573) Um outro velho jornal reacionario: velinhas para o Wall Street Journal

Leio na coluna "This Day in History":

1889 Wall Street Journal begins publishing

Meus parabéns ao venerando jornal capitalista. Ele tem a idade da República brasileira e certamente passou por menos reformas e turbulências, cosméticas ou de substância, do que o nosso combalido e altamente desacreditado regime republicano.
Não sou um leitor, sequer habitual, desse jornal que não tem vergonha de defender, acerbamente, valores e princípios capitalistas.
Apenas recebo, diariamente, o resumo de suas principais notícias e editoriais.
Como não sou um capitalista, não me sinto obrigado a pagar uma assinatura para acesso pleno às muitas matérias publicadas nesse jornal, que faculta apenas parte do material publicado para leitura online.
Mas sempre presto atenção à coluna semanal, publicada aos sábados, chamada "Five Best" que sempre seleciona os "cinco melhores livros" -- na concepção de seus autores, obviamente -- numa área determinada: pode ser policial, história, política, artes, whatever.
A seleção deste sábado 8 de julho de 2006, por exemplo, cobre as cinco melhores novelas, efetuada por Louis Auchincloss -- sempre é uma personalidade convidada a fazer a sua seleção, geralmente jornalistas e críticos, mas também pode ser um politico ou artista -- que oferece sua lista e que transcrevo abaixo.

Para terminar, renovo meus cumprimentos ao velho jornal do bastião capitalista da América, certamente in good shape do ponto de vista fiscal e orçamentário, o que talvez não possa ser dito da nossa república combalida.

FIVE BEST

The Long and the Short of It
The best novellas.

BY LOUIS AUCHINCLOSS
Saturday, July 8, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT

1. "Madame de Treymes" By Edith Wharton (Scribner's, 1907).

A notable form of fiction, the novella is approved more by the reading public of yesterday than of to day. Its length is hard to specify other than to say that it is usually not long enough to justify a separate publication under its own covers, yet it is certainly a useful form for any subject too simple for a novel but too complex to be fitted within the limits of a short story. Edith Wharton's "Madame de Treymes" is a remarkable example of the form. It is the story of the tactical defeat but moral victory of an honest and upstanding American in his struggle to win a wife from a tightly united but feudally minded French aristocratic family. He loses, but they cheat. It is essentially the same tale with the same moral as James's full-length novel "The American." In a masterpiece of brevity, Wharton dramatizes the contrast between the two opposing forces: the simple and proper old brownstone New York, low in style but high in principle, and the achingly beautiful but decadent Saint-Germain district of Paris. The issue is seamlessly joined.

2. "The Author of Beltraffio" By Henry James (1884).

Here Henry James successfully encapsulates a tale that might seem to require longer treatment. A mother allows her young son to die unattended by a doctor rather than see him live to be corrupted by his father's literary infatuation with what she considers the evil beauty of the Italian Renaissance. All that James wished to draw from his donnée is a sense of the horror that may result from a philistine's loathing of anything charming enough to interfere with the dullness of order for order's sake.

3. "Olivia" By Dorothy Bussy (William Sloane, 1949).

Dorothy Bussy's "Olivia" is the perfect novella because the form and content are in ideal proportion. It is the deeply moving tale of a girl's crush on the cultivated headmistress of a French boarding school and of the tender and humane way that the infatuation is handled by the older woman. The headmistress realizes that her initial response to the girl's attachment is too warm for the student's ultimate good. One feels that, though her crush may be an isolated incident in the girl's existence, to be replaced by maturer emotions, perhaps even a happy marriage, it is nonetheless an important and ever memorable phase in a lifelong engagement with the art of love.

4. "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." By Oscar Wilde (1889).

Wilde's novella is a delightful and half-plausible romp through the multitudinous inquiries into the identity of the youth to whom Shakespeare's sonnets are largely addressed. "The Portrait of Mr. W.H." ends with the novel theory that the young person is not a beautiful maiden, as one might assume, but the boy actor who performed as Rosalind, Juliet and Cleopatra at the Globe Theatre. The reconciliation of this idea with the text of the poems is brilliantly provocative and even enhances one's appreciation of the verse by stretching the imagination. Of course, one is not convinced; one is not meant to be. It is a glorious jeu d'esprit.

5. "Le Procurateur de Judée By Anatole France (1892).

This pearl of a novella is known to many principally through its final line: the aging Pontius Pilate's response to a query put to him by an old friend. The two are reminiscing about their past in Judea, when Pilate was the local Roman administrator. Recalling an early mistress who left him to follow a young man reputed to perform miracles--and who was later crucified for some crime--Lamia asks Pilate if he remembers the man, one Jesus of Nazareth. Pilate scratches his head and says, no, he does not recall the name. Anatole France wonderfully contrasts the former Roman ruler's calm, philosophic detachment with the violent eruptions of portions of the empire that preferred religious fanaticism and independence to deference to the eternal city. Pilate predicts the terrible coming revenge of emperor Titus. But what broods over the story is the inevitable triumph of an even more terrible church militant.

Mr. Auchincloss's most recent book, "The Young Apollo and Other Stories," was published by Houghton Mifflin in April.