the Devil's room when he receives the variety's buffet administrator lamenting the fake banknotes, when its entourage and him hold a small, intimate discussion after the ball, and when everything goes up in flames. I see the Devil talking with Levi Matthew on a roof overlooking Moscow; the roof is flat with a concrete banister, and holds a semi-spherical penthouse in the centre: Levi Matthew appears into reality from its walls. The colour is a clear concrete beige over the whole roof, and the sun is progressively being covered by the impending storm. Last time I read Margarita's flight and descent into the Valpurgisnacht around Moscow, I was flying out of Sheremetevo airport at dusk, bound for Ulaanbaatar on an Aeroflot jet. I saw feeble lights flicker in the woods and recognized various sabbat's characters. I don't want any bloody film getting rid of all this.

http://www.librarything.com/work-info.php?book=3998352

http://scritture.blog.kataweb.it/francescamazzucato/200…

This book is a trusted friend. I had found it first in my parents'library at home, a three-volume paperback in Italian that looked colourful but huge. I guess I must have been around eight then. I brought it into my room with a mind of starting a ``grown-up'' library of my own. I told myself, why not start with the BIGGEST book I could find in the house? And so I moved it from the my parents' shelves to my own, and there it rested for years withoutever being opened. My parents noticed, of course, but since neither of them liked the book, as I found this out later on, neither bothered to pick it up from my room and return it to its proper shelf. Well I must have caught a fever or something, a few years later, for I was languishing in bed without anything to do. I'd played with my Lego, I'd read some comics. I'd already grown out of pirate adventure books, so, very bored and depressed, I picked up this book and started it. Boy oh boy never did I make a fever last so many days. I kept putting the thermometer under my bedlight lamp to convince my mum to keep me home from school, as I devoured the book. Well, its Italian translation really. I think I must have been twelve or thirteen (yes I was still playing with Lego and in fact I still do --- I'm 33 now --- if the occasion arises). What I really hate in almost all stories is that they leave you alone after they end, so I appreciate those that don't. The Lord of the Rings, for example, does not: you get a mini-story after the end of the story, and then by reading the appendices you can follow all the characters' lives until The End Of Time (so ok, I guess even I allow a story to end --- albeit begrudgingly --- after the fictional End Of Time). After reading the book once I was already a maniac. I have a knack of reading my preferred books over and over again. People often ask me whether I don't get tired of it. Well I guess my trick is that I'm a fast reader. So fast that I allow myself to skip some pages, or small parts, in order to follow the story (actually, this is starting to change now, as I savour stories' details more). Anyhow, I don't really skip them so much as glance over them. Then of course when I pick it up the next time, I have those parts left to read. I guess by now I really have read the whole of the Lord of The Rings, though there may remain some single words that have escaped my attention yet. I read it an unknown number of times ranging between 15 and 25, over two decades. Yes I did read it twice in some years. I used it as an educational tool. When I was sixteen, my family moved to the UK, as my father took up a position there; I spoke little English then, but I bought myself a second-hand copy of the second book, the Two Towers. The reason why I bought the middle part is that I simply found the lone copy at a car boot sale in Oxfordshire. Being one of a three-parter, it was sold cheap, like fifty pence or something. The rationale was that what blocked me in reading in another language was simply the laziness of having to look up words in a dictionary. By reading a book I was supposed to know almost by heart, I would not need dictionaries. And the idea actually worked pretty well. I still remember learning the word ``ridge'' as Frodo and Sam walked their long, wriggling way into the wastelands towards Mordor. I read the Two Towers in the buses that brought me every saturday from Oxford to London and back, for I attended the European School in Culham every week (sad place, don't send your kids there for goodness' sakes) and the Royal College of Music in London on saturdays. The upshot was really that I had to go to sleep early on friday nights whilst all the rest of the kids learned the art of downing pints down the pub. You might think I was the smart one, learning how to play the piano whilst the rest of the world got drunk, but well, at that age, classical music made me more of a social outcast than an educated young fellow. On monday mornings, tales at school were told (or simply fabricated) about the number of girls people got off with, the number of pints poured in people's guts, the number of riots spawned, and so on and so forth in similarly constructive pastimes. Then these very
same people turned towards me, smirked, and told me ``hey ya fahcking bahstard, d'ya wanna fight?'', very aggressively. It took me around fifteen to twenty seconds to process the sentence and understand it, by which time the kids had already sniggered at me, told me to fuck off and die (``ya sad cunt''), chanted ``every saturday night begins with an E'', and lost interest. I never got involved in a fight at the European School but my social status was lower than most snails that scraped a living in the sports fields. At least they got honourably squashed by the Sacred Rugby Ball (which I never touched --- the only time I did not successfully manage to avoid the rugby session, I was busy keeping the maximum possible distance from it during the game, running about the same distance as the ``ol' pigskin'' travelled in the air). I escaped such dread in various ways, one of which was reading the Lord of the Rings over and over again: in English. I had discovered most of the lovely, old and dusty Oxonian second-hand bookshops, filled with antique curiosities in Latin, Greek and English. I chased old, leather-bound books with the passion of an old Etonian librarian, though I was just going on eighteen then. I put together a respectable antique shelf with various copies of the Aeneids dating eighteenth and nineteenth century, some odd volumes from a nice nineteenth century pictorial Shakespeare opera omnia, and other odd bits and pieces. By this time, I had purchased the other two volumes of the Lord of the Rings, and I had read it (in English) at least twice. When I finally finished high school, right before I moved to London to start my maths B.Sc. at Imperial College, I had two weeks to kill, so I bought an expensive edition illustrated by Alan Lee and spent two weeks reading it, doing nought else. London had even more second-hand bookshops than Oxford, and it was in one of these, the Gloucester Road Bookshop close to Imperial College, that I found a beautiful Unwin edition of the Lord of the Rings. It was rather worn and battered, but it had an elegant black hard binding with an elvish looking rune on the front. The fifteen hundred pages squeezed into a volume that was hardly an inch thick, thanks to a beautiful, strong and exceedingly thin paper. The print had been made by types rather than electronic typesetting. This one volume edition only cost a tenner, and practically shouted at me to buy it. But my room at Imperial was so small I could hardly afford to keep two separate copies of the Lord of the Rings --- for I had brought the three separate paperbacks, Fellowship of the Ring, Two Towers and Return of the King, with me to London of course. So I arranged with the bookseller for a swap; I think he must have given me a pound or so off the price. I never read the book in Italian again, for I found that the Lord of the Ring was a text in linguistics as well as a novel. I found the names carried with them the meaning, magic and nuances I clothed the characters with, in my head. And it is true that Elvish sounds higher and nobler than common talk. Elessar is kinglier than Aragorn. Mithrandir is more godlike than Gandalf. I came to associate the eo- prefix with horses, and shuddered at the throat-rasping sounds of the Mordor language. I noticed later on that Tolkien attached geopolitical tracts to his own etymologies, as Anglo-Saxon and Nordic roots were associated to Good and Arabic-looking words to Evil; more in general, most of what is northern is good and most of what is southern is bad. Strangely, there are scarce traces of Latin roots in his work, which is probably the reason why I found all his names so exotic and fascinating. The book accompanied me in various travels, but I never really read it through during a journey. I think it lends itself best to a mind-travelling experience whilst the body comfortably rests in one's own easy chair. Lately, after I moved to Paris, I thought I could use the same trick to learn French. Why not buy the Lord of the Rings in French and read it? But somehow the text has become inextricably linked with English, and I turned to other books for that purpose, for I don't think I'd have enjoyed it in French. The last thing I want to say on the matter is that I met a person who met Tolkien. This guy's name is Stephen Boyd, a mathematician from Stanford University whose parents were both academics. They spent a sabbatical visiting colleagues in Oxford, and a very young Stephen got to meet Tolkien at a social gathering. Unluckily, he was too young then to appreciate the event.

This is one of the first books I remember my father strongly recommending me. I guess he'd already bought me many books, but they might have been adventure books that he himself had read when he was a kid, so was unenthusiastic about. For this book, however, he had an ongoing admiration, so it was one of the first times we got to share an enthusiasm in a book. Besides, he's a naturalist turned chemical engineer (and gone back to natural sciences since his retirement) so obviously he likes Gerry Durrell. It's only recently I found this second-hand copy in English in the antique bookshop of the Galerie Vivienne, in Paris. I'd only ever read Durrell's books in Italian up to this one, for they were linked to my early adolescence. But it's not one of those books that suffers badly from translation, in my opinion.

I am in love with this book. I think it's shameful how Hanif Kureishi went from writing this wonderful book, to an OK book like the Black Album (his second novel) to a long string of novels that really did not even stick in memory. Maybe this is one of those cases where good is in the eye of the beholder. I had met Victoria, my first girlfriend, one night in the Imperial College's Falmouth-Keogh Halls of Residence at Princes' Gate Gardens. It was the first or second month into my maths B.Sc., and was coming home late from some drinking session or other. I was only slightly tipsy. There's this cute, long-haired, very english-looking girl crying over someone's shoulder near the public telephones. I eye them a little and from the body language I understand that this someone is not anyone she's crying over, but just a passer-by. Good, I tell myself. Let's DO this! So I quickly sent him on his way (he was actually relieved, he'd had enough of her tears I guess) and proceded to console the distraught girl. We have been together for three years and then split up when I moved back to Italy after the end of the B.Sc. One and a half years into our relationship, she lent me her copy of the Buddha of Suburbia, and I've been reading it once every two years on average ever since. I have a weak spot for books relating stories from the seventies. A lot of individuals have the feeling they've been born a generation too late. From what I was told and read about being a young twentysomething during the seventies, it sure looked like a fun period to be alive in. Ideals drove politics that drove economy, whilst nowadays it's imperfect market laws driving economy driving politics. People discussed books, stories, and culture. Experimented with sex and art. Fought political battles demonstrating from the streets against the Powers That Be. When I attended demonstrations, they had already become marginal events (in the economic sense). They'd gone from the workers' struggles to the university struggles down to high school level. I was fourteen. What can a shy, sexually immature, hormone-imbalanced fourteen year old possibly demonstrate about? Like many other kids, I think I went to demonstrations partially to avoid one day of school and partially to try and catch girls' attention (going to demonstrations for sexual reasons was wildly popular, at least in Italy, as related by both Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum and in Ravera and Radice's Porci con le Ali). I was successful in the first feat, largely by default, whilst I was a failure in the much more important girl-scoring area. Never mind. So I would have liked to attend demonstrations which were not just copies of copies of copies. I would have liked to see and live the real thing. I read books and books and I think I can refer to seventies' idols and trends in a hip, knowing way, without ever having been there. Now I'm an adult, I tell myself that if I'd lived during the seventies, I'd have probably stayed on the side anyway, and dreamt of how nice it would have been to be living in the fifties. The Buddha of Suburbia told me a seventies' story from two novel points of view: that of geography (I'd only ever known about the seventies in Italy) and race (which was not an issue in Italy, but was very much an issue in the UK). And it did so whilst transmitting a curiosity towards all that is Indian, for all the black (well, Indian really) characters in the book are interesting and much more alive than the white ones. This book gave me a key to interpreting a lot of current English behaviour. Having been bullied by English people myself, without really being able to explain why --- since there was very little bullying in Italy --- I'd always been extremely puzzled about it. Now I started to understand the backlash of the colonies, the poverty of the basest home-grown culture confronted with the most enterprising individuals choosing the difficult task of moving from India to England, and the resulting defeat. Jobs were robbed and competition became fiercer at the margins, but the competitors from outside had already proven to be of sturdier stock. This generated hate. Besides, England being an island, they were always somewhat prone to xenophobia. Helen's father saying ``we're with Enoch'' was a sentence that always perplexed me. I recently found out about Enoch Powell and his movement. This book had a way of introducing me to things and events that English people in the nineties did not talk about --- maybe simply because Enoch was far from making the news in the 1990s --- but all knew, and sometimes referred to implicitly. I also took in all the good hints like touching girls' ears to see if they're ready for sex (actually, after much experimenting, I think this is false). I was fascinated by the sexual relationship between the cousins, and could see the difference between real London and that described in the book. West Kensington was much less run-down, for example. But Earls' court, although more upscale, was still ambivalent about its social status. And all these places were within walking distance from Imperial College! How much better can you get huh? Furthermore, although I hate books without a definite ending, I make an exception for this one. Yes, the story actually ends without strictly needing to. But there is a sense of conclusion to it. Like an age has been told, there may be strands of the past age drawing into the new one, but fundamentally the boy's gotten out of adolescence and into adulthood.

I first read this book when I was fourteen. Get this --- it was assigned as a textbook in an Italian literature course I was following when I attended high school in Milan. Like, far out, man, dig? The guy's Russian, for goodness' sakes. But I liked it straight away, as it tuned in with my hormonally-high, sexually frustrated adolescence. That was a funny period in my life. I fell in love with virtually any girl who talked to me, and a lot of those who didn't. It must seem as though I had very low standards and lots of girls consequently, but the truth is, girls smell overeagerness like dogs smell fear; unlike dogs chasing after fearful running backsides though, they steer well clear of it. I always became everyone's friend, and the label stuck there like dog poo under a damn shoe, I couldn't get rid of it no matter what. So in this desolation I played romantic games with myself where I imagined I was Nemorino in the Elisir D'Amore or some similarly love-challenged loser (the technical Italian term is ``sfigato'', for those of you who speak it). Who better to identify with than a guy who declares, ``I'd never feel jealous if a man whom I hold in high esteem were to fall in love with the same woman I love: rather, I'd feel a sort of common woe''? I mean you can sweep his Lara away and as long as he likes you, he'll just sigh and say, c'est la vie. Ain't he grand? So other boys got off with the girls I liked (almost all girls, that is) and my trick was just to hold them in high esteem, like Zhivago. So after becoming the unfuckable friend of every girl I met, I also became (luckily also unfuckable) friends with all the boys in order to deflect jealousy. After all, Jurij Andreevic was doing it too, right? The problem was, people were getting off all over the place whilst I was reading Doctor Zhivago and crying over fictional characters' love stories. And once you see the film, man, you'll understand that your standards are all wrong. OK, then, Jurij was not saying what he was saying on accounts of just any girl. It was Julie Christie! Have you seen her? No, I mean, have you really really looked at her? My standards were all wrong. I should have just fucked the fuckable, been jealous by the spadeloads, and maybe held off for Julie Christie. Right, so then I'm not a xerox of Omar Sharif, that I'll grant you.

But Doctor Zhivago did pay off later on. I must have been around 20 or 21, and spent a holiday at an international summer school of music in Vasto, Italy. It was a good age. I was having fun all over, my summers were all the rage. I'd been inter-railing, I'd run off to Amsterdam to smoke my eyes out, and did it again. It was just great. No real responsibilities, I was doing well in my mathematics degree, my parents were forking out. I was relaxed and forward and reached out to people when I met them. So I saw this girl at the music school. German. Blond. Very beautiful. Actually, I can even show you her picture: http://www.nmz.de/nmz/nmz2001/nmz03/seiler.jpg (the blond one on the right, you bastards --- the other one is her mother), I googled her some time ago and out she popped. Well we flirted and we kissed and really nothing else but I was on top of the world. I felt I was in love. Whatever. Maybe I was, maybe I wasn't. But the point is that I gave her a copy of Doctor Zhivago as a gift, and kept comparing us to Lara and Zhivago for various reasons. It's almost comical: we lived in different countries; after the summer I tried once to go and see her but I literally did not find her. She said she had a concert somewhere else, and she hadn't received my message. Older and wiser I am now, master Yoda, and can more easily reckon the truth. Back then, I just didn't know what to do. So I toured around a strange German city with my rucksack and my skateboard, and I dreamed, waking and walking. I wrote things down in my notebook. If I read these things now, I think to myself, I must have been on drugs. Making a huge mistake, I once let my parents read it, too, and of course it backfired: they accused me of being on drugs. The truth is I wasn't. I was lonely, estranged, disillusioned, and longing for a person that just wasn't there, notwithstanding all my imaginative efforts with us cast in Lara and Zhivago's characters.

My advice to you, loser boys, is: read it and store useful bits to make girls fall in love with you later on. My advice to lover girls is, don't compare yourself to Lara. The contest with Tonja is much easier.

This book contains "Heart of a dog". It's a new French translation --- La Pleiade almost always commissions new translations for their editions, and they came out with this Bulgakov opera omnia in 2 volumes (this is the first) rather recently. I really like Heart of a Dog. It's the first Bulgakov I ever read.