Renaissance has now been published, after more than ten years of writing and re-writing and learning to live with the characters of Raymond and the others who make up this life experience…
This is how it all begins: Raymond see Don Quixote lying in a skip… Arts Librarian Raymond mounts a defence of the printed word as a digital purge sweeps through his university library. Thousands of volumes are culled before the librarian himself is shown the door. Redundant, alone with his books, Raymond plots his renaissance…
Renaissance is a novel of books, of architecture, of rediscovery that explores the relationship between past and present, old and new, between personal and cultural longing.
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Don Quixote
Miguel de Cervantes
This is how it all begins: Raymond sees Don Quixote lying in a skip. The last week of summer, sun shining in the bluest of skies, small birds singing, a sweet breeze flirts with the leaves on the eucalypts, no hint of the autumn to come. Raymond climbs up on the skip, bangs his knee on the hard metal edge, loses his balance and tumbles onto his back. He rolls over and now they’re face to face. Don Quixote. Someone has thrown Cervantes into the skip! Back up on his knees, the librarian examines his find. Wear on the spine, a faded scratch on the cover, fresh damage on the bottom left corner where the precious volume landed. He tries to smooth out the crease, gently coaxing the bent corner back, but he knows you can’t do that, the scar will be forever.
Don Quixote, the Tobias Smollett translation. Yes, the pantomime getting that… Years out of print it was, but the librarian was determined to track down a copy. His only lead was in London, so an avalanche of faxes to that Irish bookseller in Tottenham Court Road, who thought he had a copy, then didn’t have a copy, then claimed to know where to get a copy, then didn’t really know and just seemed to be playing the Australian along. Then one day, months later, after Raymond had given up the cause as lost, a parcel arrived at the library with Raymond’s name on it and the bookseller’s twee little stamp. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes, translated by Tobias Smollett. The library has others, Putman’s and the Edith Grossman translation, as good as any contemporary version, but Tobias Smollett is the original and Raymond’s favourite. It’s the language…
So eager and entangled was our Hidalgo in this kind of history, that he would often read from morning till night, and from night to morning again, without interruption; till at last, the mois-ture of his brain being quite exhausted with indefatigable watching and study, he fairly lost his wits: all that he had read of quarrels, enchantments, battles, challenges, wounds, tortures, amorous com-plaints, and other improbable conceits, took full possession of his fancy; and he believed all those romantic exploits so implicitly, that in his opinion the holy scripture was not more true…
Don Quixote. Raymond gets back up and perches on the slender metal edge of the skip, one foot resting on somebody or other’s First Principles of Accountancy, the other on a science textbook, Inorganic Chemistry, Kotz & Purcell. There is a broad ledge at the front of the skip and it is there he places Miguel de Cervantes’ classic text, tracing an arc across the cover with the tips of his fingers and whispering an apology for the outrage.
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linzi murrie 