The Invalid

My illness has become worse. I've spent the entire weekend in bed, for the most part, arising occasionally to attempt eating and to watch brief films ... Gun Crazy and Force of Evil ... otherwise I am sleeping or reading.

Surprisingly enough, I finished The Nibelungenlied. It was not what I expected. What I expected was Wagnerian drama on a collossal scale, a truly enormous epic. What I read was a rather pedestrian tale set, not in a Wagnerian pre-Christian era, but in decidedly Christian Medieval Burgundy where everyone was consumed by hidebound sense of protocol and their place within the system. Some of the more interesting parts of the story were simply glossed over. In fact, the plot didn't really get cooking until Sifrid was killed and his wife, Kriemhilde, began plotting and exacting her revenge.

Needing a novel filled with real barbarian splendour, I have begun reading Gustave Flaubert's Salammbo. So far this littel-known novel is right up there with Wilde's Salome and Huysmans' Against the Grain in obssessive Decadence.

Here are two books I would like to own:

Salome by Oscar Wilde, 1908 or 1912 edition by John Lane, The Bodley Head.

The Defence of Guenevere by William Morris, illustrations by Jessie M. King, 1904, John Lane, The Bodley head.