This is one of a very occasional series on literary references to rail
transport. This, like previous ones, reflects the delights of this
languorous midsummer season, when I can catch up on some reading. Indeed
this most glorious of all weeks of all the year, high summer between
Christmas and New Year, with only the Boxing Day test and the beach to
distract, seems just the time for sampling the best (and worst) prose being
turned out, ever searching for those elusive rail references.
Well, this year's quotation is a beauty. It's been rather hot - it was 39
degrees on Christmas Day here - which was a good excuse for drinking deeply
of some bons vins d'Anjou and delving deeply into the world of Alexandre
Dumas. (The two go together.) This led me to explore a recent Spanish novel
called El club Dumas by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. My Spanish not being what it
should be, I read it as Sonia Soto's translation, The Dumas Club (London,
Harvill Press, 1996). Yes, I know I'm behind with my reading - 1996 indeed
- but by way of excuse I'm a long way from the centres of European
literature and style! It's a decidedly postmodern work, heavily into
intertextuality, but witty and erudite for all that.
Anyway, on with the extract. A Madrid book-dealer, Lucas Corso, is enjoying
a gin, a cigarette, and a reverie. Excellent combination, I think we can
all agree on that. Corso is a true bibliophile, more than a little crooked,
and improbably enough resembles - psychologically not physically - Raymond
Chandler's Marlow as portrayed so memorably by Humphrey Bogart. Flavio La
Ponte is more timid but of much the same ilk.
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The telephone interrupted his thought. It was Flavio La Ponte. He wanted to
tell Corso how he'd found, in with some books (he'd had to buy the whole
lot, that was the deal), a collection of European tram tickets, 5,775 of
them to be exact. All of them palindromic numbers, sorted by country in shoe
boxes. He wasn't joking. The collector had just died and the family wanted
to get rid of them. Maybe Corso knew someone who'd be interested. Naturally.
La Ponte knew that apart from the tireless, and pathological, activity of
collecting 5,775 palindromic tickets it was completely pointless. Who would
buy such a stupid collection? Yes, perhaps it was a good idea: the Transport
Museum in London. The English and their perversions… Would Corso deal with
the matter?
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'The English and their perversions' indeed! Happy New Year, everyone.
Robert Lee
Yamba, NSW
"Da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo." (S Augustinus)
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