Word: boccaccio
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...have heard of hashish prior to commencing his trade in it. This is nonsense. It was the stuff of daily social intercourse in North Africa at the time. And how could an erudite, well-traveled Frenchman who alludes throughout his book to canonical authors and works - from Homer to Boccaccio to fellow French writers like Dumas and Molière - not have been familiar with Baudelaire's 19th century writings about drugs, hashish in particular? One can only speculate that De Monfreid's feigned innocence is a raconteur's device, making his descent into the netherworld of drug smuggling...
That's a pretty good description of Ten Days in the Hills (Knopf; 445 pages), a leisurely stretch of talking and rutting that takes its structure from The Decameron and a good part of its spirit from The Kama Sutra. Let's start with The Decameron. In Boccaccio's 14th century compendium of tales, 10 people depart Florence, where the Black Death is raging, for two weeks of food, drink and storytelling in the Tuscan countryside. In Smiley's update, the Iraq war stands in for the plague. Los Angeles, the silkier parts, plays Tuscany. As the war begins...
...Girl Interrupted,” comment, Apr. 26). If a few plot points and a borrowed phrase every 10 pages constitute “literary identity theft”, as Tuesday’s statement from Random House alleges, few authors will escape whipping. With Chaucer and Boccaccio, Shakespeare and Holinshead, Robert Johnson and Skip James, why not Viswanathan and McCafferty? Any literary omelet worth its salt is likely to contain a few borrowed eggs...
...jolt shook the passenger ferry Al Salam Boccaccio 98 during an overnight voyage across the Red Sea last week, stirring Girgis Rifaat awake in his cabin. "People began yelling 'Fire, fire!'" Rifaat, a 30-year-old Egyptian returning from his job as a salesman in Kuwait, told Time at a hospital in Hurghada. "I realized that the boat was going down." As the vessel listed precariously, Rifaat leapt overboard, swam to a lifeboat and waited 19 hours before being pulled out of the water by a helicopter. Most of the other 1,510 people thought to be on board, mainly...
...weeks later they staged a wedding that reflected their artistic interests at the Castello di Montegufoni, a castle in the Tuscan countryside. Sixty guests stayed in the castle for a week, during which friends and family joined the couple in reciting poetry and enacting scenes from The Decameron, Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th century collection of fables, in the castle's theater. On the wedding day, Quirk's brother, a drummer, led the processional through the grounds while guests banged along on pots and pans. When they reached a hilltop olive grove, the guests formed a circle around the couple...