Le Chien Des Baskervilles
By Arthur Conan Doyle
Radio and I were casually walking through the streets of Berne, the capital of Switzerland. No really, it *is* the confederation’s principal settlement. I never get that answer correct in Trivial Pursuit either.
Anyway, we were wiling away some time, in pursuit of cheap bookshops. It’s my undoing. (I’ve bought another five from an antiquarian dealer today. I only chanced upon his shop because I followed the directions for ‘cheap framing’.)
Anyway, my German is woeful. Pitiful. I’m sly enough to work out a solution that makes it appear that I’m being modest: Anytime I need to speak German, I always think ahead so that I’m prepared, and start my conversation with “Hi there, ever so sorry. I’m not from around these parts, so my German’s not good.” That’s fine for getting around conversations, but it doesn’t help with books.
I’m blabbering, by the way, for a reason, that I’ll get to later.
Anyway, we just so happened to find an antiquarian dealer. Whilst Radio perused the Swiss literature outside, I headed inside and immediately saw the owner. Man, he couldn’t have looked any more Teutonic if he’d tried, resembling this chap:
No getting around it, we were served by Hindenburg.
Anyway, out came my canned German conversation-starter, slightly modified to say that I don’t read rather than speak. “Haben Sie Bücher auf englisch, französisch oder Italienisch?”
To my delight, there were indeed books in those three languages. The Italians were very few, expensive, and unappealing. The English consisted of copies of NatGeo at a highly inflated cost. The French books were much better, not least because there was a copy of “The Hound Of The Baskervilles”.
This wasn’t new to me, since it was the first book I ever read in Esperanto. However: I didn’t particularly like it when I read it that time. I have to begrudgingly say that I didn’t like the French version any better, though that makes me about the only person who could have bad taste enough to dislike a book that most consider a masterpiece. (This is why I was blabbering earlier: I didn’t want to jump straight into the negativity and it would’ve been a short review anyway without the padding.)
Am I paying the price for reading it in a foreign language? I doubt it. Looking over my copy of the Esperanto version, it’s covered in annotations, and it’s clear that I was using it as a learning tool. (How would you expect a beginner to read chapters all about moors and heaths and not need the help of a dictionary?) This wasn’t the case with the French version though, since there were scant words that I didn’t know.
I just felt that the book was … plodding. I liked the last chapter, when all was revealed but felt that it took too long to get there. Yes, I now understand why a second shoe was stolen and that there really was a dog, but it felt like I was doing penance, my prize for sitting through a few hours of inactivity being the revelation of what the story was about.
Radio loves Sherlock Holmes, so I’ll watch the film version of this with her at some point. I have some other books by Conan Doyle, so I’ll see what I think of those a little later, but I’m not holding out to be impressed 
Tags: Arthur Conan Doyle