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| 0679720227
| 9780679720225
| 0679720227
| 4.04
| 123,543
| May 16, 1956
| May 07, 1991
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really liked it
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A man named Clamence spent much of his life as a lawyer in Paris working on behalf of ‘widows and orphans.� He was the type of guy who helped blind me
A man named Clamence spent much of his life as a lawyer in Paris working on behalf of ‘widows and orphans.� He was the type of guy who helped blind men cross the street. He believed in “� rising to that supreme summit where virtue is its own reward.� One day though, he fails to react when he is crossing a bridge at night and hears a young woman throw herself into the water. She apparently drowned. Why didn’t he react? [image] We learn about Clamence’s life from conversations in an Amsterdam bar between him and a stranger. The ‘action� takes place in what was a real bar called Mexico City. “Have you noticed that Amsterdam's concentric canals resemble the circles of hell?� Supposedly that’s why Camus chose Amsterdam as the setting for this novel. The sleazy bar in the red light district forms the innermost circle for Clamence’s new life, one of dissipation. The Holocaust is mentioned in the story and what is now the red light district was in the Jewish Quarter before WW II. (The book was published in 1956, the year before he won the Nobel Prize and three years before his death in an auto accident.) The main character becomes more dissatisfied with some other major events in his life. He asks himself later, when the blind man thanked me for helping him cross the street, why did I doff my hat to him? He couldn’t see me do that. Clamence now feels the answer is that he wanted public acclaim for his good actions and that they were all self-centered. More things happen. (view spoiler)[ He has an altercation with a motorcyclist; he stores a stolen painting in his apartment; he goes to North Africa with a dream of fighting in the French Resistance but fails to do so. (hide spoiler)] Here are some quotes: “I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the papers, After that vigorous definition, the subject will be, if I may say so, exhausted.� “People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.� “Moreover, we cannot assert the innocence of anyone, whereas we can state with certainty the guilt of all.� “I didn't know that freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne. Nor yet a gift... It's a chore, on the contrary, and a long-distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.� Camus was famous for his existentialist writings. A lot of this comes across as cynicism but it looks like he is exploring the good and evil dual nature of us humans. Other novels I’ve read by Camus include The First Man, The Plague and The Stranger. Image: A map of Amsterdam’s canals from amsterdamguiden.nu ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 12, 2024
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Jul 14, 2024
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Jul 14, 2024
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Paperback
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| 0593801997
| 9780593801994
| 0593801997
| 3.59
| 41,702
| Mar 06, 2024
| Mar 12, 2024
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liked it
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This is a posthumous book by the author. He had worked on it for many years and was still working on it when dementia took over during the last decade
This is a posthumous book by the author. He had worked on it for many years and was still working on it when dementia took over during the last decade of his life (1927 � 2014). When his death was approaching he told his two sons the book was unfinished and to destroy it. Kids disobey their parents, so here it is. [image] It’s a novella, a hair over 100 pages. To fill out the slim book we are given a preface by the sons, Editor’s notes, and a few photos of the author’s handwritten corrections on various pages. The story is simple. A married woman with kids takes a few days each year to go visit her mother’s grave on the resort island where she is buried. Suddenly she decides she’ll pick up a guy while she’s there. So we follow her adventures for four summers with four different men. Each experience is different. (view spoiler)[ But each is disappointing in a different way and we wonder why she does this. (hide spoiler)] There is none of Marquez's usual magical realism. It comes across as ordinary writing and has a bit of a rough draft feel to it. The story has a bizarre ending that to me doesn’t fit with the rest of the story. We are told in the introductory material that Marquez struggled with an ending and finally said ‘I’ve got it.� I guess we are told this to assure us it wasn’t added by the editors. No one tells us why they waited ten years to publish the book posthumously. [image] I’ve read a half-dozen novels by Marquez and my two favorites are Love in the Time of Cholera and Chronicle of a Death Foretold Top photo: a beach at La Miel, Colombia from planetware.com The author from bostonreview.net ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 25, 2024
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May 27, 2024
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May 27, 2024
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Hardcover
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| 0142000698
| 9780142000694
| 0142000698
| 3.55
| 257,264
| 1947
| Jan 08, 2002
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really liked it
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A novella, a fable really. An impoverished family along the Gulf of Mexico coast (we presume Mexico) struggles for a living by pearl diving. One day t
A novella, a fable really. An impoverished family along the Gulf of Mexico coast (we presume Mexico) struggles for a living by pearl diving. One day the man discovers a huge perfect pearl that can change their life. But will it change it for the better or for worse? [image] The man knows the local pearl buyers are in cahoots with each other to offer the lowest prices, so he will make a multi-day trip out of town to sell the pearl in the big city. Everyone in town knows about the pearl and they are a target for theft and scams. Meanwhile the man’s son is bitten by a scorpion. The doctor, who does not speak the language of the poor people, refuses to tend to his son � until he hears about the pearl. (view spoiler)[ Even then, he gives the child some kind of fake ‘cure.� (hide spoiler)] The local priest suddenly takes an interest in the family. Things reach a point where the pearl diver’s wife considers throwing the pearl back into the sea. Steinbeck was heavily influenced by Hemingway’s writing, so we have short, simple, direct sentences with no flowery language, but occasionally Steinbeck offers us an expansive paragraph such as the following: “It is wonderful the way a little town keeps track of itself and of all its units. If every single man and woman, child and baby, acts and conducts itself in a known pattern and breaks no walls and differs with no one and experiments in no way and is not sick and does not endanger the ease and peace of mind or steady unbroken flow of the town, then that unit can disappear and never be heard of. But let one man step out of the regular thought or the known and trusted pattern, and the nerves of the townspeople ring with nervousness and communication travels over the nerve lines of the town. Then every unit communicates to the whole.� [image] The two authors were contemporaries although they were not friends. Hemingway lived 1899-1961; Steinbeck, 1902-1968. But Hemingway had the jump on writing with most of his major works published a decade before Steinbeck’s. Hemingway won the Nobel Prize in 1954 and had died by the time Steinbeck won his in 1962. I also enjoyed reading Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row Top photo of poverty in Mexico from voanews.com The author from theparisreview.org ...more |
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1
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Jan 25, 2024
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Jan 27, 2024
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Jan 27, 2024
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Paperback
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| B07TVKLV2B
| 3.95
| 129,203
| Nov 25, 2009
| Aug 13, 2019
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really liked it
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A philosophical and existentialist book disguised as a kind of noir thriller. Its main themes are animal rights and the lives of 'marginal' people jus
A philosophical and existentialist book disguised as a kind of noir thriller. Its main themes are animal rights and the lives of 'marginal' people just surviving . (The 2018 Nobel prize-winning author is a vegetarian.) The main character is a woman, a retired engineer and teacher now living in a rural area of Poland near the Czechoslovakian border. Rich people from the cities have summer homes here and her main source of income, other than a puny pension, is caring for these summer homes in the off-season. The few neighbors she has are all kind of cast-off folks (like herself) and she gives them names like Oddball and Big Foot. A former student of hers, ‘Dizzy,� visits occasionally. [image] She’s a bundle of nerves and anxieties, aches and pains that she tries to cure with herbs. She often uses the phrase ‘at my age,� yet she climbs ladders to make repairs to houses. Her hobby is astrology, especially predicting people’s deaths from their dates of birth. She and her former student love the poetry of William Blake and make many references to it - that's where the title comes from. Like the author, the main character is a vegetarian and she does not endear herself to her neighbors, some of whom hunt and poach off-season. She reports them to the police, who do nothing. Someone shot her darling dogs, ‘my dears.� When the bodies of neighbors and hunters start turning up in the woods, she goes to the police with her astrological theories and her opinion that they were killed by animals for revenge. Of course she is immediately branded as a ‘nut.� I particularly enjoyed her writing as illustrated by the quotes below. Rather than giving away any plot, I’ll let the author speak: “With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts.� � ‘Its Animals show the truth about a country,� I said. ‘Its attitude toward Animals. If people behave brutally toward Animals, no form of democracy is ever going to help them, in fact nothing will at all.� � “The old method for dealing with bad dreams is to tell them aloud over the toilet bowl, and then flush them away.� “Winter mornings are made of steel; they have a metallic taste and sharp edges.� “There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there's something I haven't done, something I've forgotten, that I'm not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I'm lagging behind the rest.... But when one takes a careful look at the people passing in the street, one might assume that many others have the same problem too, and haven't done what they should with their lives either.� “So far we've never provided the world with anything useful. We haven't come up with the idea for any invention. We have no power, we have no resources apart from our small properties. We do our jobs, but they are of no significance for anyone else. If we went missing, nothing would really change. Nobody would notice.� “A large tree, crooked and full of holes, survives for centuries without being cut down, because nothing could possibly be made out of it. This example should raise the spirits of people like us. Everyone knows the profit to be reaped from the useful, but nobody knows the benefit to be gained from the useless.� [image] This book is the author’s best-known work with almost 100,000 ratings on GR, a huge number for a translated author. The Polish author, Olga Tokarczuk, was the 2018 Nobel prize winner. I have also read her second best-seller, Flights, which won the Man Booker International prize also in 2018. Top photo of a vacation home rental in Poland from holidu.com The author from seattletimes.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 03, 2024
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Jan 07, 2024
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Jan 07, 2024
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Audible Audio
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| 0525534199
| 9780525534198
| 0525534199
| 3.75
| 34,915
| Sep 2007
| Aug 14, 2018
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it was amazing
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A potpourri of brilliance from the Polish author who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. This book also won the 2018 Man Booker International prize for trans
A potpourri of brilliance from the Polish author who won the Nobel Prize in 2018. This book also won the 2018 Man Booker International prize for translations. The organization of the book confused me at first and I almost gave up on it but I’m glad I stuck with it. We have alternating mini-essays, many related to travel, airports and airplanes (thus the title), interspersed with a few short stories. Most of the short stories have a travel theme as well. These mini-essays focus on topics like airports becoming mini-cities in their own right, or hotel rooms, or watching people in the lobby at a hotel registration area; even selecting travel toiletries. [image] Some of the mini-essays come as stories you might hear from talking to strangers in your travels. She tells us that rather than seeking out people who speak her language when she travels, she avoids them. She doesn’t have anything good to say about travel guidebooks. As the narrator travels, she’s particularly interested in museums that have collections of preserved body organs and plasticine models of human veins and organs. So we have essays on the early development of preservation techniques and related stories (that we assume are true), such as Chopin leaving specific instructions about how to make his death mask and how to cut out and preserve his heart in a jar. There’s a series of letters written to Emperor Frederick from the daughter of a black North African man who had risen to be a minister and right-hand man of the emperor. Still, when the minister died the emperor had his body stuffed and preserved and put on display in his museum, along with animals, with just a fig leaf for cover. The daughter is writing to plead for his body to be returned for a Christian burial. Fact or fiction? The situation sounds true, but maybe the letters are fiction? As I said, most of the embedded short stories relate to travel, such as one that is told in three sections throughout the book. A husband, wife and young child travel for vacation to the Croatian island of Vis in the Adriatic. The woman and child disappear. Despite searches by teams of officials and helicopters, they can’t be found. It’s a tiny island the size of Nantucket. Where could they have gone? (view spoiler)[ Yet, here they are because the story is told retrospectively after they are back safe and sound. (hide spoiler)] Another story involves an elderly professor who gives lectures about the Greek islands on cruise ships. His frail body comes alive for his lectures. A veterinary researcher gets an email from a former lover she has not seen or heard from for 30 years. Yet she packs her bags and takes leave of her husband and kids for a trip across Russia and then back to Poland with a single astounding purpose accomplished. There is good writing such as this passage from a short story about a woman with a teenaged son who is bedridden and completely incapacitated. She spends her life caring for him. In a rare occasion out of the house she sees teenagers in a park gathered around a girl on a horse: “In all of them she sees her Petya; they are around the same age. Petya comes back into her body, as though she'd never given him up into the world. He's there, curled up, heavy as a stone, painful, swelling inside her, growing - it must be that she has to give birth to him again, this time out of every pore she has in her skin, sweating him out. For now he comes up in her throat, sticking in her lungs, and he won't emerge in any other way besides a sob. No, she won't be able to eat a blini - she's full. Petya’s lodged in her throat, when he could have been sitting there and reaching up with a beer can in his hand, giving it to the girl with the horse, leaning into it with his whole body, bursting out laughing. He could have been in motion…� At various times she talks of ‘travel psychology� and even ‘travel psychoanalysis.� So we have passages like this one: “She gives up on the idea of visiting the halls where she’d once lived. In fact, everything here repels her. Suddenly she's utterly baffled by this phenomenon of people actually choosing, of their own free will, to go back and visit the different places of their youths. What is it they think they're going to find? What is it they have to have validation of - just the fact that they had been there? Or that they’d done the right thing in leaving? Or perhaps they were urged on by some hope that recollecting more precisely these lost places would work with the lightning speed of a zipper to unite the past and future, creating a single stable surface, tooth to tooth, a metal suture.� And a few quotes I liked: “…life seems like a disgusting habit we lost control over a long time ago.� “There's too much in the world. It would be wiser to reduce it, rather than expanding or enlarging it. We'd be better off stuffing it back into its little can... We have no choice now but to learn how to endlessly select.� “…I had heard that nothing cures melancholy like looking at maps.� [As a retired geography professor, should I agree? Lol.] It’s rare for me to think while reading a book “Wow, this person is brilliant.� But that’s the feeling I had several times while reading. It’s interesting though that the narrator tells us nothing about herself, other than at the very beginning when she writes that she thinks her wanderlust came from traveling with her parents in a camper as a child. [image] The author (b. 1962) has written about eight novels; almost all available in English. Her best-known work in English is Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead. Top photo from ustravel.org The author from parisreview.org [Edited 8/13/23] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 27, 2022
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Dec 30, 2022
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Dec 30, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 1583225749
| 9781583225745
| 1583225749
| 3.92
| 43,742
| 1991
| May 01, 2003
|
really liked it
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This is an intimate portrait of a woman in love. Everything she does, everything she sees, everyone she talks with is related back to HIM. She reads t
This is an intimate portrait of a woman in love. Everything she does, everything she sees, everyone she talks with is related back to HIM. She reads things he might be interested in. If she hears someone talk of a vacation she thinks ‘I’ll ask him if he’s been there.� She dresses ‘just in case,� and she looks at fashions in store windows daily. A phone call brings dejection if it’s NOT HIM. Everything else is simply filling time before their next meeting. Of course, he’s married with kids. He’s from Eastern Europe (she never tells us where), assigned to France for his job, and has brought his family with him. She lives for his calls and his hurried visits. When they are together she dreads seeing him sneak a glance at his watch and then suffers dejection as she watches him dress to leave. [image] The quick calls are all-important and infrequent. He can’t call from home and these are the pre-cellphone days of pay-phones on street corners. (It’s 1991.) She makes promises, in effect, ‘if he calls today I’ll make a donation to…� She drops money into beggars� cups with a wish. The book is a primer on what it is like for a woman to be in love with a married man. She never tells us if he’s in love with her. (view spoiler)[ She doesn’t have to tell us. Sure he likes her, but we know he’s in it for the sex. (hide spoiler)] The book is also a bit of a meta-novel. She tells us she is writing the book as therapy to get over him. There's an extended analogy between her obsession with writing a book and trying to make it perfect with the way she tried to make her relationship perfect. Some passages about this: [On why she is writing.] “I do not wish to explain my passion - that would imply that it was a mistake or some disorder I need to justify - I just want to describe it.� “Living in passion or writing: in each case one's perception of time is fundamentally different.� “I stare at the written pages with astonishment and something resembling shame, feelings I certainly never felt when I was living out my passion and writing about it.� She raises an interesting question. Once you are past a reality that happened to you, and then you have written about it, what’s the difference between having experienced something and just having read about it in the first place? Her lover’s native language is not French so his French is imperfect. “…I was able to appreciate the approximate quality of our conversations. From the very beginning, and throughout the whole of our affair, I had the privilege of knowing what we all find out in the end: the man we love is a complete stranger.� Her lover is called back to his home country. She waits for a phone call that will never come. Or will it? (view spoiler)[ Months later, after absolutely no contact, he’s in town and he calls: “It’s me.� We know he just wants a quickie. Will she see him? (hide spoiler)] [image] I liked the writing. The sentences flow; not necessarily short, but simple, sparse and to the point, nothing lyrical. It’s a very intimate portrait of a woman baring her soul in a way that I think few authors, men or women, would have the courage to do. There’s a bit of explicit sex. This is the first book I've read by the 2022 Nobel Prize winner. Almost all of her work is autobiographical. Her books in order, catalog her parents� lives, her teenage years, her marriage, her affair with an East European man (this book I am reviewing), her abortion, the onset of Alzheimer's, her mother's death, her battle with breast cancer. Top photo: the author, age 18, with her mother at her parents� café in Yvetot, Normandy from france.amerique.com (copyright by the author) The author (b. 1940) from newyorker.com [Revised 7/24/23] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 07, 2022
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Nov 09, 2022
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Nov 09, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0941419746
| 9780941419741
| 0941419746
| 4.03
| 27,341
| 1925
| Sep 01, 1992
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I have enjoyed some other works by this author, such as The Late Mattia Pascal, but this was a DNF for me. I got about a third of the way through, so
I have enjoyed some other works by this author, such as The Late Mattia Pascal, but this was a DNF for me. I got about a third of the way through, so I gave it a good shot. In all of the other works I’ve read by this author, the main character is an anti-hero, stumbling through life, always doing and saying the wrong thing, then trying to make amends, and getting himself in deeper. This book has the usual humor and sarcasm but it’s basically philosophical ramblings as we watch the main character’s descent into madness. Otherwise there’s no plot. “Wives are made for discovering a husband’s faults.� His father died before he gave him a grandson “who would be not at all like me.� He wants to be alone “without myself, and with a stranger at hand.� There’s a lot of looking in the mirror. Who is it? Is it me? A stranger? What if we never were able to see a reflection of our selves? You’re not the same person you were a minute ago. (Thus the one hundred thousand of the title.) “Does a cloud by any chance know anything of the fact of being?...But to explain the wherefore of the why?� I gave up. Maybe it’s just me because the book is highly rated on GR � about a 4.1 and many of my GR friends rated it highly. I didn’t give a rating because I did not finish it. I also note some confusion in the title given this translated book � it is listed as both ‘One, None� and ‘One, No One.� [image] The Italian author (1867-1936) won the Nobel Prize in 1934. Photo from news.18.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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May 13, 2022
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May 13, 2022
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Paperback
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| 0802119360
| 9780802119360
| 0802119360
| 3.54
| 1,195
| 2000
| Mar 16, 2010
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really liked it
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[Edited 10/19/23, spoilers hidden] A book without a lot of plot but a considerable number of themes, and I’ll even say deep and unusual themes. As is t [Edited 10/19/23, spoilers hidden] A book without a lot of plot but a considerable number of themes, and I’ll even say deep and unusual themes. As is the case in every other book I have read by this author, the main character has a son with brain damage (as does the author). In this case the son is a savant who is brilliant at musical composition. [image] REVIEW BELOW CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS ALTHOUGH MAIN ONES HIDDEN The story focuses on the main character’s reaction to the suicide of his lifelong best friend, his brother-in-law. They were best buddies as kids and the main character married his best friend’s sister. Now both men are extremely successful and well known in Japan. The main character is an author and a public intellectual who is frequently interviewed on television. The brother-in-law is also well known as a documentary filmmaker, idolized not only in Japan but in Germany as well. So, suicide is a major theme as it is in some other Japanese novels I have read. As we know, there is a tradition of ritual suicide by men in Japan including suicides by many famous authors. Suicide is a theme that illustrates why I like to read stories from other cultures. In one of the many Japanese novels I have read I recall one where the family is discussing suicide around the dinner table, with the children asking the parents ‘would you ever kill yourselves?� Their answer isn’t a shocked ‘No, of course not, what are you talking about? Instead. it’s ‘Well� � In this novel, the main character has an acquaintance he occasionally has lunch with and the man says to him, in effect, ‘I like to keep an eye on you because I know you are the type of guy who might kill himself. So, how have you been?� Another theme I’ll call ‘the possibility of communicating with the dead.� As adults, the man and his brother-in-law did not actually have much in-person interaction over the years. Instead they communicated by letter, phone calls and by occasionally mailing cassette tapes. Just before the brother-in-law died, he had recorded hours of tapes to send to his brother-in-law. The dead man reviewed their lives and how they had influenced each other. After the brother-in-law is dead, the main character becomes obsessed with listening to these tapes in the evening and recording his own responses to them as if he were still communicating with the dead man. He comes to believe that the topics that the brother-in-law recorded seem to relate to events in his current life as if he were receiving timely advice and commentary from beyond the grave. Another theme relates to the remnants of the post-war militaristic culture that remains in Japan. This will sound familiar to residents in the US and other countries concerned with neo-Nazi white supremacist militia types in their own country. And it appears they are still active in Japan. (We are told the brother-in-law died in 1999, so that’s around the time most of the story is set.) (view spoiler)[ The main character’s father had been a leader of a failed paramilitary action right at the end of WW II. These guys refused to accept Japan’s surrender and wanted restoration of the empire. Some of these guys who knew his father are still around, living in a type of rural commune. They expect these two local boys who have risen to fame to help them out. They harass and attempt to coerce them in bizarre ways. (hide spoiler)] [image] Another storyline - I guess I won’t call it a theme - concerns the main character’s wife, sister of his best friend. She had a dysfunctional mother who died young, and from an early age she was like a mother to her younger brother - the one who committed suicide. (view spoiler)[ Can a woman be so attached to the memory of this little boy that she had her own child as an attempt to replace that lost kid that she treated as a son? This is particularly true after her brother became the ‘changeling� that the title refers to. (hide spoiler)] There’s a lot of stuff about art. There are discussions of these two men talking about how much of Japan’s artistic endeavor is indigenous vs. copied from the west. We get into music with the son’s interests. There’s discussion about issues with translations and reading works in translation versus the original language. There’s a bit about the early history of the Japanese film industry. The main character’s wife is an artist and, in the last quarter of the book or so, the story focuses more on her reactions to her brother’s death, this idea of a changeling, and its connections to literature she has read including children’s stories and illustrations by Maurice Sendak about ‘changelings� and ‘the stolen child.� After his best friend’s death the fictional author takes a few months to go to Germany after being invited as a visiting scholar by a university. His best friend spent much time in Germany making documentaries. The main character takes this opportunity to look into his friend’s life in Germany, including some women he was involved with. His time in Germany becomes “a solitary marathon of reminiscence� about his brother-in-law. One of those young women in Germany, who is Japanese, returns to Japan and provides a twist to the ending of the story. Some deep stuff. A little slow in starting and a bit bogged down at first when the two boys discuss literature, but I stuck with it and I was glad I did. [image] This is my fourth book by this author (1935 - 2023). Of the four books I still like The Silent Cry best. When the author won the Nobel Prize in 1994, the Nobel committee cited that novel in particular as one reason for the award. Top image: from Maurice Sendak’s book Where the Wild Things Are from townsendcenter.berkeley.edu Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri from britannica.com The author from telegraph.co.uk ...more |
Notes are private!
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2
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May 05, 2022
not set
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May 08, 2022
not set
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May 08, 2022
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0934977631
| 9780934977630
| 0934977631
| 3.78
| 6,503
| Apr 27, 1913
| Sep 29, 2008
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really liked it
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I had never read a novel set in Sardinia. When I saw this book I assumed it was by an obscure Sardinian author. Imagine my surprise when I read the bl
I had never read a novel set in Sardinia. When I saw this book I assumed it was by an obscure Sardinian author. Imagine my surprise when I read the blurbs and saw that she was the 1928 Nobel Prize winner in literature! That led me to wonder how many female Nobel Prize winners in literature are out there I had not heard of. (I made a list, at end.) [image] Sardinia is an island province of Italy, just south of Corsica which is part of France. (see map). The topography of the island, its rural nature, and its poverty are a lot like Sicily. The story was published in 1913. While the presence of a few autos in the local city are mentioned, it really has the flavor of the author’s childhood in the late 1800’s. Some spoilers follow: The first few pages outline the setup of the story for us. We have a declining noble family in a decaying mansion. That theme is a genre in itself! I think of The Leopard by Lampedusa The Leopard, On Heroes and Tombs by Argentina’s Ernesto Sabato On Heroes and Tombs, Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote Other Voices, Other Rooms. We also learn a lot about the superstitions of the local peasants, such as Giobiana, a witch, who appears to local women if they spin yarn on Thursday evenings! There’s a lot of local color of the landscape and of rural peasant customs. There are three sisters, the Pintors, who were essentially terrorized by their now-deceased father. They could not leave the house while he waited to select suitable husbands for them. (view spoiler)[ They never arrived. (hide spoiler)] The youngest sister managed to run off with a lover and the father searched for her until he died under mysterious circumstances. The two older sisters never answered the runaway sister’s letters but they stayed in touch with her son, their nephew, who comes to figure prominently in the story. The sisters remain relatively isolated in their decaying house - pieces of it fall into the street in several scenes. Although they are at times on the border of starvation, they maintain their ‘nobility� by maintaining their distance from the common people. Their only social activities are occasionally going to church and to church festivals. The narrator of the story is Efix, an old man who single-handedly farms and runs what remains of the estate. Over the years most of the land was sold off or lost in lawsuits. There’s no money. He is dedicated to serving them and lives his life vicariously through the sisters, dreaming of the restoration of their nobility. He was secretly in love with the sister who ran off and he’s a little bit in love with the youngest remaining sister (now 30-ish). They ‘pay� him with IOUs and even talk about him inheriting the estate when they die. (Fat chance � he’s considerably older than all of them!) [image] Efix is very religious. Religion � sin, guilt, forgiveness, penance - become major themes even though the sisters are pretty nonchalant about religion. They go to church for show and to the church festivals for entertainment. Efix has secrets. (view spoiler)[ He knows the mysteries about the youngest sister’s escape and the death of the father and he’s not talking. (hide spoiler)] The runaway sister dies and the nephew they have never met appears and turns their world upside down. He’s good-looking and spends money lavishly at the local festa. Every young woman is after him. But things are not what they seem. The sisters get further in debt. There’s an old woman in town known as ‘the usurer� who gets her hooks into them. The rich widower in town � actually a cousin of theirs - wants to take over their estate. (view spoiler)[ He’s secretly in love with the youngest sister. Will he essentially force her into marrying him so the sisters don’t end up as beggars on the street? (hide spoiler)] The theme of decline goes beyond the decaying house and the sisters� fall from nobility. The sisters lament that ‘even gentlemen are merchants now.� There’s nothing to do in the town. There are abandoned houses in ruins. Malaria is endemic. People live in the past when times were better. “She lived so much in the past that the present hardly interested her.� The phrase ‘memory sickness� is used. By the way, this is the condition of a lot of these isolated rural towns today in Italy and in much of southern Europe. Abandoned villages where only a few elderly folks remain. Here's a sample of the author’s nicely descriptive writing about a church festival: “She seems to be a girl again, on the priest’s belvedere on a May evening. A great copper moon rises from the sea and the whole world seems made of gold and pearl. An accordion fills the air with plaintive cries. The courtyard is illuminated by a fire’s rosy gleam that makes the slender figure of the dark musician and the purplish faces of the women and children dancing the ballo sardo stand out against the gray wall. Their shadows move like phantoms on the trampled grass and along the church walls; gold buttons, silvery braids of costumes, accordion keys flash and gleam. Everything else is lost in the pearly shadows of moonlight. Noemi remembered never taking part directly in the feast, while her older sisters laughed and enjoyed themselves, and Lia couched like a here in a grassy corner of the courtyard, perhaps thinking of escape even then.� [image] The author (1871-1936) grew up in this area of Sardinia that she wrote about. Her family discouraged her writing because, Wikipedia tells us, nice girls didn’t write novels for the world to read and ridicule them. She was a prolific writer with dozens of novels and stories although very few appear to have been translated into English. Here's a list of female Nobel Prize recipients. Of the 120 recipients of the Nobel award in literature by 2023, only 17 are women. I thought it would be an interesting project for someone to read one work by each. Several are poets. Women who won the Nobel Prize in Literature: 2022 - Annie Ernaux (France) 2020 - Louise Gluck (United States) 2019 - Olga Tokarczuk (Poland) 2015 - Svetlana Alexeivich (Belarus) ... 2013 - Alice Munro (Canada) ... 2009 - Herta Mueller (Germany) ... 2007 - Doris Lessing (Britain) ... 2004 - Elfriede Jelinek (Austria) ... 1996 - Wislawa Szymborska (Poland) ... 1993 - Toni Morrison (United States) 1991 - Nadine Gordimer (South Africa) 1966 - Nelly Sachs (Germany, Sweden) 1945 - Gabriela Mistral (Chile) 1938 - Pearl S. Buck (United States) 1928 - Sigrid Undset (Norway) 1926 - Grazia Deledda (Italy) 1909 - Selma Lagerlöf (Sweden) Map from researchgate.net The town of Galtelli in northeast Sardinia, where the story is set from deliciousitaly.com Sketches of the author from sicilyinsideandout.com [Edited for typos, spoilers 3/25/22, 11/17/23] ...more |
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| 0679761055
| 9780679761051
| 0679761055
| 3.81
| 14,277
| 1964
| Jan 30, 1996
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liked it
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There are really three main characters in this book. A married man; a famous female artist, now 39, who had an affair with the married man years ago;
There are really three main characters in this book. A married man; a famous female artist, now 39, who had an affair with the married man years ago; and the artist's young female protégée with whom she is having a lesbian relationship. I can see that women may not like the story in this book because of the main character. Do we still use the phrase ‘male chauvinist pig?� Let’s first examine the male character, an author. When he was 39, he had an affair with a 16-year-old girl (now the artist) while he was married. She had a baby that died at birth and she tried to commit suicide. He later wrote about all this in his (only) best-selling novel. His wife, who types all his manuscripts, knew of the affair. And stoic that she is, insisted on typing the story of the affair for him while pregnant and while tears streamed down her cheeks. She suffered bouts of nausea and ultimately had a miscarriage. [image] But hey, 15 years later the author reads about the now-famous artist in a magazine and thinks 'I wonder what she’s up to? I’ll take the train over to see her in Kyoto.' (We are told he is now 54 and she is 39.) The artist, who never married, is still attractive, and it’s clear he’s ready for Round 2 if she’s interested. The artist seems stand-offish but guess what? Her young protégée is drop-dead gorgeous and seems ready to hop into bed with him, despite her lesbian relationship with her mentor. (The man is unaware that the two women are lovers.) And that's not all he doesn't know. What he doesn’t know becomes the main focus of the story. The young woman protégée who knows all these details about her mentor’s early life is seeking revenge on the author or on his family for how the man treated her lover (the artist) 15 years ago. Will the young woman seduce and abandon the older man? Will she go after his college-aged son? She even said she might try to break up his daughter’s marriage by going after the daughter’s husband. Will she do all three? Will her mentor really abandon her if she seeks revenge the way she talks about? Now I’ll jump to the ending, which I won’t reveal, but I will say I found it unsatisfactory because it offered no resolution to the issues raised in the story. Kind of like a TV serial that gets you all hepped up for next season and then you read that the show has been canceled. Still a good read, but a '3.5' that I leave as a '3.' Like Kawabata’s other books I have read, many passages are beautiful descriptions of nature. Here’s an example: “From the studio veranda one could see only the inner garden - the view was cut off by the temple's main residence. It was a rather artless oblong garden, but about half of it was bathed in moonlight, so that even the stepping stones took on different colors in the light and shadow. A white azalea blooming in the shadows seemed to be floating. The scarlet maple near the veranda still had fresh young leaves, though they were darkened by the night. In spring people often mistook its bright red budding leaves for flowers, and wondered what kind of blossoms they were. The garden also had a rich cover of hair moss.� There is also enough about art that I added the book to my art shelf. Both of the two main female characters are artists - teacher and mentor - and both paint many pictures of nature. The younger one paints in an abstract style, the older one in a more realistic style. They think about and discuss how their paintings of nature are reflections of their feelings. (I read somewhere that the author considered a career as an artist in his youth, although I cannot find that reference now.) [image] Kawabata was the first Japanese recipient of the Nobel Prize (1968) and he was mentor to Yukio Mishima. Both men committed suicide. Top photo of street scene in Japan in the 1950s from alamy.com The author from myanimelist.net [Revised 7/15/23] ...more |
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Jan 04, 2022
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| 1476785082
| 9781476785080
| 1476785082
| 4.02
| 18,531
| Sep 07, 2021
| Sep 07, 2021
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it was amazing
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[Edited 3/17/23] This book is a fictionalized biography of the Nobel prize-winning German author, Thomas Mann, kind of a counterpart to Toibin’s book T [Edited 3/17/23] This book is a fictionalized biography of the Nobel prize-winning German author, Thomas Mann, kind of a counterpart to Toibin’s book The Master, a fictionalized biography of Henry James. Toibin is, and Mann was, gay or bi, and in his biography of James, Toibin assumed Henry James was gay but 'in the closet' � there is no hard evidence. Thomas Mann had a long and complicated life (1875-1955). I know I often summarize books rather than ‘review� them, so for this book I thought I would just highlight a few important themes of Mann’s life that intrigued me, as Mann was portrayed by the author. [image] Above: Mann’s two oldest children with their gay lovers. Erika, second from left; Klaus, far right. From dw.com One aspect of Mann’s life, which occupies a lot of the story, was his wild and crazy children. Gay or bi-, Mann fathered six children and they all led complex lives that would be reality show material today. If then was now, and we were in Germany, we’d see one of their pictures on the front page of the National Enquirer every week at the supermarket. The best example of their chaotic adventures is the oldest brother and sister, both gay, who became famous in Germany as stage actors starring in plays that they wrote about their own love lives and their sexuality. This was Europe so they could do that when they could not have done so in the United States. They announced to the press that they would marry each other's lover, which the young woman did. Fortunately times change, but at one point, one of their daughters said of their mother “She will think she has been a failure as a mother. Three homosexuals, or two homosexuals and one bisexual. Two daughters who enjoy the company of older men.� (Two daughters married men their father’s age.) Independent of their sexual orientation, the relationship between the two oldest siblings is fascinating. Perhaps it has something to do with genetics because the situation was repeated from Mann’s wife's family to his own. Mann's wife had a twin brother. When they were young, they existed for each other in a self-contained world. Even at social gatherings, everything was a private joke between themselves and it was difficult for any outsider to enter that world. That was repeated in the relationship between Mann’s two oldest children. It continued all their lives until the brother became absent and dysfunctional in his 30s or so. (I also think of the brother-sister act in Donna Tart’s novel The Secret History.) (view spoiler)[ The brother died of a drug overdose. Mann and his wife did not attend the funeral. (hide spoiler)] [image] Above: Mann’s in his study in his California home from brightspotcdn.com All of Mann’s children relied on their father’s financial support well into and beyond adulthood. And yet they critiqued his lifestyle, saying that the house he eventually built California after he fled Germany during the War was ostentatious, and they had too many servants, etc. A continuous stream of money flowed out from him to his children for their rent, travel and other support, and they always had meals cooked by servants and a rent-free home to return to all their lives. Another theme that intrigued me was Mann’s reaction to the rise of Hitler. Of course he opposed Hitler. But why did it take him so long to speak out publicly against Hitler? Mann was the most influential intellectual in Germany. Hitler took power about the time that Mann was at the top of his fame: he had received the Nobel Prize in 1929. Mann’s main excuse was that he did not want to endanger his wife's parents who were in Germany and who, even though they became Protestants, were considered by everyone to be Jewish. But he also knew that most of his money was derived from his book sales to his German readers. He knew that opposing Hitler would result in the banning of his books. Mann already saw one effect of Hitler: Mann gave well-paid lectures around the country, but suddenly organized Nazi thugs appeared at his lectures to chant slogans and shout him down. In reaction, he wrote a weaselly political book that some critics called “unintelligible.� Mann simply assumed Hitler could not rise to power in Germany. It’s chilling, in the context of modern American politics, to be reminded how Hitler did it: among other things, the repetition of lies, the need for enemies, public reprisals to those who opposed him. After Hitler took power, Mann and his family fled first to Switzerland, then to France, then to the United States. In the US they lived first in Princeton, New Jersey, and later, California. Still Mann remained silent. Mann and his wife were invited to a private dinner with the Roosevelts and later he met several times with Eleanor Roosevelt to strategize about how he could help the war effort. Eventually Mann finally spoke out forcefully against Hitler but you wonder what was the point at that time, given that America had already entered the war. [image] Above: Mann’s home in California from watmh.org Mann liked real estate. He built a mansion in Germany in part to get his wife re-interested in family life after she became a patient in a tuberculosis sanitarium. After a year, she seemed to simply be adopting the life of “a patient.� His strategy worked. She came back home to her husband and children. Her telling of her experiences and Mann’s numerous visits to the sanitarium became the basis for one of his most famous books, The Magic Mountain. Much later he hired an architect to build a home in Pacific Palisades in California. It’s still there and it recently sold for $14 million. (Amazingly, it was listed as a ‘demo� since the land was so much more valuable than the house, but it was bought and saved from demolition by the German government.) For most of his life Mann’s wife was his manager. She protected his secluded time for his writing. In later years his oldest daughter took over that role. For all of Mann’s life, his wife managed the often-times chaotic complexities that their six children got into. Mann left not only the running of his house to his wife but the raising and the management of the children. He appeared at dinner and cracked jokes and did magic tricks (the title) but otherwise he was an absent father. A dozen times in the story some dramatic, chaotic family situation arises and it's followed by the words ‘Thomas retired to his study and closed the door.� Mann’s older brother was an important influence, and at times a nemesis, throughout his life. His brother became a well-respected author as well. He wrote mostly about politics, but his politics were radical. Mann hated to talk politics with his brother. And, as Hitler’s power grew, his brother became another person constantly urging Mann to speak out and oppose Hitler. The two Mann brothers in effect came to be opposing leaders of thought about different approaches to German government. And, of course, while the nation was having this reasoned intellectual discussion, Hitler arrived on the scene and burned the place down. His brother was another one who didn’t like Mann’s lifestyle, but Mann supported his brother financially for much of his brother’s life. It's interesting how the author structures the book. It's biography but it is far from a traditional biography. Dates are hardly ever mentioned. We do not hear what year he was born or when he was married or what year this or that book was published or how old he was when some dramatic event occurred. In fact at times I found myself wondering ‘How old was Mann now?� Toibin does focus on Mann’s work in the sense that he gives us an overview of how particularly important works came about such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Dr. Faustus and Death in Venice. Death in Venice is particularly intriguing. It’s the story of an old man in love with a young boy, and you wonder how a closeted gay man could have ‘gotten away with� this story? The author explains how that was the case. And at the risk of giving too much away, I won’t go into details about Mann’s sex life, but some people, including family members, ‘knew,� and many suspected his orientation. [image] Mann on a German postage stamp from Wikimedia When the McCarthy era hit the US, Mann and most of his children were investigated by the FBI. 'They had files.' You can imagine all the meticulous details those files were filled with about his children’s sex lives. Against US State Department urgings, Mann agreed to give a lecture in East Germany which the US authorities feared would help 'legitimize' East Germany’s communist government. After that, in effect, Mann and his children were hounded out of the country and Mann spent his last years in Switzerland. A great book. Very readable. Maybe a bit too much detail on the children’s lives, especially the details on getting all members of his extended family out of Europe as Germany took over country after country. The book has no pictures, so I added some in the review and put captions under them. ...more |
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Dec 22, 2021
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Dec 29, 2021
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Dec 29, 2021
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Hardcover
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| 1593760329
| 9781593760328
| 1593760329
| 3.73
| 7,301
| Jan 31, 1962
| 2006
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it was amazing
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This is my eighth book by the 1968 Nobel Prize winner, Kawabata. This book was specifically mentioned by the Nobel Committee as one of the three that
This is my eighth book by the 1968 Nobel Prize winner, Kawabata. This book was specifically mentioned by the Nobel Committee as one of the three that were most important in his receiving the award. [image] Before I get to the story I'll talk about the beautiful nature writing that pervades all of his books that I have read. In the very first chapter we read extensively about two clusters of violets growing in the tree bark, cherry blossoms of course, and of crickets being raised in a jar. Many authors introduce chapters or sections of novels where an omniscient narrator tells us about the beauty of the landscape - I think of Virginia Woolf and Colette, and many others. But Kawabata’s characters gape, touch and smell in wonderment of nature. He’s a master of weaving nature into the story. Just about all of the chapter titles have some reference to nature or the seasons. The author also introduces us to ancient customs of people working with nature. In this book a chapter titled Kitayama Cedars tells us how village men strip the bark from the tree limbs. The women massage the bare stumps in sand and hot water to produce cedar poles for particular use in tea houses and temples. The tree is never cut down. Rather, like a bonsai, the knot-free strait shoots are harvested in a process called Daisugi. (See photo � not all this detail is in the book, I looked it up.) This reminded me of his book Snow Country where the author tells us about the special Japanese fabric called chijimi, and how it is laboriously made. It’s a white fabric that is dyed by exposure to the sun on top of the snow. The title of the book refers to Kyoto which was Japan's capital before it was moved to Tokyo in 1868. Kyoto retains many ancient shrines and treasured historical sites. It is a city of festivals always celebrating special days, especially changes in nature like the blossoming of the cherry trees. Onto the story which has an unusual but fairly simple plot. A young woman, 20-ish, has been raised by a loving couple but she is not their biological child. She has heard different stories and doesn't know which one to believe. Was she a foundling left at a nunnery to be given up for adoption? Or did her parents kidnap her as an infant in a park? The latter version is what her mother tells her but perhaps her mother is saying this simply because the mother does not want her daughter to think she was abandoned. At this point, that was 20 years ago, so what difference does it make now? But we find out later that this leads to a critical development in the story. The young woman’s father is an artist - a kimono designer. But it is a failing business because of the expense of hand-woven individually designed fabrics. A design is sketched and a loom pattern has to be made by a handloom operator to make the actual cloth. All this hand labor can no longer compete with cheap mass-produced goods. To economize, she wears only kimonos that didn't sell in the shop. Much of the story is about her being courted by three young men. One is a weaver who makes special garments for her. But she is not only torn about choosing one of the three men. She can’t bear to think of her father selling the house and attached business, moving away and retiring. In line with the thinking of the times, it seems she thinks that if she married, she could not also run the business. We watch the approaches of the three young men to her through various festivals and visits to shrines. Two of the Kyoto shrines mentioned in the story are famous in Japanese literature. The author tells us one is featured in the Japanese classic The Tale of Genji. He also mentions the Golden Pavilion without talking about Yukio Mishima’s book of that title written six years earlier. (Kawabata was a mentor to Mishima.) [image] The main theme is change. The author is writing in 1962. Japan is westernizing more than ever and losing some of its attachment to these historical underpinnings of its culture. Approaching retirement, the father is in personal decline. Business is declining and he feels he can no longer create innovative kimono designs even with the help of western art books his daughter gives him, such as those featuring the work of artists like Paul Klee. The father makes a point of riding the last old trolley in Kyoto on the day it will be put out of service. (Even though the trolley was an introduced western invention.) He tells us of a famous Buddhist shrine where the sacred pillars have been dishonored by being used as backdrops by photographers doing fashion shoots for magazine ads. He visits the botanical gardens he has not been in for years and he wonders what happened to all the big trees. He knows the site was used as a US Army occupation village but he thinks ‘surely the Americans would not have removed the trees?� (Do we think we hear the sound of bulldozers in the distance?) Even his daughter laments the decline of door-to-door flower sellers. Simple writing and a calming read. [image] Top photo of cultivated Kitayama cedars from mymodernmet.com Old town in modern Kyoto from shutterstock.com The author on a Japanese postage stamp from us.123rf.com [Edited 11/30/23] ...more |
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not set
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Dec 26, 2021
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Dec 26, 2021
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| 014200068X
| 9780142000687
| 014200068X
| 4.06
| 147,242
| 1943
| Feb 05, 2002
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really liked it
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[Edited 12/13/23] I hadn’t read anything by Steinbeck in a while so I revisited Cannery Row which I read many years ago. [image] An omniscient narrator g [Edited 12/13/23] I hadn’t read anything by Steinbeck in a while so I revisited Cannery Row which I read many years ago. [image] An omniscient narrator gives us an overview of these mostly down-and-out men during the Depression. A group led by Mack lives as heavy-drinking squatters in an abandoned building down by the docks. They occasionally earn money unloading sardine fishing boats or by collecting sea creatures. They buy their food and drink from a Chinese grocer. The grocer and 'Doc,' a biologist who runs a lab collecting and preserving sea specimens, are the only people who have steady jobs. Unless you count the ‘girls� in Dora’s flophouse � they have pretty steady employment. The main story is a sitcom. The men idolize Doc and want to throw a party for him. It ends up being two parties. (view spoiler)[ Drunken sprees, both of which trash Doc’s home and lab. (hide spoiler)] The men have various humorous Keystone Cops episodes out collecting tomcats and frogs. [image] The story gives us an interesting juxtaposition of sitcom humor and hints of tragedy. Everyone, deep down, is kind and generous; they’ll help you out when you are really down on your luck. The ‘girls,� of whom we hear nothing about in any depth (the story is all about MEN), are the stereotypical warm-hearted prostitutes. Everyone is kind and understanding to the two mentally challenged young men who work in Doc’s lab. But lurking in the background are three suicides and a woman’s body in the bay. However, we learn nothing about the tragic lives of these four people. (view spoiler)[ Other than that two of the suicides were of men who had no money and one was a man who felt ‘unloved.� (hide spoiler)] It’s a mostly fun story of another time and a real place - Monterey, California where Steinbeck lived for a time. Doc’s lab is still there preserved among the surrounding urban sprawl along Ocean View Avenue, renamed 'Cannery Row' in the story. At the very beginning of the book, the author tells us: "Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flophouses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'Saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing." [image] Steinbeck (1902-1968) revisited these characters and setting in another novel, Sweet Thursday, written years later. The two books were made into a movie in 1982, Cannery Row (Nick Nolte and Debra Winger). (And his first successful novel, Tortilla Flat, was also about a group of semi-homeless men.) The author won the Nobel Prize in 1962. Top photo, modern-day Cannery Row from 4.bp.blogspot.com Doc's lab in Monterey from Wikipedia The author from observer.com ...more |
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Nov 10, 2021
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Nov 12, 2021
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Nov 12, 2021
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| B003T0GBOM
| 4.18
| 318,211
| 1995
| Aug 23, 2013
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it was amazing
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Another surreal, science fiction/dystopian work from the master. People in a small country are catching a disease that causes them to go blind. As the Another surreal, science fiction/dystopian work from the master. People in a small country are catching a disease that causes them to go blind. As the disease spreads, the government isolates them, like lepers, in decrepit abandoned dormitories. Soldiers surround them with orders to kill anyone who tries to leave. All the soldiers do is dump food in the parking lot and tell the inmates to figure it out. [image] The attempted self-governance of the hundreds of people who end up within the walls becomes a kind of Lord of the Flies or Animal Farm parody. Their initial efforts at self-governance, building by building, goes along reasonably well until a man with gun assembles a group of thugs. (view spoiler)[ They terrorize the facility, stealing everyone’s valuables and forcing women into prostitution. (hide spoiler)] The story follows the traumas and the exploits of a small group that sticks together: an ophthalmologist, a car thief, a prostitute, a young boy, an old man, etc. (view spoiler)[ One woman becomes the group’s leader. She is careful not to reveal that she can still see because she will feel obligated to be at everyone’s beck and call. (hide spoiler)] In the second stage of developments, the whole city has gone blind. The soldiers are gone and the small group goes into the city where throngs of blind people crowd the streets desperately seeking food and shelter. There is a complete breakdown of civic services and there is no electric power or even water. [image] With all this as background we ponder the various nuggets of wisdom from the author: “He had even reached the point of thinking that the darkness in which the blind live was nothing other than the simple absence of light, that what we call blindness was something that simply covered the appearance of beings and things, leaving them intact behind their black veil.� “…the [eye] doctor took him by the arm and installed him behind a scanner which anyone with imagination might see as a new version of the confessional, eyes replacing words, and the confessor looking directly into the sinner’s soul…� “The skeptics, who are many and stubborn, claim that, when it comes to human nature, if it is true that the opportunity does not always make the thief, it is also true that it helps a lot.� “An empty belly wakes up early.� “Would you like to hear the latest news, that colonel we mentioned earlier has gone blind, It’ll be interesting to see what he thinks of that bright idea of his now, He already thought, he shot himself in the head, Now that’s what I call a consistent attitude, The army is always ready to set an example.� “Be quiet the doctor’s wife said gently, let’s all keep quiet, there are times when words serve no purpose, if only I, too, could weep, say everything with tears, not have to speak in order to be understood.� “Do you mean that we have more words than we need, I mean that we have too few feelings, Or that we have them but have ceased to use the words they express, And so we lose them…� [image] This is the tenth book I have reviewed by this Nobel Prize-winning author. I see it as a science fiction work where an aberration of normal life lets us see how quickly some kind of dystopia develops. So it’s like two other works of his I have read: Death With Interruptions and The Stone Raft. Great reading! 4.5 and I’ll round up to 5. [Edited 4/7/24] Top photo from thehindu.com Photo from a dystopia animation by Saad Moosajee from thisiscolossal.com The author as a young man from nytimes.com ...more |
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Jun 30, 2021
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Jul 05, 2021
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Jul 05, 2021
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Kindle Edition
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| 1852426020
| 9781852426026
| 1852426020
| 3.84
| 4,392
| 1967
| 1998
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it was amazing
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[Edited for spoilers 9/7/24] When the author (1935 - 2023) won the Nobel Prize in 1994, the Nobel committee cited this novel in particular as one reaso [Edited for spoilers 9/7/24] When the author (1935 - 2023) won the Nobel Prize in 1994, the Nobel committee cited this novel in particular as one reason for the award. The novel basically tells the story of two brothers in Japan in the early 1960s. The older brother is a married part-time English professor but has a dying relationship with his wife, in large part because of the tragedy of having a son born with severe brain damage; the boy is institutionalized. The younger brother is a free spirit, having just returned from the USA where he led student demonstrations. [image] The younger brother seems to be a natural leader and has ‘followers� or I guess these days we might call them ‘groupies� � several young men and a young woman. Now that both of their parents have died, the two brothers return to their rural family homestead to dispose of the property. They seem haunted by their ancestors, in particular a great-grandfather and a great-uncle. (view spoiler)[ Each bother feels that they are like an ancestor in personality. They argue about what they recall or what they heard of these ancestors and what their personalities were like and, of course, they are arguing about their own personalities and how their worldviews differ. (hide spoiler)] Neither brother is employed so they have free time on their hands. The younger brother’s idol, the great-uncle led a peasant revolt in the 1860’s. The older brother’s idol was a large landowner, the wealthiest man in the village, so that gives them a lot to argue about in terms of distinctions of class, wealth and politics. The groupies of the younger brother think the older brother is basically a capitalist ‘rat.� Other crises thicken the plot. (view spoiler)[ The older brother’s best and only friend just committed suicide in a bizarre, almost ritualistic fashion. (I think the book’s title, Silent Cry, refers to suicide.) Not good for the older brother since he thinks often of suicide. His wife has become an alcoholic. She starts to go over to the other side, becoming more like one of the younger brother’s groupies, supporting a modern-day ‘peasant revolt� he is trying to lead � basically a boycott of the big local Korean-owned grocery chain store. (hide spoiler)] The brothers� former nanny lives as caretaker of their deceased family property. She’s notorious from newspaper articles claiming she is “the fattest woman in Japan.� If they sell the house, what are they to do with her and her family? The brothers are also haunted by more recent ghosts � an older brother mysteriously killed years ago in the village and a younger sister who committed suicide. In one scene the main character crawls down into a well-like pit being dug to repair the sewage system on his property and he sits there all day to meditate. (Shades of Murakami? Lol.) Another interesting sidenote that I found fascinating relates to a real historical character mentioned several times in the book � John Manjiro. I grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts, the whaling capital of the world in the 1800’s. I read some of the several books that have been written about Manjiro (when not reading Moby Dick, lol). As a young boy in the 1840’s, Manjiro had been shipwrecked, picked up by a whaler out of New Bedford, and ended up being schooled in the US. He later became an important person in the opening up of Japan to foreign influence. [image] This is the third novel I have read by this author and I liked it the best. Second, I liked A Personal Matter. Death by Water was ok but I thought a bit repetitive. In all three books the main character is a professor or writer and he has son with brain damage, as does the author. Here's a link to Oe's Nobel speech. Thanks to GR friend Michael Perkins for this: Top photo of a village in Japan in Shikoku (the island where the story take places) from flickr.com The author from puterbaughfestival.org ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 05, 2021
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Apr 08, 2021
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Apr 08, 2021
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1906497486
| 9781906497484
| 1906497486
| 3.44
| 3,609
| 2010
| May 15, 2010
|
really liked it
|
[Edited to hide spoilers 9/22/24] An autobiographical novella, the story of a young man and how change in China affected his life. It’s kind of a peopl [Edited to hide spoilers 9/22/24] An autobiographical novella, the story of a young man and how change in China affected his life. It’s kind of a people’s history in that sense that there is very little talk of politics or societal change in a big way, just how all the dramatic events and turmoil in China, going back to 1969, impacted this one man and his family. [image] The main thread is a coming-of-age story of a young man from a peasant family who is always in trouble, often through no fault of his own. His teachers assume him to be a juvenile delinquent � and he is, a bit and it's enough to get thrown out of school. This devastates him because he enjoyed learning. After this rocky start in life he does factory work and then goes into the army. He does well in the army but he yearns to see combat, to die in battle to make his parents proud. (The Chinese army fought in both Korea and Vietnam at the time.) There’s a lot of classism going on � the good-looking girls from better-off families don’t give peasant boys a second look. Some of this is even aggravated by the government. (view spoiler)[ His school has a special mission training some girls for Olympic ping-pong. The girls are even fed special diets and as a result are physically larger than the other girls and even boys, almost like a cadre of super-heroes. (hide spoiler)] [image] The theme is change of course and we see some of that (although not actually a lot). Some of the change is incidental and pretty minor. (view spoiler)[ He mises the old dumplings dripping with fat; now they tend to be vegetarian. There’s a lot of talk of an old Russian army truck that a wealthy man drives around his hometown. (hide spoiler)] The main character finds his role in life in writing short stories. (A lot of this novel is autobiographical.) Much of the story concerns another boy at school who was a real juvenile delinquent and also expelled. They meet up again much later in life. (view spoiler)[ The two 'delinquents' were the most materially successful of the students in their class. (hide spoiler)] The author insets himself into the narrative on occasion, such as this: “If you are reading this, please forgive me for being so long-winded. My head is crammed full of these assorted memories, and I don’t mean to write them down � they just flow out of their own accord. [image] A decent, not a great story; a 3.5 that I’ll round up to 4. The author (b. 1955) has written ten or so novels and novellas and he won the Nobel Prize in 2012. He is best known for his novel Red Sorghum Clan. Mo Yan is actually his pen name. It means “don’t speak� in Chinese and it represents his parents� advice to him, reflecting the political environment he grew up in: ‘Don’t go shooting off your mouth and get in trouble.� LOL. Of course he did, and has run into trouble with the government censoring or banning some of his stories. Photos: a rural Chinese market from wikipedia Chinese farm workers during the cultural Revolution from laurenream.github.io The author from telegraph.co.uk ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 22, 2021
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Mar 25, 2021
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Mar 25, 2021
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0151010404
| 9780151010400
| 0151010404
| 3.97
| 23,418
| 2002
| Oct 04, 2004
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it was amazing
|
Tertuliano Máximo Afonso watches a video recommended by a friend and discovers he has a double � a man who could be his identical twin, who looked and
Tertuliano Máximo Afonso watches a video recommended by a friend and discovers he has a double � a man who could be his identical twin, who looked and sounded exactly like Maximo did five years ago when the film was made. Like a private investigator, he sets out to find who the man is and meet with him. It’s a harder task than it seems because the man had only a walk-on role and is simply one name among a long list of extras in the film. [image] Finding his double shocks him so much that he doesn’t tell any of the (only) three significant others in his life: his on-again-off-again woman friend, his mother, and a male colleague at work. Since he is not revealing what has become an obsession, a good part of the story is how this secrecy impacts his relationships with these three people. There’s a metaphor with the double in the sense that they tell him he is acting like “another person.� Máximo is a very intelligent history teacher who realizes he is as confused as his students by the broad scope of human civilization he tries to convey in his classes. “…he viewed sweet History, the serious, educational subject which he had felt called upon to teach and which could have been a soothing refuge for him, as a chore without meaning and a beginning without an end.� As he ends up watching his double in 30 videos, and debates if he should view the oldest first, or the most recent first, the author develops an extended metaphor about the applicability of his order of viewing to the best way of teaching history: why must history always be taught from the past to the present � why not the reverse? As in many of Saramago’s novels, there’s a science fiction touch to the story � in this case based on the idea of clones. We all heard of Dolly the Sheep in 1996 and this book was published in 2002. I won’t reveal any of the story after he meets the man who is his double other than to say that there are some startling developments that keep the story moving and that dramatically impact the life of our main character, his woman friend and the double. I appreciate the authors philosophical nuggets and metaphors. Some examples: “…one of those hardy types to whom human frailty, especially in its most refined and delicate forms, is the cause of mocking laughter, the truth is that the inarticulate sounds which, quite against our wishes, occasionally emerge from our own mouth, are merely the irrepressible moans from some ancient pain or sorrow, like a scar suddenly making its forgotten presence felt again.� “As can never be stated too often, the best inventions are made by those who did not know what they were doing.� “…what tends to happen is that people gather together under an opinion as if it were an umbrella.� “…that awful old chestnut, we’re friends now and we’ll always be friends, that’s the worst thing anyone can say if they’re trying to end a romantic relationship, it’s as if we had closed the door only to find that were stuck fast in it…� “Being a man should never be an impediment to behaving like a gentleman.� “All the dictionary’s put together don’t contain half the terms we would need in order for us to understand each other…� “…teachers were trying to pass unnoticed amid the choppy sea of heads that surrounded them on every side, dodging as best they could the reefs that rose up before them as they slunk toward their natural harbor, the staff room.� “…just one of those problems that comes with old age, they come and go, go and come, and finally stay.� “Antonio Claro [the actor] will not waste his breath by replying that it’s impossible not to have enemies, that enemies are born not out of our will to have them but out of their irresistible desire to have us.� It happens that I read and reviewed another of Saramago’s books last week: All the Names. I was struck by what I will call ‘structural similarities� between the two books. The Double was published in 2002; All the Names in 1997. Both are about a fundamentally lonely man who lives by himself, who has an unsatisfying or boring job with a with a revered or feared supervisor. In both books the main character goes on an obsessive private investigator-like quest looking for another person and he is not able to tell anyone else about it. Because he can’t talk about his quest with another character in the book, the author invents a method for him to hold discussions and keep the reader informed of his thinking: in All the Names it is his bedroom ceiling; in The Double, it is his ‘common sense� talking to him. [image] In any case, a good story with excellent writing as we expect from the Nobel prize winning author. Lisbon from canstockphoto.com Sketch of the author by David Levine on nybooks.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Feb 13, 2021
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Feb 13, 2021
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0156010593
| 9780156010597
| 0156010593
| 3.91
| 23,184
| 1997
| Oct 05, 2001
|
it was amazing
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[Edited 11/4/2021] Another great novel by the Nobel prize-winning author. Senhor Jose is a friendless clerk who works in the Central Registry of Births [Edited 11/4/2021] Another great novel by the Nobel prize-winning author. Senhor Jose is a friendless clerk who works in the Central Registry of Births, Marriages and Deaths in the days before computers when all records were recorded by hand. He’s 50-ish and still not even a senior clerk. He lives alone in an old building that used to be part of the registry, so he has access to an old door that secretly lets him into the building after hours. [image] He has no life and his only hobby is sneaking into the building at nights to look up information about famous people he reads about in magazines. One day at work, an “unknown woman’s� card accidentally stuck to another he was working on. He becomes obsessed with finding out about her. Like a private investigator he starts spending his time visiting her old addresses, interviewing former neighbors (view spoiler)[ even breaking into her old school to look at her old school records. (hide spoiler)] The social hierarchy in his work environment is byzantine and he lives in terror of the head Registrar who speaks only to his two underlings, who in turn, only speak to their four subordinates, and so on down the line. There’s a long-running metaphor between the organization of the file cards and life � the cards of the dead are kept separately in an analogous ‘card cemetery� that is so huge and disordered that the clerks use an Ariadne’s thread to find their way back. We read Saramago to ponder his insights. Some examples: “Strictly speaking, we do not make decisions, decisions make us. The proof can be found in the fact that, though life leads us to carry out the most diverse actions one after the other, we do not prelude each one with a period of reflection, evaluation and calculation, and only then declare ourselves able to decide if we will go out to lunch or buy a newspaper or look for the unknown woman.� At the all-male Registry, everyone addresses everyone else as Senhor: “…the fact that everyone addresses everyone else in the same way, from the Registrar down to the most recently recruited clerk, does not necessarily have the same meaning when applied to the different relationships within the hierarchy, for, in the varying ways that this one short word is spoken, and according to rank or to the mood of the moment, one can observe a whole range of modulations: condescension, irritation, irony, distain, humility, flattery…� [image] “…to come up with a good hundred truly famous people without falling into the familiar laxness of anthologies of the one hundred best love sonnets or the one hundred most touching elegies, which so often leave us feeling perfectly justified in suspecting that the last to be chosen are only there to make up the numbers.� “I’ll begin by asking you if you know how many people there are in a marriage, Two, a man and a woman, No, there are three people in a marriage, there’s the woman, there’s the man, and there’s what I call the third person, the most important, the person who is composed of the man and the woman together…For example, if one of the two commits adultery, the person who is most hurt, who receives the deepest cut, however incredible it may seem, is not the other person, but that other “other� which is the couple, not one person, but two…� “It is absurd, but it’s about time I did something absurd in my life…� “Contrary to what is generally believed, meaning and sense were never the same thing, meaning shows itself at once, direct, literal, explicit, enclosed in itself, univocal, if you like, while sense cannot stay still, it’s seethes with second, third and fourth senses, radiating out in different directions that divide and subdivide into branches and branchlets…� “What if the lady in the ground floor apartment has died too, she wasn’t exactly brimming with health, besides, in order to die you need only be alive, especially at her age…� “…a man a little older than himself, who had absorbed the air of one who no longer expects anything more from life.� When I read Saramago's 'The Double' recently, I was struck by what I will call ‘structural similarities� between the two books. The Double was published in 2002; All the Names in 1997. Both are about a fundamentally lonely man who lives by himself, who has an unsatisfying or boring job with a revered or feared supervisor. In both books the main character goes on an obsessive private investigator-like quest looking for another person and he is not able to tell anyone else about it. Because he can’t talk about his quest with another character in the book, the author invents a method for him to hold discussions and keep the reader informed of his thinking: in All the Names it is his bedroom ceiling; in The Double, it is his ‘common sense� talking to him. [image] This is the sixth novel I’ve read by Saramago. Great stuff! Top photo of Lisbon from theculturetrip.com File clerks from collections.cmoa.org The author from kinnareads.files.wordpress.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 2021
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Feb 09, 2021
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Feb 09, 2021
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0679767924
| 9780679767923
| 0679767924
| 4.13
| 13,561
| 1934
| Jan 14, 1997
|
it was amazing
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[Edited 1/4/21] I don’t usually cite book cover comments from critics in my reviews, but I’ll make an exception for this book by the 1955 Nobel Prize-w [Edited 1/4/21] I don’t usually cite book cover comments from critics in my reviews, but I’ll make an exception for this book by the 1955 Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author (1902-1998). In the introduction, Brad Leithauser, a poet, novelist and English professor called it (at the time he wrote the introduction) “my favorite book by a living novelist.� Annie Proulx said it was “one of my top ten� and Jane Smiley called it “one of the best books of the twentieth century.� [image] The story is about Bjartur, a hard-nosed sheep farmer in Iceland in the early 1900’s. He loves hard work, dawn to dusk. He’s a skinflint and he drives his family as hard as himself � 16 hour days in the summer. He’s obsessed with expanding his herd of sheep and doesn’t believe in debt. So the family survives on porridge and saltfish - and coffee. They live in a cave-like croft, built partly underground, above the stench of their animals. Bjartur dreams of sheep, but his wives and children dream of food � especially of meat. (It occurs to me that dreaming of food is a stellar mark of poverty. I’m reminded of a story of a young boy who was a Portuguese American immigrant from the Azores � in Home Is an Island by Alfred Lewis - who dreams almost every night of coffee, sugar and white bread.) Over time he contributes to the deaths of his two wives (in the introduction they are described as “tortuously unhappy�) and drives off his children when they are old enough to leave. [image] Perhaps Bjartur has a couple of humanistic qualities but I don’t agree with the writer of the introduction who tells us we develop a kind of grudging admiration for Bjartur’s persistence. (Like we do for the crotchety old man in A Man Called Ove.) I don’t feel that way � I see Bjartur as a thug. It’s true that while he works he recites and formulates poetry. Poetry is part of the Icelandic tradition that has led it to be considered the most literate country in the world. Iceland is where people read the most books per person and publish the most books per capita. How many countries with 350,000 people have a Nobel laureate? If Bjartur loves anyone, it is his eldest daughter. A childhood incident destroys their mutual affection and he chases her away too. The daughter has a terribly tough life. One year, when she is 15 years old, her father goes away for months to work as a day laborer. (view spoiler)[ She is left in their semi-isolated house in charge of her little brother and the entire farm and animals. (hide spoiler)] [image] They live in semi-isolation. We hear of other characters when visitors stop by or when Bjartur goes into town, a day’s journey away. We read of the bailiff’s wife, the wealthiest woman in the area who expresses her admiration for the “independent people� who commune with nature and live such simple and rewarding lives. (There are times when they starve.) We pity her as she struggles with the complexity of her wealthy existence. (‘White people’s problems� in Iceland in the 1900s! lol) There’s a lot of political discussion between Bjartur and the men in town. I’ll add this to my shelf of ‘environmental novels� � those where the weather and climate (usually harsh) play such a role that it’s almost like another main character. [image] Independent People is an intriguing story that kept my attention all the way through. It’s a novel that very successfully inserts us into another time and place. It’s about survival in overwhelmingly harsh physical and mental conditions. Squalor with poetry, humor and irony. And yes, a classic. To photo: a contemporary farmstead in Iceland from thetravelimages.com Rural farmstead in Iceland around 1900 from digital.library.cornell.edu Modern-day Reykjavik from seabourn.com Icelandic postage stamp honoring the author from hipstamp.com ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 18, 2020
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Dec 21, 2020
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Dec 21, 2020
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 1609809335
| 9781609809331
| 1609809335
| 3.52
| 252
| 1973
| Dec 03, 2019
|
really liked it
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Who knew that Saramago wrote a children’s book? It’s a fable that you can read in five minutes. There are lovely colorful woodcut illustrations by J.
Who knew that Saramago wrote a children’s book? It’s a fable that you can read in five minutes. There are lovely colorful woodcut illustrations by J. Borges, a Brazilian artist. Here’s the story from the blurb: [image] When a lizard appears in the neighborhood of Chiado, in Lisbon, it surprises passers-by, and mobilizes firefighters and the army. With a clear and precise style, the fable offers a multitude of senses, reaching audiences of all ages. The Lizard is an illustrated version of the chronicle by J. Borges. Chiado is a neighborhood in the center of old Lisbon. [image] As I said in my review of Saramago’s Tale of the Unknow Island, also a fable, I wonder if this Nobel Laureate author wrote these fables to compete with his linguistic countryman, Paulo Coelho, who is a megaseller of simple allegorical tales. (Saramago is Portuguese; Coelho is Brazilian.) [image] If you are a fan of Saramago you will enjoy the Portuguese documentary Jose e Pilar (Jose and Pilar, subtitled in English). The video, directed by Miguel Gonçalves Mendes, follows the last years of Nobel Prize winner Saramago. It the story of the last few years of the author’s life and his relationship with his devoted wife and business manager, Pilar del Río. Wow did she push him even in his 80’s! They were constantly traveling, giving talks and working on book deals. Even after a severe illness � out of the hospital � back on the road! But it probably kept him going � he died at 88. Graphics: A woodcut in the book from nyt.com Chiado neighborhood from tripadvisor.com The author and his wife from telesurenglish.net ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 29, 2020
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Oct 29, 2020
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Hardcover
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my rating |
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|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
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| 4.04
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really liked it
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Jul 14, 2024
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Jul 14, 2024
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| 3.59
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liked it
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May 27, 2024
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May 27, 2024
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| 3.55
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really liked it
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Jan 27, 2024
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Jan 27, 2024
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| 3.95
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really liked it
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Jan 07, 2024
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Jan 07, 2024
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|||||
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| 3.75
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it was amazing
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Dec 30, 2022
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Dec 30, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.92
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really liked it
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Nov 09, 2022
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Nov 09, 2022
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|||||
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| 4.03
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May 13, 2022
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May 13, 2022
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| 3.54
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really liked it
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May 08, 2022
not set
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May 08, 2022
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| 3.78
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really liked it
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Jan 25, 2022
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Jan 25, 2022
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|||||
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| 3.81
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liked it
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Jan 06, 2022
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Jan 06, 2022
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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Dec 29, 2021
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Dec 29, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.73
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it was amazing
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Dec 26, 2021
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Dec 26, 2021
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| 4.06
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really liked it
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Nov 12, 2021
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Nov 12, 2021
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|||||
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| 4.18
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it was amazing
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Jul 05, 2021
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Jul 05, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.84
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it was amazing
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Apr 08, 2021
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Apr 08, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.44
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really liked it
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Mar 25, 2021
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Mar 25, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.97
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it was amazing
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Feb 13, 2021
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Feb 13, 2021
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|||||
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| 3.91
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it was amazing
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Feb 09, 2021
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Feb 09, 2021
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|||||
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| 4.13
|
it was amazing
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Dec 21, 2020
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Dec 21, 2020
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|||||
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| 3.52
|
really liked it
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Oct 29, 2020
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Oct 29, 2020
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