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Filleting sources
20 September 2015 04:41 pmFinally finished 'filleting' The Polish Officer (Alan Furst) for the Double Agents de Chagny project: fourteen pages of notes, but it's only taken me about a year to do it... (And I note from my deviantArt post on the subject that I was partway through Le Diable en rit encore a year ago -- I still haven't finished the novel in French, let alone taken notes from it, although I'm closer to the end than I was!)
Unfortunately I've acquired another three books to add to the 'pending' pile in the interim, along with the Suite Française that is still sitting on my bedroom floor and that has been made into an (allegedly not very good, and which I didn't see) film since I first read it... Another Alan Furst (usually useful material), Dark Star, which I haven't read yet: I'm hoping the Paris section in that is not too long. because the whole book looks pretty dense, albeit probably a good read for its own sake. The Paris Architect, by Charles Belfoure, which is a first-time novel by an architect, and shows it: probably not too much to be gleaned from that, as I get the impression he has been reading the same sources as I have and regurgitating them rather clumsily. And The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer, which I read immediately following the Charles Belfoure, and which shows up the literary and historical deficiencies of the former rather cruelly: it is an infinitely better book. All about a female SOE agent, though, so probably not too much Resistance-related stuff I need to note: I've already done Nancy Wake for the real-life equivalent, and I'm not planning to write about events from the British point of view. Any SOE people who might turn up anywhere will be peripheral outsiders from Raoul's hostile point of view.
The exercise of scribbling down all those notes has brought me back a little closer to the almost-totally-faded impulse for that story, though...
Still working over "The Girl He Left Behind Him" (and not entirely happy with that title); I hope to get that posted soon. The amount of work I have put into this is completely out of proportion with the reception it's likely to get, alas -- like "Blue Remembered Hills", that erstwhile grand crossover project :-(
Unfortunately I've acquired another three books to add to the 'pending' pile in the interim, along with the Suite Française that is still sitting on my bedroom floor and that has been made into an (allegedly not very good, and which I didn't see) film since I first read it... Another Alan Furst (usually useful material), Dark Star, which I haven't read yet: I'm hoping the Paris section in that is not too long. because the whole book looks pretty dense, albeit probably a good read for its own sake. The Paris Architect, by Charles Belfoure, which is a first-time novel by an architect, and shows it: probably not too much to be gleaned from that, as I get the impression he has been reading the same sources as I have and regurgitating them rather clumsily. And The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Simon Mawer, which I read immediately following the Charles Belfoure, and which shows up the literary and historical deficiencies of the former rather cruelly: it is an infinitely better book. All about a female SOE agent, though, so probably not too much Resistance-related stuff I need to note: I've already done Nancy Wake for the real-life equivalent, and I'm not planning to write about events from the British point of view. Any SOE people who might turn up anywhere will be peripheral outsiders from Raoul's hostile point of view.
The exercise of scribbling down all those notes has brought me back a little closer to the almost-totally-faded impulse for that story, though...
Still working over "The Girl He Left Behind Him" (and not entirely happy with that title); I hope to get that posted soon. The amount of work I have put into this is completely out of proportion with the reception it's likely to get, alas -- like "Blue Remembered Hills", that erstwhile grand crossover project :-(