(For some reason, this did not post when I wrote it last night, so a lot of my statements about having posted already today are no longer relevant. It sounds weird, but as far as concerns about my blog go, I feel that it may be the least of my problems.)
Hello! I know that I already posted here today, but I just finished reading Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, by Maurice Leblanc, which I bought from the Kindle store (found, as always, at Amazon.com) about a week ago. I started reading it while I was still subbing in the library this afternoon, but it was really entertaining, so I decided to finish it before eating dinner. It was a bit different from some of the other Lupin novels I've read in that Lupin spends it acting more as a detective than an active part of the plot. The first half seemed to me like a pretty normal mystery, but I actually preferred the second half, which is both a mystery and a somewhat sick soap opera at the same time.
In writing about Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge, I think that it's also worth noting that in the middle of the book, there's a supposed drowning that's almost directly lifted from the last Fantomas book that I read (Messengers of Evil- Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas, which isn't at all a wordy title), which was very jarring. The aftermath of the event in question isn't all that similar, since Juve, the super-detective from Fantomas, is a bit more efficient than Lupin is in terms of getting things done, but it still seems strange. Despite this, though, this was a genuinely difficult to unravel mystery, and not just because it was bizarre or convoluted, like the goings-on in Lady Audley's Secret earlier today, and it was fun to read, too.
Though I've already said plenty about the book in question, I want to say that the coolest thing about my having read Arsene Lupin and la Cagliostro's Revenge is that it's a new translation of the novel by Josephine Gill, making it readily available to English language readers. Before finding this last week, I'd downloaded all of the Lupin novels that I could find from Amazon and Project Gutenberg, feeling sort of disappointed that once I'd read them all, the series would be done for me, unless I got much better at reading in French. When I did see all of the new translations, though, I got really excited and downloaded one of them immediately. As far as the quality of the writing in it goes, it seemed to me to be on par with most of the other Lupin books that I'd read, with some parts of it, particularly the conversations between the Gentleman and Thomas le Bouc, seeming more contemporary than what I'd read in the others. I can't imagine people going "that guy" in 813, which I thought was the draggiest of all the Lupin books I've read, but here, it didn't at all seem out of place. There were a couple of missing periods, and, at least on my old-fashioned buttons on the side Kindle, the formatting had some weird giant spaces between the words, but that didn't bother me much. I still plan to read more of Josephine Gill's new translations, though in the future, I'm hoping to skip the part where I get so excited that they exist that I read the novels completely out of order with the rest of the series.
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