Volume 25, Number 21 & 22 · January 25, 1979
The Sayings of Don Geraldo
By V.S. Pritchett
Thoughts in a Dry Season
by Gerald Brenan
Cambridge University Press, 177 pp., $14.95
There is a moment in the old age of a writer when he finds the prospect of one more long haul in prose intimidating and when he claims the right to make utterances. We grow tired of seeing our experience choked by the vegetation in our sentences. We opt for the pithy, the personal, and the unapologetic. For years we have had a crowd of random thoughts waiting on our doorstep, orphans or foundlings of the mind that we have not adopted: the moment of the aphorism, the epigram, the clinching quotation has come. So, in his eighties, Gerald Brenan has sat in his Spanish house, ignoring the fame that has gathered around him as the unique interpreter of Spanish history, politics, and literature, his energetic past as a sort of scholar-gypsy in Europe, Morocco, his previous hopes as a poet and novelist, and his interest as a confessional biographer, and has set about polishing his pensées in this miscellany which he has called dismissively Thoughts in a Dry Season. (Dry is the wrong word: the juices are very active in him.)
Review, 1926 words
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