'Thought That He Knew How It Was Done'

A friend whose taste in books I generally trust suggested I read Adam Thorpe’s first novel, Ulverton, published in 1992. “Layered history” he called it. “You’ll like it.” So, I emailed Kaboom Books here in Houston, John Dillman put a copy aside and I picked it up on Saturday. I seldom read recent fiction, so I’m hoping the experiment pays off. I also realized I almost never buy books I haven’t already read, and I’m not certain what that means. It may suggest a lifelong reliance on libraries. Or caution, unwillingness to buy something I don’t want to keep or at least recommend to someone else. Or maybe cheapness. From John I bought two other (pre-read) books: 

The first American edition of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Knox Brothers (1977)

 

Zbigniew Herbert’s The King of the Ants: Mythological Essays (trans. John and Bogdana Carpenter, Ecco Press, 1999)

 

Fitzgerald’s book, a charming collective biography of her father (Edmund Knox, editor of Punch) and his three brothers (Ronald, theologian, Bible translator, author of Enthusiasm and crime writer; Dillwyn, cryptographer; Wilfred, Bible scholar), contains an unexpected passage I remember well, about Fitzgerald’s great- grandfather:

 

“George Knox, on the other hand, was the kind of Irishman who, like Samuel Beckett’s Watt, ‘had never smiled, but thought that he knew how it was done.’”