{"id":10593,"date":"2007-08-22T21:19:55","date_gmt":"2007-08-23T01:19:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/22\/10593.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:56:56","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:56:56","slug":"book-report-whats-bred-in-the","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2007\/08\/22\/book-report-whats-bred-in-the\/","title":{"rendered":"Book Report: What\u2019s Bred in the Bone"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger read The Rebel Angels<\/I> a couple of months ago in a volume that contained all three novels in the Cornish Trilogy<\/a>. I didn’t blog it at the time, largely (to my recollection) because I hadn’t finished the volume, the physical book, even though I had finished the novel and set it aside. I suspect that I figured I would carry on and read What’s Bred in the Bone<\/a> soon, and then The Lyre of Orpheus<\/I>, and then I would note it in this Tohu Bohu. Which would be odd, actually, because the spine of the book split, right down the middle, and I finished reading The Rebel Angels<\/I> with the back half of the book shoved under the bed. When I saw What’s Bred in the Bone<\/I> at the library book sale (or wherever I was), I bought it more to replace the damaged three-in-one than to read the next in the series.\n

Once it was home, though, I reread it, and enjoyed it. I do love Robertson Davies’ novels. He has a marvelous ability to slip the grotesque into the mundane, and mix them up so sweetly that I have difficulty telling which is which. He’s full of crap on a variety of topics, but that’s not so bad; he is generously full of crap, chock full of crap, overflowing with crap in a ... fertile way. Or something. He’s very Dickensian, now that I think of it, in good ways and bad, too, which may account for my fondness for his faults as well as his virtues. And What’s Bred in the Bone<\/I> is (at the moment) my favorite of his novels. There’s the magnificent recapitulation of Canadian history writ small(ish), the obsessive fetishization of art, in this case painting, and the majesting unfolding of the inevitable plot. I should get The Lyre of Orpheus<\/I>, or find the back half of the book I shoved under the bed back then.\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger read The Rebel Angels a couple of months ago in a volume that contained all three novels in the Cornish Trilogy. I didn\u2019t blog it at the time, largely (to my recollection) because I hadn\u2019t finished the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[194],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18087,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10593\/revisions\/18087"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}