The Good Soldier Švejk is a picaresque novel of The Great War. Its title character is a Czech everyman, slow-witted, cunning, or most likely some combination of both, who wends his way very slowly from a Vienna bar to the Eastern Front, taking turns as the batman for a few people slightly more [...]
|
|
||||
|
As much as I always love New Directions, it’s rare for me to actually read three of their titles in a row, as happened quite by chance with Robinson, Alphabetical Africa, and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry. Though I’d call B.S. Johnson’s novel the most avant-garde in the bunch, Abish is no stylistic slouch, [...] I’m aiming to do a few “quick hit” type posts this week, both to help get back into the swing and to put off writing about The Good Soldier Švejk for a while (though I should be writing about Švejk immediately after my other war post, sigh). Today’s I’ve got Robinson, Muriel [...] At the beginning of this week, I discussed the morality of Middlemarch, and how the results that Rohan Maitzen was somewhat uncomfortable with rest on the problem that Eliot’s morality is not based on dessert. Today, I’ve got a book about exactly the opposite problem. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, a 1973 novel by [...] So who cares about all these Raj orphans anyway? I mean, other than Jane Gardam and Rudyard Kipling? They make an interesting subject around which to weave a plot and some character psychology, but their real significant, I think, is in their being what I called last week a “casualty of Empire.” They [...] Pastors and Masters has continued to prove difficult to write about. Usually when that happens I come up with some strategy for attack. Attack! Break it down, pull it apart, expose all the works inside, say something. I managed only the tinest bit of that in my post on its style. Part of [...] Ivy Compton-Burnett’s first book, Dolores, was published in 1911. Her second, Pastors and Masters, did not appear until 1925—a gap of 14 years. In later life she considered Dolores a girlish effort only, not worth talking about. That is all I know about that novel. About Pastors and Masters, I know this: it [...] This will certainly be my most spoilerific Butcher’s Crossing post, so, fair warning. I mentioned earlier in the week that Will Andrews had gone out to Butcher’s Crossing because a family friend was based there, working in the hide trade. This man, McDonald, is a trader and outfitter of buffalo-hunting trips. Most of [...] Trevor’s podcast gave me one idea that truly—and somewhat shockingly—had not occurred to me before at all: the idea of Miller as Ahab. The signs are all there, and there is no question of Ahab’s same extreme monomania in Miller’s pursuit of the buffalo in the valley. But the parallels to Moby-Dick are [...] Will Andrews, the protagonist of Butcher’s Crossing, is a young man who heads West, leaving behind Harvard and everything else familiar to him to do so. He is one of the yarb-doctor’s “sick spirit[s],” sent “to green pastures, like lame horses turned out unshod to the turf to renew their hoofs.” Will the [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
|||
|
Copyright © 2013 bibliographing - All Rights Reserved |
||||
Recent Comments