{"id":11572,"date":"2018-10-01T11:54:30","date_gmt":"2018-10-01T01:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=11572"},"modified":"2018-10-01T11:54:30","modified_gmt":"2018-10-01T01:54:30","slug":"six-degrees-of-separation-the-outsiders-to-sweet-water-stolen-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/soundslikewish.org\/?p=11572","title":{"rendered":"Six degrees of separation: The Outsiders to Sweet Water – Stolen Land"},"content":{"rendered":"

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For the challenge by Booksaremyfavouriteandbest<\/a> to find six degrees of separation between books, this month’s starting point is The Outsiders<\/em> by S.E. Hinton.<\/p>\n

1. At first I thought it was The Outsider<\/em> (singular), one of the English titles given\u00a0 to Albert Camus’ L’\u00c9tranger<\/em>. But reading the author’s name made me look again. I noticed the plural in Hinton’s title and recalled my sons reading this book at high school and then reading it myself. However, I had immediately thought of Camus’ book and its opening line, ‘Aujourd’hui maman est morte’, much discussed by translators. In Stuart Gilbert’s translation, The Outsider<\/em>,\u00a0 it becomes ‘Mother died today’.<\/p>\n

2. This led me to think of another opening line disputed and revised by translators, the first line of Swann’s Way<\/em> by Marcel Proust, translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff: ‘For a long time I used to go to bed early.’ So many ways to say this.<\/p>\n

3. And the first line of Anna Karenina<\/em> by Tolstoy, translated by Constance Garnett: ‘Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’<\/p>\n

4. And from there my mind went to Tolstoy’s War and Peace,<\/em> currently showing as a TV serial. I have the book, a gift from my daughter-in-law who works in a bookshop, but I haven’t tackled it.<\/p>\n

5. However, I have decided to tackle another hefty Russian novel, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment<\/em>, only because I found a pocket-size edition in a 2nd-hand shop.<\/p>\n

6. I took a break from Crime and Punishment<\/em> after a few chapters and picked up a shorter novel, Sweet Water – Stolen Land<\/em> by Philip McLaren. What surprised me after reading a description of a gruesome murder in Dostoevsky’s novel was to read a number of such scenes in McLaren’s.<\/p>\n