Duncan MinshullRezensionen

The best stories were New Music by Carol Shields, The Dancing-Master's Music by William Trevor, and Like a Circle in a Spiral by Russell Hoban.

I'm enjoying dipping into these at bedtime. A plonker by Beryl Bainbridge in there, but a lovely story by someone I'd never heard of, Steve Dixon.

Such a physically appealing little book, I'm sure it's just as good inside and look forward to dipping in. Sadly my friend came over the day it arrived, borrowed it and has yet to return it. Lucky I like her.

This is a ibrary thinearly review book and refers to the Hesperus Press Limited edition. I found this book very pleasing. It is a slim hardback and brings forward extracts of famous writers on 'walking'. It is has a lesiurely pace and ends when you are still 'wanting more'........thus quits while ahead. A very enjoyable light read for the serious minded intellectual!

Prachtig hebbedingetje van Hesperus Press, waarvoor van harte dank. Perfekt verzorgde uitgave: aangename bladspiegel, leesuitnodigend papier én stevig ingebonden, wat kan je nog meer verwachten van een boekje dat de fervente wandelaar - in de praktijk of in gedachten - het gezelschap en de mijmeringen biedt van zovelen die voor hem liepen. Ook het voorwoord is beklijvend: een ode aan de vader aan wiens hand het jongetje leerde te wandelen.
Citaat: 'I have had one companion on these walks - and that's been my father's sensibility. Indeed, the consistency with which he has walked beside me, invisible, has verged on the Eliotic; and while I said that the idea of him 'singing up' the country like an Aboriginal spirit seemed a little fanciful when he was alive, now that's he's long dead it has become indisputable: fathers and sons, mothers and daughters - we walk our way through life hand-in-hand, and experience itself remains inchoate until we have discussed it.'
En na voorwoord en inleiding komen een zesendertigtal korte fragmenten uit werken van hoofdzakelijk Engelstalige en Franstalige auteurs., heel kort soms, uitnodigend om te lezen ergens op een steen langs de weg, of op een bank onder de wilg in je eigen tuin..in gedachten kijkend hoe het toen en daar was, herinneringen en mijmeringen als spiegelbeelden van je eigen overdenkingen.

This is an early review book and the publisher asked me to mention them in my review. So, this review refers to the Hesperus Press Limited edition.

I requested this book because its premise as an anthology of famous walking scenes from literature sounded intriguing, and heaven knows, I love literature. I was a bit sceptical when I received this small, slender volume. It just didn't look like there could be much here. However, I have in no way been disappointed, and actually count myself lucky for being chosen to read this book. Don't be put off by it's size.There is enough in these selections to spend hours pondering or just lolling in the lush fields of language. Without pondering it took me, a slow reader, about two hours to race through.

Each selection has a small three or four word phrase written by the editor to introduce it. At the end of the selection the specifics of author and work are given. As I read, I found myself playing a game of recognition. Have I read this before? Who is the author? Which work of theirs is it excerpted from? As you might expect some were easier than others to identify. Dostoyevski is represented by the hilarious, fevered thinking of the Underground Man as he works through how he will make his existence real to an Army Officer who at some earlier point gave him an imagined slight. Read in context this passage is one of the building blocks Dostoyevski carefully arranges in constructing the Underground Man. Lifted from it's context and presented alone the absurdity becomes comedic and hilarious. and introduces the casual reader to Dostoyevski's exquisite humor. Of course I recognized it almost as soon as I started it. There were others that I recognized, although the clues were in the writing itself. The excerpt from "Oliver Twist" was one of these. It wasn't hard to recognize when the first word was "Oliver". Of course Dickens is instantly recognizable in style and voice. Some I had never read, but recognized the voice of the author. The excerpt from Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice" was like that. I've never read it, but I recognize Austen anywhere. Some were just mysteries and it was always fun to find out who the author was and its origins. I enjoyed hearing some of the voices I had heard about but never read, such as Elizabeth Gaskill and D. H. Lawrence. I was fortunate, too in that most of the excerpts are from nineteenth century English and American literature: right in my wheelhouse.

Speaking of wheelhouses, the only clunker, to my mind and taste was Mark Twain's "Rigi-Kulm". I'm not a big Twain fan anyway, and this just pointed out why. I'm not big on smarmy irony, which was Twain's calling card, particularly in his short stuff, and this story was loaded with it. If you like smarmy, wiseacres who love to make fun of others (and themselves), you may love this story. I don't and I didn't. That was the only clunker in the bunch.

Several of these were complete short stories, or nearly complete. Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" appears here, as does Jack London's "To Build a Fire", an excellent short story which I had never read before.

This was a true find, and to have received it for the price of a review was just too good. I heartily recommend this book to anyone lucky enough to come across it. Wonderful Job.½

A delicous little hardback, bound in blue cloth, with dust jacket, sent to me kindly by Hesperus Press.

Compilations are strange things – rather like buffet meals. I never know whether I should just plunge in and help myself to a little of whatever I fancy, or start at the beginning and work my way to the end of the table, tasting a bit of everything. Either way, I always eat too much.

Considering that I promised to review it, I read this book from beginning to end, starting with the appetizer (a foreword by Will Self), the hors-d’oeuvre (introduction by the editor Duncan Minshull) and all the main courses, dessert and the petit-fours of the last pages (a quotation, the acknowledgements, and a biographical note).

On the very first page I had one of those “light-bulb flashing above the head” moments when Will Self mentions Jean-Jacques Rousseau:
“It was Rousseau, a great walker, who observed that we think at walking pace; and while I went on to have a perfectly troubled relationship with my father, in the decade since his death I have come to prize his legacy, which was this: all those thoughts divulged at walking pace; the steady 4/4 beat of his metre as he read the landscape then interpreted it for me.” Of course! that's why I prefer to walk down to the railway station every morning, rather than catch the bus: these 20 minutes of regular footfalls are indeed the best moment for me to think, to imagine, to compose wonderful sentences in my head, which I try to jot down when I get into the train or they disappear for ever.

The extracts are irregular, ranging from Milton and Paradise Lost to Kipling and Kim. I very much enjoyed Mark Twain’s account of climbing the Rigi-Kulm, Edith Wharton’s walk through the streets of Paris, “like the unrolling of a vast tapestry from which countless stored fragrances were shaken out”, the scene from The Return of the Native where Mrs Yeobright walks over the heath in the heat to visit Clem and Eustacia, and the exquisite moment in Anna Karenina, when Koznyshev is all keyed up to propose to Varenka, then suddenly blurts out “What difference is there between the white boleti and the birch-tree variety?”

Probably each reader will find his or her own favourite passages. However, I was a little disappointed by the choice. Although the words "walk", "foot", "leg" are probably mentioned in all of them, I rarely found that the extracts illustrated the concept of walking, the burning leg. Perhaps I should have just dipped in here and there.

This Hesperus Edition of The Burning Leg is a great collection of short stories, excerpts, and poems with the common theme of walking and travel and the thoughts and events that come to us during such. All of the selected passages are wonderfully written and deserve to be read again and again.
One thing I found not so great about this anthology was that not all the passages addressed the idea of walking or at least the significance of their walking wasn't presented. It seemed like for some the characters just happened to be walking but it wasn't that important.½

The editor of this small anthology of scenes from classic literature that deal with walking has achieved several things quite well: The foreword by Will Self is brilliant, the introduction by the editor is a nice little introduction into the topic and some of the chosen scenes are wonderful, my absolute favourite being Mark Twain's description of a tour of the Swiss Alps, on which he is looking for a famous Alpine sunrise, equally brilliant a scene from Stephen Crane's "The Mesmeric Mountain", and of course a well-chosen passage of Jane Austen's is a must for such a collection. There are only two points to deduct from reading pleasure that seemed at all notable to me: Firstly I thought some of the scenes a little off topic (Poe and Chesterton and perhaps Hawthorne are way too much on the mysterious side), secondly I missed scenes from more recent books (e.g. a perfect closer would have been a scene from Cormac McCarthys "The Road"). Still a very enjoyable read and a beautifully designed book, a perfect present for lovers of literature and walking.

An anthology of 'Walking Scenes from Classic Fiction' is potentially a problematic thing. As Will Self notes in his introduction, walkers are often to be found doing the walking rather than just reading about it. I have a feeling this is partly because the act of walking is, in itself, usually not very interesting. What happens on the walk, or precipitated the walk, is generally what's of interest to the author and reader. And virtually anything can happen while walking! An anthology of walking could therefore almost turn into an anthology of life itself, which when pressed into 100-odd pages may feel a little rushed.

Duncan Minshull has gone even further in some respects, almost attempting a reflection of every viewpoint on walking in classic literature. The shorter selections I often found rather too terse to enjoy, and often amounted to a single viewpoint on walking. But without the journey, walking isn't really up to much: I would have preferred more of the longer extracts and short stories which enabled a bit more of the showing of walking, rather than characters just telling us what they thought.

Duncan Minshull has done a good job in trying to present an overview of walking in classic literature, collecting the pieces together as much as possible to have some sense of theme. Despite the fact that I sometimes felt the rhythm of the collection was disrupted by trying to fit too much in, I enjoyed this. It's a nicely made book, and would make a fun gift for the reader-walker in your life.

The Burning Leg (great title!) is a small-format book containing brief excerpts and very short stories about the subject of walking. It's about 100 pages in length and almost all the selections are in the public domain (pre-1923). I often read anthologies and would not call this one "generous", for $20 the book could be read cover to cover in a hour or two. I'm not sure who the ideal audience would be, perhaps as a gift to someone off on a long hike who wants something light and easy to carry and who reads slowly. It would also make a fine ornamental piece, like in the bathroom of a vacation lodge or in the backseat of a car, any place where people are traveling and appreciate short pieces that can be read in a few minutes.½