Paperback 1113: Pyramid G596 (1st ptg, 1961)
Title: World So Wide
Author: Sinclair Lewis
Cover artist: Tom Miller
Condition: 7/10
Value: $5-8
- They shoulda called this "Gondola So Wide." Gondola so wide it fills the frame and reduces the lovely languishing lady to the size of a postage stamp. More bored expatriates in party dresses, fewer expanses of dull blue-gray, please!
- The composition is actually very nice, it's just that I don't buy these books for their lovely motel-room-quality pictures of exotic locales. I buy them for the sexy people acting strangely. For the hair, for the shoes. For the fashion. For the depravity. For the world-weary ennui of the mid-century sophisticate. This tepid gondola scene gives me (almost) none of this.
- To his credit, the artist (Tom Miller! Credited!) does a good job of making the couple pop. That damn pink dress against the somehow even pinker cushion? Magnificent. Also magnificent: her half-interest in Jake Trustfund there. Jake: "I love you, darling!" Her: "Mmm, yes. I know. Let's practice being quiet."
Best things about this back cover:
- This ... this just tints the least interesting part of the front cover pink!? Boo! Boo to this back cover designer, I say.
- Adjectives must come in pairs! "Blazing sunny!" "warm and human!" "hot, passionate!" "scathing, cynical!" Can't believe they left "amazing" in there unattended.
- Lewis had been accused of being "Red" after the publication of It Can't Happen Here, a novel from the mid-'30s that imagined what American fascism would look like. The book was ... prescient. It concerned "a demagogue [Windrip] who is elected President of the United States, after fomenting fear and promising drastic economic and social reforms while promoting a return to patriotism and "traditional" values. After his election, Windrip takes complete control of the government via self-coup and imposes totalitarian rule with the help of a ruthless paramilitary force" (wikipedia). Sound familiar? No? OK.
Page 123~
The five of them, plus the inescapable Marchesa Valdarno, sat prim about the refectory table of Irish oak, eating their molds of rice with duck livers served on English plates with views of Kent, while Belfont, with what he felt to be gentlemanly but learned humor, pumped Lundsgard, who answered with good-hearted simplicity.
This is very precise, poetic writing. And yet I can't help but wish there were more about "the inescapable Marchesa Valdarno." Flipping through the book, I find that the Marchesa "suavely jeered not only at America but at Parisian drunkards, English watering-places, old Roman society, and the Sadie Lurcher Riviera set [!!!?], of which Valdarno herself was a member." I'd sit next to her at the refectory table of Irish oak any day.
~RP
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky]
I'd love to get a closer look at the couple. The way they're holding hands looks like they're engaged in a really awkward round of arm wrestling.
ReplyDeleteThe palette is so dull, except for the woman and the cushions. Even the guy kind of fades into the background. It takes talent to make Venice look dull and colorless.