casparb's reviews
941 reviews

I think this is a 3.5 star book - it's a relatively traditional tale of falling in and out of love, only Fitzgerald has the talent to make it interesting:

'he was thankful to have an existence at all, if only as a reflection in her wet eyes.'
Wonderful!

Tender is the Night appears to me to be an excellent holiday read - could be something about the ease of the French Riviera setting.

I think the most intrigue comes from trying to uncover the meaning of the Keatsian title. Much appreciated. Plenty of material here for Freudians too :)

Perhaps there is something in rereading this novel within the space of 24hrs that better communicates immediacy & chaos.

It is fair to say Mrs Dalloway has endeared itself to me more than it once did. Possibly this is a side effect of reading a heap of essays on The Waste Land lately, such that I think I have become a little over-sensitive to symbols in literature.

I particularly loved the sky-writing scene! A wonderful symbol that blends awe and confusion.

Woolf's prose is always so tender. I have missed it since reading The Years.

Hope everyone is well :)

Inevitably (perhaps unfortunately), Beloved will be compared to The Color Purple, and it's easy to see why - both novels are historical fiction written by black women, with a focus on the struggles of black women in a country that is hostile to the notion of coming to terms with the legacy of slavery.

But I think Beloved is the far more mature work of the two. In formal and expressive terms, it bears much more resemblance to Faulkner's Light in August than The Color Purple. In my opinion, Sethe and Denver are far more satisfying characters than Celie and her sister - Morrison's characters appear to have far more agency.

I had an interesting time with the literary references in this - the character of Paul D appears to be a veiled reference to Joyce's Ulysses (I am thinking primarily of the punning on the name Paul De Kock). I believe, however, that I would need a fine pair of tweezers and vaster quantities of alcohol than are presently available in order to attempt to parse the meaning out of this reference.

Morrison's talent for ever so gently dislocating the real in her prose shines in particular during the quasi stream of consciousness section, which flows and distorts so carefully. I loved the wonderful romantic phrase:

'She is the laugh; I am the laughter'
During this section - it seems to recall W.B. Yeats' Among School Children:
'How can we know the dancer from the dance?'

Fantastic! :)

I've been between four and five stars on this one, but thought I'd be positive this once :)

I think this narrative is an incredible example of just what the novel can do - I'd be inclined to present it as justification for the invention of the form. It's a novel of endless shenanigans, treachery and melodrama.

In his introduction, Robin Buss appears to be keen to defend TCOMC from the label of 'popular fiction' by pointing out the references to Horace, Shakespeare etc - If pressed, I think I'd be inclined to defend popular fiction: I don't see that labelling Dumas as a popular novelist necessarily disparages his works.

Having said this, there are wonderfully thunderous moments that evoke Milton, the Tempest, Virgil, and others. I am thinking in particular of the 'Ideology' chapter appx halfway through :)

A cherry on top for me was the careful overlaying of The Divine Comedy as analogue - most obviously suggested by the name of Dantès. Dumas has thoroughly impressed me with this. Consider the descent (Inferno) of Chateau D'If and the WONDERFUL twist in the name Monte Cristo (that took far too long to click for me), the ascent of Purgatory being in the name of holiness. Thus, Christ's Mountain/Monte Cristo. I presume others came to this conclusion.

One learns an awful lot about poison when reading this novel, if that is to anybody's interest.

It looks gorgeous on my shelf!

A somewhat shorter novel from Nabokov - but delightful nonetheless! Interestingly, Pnin appears to be more straightforwardly comedic than many of his other novels, which tend more so to rely on clever wordplay, allusion, and intensely veiled sexual references.

Pnin appears to be a manner of skewed autobiography, in the vein of Pale Fire (though be wary of overstating the biographical elements!). I say 'skewed', as Nabokov relentlessly mocks poor Timofey Pnin for his poor english skills and eccentric mannerisms. I understand that the author himself only suffered from the latter.

I will admit to laughing out loud at the scene where Pnin ruthlessly investigates the washing machine - there is something about it that is so accessible and familiar.

Of course, searching for beauty in Nabokov is much like searching for water droplets in the sea. Thus I will be strict with myself, and quote only once:

'I do not know if it has ever been noted before that one of the main characteristics of life is discreteness. Unless a film of flesh envelops us, we die. Man exists only insofar as he is separated from his surroundings. The cranium is a space-traveller's helmet. Stay inside or you perish. Death is divestment, death is communion. It may be wonderful to mix with the landscape, but to do so is the end of the tender ego.'

'Before and after book' is a phrase I believe has entered the common lexis - the idea of a book that changes the reader's perspective to the extent that their thinking may be demarcated into 'before' and 'after reading'.

This may well be a suitable descriptor of Orientalism for me. For the unaware, Orientalism is often considered an initiator of post-colonial criticism, with a focus on what (in Western circles) is termed the 'near', rather than 'far' East.

I was warned by informed sources that this text was rather dry and technical - which was a little daunting for me. I'm not always one for non-fiction. This warning appears valid (in my opinion), as Said (wonderfully) references Gramsci, Althusser, and the likes of Spengler before even the end of the introduction. I do not think I would have finished this book had I attempted it a year ago.

However, I am very glad that I have read it! It's a genuinely incredible piece of scholarship that spans centuries. Said refuses to take any shit from the scholars he discusses - he is particularly merciless at pointing out the psychosexual aspects of so many Western commentaries on the 'Orient'. I found this delightful.

Fanon's incredible and unapologetic assessment of colonialism, African nationalism, and the cultures therein.

This text is worth reading for the last section ('Colonial War and Mental Disorders') alone - it's a truly astonishing, jarring sequence of notes from his time as a psychotherapist during the Algerian revolution. It's been a long time since I felt something so visceral & human delivered in an entirely passive tone. In fact, I found myself sinking into the misbelief that these haunting narratives are fiction, until reminded that Fanon himself experienced and met these individuals.

If it wasn't clear thus far, it's not a cheerful read. An essential one, nonetheless.

Something that struck me as new about the style of this book as a whole was Fanon's refusal to assume a European audience. It's an interesting thing to realise - he never draws attention to this perspective, but I found it instructive as an emphasis for his notes on producing 'de-colonialised culture' and the necessity of artistic reinvention within African independent and colonial states.

I found myself highlighting every other sentence in chapter one.

'...Polo answers, 'Traveling, you realise that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.'

The above quote hopefully demonstrates the quiet beauty of Calvino's prose. I think much of this arises from a tendency to understate.
A review is (for me) a manner of infraction - so this is a little daunting. I love this book, and refuse to muddy the waters through redundant use of terms such as 'kaleidoscopic' or 'concentric'.

Invisible Cities will invite comparisons to Escher, Scheherazade, Borges, and Dali. Something about this frustrates me - perhaps to do with the impulse to compartmentalise. But I can't deny there is a validity to these comparisons.

Calvino always invites the reader (sometimes teasingly) to participate in his narratives, and I think this novel is perhaps the key example of this. Read it. I promise you won't regret doing so.

A rather macabre, but amusing novel with flashes of absolute genius - even in translation.
Going into a 21st century Polish novel, I wasn't expecting comedy, so there were pleasant surprises.

'There are some people at whom one only has to glance for one's throat to tighten and one's eyes to fill with tears of emotion. These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature not entirely battered by the Fall.'

This is one of those novels that fit into that peculiarly popular vein in contemporary fiction that I like to succinctly call: Novels In Which The Protagonist Is An Elderly Person That Is Alone In The World (NIWTPIAEPTIAITW). Tokarczuk's style reminds me of Anna Burns' Milkman in its anonymity, but here there is a certain clawing for names: Janina, the aforementioned elderly protagonist nicknames everyone around her (including herself). It's something I have recently been informed is true to life.

Plenty here for ecocritics to go ham (or preferred substitute) on , there's overall a wonderful balance between wacky hysterical realism and saccharine post-irony.