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Fulidhoo, Maldives.28° and quite sunny at 11.30am.
We have moved to another little island, further south.A couple of sand roads, lots of palm trees and beach around the edges…at first sight it looks like Guraidhoo, only quieter.
Later on we’ll see what the reef snorkeling is like here, and maybe do some more scuba diving.
Is anyone on here into fishing?
I met another Chinese family yesterday, the second one on this trip who were spending all of their vacation basically catching fish and seafood, cooking and then eating.
Not interested at all in beaches or snorkeling/diving, the usual stuff that tourists do here.Indeed they were completely covered up,to get as little tanned as possible.
I made nasu dengaku yesterday. You get a bunch of eggplant, cut in half lengthwise, score the flesh in a cross-hatch pattern (like diamonds). Fry both sides lightly in a pan, and then cook till soft (I used a cast iron pan and put it in the oven after frying. Then you make a glaze of miso, sugar, soy, mirin and sake, brush it generously over the scored side and broil under the oven grill. Sprinkle with sesame seeds. It is so so so good. And I don’t even like eggplant that much. If you are looking for more vegan entrée options, I highly recommend it.
I wonder what else I could miso-glaze.
Anyway, niche book review time!
Of all the wealth of Russian Golden Age books, one doesn’t hear the name Mikhail Lermontov that much. It is a bit of a shame, since he seems to have been such a character. I am currently reading “A Hero of Our Time”, which takes place in the Caucasian mountains in around 1840s. It is a bit of a “superflous man” book (maybe you are familiar with it from Eugene Onegin, or Oblomov), a man who is born into wealth and status and is intelligent and capable, but perpetually unhappy and can’t fit into social norms. The book is about a man named Pechorin, which is our antihero/superfluous man who decided to join the military and is stationed in the Caucasian. But the telling of the story is quite a bit more complex and has layers of narrators.
Interestingly, Pechorin and Lermontov have suspiciously much in common. I guess author self inserts are nothing new.
Another remarkable thing about the book is that it’s translated by none other than Vladimir Nabokov. I usually don’t read forewords, and I didn’t, but I did read the translator’s notes. And while Nabokov translated the book, he doesn’t seem to have a very high opinion on Lermotov’s writing. He gives a disclaimer about how he’s the translator and not the author, so he couldn’t take liberties to improve any of the prose. Then he goes on about how the prose is dry and clumsy, the Russian is as bad as Stendhal’s French (is Stendhal’s French bad?), overuse of epithets, ostentatious similes and so on. I prepared myself for the worst, and then I started reading and… it’s fine? Like, it is not the peak of literary accomplishment but it has very distinct narrative voices and for the fact that Lermontov was a young man when he wrote it, there’s really nothing wrong with it. I think as one of the best writers of all time, Nabokov took a lot of liberties with the shade, ha ha.
What is amazing about the prose is the descriptions. So much delicious scenery porn about the Caucasus, it’s almost cinematic. When I was reading, I thought there’s no way Lermontov wasn’t an artist. And he was! [Look at this incredibly romantic landscape.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Lermontov#/media/File:Lermontov_TiflisGLM.jpg) There are a few more paintings by him on Wikipedia.
Unfortunately Lermontov lived the life of a hopeless romantic antihero, seduced lots of women, broke lots of hearts, was unhappy and cynical and got killed in a duel at an early age for no reason whatsoever. It kind of suits him, but it’s also sad because I would have liked to see what else he’s capable of writing at a later time. So yeah, it’s a very good book! If War and Peace is too long and heavy, try this one. It’s very easy to read.
(speaking of War and Peace, I put aside War and Peace and Vampires for now. The protagonist caught the idiot ball and can’t get rid of it 🙄 I may go back to it one day)
On my way this morning, I saw someone having a spinning wheel to make thread out in their driveway for free – such a shame I couldn’t take it with me. I hope it’ll still be there later and that I can figure a way of getting it home