Stephen's bookshelf: all en-US Tue, 25 Feb 2025 04:56:51 -0800 60 Stephen's bookshelf: all 144 41 /images/layout/goodreads_logo_144.jpg Audition 7280651 191 Ry¨± Murakami 039333841X Stephen 2 3.43 1997 Audition
author: Ry¨± Murakami
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.43
book published: 1997
rating: 2
read at: 2010/06/12
date added: 2025/02/25
shelves:
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There must be a term about 80 yards the other side of "femme fatale" to describe Yamasaki Asami, the extremely nasty and vastly over-sexed woman this novel's narrator, Aoyama, becomes involved with. Despite the warnings of all around him, including his teenage son, who sense something dark in Yamasaki, Aoyama, a forty-plus widower, just can't resist her incredible beauty. The book builds slowly to a horrific climax, which one more-or-less sees coming, since nearly everything is foreshadowed . . . maybe we could say "over-foreshadowed." I won't spoil that ending except to say that it gives new meaning to "foot fetish." Well, I confess, I did have difficulty putting this book down--one reads on with horror and disgust, suffering through lots of wooden dialogue and an unbelievable plot. Apparently, "Audition" has been made into a movie. I'm afraid I'll pass it by and go see "Mary Poppins" again.
]]> <![CDATA[The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic]]> 129876 157 R.K. Narayan 0143039679 Stephen 4 3.92 1957 The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic
author: R.K. Narayan
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1957
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/20
date added: 2024/08/13
shelves:
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An excellent, very brief introduction to Ramayana. My main goal in reading this was to refamiliarize myself with the plot and characters as I contemplate a full reading of this great epic later this year. I am particularly interested in the topic of how the Hindu character Hanuman does or does not inspire the later Chinese character Sun Wukong (sometimes called "Monkey") in Wu Cheng'en's Journey to the West. One thing is certain, the fantastical nature of the battles, even as reflected in this version, is quite similar to that of Journey to the West. It seems quite clear to me, as others have suggested, that the latter do have an Indic influence, although I still don't know how much one can go with a more specific and pointed comparison. Anyway, a fairly quick way to get an idea of this vast epic!
]]> <![CDATA[The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories]]> 514310 Tolstoy knows that his readers have fallen in love and also, often, fallen out of it; they have wanted to kill their loved ones; they have lusted vigorously; or desperately sought the approval and even worship of others - Tolstoy depends on our own memories to entangle us in his tragic stories.
In these four stories, Tolstoy depicts desire in its different manifestations - from idealistic romance to sexual jealousy, from desperate lust to relentless longing. "Family Happiness", an early work, portrays the struggles of a couple as they move from courtship and passion through disillusionment to the quieter stage of married love. A passenger tells a bitter tale of sex, suspicion and murder when strangers on a train discuss the nature of love in "The Kruetzer Sonata", a novella banned for its scandalous content in 1890. In "The Devil", a young man finds it impossible to resist a beautiful peasant woman with whom he had an affair before his marriage, while "Father Sergius" shows a man going to increasingly desperate ends - from a soldier to monk, to hermit to beggar - in order to avoid the temptations of the flesh.

The translations by David McDuff and Paul Foote faithfully convey Tolstoy's candid, vigorous prose. This edition also includes a new introduction by Donna Orwin discussing Tolstoy's depiction of love and sex in these works, as well as a chronology, further reading and notes.]]> 318 Leo Tolstoy Stephen 4 3.96 2014 The Kreutzer Sonata and Other Stories
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.96
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2015/01/17
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
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Tolstoy wrote both the novella "The Kreutzer Sonata" and the short story "The Devil" in 1889 during the period when his marriage was floundering. Marital happiness, he seems to say in the first of these, is illusory and sure to crash on the shoals of sexuality. A "madman" rants on page after page about the impurity of marriage, or "long-term prostitution" as he calls it. Marital life alternates, the madman says, between bouts of sexual indulgence and mutual hate. The only hope, he seems to say, is for a man and woman to live as brother and sister in a spiritual union that precludes "bestial indulgence." Very Schopenhauerian . . . except that so few people will actually do this that we needn't fear humanity will perish! While Tolstoy was surely losing faith in his own marriage at this time, I am uncomfortable with the common critical gesture of turning this madman, who after all is a murderer, into a simple spokesperson for Tolstoy's own views (although I grant there must be some of this!). "The Devil" for me is a more powerful story. It concerns a young landowner who just wants to put his own "healthy" pre-marital affair with a young peasant woman behind and lead a happy life with his new wife. But it is not so simple. The enticements of the past have a way of coming back--and "The Devil" becomes a classic study of male obsession and self-destructiveness.
]]> Le Horla 21889711 Le Horla raconte la lente d¨¦sagr¨¦gation d'un esprit, de la d¨¦pression ¨¤ la folie ¨C des maux que connaissait bien Maupassant. Le h¨¦ros se sent peu ¨¤ peu envahi par un autre, qui agit ¨¤ travers lui : le Horla, puissance invisible, inconsciente, qui le manipule. S'installent alors l'incompr¨¦hension, la peur, l'angoisse. Jusqu'¨¤ l'irr¨¦parable.
Prenant la forme du journal intime, la nouvelle illustre ce que Freud nommera l'inqui¨¦tante ¨¦tranget¨¦, cette intrusion progressive du malaise dans le quotidien. Mod¨¨le de nouvelle fantastique, Le Horla est aussi une description clinique du d¨¦doublement de personnalit¨¦ qui menace toute conscience.]]> 96 Guy de Maupassant 2070458202 Stephen 4 3.81 1886 Le Horla
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1886
rating: 4
read at: 2018/04/30
date added: 2024/08/07
shelves:
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Well, perhaps I am cheating to add a "folio classique" volume of a single story around 40 pp. in length. Count this as only an addendum to my previous excursion into Maupassant . . . and a powerful addendum at that. Is this a story of the supernatural or of madness? I am inclined, like I suppose most readers today, to consider it the latter. Perhaps, as critics have suggested, it arose from Maupassant's own decline into a form of syphilitic madness. Maybe. But I dare say that many of us who lead a fairly rich and haunted dream life will find elements in "Le horla" that remind us of our own "madness." And don't we who brush up against such a world in the depth of night worry that those "imagined" phantoms might somehow take over? Enough of that. Worth reading and . . . for some of us, contemplating.
]]> <![CDATA[Swann¡¯s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)]]> 133539
He claims that people are defined by the objects that surround them and must piece together their identities bit by bit each time they wake up. The young Marcel is so nervous about sleeping alone that he looks forward to his mother's goodnight kisses, but also dreads them as a sign of an impending sleepless night. One night, when Charles Swann, a friend of his grandparents, is visiting, his mother cannot come kiss him goodnight. He stays up until Swann leaves and looks so sad and pitiful that even his disciplinarian father encourages "Mamma" to spend the night in Marcel's room.]]> 615 Marcel Proust 0375751548 Stephen 5 4.28 1913 Swann¡¯s Way (In Search of Lost Time, #1)
author: Marcel Proust
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.28
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2010/09/12
date added: 2024/04/29
shelves:
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My reading pace has slowed . . . and Proust is the reason. I will not attempt to say much about the first volume of "In Search of Lost Times," since everything has already been said. Yes, this is a masterpiece, and yes this is a challenging read. Has human psychology ever been explored more profoundly? The analysis of jealousy, for example, is dazzling, as is the study of obsessive love. Proust requires concentration, and I intend to read a few "lighter" novels before returning for volume two. But return I will!
]]> Bel-Ami 780581 416 Guy de Maupassant 0140443150 Stephen 4 3.85 1885 Bel-Ami
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1885
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/14
date added: 2024/01/14
shelves:
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A wonderful portrayal of a scoundrel obsessed with wealth and women, especially women who can assist his acquisition of wealth! To say there is no moral center to Georges Duroy goes without saying. Why would there be, since morality doesn't even enter the picture? Yes, it is a cynical and devastating portrait of the rich and powerful in belle ¨¦poque France, but Duroy is not so different from certain figures in our own money-worshipping society. At any rate, Maupassant, as ever, writes with power and a kind of perverse humor. There is truly something rather humorous about Duroy's shamelessness, although one, I suppose, should feel somewhat embarrassed about being amused.
]]> Like Death 34318283
A devastating novel about the treachery of love by Maupassant, now in a new translation by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning poet and translator Richard Howard

Olivier Bertin is at the height of his career as a painter. After making his name as a young man with his Cleopatra, he has gone on to establish himself as ¡°the chosen painter of Parisiennes, the most adroit and ingenious artist to reveal their grace, their figures, and their souls.¡± And though his hair may be white, he remains a handsome, vigorous, and engaging bachelor, a prized guest at every table and salon.

Olivier¡¯s lover is Anne, the Countess de Guilleroy, the wife of a busy politician. Their relationship is long-standing, close, almost conjugal. The countess¡¯s daughter is Annette, and she is the spitting image of her mother in her lovely youth. Having finished her schooling, Annette is returning to Paris. Her parents have put together an excellent match. Everything is as it should be¡ªuntil the painter and countess are each?seized by an agonizing suspicion, like death. . . . In its devastating depiction of the treacherous nature of love, Like Death is more than the equal of Swann¡¯s Way. Richard Howard¡¯s new translation brings out all the penetration and poetry of this masterpiece of nineteenth-century fiction.]]> 241 Guy de Maupassant 1681370336 Stephen 4 3.80 1889 Like Death
author: Guy de Maupassant
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.80
book published: 1889
rating: 4
read at: 2024/01/02
date added: 2024/01/11
shelves:
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One of the great writers of marital infidelity, tackles a curious situation. The painter Olivier Berlin has carried on a long affair with Anne, the Countess de Guilleroy, who is married to a politician. Originally they fell in love while Olivier was painting her portrait. He is "faithful" to the Countess but finds himself sorely tempted years later when her daughter begins to look exactly like her mother at the time Olivier originally painted her. Yes, you guessed right, Olivier begins to fall in love with his mistress's daughter, who is, after all, an almost precise replica of his much admired painting of the younger, beautiful Countess. Of course Olivier tries to deny what is happening, and nothing much does happen except overwhelming longing. The Countess, however, sees precisely what her lover is now feeling and is both devastated and, at the same time, understanding. In a very real sense, Oliver's love for the daughter is driven by his old love for the mother, which does linger on in a somewhat more mature fashion. Anyway, no more, I don't want to issue spoiler alerts. But, it is a Maupassant novel--you really can't expect a happy ending.
]]> The Tartar Steppe 83017 198 Dino Buzzati 1567923046 Stephen 3 4.24 1940 The Tartar Steppe
author: Dino Buzzati
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.24
book published: 1940
rating: 3
read at: 2016/10/30
date added: 2024/01/10
shelves:
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Giovanni Drogo is stationed at an obscure fort, which guards the border against a possible Tartar invasion from the steppeland that stretches off into the distance below. He intends for his stay there to be brief, no more than four months, but many years later he is still there, dutifully following the regular routine and hoping for a moment of glorious battle. Indeed, there is something intoxicating about the fort, something that almost lulls ones consciousness asleep. And, so, time flies, and quite suddenly, at least so it seems, he is an old man. Diogo is "everyman," waiting for a moment of meaningfulness that never quite materializes, at least not in the form he expects. Still, he will have his time to show courage . . . as we all will.
]]> The Razor¡¯s Edge 31196 314 W. Somerset Maugham 1400034205 Stephen 4 4.20 1944 The Razor¡¯s Edge
author: W. Somerset Maugham
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.20
book published: 1944
rating: 4
read at: 2023/12/15
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves:
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So, after struggling a bit with Paul Lynch, I turn back eighty years or so (1944) to Somerset Maughan's "The Razor's Edge." Two absolutely unforgettable characters in this novel: Elliot Templeton, a snobbish art collector and social butterfly, who for all his knowledge and energy remains entirely superficial, even empty; and his, opposite, Larry Darrell, an intense young man who has real if sometimes rather elusive values, forged in unhappy World War I experience, and cares nothing for the wealth or the attention of others. They are at the opposite ends of residents abroad, one concerned with all the right people and proper social moves, the other on his own spiritual journey, which even leads him to India. And in the middle is the character, Maughan, obviously an extension of the real author, who is friends with both of these men and narrates their adventures. Somerset Maughan is a delight to read--he writes with grace and knows well how to pace a novel. He may not be an innovator, but he has mastered the art of the novel--especially the ability to create vivid, interesting characters.
]]> Prophet Song 158875813
On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland¡¯s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist.

Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and Eilish can only watch helplessly as the world she knew disappears. When first her husband and then her eldest son vanish, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a collapsing society.

How far will she go to save her family? And what ¨C or who ¨C is she willing to leave behind?

Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother¡¯s fight to hold her family together.]]> 259 Paul Lynch Stephen 3 4.03 2023 Prophet Song
author: Paul Lynch
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.03
book published: 2023
rating: 3
read at: 2023/12/03
date added: 2023/12/26
shelves:
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This book just won the "Booker Prize" for 2023, so I was eager to read it. I confess to being somewhat disappointed . . . or perhaps it is more that I was disappointed in myself for struggling to stay with it. No doubt, Prophet Song is exquisitely written and tells of a type of tragedy we all should fear just now--the rise of an authoritarian regime that ends all pretense of equal treatment under the law. Perhaps I desired more top-down information, material that would enable me to see how this "Irish" terror had all come about, when the author's real intent, and an important one, was the view from the bottom . . . one family's desperate struggle to stay together first as opponents of the state and second as refugees, their numbers terribly diminished by violence, real and supposed. It is an intimate and harrowing story, but I began to wonder as I found myself struggling to finish this book, why I was not feeling more emotion and drive to reach the end. Perhaps, I have little faith these days that any of our world's various flirtations with authoritarianism can have a happy ending and what I was bogged down in was my own unhappy visions of what could lie ahead for all of us.
]]> Trilogy 28649367 147 Jon Fosse 1628971398 Stephen 4 4.06 2014 Trilogy
author: Jon Fosse
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/10
date added: 2023/10/10
shelves:
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Embarrassed to say that I hadn't read any Fosse until he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature just a week ago. Well, now I have, selecting for my first dive into his work the three interlocking stories of "Trilogy." The raw power of his stories is astounding. A reader begins to understand what is going on "off screen" in the first of these stories and finds it both appalling and mystifying. But love can never quite look under the stones to ascertain what ugliness might be there, nor, perhaps, does love care. In the second story, we know Asle is guilty, but he moves through a strangely abbreviated nightmare towards his demise. The relentless, rhythmic movement of Fosse's stripped down language, the meandering of the narrative through time and space, and the hints at a mythic, Biblical influence make for a powerful mix. So, I've ordered "Septology" and eagerly await its arrival at my doorstep.
]]> Old God's Time 61358640 From the two-time Booker Prize finalist author, a dazzlingly written novel exploring love, memory, grief, and long-buried secrets

Recently retired policeman Tom Kettle is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean-to annexed to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who has moved in next door. Occasionally, fond memories return, of his family, his beloved wife June and their two children, Winnie and Joe.

But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades-old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past.

A beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite as it seems, Old God's Time is about what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.]]> 261 Sebastian Barry 0593296109 Stephen 4 3.76 2023 Old God's Time
author: Sebastian Barry
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2023
rating: 4
read at: 2023/10/03
date added: 2023/10/03
shelves:
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Barry, as I have noted in other reviews, is an extraordinarily gifted stylist. I continue to be dazzled by his prose, but what struck me most in this novel is how deeply he empathizes with his characters and their circumstances. This story of a retired detective who is beset with painful memories and a profound sense of loss unfolds slowly and in a world of mystery where dream and reality mix, but what moved me the most is the vividness of the portrayal of the central character--his dread, his despair, and how deeply and personally he is troubled by the grave injustice that so many priests have largely escaped punishment for decades of child abuse. This is a moving novel and one with a powerful message about the crimes of the past and the horror inflicted upon so many innocent lives. Once again, despite the brilliance, this made the Booker longest, but not the shortlist. So the bar is now quite high for my future reading from the latter list!
]]> Go, Went, Gone 36217818
Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas, but now he is retired, his books remain in their packing boxes and he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin. Here, on Alexanderplatz, he discovers a new community -- a tent city, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly, getting to know the new arrivals, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us.

At once a passionate contribution to the debate on race, privilege and nationality and a beautifully written examination of an ageing man's quest to find meaning in his life, Go, Went, Gone showcases one of the great contemporary European writers at the height of her powers.]]> 339 Jenny Erpenbeck 1846276217 Stephen 4 3.95 2015 Go, Went, Gone
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2015
rating: 4
read at: 2017/12/30
date added: 2023/09/06
shelves:
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This novel takes up a political problem of the highest importance¡ªAfrican political refugees in Europe, particularly Germany, and their struggle to gain a toehold in what is for them a very new and frequently perplexing world. The central character of this novel, Richard, a recently retired professor of classical studies, becomes obsessed with a group of Africans who have established a tent city in one of Berlin¡¯s large public squares. Eventually Richard opens his heart and his home to this group of men and quickly comes to understand just how many boundaries, both physical and intellectual, separate him and ¡°his people¡± from them. Erpenbeck, one of Germany¡¯s best contemporary novelists, has given us in Go, Went, Gone a rich, sympathetic portrayal of the plight of migrants. But this is a novel, not just a ¡°study,¡± so we follow, too, Richard¡¯s struggle to come to terms with retirement and establish a new identity for himself outside of the academy, a topic of considerable currency for many of us (at least for me), even as he labors to help other¡¯s find their own way in a new life.
]]> The Dreams 6623726 276 Naguib Mahfouz 0307455076 Stephen 3 3.44 2004 The Dreams
author: Naguib Mahfouz
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.44
book published: 2004
rating: 3
read at: 2009/10/01
date added: 2023/07/31
shelves:
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As I read this collection of Mahfouz's dreams, I was struck once again by how thematically similar dreams are from one person to another, regardless of one's culture of origin. The same sense of insecurity, of loss, and of confusion seems to constitute the hidden texture of our souls. These dreams, moreover, are those of a very aged man, and the role of memory and its peculiar distortions are everywhere. I can not say that I appreciated or even understood many of these brief records (can one even say "understood" of a dream?), but I did feel my reading of this book was rewarded by the following sections alone: #5, 14, 19, 31, 37, 65, 70, 80, 92, 128, 144, 157, 168, 179, 202, 206.
]]> Caribou Island 8584946 On a small island in a glacier-fed lake on Alaska's Kenai Peninsula, a marriage is unraveling. Gary, driven by thirty years of diverted plans, and Irene, haunted by a tragedy in her past, are trying to rebuild their life together. Following the outline of Gary's old dream, they're hauling logs to Caribou Island in good weather and in terrible storms, in sickness and in health, to build the kind of cabin that drew them to Alaska in the first place.

But this island is not right for Irene. They are building without plans or advice, and when winter comes early, the overwhelming isolation of the prehistoric wilderness threatens their bond to the core. Caught in the emotional maelstrom is their adult daughter, Rhoda, who is wrestling with the hopes and disappointments of her own life. Devoted to her parents, she watches helplessly as they drift further apart.

Brilliantly drawn and fiercely honest, Caribou Island captures the drama and pathos of a husband and wife whose bitter love, failed dreams, and tragic past push them to the edge of destruction. A portrait of desolation, violence, and the darkness of the soul, it is an explosive and unforgettable novel from a writer of limitless possibility.

]]> 293 David Vann 0061875724 Stephen 3 3.45 2010 Caribou Island
author: David Vann
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.45
book published: 2010
rating: 3
read at: 2011/10/14
date added: 2023/07/28
shelves:
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I spent a good part of my boyhood in Alaska. However contradictory it may seem on the surface, there is a deep tension in Alaska between the vastness of the landscape and the terrible psychological claustrophobia life in that landscape can produce. Those of us who have lived in Alaska often speak of "cabin fever," a kind of madness induced by long hours trapped inside, which can, and every year does in a few cases, lead to madness, mayhem, and even murder. The young Alaskan novelist David Vann, now living in San Francisco, captures all of this quite brilliantly. "Caribou Island" is about a couple, married for thirty years or so, who become caught in an old Alaskan fantasy: testing one's resourcefulness against the challenges of the great outdoors. The marriage, already fragile, begins to unravel, and what ensues also sweeps up their daughter, who is on the edge of blundering into her own mistaken marriage. This is a fast and engaging read and paints a picture of contemporary Alaska that those who romanticize the place from off in the distance should contemplate (i.e., those expecting lovely little villages set in a beautiful, pristine environment are in for a very big surprise!). I do have some concerns, though, about David Vann and this novel. In many ways "Caribou Island" is a rewrite of his early "Legend of a Suicide." I hope his future writing expands in new directions. Moreover, literature about people in extremis makes for powerful reading, but it can also fall into its own predictable patterns and stereotypical characters. I am not saying that has yet happened with the relatively small Vann oeuvre . . . it is, though, moving a bit in that direction.
]]> Hag-Seed 28588073
Eventually he takes a job teaching Literacy Through Theatre to the prisoners at the nearby Burgess Correctional Institution, and is making a modest success of it when an auspicious star places his enemies within his reach. With the help of their own interpretations, digital effects, and the talents of a professional actress and choreographer, the Burgess Correctional Players prepare to video their Tempest. Not surprisingly, they view Caliban as the character with whom they have the most in common. However, Felix has another twist in mind, and his enemies are about to find themselves taking part in an interactive and illusion-ridden version of The Tempest that will change their lives forever. But how will Felix deal with his invisible Miranda¡¯s decision to take a part in the play?]]> 301 Margaret Atwood 0804141290 Stephen 3 3.77 2016 Hag-Seed
author: Margaret Atwood
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2016
rating: 3
read at: 2023/02/27
date added: 2023/04/04
shelves:
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Margaret Atwood¡¯s novel, Hag-Seed, is part of a Hogarth series in which famous novelists rewrite or reinterpret Shakespeare plays, in this case The Tempest. The novel, in this reader¡¯s opinion, is a bit over-loaded. Atwood¡¯s rewriting of Shakespeare takes place on two levels. First, a former artistic director named Felix pursues vengeance against several men who had him fired from his job imaginatively directing plays at a local drama festival. Much in his personal story parallels that of Prospero, including a daughter named Miranda, who died at the age of three but still lives on with her father as an imagined presence. Second, Felix takes a job as an instructor of literature in a local prison, where he stages plays, ultimately The Tempest, in which his prisoner-students play most of the roles. These two levels come together as Felix exacts vengeance inside the prison against his enemies, now powerful politicians, who are visiting his staging of The Tempest that day with the plan of cancelling the prison program. Yes, all this might be rather hard to follow . . . and the full story is still more complicated. But I did read on rather impulsively because I have taught literature in maximum and medium security prisons and was flabbergasted at the latitude this fictional instructor was allowed with his class. Probably Canadian prisons are more liberal than those of my state in what some have labelled ¡°The Incarceration Nation,¡± but I seriously doubt an instructor would have been permitted to carry out half of the actions described in this novel. Oh well, it is a novel and, like all of Atwood¡¯s works, gracefully written. As for throwing new light on The Tempest, well, the best part of the novel is probably the prisoners¡¯ imagined depiction of what might have happened to different characters after Shakespeare¡¯s play ends, which includes, as we might expect in this context, a vindication of Caliban.
]]> The Swimmers 58214333 From the award winning author of The Buddha in the Attic and When the Emperor Was Divine, a tour de force of economy, precision, and emotional power about what happens to a group of obsessed recreational swimmers when a crack appears at the bottom of their local pool.

The swimmers are unknown to each other except through their private routines (slow lane, fast lane), and the solace each takes in their morning or afternoon laps. But when a crack appears at the bottom of the pool, they are cast out into an unforgiving world without comfort or relief.

One of these swimmers is Alice, who is slowly losing her memory. For Alice, the pool was a final stand against the darkness of her encroaching dementia. Without the fellowship of other swimmers and the routine of her daily laps she is plunged into dislocation and chaos, swept into memories of her childhood and the Japanese internment camp in which she spent the war. Narrated by Alice's daughter, who witnesses her stark and devastating decline, The Swimmers is a searing, intimate story of mothers and daughters, and the sorrows of implacable loss, written in spellbinding, incantatory prose.

The most commanding and unforgettable work yet from a modern master.
]]> 176 Julie Otsuka 0593321332 Stephen 4 3.65 2022 The Swimmers
author: Julie Otsuka
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.65
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2023/02/15
date added: 2023/04/02
shelves:
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Well, not really about swimming, except as a kind of metaphor, and, moreover, not a comfortable read for someone nearing eighty and worried over occasional lapses of memory! But, still, Otsuka, one of our most imaginative writers, is still at it, and this is a powerful and affecting novel. The narrator speaks of her mother, once a compulsive amateur swimmer, who is now descending into dementia. Using a second person narrator, Otsuka nods to Buddhism, which has been a recurrent topic in her writings: "You will have attained that state of being aspired to by mindful meditators across the planet--you will be existing utterly and completely 'in the now.'" I guess that's some consolation, both for those of us who worry about dementia and for the narrator-daughter who painfully watches her mother achieve nirvana, of a sad sort.
]]> Stay True 59900070 New Yorker staff writer Hua Hsu, a gripping memoir on friendship, grief, the search for self, and the solace that can be found through art.

In the eyes of eighteen-year-old Hua Hsu, the problem with Ken--with his passion for Dave Matthews, Abercrombie & Fitch, and his fraternity--is that he is exactly like everyone else. Ken, whose Japanese American family has been in the United States for generations, is mainstream; for Hua, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, who makes 'zines and haunts Bay Area record shops, Ken represents all that he defines himself in opposition to. The only thing Hua and Ken have in common is that, however they engage with it, American culture doesn't seem to have a place for either of them.

But despite his first impressions, Hua and Ken become friends, a friendship built on late-night conversations over cigarettes, long drives along the California coast, and the textbook successes and humiliations of everyday college life. And then violently, senselessly, Ken is gone, killed in a carjacking, not even three years after the day they first meet.

Determined to hold on to all that was left of one of his closest friends--his memories--Hua turned to writing. Stay True is the book he's been working on ever since. A coming-of-age story that details both the ordinary and extraordinary, Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging.]]> 208 Hua Hsu 0385547773 Stephen 4 4.01 2022 Stay True
author: Hua Hsu
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.01
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/12/31
date added: 2022/12/31
shelves:
review:
Not only a moving book about friendship and the trauma of tragically losing a friend, but an excellent account of growing up Chinese-American. It is only toward the end of this book that the author, New York Times writer Hua Hsu, grows to understand and accept the profound ways he has been influenced by his circumstances as a first-generation Chinese-American born to parents, who had immigrated from Taiwan. An excellent addition to Asian-American memoir.
]]> The Return 28007895
When he was twelve, Matar and his family went into political exile. Eight years later Matar's father, a former diplomat and military man turned brave political dissident, was kidnapped from the streets of Cairo by the Libyan government and is believed to have been held in the regime's most notorious prison. ?Now, the prisons are empty and little hope remains that Jaballa Matar will be found alive. Yet, as the author writes, hope is "persistent and cunning".????

This book is a profoundly moving family memoir, a brilliant and affecting portrait of a country and a people on the cusp of immense change, and a disturbing and timeless depiction of the monstrous nature of absolute power.]]> 256 Hisham Matar 034580774X Stephen 4 4.15 2016 The Return
author: Hisham Matar
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.15
book published: 2016
rating: 4
read at: 2022/10/23
date added: 2022/12/31
shelves:
review:
A powerful, well-written account of Matar's return to post-Qaddafi Libya in search of traces of his father, who disappeared into one of Libya's dreadful secret prisons.
]]> The Wall 586852 The Wall chronicles the life of the last surviving human on earth, an ordinary middle-aged woman who awakens one morning to find that everyone else has vanished. Assuming her isolation to be the result of a military experiment gone awry, she begins the terrifying work of survival and self-renewal. This novel is at once a simple and moving tale and a disturbing meditation on humanity.
]]> 240 Marlen Haushofer 1573440949 Stephen 5 4.00 1963 The Wall
author: Marlen Haushofer
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.00
book published: 1963
rating: 5
read at: 2022/09/22
date added: 2022/10/09
shelves:
review:
Yes, as my rating might indicate, I have been taken in by what some people call "a cult classic." The premise of this novel is clever--a woman wakes up in a hunting lodge in the mountains to discover that a mysterious transparent wall has isolated her from what she soon comes to believe has been a great cataclysm that has left whatever exists outside this wall in a petrified state. The cleverness of the book is a main character, more-or-less the only human character, less upon the total oddness of her situation and how it might have come about than upon simple survival and, most powerfully, her emotional attachment to her animals--a cow with a baby bull, two cats, and a dog. The story, at times, is exceedingly mundane, but it never loses interest. Of course, one knows through certain comments of the narrator that some terrible event is about to arrive, but when it finally comes about, you sense the narrator will continue go on until all manners of surviving her solitude are simply exhausted. This is a provocative book, one that deserves to be taught and discussed. Highly recommended.
]]> <![CDATA[A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play (New Press People's History)]]> 2288022 302 Dave Zirin 1595581006 Stephen 3 3.91 2008 A People's History of Sports in the United States: 250 Years of Politics, Protest, People, and Play (New Press People's History)
author: Dave Zirin
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.91
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/17
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves:
review:
Zirin follows Zinn. Both books are very much in the same polemical and political vein. That being said, this is an enjoyable and informative read. Zirin, who clearly loves sports himself and has made a living therefrom as sports editor of The Nation, chronicles the corruption and racism that has plagued sports in the U.S. from the beginning up to the present time. Within this context it is fairly easy to guess who the heroes and the villains are going to be. I won't list those, since they can mostly be guessed. I will only note that much to my surprise, a game at which I was present, the 1972 University of Washington spring football game, during which an anti-war announcement was read. Written and endorsed by the University of Washington team under the leadership of quarterback Sonny Sixkiller (my all-time favorite football name), this caused quite a shouting match between the student section, largely anti-war, and the rather right-wing "townsfolk," who were very much on the other side both politically and specially. Moments like these, rather than the most famous sporting accomplishments are stressed throughout . . . and there are plenty of such moments.
]]> Go Up for Glory 1837936 126 Bill Russell 0425046761 Stephen 4 4.14 1966 Go Up for Glory
author: Bill Russell
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.14
book published: 1966
rating: 4
read at: 2022/09/15
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves:
review:
In my pantheon of basketball stars, the recently deceased Bill Russell is the most noteworthy. Not only was he a complete player who always seems to have cared more about the team than his own "numbers," but he played a critical and, at times, uncompromising role in the integration of the game. He accomplished what he did because of unflinching pride. The small book, first written when Russell was thirty-one is full of juicy basketball tidbits, to be sure, but its importance is elsewhere. Few athletics have written so boldly and personally about the way race shaped the game and the careers of black athletes. A must read for those who care about the game of basketball and the way a single, bold personality changed it.
]]> <![CDATA[Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America]]> 59146774 282 Thomas Aiello 1538148560 Stephen 3 2.86 Hoops: A Cultural History of Basketball in America
author: Thomas Aiello
name: Stephen
average rating: 2.86
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2022/09/08
date added: 2022/09/29
shelves:
review:
A solid and, at times, interesting history of basketball, with emphasis upon the interaction of the sport and the cultural history if America. The book gives due space to what I would consider the central issue in the history of basketball--race. As LeBron James said at the time of his famous "decision" to leave the Cleveland Cavaliers, "There's always . . . a race factor in basketball." Aiello traces this "factor" and notes that even into the 1960's, such college teams as the University of Kentucky remained lily white. Certainly one of the great days in collegiate basketball was in 1964 when Don Haskin's Texas Western team, which consisted of five black starters, defeated Adolph Rupp's all-white UK five. Rupp, I must say, does not come off on these pages as particularly admirable. Anyway, this book is a good overview if one is looking for a discussion of "hoops" within the context of the larger culture. It is, however, a bit thin on the overall development of the game itself. And, one final stylistic criticism: it is sometimes maddening to try to figure out the year of a particular event, since there is often an assumption that the year is remembered from mention, say, often ten or so pages before some other event that might have happened in that same year.
]]> A Sentimental Journey 762821 A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy became a hugely influential work of travel writing in its own right. This Penguin Classics edition includes an introduction and notes by Paul Goring.

When Yorick, the roving narrator of Sterne's innovative final novel, sets off for France on a whim, he produces no ordinary travelogue. Jolting along in his coach from Calais, through Paris, and on towards the Italian border, the amiable parson is blithely unconcerned by famous views or monuments, but he engages us with tales of his encounters with all manner of people, from counts and noblewomen to beggars and chambermaids. And as drama piles upon drama, anecdote, flirtation and digression, Yorick's destination takes second place to an exhilarating voyage of emotional and erotic exploration. Interweaving sharp wit with warm humour and irony with genuine feeling, A Sentimental Journey paints a captivating picture of an Englishman's adventures abroad.

In his introduction, Paul Goring discusses Sterne's literary career and his semi-autobiographical depiction of Yorick, and sets the novel within the context of eighteenth-century travel writing and the vogue of sentimental fiction. This edition also includes a chronology, updated further reading and notes.

Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) graduated from Cambridge in 1737 and took holy orders, becoming a prebend in York Cathedral. His masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman made him a celebrity but ill-health necessitated recuperative travel and A Sentimental Journey grew out of a seven-month trip through France and Italy. He died the year it was published, 1768.

If you enjoyed A Sentimental Journey, you might like Sterne's The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, also available in Penguin Classics.]]> 170 Laurence Sterne 0140437797 Stephen 4 3.32 1768 A Sentimental Journey
author: Laurence Sterne
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.32
book published: 1768
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/17
date added: 2022/08/27
shelves:
review:
Sterne¡¯s work is a kind of anti-travelogue. He is not much interested in the physical details of this or that place but rather, as his title implies, his reaction to various personal encounters, often encounters that seem, at first glance, trivial. To him, the value of travel is keeping a heart open to the mostly accidental moments that happen along the way. Several of these, in his case, are encounters with intriguing women. Here the reader, at least this reader, suspects he is not telling the whole truth as he tries, simultaneously. to show his incredible understanding of and appeal to sensitive women, while, at the same time, assuring the reader that these relationships stayed within proper Christian boundaries. This book is a delightful read, and one does come away convinced that Sterne was indeed an open-hearted and exceedingly good-natured traveler. I confess, in conclusion, that I am a traveler myself and am, too, more fascinated by the people I meet along the way than the sights I see.
]]> <![CDATA[Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine]]> 813789 Avant le d¨¦lai imparti, Kin-Fo recouvre sa fortune, doubl¨¦e. Il n¡¯est plus question pour lui de renoncer ¨¤ la vie. Mais Wang a disparu avec la lettre et il n¡¯est pas homme ¨¤ rompre une promesse ! Voil¨¤ donc Kin-Fo condamn¨¦ ¨¤ mort, par ses propres soins !
Une seule ressource : retrouver Wang. Et Kin-Fo de se lancer dans le plus haletant des p¨¦riples au pays du C¨¦leste Empire.
R¨¦cit alerte ¨¤ l¡¯intrigue parfaitement men¨¦e, Les Tribulations d¡¯un Chinois en Chine est un des joyaux des ? Voyages extraordinaires ? du grand Jules Verne.

Illustrations de l¡¯¨¦dition originale Hetzel.]]> 352 Jules Verne 2253012742 Stephen 4 3.67 1879 Les Tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine
author: Jules Verne
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1879
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/10
date added: 2022/08/27
shelves:
review:
The rich Chinese Kin-fo is bored with life and convinced that the best course is simply to commit suicide. Meanwhile his older friend, Wang, an ex-Taiping rebel now turned to philosophy, tries to convince him that the best way to find the joy of life is to seek adventures and challenges¡ªonly challenges, suffering, and even misery, he argues, can lay the foundation for true happiness. Kin-fo is not convinced and takes out a life insurance policy with an American company in Shanghai with the intention of committing suicide and leaving some of his money to a rich widow for whom he feels affection and some to his friend Wang. The company, suspicious that he might be suicidal, assigns two detectives to follow and protect him, chiefly from himself. Well, the story soon gets very complicated, quite humorous and, of course, entirely unbelievable. But, like most of Verne, it is delightful reading and is written in a fast-paced manner that keeps the reader moving along, most often with a smile on his face. I had decided to try to push myself to read twenty-five pages of the French version each day (I have limited time to spend on French), but soon found I was reading forty or fifty pages with no great difficulty and finished the book in under a week. Anyway, Verne is worth a frolic or two, as I hope my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviews will indicate in the months and years ahead!
]]> Alabama 1963 54564226 Bud Larkin, d¨¦tective priv¨¦ bougon, alcoolique et raciste, accepte d'enqu¨ºter pour le p¨¨re de la premi¨¨re victime.
Adela Cobb, femme de m¨¦nage noire, jeune veuve et m¨¨re de famille, s'interroge : ? Les petites filles, ?a dispara?t pas comme ?a¡­ ?
Deux ¨ºtres que tout oppose. A priori.
Sous des airs de polar am¨¦ricain, Alabama 1963 est avant tout une plong¨¦e captivante dans les ?tats-Unis des ann¨¦es 1960, sur fond de s¨¦gr¨¦gation, de Ku Klux Klan et d'assassinat de Kennedy.]]> 384 Ludovic Manchette 2749165911 Stephen 4













'
]]> 4.22 2020 Alabama 1963
author: Ludovic Manchette
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.22
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2022/08/04
date added: 2022/08/04
shelves:
review:
I have difficulty rating this book for a number of reasons. I read the book in response to attending a discussion of the book led by the two authors themselves in, of all places, Quiberon, France. The authors are, as the French say, "tr¨¨s sympathique." Moreover, they are originally translators who did all translations in tandem and now have taken the unusual step to become fiction authors who continue to write side-by-side. On one level, this is a detective novel, using many of the conventions of that genre. On the other hand, it is a picture, quite convincing I think, of Alabama in 1963, a pivotal year in American history, particularly with regards to issues of race. Now, my judgment of books I read in French is influenced to some degree by how easy I find the reading and how successfully the story pulls me forward, thus improving my mediocre French by insuring that decent number of French pages--say thirty to sixty--pass in front of my eyes each day. In this respect, "Alabama 1963" was a complete success. Still, one can feel a little guilty for ranking this work so high. For one thing, it violates my notion of what is proper to a detective story by including a kind of deus ex machine to help solve the crime. Well, not quite a "deus" but an eccentric white woman who has strange dreams that lead to the murderer and the rescue of one of his potential victims. Moreover, the novel does recycle character types, both black and white, we have seen before. But perhaps we have seen so many stereotypes from works of this type that almost any character can be made to fit one or another. Oh well, I liked the novel, dammit . . . and it helped my French by adding some fairly informal vocabulary you just don't find in Flaubert or even Jules Verne whom I am reading just now.














'

]]> Claude gueux 2999099 De ce sordide fait divers et de ce proc¨¨s, Hugo va faire le plus violent et le plus passionn¨¦ des r¨¦quisitoires. Contre la peine de mort d'abord, que cet ouvrier, ce damn¨¦ de la terre ne m¨¦ritait pas. Contre une soci¨¦t¨¦ inhumaine ensuite.]]> 96 Victor Hugo 2080721216 Stephen 3 3.76 1834 Claude gueux
author: Victor Hugo
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.76
book published: 1834
rating: 3
read at: 2022/07/08
date added: 2022/08/04
shelves:
review:
This brief but powerful story concerns one of Victor Hugo's obsessions: the injustice of the death penalty, which so often executes people who are victims of arbitrary and cruel social forces. One of Hugo's great strengths as a writer is characterization, often of the judge, warden, or policeman who unthinkingly carries out what the law, or at least "the authorities," decrees. It is the human tendency "to follow the rules," even when conscience would dictate otherwise, that Hugo sees as one of our greatest weaknesses. In this respect he is a harbinger of some of the horrors of the century that follows him. This is a powerful story of a simple but charismatic man caught in a web the pushes him toward violence and, eventually, the guillotine. It is, however, a short, apparently experimental piece that points toward some of Hugo's later, more expansive writings.
]]> Paradise Lost 15997 Paradise Lost is one of the greatest epic poems in the English language. It tells the story of the Fall of Man, a tale of immense drama and excitement, of rebellion and treachery, of innocence pitted against corruption, in which God and Satan fight a bitter battle for control of mankind's destiny. The struggle rages across three worlds - heaven, hell, and earth - as Satan and his band of rebel angels plot their revenge against God. At the center of the conflict are Adam and Eve, who are motivated by all too human temptations but whose ultimate downfall is unyielding love.

Marked by Milton's characteristic erudition, Paradise Lost is a work epic both in scale and, notoriously, in ambition. For nearly 350 years, it has held generation upon generation of audiences in rapt attention, and its profound influence can be seen in almost every corner of Western culture.]]> 453 John Milton 0140424393 Stephen 5 3.83 1667 Paradise Lost
author: John Milton
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.83
book published: 1667
rating: 5
read at: 2022/07/05
date added: 2022/07/05
shelves:
review:
An overwhelming read. Certainly one should not wait until his seventy-eighth year of life to read this work, but I'm embarrassed to say that is my case. I had read enough of Milton's poetry to know the language would be extraordinarily rich and powerful, but I did not expect such theological and philosophical sweep, nor the imagination of Milton's portrayal of cosmic strife and warfare. I'll stop here: I can only embarrass myself further by trying to say something more about such a masterpiece. I will revisit this work frequently before I am gathered in.
]]> Si j'¨¦tais vous... 45043545 Paru en 1947, Si j'¨¦tais vous... est ¨¤ la fois un grand mythe romanesque ¨¤ placer dans la descendance de Dr Jekill et Mr Hyde, et une r¨¦flexion tendue, douloureuse, sur l'¨¦ternelle insatisfaction de l'individu prisonnier d'un destin.]]> Julien Green 9782253138 Stephen 3 3.70 1949 Si j'¨¦tais vous...
author: Julien Green
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1949
rating: 3
read at: 2022/06/20
date added: 2022/06/20
shelves:
review:
I have mixed feelings about this novel--of course, everything I read successfully in French gets a little boost in my ratings, since I still struggle with the language. Anyway, the novel deals with a wish nearly all of us have had at one time or another: gee, it would sure be nice to be someone else, at least for a while. Well, this happens in this novel, thanks to some help from a dark Satanic figure named M. Bittomart. The result is not too surprising: our protagonist discovers that everyone has problems, including even (surprise?) good-looking people. Okay! Nevertheless, I was getting into the story when suddenly Part 1 ended and Part 2 began with a whole new cast of characters and a typical story of an unhappy family with a tyrannical, hypocrite father. Then my only interest became when and how the two stories would converge. Well, they did, eventually, but not entirely to my satisfaction. At least I finished with a slight sigh of relief and more-or-less understood the sometimes tangled tale. Anyway, Julien Green was an American who was born in France, wrote mainly in French, and became a member of the famous Acad¨¦mie Francaise, so he does have some admirers, especially of his multi-volume diary. The latter will have to wait until I can shift my soul, through some Bittomartish hocus focus, into the body and mind of a far faster reader of French.
]]> <![CDATA[AVENTURES PRODIGIEUSES DE TARTARIN DE TARASCON]]> 1310463 Alphonse Daudet 2070513750 Stephen 4 3.45 1872 AVENTURES PRODIGIEUSES DE TARTARIN DE TARASCON
author: Alphonse Daudet
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1872
rating: 4
read at: 2022/06/05
date added: 2022/06/05
shelves:
review:
I am something of a Daudet fan. Not without some guilt. His antisemitism is not easy to forgive, even within the context of the nineteenth century, where we all know antisemitism is pervasive. Still, at the least, we can say Daudet turns his satire against virtually every group. In this case, the primary target, Tartarin, is a Provencal, which means, for Daudet, prone to exaggerate and then become trapped in that exaggeration! Anyway, this is a very funny story about the town of Tarascon's most skillful "Chasseur de casquettes," the latter a group of intrepid "hunters" who go out into the countryside each week, get thoroughly drunk, and then toss their hats into the air and shoot at them. So, to make a long and funny story short, Tartarin gets trapped into going off to Algeria to hunt lions . . . and he succeeds! Well, not really, but sort of. Anyway, he comes back with enough "credibility" to be regarded as a village hero for the rest of his life. His adventures in Algeria are a total disaster from beginning to end, but nobody home really knows about that . . . and besides, Tartarin has a lion's skin he can show them! A quick read in French--at least if you have a French version, such as I had, which glosses the occasional Provencal dialect and Algerian Arabic terminology.
]]> Men Without Women 33652490 Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage.

Across seven tales, Haruki Murakami brings his powers of observation to bear on the lives of men who, in their own ways, find themselves alone. Here are vanishing cats and smoky bars, lonely hearts and mysterious women, baseball and the Beatles, woven together to tell stories that speak to us all.

Marked by the same wry humor that has defined his entire body of work, in this collection Murakami has crafted another contemporary classic.]]> 242 Haruki Murakami 0385689454 Stephen 4 3.75 2014 Men Without Women
author: Haruki Murakami
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.75
book published: 2014
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/27
date added: 2022/05/27
shelves:
review:
Murakami is a special taste--not all are intrigued or can identify with his world populated by strange, often lonely, people, usually living something we might label a "minimalist life." And despite the title, this collection of seven stories concerns women as well as men, although the point of view is typically that of a man. In the first story, "Drive My Car," a man forms a drinking friendship with his deceased wive's former lover and then tells the story of that friendship to a quite mysterious female driver--no one in this story quite connects with the others. In the story "Yesterday," another man, sexually blocked, wants a friend to date his girlfriend. These strange characters whose stories are typically being told to some listener are all fragile and desperate. One man in the wonderful story "Scheherazade" is being taken care of by a kindly woman whose name he doesn't even know but whom he calls, by her permission, Scheherazade because of the wonderful stories she always tells him, after sex! But he lives in dread she will one day disappear, with the end of her stories more dreaded than the end of sex. And on and on. For me it's a hypnotic but rather sad world where almost anything that happens is sure to be slightly off kilter.
]]> Erewhon (Erewhon, #1) 516570 272 Samuel Butler 0543899462 Stephen 4 3.32 1872 Erewhon (Erewhon, #1)
author: Samuel Butler
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.32
book published: 1872
rating: 4
read at: 2022/05/17
date added: 2022/05/17
shelves:
review:
In terms of plot and characterization, this book is exceedingly thin, not uncommon I suppose with Utopian/Distopian literature, which, after all, usually focuses upon ideas and institutions. What redeems this book, in my opinion, are two sections that are both humorous and provocative. The first derives from the Erewhonians hatred of machines and maintains that machines, with their ever-growing sophistication and power, are supplanting human beings and becoming not man's servant but man's master. Indeed, machines might one day rebel against humans and replace us. In so many ways, this part of this 1872 book sounds very much like the arguments currently being made about artificial intelligence and the danger it presents to our future. The second is a lecture from an Erewhonian professor of botany who argues that plants are possessed of an exceedingly high level of intelligence. They are, he says, our "relatives" as much as animals and consequently, just like animals, should not be eaten. Without going into the particularities of this argument, I will only say I found it great fun. So despite parts of the novel being tedious and hardly worth the time, there are jewels here that will bring a smile to the reader's face. And, at this rather dreary moment of time, that's welcome.
]]> Madame Chrysantheme 1320877 146 Pierre Loti 1406952060 Stephen 3 3.03 1887 Madame Chrysantheme
author: Pierre Loti
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.03
book published: 1887
rating: 3
read at: 2022/05/16
date added: 2022/05/16
shelves:
review:
Loti's account of his short marriage to a Japanese woman in Nagasaki became the source of the opera "Madame Butterfly," but expect no great romance in this book. Loti finds his wife quaint and nicely decorative, especially when she is asleep, but he is happier without her. Nevertheless, the descriptions of Nagasaki and various aspects of Japanese life are magnificently written, although the tone is, shall we say, "dated!"
]]> <![CDATA[The Story of the Stone, Vol. 1: The Golden Days]]> 9405251 436 Cao Xueqin Stephen 5 3.88 1791 The Story of the Stone, Vol. 1: The Golden Days
author: Cao Xueqin
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.88
book published: 1791
rating: 5
read at:
date added: 2022/05/14
shelves:
review:
No justification for this rating needed--one of the greatest novels ever written, a masterpiece every person should read at least once during her lifetime. This is my third or fourth reading . . . and I'm only beginning this time, since four volumes remain, but, as is so with most great texts, each reading brings greater rewards. In this first volume we move from the novel's vast cosmic frame, which reaches back even to the creation of the vault of heaven, into the mundane and diurnal world of the Jia family. By the end of this first volume, a bit like the main character Baoyu, we the readers become ensnared in illusion, forgetting, for a time at least, that the story we are reading is inscribed on a stone standing long after the events it records and bears testimony not only to a vanished world but also to the path followed by "The Precious Jade" (Baoyu) to become disillusioned and withdraw from that world. All the elements of the tragedy are now in place--Baoyu, his two female cousins Baochai and Daiyu (each name carrying one syllable of his name), the redoubtable Xifeng, who seems so confident in managing the household but is really overseeing its eventual ruin, etc. And Baoyu is resisting his duty as a young male to study Confucian texts and prepare for eventual appointment to government service, which could save the family from its decline. Instead, he plays happily with his cousins and maids, indulging in poetry and sentiment, and, toward the end of this volume, moves into the "garden," a kind of feminized space, that was built for an official home visit of his older sister, an imperial concubine. Let's not give too much away until subsequent volumes are read and registered here, although that might take time since I am working through much of the Chinese text as I move along with Hawkes' translation.
]]> Chike and the River 134001 Things Fall Apart]]> 64 Chinua Achebe 0521040035 Stephen 3 3.85 1966 Chike and the River
author: Chinua Achebe
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.85
book published: 1966
rating: 3
read at: 2022/04/25
date added: 2022/04/25
shelves:
review:
A delightful story of a young boy who dreams of a journey to the other side of the river, the Niger River, which he pictures as a utopia. The trip, when it finally comes, both ends up being much less than he hoped and much more than he could have imagined. This book will go directly from my hands to those of my eight-year-old grandson, who, I think, will get caught up in the simple and relatively brief story as much as I did.
]]> <![CDATA[A Childhood: The Biography of a Place]]> 24849 A Childhood is the unforgettable memoir of Harry Crews' earliest years, a sharply remembered portrait of the people, locales, and circumstances that shaped him¡ªand destined him to be a storyteller. Crews was born in the middle of the Great Depression, in a one-room sharecropper's cabin at the end of a dirt road in rural South Georgia. If Bacon County was a place of grinding poverty, poor soil, and blood feuds, it was also a deeply mystical place, where snakes talked, birds could possess a small boy by spitting in his mouth, and faith healers and conjure women kept ghosts and devils at bay.

At once shocking and elegiac, heartrending and comical, A Childhood not only recalls the transforming events of Crews's youth but conveys his growing sense of self in a world "in which survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."

Amid portraits of relatives and neighbors, Bacon County lore, and details of farm life, Crews tells of his father's death; his friendship with Willalee Bookatee, the son of a black hired hand; his bout with polio; his mother and stepfather's failing marriage; his near-fatal scalding at a hog-killing; and a five-month sojourn in Jacksonville, Florida. These and other memories define, with reverence and affection, Harry Crews's childhood "its people and its customs and all its loveliness and all its ugliness." Imaginative and gripping, A Childhood re-creates in detail one writer's search for past and self, a search for a time and place lost forever except in memory.]]> 182 Harry Crews 0820317594 Stephen 4 to-read 4.35 1978 A Childhood: The Biography of a Place
author: Harry Crews
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.35
book published: 1978
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/25
date added: 2022/04/25
shelves: to-read
review:
The most unforgettable characters of Harry Crews¡¯ account of his childhood are ¡°Auntie,¡± an elderly black woman who lovingly nurses Harry through two traumatic periods of childhood convalescence, and Uncle Alton, who appears toward the end of the book as Harry¡¯s final ¡°father figure.¡± Both are unforgettable for the same reason: they are rich fonts of local lore . . . the local lore of Bacon County, Georgia. In fact, this work is as much about a place as it is about a young life. Books about growing up in incredibly difficult circumstances are common, but this one is noteworthy in large measure as such a vivid portrayal of place . . . and as an example of about as honest, or seemingly honest, account of a young life as I have read, virtually free of self-pity, despite more than sufficient reason to indulge such an emotion!
]]> Some Prefer Nettles 194642 202 Jun'ichir¨­ Tanizaki 0679752692 Stephen 4 3.66 1928 Some Prefer Nettles
author: Jun'ichir¨­ Tanizaki
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.66
book published: 1928
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/22
date added: 2022/04/22
shelves:
review:
I read this book perhaps twenty-five years ago but had largely forgotten it and felt rewarded for this rereading. A marriage is disintegrating, Kaname¡¯s wife has taken a lover, and Kaname himself is looking for other possibilities, albeit without great passion or urgency. A Japanese of the 1920¡¯s, Kaname is torn between traditional Japan and the West, between Louise, a Westerner, and O-hisa, his own father¡¯s lover from Kyoto who seems little more than an incarnation of a Japanese puppet. In the end which he will choose remains ambiguous, as this very low-key narrative captures the ambivalence and indecisiveness so many Japanese must have felt in these years. What gives this novel its power, however, is the languorous and intoxicating style of one of modern Japan¡¯s greatest stylists, Junichiro Tanizaki, here masterfully translated by Edward Seidensticker
]]> The Old Man and the Sea 52756485 Ernest Hemingway¡¯s most beloved and popular novel ever, with millions of copies sold¡ªnow featuring early drafts and supplementary material as well as a personal foreword by the only living son of the author, Patrick Hemingway, and an introduction by the author¡¯s grandson Se¨¢n Hemingway.

The last novel Ernest Hemingway saw published, The Old Man and the Sea has proved itself to be one of the enduring works of American fiction. It is the story of an old Cuban fisherman, down on his luck, and his supreme ordeal: a relentless, agonizing battle with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.

Using the simple, powerful language of a fable, Hemingway takes the timeless themes of courage in the face of defeat and personal triumph won from loss and transforms them into a magnificent twentieth-century classic. Written in 1952, this hugely successful novel confirmed his power and presence in the literary world and played a large part in his winning the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.]]> 128 Ernest Hemingway 1476787840 Stephen 5 4.12 1952 The Old Man and the Sea
author: Ernest Hemingway
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1952
rating: 5
read at: 2022/04/05
date added: 2022/04/05
shelves:
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I first read this long ago. But this recent reading was my first as a bonafide "old man." It makes a difference . . . resonates more. I hesitate to add anything precisely because enough has already been said about this classic. So, a simple aside. Can anyone doubt how events subsequent to a novel can influence our reaction to a text after this, which comes a moment in the novel, where we would normally not guffaw: "My head is not that clear. But I think the great DiMaggio would be proud of me today. I had no bone spurs. But the hands and the back hurt truly. I wonder what a bone spur is, he thought. Maybe we have them without knowing of it" (p62). Oh yes, DJT and the discourse of bone spurs!
]]> Notes on an Execution 57773248
Ansel Packer is scheduled to die in twelve hours. He knows what he¡¯s done, and now awaits execution, the same chilling fate he forced on those girls, years ago. But Ansel doesn¡¯t want to die; he wants to be celebrated, understood. He hoped it wouldn¡¯t end like this, not for him.

Through a kaleidoscope of women¡ªa mother, a sister, a homicide detective¡ªwe learn the story of Ansel¡¯s life. We meet his mother, Lavender, a seventeen-year-old girl pushed to desperation; Hazel, twin sister to Ansel¡¯s wife, inseparable since birth, forced to watch helplessly as her sister¡¯s relationship threatens to devour them all; and finally, Saffy, the homicide detective hot on his trail, who has devoted herself to bringing bad men to justice but struggles to see her own life clearly. As the clock ticks down, these three women sift through the choices that culminate in tragedy, exploring the rippling fissures that such destruction inevitably leaves in its wake.

Blending breathtaking suspense with astonishing empathy, Notes on an Execution presents a chilling portrait of womanhood as it simultaneously unravels the familiar narrative of the American serial killer, interrogating our system of justice and our cultural obsession with crime stories, asking readers to consider the false promise of looking for meaning in the psyches of violent men.]]> 306 Danya Kukafka 0063052733 Stephen 4 4.05 2022 Notes on an Execution
author: Danya Kukafka
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.05
book published: 2022
rating: 4
read at: 2022/04/03
date added: 2022/04/03
shelves:
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I could not put this novel down, despite (or maybe "because of") the rather sordid subject matter. As in Victor Hugo's great "Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamn¨¦," a man, this time a serial killer of young women, is in his final day before execution. Through flashbacks we learn the horror of his crimes and the widening circle of persons his acts have touched, from immediate family members to a fascinating young detective obsessed with finding evidence to have him arrested. But what impressed me most about this work, as a lifetime opponent of the death penalty, is the unflinching way Kukafka deals with both the criminal and his victims and, I think, deconstructs that most banal of pronouncements we hear with every execution: "finally we have closure." Really? Or, more likely, does the pain always linger on? As the twin of one of the victims muses as she watches the execution: "How absurd. A death like this --sterile, regulated, watched from a box--is just death. She has no idea to what extent it serves as punishment. The futility comes barreling down, a crumbling house" (291).
]]> More Than I Love My Life 55894188 From the internationally best-selling author--and revered moral voice--a remarkable novel of suffering, love, and healing, the story of three generations of women and a secret that needs to be told.

More Than I Love My Life is the story of three strong women: Vera, age ninety; her daughter, Nina; and her granddaughter, Gili, who at thirty-nine is a filmmaker and a wary consumer of affection. A bitter secret divides each mother-and-daughter pair, though Gili--abandoned by Nina when she was just three--has always been close to her grandmother. With Gili making the arrangements, they travel together to Goli Otok, a barren island off the coast of Croatia, where Vera was imprisoned and tortured for three years as a young wife after she refused to betray her husband and denounce him as an enemy of the people. This unlikely journey--filtered through the lens of Gili's camera, as she seeks to make a film that might help explain her life--lays bare the intertwining of fear, love, and mercy, and the complex overlapping demands of romantic and parental passion.

More Than I Love My Life was inspired by the true story of one of David Grossman's longtime confidantes, a woman who, in the early 1950s, was held on the notorious Goli Otok (the Adriatic Alcatraz). With flashbacks to the stalwart Vera protecting what was most precious on the wretched rock where she was held, and Grossman's fearless examination of the human heart, this swift novel will thrill his many readers and bring new ones into the fold.]]> 288 David Grossman 0593318919 Stephen 4 3.94 2019 More Than I Love My Life
author: David Grossman
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.94
book published: 2019
rating: 4
read at: 2022/03/29
date added: 2022/04/03
shelves:
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I have never been disappointed by a David Grossman novel. He is, in my opinion, one of our world's greatest humanist writers. But this time, I was worried: I've grown a bit tired of novels that revolve around some family secret that is only revealed fully in the last twenty pages or so, and it didn't take long before I knew that is what this novel would be. But "More Than I Love My Life" eventually redeemed itself for two reasons: first, the character Vera, the ninety-year-old matriarch of the family, is unforgettable, particularly as layers of depth get added to her seemingly indomitable character; and second, the novel informed me about yet one more scene of horror, of which our earth seemed already to have in too great abundance,--Goli Otok, a small island off the coast of Croatia, where Tito tortured Stalinists. Vera might dominate this novel, but it is a story of three generations of women, each interesting (and traumatized) in her own way, and it moves toward a sort of reconciliation, although one closes the book suspecting the trauma is not quite put to rest--as, I suppose, is always the case. Anyway, as with all Grossman novels, it is well worth reading.
]]> <![CDATA[The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries]]> 34127174 138 Thich Nhat Hanh 1941529151 Stephen 3 4.68 The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries
author: Thich Nhat Hanh
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.68
book published:
rating: 3
read at: 2022/03/02
date added: 2022/03/30
shelves:
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Once again I feel a bit apologetic about my reaction. I have always disliked reviews that wanted a different kind of book than the one the reviewer chose to read, but that's basically where I am in this case. The Heart Sutra is a provocative and, I believe, difficult text. I was looking for serious exegesis, and what I got was engaging, to be sure, but a rather popularized presentation that struck me as trying to update the Sutra for contemporary seekers of truth. I should have known. Thich Nhat Hanh spent much of his life as a "missionary" of Buddhism and was highly successful in that endeavor. He has a big audience for what he writes, and he writes with clarity and persuasiveness. But, I was looking for something that elucidated rather than adapted the original. Once I have properly digested something like that, maybe I'll feel better prepared to go on to more daring revisions of the text such as those of Thich Nhat Hanh.
]]> <![CDATA[The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of The Journey to the West]]> 158792
These fantastic episodes recount the adventures of Xuanzang, a seventh-century monk who became one of China¡¯s most illustrious religious heroes after traveling for sixteen years in search of Buddhist scriptures. Powerfully combining religious allegory with humor, fantasy, and satire, accounts of Xuanzang¡¯s journey were passed down for a millennium before culminating in the sixteenth century with The Journey to the West . Now, readers of The Monkey and the Monk can experience the full force of his lengthy quest as he travels to India with four animal disciples, most significant among them a guardian-monkey known as ¡°the Great Sage, Equal to Heaven.¡± Moreover, in its newly streamlined form, this acclaimed translation of a seminal work of world literature is sure to attract an entirely new following of students and fans.?

¡°A new translation of a major literary text which totally supersedes the best existing version. . . . It establishes beyond contention the position of The Journey to the West in world literature, while at the same time throwing open wide the doors to interpretive study on the part of the English audience.¡±¡ª Modern Language Notes , on the unabridged translation]]> 528 Wu Cheng'en 0226971562 Stephen 3 3.85 2006 The Monkey and the Monk: An Abridgment of The Journey to the West
author: Wu Cheng'en
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.85
book published: 2006
rating: 3
read at: 2022/02/27
date added: 2022/03/30
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Three stars for an abridgment of one of the greatest traditional Chinese novels might strike some as surprisingly low. Two caveats: first, I believe this novel to be a work of the highest significance and fully worthy to be considered alongside its contemporary Western counterpart "Don Quixote;" second, the late Anthony Yu's full translation, "Journey to the West," published in four volumes is a brilliant work and fully deserves the praise it has received. But the work being reviewed here is an abridgment, and must be judged as such, and as an abridgment it is problematic. Anyone who presents an abridgment of this long and complex novel obviously does it against the background of Arthur Waley's widely read "Monkey," published originally in 1942. Waley knits the longer novel into a coherent and frolicking abridgment that emphasizes, perhaps overemphasizes, the "fun" of the novel at the expense of it more serious and problematic religious content. But, those who read Waley's version at least usually come away satisfied, even if the satisfaction comes as much or more from Waley than Wu Cheng'en, if the latter was indeed the author of the original. Anthony Yu is truer to the original but his abridgment, it seems to me, is a bit lazy. He has simply extracted thirty-one of the novel's original one hundred chapters and pieced them together with only one or two notes clarifying internal references to what has been left out. And his selections, I think, are problematic. The first fifteen chapters of the original are all included in the abridgment, which great foreshortens and diminishes the journey itself--only sixteen of the final eighty-five chapters are included. Yes, Yu's abridgment does give a much better notion of the religious content of the original, including, for example, the Heart Sutra (pp272-73), so important for understanding this novel, but the overall arc of Wu Cheng'en's work is more-or-less lost.
]]> Language and Myth 507221 These six essays are of great interest to the student of philosophy or the philosophy of science, the historian, or the anthropologist. They are also timely for students of literature, what with the enormous emphasis placed upon "myth" in modern literary speculation. This book isn't superficial speculation by a dabbler, but a penetrating study by one of the most profound & sensitive philosophic minds of our time.]]> 128 Ernst Cassirer 0486200515 Stephen 4 3.92 1924 Language and Myth
author: Ernst Cassirer
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.92
book published: 1924
rating: 4
read at: 2022/02/04
date added: 2022/02/04
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This important short book was written by Cassirer as an accessible introduction to the core of his thought, which is essentially that language emerges simultaneously with myth, neither having anteriority over the other, and that language and myth then continue to be intertwined with one another through metaphor and, eventually, literary expression, particularly that of lyrical poetry. It is an intriguing and powerful thesis, although it is far from certain that even those first human utterances, which go back at least 150,000 years (perhaps even one million according to one recent study of the human brain), were raw and concentrated expressions of a kind of religious (or rather pre-religious) awe. That is to say that I think Cassirer is mostly right about the essential interconnection of language, from very early stages, with myth. But whether this is so from the first human word, whatever that may have been, will remain only one conjecture, I suspect, among many others.
]]> Thrown 20949601
Kerry Howley 's work has appeared in The Paris Review , New York Times Magazine , the Atlantic , Wall Street Journal , Slate , and frequently in Bookforum . She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa's Nonfiction Writing Program.]]> 288 Kerry Howley 1936747928 Stephen 3 3.76 2014 Thrown
author: Kerry Howley
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2014
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/28
date added: 2022/01/28
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I was drawn in by the unusual situation: a graduate student in philosophy, the author Kerry Howley, walks out of a boring academic conference and wanders into a cage fight venue. She has some sort of Artaudesque/Nietszchesque feeling of violence-enduced ecstasy and, for the rest of the book, becomes a "spacetaker," as they are called, in the entourage of two separate cage fighters, Sean and Erik, the former more-or-less washed up and the second ascending to near stardom. Howley writes well, but I was slightly disappointed that she did not develop more fully the rationale for her attachment to cage fighting. She does make passing references to several philosophers whose thought is relevant and, more pointedly, indicates some of the inconsistencies of those, like war hero John McCain, who reject cage fighting as mindless violence unworthy of serious attention, but mostly she becomes absorbed in two lives . . . even though the details of those relationships are not fully revealed and elaborated. Oh well, this is an unusual book and does have its moments of high interest. Plus I always enjoy the unexpected, and a philosopher who feels attracted to cage fighting is not something one encounters every day.
]]> Elective Affinities 128837 Elective Affinities was written when Goethe was sixty and long established as Germany's literary giant. This is a new edition of his penetrating study of marriage and passion, bringing together four people in an inexorable manner. The novel asks whether we have free will or not and confronts its characters with the monstrous consequences of repressing what little "real life" they have in themselves, a life so far removed from their natural states that it appears to them as something terrible and destructive.]]> 272 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 0192837761 Stephen 4 3.81 1809 Elective Affinities
author: Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1809
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/23
date added: 2022/01/23
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What happens when new elements are introduced into an ostensibly stable relationship? The chemical metaphor that is this novel's title points to the possibility that new affinities might rend that stability. And, in fact, so goes the novel as, first, the husband Edward suggests taking in his friend, the "captain," and, second, the wife Charlotte, wary of this new male presence, assents as long as she might take in a somewhat mysterious, young woman named Ottilie. Of course, the problem with "elective affinities" is they are not easily played out in a world governed by conservative forces of tradition and social convention: "You can do anything in society except anything that has consequences" (p194). What ensues in this novel is a penetrating analysis of marriage and the way it so often constrains rather than channels passion. Perhaps the most bizarre moment of this novel--a nice gothic touch--is when the newborn son of Edward and Charlotte bears no resemblance to them but resembles the partner each of them was fantasizing when that child was conceived. What an interesting world this would be if "adultery of the heart" (spoiler alert: that is the extent of "things" in this novel) had such a consequence! When so many of us think of the great Goethe, we think exclusively of "Faust"--certainly this work deserves to be read as well . . . and, in this case, discussed. Very provocative.
]]> <![CDATA[Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy]]> 49099790 A grand narrative of the intertwining lives of Walter Benjamin, Martin Heidegger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Ernst Cassirer, major philosophers whose ideas shaped the twentieth century

The year is 1919. The horror of the First World War is still fresh for the protagonists of Time of the Magicians, each of whom finds himself at a crucial juncture. Benjamin, whose life is characterized by false starts and unfinished projects, is trying to flee his overbearing father and floundering in his academic career, living hand to mouth as a critic. Wittgenstein, by contrast, has dramatically decided to divest himself of the monumental fortune he stands to inherit, as a scion of one of the wealthiest industrial families in Europe, in search of absolute spiritual clarity. Meanwhile, Heidegger, having managed to avoid combat in war by serving instead as a meteorologist, is carefully cultivating his career, aligning himself with the great Edmund Husserl and renouncing his prior Catholic associations. Finally, Cassirer is working furiously on the margins of academia, applying himself intensely to his writing and the possibility of a career at Hamburg University. The stage is set for a great intellectual drama, which will unfold across the next decade. The lives and ideas of this extraordinary philosophical quartet will converge as they become world historical figures. But as the Second World War looms on the horizon, their fates will be very different.

Wolfram Eilenberger stylishly traces the paths of these remarkable and turbulent lives, which feature not only philosophy but some of the most important economists, politicians, journalists, and artists of the century, including John Maynard Keynes, Hannah Arendt, and Bertrand Russell. In doing so, he tells a gripping story about some of history's most ambitious and passionate thinkers, and illuminates with rare clarity and economy their brilliant ideas, which all too often have been regarded as enigmatic or opaque.]]> 432 Wolfram Eilenberger 0525559663 Stephen 4 3.87 2018 Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade That Reinvented Philosophy
author: Wolfram Eilenberger
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.87
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2022/01/12
date added: 2022/01/12
shelves:
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Books on difficult or technical subjects that are meant to address a large, non-specialist audience have rough going, as Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviews on this particular book demonstrate. The philosopher, in this case, finds it too superficial or only repetition of what can be found elsewhere, while the non-philosopher, comme moi, can complain about getting lost with this or that explanation. I am an academic, albeit in a very different discipline and area of specialization, and I know how we sneer at those who are "mere popularizers," even though they are simply trying, in their own way, to contribute to general knowledge, which, incidentally, is what we academics all do when we teach a general introduction (hoping, of course, no colleague walks into the classroom and overhears how simply we might be presenting things). So, let me put my cards on the table. Yes, I did like this book, despite the obvious and sometimes unfair criticisms it has received. Yes, it perhaps covers too much--four major thinkers of the 20s--but I am more interested in that lively period, particularly in the Germanic world which was hurtling toward horror, than I am in the difficult details of Heidegger's thought (or, even more so, Benjamin's), which my brain probably would not understand completely no matter who explained it to me. And, yes, the comments about the private lives of these great thinkers might be a bit gratuitous, but such details kept me reading on. Gotta have some entertainment in my old age . . . apart from Netflix.
]]> I and Thou 551866 An alternate cover for this isbn can be found here.

Martin Buber's I and Thou has long been acclaimed as a classic. Many prominent writers have acknowledged its influence on their work; students of intellectual history consider it a landmark; and the generation born after World War II considers Buber one of its prophets. Buber's main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways: (1) that of the "I" toward an "It," toward an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience; (2) that of the "I" toward "Thou," in which we move into existence in a relationship without bounds. One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. All of our relationships, Buber contends, bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou.

The need for a new English translation had been felt for many years. The old version was marred by many inaccuracies and misunderstandings, and its recurrent use of the archaic "thou" was seriously misleading. Professor Walter Kaufmann, a distinguished writer and philosopher in his own right who was close to Buber, retranslated the work at the request of Buber's family. He added a wealth of informative footnotes to clarify obscurities and bring the reader closer to the original and wrote an extensive prologue that opened up new perspectives on the book and on Buber's thought. This volume provided a new basis for all subsequent discussions of Buber.]]> 185 Martin Buber 0684717255 Stephen 3 4.08 1923 I and Thou
author: Martin Buber
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.08
book published: 1923
rating: 3
read at: 2022/01/05
date added: 2022/01/05
shelves:
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I emphasize again that my "stars," three in this case, are a reflection of how much I enjoyed the book and not a judgment of the book's ultimate worth, which I will leave to those more qualified than I! Buber's distinction between the word pair I-It and the I-You and how the worlds defined by these pairs interact is indeed provocative and, for me at least, inspiring. The latter is in Buber's scheme the source of life--almost ecstatically so: "The basic word I-You can only be spoke with the whole being. The basic word I-It can never be spoken with one's whole being" (54). The tragedy and challenge, as he outlines it, is to keep the I-You from fading into the objectification and expropriation of the I-It. But, unfortunately, I am precisely the type of reader that Walter Kaufmann, in his brilliant and helpful introduction to this edition, excoriates: that is, a reader too lazy to read the many difficult portions of this text over and over again so as to gain some clarity, a process Kaufmann admits is essential for Buber's writings. Perhaps giving the book the careful and extended attention Kaufman recommends would bring me better understanding of the last section of the book, where all the Yous of our life converge in God. Didn't quite get that in my doubtlessly overly hasty reading, but I seem to have an allergy to such arguments anyway.
]]> <![CDATA[Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt G?del]]> 55298400
Stephen Budiansky¡¯s Journey to the Edge of Reason is the first biography to fully draw upon G?del¡¯s voluminous letters and writings¡ªincluding a never-before-transcribed shorthand diary of his most intimate thoughts¡ªto explore G?del¡¯s profound intellectual friendships, his moving relationship with his mother, his troubled yet devoted marriage, and the debilitating bouts of paranoia that ultimately took his life. It also offers an intimate portrait of the scientific and intellectual circles in prewar Vienna, a haunting account of G?del¡¯s and Jewish intellectuals¡¯ flight from Austria and Germany at the start of the Second World War, and a vivid re-creation of the early days of Princeton¡¯s Institute for Advanced Study, where G?del and Einstein both worked.

Eloquent and insightful, Journey to the Edge of Reason is a fully realized portrait of the odd, brilliant, and tormented man who has been called the greatest logician since Aristotle, and illuminates the far-reaching implications of G?del¡¯s revolutionary ideas for philosophy, mathematics, artificial intelligence, and man¡¯s place in the cosmos.]]> 368 Stephen Budiansky 1324005440 Stephen 4 4.03 Journey to the Edge of Reason: The Life of Kurt G?del
author: Stephen Budiansky
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.03
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/27
date added: 2021/12/27
shelves:
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While it would take a more mathematically sophisticated reader than yours truly to unpack the critical pages of this book that concern G?del¡¯s ¡°Incompleteness Theorem,¡± the philosophical implication that he drew from his work is clear and wide-ranging: there are truths that are unprovable, that will always escape the grasp of mathematical rules. Quite beyond these issues, however, this book is a fascinating account of the remarkable group of mathematicians and other scientists, mostly Jewish, who gathered in Vienna during the 1920s and 30s. We all know what was soon to happen, and the author traces the consequences, which he calls the largest brain drain in world history, as so many of these scholars fled Austria and settled in the West, particularly America. G?del was one of the more important members of the Vienna circle and later became a good friend of Albert Einstein, who held him in the highest esteem, at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. Just as one has a hard time imagining Thomas Mann and Arnold Sch?nberg living out their lives in Los Angeles, it is sometimes hard to imagine G?del, depressive and increasingly paranoid, and other Austrian and German refugees finding refuge in what was at that time a very conservative New Jersey town. At any rate, this is an enjoyable and informative read on many levels, even if one doesn¡¯t always get the math!
]]> Mars 2197816 315 Fritz Zorn 2070373681 Stephen 3 3.86 1977 Mars
author: Fritz Zorn
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.86
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2021/12/23
date added: 2021/12/23
shelves:
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This book is difficult to assess. The author engages in a sustained and highly repetitive attack on his parents as representatives of a Swiss bourgeoisie that inadvertently destroys their children and, in his case, induces cancer! Yes, Fritz Zorn, applying the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, attributes his tragic and ultimately fatal case of cancer to the life-stifling child-rearing of his parents. Anyone raised in a world where "harmony," "decency," and "discipline" are stressed, as I was too, cannot help but applaud the cleverness with which Zorn sometimes skewers these often hypocritical values. But at what point does the exhausting fury of this work and its lack of any real progression finally overwhelm the sympathetic reader's inclination to say, "Well, we must be indulgent, this guy is dying of a terrible cancer"? No, we are until the end of the book trapped inside a highly claustrophobic world of intense emotion devoid of the kind of detail or nuance that might enable us to identify more fully with another human being in such terrible distress.
]]> Ren¨¦ Leys 935852 240 Victor Segalen 1590170415 Stephen 4 3.59 1919 Ren¨¦ Leys
author: Victor Segalen
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1919
rating: 4
read at: 2021/12/02
date added: 2021/12/02
shelves:
review:
Victor Segalen has in the last decade or so come into vogue as a theorist of cultural diversity, albeit a complex and problematic one. This is his best known novel and stands with his collection of poetry, St¨¨les, and his essay "Exoticism" as his most important works. The basis for the novel seems to have been Victor Segalen's time in China, which began in 1911, and his relationship there to a strange young man, Maurice Roy, whom Segalen took on as his language instructor. In the novel, the narrator is a man named "Victor" and Rene Leys is the name of a young European linguistic genius he takes on to learn Chinese. As the relationship between the older Victor and Rene develops, the latter begins to weave tales of his supposed access to the Forbidden City and, indeed, the very body of the Empress Dowager. These tales are provoked, at least in part, by Victor's obsession with the mysterious, inaccessible center of the Chinese world. The relationship between the two and the way each feeds the imaginative needs of the other is fascinating. But it goes beyond this, with the message ultimately haunting any of us who have ever become infatuated with a "cultural other."
]]> Le D¨¦sert de l'amour 1742209 C¡¯est ¨¤ quarante ans que Fran?ois Mauriac publia ce roman, constat d¨¦sabus¨¦ de la st¨¦rilit¨¦ des passions humaines, illustration m¨¦lancolique, dans le Paris noceur des ann¨¦es 1920, du th¨¨me pascalien de la mis¨¨re de l¡¯homme sans Dieu. ?Le D¨¦sert de l¡¯amour, devait-il ¨¦crire, c¡¯est le roman de mon renoncement. Ce pourrait ¨ºtre le titre de mon ?uvre enti¨¨re. ?]]> 244 Fran?ois Mauriac 2253012343 Stephen 3 3.52 1925 Le D¨¦sert de l'amour
author: Fran?ois Mauriac
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.52
book published: 1925
rating: 3
read at: 2021/10/06
date added: 2021/12/02
shelves:
review:
A decidedly dark novel concerning a man whose sexual life has been merely an attempt to compensate for being rejected by the first woman he truly desired, a woman who happens to have been at that same time his father's lover. Finally, he has an opportunity for revenge . . . Yes, Mauriac here lays out a strong argument to regard "l'amour," at least as many experience it, as little more than a desert of frustration and failure. As always with Mauriac, the religious message is just below the surface.
]]> At Night All Blood is Black 50403480 ¡°°ä³ó´Ç³¦´Ç±ô²¹³Ù¡± soldier with the French army during World War I. When his friend Mademba Diop, in the same regiment, is seriously injured in battle, Diop begs Alfa to kill him and spare him the pain of a long and agonizing death in No Man¡¯s Land.

Unable to commit this mercy killing, madness creeps into Alfa¡¯s mind as he comes to see this refusal as a cruel moment of cowardice. Anxious to avenge the death of his friend and find forgiveness for himself, he begins a macabre ritual: every night he sneaks across enemy lines to find and murder a blue-eyed German soldier, and every night he returns to base, unharmed, with the German¡¯s severed hand. At first his comrades look at Alfa¡¯s deeds with admiration, but soon rumors begin to circulate that this super soldier isn¡¯t a hero, but a sorcerer, a soul-eater. Plans are hatched to get Alfa away from the front, and to separate him from his growing collection of hands, but how does one reason with a demon, and how far will Alfa go to make amends to his dead friend?

Peppered with bullets and black magic, this remarkable novel fills in a forgotten chapter in the history of World War I. Blending oral storytelling traditions with the gritty, day-to-day, journalistic horror of life in the trenches, David Diop's At Night All Blood is Black is a dazzling tale of a man¡¯s descent into madness.

Selected by students across France to win the Prix Goncourt des Lyc¨¦ens, David Diop¡¯s English-language, historical fiction debut At Night All Blood is Black is a ¡°powerful, hypnotic, and dark novel¡± (Livres Hebdo) of terror and transformation in the trenches of the First World War.]]> 145 David Diop 0374266972 Stephen 3 3.82 2018 At Night All Blood is Black
author: David Diop
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.82
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2021/09/22
date added: 2021/09/22
shelves:
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Let's face it, literary portrayals of life in the trenches of World War I hardly ever slant toward the cheery. Now, add to this the fact that "At Night All Blood is Black," portrays a Senegalese soldier fighting for his "motherland" (that is, yes, France), who is sinking into a world of unspeakable violence and madness, and you can only wince with horror. Yes, there is more to this novel than unspeakable violence: it is written with crisp power, it says much about colonialism and racism, and it has a mysterious and powerful conclusion. Still, it takes a strong stomach . . . .
]]> Le Sagouin 105402 Librarian's note: Alternate cover edition of ISBN13 9782266023139.

Il semble que Fran?ois Mauriac ait mis le meilleur de son art dans cette cruelle peinture d'une famille de hobereaux du Sud-Ouest dont l'h¨¦ritier, un pauvre homme d¨¦g¨¦n¨¦r¨¦, s'est m¨¦salli¨¦ en ¨¦pousant une jeune fille qui n'a pu r¨¦sister au d¨¦sir de quitter son milieu bourgeois et de devenir baronne.
De cette union mal assortie est n¨¦ un fils, Guillou. Nous suivons le calvaire de cet enfant, si disgraci¨¦ physiquement, si sale, si arri¨¦r¨¦ que sa m¨¨re ne l'appelle que le Sagouin. Nous le verrons tout pr¨¨s peut-¨ºtre du salut parce qu'enfin quelqu'un, l'instituteur du village, le traite en ¨ºtre humain, mais cet homme bon et secourable renonce ¨¤ s'occuper de l'enfant du ? ch?teau ? et la trag¨¦die se pr¨¦cipite.
Victime de la haine de sa m¨¨re ¨¤ qui il ne rappelle que d'odieux souvenirs, victime des pr¨¦jug¨¦s du village, la pauvre Guillou entra?nera son faible p¨¨re dans la trag¨¦die. Cette ? sombre et parfaite nouvelle ? - le mot est de Robert Kemp - est un r¨¦cit d'une grande intensit¨¦ qui ¨¦voque un monde de haine et de souffrance avec une remarquable sobri¨¦t¨¦ de moyens et un art achev¨¦.]]> 140 Fran?ois Mauriac Stephen 4 3.45 1951 Le Sagouin
author: Fran?ois Mauriac
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.45
book published: 1951
rating: 4
read at: 2021/09/22
date added: 2021/09/22
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review:
This brief novel, written fairly late in Mauriac's life, is a magnificent, if slightly over-heated, study of the intersection of class and politics in small-town France. Like so many of Mauriac's works, it also concerns a Dysfunctional Family (yes, capitalize that!). "The dirty child," to translate the title, is coddled by his grandmother, disliked by his mother, and largely ignored by his silent father, who does however let his son sit in the cemetery day after day and watch him tend to the graves of his ancestors! Now, the grandmother is a "fallen aristocrat," while her daughter-in-law is not only from the working class but seems to have a streak of "red" running through her spirit. Well, I won't go on with a plot summary, since it is only a one- or two-hour read (unless you are a mediocre reader of French who insists, like me, to tackle it in the original . . . then count on maybe five hours). At any rate, things come to a crisis when the mother succeeds in getting her "dirty child" a tutor, who happens to be the village school teacher and hence a left-wing rival to priests and aristocrats. Suffice it to say, things end badly, which shouldn't surprise any reader of Mauriac, who has a genius for portraying the multifaceted awfulness of family life!
]]> Bitna, sous le ciel de S¨¦oul 39293365 La premi¨¨re lutte contre la pauvret¨¦, la seconde contre la douleur. Ensemble, elles se sauvent dans des r¨¦cits quotidiens ou fabuleux, et bient?t la fronti¨¨re entre r¨¦alit¨¦ et imaginaire dispara?t.

Un roman qui souffle ses l¨¦gendes urbaines sur la rivi¨¨re Han, les boulevards satur¨¦s et les ruelles louches.

Sous le ciel de S¨¦oul se l¨¨ve ? le vent de l¡¯envie des fleurs ?...]]> 272 J.M.G. Le Cl¨¦zio 223408573X Stephen 3 3.41 2018 Bitna, sous le ciel de S¨¦oul
author: J.M.G. Le Cl¨¦zio
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.41
book published: 2018
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/22
date added: 2021/08/24
shelves:
review:
A variant on the Sh¨¦h¨¦razade theme, with the storyteller keeping someone else alive, rather than herself. The novel moves back and forth between an account of Bitna the nineteen-year-old storyteller, who is somewhat adrift in her own life, and five stories, eventually weaving into one story, she tells to the dying Salome. The novel has some fine lyrical moments and reflects here and there the texture of Seoul, where Le Clezio has lived, but I would not rank this among the noble prize winner's greater works.
]]> <![CDATA[Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship]]> 343906


At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.]]> 328 Gershom Scholem 1590170326 Stephen 3 3.95 1981 Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
author: Gershom Scholem
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 1981
rating: 3
read at: 2021/08/10
date added: 2021/08/24
shelves:
review:
Rereading Walter Benjamin's challenging essay "The Task of a Translator" and, at about the same time, passing near Portbou, Spain where he committed suicide in 1940, somehow inspired me to read this book, written by the distinguished scholar of Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem. I found it both interesting and mildly disappointing. Interesting because it gives some idea of the rich cast of characters in the Jewish-German intellectual world of the 1920s and 1930s--that is, a world on the edge of unimaginable tragedy. The book disappointed me in that Scholem, who was near the center of that world, at least until he moved to Jerusalem, gives little detail about the major intellectual issues to which he alludes. That is, plenty of names appear and alliances between various scholars are noted, but relatively little texture is provided. Such a weakness, I suspect, arises because of the long years between the events described and the time, late in his career, when Scholem penned this book. But there is, perhaps another reason, and that is Scholem's almost obsessive engagement with one particular argument: his contention that Benjamin, his good friend, was really in the tradition of Jewish mystics and was only a latecomer to the world of Marxism, which Benjamin never really integrated successfully into a convincing intellectual position. I am certainly in no position to judge whether Scholem is correct or not, but surely, as a Jewish mystic himself, he certainly would wish that his friend was one too, and not primarily a Marxist, for which Scholem had little sympathy.
]]> The Brothers Karamazov 4934
This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky remains true to the verbal inventiveness of Dostoevsky¡¯s prose, preserving the multiple voices, the humor, and the surprising modernity of the original. It is an achievement worthy of Dostoevsky¡¯s last and greatest novel.]]> 796 Fyodor Dostoevsky 0374528373 Stephen 5 4.36 1880 The Brothers Karamazov
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.36
book published: 1880
rating: 5
read at: 2021/07/20
date added: 2021/08/24
shelves:
review:
I returned last month to this classic, which I first read more than fifty years ago. It has lost none of its power, at least for this reader. Two things in particular struck me this time through. First, the novel is to some extent an illustration of Father Cosima¡¯s argument that ¡°we are all guilty for all and before all.¡± The parricide for which Dimitri is convicted results not just from the hand of the real killer, who is not Dimitri, but from the actions of a host of characters, Dimitri especially, who have created the circumstances for that murder. While I can¡¯t entirely accept Cosima¡¯s doctrine in its most literal form, I can accept, as this novel illustrates, how the actions of all of us are responsible for the society in which we live, with its cruelties and criminality. Second, the Grand Inquisitor section of the novel, which has haunted me ever since my initial reading, this time took second place in impact to Ivan¡¯s long discussion with the devil, which concerns, in part, whether the devil-interlocuter is ¡°real¡± or just our own psychological projection. I struggled myself, as a skeptical youngster growing up in a deeply religious environment, over this very question and even prayed on occasion that the devil would appear to me, because his appearance would prove, at least so I reasoned, the existence of God. And, of course, he did appear, and continues to appear, in dreams, which brings us back to Ivan¡¯s discussion. Yes, one of the values of literature is that it can help us re-experience and re-think aspects of our own lives, real and psychological.
]]> The Lost Estate 983730 The Lost Estate is Robin Buss's translation of Henri Alain-Fournier's poignant study of lost love, Le Grand Meaulnes. This Penguin Classics edition also contains an introduction by Adam Gopnik.

When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house - and his love for the beautiful girl hidden within it, Yvonne de Galais - his life has been changed forever. In his restless search for his Lost Estate and the happiness he found there, Meaulnes, observed by his loyal friend Francois, may risk losing everything he ever had. Poised between youthful admiration and adult resignation, Alain-Fournier's compelling narrator carries the reader through this evocative and unbearably poignant portrayal of desperate friendship and vanished adolescence.

Robin Buss's translation of Le Grand Meaulnes sensitively and accurately renders Alain-Fournier's poetically charged, expressive and deceptively simple style. In his introduction, New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik discusses the life of Alain-Fournier, who was killed in the First World War after writing this, his only novel.

I read it for the first time when I was seventeen and loved every page. I find its depiction of a golden time and place just as poignant now as I did then
Nick Hornby]]> 227 Henri Alain-Fournier 0141441895 Stephen 5 3.72 1913 The Lost Estate
author: Henri Alain-Fournier
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1913
rating: 5
read at: 2011/08/15
date added: 2021/08/16
shelves:
review:
It is difficult to know what to think of Le grand Meaulnes. I do not mean the novel, which is both a great read and also a work that has had an immense impact on a generation or two of young French readers, but the character. He is the ultimate adventurer, who lives in a world of fantasy and dream. But reality is never quite as satisfying as fantasy. When the young woman he has pursued is finally his, he abandons her and goes off on another pursuit, this time to fulfill a promise he has made to an eccentric young man, who seems hardly worth all the sacrifice. Meaulnes is, though, the product of a narrator, Fran?ois Seurel, who is his best friend and, in certain ways, his opposite. Fran?ois is small, not "grand," walks with a limp, never is the charismatic center of the young students, as is his friend, and builds his own world very much around Meaulnes' adventures. We see everything through Fran?ois' eyes, but we are left to wonder if he, who writes with such wonder about Le grand Meaulnes right to the end of the book, is not the more tragic figure, precisely because he never fully understands that he is the center of the real love story, which consists not of the grand gesture but of actual physical presence. The author of this great novel, Alain-Fournier, died in the First World War at the age of twenty-seven, one year after "Le grand Meaulnes" was published. While it is not a difficult book to read in French, there is a new English translation under the title "The Lost Estate," published by Penguin in 2007. It is highly recommended.
]]> The Life of the Mind 54075354 Publishers Weekly, starred review)

As an adjunct professor of English in New York City with no hope of finding a permanent position, Dorothy feels "like a janitor in the temple who continued to sweep because she had nowhere else to be but who had lost her belief in the essential sanctity of the enterprise." No one but her boyfriend knows that she's just had a miscarriage, not even her therapists--Dorothy has two of them. Nor can she bring herself to tell the other women in her life: her friends, her doctor, her mentor, her mother. The freedom not to be a mother is one of the victories of feminism. So why does she feel like a failure?

Piercingly intelligent and darkly funny, The Life of the Mind is a novel about endings: of youth, of professional aspiration, of possibility, of the illusion that our minds can ever free us from the tyranny of our bodies. And yet Dorothy's mind is all she has to make sense of a world largely out of her control, one where disaster looms and is already here, where things happen but there is no plot. There is meaning, however, if Dorothy figures out where to look, and as the weeks pass and the bleeding subsides, she finds it in the most unlikely places, from a Las Vegas poolside to a living room karaoke session. In literature--as Dorothy well knows--stories end. But life, as they say, goes on.]]> 240 Christine Smallwood 0593229894 Stephen 3 3.26 2021 The Life of the Mind
author: Christine Smallwood
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.26
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/31
date added: 2021/08/14
shelves:
review:
Well written to be sure, but academic novels are less and less interesting to me. David Lodge had it right, academia is a "small world." Now, I don't doubt that untenured instructors are treated terribly at most universities. All that learning and work to complete a Ph.D. and basically you end upon in a dead end, poorly paid job that has low status and little future. Yes, it's sad, as this novel so clearly shows, but it's hardly a tragedy. For that, let's go into the streets and look at those whose lives are truly and hopelessly broken. Sorry for the diatribe, which says little about this novel in which one instructor has an abortion that seems, then, to become a symbol of her life and her career. And she can't stop the bleeding. A good read, a sad story, but my exasperation with self pity, which I as a former academic frequently wallowed in as well (we all do it), drove me back to reading Dostoevsky, who lived in anything but a small world.
]]> Silas Marner 54539 262 George Eliot Stephen 4 3.67 1861 Silas Marner
author: George Eliot
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.67
book published: 1861
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/21
date added: 2021/05/21
shelves:
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I first read Silas Marner for a high school English class more decades ago than I would care to divulge. I found it just as moving this time through as in my teenage years. It is a simple story, which most readers here probably already know¡ªindeed it remains one of those great 19th century novels that is built upon implausible coincidence, but coincidences we accept nevertheless because, perhaps, we would prefer the world that way. Anyway, I once again stand in awe of George Eliot¡¯s skill as a storyteller, and her attempt here to redeem the religious feeling and essential goodness of the common folk.
]]> <![CDATA[When We Cease to Understand the World]]> 53972214
Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schr?dinger¡ªthese are some of luminaries into whose troubled lives Benjam¨ªn Labatut thrusts the reader, showing us how they grappled with the most profound questions of existence. They have strokes of unparalleled genius, alienate friends and lovers, descend into isolation and insanity. Some of their discoveries reshape human life for the better; others pave the way to chaos and unimaginable suffering. The lines are never clear.

At a breakneck pace and with a wealth of disturbing detail, Labatut uses the imaginative resources of fiction to tell the stories of the scientists and mathematicians who expanded our notions of the possible.]]> 192 Benjam¨ªn Labatut 1782276122 Stephen 5 4.11 2020 When We Cease to Understand the World
author: Benjam¨ªn Labatut
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.11
book published: 2020
rating: 5
read at: 2021/05/19
date added: 2021/05/19
shelves:
review:
Well, I gobbled this down in a single day, something I haven't done for a long time. I'm not at all sure how it will stand the test of time, but it is a fascinating--indeed entrancing read. This book moves from the entirely factual to the more and more fictional, concluding with a highly imaginative account of Heisenberg and his relationship with Neils Bohr. But always, at the bottom of even the fictional narrative, is is a hard fact: "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle shredded the hopes of all those who had put their faith in the clockwork universe Newtonian physics had promised." The universe became little more than a texture of possibilities. Einstein, an ardent defender of classical physics, badly wanted to disprove the new model--but he could not, and so it lives on to the present day, at least so Labatut argues. With all of this, it seems to this stranger in the world of physics and mathematics, we move into a new world--a world that we can never quite understand. At any rate, Labatut, a Chilean who writes in Spanish, is a major new writer--and I eagerly await the next act.
]]> <![CDATA[For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison]]> 13594582
For a Song and a Hundred Songs captures the four brutal years Liao spent in jail for writing the incendiary poem ¡°Massacre.¡± Through the power and beauty of his prose, he reveals the bleak reality of crowded Chinese prisons¡ªthe harassment from guards and fellow prisoners, the torture, the conflicts among human beings in close confinement, and the boredom of everyday life. But even in his darkest hours, Liao manages to unearth the fundamental humanity in his cell mates: he writes of how they listen with rapt attention to each other¡¯s stories of criminal endeavors gone wrong and of how one night, ravenous with hunger, they dream up an ¡°imaginary feast,¡± with each inmate trying to one-up the next by describing a more elaborate dish.

In this important book, Liao presents a stark and devastating portrait of a nation in flux, exposing a side of China that outsiders rarely get to see. In the wake of 2011¡¯s Arab Spring, the world has witnessed for a second time China¡¯s crackdown on those citizens who would speak their mind, like artist Ai Weiwei and legal activist Chen Guangcheng. Liao stands squarely among them and gives voice to not only his own story, but to the stories of those individuals who can no longer speak for themselves. For a Song and a Hundred Songs bears witness to history and will forever change the way you view the rising superpower of China.]]> 432 Liao Yiwu 0547892632 Stephen 4 4.06 2011 For a Song and a Hundred Songs: A Poet's Journey Through a Chinese Prison
author: Liao Yiwu
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/11
date added: 2021/05/11
shelves:
review:
Liao Yiwu was incarcerated for roughly four years for writing poetry sympathetic of the Tiananmen students. The very fact that he survived the hell described in this book is a credit to his physical toughness and willpower. While it is not unusual for prison administrators to appropriate prisoners, often the most violent among them, as a means of controlling and manipulating other prisoners, sometimes as stand-ins for guards and sometimes working in tandem with guards, the particulars of this process in the Chinese detention system, described in Liao's book, are horrifying. Physical torture, some of it disgustingly "original," is the order of the day, and no one escapes it. Moreover, the very ideology undergirding the system emphasizes confessing one's own crimes and reporting the crimes of others, all in the name of reeducation, so that "making people better" becomes the spurious justification for a cycle of violence that can only make everyone worse. Much of this book is not for the queasy, and there were times I felt I really couldn't go on, but I am glad I persevered and eventually concluded that Liao's message is too important for us to turn away. For those of us concerned about mass imprisonment of the Uyghurs that is going on just now and fearful that the prison system in China might not be much better today than it was thirty years ago, this book is a sobering read and a call to action.
]]> The War of the Poor 54765614 The Order of the Day, a powerful account of the German Peasants¡¯ War (1524¨C25) that shows striking parallels to class conflicts of our time.

In the sixteenth century, the Protestant Reformation launched an attack on privilege and the Catholic Church, but it rapidly became an established, bourgeois authority itself. Rural laborers and the urban poor, who were still being promised equality in heaven, began to question why they shouldn¡¯t have equality here and now on earth.

There ensued a furious struggle between the powerful¡ªthe comfortable Protestants¡ªand the others, the wretched. They were led by a number of theologians, one of whom has left his mark on history through his determination and sheer energy. His name was Thomas M¨¹ntzer, and he set Germany on fire. The War of the Poor recounts his story¡ªthat of an insurrection through the Word.

In his characteristically bold, cinematic style, ?ric Vuillard draws insights from this revolt from nearly five hundred years ago, which remains shockingly relevant to the dire inequalities we face today.]]> 112 ?ric Vuillard Stephen 3 3.32 2019 The War of the Poor
author: ?ric Vuillard
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.32
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2021/05/04
date added: 2021/05/04
shelves:
review:
Yes, size is not everything, not even the main thing. But still, this book, which has made the Booker International Award shortlist, is a bit short, at 79 pages. In other words, it could also be thought of as a somewhat longish short story. Still, "War of the Poor" is an engaging and well-written account of Thomas M¨¹ntzer and the Peasants War of the early sixteenth century. M¨¹ntzer's "radical"--which is to say "accurate"--reading of the Bible led to uncompromising class warfare. "Godless rulers should be killed," "Princes should not terrify the pious. But if that does happen, then the sword will be taken away from them and given to the wrathful," etc. Somehow this form of radical rhetoric seems nearer to us today than when we, perhaps naively, believed that the Enlightenment and its gentle reason would come to dominate the world and leave people like M¨¹ntzer and other prophetic voices in the dustbin of history. This is a compelling, yes, in my opinion too short, account of a fascinating and somewhat frightening fanatic, who may have spoken on behalf of those who deserved a voice. Still, very innocently, might I suggest, "Come, let us reason together!" (I know it won't work, but still . . . ).
]]> Notes from the Underground 436982 Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov ¡ª Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821¨C1881) penned the darkly fascinating Notes from the Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes ¡ª moral, religious, political and social ¡ª that dominated Dostoyevsky's later works. Notes from the Underground, then, aside from its own compelling qualities, offers readers an ideal introduction to the creative imagination, profundity and uncanny psychological penetration of one of the most influential novelists of the nineteenth century. Constance Garnett's authoritative translation is reprinted here, with a new introduction.]]> 96 Fyodor Dostoevsky Stephen 4 4.09 1864 Notes from the Underground
author: Fyodor Dostoevsky
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.09
book published: 1864
rating: 4
read at: 2021/05/01
date added: 2021/05/01
shelves:
review:
"All direct and active men are active precisely because they are dull and limited." "The best thing is conscious inertia." And yet, the Underground Man, tries to squeeze out some sort of self analysis, only to repeatedly undermine it. This is a book about a struggle toward a meaning that perhaps doesn't exist. To read it is to enter that struggle--which leads mostly to frustration, albeit sometimes preceded by one or two guffaws. This small novel is, as I understand it, a kind of preface to Dostoyevsky's more noteworthy works. So, I will struggle on . . . trying to review something as brilliant and troubling as this is bound to fail, at least from the likes of yours truly. The best reaction might be a kind of stunned silence . . . .
]]> Ethan Frome 5246
Ethan Frome works his unproductive farm and struggles to maintain a bearable existence with his difficult, suspicious and hypochondriac wife, Zeena. But when Zeena's vivacious cousin enters their household as a hired girl, Ethan finds himself obsessed with her and with the possibilities for happiness she comes to represent.

In one of American fiction's finest and most intense narratives, Edith Wharton moves this ill-starred trio toward their tragic destinies. Different in both tone and theme from Wharton's other works, Ethan Frome has become perhaps her most enduring and most widely read book.]]> 99 Edith Wharton Stephen 3 3.42 1911 Ethan Frome
author: Edith Wharton
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.42
book published: 1911
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/22
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves:
review:
¡°Ethan Frome¡± is a painful portrayal of a repressed New Englander trapped in a marriage with a woman who seems to have two modes: sick herself or caring for the maladies of others. The title character¡¯s growing attachment to his wife¡¯s young cousin, who has come to live with them, sets up a kind of triangle that can only lead to tragedy, and the particular shape of that tragedy, as well as its result, is brilliantly cruel and puts the three characters into a circumstance reminiscent, at least in broad structure, of Sartre¡¯s ¡°No Exit.¡± Wharton dangles clues throughout her short work, pointing us to its unhappy end, that damn elm tree chief among them, but when we reach the final pages of this short novel, the reader almost feels as if he/she has been hit by a train (or, perhaps, I should say, ¡°a sled¡±). I did, however, find it strange that the female author, gifted as she is, gives little room to the development of her two female characters--each is little more than a type and seems there mainly to nail Ethan Frome firmly into his private hell.
]]> Klara and the Sun 54120408
In Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro looks at our rapidly changing modern world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator to explore a fundamental question: what does it mean to love?]]> 340 Kazuo Ishiguro 059331817X Stephen 3 ]]> 3.71 2021 Klara and the Sun
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.71
book published: 2021
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/22
date added: 2021/04/22
shelves:
review:
I had read several enthusiastic reviews of Kazuo Ishiguro¡¯s latest novel, Klara and the Sun, before I finally picked it up. I am an Ishiguro fan, especially of his early An Artist of the Floating World and his more recent Never Let Me Go, and I was most intrigued to learn that the narrator of his latest novel is ¡°artificial friend¡±¡ªthat is, an artificial intelligence purchased to be a companion to a young person (in a way, an infinitely more sophisticated and more companionable iPhone). My reaction was mixed. To say the narrator sometimes seems flat is to state the obvious, I suppose, and is to admit that Ishiguro has successfully conveyed how a high-level artificial intelligent might struggle making sense of the human world around him/her no matter how many magazines that intelligence has digested to help her (¡°her¡± in this case) understand the world in which she will soon move as a friend to a young human. But, I confess that I was beginning to grow bored until Klara began to pursue her own agenda, which includes some highly engaging quasi-religious notions of ¡°sun worship.¡± I slowly came to realize that Ishiguro was almost playing a game with the reader, dangling all clues that something truly ugly, almost ¡°gothic¡± was afoot, only to rein himself in and produce a surprisingly restrained and movingly humanistic conclusion. In the end, this is about that most human of emotions, love, and even raises the possibility that there is no greater love than a kind of faithful service that has no ¡°genuinely¡± emotional basis. Klara finally comes to understand the rather fickle notion of much ¡°human love¡± and slowly begins to fade away, ever loyal to those who have abandoned her. Yes, after all, this was a worthwhile read.

]]> Dependency 43685224 The final volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers

Tove is only twenty, but she's already famous, a published poet and wife of a much older literary editor. Her path in life seems set, yet she has no idea of the struggles ahead - love affairs, wanted and unwanted pregnancies, artistic failure and destructive addiction. As the years go by, the central tension of Tove's life comes into painful focus: the terrible lure of dependency, in all its forms, and the possibility of living freely and fearlessly - as an artist on her own terms.

The final volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, and arguably Ditlevsen's masterpiece, Dependency is a dark and blisteringly honest account of addiction, and the way out.]]> 156 Tove Ditlevsen Stephen 4 4.45 1971 Dependency
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.45
book published: 1971
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/07
date added: 2021/04/07
shelves:
review:
The last of the Copenhagen Trilogy and the best of the three volumes, "Dependency" is the story of the adult Ditlevsen's failed marriages and decline into opiate addiction. Ditlevsen portrays her emotional and psychological vulnerabilities with disarming frankness, neither sensationalizing nor asking for sympathy. She tells of certain events, such as her dinner with Evelyn Waugh, in a kind of direct, clipped language that enhances the continuing incongruities of her life--a poet of great sensitivity who is from the low working class and can't quite find any place of personal comfort.
]]> The Carnal Prayer Mat 1690630 336 Li Yu 0824817982 Stephen 4 3.78 1634 The Carnal Prayer Mat
author: Li Yu
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.78
book published: 1634
rating: 4
read at: 2021/04/04
date added: 2021/04/04
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This 17th century Century erotic novel, apparently still banned in Beijing, is simultaneously a treatise on a raucous sexuality obsessed with size and numbers and a warning against indulgence in such a life. All "the fun" leads (no spoiler alert necessary since it's announced at the outset) to self-castration and becoming a Buddhist monk! While the novel is filled with humor and astounding exaggeration, all the while provoking in the modern reader some guilt about smiling over such things, it does require that a reader distance him/herself from values rather far removed from those our current world approves. Most amusing, at least for me, are the "critiques" at the end of each chapter in which Li Yu, assuming the role of an outside critic, lauds his own genius for such clever twists and turns. Well, Li Yu was something of a genius and wrote more than this novel, so I supposed, as the baseball player Dizzy Dean once said, "If you're great and you say you're great, it ain't bragging." But back to the novel: like other erotic works, this book can get tedious, but it is something of a literary landmark and worth a read--if for nothing more than to convince the gentle reader to lead a strict Confucian life and not follow the horrid example of the Scholar Vesperus!!
]]> Dissipatio H.G. 9706031
Guido Morselli¡¯s arresting postapocalyptic novel, written just before he died by suicide in 1973, depicts a man much like the author himself¡ªlonely, brilliant, difficult¡ªand a world much like our own, mesmerized by money, speed, and machines. Dissipatio H.G. is a precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world, and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider.]]> 154 Guido Morselli 8845906337 Stephen 3 3.81 1977 Dissipatio H.G.
author: Guido Morselli
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.81
book published: 1977
rating: 3
read at: 2021/04/04
date added: 2021/04/04
shelves:
review:
The premise of this book is intriguing: the protagonist leaves an isolated spot where he intended to commit suicide and subsequently discovers that while he has been away everyone else has simply vanished. Brilliantly, I think, there is no explanation of precisely what happened, but it is clear that all the "stuff" has been left behind. He begins to wander in this world where he is apparently the only living human being. Thus, in a reversal, the human world from which the protagonist intended, originally, to be absent, has become a world where he is the only presence. He then falls into a series of philosophical and psychological musings, some of them, at least to this reader, interesting and some not. While this is definitely worth reading (only about 110 pages long), it did not keep my attention as much as I thought it would (ruined by Hector Malot?). However, the intelligent introduction by the translator Frederika Randall (I have the habit of reading introductions after I have finished the novel) makes a powerful case for the novel's importance both as a literary landmark and as Morselli's final work before his own suicide in 1973.
]]> Sans famille 3773807 0 Hector Malot 2092703293 Stephen 5 4.32 1878 Sans famille
author: Hector Malot
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.32
book published: 1878
rating: 5
read at: 2021/04/02
date added: 2021/04/02
shelves:
review:
This was a long and delightful read (around 700 pages), perfect for my mediocre French because the strong plot kept me pushing forward. Of course, as with reading Dickens, Malot's older English contemporary, one does require a willing suspension of disbelief. The story prevents a vast tableau of France, and even of London, but the same rather small circle of characters intertwine in ways that carry the notion of the chance encounter to unbelievable heights and remind the reader that it is, after all, popular literature intended in large measure for the young. Anyway, to follow the orphan Remy, his mentor and protector Vitalis, and his good friend, the little Italian boy Mattia--oh yes, above all, his faithful dog Capi--around France is a delight. And even an old man, comme moi, nervously followed Remy's long entrapment in a mine, nodded his head in emotional approval of the small lad's carefully saving from his earnings to buy his former nourrice a cow, and shed a tear at the death of the good Vitalis! It's great to be young again, if only in an occasional reading! Of course, I easily fall into age-related curmudgeonliness and bemoan the fact (but is it?) that young people these days just don't give themselves the pleasure of reading such literature.
]]> Lord Jim 12194
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), was a Polish author who wrote in English after settling in England. Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English, though he did not speak the language fluently until he was in his twenties. He wrote stories and novels, often with a nautical setting, that depict trials of the human spirit in the midst of an indifferent world. He was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature.

Contents:

Lord Jim

Memoirs & Letters:

A Personal Record; or Some Reminiscences

The Mirror of the Sea

Notes on Life & Letters

Biography & Critical Essays:

Joseph Conrad (A Biography) by Hugh Walpole

Joseph Conrad by John Albert Macy

A Conrad Miscellany by John Albert Macy

Joseph Conrad by Virginia Woolf]]> 455 Joseph Conrad 1551111721 Stephen 4 3.63 1900 Lord Jim
author: Joseph Conrad
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.63
book published: 1900
rating: 4
read at: 2021/03/20
date added: 2021/03/20
shelves:
review:
This is a novel of character in both senses. A character, the eponymous Lord Jim, propels the story forward and gives it interest. But beyond the central focus upon a particular character, the novel also raises the question, essentially a moral question, of character itself. Jim is obsessed with honor, the honor he lost when, in a moment of impulse, he abandoned a "sinking" ship and left the passengers to drown--or so he believed. While, in the end, no great harm was done to those he abandoned, his "cowardly" act is known throughout the maritime world, and his reputation is ruined. Eventually, though, he regains his self-respect and his status among those around him, by becoming one of those Conradian characters lost in "a heart of darkness," the white man who escapes one world and imagines himself in control of another. And then . . . . Well, this character's falls from grace result not so much from premeditated acts as from, in the first case, impulse, and, in the second, the unforeseen intrusion of an outside force. Jim's character requires the esteem of others and so is motivated more by shame than guilt, but that esteem, in the end, is beyond his control. One who defines himself by how others see him is constantly at risk. This is Jim's tragedy, and a tragedy always too near for those of us overly concerned with the regard of others.
]]> The Fire Next Time 464260 The Fire Next Time galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement. At once a powerful evocation of James Baldwin¡¯s early life in Harlem and a disturbing examination of the consequences of racial injustice, the book is an intensely personal and provocative document. It consists of two ¡°letters,¡± written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation, that exhort Americans, both black and white, to attack the terrible legacy of racism. Described by The New York Times Book Review as ¡°sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle¡­all presented in searing, brilliant prose,¡± The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of our literature.]]> 106 James Baldwin 067974472X Stephen 4 4.55 1963 The Fire Next Time
author: James Baldwin
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.55
book published: 1963
rating: 4
read at:
date added: 2021/03/20
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review:
So much in Baldwin's classic essay on race continues to be relevant--and provocative. Of the latter, his attack on Christianity, "the white God," throws down the gauntlet not just to a black community that continues to rally around the Christian god but to the white oppressor, who still, as before, defines himself as a devout Christian (at least of a type). Baldwin was a preacher from his youth, who finally concluded, "It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being . . . must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian Church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him" (47). There is, of course, much more to Baldwin's "The Fire Next Time," but his call to rethink as honestly as we can the relationship of Christianity, at least a certain type of Christianity, to the cruel oppression of blacks in America is of even greater urgency today.
]]> <![CDATA[Childhood (The Copenhagen Trilogy #1)]]> 43685219 The first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, the searing portrait of a woman's journey through love, friendship, ambition and addiction, from one of Denmark's most celebrated twentieth-century writers

Tove knows she is a misfit, whose childhood is made for a completely different girl. In her working-class neighbourhood in Copenhagen, she is enthralled by her wild, red-headed friend Ruth, who initiates her into adult secrets. But Tove cannot reveal her true self to her or to anyone else. For 'long, mysterious words begin to crawl across my soul', and she comes to realize that she has a vocation, something unknowable within her - and that she must one day, painfully but inevitably, leave the narrow street of her childhood behind.

Childhood, the first volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a visceral portrait of girlhood and female friendship, told with lyricism and vivid intensity.]]> 99 Tove Ditlevsen 0241391938 Stephen 4 4.15 1967 Childhood (The Copenhagen Trilogy #1)
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.15
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/28
date added: 2021/02/28
shelves:
review:
This first volume of the much-praised "Copenhagen Trilogy" presents childhood as something that "must be endured and trudged through hour by hour, through an absolutely interminable number of years. Only death can free you from it, so you think a lot about death . . ." (28). Depressing stuff, but written with a kind of stripped down honesty that at times can be almost breathtaking. As others have noted, this small book can be read as a forerunner of writers like Karl Ove Knausg?rd and Elena Ferrante, who are not afraid to probe an impoverished childhood past almost like picking a scab that will never quite heal. And already we see here Ditlevesen's inexplicable obsession with poetry, with creating some private space for expressing her dreams and fears, which no one would ever have predicted would lead to what she later became. Recommended.
]]> Youth 15836839
Forced to leave school early, Tove embarks on a chequered career in a string of low-paid, menial jobs. But she is hungry: for poetry, for love, for real life to begin. As Europe slides into war, she must navigate exploitative bosses, a Nazi landlady and unwelcome sexual encounters on the road to hard-won independence. Yet she remains ruthlessly determined in the pursuit of her poetic vocation - until at last the miracle she has always dreamed of appears to be within reach.

Youth, the second volume in The Copenhagen Trilogy, is a strikingly honest and immersive portrait of adolescence, filled with biting humour, vulnerability and poeticism.]]> 132 Tove Ditlevsen 0241405556 Stephen 4 4.23 1967 Youth
author: Tove Ditlevsen
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.23
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/28
date added: 2021/02/28
shelves:
review:
The second of Ditlevsen's trilogy, "Youth," tells of Ditlevsen's struggle to hold down a job as a teenager even as she struggles to gain independence and find success as a poet. For me, two themes make this book a fascinating read. First, Ditlevsen's recurring sense of just not fitting in: "I don't seem to have any real feelings anymore, but always have to pretend that I do by copying other people's reactions" (94). Second, an absolutely irrepressible believe, which comes despite a lifetime of poverty and a lack of a strong education, that she is meant to be a poet. The second of these themes appears as early as her "Childhood," as she writes poems in a notebook she hides inside her underwear so it will not be seen and laughed at, as it once was by her brother. Where do these inexplicable childhood dreams come from? There was nothing in Ditlevesen's background, at least so it seems to me, to predict that such an obsessive desire to write poetry would come to dominate her life. But, I suppose, such are the mysteries of artistic creation, and perhaps it was her very sense of not fitting in anywhere except as a pattern of words on a page that pushed her toward poetry.
]]> <![CDATA[An Artist of the Floating World]]> 28922
Now, as the mature Ono struggles through the aftermath of that war, his memories of his youth and of the ¡°floating world¡±¡ªthe nocturnal world of pleasure, entertainment, and drink¡ªoffer him both escape and redemption, even as they punish him for betraying his early promise. Indicted by society for its defeat and reviled for his past aesthetics, he relives the passage through his personal history that makes him both a hero and a coward but, above all, a human being.]]> 206 Kazuo Ishiguro 0571225365 Stephen 4 3.79 1986 An Artist of the Floating World
author: Kazuo Ishiguro
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.79
book published: 1986
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/27
date added: 2021/02/27
shelves:
review:
Sometimes difficult circumstances from the past resurface, however much we wish they would not. Many of us, I suspect, have experienced this. How much more so is this a problem for those who have lived through terrible political times and may have served the losing side. Masuji Ono is this type of person. Although his role was never a significant one, he did serve the militarists who brought Japan to war and then to a punishing defeat. In the immediate postwar period that all seems to be quietly in the past, until Ono tries to marry off his second daughter and questions about "her father" begin to complicate the negotiations. Suddenly he finds it necessary to blunt voices from his past, on the one side, that may be speaking out against him and, on the other side, quiet his own daughters' growing suspicions. The situation is a delicate one, and Ishiguro presents it with such control and understatement that I could almost have imagined I was reading a translation of Kawabata or Tanizaki, except Ishiguro writes so beautifully in English that this book simply could not be a translation!
]]> Don Quixote 3835 Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.]]> 940 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra 0060934344 Stephen 4 4.12 1615 Don Quixote
author: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.12
book published: 1615
rating: 4
read at: 2021/02/14
date added: 2021/02/14
shelves:
review:
Yes, this may be, as so many experts have argued, the greatest novel ever written, particularly if greatness is to be judged by how many different readings it inspires, by the sense, which I share, that we can never quite exhaust this book¡¯s possibilities, which seems why Harold Bloom puts Cervantes alongside Shakespeare. So, I confess my deficiencies: I checked the page number a bit too often, indication that I was growing tired of the endless adventures. But then, as I¡¯ve gone out on my morning walk the last few days, the novel has continued to haunt me. Don Quixote, at least so it seems to me, became sane, if ever he was not "sane," in the last few pages of the novel just a bit too easily: ¡°It was his great good fortune,¡± says Sanson Carrasco, who provoked his disillusionment, ¡°to live a madman, and die sane.¡± Perhaps Don Quixote was never mad and hence his final move to sanity was not that big a shift at all. There are too many hints throughout the novel that Don Quixote sees quite clearly. He just refuses what he sees in favor of what he would prefer to see¡ªit¡¯s a choice not a disease. He has chosen his life game based upon the literature he loves, which is what so many compulsive readers do, it¡¯s just that his particular game clashes so cruelly with the world through which he moves (maybe that's not so rare for readers either). Which brings me to a second issue. I began this book smiling, sometimes laughing, but as the novel progressed, I began to feel I was trapped in a world of incredible cruelty and sadness. And I supposed I was alone in this reaction. Now I learn that no less a reader than Nabokov has written a book about Don Quixote which argues precisely this. So now that book is on its way to this compulsive reader, who remains obsessed by a great novel with which he grew both slightly bored and surprisingly uncomfortable.
]]> Gulliver¡¯s Travels 7733 A wickedly clever satire uses comic inversions to offer telling insights into the nature of man and society. Nominated as one of America¡¯s best-loved novels by PBS¡¯s The Great American Read.

Gulliver's Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship's surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs. In Laputa, a flying island, he encounters a society of speculators and projectors who have lost all grip on everyday reality; while they plan and calculate, their country lies in ruins. Gulliver's final voyage takes him to the land of the Houyhnhnms, gentle horses whom he quickly comes to admire - in contrast to the Yahoos, filthy bestial creatures who bear a disturbing resemblance to humans. This text, based on the first edition of 1726, reproduces all the original illustrations and includes an introduction by Robert Demaria, Jr, which discusses the ways Gulliver's Travels has been interpreted since its first publication. Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was born in Dublin.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.]]> 306 Jonathan Swift 0141439491 Stephen 4 3.59 1726 Gulliver¡¯s Travels
author: Jonathan Swift
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.59
book published: 1726
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/24
date added: 2021/01/24
shelves:
review:
It was good to be reminded after such a long time exactly what my mother meant when she sometimes used to scold me and my friends for "acting like a bunch of Yahoos." And though she could pay us compliments too, I don't recall her ever calling us "Houyhnhnms," because, I suppose, who among us feels confidence she is pronouncing that name correctly? Swift's biting satire has left its mark on our language and is also one of those books we read as youngsters and as adults, usually in two quite different ways: first, as a highly imaginative and thoroughly entertaining adventure story; and second, as one of the most brilliant and biting pieces of satire every produced in English. But what surprised me, at least with this reading, is that, like so much good satire, it is also a book of wisdom, directed especially at those who require reminding to keep their own doings in perspective--that is, who cannot see how ultimately ridiculous all of our airs and pretensions really are (strangely, Swift's wisdom is, in many places, very much like that of the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi!). But I must stop such commentary. After all, in the Swiftian underworld of Chapter VIII, commentators are kept in the most distant quarters of the Lower World, "because they so horribly represented the Meaning of . . . actors to posterity." Read it, if you haven't already!
]]> <![CDATA[Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate]]> 52011661
Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own--works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul... Fran?ois F¨¦nelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey, The Adventures of Telemachus--a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years--resulted in his banishment... and the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home.

Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books--a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father--that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.]]> 128 Daniel Mendelsohn 081394466X Stephen 4 3.95 2020 Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate
author: Daniel Mendelsohn
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.95
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/18
date added: 2021/01/18
shelves:
review:
I'm a Mendelsohn fan. Books that skillfully blend literary scholarship with autobiography always attract me, and this small book was no exception. Not only does it contain personal echos of his earlier Odyssey: A Father, a Son, and an Epic, which I have reviewed here, and fascinating comments about Erich Auerbach (whose Mimesis is a favorite of mine), Fran?ois F¨¦nelon, and W. G. Sebald, along with others, but it is both about and an example of ring composition. Indeed, in its own brief way (just over 100 pages), it is a genuine tour de force. And, in a somewhat unusual fashion for this slow reader, I gobbled it up in a single sitting.
]]> The Pilgrim's Progress 29797 Along a road filled with monsters and spiritual terrors, Christian confronts such emblematic characters as Worldly Wiseman, Giant Despair, Talkative, Ignorance, and the demons of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. But he is also joined by Hopeful and Faithful.
An enormously influential 17th-century classic, universally known for its simplicity, vigor, and beauty of language, The Pilgrim's Progress remains one of the most widely read books in the English language.]]> 324 John Bunyan Stephen 3 4.05 1678 The Pilgrim's Progress
author: John Bunyan
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1678
rating: 3
read at: 2021/01/12
date added: 2021/01/12
shelves:
review:
Being something of a fanatic for lists, as I have noted here previously, I was provoked by Robert McCrum¡¯s list of the 100 Greatest Novels, which he published originally in The Guardian, finally to read Pilgrim¡¯s Progress, number 2 on his list. I am rather dense at times and did not realize, at least initially, that this was more-or-less a chronological listing and did not necessarily reflect the judgment that this novel was, in his opinion, the second greatest novel ever written. So, I became needlessly upset while working through the novel¡¯s at times dreary three-hundred pages. As much as I admire Bunyan¡¯s strong prose, inspired almost entirely by the King James Bible, and his imaginative allegory of the search for salvation, it hardly struck me as deserving such a high place on such a list! In fact, aware of the fact that one of McCrum¡¯s weaknesses, and it is far from his alone, is to disregard, perhaps not even read, any novel writtenbetween, say, the Volga in the west and the Pacific in the east, I even argued with friends that this pilgrim¡¯s progress is far less inpressive and engaging than Wu Cheng¡¯en¡¯s 16th century Buddhist pilgrim¡¯s progress, Journey to the East (Î÷ß[Ó›). And while this second point, I think remains valid, and is an oversight rising to the level of mortal sin by McCrum¡¯s failure to acknowledge China¡¯s towering Story of the Stone (sometimes called ¡°Dream of the Red Chamber¡±) and Lady Murasaki¡¯s brilliant Japanese Tale of Genji, my first point was an error¡ªBunyan¡¯s puritan masterpiece, a bit harsh for this non-religious snowflake, does deserve inclusion among the hundred most important novels, albeit it should only rank number two in being written in the ever-privileged West between Don Quixote and Gulliver¡¯s Travels. There, gripe registered.
]]> Shuggie Bain 52741293 Shuggie Bain is the unforgettable story of young Hugh "Shuggie" Bain, a sweet and lonely boy who spends his 1980s childhood in run-down public housing in Glasgow, Scotland. Thatcher's policies have put husbands and sons out of work, and the city's notorious drugs epidemic is waiting in the wings.

Shuggie's mother Agnes walks a wayward path: she is Shuggie's guiding light but a burden for him and his siblings. She dreams of a house with its own front door while she flicks through the pages of the Freemans catalogue, ordering a little happiness on credit, anything to brighten up her grey life. Married to a philandering taxi-driver husband, Agnes keeps her pride by looking good--her beehive, make-up, and pearly-white false teeth offer a glamourous image of a Glaswegian Elizabeth Taylor. But under the surface, Agnes finds increasing solace in drink, and she drains away the lion's share of each week's benefits--all the family has to live on--on cans of extra-strong lager hidden in handbags and poured into tea mugs.

Agnes's older children find their own ways to get a safe distance from their mother, abandoning Shuggie to care for her as she swings between alcoholic binges and sobriety. Shuggie is meanwhile struggling to somehow become the normal boy he desperately longs to be, but everyone has realized that he is "no right," a boy with a secret that all but him can see. Agnes is supportive of her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her--even her beloved Shuggie.

A heartbreaking story of addiction, sexuality, and love, Shuggie Bain is an epic portrayal of a working-class family that is rarely seen in fiction. Recalling the work of Edouard Louis, Alan Hollinghurst, Frank McCourt, and Hanya Yanagihara, it is a blistering debut by a brilliant novelist who has a powerful and important story to tell.]]> 430 Douglas Stuart 0802148042 Stephen 4 4.29 2020 Shuggie Bain
author: Douglas Stuart
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.29
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2021/01/04
date added: 2021/01/04
shelves:
review:
Last year¡¯s Booker Prize winter has been widely and deservedly praised. I picked it up skeptically, wondering what more could be done with the drunken-Irish/Scottish-parent theme, but this particular exploitation of that theme is redeemed by two features: first, the vividly gritty depiction of working-class Glascow, including its colorful language; and second, the focalization of a young boy, Shuggie, who is going through his own struggles not only with a hopelessly drunken mother, to whom he is touchingly attached, but with his growing awareness of being gay and quite unlike the other boys in his world of destructive hyper-masculinity. It is the intersection and interweaving of these features that makes this a quite extraordinary read. The novel is obviously highly autobiographical and leaves the reader wondering, as so often with novels so thoroughly soaked in the author¡¯s past, what the very talented author, Douglas Stuart in this case, will do for an encore.
]]> The Death of Jesus 46017479
David has grown to be a tall ten-year-old. He is a natural at soccer, and loves kicking a ball around with his friends. His father Sim¨®n and Bolivar the dog usually watch. His mother Ines works in a fashion boutique.

David still asks lots of questions. In dancing class at the Academy of Music he dances as he chooses. He refuses to do sums and will not read any books except Don Quixote.

One day Julio Fabricante, the director of a nearby orphanage, invites David and his friends to form a proper soccer team. David decides he will leave Sim¨®n and In¨¦s to live with Julio. Before long he succumbs to a mysterious illness.

In The Death of Jesus, J. M. Coetzee continues to explore the meaning of a world empty of memory but brimming with questions.]]> 197 J.M. Coetzee 1922268283 Stephen 3 3.77 2019 The Death of Jesus
author: J.M. Coetzee
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2020/12/26
date added: 2020/12/26
shelves:
review:
This last novel in Coetzee¡¯s ¡°Jesus Trilogy,¡± as I noted with the first novel in the trilogy, leaves me baffled, quite unsure about what Coetzee is saying with these strange works. David¡¯s life ends as strangely as it began when he dies from a mysterious illness (no need for a spoiler alert on this). All who have known David agree that he was remarkable, that he even carried an important message, although they disagree on whether that message was conveyed in dance or in words . . . but no one seems able to articulate what the message was or even to claim they understood it. And David himself, as he was fading away, was more consumed with questions than with any answer he may have possessed. Perhaps in this world, which Coetzee regards as without genuine memory, no general message can be articulated nor understood. A savior is impossible. The best we can hope, perhaps, is to leave behind yet another question. Yes, David is a Jesus figure, but a strangely impotent one: he can produce nothing in his followers except inarticulate wonder . . . and certainly his ¡°religion,¡± if ¡°religion¡± it is at all, will fade away quite in opposition to the message of Jesus, which grew into a worldwide movement. But I¡¯m not sure at all about my reading. At least I console myself with the fact that so many other readers seem to be scratching their heads over this trilogy. Maybe Coetzee, like David himself, wishes to leave us asking what this novelist of such talent and genius really wishes us to carry away from his books, which one after the other seem to become less accessible.
]]> <![CDATA[Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family]]> 50088631 The heartrending story of a midcentury American family with twelve children, six of them diagnosed with schizophrenia, that became science's great hope in the quest to understand the disease.

Don and Mimi Galvin seemed to be living the American dream. After World War II, Don's work with the Air Force brought them to Colorado, where their twelve children perfectly spanned the baby boom: the oldest born in 1945, the youngest in 1965. In those years, there was an established script for a family like the Galvins¡ªaspiration, hard work, upward mobility, domestic harmony¡ªand they worked hard to play their parts. But behind the scenes was a different story: psychological breakdown, sudden shocking violence, hidden abuse. By the mid-1970s, six of the ten Galvin boys, one after another, were diagnosed as schizophrenic. How could all this happen to one family?

What took place inside the house on Hidden Valley Road was so extraordinary that the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Their story offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, from the era of institutionalization, lobotomy, and the schizophrenogenic mother to the search for genetic markers for the disease, always amid profound disagreements about the nature of the illness itself. And unbeknownst to the Galvins, samples of their DNA informed decades of genetic research that continues today, offering paths to treatment, prediction, and even eradication of the disease for future generations.

With clarity and compassion, bestselling and award-winning author Robert Kolker uncovers one family's unforgettable legacy of suffering, love, and hope.]]> 377 Robert Kolker 038554376X Stephen 4 4.13 2020 Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family
author: Robert Kolker
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.13
book published: 2020
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/23
date added: 2020/12/23
shelves:
review:
An excellent and highly informative read about one family¡¯s terrible struggle with schizophrenia. Careful, though, this vivid book can at times make you wonder if you have some features of schizophrenia yourself. Gosh, I jumped two times straight at the same unexpected sound the other day and wondered if I had failed the equivalent of the famous two-click experiment that has so successfully used beenmto diagnose schizophrenia! Seriously, what I liked so much about this book was the way it balanced an account of one very large, fascinating family with the history of research on schizophrenia. The latter, as is the case with so many intractable diseases like cancer, for example, demonstrates how medical science often moves from relatively simple models of disease causation (the mother¡¯s behavior, some simple genetic factor, etc.) to highly complex models that even lead to the conclusion that what we call schizophrenia (or many other diseases as well) is a cluster of physical phenomena of highly complicated genesis¡ªeven, in this case, some mysterious interplay of nature and nurture. Anyway, Hidden Valley Road has been rightly listed by many as one of the best non-fiction works of 2020. It deserves the acclaim.
]]> The Memory Police 37004370
When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

A surreal, provocative fable about the power of memory and the trauma of loss, The Memory Police is a stunning new work from one of the most exciting contemporary authors writing in any language.]]> 274 Y¨­ko Ogawa 1101870605 Stephen 4 3.72 1994 The Memory Police
author: Y¨­ko Ogawa
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1994
rating: 4
read at: 2020/12/22
date added: 2020/12/22
shelves:
review:
The Memory Police is a provocative book that somehow brought to my mind Elizabeth Bishop¡¯s great poem ¡°One Art¡±: ¡°The art of losing isn¡¯t hard to master; / So many things seem filled with the intent / to be lost that their loss is no disaster¡± etc. But here, the loss of things, masterminded by a murky, malevolent police force, results not just in the loss of a thing but eventually in any memory of that thing . . . and, in the end, it is a disaster precisely because loss of memory is eventually loss of self. I admire the way Ogawa creates her dystopia without ever explaining precisely what mechanism leads to the sudden loss of memory that follows the loss of a thing. More important to her, I suppose, is a concern about those forces around us, accelerating constantly, which push us away from things, especially those things now classified as ¡°useless¡±¡ªand even the memory of those things¡ª, toward ¡°a better world¡± that is really an ever more impoverished world. Resist! Certainly, this is one of the more original books I have read during 2020 . . . a year in which so much seemed about to be lost.
]]> Anna Karenina 151
?Nos cap¨ªtulos iniciais de Anna Kar¨¦nina, somos conduzidos, uma e outra vez, a um sentido de analogia musical. H¨¢ efeitos de contraponto e harmonia no desenvolvimento das principais tramas do ¡°prel¨²dio Oblonski¡± (o acidente na esta??o ferrovi¨¢ria, a zombadora discuss?o sobre o div¨®rcio entre Vronski e a baronesa Chilton, o deslumbramento do fogo vermelho diante dos olhos de Anna). O m¨¦todo de Tolstoi ¨¦ polif¨®nico; mas as harmonias principais desen- volvem-se com uma tremenda for?a e amplitude. As t¨¦cnicas musicais e lingu¨ªsticas n?o podem comparar-se de um modo exato. Mas como poder¨ªamos elucidar de outro modo o sentimento de que as novelas de Tolstoi surgem de um princ¨ªpio interior de ordem e vitalidade, enquanto as dos escritores menos importantes parecem alinhavadas??

?Anna Kar¨¦nina morre no mundo do romance; mas cada vez que lemos o livro ela ressuscita, e mesmo depois de o termos acabado adquire outra vida na nossa recorda??o. Em cada personagem liter¨¢ria existe algo da F¨¦nix imortal. Atrav¨¦s das vidas perdur¨¢veis das suas personagens, a pr¨®pria exist¨ºncia de Tolstoi teve a sua eternidade.? [George Steiner, Tolstoi ou Dostoievski]]]> 838 Leo Tolstoy 0143035002 Stephen 5 4.10 1878 Anna Karenina
author: Leo Tolstoy
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.10
book published: 1878
rating: 5
read at: 2016/02/22
date added: 2020/11/29
shelves:
review:
What can one say about a novel some claim to be among the greatest three or four ever written? The famous first sentence did focus my attention, as it has for so many others, on issues of romance and, more especially, domesticity: ¡°All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way¡± (1). One implication of this insight is that more stories can be written about unhappy families than happy families¡ªthere is variety in unhappiness. It answers my irrepressibly optimistic mother¡¯s question: ¡°Why aren¡¯t more novels cheerful?¡± Anyway, Tolstoy seems to establish a kind of spectrum that stretches from romance on one end to domesticity on the other. Romance leads to disillusionment, anguish and even, in Anna¡¯s case, neurosis. Domesticity, on the other end of the spectrum, brings boredom, restlessness, and dangerous dreams of its opposite (think of Dolly¡¯s fantasies of affairs, which she later purges from her mind, as she travels to visit Anna). So, what are we to do? Levin, with his wife Kitty, comes closest to a happy family. Levin¡¯s end-of-the-novel ¡°vision¡± gives him a perspective, at least so we could presume, that will reconcile him to Kitty¡¯s relentless domesticity. Or could there be another outcome? With a great novel, particularly from a writer as skilled as Tolstoy in creating a deeply textured reality, we can¡¯t help but wonder ¡°what happened¡± after the novel ended. One of Levin¡¯s realizations following his vision is that, while his insight has given him some higher perspective from which he can find solace, it has not altered his behavioral habits. So it is I can imagine an old Levin, who has sacrificed so much of his own intellectual pursuits to domesticity, sitting on a sofa (or whatever 19th century Russians sat on) sniping away at an exhausted Kitty. Yup, just another unhappy family.
]]> <![CDATA[Runaway Horses (The Sea of Fertility, #2)]]> 62812 432 Yukio Mishima 0099282895 Stephen 4 4.25 1969 Runaway Horses (The Sea of Fertility, #2)
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.25
book published: 1969
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/16
date added: 2020/11/16
shelves:
review:
¡°Runaway Horses¡± is the second of Yukio Mishima¡¯s ¡°Sea of Fertility¡± tetralogy. The central character, Isao Iinuma, is the reincarnation of Kiyoaki Matsugae, the ¡°hero¡± of the first novel in the series, ¡°Spring Snow.¡± Unlike Kiyoaki, who gave his life for love, Isao gives his life for misguided nationalism. In fact, in this second novel, Mishima is clearly working out some of his own radical political views that will ultimately lead him, like his character Isao, to seppuku. Only one person, a judge named Honda, who as a youth was Kiyoaki¡¯s best friend, realizes the truth about Isao¡¯s identity and tries to save him. This is a novel of fanaticism, a kind of fanaticism with which the author, I believe, strongly identifies. It is both disturbing and powerful. So, what will be the next incarnation, which should take us from the late 30s in which Isao lived and died to the late 40s, in which that incarnation will live? One thing is certain, none of the successive reincarnations of this overly romantic flow of karma can possibly end well.
]]> Mephisto 223635
Klaus Mann, the second child of Thomas Mann, was born in Munich in 1906. He began writing short stories and articles in 1924, and within a year was a theatrical critic for a Berlin newspaper. In 1925 both a volume of short stories and his first novel, THE PIOUS DANCE, were published. His sister, Erika, to whom he was very close, was in the cast of his first play, ANJA AND ESTHER. Mann left Germany in 1933 and lived in Amsterdam until 1936, during which time he became a Czechoslovakian citizen, having been deprived of his German citizenship by the Nazis. He moved to America in 1936, living in Princeton, New Jersey, and New York City. He became a U.S. citizen in 1943. He died at the age of forty-two in Cannes, France. Robin Smyth was a European correspondent for the London Observer.]]> 272 Klaus Mann 0140189181 Stephen 4 4.06 1936 Mephisto
author: Klaus Mann
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.06
book published: 1936
rating: 4
read at: 2020/11/10
date added: 2020/11/16
shelves:
review:
A superb character study of a man without much character at all. Hendrik Hofgren is an actor of uneven talents, who becomes most famous on the stage for his portrayal of Goethe¡¯s Mephisto. His political views are vague, and his sense of who he really is quite unstable¡ªprecisely the sort of person to somehow get caught up and ultimately to be made miserable by the treacherous political winds surrounding the early rise of Hitler. He identifies initially as a Communist but then slowly, perhaps inevitably, realizes his bread is best buttered on the other side¡ªthe side of the Nazis. But it is not so easy to negotiate all this, however ¡°talented¡± and charming he might be. Obviously, you can see where it is headed, but Klaus Mann has the talent not to take the story too far. He allows us to imagine how it might all end . . . surely not well. This is a brilliant study, not entirely irrelevant just now, of how people gravitate toward and ultimately sell out to power, not understanding that power so often has no loyalties and rarely forgives.
]]> The Infatuations 13618374 The Infatuations is a metaphysical murder mystery and a stunningly original literary achievement by Javier Mar¨ªas, the internationally acclaimed author of A Heart So White and Your Face Tomorrow.

Every day, Mar¨ªa Dolz stops for breakfast at the same caf¨¦. And every day she enjoys watching a handsome couple who follow the same routine. Then one day they aren't there, and she feels obscurely bereft.

It is only later, when she comes across a newspaper photograph of the man, lying stabbed in the street, his shirt half off, that she discovers who the couple are. Some time afterwards, when the woman returns to the caf¨¦ with her children, who are then collected by a different man, and Maria approaches her to offer her condolences, an entanglement begins which sheds new light on this apparently random, pointless death.

With The Infatuations, Javier Mar¨ªas brilliantly reimagines the murder novel as a metaphysical enquiry, addressing existential questions of life, death, love, and morality.

The Infatuations is an extraordinary, immersive book about the terrible force of events and their consequences.]]> 345 Javier Mar¨ªas 0241145368 Stephen 4 3.38 2011 The Infatuations
author: Javier Mar¨ªas
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.38
book published: 2011
rating: 4
read at: 2013/09/22
date added: 2020/11/13
shelves:
review:
Few novelists on the international scene today are as consistently engaging as Javier Marias. He has been mentioned, now and again, for the Nobel Prize, although he is not among the favorites this year (currently the odds favor Haruki Murakami, Joyce Carol Oates, and Peter Nadas . . . in that order), and he probably focuses too much on "interiority" to ever win a prize that seems increasingly to go to writers with more obvious political and/or sociological agendas (i.e., Herta Mueller, Mario Vargas Llosa, Mo Yan, etc.). Marias' novels often slide into ethical and philosophical meditation, without such inclinations overwhelming the story, as it does in the case of some writers. In "The Infatuations" the issue is an old one--the way in which the dead haunt our lives. Marias plays off two earlier works (his novels are invariably and quite blatantly intertextual): Balzac's "Colonel Chabert," in which a character believed to be dead returns and discovers he has become superfluous and unwanted: and Milady in Dumas' "The Three Musketeers," a vile woman who continues to commit crimes even after her "first death." In Marias' novel, a female character develops an "infatuation" for a happy couple that she watches sharing breakfast in a cafe each morning. Soon the couple disappears, and she eventually learns that the husband has been brutally murdered. That murder, its consequences, and its ultimate meaning, dominates the remainder of the novel. I'll leave the story aside to avoid a spoiler alert but must note that this tale is filled with crisscrossing "infatuations" and leaves us with sense that the characters' badly compromised objectivity will never allow us to get to the truth, if truth there is. Marias is one of those writers who deepens the way we see and think about ourselves and those around us--for this alone he deserves to be read.
]]> The Cockroach 53021592 That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.

Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain ¨C and it is his mission to carry out the will of the people. Nothing must get in his way: not the opposition, nor the dissenters within his own party. Not even the rules of parliamentary democracy.

With trademark intelligence, insight and scabrous humour, Ian McEwan pays tribute to Franz Kafka¡¯s most famous work to engage with a world turned on its head.

]]> 109 Ian McEwan Stephen 3 3.28 2019 The Cockroach
author: Ian McEwan
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.28
book published: 2019
rating: 3
read at: 2020/01/17
date added: 2020/10/27
shelves:
review:
Everything McEwan writes is well-written, to be sure. And, I think, worth reading. "The Cockroach" begins with a good premise, a kind of reverse "Metamorphosis," where an insect turns into a man, rather than the other way around. The groundwork is laid for some good satire, even if identifying one's political opponents as cockroaches is not particularly, uh, kind. However, McEwan has a few too many targets in mind for the relatively few pages he allocates to his satire. Yes, the Brexit advocates, the French, the American president, tweets, the press, the me-too movement, etc. all are caught on McEwan's barbs, in very rapid succession . . . a bit much. Maybe he should have attempted less . . . or written more.
]]> Visitation 8638226 Visitation offers the life stories of twelve individuals who seek to make their home in this one magical little house. The novel breaks into the everyday life of the house and shimmers through it, while relating the passions and fates of its inhabitants. Elegant and poetic, Visitation forms a literary mosaic of the last century, tearing open wounds and offering moments of reconciliation, with its drama and its exquisite evocation of a landscape no political upheaval can truly change.]]> 160 Jenny Erpenbeck 081121835X Stephen 3 3.77 2008 Visitation
author: Jenny Erpenbeck
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2008
rating: 3
read at: 2020/10/13
date added: 2020/10/13
shelves:
review:
This small novel is written in Erpenbeck's typically crisp, poetic language. Moreover, it is structured in a fashion I have always found of interest: a place rather than a central character is the structuring element. For me, George Perec's "Life A User's Manual" is a particularly brilliant example of this type of novel. In this case, the critical place is a property on a lake near Berlin. The sequence of persons passing through this property, in one capacity or another, provides a sort of overview of German history, its tragedies and transformations, across the twentieth century. So why only three stars? Here in Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ, as we know, we catalogue how much we enjoyed a work rather than our judgment of its artistic merit. And as much as I wanted to become absorbed in this work, I had difficulty staying on track. Perhaps it was that the novel was too short, given the array of characters, to allow the kind of character development I prefer. Yes, the "gardener" was present throughout most of the episodes as a unifying character (or "presence"), but unless one enjoys the details of gardening, which this not-too-green-thumb does not, there is not there there.
]]> The Driver's Seat 668282 Alternative cover edition of ISBN 0141188340

Lise is thin, neither good-looking nor bad-looking. One day she walks out of her office, acquires a gaudy new outfit, adopts a girlier tone of voice, and heads to the airport to fly south. On the plane she takes a seat between two men. One is delighted with her company, the other is deeply perturbed. So begins an unnerving journey into the darker recesses of human nature.]]> 103 Muriel Spark Stephen 4 3.62 1970 The Driver's Seat
author: Muriel Spark
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.62
book published: 1970
rating: 4
read at: 2020/10/03
date added: 2020/10/03
shelves:
review:
It is hard to put this novel down, but not much CNN news will be missed in the meantime since it takes only an hour or two to read, even for a slow reader like me. The main character, a rather drab, thirtyish office-worker named Lise, decides to take a vacation and in so doing falls into the very opposite of her usual existence: a long day of eccentricity, madness, and, eventually murder. The latter does not require a spoiler alert since we are told from almost the beginning of the novel that Lise will be murdered within twenty-four hours of arriving in Italy, and, in fact, we almost see her trip as an after-the-fact reconstruction from the testimonies of the people she meets along the way. While there is some suspense about exactly how the murder will come about, Sparks keeps our attention on Lise and her mysterious obsession about some mysterious man she feels she must encounter. What makes this novel work so well is Muriel Spark's completely undramatic, even flat narrative style, which describes a world of madness and self-destruction that is anything but flat. This is a novelist very much in control of her art.
]]> Mrs. Caliban 34377087 128 Rachel Ingalls 0811226697 Stephen 3 3.77 1982 Mrs. Caliban
author: Rachel Ingalls
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 1982
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/29
date added: 2020/09/29
shelves:
review:
A short but engaging novel on "other species" love--well, sort of. A woman, named Dorothy, falls in love with a frog-man (albeit more man than frog it seems), named Larry, whose slightly off-beat affect and murderous tendencies (or is it really just self-defense?) present a variety of challenges to their relationship, as does her philandering husband. In the end, "Mrs. Caliban" strikes me as a comment on the power of love, which so often develops during a period of greatest need and thereby grants a lover the capacity to idealize and even romanticize the most bizarre relationship. To be sure, this book is a pleasant way to spend an hour. Ingalls' straightforward, under dramatized story telling, even as she is telling the strangest of tales, is part of the fun.
]]> <![CDATA[A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories]]> 48464
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
"The River"
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"
"A Stroke of Good Fortune"
"A Temple of the Holy Ghost"
"The Artificial Nigger"
"A Circle in the Fire"
"A Late Encounter with the Enemy"
"Good Country People"
"The Displaced Person"
?1955 Flannery O'Connor; 1954, 1953, 1948 by Flannery O'Connor; renewed 1983, 1981 by Regina O'Connor; renewed 1976 by Mrs. Edward F. O'Connor; (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.]]> 252 Flannery O'Connor 0151365040 Stephen 5 4.19 1955 A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories
author: Flannery O'Connor
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.19
book published: 1955
rating: 5
read at: 2020/09/27
date added: 2020/09/27
shelves:
review:
I have read one or two of these stories before, but this is my first time to read the entire collection. As a slice of Americana, I cannot recommend this collection too highly. And, despite being published in 1955, it is a "slice" of particular relevance today. These are stories of xenophobia ("The Displaced Person"), shocking violence and cruelty ("A Good Man is Hard to Find," and "Good Country People"), and, in almost every story, religion. Yes, peculiar American religion: judgmental, superficial, hypocritical, harsh, but also, at some deeper level where Flannery O'Conner's own Catholic faith resides, clear-sighted about the depths of human weakness and the pathetic, but sometimes touchingly earnest, search for salvation. Now, all this might seem to leave very little room for humor, but these stories can be very funny--sometimes dark humor to be sure, but also humor that comes from language itself, from a lively American idiom captured perfectly. Flannery O'Conner is an American treasure and deserves to be read over and over again, especially as we scratch our heads and try to figure out what strange forces shape this strange America in which some of us "good-readers" live.
]]> <![CDATA[How Much of These Hills Is Gold]]> 45895362
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.

Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it's about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.]]> 288 C Pam Zhang 0525537201 Stephen 3 3.77 2020 How Much of These Hills Is Gold
author: C Pam Zhang
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.77
book published: 2020
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/27
date added: 2020/09/27
shelves:
review:
"Where is home" might be the central question of this novel--and the answer, if I understood correctly what may in fact be the answer, is surprising: it's back there where you began, however miserable and even unaccepted you may have been in that particular place. Depressing, perhaps, especially for those of us who feel ever compelled to move forward to something new and just can't bear the thought of going back. Anyway, Pam Zhang is a genuine talent, and I look forward to her future work. I can't say, however, that this particular novel always held my interest, and I'm not precisely sure why. Perhaps this reader kept hoping, spoiled recently by the likes of Yehoshua and Mishima, whom I read recently, for a clearer narrative arc. My tastes, perhaps with age, are growing less elastic.
]]> <![CDATA[Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility, #1)]]> 62793 Alternate cover edition of ISBN 9780099282990

Tokyo, 1912. The closed world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders - rich provincial familes, a new and powerful political and social elite. Kiyoaki has been raised among the elegant Ayakura family - members of the waning aristocracy - but he is not one of them. Coming of age, he is caught up in the tensions between old and new, and his feelings for the exquisite, spirited Satoko, observed from the sidelines by his devoted friend Honda. When Satoko is engaged to a royal prince, Kiyoaki realises the magnitude of his passion.]]> 389 Yukio Mishima Stephen 4 4.18 1967 Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility, #1)
author: Yukio Mishima
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.18
book published: 1967
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/14
date added: 2020/09/14
shelves:
review:
The first volume of the "Sea of Fertility" tetralogy, Mishima's final work and finished two days before his harakiri. While I have always liked Mishima, I have never put him quite on the level of Kawabata and Tanizaki, but the first of the tetralogy (and I will go one) is changing my mind. While the slightly overheated romanticism is still there, this book has a kind of sincerity, intensity, and sensitivity to beauty, that I greatly admire. Kiyoaki, moreover, is a fascinating character, a character of intense, destructive emotion, that stands in stark contrast to his brilliant and "logical" friend Honda, and that makes a fitting (and therefore doomed) match with Satoko, his first and last love. And no need to issue a spoiler alert for that "last" because, folks, it is, after all, a Mishima novel. At any rate, the 20th century Japanese novel is, for me, one of the world's great literary treasures, and "Spring Snow" is a splendid example.
]]> <![CDATA[Death in Venice and Other Stories (Vintage Classic Europeans Series)]]> 39078125
Aging writer Gustave von Aschenbach is disappointed by Venice. The skies are leaden, the air is thick and sultry, and a sickening stench emanates from the murky labyrinth of canals. It would hardly be sensible to stay, especially not when rumours of a ¡®sickness¡¯ spread through the city. And yet Aschenbach cannot leave: he has seen an entirely beautiful young boy and has fallen under an enchantment. He must stay near the boy, though never speaking to him, even until it is too late.

Also includes the stories 'LITTLE HERR FRIEDEMANN', 'THE JOKER', 'THE ROAD TO THE CHURCHYARD', 'GLADIUS DEI', 'TRISTAN' and 'TONIO KRUGER'.

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN BY DAVID LUKE


¡®Mann was a master magician of German ¨C and world ¨C literature in the twentieth century¡¯ Sunday Telegraph]]> 326 Thomas Mann 1784875015 Stephen 4 3.68 Death in Venice and Other Stories (Vintage Classic Europeans Series)
author: Thomas Mann
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.68
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2018/08/28
date added: 2020/09/12
shelves:
review:
Thomas Mann is one of my favorite writers, but my high opinion of his work derives from "Magic Mountain," "Doctor Faustus," and "Death in Venice." While the latter piece is contained in this collection of Mann's early short fiction, I will say little about it here and concentrate on the other six stories. First, I must emphasize how much I liked these stories. I see now why Mann was himself so attached to his short fiction and regarded it as some of his best work. Two interrelated themes weave through these stories: first, how easily hard-earned placidity can be disrupted by a vision of beauty; and second, the tension between contemplating life, particularly as an artist, and actually living life. The former theme appears most famously in "Death in Venice" but also in his stories "Little Herr Friedman" and "The Joker." The second theme dominates "Tonio Kurger," who near the end bemoans, "If only I could be freed from the curse of insight, and the creative torment, and live and love, and be thankful and blissfully commonplace" (189). But somehow feeling oneself "outside of life" also appears in the powerful and pathetically humorous story "The Road to the Churchyard," although it is not pursuit of art that makes the main character of this story both envy and curse life. Throughout these stories I was reminded again of how well Mann controls his own art--perhaps he is right, as he more-or-less concludes towards the end of "Tonio Kruger," that a rigid bourgeois background might in some ways serve a writer well. One final point. The modernist conception of the artist one finds in Mann and so many other writers of his time--that is, the artist as some blessed/cursed individual who lives apart from run of the mill humanity in a kind of rebellion and torment--somehow seems pass¨¦ in an age when writing has mostly become either a profession or a "hobby" instead of an unbidden calling that casts one into alternating agony and ecstasy!
]]> <![CDATA[Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel (One Volume)]]> 2099102 504 Guanzhong Luo (Lo Kuan-Chung) 0520215850 Stephen 4 4.05 1522 Three Kingdoms: A Historical Novel (One Volume)
author: Guanzhong Luo (Lo Kuan-Chung)
name: Stephen
average rating: 4.05
book published: 1522
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/20
date added: 2020/09/11
shelves:
review:
One of the six classic Chinese novels from the Ming-Qing period. "Three Kingdoms" is a historical novel but reflects, as the narrative progresses, the rise of its central characters from a historical to a legendary, and then, towards the end, an almost mythological status. That is, it witnesses in its very narrative a sort of apotheosis of Lord Guan, Liu Bei, Zhang Fei, and Zhu Geliang, which any visitor to various temples in the contemporary Chinese world might still see enshrined in brightly colored and dramatically posed statuary. But most of all this is an engaging and sometimes exciting tale of loyalty, warfare, military strategy and the ever-shifting world of political alliances. Moss Robert's translation is rich and readable--in fact, it is something of a masterpiece. His full translation (2000+ pages) now awaits on my shelves.
]]> Tender Is the Flesh 49090884
His wife has left him, his father is sinking into dementia, and Marcos tries not to think too hard about how he makes a living. After all, it happened so quickly. First, it was reported that an infectious virus has made all animal meat poisonous to humans. Then governments initiated the ¡°Transition.¡± Now, eating human meat¡ª¡°special meat¡±¡ªis legal. Marcos tries to stick to numbers, consignments, processing.

Then one day he¡¯s given a a live specimen of the finest quality. Though he¡¯s aware that any form of personal contact is forbidden on pain of death, little by little he starts to treat her like a human being. And soon, he becomes tortured by what has been lost¡ªand what might still be saved.]]> 209 Agustina Bazterrica 1982150920 Stephen 3 3.76 2017 Tender Is the Flesh
author: Agustina Bazterrica
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.76
book published: 2017
rating: 3
read at: 2020/09/09
date added: 2020/09/09
shelves:
review:
Here's a dystopian novel you might not want to read while munching on slices of beef jerky. In fact, even this rather hardened reader found himself saying, as with few other novels, "This just goes too far." It is well done to be sure, and just as you start feeling it is falling into a kind of love-can-save-all sentimentality, it hits you right between the eyes. But I stop here so as not to feel compelled to issue a spoiler alert. Reader be warned, strong stuff and, I guess, a reminder that things could be worse.
]]> The Tunnel 43261143 A FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD

From the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a suspenseful and poignant story of a family coping with the sudden mental decline of their beloved husband and father¡ªan engineer who they discover is involved in an ominous secret military project

Until recently, Zvi Luria was a healthy man in his seventies, an engineer living in Tel Aviv with his wife, Dina, visiting with their two children whenever possible. Now he is showing signs of early dementia, and his work on the tunnels of the Trans-Israel Highway is no longer possible. To keep his mind sharp, Zvi decides to take a job as the unpaid assistant to Asael Maimoni, a young engineer involved in a secret military a road to be built inside the massive Ramon Crater in the northern Negev Desert.

The challenge of the road, however, is compounded by strange circumstances.?Living secretly on the proposed route, amid ancient Nabatean ruins, is a Palestinian family under the protection of an enigmatic archaeological preservationist. Zvi rises to the occasion, proposing a tunnel that would not dislodge the family. But when his wife falls sick, circumstances begin to spiral . . .

The Tunnel¡ª wry, wistful, and a tour de force of vital social commentary ¡ª is Yehoshua at his finest.]]> 324 A.B. Yehoshua 1328622630 Stephen 4 to-read 3.59 2018 The Tunnel
author: A.B. Yehoshua
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.59
book published: 2018
rating: 4
read at: 2020/09/05
date added: 2020/09/05
shelves: to-read
review:
Okay, I confess, I'm a 76-year-old male who sometimes forgets first names. No, I've not yet been diagnosed as having dementia, but I do worry . . . . So, how could I not be drawn to the great Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua's latest novel, which has as its central character a 73-year-old male who has been told by a neurologist that there is a black spot on his cerebral cortex, which perhaps explains his recent trouble with first names and will most likely lead to yet more serious problems in the years ahead. So what does he do? Well, he tries to follow his doctor's advice and not to turn his back on life--every aspect of life. He returns from retirement to his profession as highway engineer and works as an unpaid assistant to a younger engineer designing a new road near the Ramon Crater in southern Israel. All kinds of interesting episodes follow. But most captivating for me was the relationship between the aged male and his wife, a prominent pediatrician who is hellbent on helping and encouraging her husband while being justifiably wary of his situation and prone (aren't we all after a certain age?) to see every mistake of her partner as evidence of ominous decline. This is a very human story and, I think, proceeds on two levels simultaneously: first, saying something important about the aging process and how we should adapt or refuse to adapt to physical and mental realities; and second, Israel itself, which also, Yehoshua seems to say, is prone to a certain type of forgetfulness.
]]> Joe Hill 89323 Joe Hill is full-bodied portrait of both the man & the myth: from his entrance into the short-lived Industrial Workers of the World union, the most militant organization in the history of American labor, to his trial, imprisonment & final martyrdom-- his last words to the I.W.W., "Don't waste time mourning. Organize."]]> 384 Wallace Stegner 0140139419 Stephen 4 3.70 1950 Joe Hill
author: Wallace Stegner
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.70
book published: 1950
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/30
date added: 2020/09/04
shelves:
review:
Stegner's historical novel concerning Joe Hill is a sympathetic look at the radical labor movement of the first decade of the 20th century, and, at the same time, a complex and nuanced study of Joe Hill(strom) himself. In fact, it is a story of just how Joe Hillstrom, the Swedish immigrant, became the legendary Joe Hill, a hero of popular culture down to the present day. Was Hillstrom guilty of the robbery and murder for which he was executed in 1915? Probably, although Stegner leaves the question, however improbably, open. At least no evidence ever surfaced of the mysterious woman Joe claimed he was with when he was wounded by a bullet, as it just so happens, on the same evening the intruder and murderer at the downtown Salt Lake store was also wounded and fled the scene. Hill, it seems, never wavered from his hatred of capitalist enterprise, so many of his decisions as he stood trial and then waited through appeals on death row seems to have been shaped by loyalty to the IWW and to his sense of the legend that was growing around him. Stegner is a writer of flawless technique, who intimately knows the world in which this story takes place. It was a pleasure to read this book, despite the grave seriousness of so much of the story Stegner tells.
]]> <![CDATA[Ma vie parfaite (French Edition)]]> 54426581 168 Antoine Bargel Stephen 4 3.78 Ma vie parfaite (French Edition)
author: Antoine Bargel
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.78
book published:
rating: 4
read at: 2020/08/20
date added: 2020/08/20
shelves:
review:
Sometimes one picks up a new book without quite knowing what to expect, a book that has not gained much public notice nor been published by a major publishing house, and is then quite astonished by the quality of the work. This is just such a book. "Ma vie parfaite" is set in Texas and tells a powerful story of the way the secrets of the past can explode to the surface in an entirely unexpected and even, at least from the perspective of the central characters, absurd fashion. A small family seems to have fought its way up to respectability and a position of some status in their community. But then a "confession" threatens it all. It is difficult to say more without ruining a skillfully told narrative that will pull you forward. It is indeed a book that can and probably should be read in a single sitting. The author, I believe, is an important new presence in the French literary scene. He writes with grace, power, and intelligence. For something of a surprise, both for the skill of its author and the propulsion of the story he weaves, you too should pick up this novel.
]]> Masters of Atlantis 52290 Codex Pappus said to be the sacred Gnomonic text. He expands the noble brotherhood, survives scandalous schism, bids for governor of Indiana, and sees Gnomons gather in East Texas mobile home. This is an America of misfits and con men, oddballs and innocents.]]> 248 Charles Portis 1585670219 Stephen 3 3.72 1985 Masters of Atlantis
author: Charles Portis
name: Stephen
average rating: 3.72
book published: 1985
rating: 3
read at: 2020/07/17
date added: 2020/07/17
shelves:
review:
This book deals with lunatics but does so with a straight face, precisely what so many of us are more-or-less required to do these days. Anyway, "Masters of Atlantis" describes grown men who imagine themselves in possession of profound secrets, which neither they nor anyone else can quite understand, and go about their small lives, wearing funny hats and exchanging knowing glances. Portis could have had any number of groups in mind--shriners, masons, etc., but it is really a novel about how extreme we small people can become in pursuit of some meaning that will help us imagine ourselves to be of greater significance than we really are. As a prominent politician might be inclined to say, "Sad." But kind of fun too, although the joke does wear thing after a hundred or so pages.
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