Paris Salon feedback

Last weekend we had a Salon overnight in Villennes-sur-Seine outside of Paris with a wonderful group of readers working carefully through Virgil’s Aeneid: rich work, lovely, floating in the air setting and scrumptious eats…felt like a Spa for the mind.

Here are some of the participants’ comments:
“Thank you, once again, for a stimulating, interesting, and just plain fun book salon on Saturday! I really enjoyed it. It reminds me how important it is to have an English language literary conversation in my life again… Oddly enough, it makes me feel more integrated in France!”-WWM

“Once again what a great session that was, and a difficult and demanding one. I think we really managed to do justice to The Aeneid even in that short space of time…and it was so great being AWAY, out of Paris, in a spacious house with the fire at night and the rooms full of light and sun the next morning. A lovely experience and Lizzie was such a relaxed and generous host.

I came away my mind still full of the reading and realised that the characters that stuck with me most were the WOMEN. Juno – wonderfully complex with her passionate nature but also the wisdom of her advice to Aeneas about letting the Latins keep their own name and culture etc; the wonderful, tragic Dido; Camilla the woman-warrior, bosom bared…(and for me to a lesser extent Juturna). Truly great portraits of women!

I wish I’d picked up on the post-script by Fagle before…I found the parallels between the first half of the Aeneid and Aeneas’ wandering and the Odyssey, and the second war-packed part and the Iliad absolutely relevant and true.

Hope you had a good evening and now you’re back in London, swimming in Hampstead pool as I write perhaps, life packed with more sharing and teaching…

Looking forward to Melville!”

Coming Salons in Paris for 2013 (Proposed)
weekend of January 25th-27th –Short story study, Aeneid, Beowulf (to be confirmed)

Weekend March 22nd-24th Moby Dick, Sound & The Fury and…? Send your requests now!!27.11.12

Toby’s Aeneid weekend in Paris: Traffic jams and twilight wanderings to experimental Japanese food down cobbled streets with dear friends…braving the trek to the western suburbs to study the Aeneid on a ship like huge home perched in the edge of a hill overlooking the Seine valley…nine hours of engaged reading and discussion on the strivings of Aeneas and the powerful female characters that disappear in wisps of smoke around him…fine food to keep us going through the founding of Rome…dashing back to Paris through startling Sunday sun to a Thanksgiving feast amongst more Paris friends–one brief quiet moment I stood in front of the Gare St Lazare full of words and love and blooming in the winter sun.