Energetic Lives

As I sometimes do I am reading three books at once.  I was deep into the third volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's life story, when I suddenly felt I could not stay one more minute with pre teenaged angst no matter how interesting it was.  And I was the Sarasota Library to pick up a book on Berlin of which I had recently a very favorable review, and my eye fell on a life of the Wallis Simpson, the Duchess of Windsor, and I checked it out, figuring that this would be about as far as I could go from Norway.  Hugo Vickers, the author, is one of those fluent campy English writers whose perch is always inside the milieux of the aristocratic highborn.  The tone is that of a very well educated lady's maid whose concern is to protect the family and maintain the proprieties.  Vickers tells a tale of a woman much misunderstood, and it moves smoothly through her Southern childhood, many marriages to the last decades as she sat in their estate on the edge of the Boi du Boulogne and she began to lose her marbles.  Lots of gossip.  Then, to round things off, I picked up at the bookstore a biography of the Russian dissident, Stalinist fan, total nut, Manhattan thug, and heavy duty sex pot named Eddie or Edichka Limonov.  It reminds me of why I am dubious of all the Russian immigrants who poured into this country since Russian loosened its exit policies  Otherwise it is an astounding record of audacity, not the audacity of hope, but of impudence, pugnacity, and hormonal energy.  Knausgaard entitled his six volume piece "My Struggle," and that's what you could say about all three.  What tenacity, what yearnings, what triumphs!  Now I must begin to read the texts of the tragic dramas I shall be using in my course; I need a lot of refreshment after all these years of retirement.  More struggle, more audacity from Oedipus to Clytemnestra.  The same but different.