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| 0156628708
| 9780156628709
| 0156628708
| 3.79
| 321,021
| May 14, 1925
| Sep 24, 1990
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it was amazing
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‘Moments like this are buds on the tree of life.’ Our lives are an elaborate and exquisite collage of moments. Each moment beautiful and powerful on th ‘Moments like this are buds on the tree of life.’ Our lives are an elaborate and exquisite collage of moments. Each moment beautiful and powerful on their own when reflected upon, turned about and examined to breath in the full nostalgia for each glorious moment gone by, yet it is the compendium of moments that truly form our history of individuality. Yet, what is an expression of individuality if it is not taken in relation to all the lives around us, as a moment in history, a drop in a multitude of drops to form an ocean of existence? Virginia Woolf enacts the near impossibility in ‘Mrs Dalloway’ of charting for examination and reflection the whole of a lifeline for multiple characters, all interweaving to proclaim a brilliant portrait of existence itself, all succinctly packaged in the elegant wrappings of a solitary day. Akin to Joyce’s monumental achievement, Ulysses, Woolf’s poetic plunge into the minds and hearts of her assorted characters not only dredges up an impressively multi-faceted perspective on their lives as a whole, but delivers a cutting social satire extending far beyond the boundaries of the selective London society that struts and frets their 24 hours upon the stage of Woolf’s words. ‘Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.’ This simple phrase is one any serious student of literature would recognize lest they fear an inadequacy of appearance in the eyes of their collegiate classmates, much in the way a great deal of actions in Mrs Dalloway is a learned behavior for the sake of appearances. ‘Rigid, the skeleton of habit alone upholds the human frame,’ and much of what we do out of habit, out of adherence to social standards, is what upholds the society at hand and shapes the civilization of the times. Woolf’s novel hinges upon manners and social standings, highlighting a withering hegemony during the a period of change and rebirth with society marching forward into an uncertain and unrestrained future following the first World War. However, before getting too far ahead into a broad scope, it is imperative to examine the immediate and singular implications of the novel. Much of Mrs Dalloway is deceptively simplistic, using the singular as a doorway into the collective, and offering a tiny gift of perfect that can be unpacked to expose an infinite depiction of the world. Take the title, for instance. In most cases, the central character is referred to as Clarissa Dalloway, yet it was essential to place Mrs Dalloway first and foremost in the readers mind to forever bind their impression of her as a married woman, an extension of Mr. Richard Dalloway. In comparison, Miss Kilman is never addressed in text without the title ‘Miss’ to emphasize her unmarried—and, in terms of the social standings of the time, inferior—position in society; or even Ellie Henderson whose poverty doesn’t even earn her a title of marital status in the eyes of the Dalloway circle, forever condemned to a singular name inconsequential to anything. Just the indication of Clarissa as the wife of a member of government expands well beyond her status as an individual to open a conversation about social implications. ‘Mrs Dalloway is always giving parties to cover the silence.’ Personal identity plays a major theme within the novel with each character’s entire life on display simply through their actions and reflection within the solitary June day. Clarissa is examined through a weaving of past and present as she tumbles through an existential crises in regards to her position as the wife of a dignitary and as a the perfect party host. ‘Why, after all, did she do these things? Why seek pinnacles and stand drenched in fire? Might it consume her anyhow?’ Through her interactions with Peter, the reader is treated to her romantic lineage, rejecting Peter for the safer, more social circle security of Robert, which gives way to a questioning if she is merely a snob. Furthermore, the reader witnesses Clarissa in her heights of emotion through her friendship with Sally Seton¹, a relationship that seems to transcend the rigid gender roles of the time. The strange thing, on looking back, was the purity, the integrity, of her feeling for Sally. It was not like one’s feeling for a man. It was completely disinterested, and besides, it had a quality which could only exist between women.Virginia Woolf’s own sexuality has been a topic of interest over the years, and the relationship between Clarissa and Sally—the kiss shared between them being considered by Clarissa to be a notable peak of happiness in her life—was often written as being “open to interpretation.” Which is funny to me because it feels like the tumblr joke of like “they were just really good friends,” and reading Woolf’s own letters with Vita Sackville-West it all feels very out in the open that there are queer desires in the novel that get packed away due to an unwelcoming society. We see how socially enforced gender norms and heterosexuality become restrictive and Sally is a symbol of rejecting those through examples such as her openly smoking cigars which is said to be a “man’s thing” to do. Through Clarissa we see a desire of life, of not becoming stagnant, of not ‘being herself invisible; unseen; unknown…this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa any more; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.’ There must be a way to separate from the society, to form an identity beyond social conventions or gender, to find life in a world hurtling towards death. ‘Once you fall, Septimus repeated to himself, human nature is on you.’ As a foil to the character of Clarissa, Woolf presents the war-torn Septimus. While Clarissa finds meaning in her merrymaking because ‘what she liked was simply life’, and bringing people together to be always moving towards a warm center of life, Septimus is shown as moving outwards, stolen away from the joys of life through his experiences of bloodshed in battle. So there was no excuse, nothing whatever the matter, except the sin for which human nature had condemned him to death; that he did not feel.While Clarissa grapples with her fear of death, ‘that is must end; and no one in the whole world would know how she had loved it all,’ Septimus finds life, a never-ending spiral of guilt for not feeling beset by visions of his fallen comrade, to be a fearsome and loathsome beast. Doctors would have him locked away (a dramatic contrast to the lively parties hosted by Clarissa), and even his own wife forges an identity of guilt and self-conscious sorrow for upholding a clearly disturbed husband. This is a haunting portrait of post-traumatic stress disorder and depression, the latter fmuch like Woolf herself suffered. Septimus and Clarissa are like opposite sides to the same coin, however, and many essential parrallels exist between them. Both find solace in the works of Shakespeare², both obsess over a lonely figure in an opposing window (one of Septimus’ last impressions in the land of the living), and both trying to express themselves in the world yet fearing the solitude that their failures will form for them. Even his inability to feel is similar to the love felt by Clarissa: 'But nothing is so strange when one is in love (and what was this except being in love?) as the complete indifference of other people.' Death becomes an important discussion point of the novel, with each character trying to define themselves in the face of, or in spite of, their impending demise. Peter so fears death that he follows a stranger through town, inventing an elaborate fantasy of romance to blot out the deathly darkness. Yet, it is in contrast to death that we find life. Clarissa’s desire for communication, community and life is only given weight in relation to the news of death that invades her party. Death was defiance. Death was an attempt to communicate; people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which, mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; repute faded, one was alone. There was an embrace in death. What is most impressive about Mrs Dalloway is the nearly endless array of tones and voices that Woolf is able to so deftly sashay between. While each character is unique, it is the contrast between death and life that she weaves that is staggeringly wonderful. Right from the beginning, Woolf treats us to a feast of contrast. For it was the middle of June. The War was over, except for some one like Mrs. Foxcroft at the Embassy last night eating her heart out because that nice boy was killed…but it was over; thank Heaven – over. It was June…and everywhere, thought it was still early, there was a beating, a stirring of galloping ponies, tapping of cricket bats…Cold death and warm life on a sunny June day all mingle together here, and throughout the novel. And we are constantly reminded of our lives marching towards death like a battalion of soldiers, each hour pounded away by the ringing of Big Ben. This motif is two-fold, both representing the lives passing from present to past, but also using the image of Big Ben as a symbol of British society. The war has ended and a new era is dawning, one where the obdurate and stuffy society of old has been shown to be withered and wilting, like Clarissa’s elderly aunt with the glass eye. Not only are the lifelines of each character put under examination, but the history of the English empire as well, highlighting the ages of imperialism that have spread the sons of England across the map and over bloody battlefields. Clarissa is a prime example of the Euro-centrism found in society, frequently confusing the Albanians and Armenians, and assuming that her love of England and her contributions to society must in some way benefit them. ‘But she loved her roses (didn’t that help the Armenians?)’ In contrast is Peter, constantly toying with his knife—a symbol of masculinity imposed by an ideal enforced by bloodshed and military might—to evince not only his fears of inadequacy as a Man (fostered by Clarissa’s rejection for him and his possibly shady marriage plans), but his wishy-washy feelings of imperialism after spending time in India. Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that, in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks—all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.Mrs Dalloway is nearly overwhelming in scope despite the tiny package and seemingly singular advancements of plot. Seamlessly moving between the minds and hearts of each character with a prose that soars to the stratosphere, Woolf presents an intensely detailed portrait of post-war Europe and the struggles of identity found within us all. While it can be demanding at times, asking for your full cooperation and attention, but only because to miss a single second would be a tragic loss to the reader, this is one of the most impressive and inspiring novels I have ever read. Woolf manages to take the scale of Ulysses and the poetic prowess of the finest poets, and condense it all in 200pgs of pure literary excellence. Simple yet sprawling, this is one of the finest novels of the 20th century and an outstanding achievement that stands high even among Woolf's other literary giants. This novel has a bit more of a raw feel when compared to To the Lighthouse, yet that work is nothing short of pure perfection, a novel so highly tuned that one worries that even breathing on it will tarnish it's sleek and shiny luster. Dalloway stands just as tall, however, both as a satire on society and a powerful statement of feminism. A civilization is made up of the many lives within, and each life is made up of many moments, all of which culminating to a portrait of human beauty. Though at the end of life we must meet death, it is through death we find life. 5/5 It is a thousand pities never to say what one feels. ¹ With regards to the discussion of marital titles, Sally Seton later becomes Lady Rosseter through marriage. This title further emphasizes marriage as a means of climbing the social ladder, with Sally seen in the past as an impoverished, rebellious ragamuffin, yet through marriage gains an aura of dignity. Perhaps Sally becoming a housewife is a statement on the society of the times suffocating feministic freedoms. ² There is an interesting rejection of Shakespeare found most notably in the characters of Richard Dallowlay and Lady Bruton. This emphasized the dying British society as a cold and artless being, devoid of emotion. This is most evident through Richard Dalloway, seen as a symbol of British society, as he fails to express his emotions of love towards his wife. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Feb 20, 2014
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Paperback
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| 0393311465
| 9780393311464
| 0393311465
| 3.78
| 5,603
| 1934
| Apr 17, 1994
|
really liked it
|
‘They watch you, their faces like masks, set in the eternal grimace of disapproval.’ While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emoti ‘They watch you, their faces like masks, set in the eternal grimace of disapproval.’ While a first love can be a period of intensely effervescent emotion and passion, the decline and death of the ill-fated romance is often a harrowing and hellish plunge into the darkness of pain and sorrow. Jean Rhys impeccable Voyage in the Dark chronicles such a descent, or tragic voyage, through the rise and fall of Anna Morgan’s love affair with a wealthy Englishman. Anna, coming from the West Indies and working as a chorus girl across England—much like Rhys herself, whose own experiences illuminate this emotionally charged novel—has her beautiful and youthful innocents trampled upon by the misogynistic society of men who willfully takes advantage of her to fulfill their carnal lusts. She must stay strong and keep her head above water by accepting the money her late-night lovers pass her way, as the often-married men mistake financial support as a morally acceptable compensation for the responsibility they have no intentions of shouldering. Through her elegantly executed juxtaposition of England and the West Indies, as well as gender relations, Rhys creates a cutting compounded metaphor of English imperialism and misogyny that exposes the hardships a poor, young woman must face in a society that views them as nothing but material goods to be plundered and discarded while they struggle to etch out their own identity. The first draft of Voyage in the Dark predates Rhys first two published novels, yet it wasn’t until she found herself alone in Paris with her first husband behind bars that she began to rework the novel with editor Ford Madox Ford (whom she would have an affair with for several years). She disliked how the novel came out and set it aside, releasing it almost ten years later in 1934. Written early in her life, Voyage carries the weight of her own experience and features a protagonist not unlike Rhys herself. What is most striking about the book, however, is her subtle and perfect prose that rings out so crisp, clear and caustic without calling much attention to itself. There is a brilliant beauty in her concisely incisive observations of social class and others telling mannerisms that really bring the novel to life, as well as her finely-tuned ear for speech patterns. Each character seems to be heard through the ears and instead of read through the eyes, and the speech patterns, as well as the way a character carries themselves, are extremely telling to the sort of person they are. She had…an English lady’s voice with a sharp cutting edge to it. Now that I’ve spoken you can hear that I’m a lady. I have spoken and I suppose you now realize that I’m an English gentlewoman. I have my doubts about you. Speak up and I will place you at once. Speak up, for I fear the worst. That sort of voice.Rhys enacts a prose style that exquisitely breaks into a sort of stream-of-consciousness, imposing Anna’s subconscious into the narrative in a way that often recalls her warm past on the island and wonderfully represents the way her present cannot accommodate her past, leaving her torn, conflicted and imminently alienated. his is England Hester said and I watched it through the train-window divided into squares like pocket-handkerchiefs; a small tidy look it had everywhere fenced off from everywhere else—what are those things—those are haystacks—oh are those haystacks—I had read about England ever since I could read—smaller meaner everything is never mind—this is London—hundreds thousands of white people white people rushing along and the dark houses all frowning down one after the other all alike all stuck together—the streets like smooth shut-in ravines and the dark houses frowning down—oh I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place I’m not going to like this place…Anna’s past in the Caribbean is always remembered as a period of warmth and love, fresh with colour and life (‘Amd the sky close to the earth. Hard, blue and close to the earth. The mango tree was so big that all the garden was in its shadow…’), which is constantly contrasted with the Anna’s view of England as cold, grey and deathly. She is frequently falling ill and misses the warmth of her childhood, the warmth of innocence and naivety. Childhood is looked at as simplistic and preferable to the hardships and cruelty of adulthood, the years when family are loving caregivers that in adulthood turn their backs on account of money, where mistakes are easily corrected and forgiven, and when the world seems a ripe fruit to be picked, tasted and enjoyed. England is the bitterness of reality, where love is fleeting or false and the sweetness of life is either rotten or far beyond reach, where Anna must come to grips that she is of the lower class, ‘the ones without the money, the ones with beastly lives.’ The cold grey streets of England are where Anna must face the grim realities of gender roles in a prejudiced, misogynistic society where there are those who have and those who need and grieve. Women are denied means to support themselves without having much access to work or wealth and thereby are stuck needing to rely on a man to supply them with money and stability and, if they are lucky enough, love that lingers beyond the youthful moments of lust. It makes clear what Simone de Beauvoir means when she wrote that access to financial gain is imperative for women’s liberation. Anna is surrounded by women with ideas of how a woman should behave, most of them involving methods to convince a man into marriage (or at least becoming a kept mistress with financial stability being more valued than romance anyways), viewing men as their Caribbean sun to keep them warm into their twilight years. The harsh reality of her position is made no more clear than the frantic cries of her employer late in the novel as she begs Anna to see her predicament as a single and aging women who must wrangle up money while she can lest she face the cruelest of fates. Voyage in the Dark is filled with rampant misogyny and delivers a powerfully depressing image of men viewing women as nothing but material goods. ‘It's funny,’ Anna’s lover has the audacity to tell her, ‘have you ever thought that a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside them?’ Anna’s offers her entire existence to a man that is clearly no good for her, pinning her emotional and psychological well-being on his acceptance, to a man that only views her as transitory goods. ‘=The light and the sky and the shadows and the houses and the people—all parts of the dream all fitting in and all against me. But there were other times when a fine day, or music, or looking in the glass and thinking I was pretty, made me start again imagining that there was nothing I couldn’t do, nothing I couldn’t become. Imagining God knows what.When she is loved, she is eternal, empowered, and invincible, but when he leaves, as he inevitably will, she faces a descent into a darkness that she had never thought possible. These men that seek her and her peers hands are men of stature, often already married, that only wish for a fling and are willing to support them financially afterword to avoid a scene. Anna must face a world in England where love is false, where everything is cold, and where any hope of the opposite, anything that would fulfill her desires for her past, is merely a façade. ‘The bed was soft, the pillow was as cold as ice…. The fire was like a painted fire; no warmth came from it.’ While we as the reader can grasp at the beauty in Anna’s heart, her silence and innocence leads those around her to see her as stupid, somehow validating their deception of her. It becomes painful to witness her decline, mistaking lust for love and not recognizing that she is a mere commodity, being paid and adorned in fancy dress in exchange for her satisfying sexual thirsts. Anna’s plight as a woman objectified under a patriarchal society becomes an expression of English imperialism. Often there are passages reflecting on her childhood that align with the most impactful examples of misogynistic policing. She, as a woman in English society, is much like the black population kept as chattel back home; Anna’s former home being an English colony viewed more as a financial tally on account books than a place full of people living, breathing and dreaming. Voyage begins to reveal itself as a spiteful commentary on imperialism as well as social and gender roles, becoming a powerful fist of rebellion against all those who would belittle and tower over another human being for any reason, be it gender, race, religion, etc. Innocence becomes a period of social and cultural blindness, when she is unaware of the reasons why her family dislikes her kinship with the black house girl, and adulthood becomes a cold barren wasteland when the blindfold is released and the soul must take in and accept all the horrors of reality. How can Anna carry on and carve her place in the world, create her own identity, in a world set on viewing her as a commodity? The stream-of-conscious style adopted by Rhys becomes a perfect method of highlighting her conflicted mind, seeming almost like a descent into madness as she finds her experiences of the world and her youthful impression of the world to be totally and painfully incongruous. Voyage in the Dark’ was a fantastic and emotionally stimulating introduction into the works of the fabulous Jean Rhys, and author I have every intention of pursuing until I’ve drunk every last word. She employed a wonderfully simplistic, yet exceptionally poetic style that cuts directly to the heart of matters, wasting not a single word to expose the deepest depths of human emotion. While brief, it is a novel that will stick with you for long after, and will dredge up those painful memories of loss in love, yet allow you to examine them along with Anna in a way that make you thankful for having experienced them simply because you can now understand how they made you the person you are today and simply for reminding you that you are a beautiful human being full of life, love, sorrow, rage and that we all must play our part in the human comedy. There is a strong urge for equality and respect for woman that call to mind beloved authors such as Virginia Woolf, whose book title The Voyage Out partially inspired this ones. Jean Rhys is an author not to be missed, and goes down great with a bottle of dark red wine. 4.5/5 ‘There's fear, of course, with everybody. But now it had grown, it had grown gigantic; it filled me and it filled the whole world.’ [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 25, 2013
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Oct 27, 2013
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Sep 25, 2013
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Paperback
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| 159017268X
| 9781590172681
| 159017268X
| 4.02
| 44,907
| 1972
| May 20, 2008
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it was amazing
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‘The forest was full of signs and portents, its own secret written language.’ Tove Jansson, the world-renowned creator of the Moomintroll characters, s ‘The forest was full of signs and portents, its own secret written language.’ Tove Jansson, the world-renowned creator of the Moomintroll characters, succinctly harnesses the power and glory of a seaside summer season in the twenty-two elegant vignettes contained within The Summer Book. Here is a book in no need of magic or any other fantastical adornments as she reminds us that we can discover pure, beautiful magic in the natural world all around us if only we quiet our lives and open our eyes to it. Set upon a tiny island in the Gulf of Finland much like where Jansson’s own family spent their summers, Summer Book chronicles the interactions and adventures between a young girl, Sophia, and her grandmother as they embrace the world and all the facts of life that surround them. Tender and subtle, yet laced with poignant investigations of life, love and death, Jansson’s words caress the soul like a warm breeze carrying with it the effluvium of the sea and all its majesty. [image] The childhood vacation home of Tove Jansson The Summer Book is a book where almost nothing happens, yet everything happens. It is a quiet little book that that only hints at the powerful undercurrents that charge the events that transpire. Each vignette details what initially appears to be seemingly inconspicuous moments in the lives of young Sophia and her grandmother, yet unveil guideposts leading to deeply penetrating insights into the human condition, much like the wooden animal figurines created by the grandmother. She cut the them from branches and driftwood and gave them paws and faces, but she only hinted at what they looked like and never made them too distinct. They retained their wooden souls, and the curve of their backs and legs had the enigmatic shape of growth itself and remained a part of the decaying forest... Grandmother worked only in old wood that had already found its form. That is, she saw and selected those pieces of wood that expressed what she wanted them to say.Jansson doesn’t force meaning or preach morality, she simply selects sublime moments of human interaction and lets them point towards something far greater. In this manner, Jansson avoids the pitfalls of choking the reader in oversentimentality and soars to great heights of succinct poetic grace. Accompanying her awe-inspiring words are her gorgeous illustrations, which make a perfect match by being both simple, yet magnificent. [image] An island can be dreadful to someone from outside. Everything is complete, and everyone has his obstinate, sure, and self-sufficient place. Within their shores, everything functions according to rituals that are as hard as rock from repetition, ad at the same time they amble through their days as whimsically and casually as if the world ended at the horizon.Each vignette is as self-contained as an island, with one event gesturing towards one idea, and then never returned to again, much like children’s cartoons where each episode is irrelevant from the next, which only furthers the glorious childlike feelings that emanate from each page. There is no need to establish a time-line—the months moving back and forth across the summer season may imply that it occurs over several different summers, yet there is no indication which summer it is or if Sophia has aged—or for events to be considered in light of later events. It is a blur of summer grandeur. Nothing really progresses, yet nothing really has to because The Summer Book is a vacation from the stresses and hustle of life. It moves to the gentle rhythm of a bobbing sea quietly breaking on shore as you read in the long grass beneath a sweltering sun. There is only one major event that directs the course of the action: ‘Sophia woke up and remembered that they had come back to the island and that she had a bed to herself because her mother was dead.’ This is the only mention of Sophia’s tragic loss, and while it sits hushed in the peripheries of the margins, it casts an omnipresent shadow that is always lurking in the back of the reader’s mind. Jansson wrote this book a year after loosing her own mother. After witnessing a worm cut in two and learning that both halves will continue on, Sophia dictates a study on worms to the grandmother in which she say ‘They realized that from now on life would be quite different, but they didn’t know how, that is, in what way.’ Sophia must live her life without her ‘other half’, not knowing how it is affecting her, but only knowing that it is affecting her. Amidst the joyful effervescence of summer are the grim realities of mortal lives that must interact with one another. Jansson does not depict a world full of eternal sunshine and happiness, but one where the sky may break into a furious storm at any moment to rattle us like a house being tugged from its foundation in gale force winds. ‘’It’s funny about me,’ Sophia said. ‘I think nice weather gets to be boring.’’ Once again managing to avoid being overly sweet, Jansson creates a cast of flawed, yet very human, characters. Sophia often flies into an angry rage, often irritated that the world doesn’t fit her idea of how it should be, and has a fierce need to test boundaries and assert her independence and identity, whereas the grandmother is cantankerous and rather unsentimental. The two make a wonderfully comedic pair, bickering as equals and passing time together, being both too young and too old to partake in much of the activity around them—such as a booze-filled party on a boat the father leaves them for—and having to find ways to assert their existence in the world in spite of it all. Jansson illuminates a world that is indifferent and unsentimental, yet manages to create a passionate tenderness out of embracing reality as it is. We must make the best of the world we have and learn to love it if we are to find true happiness in our lives, and this book is a wonderful example of finding this love. As the pair face the world, the readers are given small glimpses into their hearts and souls. Many of life’s big issues are addressed and handled with finesse, such as the way in which we love even what hurts us. Sophia is disgusted by her cat because it is a killer, always bringing dead mice to the door, and trades it for a different cat only to miss her original cat. ‘’It’ll be awful,’ said Sophia gravely. ‘But it’s Moppy I love.’’ A wide assortment of life’s toughest realities, all its joys and sorrows, are viewed through the innocence of a young girl finding her way in the wild, and the result is immensely moving. Nothing last forever, and our summer of childhood must come to an end. We must shoulder the cold of the world and move on into our seasons of adulthood, carrying with us the lessons we learned as wild-eyed children trying to decipher the mysterious signs of nature. Each page of The Summer Book rolled across me in waves of nostalgia for idyllic childhood summers spent in a cabin rented by my parents on Sunset Lake in the Upper Penninsula of Michigan. With each luminous description of the luscious landscapes I was transported back to the sights, sounds and smells of the waves, trees and summer air of my childhood and sat back in wonderment as I watched my memories play back images of my younger self encountering the mysteries of the world. This truly is a beautiful book that instilled an emotion in me so delicate and beautifully ineffable that I had to get sloppy drunk enough to have the audacity to tarnish it’s power by attempting to convey it through the dingy pipelines of my own words. This is a subtle little novel that immerses you into nature and reminds you that you are just a tiny dot in a vast universe. While nothing appears to be immediately meaningful, there is a vast depth to be uncovered if we just sit back, relax, and let ourselves be engulfed in Jansson’s prose. Which is much like the magic of the world around us. We miss so much if we rapidly hurtle through the world, trying to leave a mark upon it as we attempt to ensnare some sort of meaning that we can hold onto and bottle up in an airtight jar of our own identity. Instead, Jansson asks us to take the slow, scenic route, and transcend beyond our own identity, to become a small part of nature, a tiny part of something greater. There is where the true magic of existence is found, listening to the orchestra of nature all around us and seeing the power and beauty in the tiniest of interactions, in seeing each interaction with another consciousness as a gift in itself, and finding peace in our small corner of the world. Jansson expertly harnesses the aura of summer, and its nights that are, as Bruno Schulz once wrote, ‘as vast as the megalomanic aspirations of young lovers.’ This book is utterly cleansing to a weary heart, like a brilliant ray of sunshine through a dusty attic, and makes for a perfect summer get-away for readers of any age. This book makes me glad to be alive. 5/5 ‘To the final landscape of our old age, as summer fades. This is a fine moment. Silences settles all around us, each of us wanders his own way, and we all meet by the sea in the peaceful sunset.’ [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jul 10, 2013
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not set
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Jul 10, 2013
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0811219925
| 9780811219921
| 0811219925
| 3.70
| 2,463
| 1917
| Jun 05, 2012
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really liked it
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The earth became a dream; I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world. The joys, clear-headed thinking, and sheer beauty of The earth became a dream; I myself had become an inward being, and I walked as in an inward world. The joys, clear-headed thinking, and sheer beauty of a walk through the world come alive in Robert Walser’s The Walk. This is a sentiment that I too share, as I find I do my best thinking and arrive at my best inspirations while out on a run—I never review a book without getting at least one run in between the completion of the novel and sitting down to write so I can contemplate what it is I want to say and formulate at least one satisfactory statement to include in the review. There is a certain clarity that seems to accrue with my heart thumping out in the greater world as I attempt to conduct phrases to the rhythm of my footfalls down the paths cut between the trees, a clarity and rejuvenation of heart and soul that the narrator of The Walk seems to enlist as a canvas for his literary creations. Leaving behind his ‘room of phantoms’ where he was ‘brooding gloomily over a blank sheet of paper’, the narrator embarks on foot through the open air where ‘everything I saw made upon me a delightful impression’. Chronicling his walk through the town and countryside, Walser’s narrator builds an introspective portrait of an artists creation process and philosophical musings through the allegorical, and often surreal, events that transpire along the way. ’Walking is for me not only healthy, it is also of service—not only lovely, but also useful.’The walks around town have become an essential component of the narrators writing process, a segment he holds in higher regard than the actual act of writing. ‘Without walking I would be dead, and would have long since been forced to abandon my profession,’ he writes. ‘A pleasant walk most often veritably teems with imageries, living poems, attractive objects, natural beauties, be they ever so small.’ It is a time for inspiration, of intense soul searching, where one can appreciate their small place in a world so great and beautiful. Although others question his walks as being the sign of a lazy man, he is proud of them and considers them a high point of industriousness. The reader sees how his emotional and intellectual state is so tied to his walks and the world around him as the bright, welcoming sky raises his spirits, while oppressive encounters with offensive others instantly plunge him into fear and sadness. It is in the solitude of nature where he finds himself most at peace, and the ineffable beauty of the natural world quickly assuages any dark thoughts and pulls him to ecstatically aware of his place in the present. The soul of the world had opened and I fantasized that everything wicked, distressing and painful was on the point of vanishing….all notion of the future paled and the past dissolved. In the glowing present, I myself glowed.These walks instill a near-religious experience in him and allow him to comfortably—and without the fear of shadows, pain and phantoms but guided by warmth and love instead—move inward into his soul and true self where he can extract the essentials needed to produce his literature. ‘In the sweet light of love I believed I was able to recognize—or required to feel—that the inward self is the only self which really exists.’ It is his encounters with other people that send the narrator into a downward spiral of anger and grief. While the sight of a pretty woman inspires great confidence and loquacious praise to her talents, his encounters with the wealthy or those with airs of power get his blood boiling. Each event chronicled into text becomes an exceptional allegory for the society around him, and Walser emphasizes the comical grotesqueries in each scene to give an absurdly surreal look at the people and places that pass before the narrator. The upper class and those with power are typically the ones that most come under his satirical aim. He describes the any actions that ‘gratify the thirst for money’ as ‘the vilest thing on earth’ and is constantly furious at any signs of one displaying themselves as above anyone else. Even the sight of golden lettering on a bakery inspires a vitriolic rant. The narrator reflects an uneasy sense of alienation from those with wealth, those who ‘think themselves important because they are inconsiderate and discourteous, who think themselves powerful because they enjoy protection.’ He rejects these people, and their pleasures, for they are the ones he sees as holding down him and fellow artists of letters. He enters a bookshop to ‘cold-bloodedly’ dismiss the most popular and widely read novel that he request the bookseller to find, He insists that critics are nothing but injurious to the lives and livelihoods of artists. His sources of income are few and far between, and even then, they are suffocating. The narrator makes a plea for the author and artists. He compares an author to a military general because of their ‘laborious preparations before they dare march to the attack and give battle: in other words, fling their book or artistic or shoddy product into the book market, an action which sometimes vigorously provokes very forceful counterattacks.’ He argues that a true lover or art appreciates even the most dull and inferior forms because they acknowledge that heart, soul and passion went into its creation. Is not all music, ever the most niggardly, beautiful to the person who loves the very being and existence of music? Is not almost any human being you please - even the worst and most unpleasant - loveable to the person who is a friend of man?What he argues for is a polite society where we accept we all have weaknesses. I here implement a policy of softheartedness, which has a beauty that is not to be found anywhere else; but I consider a policy of this sort to be indispensible. Propriety enjoins us to be careful to deal as severaly with ourselves as with others, to judge others as mildly as we judge ourselves…The narrator attempts to practice what he preaches and always checks himself when he lets his indignation get out of hand and apologizes to the reader. ‘Abuses of writing should not be practiced,’ he often says, and keeps his promise to return to criticize himself just as he does those around him. When this moment arrives, it is utterly heart wrenching and leaves the reader drenched in sorrow and pity, yet full of blossoming adoration. The narrator writes in an engaging, highly descriptive style that often switches tenses to occasionally accommodate a present tense. As he often addresses the reader, pontificating and apologizing to the reader at times in an attempt to appear as a cordial, good natured narrator, these shifts in tense help build a sense that the reader is out on the walk with them, with the narrator occasionally overtaking them or walking along-side them. It also helps highlight the difference between the narrator-on-the-walk and the narrator-writing-the-book, with the reader always conscious that the narrator must return to his gloomy room and battle with the blank page before him to wrangle his experiences into words. While the reader is aware of the joys experienced by the walking narrator, they are always besieged by the omnipresent melancholy of the authorial narrator locked away in his shadowy studio—despite the comedic nature of most events, on the fringes lurks a vicious sadness that keeps the reader in a state of unease even in the most jovial of passages knowing that the narrator must leave the warm inward world or the outdoors to enter the vicious introspection behind closed doors. The final pages of the book are sure to break the readers heart, hinting at a looming sadness and allowing them to feel the burden of his painful self-criticisms. While the novel is a blend of both images of the narrator, the interplay between both mindsets it what brings out the sheer brilliance of this short book. Originally written in 1917 but then heavily edited in 1920, this new translation by Susan Bernofsky is mostly a reworking of the Christopher Middleton translation in accordance with Walser’s own revisions. Apparently, Walser altered nearly every sentence, cutting out the superfluous to achieve his incredible minimalism, ensuring that every sentence maintained an eloquent flow, and ‘minimizing the divide between the walking protagonist and the writing protagonist’ (from Bernofsky’s introduction). Although I have never read the original translation—The Walk being Walser’s only work to be translated into English during his lifetime—what appears in print here is a darkly comedic masterpiece of subtlety. While this short novel initially didn’t strike me as anything special, about halfway though (and while out on a run, which seems fitting) I realized the incredible depths that hid within each carefully crafted sentence. Walser has a very special story to tell about being an author and offers a very positive plea for those who appreciate art to be good to one another and to not drown authors in negative criticism or suffocate them with elitism. This is a wonderful little book (the New Directions Pearl edition is 96pgs and about the size of a checkbook) with a wide wealth of ideas to ponder on your next walk. I will certainly be back for more Walser. I’ll take you out [with dedication to the lovely (ifer) of course] on this seemingly appropriate song. Now I need to go for my own walk with my dogs. 4.5/5 ’I would like to confess that I consider nature and human life to be a solemn and charming flow of fleeting approximations, which strikes me as a phenomenon which I believer to be beautiful and replete with blessings.’ [image] ...more |
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May 03, 2013
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| 081120054X
| 9780811200547
| 081120054X
| 3.78
| 1,366
| 1913
| Jan 17, 1968
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liked it
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‘To dissect is a form of revenge’ -Gustave Flaubert in a letter to George Sand Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas is an ironic, witty, and outright ‘To dissect is a form of revenge’ -Gustave Flaubert in a letter to George Sand Flaubert’s Dictionary of Accepted Ideas is an ironic, witty, and outright humorous satire on the minds and manners of the everyday man, the philistines, as Flaubert would call them, that move within a higher society. Alphabetized within its pages are a wide variety of objects, ideas and people with a clichéd definition highlighting the ‘accepted’ opinions on them and instructions as to how to utilize such ideas to give the appearance of a culture-savvy citizen. For example: ‘BEETHOVEN: Do not pronounce Beathoven. Be sure to gush when one of his works is played.’ As noted on the back cover, much of the ‘devastating humor and irony are often dependent on the phrasing in vernacular French’, making a translation difficult, yet this New Directions edition, with introduction and translation by Jacques Barzun, does a well enough job of getting much of the general ideas, insults and irony across, making this a very funny read. Barzun’s introduction offers a useful insight into the workings of this short book and Flaubert’s mindset in creating it. As Barzun points out, Flaubert was outspoken in his disgust with ‘philistines’ and considered the social norms of culture to be a direct affront on education and the educated artist. While there are statements made in this book which are at times necessarily true, Barzun asserts that ‘what damns them is the fact that they are the only thing ever said on the subject by the middling sensual man’. Flaubert, spending most of his time around society which was ‘not simply bourgeois and philistine, but invincibly repetitious and provincial’, created this book to denounce these repetitions of such cliched ideas that drove him mad. He stated that these ‘repetitions proved more than signs of dullness, they were philosophic clues from which he inferred the “transformation of the mind under machine capitalist”’(Barzun). This collection of repetitious ideas paints a comical caricature of this society Flaubert detested, yet offers such humorous depictions of the ideas presented that will have the reader laughing out loud at the bawdy satire. While writing this book, Flaubert stated in a letter, ‘After reading the book, one would be afraid to talk, for fear of using one of the phrases in it.’ The comedy is rich and, like a bad American comedy, desiring of quotation, yet quoting it ironically places you on the side of the philistines. If you can find this collection (especially if you speak French and can find it in it’s original form), I highly recommend flipping through it. It is often offensive, occasionally insightful, and always funny. Someone should remake this for the American redneck. 3/5 (while there are some gems, much of this is either lost on a modern/english speaking reader or just rather ordinary and un-funny. Worth reading for the funny though!) A few gems include: ARCHIMEDES: On hearing his name, shout “Eureka!”. Or else: ‘Give me a fulcrum and I will move the world.” There is also Archimedes’screw, but you are not expected to know that. ARTIST: All charlatans. Praise their disintrestedness (old-fashioned). Express surprise that they dress like everyone else (old-fashioned). They earn huge sums and squander them. What artists do cannot be called work. AUTHORS: One should ‘know a few’. Never mind their names BUYING AND SELLING: The goal of life. COFFE: Induces wit. Good only if it comes through Havre. After a big dinner party, it is taken standing up. Take is without sugar – very swank: gives the impression you’ve lived in the east. EGG: Starting point for a philosophic lecture on the origin of life. FAVOR: It is doing children a favor to slap them; animals, to beat them; servants, to fire them; criminals, to punish them. GENTLEMEN: There aren't any left. IMMORALITY: Distinctly enunciated, this word confers prestige on the user. MACHIAVELLI: Though you have not read him, consider him a scoundrel. NEIGHBORS: Try to have them do you favors without it costing you anything. NOVELS: Corrupt the masses. Less immoral in serial than in volume form. Only historical novels should be allowed, because they teach history. Some novels are written on the point of a scalpel, others the point of a needle. OPTIMIST: Synonym for imbecile. PIDGIN: Always talk pidgin to make yourself understood by a foreigner, regardless of nationality. Use also for telegrams. RELATIVES: Always a nuisance. Keep the poor ones out of sight. REPUBLICANS: “The republicans are not all scoundrels, but all scoundrels are republicans!” SELFISHNESS: Complain of other people's; overlook your own. THINK (To): Painful. Things that compel us to think are generally neglected. ...more |
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| May 05, 1927
| Dec 27, 1989
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it was amazing
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The lighthouse is out there, it's eye caressing our struggles with cold indifference. We can beat against the tides in pursuit, but will we ever reach
The lighthouse is out there, it's eye caressing our struggles with cold indifference. We can beat against the tides in pursuit, but will we ever reach it? Does it even matter, and is it even attainable? If we only look to that spot on the horizon we miss the love around us, miss those gasping for our love and friendship, miss the callouses born in dedicated strife rowing us towards the end. Like in all things, it is the journey that matters, not the destination. Futility can be beautiful, especially when we don't give up on plunging our oars against it and making our place in a world destined to end in a .... flash..... ‘…for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge…’ To enter within the pages of Woolf’s 1927 masterpiece, To the Lighthouse, is to dive headlong into a maelstrom of vivid perspectives and flawless prose. Few authors are able to achieve the vast scope of human emotions and frustrations as of this novel, let alone accomplish such a task in the mere 209pgs Woolf offers. Flowing to the breezy soundtrack of waves breaking upon the shoreline, To the Lighthouse investigates the frailties of life and human relationships in breathtaking prose through the minds and hearts of Woolf’s characters as they struggle to affect a state of permanence within an ever-changing ephemeral existence. Reading Woolf is like reading an extended prose poem. Each word shimmers from the page as every sentence illuminates the deep caverns of the heart. She accentuates her themes through carefully chosen imagery and metaphors, or constantly alluding to the passage of time themes through metaphors of fraying draperies and aging furniture and keeping the focus on the island setting through descriptions such as ‘bitter waves of despair’. The notion of each person as an island plays a major role in the novel. The waves continuously crash on shore much like the collision of characters as they interact and attempt to understand one another. These repetitions of ideas and symbols are used through this novel as a method of reinforcing them. Similarly, the characters often repeat their own beliefs, much like a mantra, to help reassure themselves of who they are. Woolf effectively utilizes her own stream-of-consciousness style to tell her story, examining each characters unique perspectives and feelings of one another that culminate to form a tragically beautiful portrait of the human condition. Unlike the stream-of-consciousness technique employed by others such as James Joyce or William Faulkner, Woolf retains a consistence prose style, being more an observer of the inner-workings of each character instead of melding with their consciousness and writing in their own words. While this may seem a cop-out to some, it felt actually beneficial to the structure of this novel, such as allowing Woolf to seamlessly transition from character to character. This also was in keeping with the ‘person as an island’ theme since we could only observe through an authorial perspective and never truly know commune with the character, leaving the reader as just another wave crashing upon the shoreline of their consciousness. Late in the novel, Lily ponders over the power of narrating what one thinks a person is like as a method of understanding them: ‘this making up scenes about them, is what we call “knowing” people, “thinking” of them, “being fond” of them!’ There are several metafictional moments such as this within the novel that justify Woolf’s stylistic choices. Woolf’s decision to maintain a constant narration makes the book ‘about’ perspectives instead of ‘constructed out of’ perspectives. Human interaction is the crux of this novel, and also one of its saddest messages. These characters interact daily and are under the constant scrutiny of one another, yet, try as they might, they can never truly understand each other. ‘She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst were between men and women’. They all try to leave their impressions upon one another but, at the end of the day, are still only left with their perspective and opinion of the others instead of the unity and knowledge of who their contemporaries truly are inside and what motivates their actions. They are forever separated by the fact that souls cannot ever meld and become one. The real tragedy is that these characters, while desiring to understand and be understood, more often than not hurt one another, often due to fear and insecurity, through their attempts of reaching into the others soul. Mr. Ramsey, while being exceptionally needy of praise and security, keeps his family at arms length through his neediness while resenting them and wishing they would leave him be: ‘he would have written better books if he had not married’. These characters reach out to one another as if to a life raft, they need something to cling to and bind them with the present. Each character in their own way, be it Mr. Ramsey’s philosophy, Mr. Carmichael’s poetry, Lily’s paintings or Mrs. Ramsey’s guiding hand, attempt to leave their permanent scar on the face of eternity. Mrs. Ramsey in particular fears death and the unstoppable change that pushes us forward towards the grave. ‘A scene that was vanishing even as she looked…it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past’. She watches in horror as time slips by, firmly believing nothing good can come with the future and goes so far as to cover up Deaths bleak head in the form of a boars skull that hangs on her children’s walls. ‘With her mind she had already seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base fir the world to commit… No happiness lasted’. No matter what, time will pass us all by, like the lighthouse beam, illuminating us and calling us up from the dark for one brief moment, and then passing on again to leave us formless in the dark. If is fitting, given the fears of death and time passing, that death comes in this novel swiftly and suddenly. There is no telling when the beam of life will be gone, no preparations can be made, and we must deal with it. Such is existence. These fears can only be subsided, our lives given meaning, if we can reach each other, understand and love each other, thereby existing forever in memory and framed by love in the hearts of those we knew. This novel takes much inspiration from Woolf’s own life (Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey being based on Virginia’s own parents, making this an elegy to her own mother as well as an elegy to Mrs. R) and doubly serves as a cutting commentary on the literary world in which Woolf was immersed. Woolf set out to oppose the obdurate male society that dominated the literary scene, Tansley’s words to Lily of ‘women can’t paint, women can’t write’ echoing a stereotype that Woolf would have had to combat her whole life. Woolf combats the patriarchy through this novel, creating a sleek, short masterpiece as opposed to the behemoth (but equally amazing) Ulysses, filled with attacks on the ‘masculine intelligence’ and making parody of the male opinions on women. Often the reader is given the opinion though a male perspective that ‘women made civilization impossible with all their “charm”, all their “silliness”…’, yet these same men crave the attention and affection of Mrs. Ramsey – they fly into an anxious fit without the reassurance of the women. They spend their time thinking lofty thoughts, but it is the women that keep order. Mrs. Ramsey despises such masculine activities as hunting and is the head of the household and the keeper of peace, yet she still reads as a bit of a cautionary tale. She still succumbs to the gender roles expected of her, such as being submissive to Mr. Ramsey and playing matchmaker – although this serves more as her attempt to maintain control over life than actually falling into stereotypes. Lily is therefor given as the ideal, the one who can press on despite naysayers like Tansley, be a self-sustaining, ambitious woman that keeps an understanding and open heart and painting those around her into eternity through her perseverance. This was without a doubt one of the finest novels I have ever read. Woolf offers pages after page of incredible poetry, never letting up for an instant. It takes a bit to get your footing, as she drops the reader right into the scene without any exposition, but once you have found your bearings your heart will swell with each flawless word. The middle section of the novel, the brief 20pgs of ‘Time Passes’, may be one of the most enduring and extraordinary displays of writing I have ever seen. This novel will force the reader to face the bleak truths of change and death along with the characters, yet offer a glimmer of hope through unity and love that is sure to strike a chord in even the coldest of hearts, all the while being a stunning anthem of feminism. This is a novel to read, and read again and again as you witness your own present and future fade into the past. 5/5 ‘Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures’ This novel came highly recommended to me through two trusted friends, whose reviews I would like to share with you here and here. But don’t just take our word for it, because this is one that should not be missed! ...more |
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| 1590171691
| 9781590171691
| 1590171691
| 4.27
| 140,697
| Sep 1942
| Dec 09, 2005
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really liked it
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‘The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particul
‘The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.’ *EDIT 12/20/21* Chess, the ‘Royal Game’, ‘regally eschews the tyranny of chance and awards its palms of victory only to the intellect, or rather to a certain type of intellectual gift.’ Stefan Zweig plunges the reader into this cold, calculating world through a simple premise of a chess match between the reigning world champion and a mysterious doctor who reveals an incredible knowledge of the game’s strategy despite his claims that he hasn’t touched a chessboard for over twenty years. In a mere 80 pages, Zweig’s Chess Story, reaches an emotional and psychological depth that leaves the reader shivering with horror through a haunting allegory of Nazi Germany where human lives are mere wooden pieces to be strategically moved and sacrificed by an indifferent hand. [image] Zweig’s grasp on human nature is chillingly accurate, and the few characters presented come alive through such simple descriptions of their psychology, made easily accessible through having a psychologist serve as the narrator. Czentovic, the reigning world chess champion, quickly develops into a lifelike monomaniac through the brief summary of his life. This apathetic, uneducated youth miraculously develops a keen intellect for chess, being described as ‘Balaam’s ass’ when his talents are revealed, and quickly defeats chess masters across the world which ‘transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.’ Zweig presents us with a highly unlikeable adversary, a wealthy, self-important man who looks upon all those around him as if they ‘were lifeless wooden pieces’ despite his vulgar manners and ‘boundless ignorance’ towards anything intellectual aside from chess (there is a wonderful aside where the narrators fried remarks ‘isn’t it damn easy to think you’re a great man if you aren’t troubled by the slightest notion that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante, or Napoleon even existed?’). We can all put a face to this character, we’ve all encountered someone vain and offensive who, despite our disdain, will always be able to sneer down upon us because we are no match to the one talent they hold most dear. While aboard a steamship, the passengers arrange a chess match with the great Czentovic, him versus all others, in which he crushed them in the first game without hiding his arrogance of being the superior. Enter our hero, Dr. B, an immediately likeable, shy and nervous man with an immense intellect that bestows a method for forcing a draw with the great chess master. For the majority of the novella, the reader must face the horrors of Dr. B’s pas to understand where his talents grew, somehow blossoming in the cracks of soul-crushing interment in the Gestapo headquarters. Often relaying the story in the second-person, the use of ‘you’ brings the reader into maddening solitude of Dr. B, enduring his pain along with him, and even the most calloused of readers must come away with a residue of unbearable horrors and madness forever coating their consciousness. Zweig, having fled his home in Austria in fear of the Nazis, forces the reader to witness and endure a fate worse than the sickening dehumanization and deathly labor of a concentration camp, but to share in his solitude, emphasized in frightening proportions by Dr. B’s torment that is ‘a force more sophisticated than crude beating of physical torture: the most exquisite isolation imaginable’. The allegory presented in the novella is sickening enough to rot any heart. We have Germany ruled by an inhumane, obdurate hand, cold and calculating in each move it makes, and we have the artistic mind going mad in solitude. Creativity and art is trampled by the sinister, calculating powers that march forward seeking victory, unshaken by the countless lives that must be sacrificed to achieve it. Chess, however, is a game of two sides, black and white, and Zweig pushes his allegory even further to represent this duality. As in the ‘blind’ games played in Dr. B’s head, Germany undergoes schizophrenia of sorts, declaring war on itself by seeking to exterminate those within, be it for their religious or political views. While chess becomes a solace to Dr. B, it can also be observed as a metaphor of National Socialism – what had roots as something empowering, something to cling to in order to rise up from the depth of depression (ie. his solitude or the state of Germany post-WWI), can become something fierce, violent and destructive as history has revealed and as is seen in the mania that grips our hero in this tale. [image] Zweig displays a mastery over his writing much as his characters do over chess. While the subject matter is sure to weigh heavy on the mind¹, the writing comes across effortlessly and pleasingly, almost as if it were intended to purvey an uplifting, humorous tale. I had a laugh as Zweig probed my own literary pretentions, casting Czentovic’s vain disinterest and quick removal from the vicinity of a chess match between two ‘third-rate’ players as being ‘as naturally as any of us might toss aside a bad detective novel in a bookstore without even opening it, he walked away from our table and out of the smoking room.’ The language flows and manages to embrace the reader through its simplicity, although it drags along a heavy burden with it. There was one aspect of the narrative that specifically caught my attention, and as I am still just a blind child testing the waters of literature, I would like to present to those of you whom I look up to this query of mine. Zweig often has his narrator connect the dots for the reader, such as when Czentovic states that he allowed the draw to happen, saying ‘I deliberately gave him a chance’, a few lines later the narrator asserts that ‘as we all knew, Czentovic had certainly not magnanimously given our unknown benefactor a chance, and this remark was nothing more than a simple-minded excuse for his own failure.’ In my initial read of the book I had written that I found some elements to seem overly explanatory, though as Traveller so eloquently pointed out (see comments below), Zweig uses a nested-narrative style and the author and characters point of views are separate, with many of the dot-connecting moments being rational details the narrator would add. Something I enjoy about this website is the ability to connect and discuss books with people and gain a new perspective. Another thing I enjoy is being able to revisit my own thoughts and see how they have changed/developed/etc over the years. Thanks to everyone who has ever engaged on book chat here, it makes for a really fulfilling experience. Chess Story is a tiny powerhouse of depth. The conclusion had me pacing back and forth in the snow smoking a cigarette to calm the ever-increasing beating of my heart. It is horrific, it is harrowing, it is pure brilliance floating from the page. Despite it’s small size, this is not a novella to be taken lightly, as it will leave a dark cloud over your thoughts once the final page has found its way into your heart. Zweig is a master of the human psychology, and a master and condensing such potent messages into a tiny novella. The clash between an uncaring, calculating intellect and the manic but human mind of a hero will grip you until the end, which comes both mercifully soon (this book is easily read in an hour), yet far too soon. The allegory is ripe and shakes you to the core. 4.5/5 ¹ The fact that Zweig eliminated his own map shortly after completion of Chess Story will come as no surprise, for the darkness this story wallows in is something that an optimistic mind wouldn’t dare approach. As Nietzsche said: ‘ if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you’. When I was at the edge of my teenage years, a former English teacher and close friend of mine warned me of wallowing in the darkness of literature and philosophy, telling me ‘the longer you flirt with darkness, the more it seeps into your soul’, which, while being a spin on the Nietzsche quote, has never left the back of my mind. From that I learned to climb out from the depths and appreciate things that satisfy a lighter side of myself, the white side of the chessboard, without spending all my time feeding the darker side. Without such guidance I wouldn't be here to write this today. ‘But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, a unique yoking of opposites, ancient and yet eternally new, mechanically constituted and yet an activity of the imagination alone, limited to a fixed geometric area but unlimited in its permutations, constantly evolving and yet sterile, a cogitation producing nothing, a mathematics calculating nothing, an art without an artwork, an architecture without substance, the only game that belongs to all peoples and all eras, while no one knows what god put it on earth to deaden boredom, sharpen the mind, and fortify the spirit? Where does it begin, where does it end?’ ...more |
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| 0720612683
| 9780720612684
| 0720612683
| 3.67
| 9,707
| 1967
| Jul 01, 2016
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it was amazing
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‘I was afraid the dream might turn out to be real…. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark p
‘I was afraid the dream might turn out to be real…. Something in her demanded victimization and terror, so she corrupted my dreams, led me into dark places I had no wish to explore. It was no longer clear to me which of us was the victim. Perhaps we were victims of one another. Stunningly surreal and chilling, Anna Kavan’s final novel, Ice, is a frightening plunge into the icy darkness of the human mind and heart. Written with a fitful urgency, the reader flows on the glimmering prose across swirling imagery of desolate landscapes beset by an impending apocalypse, as the narrator continuously pursues a woman known only as ‘the girl’ while struggling to anchor himself to the elusive, ever-deteriorating reality. Through spiraling hallucinations and indefinite descriptions, reality becomes nothing but a translucent veil giving shape to the real violent and grim truths that exist only in abstraction. The blurring of reality and unreality that occurs gives these sinister abstractions a staging ground to take form within in order to explore the otherwise unspeakable darkness that leads people to make victims of one another. Nothing in Ice is ever certain or concrete. Characters are not given names and reality is only tasted in fleeting moments, ‘but only as on might recall and incident from a dream.’ Told through the tormented mind of a narrator who—within the first 10 pages—openly admits to suffering from daytime hallucinations, the reader is forced to be led by the hand through this menacing novel by someone they cannot fully trust. Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado and his use of the unreliable narrator immediately come to mind through this narrators vague descriptions and elusive explanations to his afflictions, much like the intentionally unspecified ‘thousand injuries’ in Poe. There is, for instance his explanation of the girl: ‘Systematic bullying when she was most vulnerable had distorted the structure of her personality, made a victim of her, to be destroyed, either by things or by human beings…. It made no difference, in any case she could not escape.’ ¹ Despite being alluded that it was a cruel, obdurate mother that inflicted such psychological injury, there is nothing to ground this to reality and justify his claims. We have only his observations of the girl, much of which may be distorted and our own impression is further distorted as we observe her already believing it to be true and using our glimpses to justify our pre-disposed conclusion instead of constructing our own. The same goes for the slowly creeping apocalypse, a wall of ice ‘marching in relentless order across the world, crushing, obliterating, destroying everything in their path’, the consequence of constant world wars which lead to this new ice age. However, the science behind the ice is only vaguely surmised, more as if playing at a guess, and the reader is occasionally reminded that ‘no reliable source of information existed’. Kavan uses repetition to its glorious, full potential, constantly reminding us of the vague premises to reinforce their believability and tricking us to perceive something formless as concrete. The elusive nature of the novel serves a secondary purpose beyond misdirection, as it allows the reader to experience the story and settings exactly as the narrator sees and comprehends them. The landscapes and the narrative are co-dependent metaphors of one another. ’There were many small islands, some of which floated up and became clouds, while formations of cloud or mist descended and anchored themselves in the sea. The white snowy landscape below, and above the canopy of misty white light, the effect of an oriental painting, nothing solid about it. The town appeared to consist of ruins, collapsing on one another in shapeless disorder, a town of sandcastles, wrecked by the tide’The narrators own fractured mind controls our sense of time and reality, and often, and without warning, we are sent into some unreality, some brief fantasy and then dropped back into the plot as if nothing had occurred. ‘The hallucination of one moment did not fit the reality of the next,’ our narrator reflects, ‘I had a curious feeling that I was living on several planes simultaneously; the overlapping was confusing’. As the novel progresses the seamless hallucination sequences aren’t as obvious, and the novel suddenly drives forward at break-neck pace taking us through spy-dramas, courtroom scenes, war-stories and other edge-of-your-seat escape stories that we must ingest whole and wonder where the fantasy and reality may have blurred. Tiny hints of obvious unreality present themselves occasionally, such as producing a ‘foreign automatic weapon’ when one wasn’t present earlier, however, the all we can truly do is hold on tight and enjoy the thrill-ride. Time itself is subject to the narrators own distorted mind, as events are mentioned that he once observed that could not have occurred within the boundaries of time presented in the scenes, and the positioning of the opening scenes is a bit cumbersome to place along the timeline. The narrative almost feels cyclical at times. There are many different methods of addressing these incongruities depending on how the reader interprets the novel, yet it would appear that nothing in the book aims towards one certain conclusion or meaning. Instead, Kavan seems to write to give a wide interpretability because the real issues at play are very abstract and intangible, and it appears she would prefer to keep them that way in order to allot them their full force. Ultimately, depriving the reader of lucidness and conclusiveness brings the uncomfortable, uncertain tone of the novel to life. The surrealist qualities are elevated to near maddening proportions by taking any safe-guards away from the reader and forcing them to grasp desperately at the intangibles. Brick by brick, Kavan builds only one certainty in this novel – the destructive powers of man. ‘An insane impatience for death was driving mankind to a second suicide, even before the full effect of the first had been felt.. Each scene and setting is beleaguered by references to wars past and present, ‘everywhere the ubiquitous ruins, decayed fortifications, evidences of a warlike bloodthirsty past’, and the encroaching ice and it is always at the forefront of the mind that the world is in a perpetual state of violence. This violence is said to be the cause of the icy apocalypse, a world collapsing both figuratively and literally due to mans ‘collective death-wish, the fatal impulse to self-destruction’. Even the response to destruction is more destruction as wars rage on in increasing intensity to match coming end. ‘By making war we asserted the fact that we were alive and opposed the icy death creeping over the globe,’ we are told, the narrator not missing out on the obvious ironies. He looks at the actions of those around him with disgust and dismay, saddened when encountering a violent brute of a man as being ‘the kind of man who was wanted now’ and placing himself in league with a civilized, admirable man that is brutally murdered for no reason saying he ‘was my sort of man, we were not like that rabble’ to distance himself from the bleak violence. Yet, he knows he cannot escape it and is constantly drawn towards the fighting, joining the army for a time believing he ‘was involved with the fate of the planet, I had to take an active part in whatever was going on’. The narrator’s method of misdirection leads one to wonder where his loyalty and morality really lies*. The war-torn, doomed world is a mere backdrop for the evils that play out within arms reach of the narrator as he embarks on his crusade for the girl. ‘I was totally absorbed in that obsessional need, as for a lost, essential portion of my own being,’ he admits, ‘Everything else in the world seemed immaterial’. The real heart of this novel is the relationship with the girl, and the narrator freely declares the world around him as questionable, as a mere veil of reality where he must conduct his search. While the universal message of destruction and more powerful groups such as the warring armies victimizing one another is chilling, Kavan directs us to the more poignant and disturbing victimization one person can inflict upon another, especially one they love. The interplay between the male characters of the husband, the warden, the narrator and their experiences with the girl show an alarming portrait of obsessive, sadistic possession. The girl ceases to be considered an equal human and becomes nothing more than chattel. ‘It was clear that he regarded her as his property. I considered that she belonged to me. Between the two of us she was reduced to nothing her only function might have been to link us together.’These malignant pleasures of victimization are at the core of each scene, real or unreal, and illustrated through the vibrant imagery of each stark landscape which Kavan paints with her words. ‘All of this was happening, but with a quality of the unreal; it was reality happening in quite a different way.’ The surreal plotline becomes a place for her abstract ideas to flicker in and out of physical form but their malevolent nature is too poisonous to exist in glaring reality so reality must fold up and falter in order for them to truly rear their ugly heads. Hallucinations occur so we can look them in the face and make sense out of non-sense, horrific ideas are structured in a way to make them tangible enough to process. The narrator himself cannot even fathom his own depravity, and suffers from unrealities, or projects them onto others because he cannot face the blinding truth². Kavan presents a humanity that deserves the destruction that it receives, and this is the most horrific aspect of the novel. It makes one wonder if they are blind to their own moral deformities, conditioned to accept them as normal because we are so able to rationalize and gloss over the troubling aspects of ourselves. One must question if they are actually some damnable beast writhing in their own bile yet thinking it smells of roses and projecting onto society and those around them their own personal iniquity. What else is truly alarming is the way the victims become conditioned to accept these monstrosities, playing right into the degredation and violence. Kavan seems to admonish this behavior, creating a borderless world of victimization that damns both parties. ’In the delirium of the dance, it was impossible to distinguish between the violent and the victims. Anyway, distinction no longer mattered in a dance of death, where all dancers spun on the edge of nothingness.’It isn’t so much an attack on the victim, as it is an attack on the ways it is so easy to succumb to behavior that can make oneself into a villain. Anna Kavan was known for these startling perspectives on humanity. Her own life is a fascinating story. Born Helen Woods in what was assumed to be Cannes in 1901, she changed her name to Anna Kavan while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown following the end of her second marriage. The name Anna Kavan, the protagonist of her 1930 novel Let Me Alone, brought with it a new personality and writing style. Beyond suffering from mental illness, she was a lifelong heroin addict³. She died in 1968 of heart failure not long after this novel was published, but before dying she burnt all her diaries, correspondence and other links into her private life to ensure that she would become ‘one of the world’s best-kept secrets’. This fascinating woman had an incredible knack for prose and a sharp, disturbing insight into human nature. For readers interested in further insight into Kavan herself, they will be pleased to know that many of her books contain thinly-fictionalized biographical elements. Books like Asylum Piece cover her mental states and time spent in the asylum, Sleep Has His House hints at her sorrowful childhood, and her addiction to heroin and her open disgust of humanity is unapologetically broadcast in her short story collection Julia and the Bazooka. This novel is one of the most unique and engrossing literary events I have encountered. To give it a genre would cheapen the novel, as it both is and isn’t science fiction and horror, being a work of literature as elusive as its own narrative. The prose will surround and penetrate your heart much like the wall of ice in the novel as it builds the gorgeously surreal images to dazzle your mind. The subject matter, and the tone, is bleak and chilling, and exposes a violently disturbing vision of humanity, yet it is a book that you want to hug tightly as you race through the streets yelling to everyone that they should read it. As menacing as a nightmare, yet as soothing as a pleasant daydream, this book scratches an itch that few other books have been able to reach. 4.5/5 ‘I was oppressed by the sense of universal strangeness, by the chill of approaching catastrophe, the menace of ruins suspended above; and also by the enormity of what had been done, the weight of collective guilt. A frightful crime had been committed, against nature, against the universe, against life. By rejecting life, man had destroyed the immemorial order, destroyed the world; now everything was about to crash down in ruins.’ ¹ The girl, ‘forced since childhood into a victim’s patter of thought and behavior’, is here further victimized by her lack of name. Although ‘woman’ would be a more age-appropriate term for her, the usage of ‘girl’ is delivered with an extremely negative connotation that implies her as weak, a fragile and innocent ‘glass girl’ with no will of her own. Her physical appearance, pale and frail, is also used to highlight her weak and innocent nature, making the narrators own personal ‘indescribable pleasure from seeing her suffer’ all the more sadistic despite his own assertion that ‘I disapproved of my own callousness, but there it was. Various factors had combined to produce it, though they were not extenuating circumstances’. It would appear the narrator is trying to be upfront (this admission coming right at the beginning of the novel) to gloss over his sadism, but reflection on his word choices reveals the residue of the disturbing truths he is attempting to misdirect the reader from. ² (view spoiler)[It is debatable, but there is strong evidence to indicate that the warden and the narrator are one and the same person. There are moments of half-clarity when the narrator recognizes his own denial and notices the inconsistencies in his fantasy. ‘I seemed to be looking at my own reflexion [sic]. Suddenly I was entangled in utmost confusion about which of us was which, We were like halves of one being, joined in some mysterious symbiosis. I fought to retain my identity.’ The husband may very well be the same character as well. In the introduction, Christopher Priest asserts that the warden and the husband are the same man, but says nothing of the narrator. The multiple interpretative quality of this book is one of its strongest aspects. (hide spoiler)] ³ Christopher Priest’s introduction discussed that many critics have unsuccessfully attempted to view the ice as a metaphor for Anna Kavan’s own heroin addiction. This overly self-conscious footnote serves more as an excuse for awkwardly placing the biographical information at the end of the review. The novel is best served by being examined on its own, as the details of the authors life are so engrossing that they easily lead towards the disservice of the Intentional Fallacy, as Priest discusses with the heroin-as-ice metaphor. That said, other novels of hers, particularly Asylum Piece or Sleep Has His House, have been interpreted as being highly-autobiographical. The ice, like much of the symbolism, seems to be reflective of many different ideas, but a corner stone to it's meaning may be (view spoiler)[the silent and white aspect of it that the narrator frequently mentions. It seems it is a fresh start, a blank, pure whiteness to cover up all the ugly and violent aspects of humanity and himself. He often speaks of how it will end all wars and engulf the earth in silence, a silence he so wishes for because his own actions are unspeakable. He is drowning in his and the worlds evils and wishes for them to be purified in their own destruction. (hide spoiler)] [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 2013
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Jan 08, 2013
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May 30, 2012
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Paperback
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| 0143039377
| 9780143039372
| 0143039377
| 3.75
| 7,790
| 1898
| Nov 29, 2005
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really liked it
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‘Love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.’ The passions and desires ‘Love became the world’s beginning and the world’s ruler; but all its ways are full of flowers and blood, flowers and blood.’ The passions and desires of young love, and the frustration of love torn apart by society, is a source of considerable energy that has been harnessed by writers through all of history. Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun’s 1898 novella, Victoria, draws on this energy to fuel his inextinguishable prose and return to the theme of doomed love, a theme characteristic of his impressive oeuvre. Although this theme was the heart of Pan, Victoria takes a different approach stylistically, poetically, and most of all, in the behavior of the protagonist. Within this tragic tale of two star-crossed lovers, Hamsun explores the complexities, hopes and inevitable destruction of love in a world ordered through social class as he weaves a multi-layered metafictive prose that marks the dawn of a bright new era for his novels. Published only 4 years after Pan, a tragic tale of failed love set in the northern wilderness, Victoria evinced a period of major artistic growth and maturity in Hamsun’s already potent literary pen. According to the excellent introduction provided by translator Sverre Lyngstad, Hamsun wrote in a letter during this period between novels that he had ‘tired of the novel, [and] always despised the drama,’ so he had taken up writing verse, which he considered ‘the only literature that is not both pretentious and insignificant, but only insignificant’. The time spent harnessing the power of poetry is immediately apparent from the first page. Having become tighter and slimmed down to near-poetic verse, the prose simply blossoms upon the page. The striking variance in style between his early, gritty, psychologically intense works including Hunger and Mysteries, and later novels such as Growth of the Soil (a crucial work that, as well as being heralded as his ‘masterpiece’, was cited by the Nobel committee as a primary impetus for awarding him their prestigious prize) seems to meet up and pivot upon this novella. Victoria retained his early themes of doomed love, obsession and focal character with manic dispositions - which still continued throughout his body of work, becoming used more for the traits of supporting characters and secondary plotlines – while striking out into different narrative styles and the more streamlined storytelling that shone best in Growth. Hamsun began to keep dialogue to the bare minimum, a strong departure from the loquacious ravings of Nagel in Mysteries, choosing to supply the gist of conversations and leaving the particulars to be filled in through the creative impulses of the reader. Hamsun was a master of revealing only what was absolutely necessary, which helped to drive his novels forward and give him total narrative control. Even a good deal of the action is revealed after the fact, recounted by the characters in a way that gives rise to suspicions of absolute validity. ‘Asked what love is, some will say it is nothing but a wind whispering among the roses and then dying down. But often it is like an unbreakable seal that holds for a lifetime, until death. God created it in so many different kinds and has seen it endure or perish’. Doomed love was a favorite theme of Hamsun’s and appears in some for in almost every one of his books and short stories (the short stories in particular show Hamsun sharpening his skills and insight into this topic). In Victoria, the reader watches the doomed dance of two lovers as they waltz through a series of ups and downs. The novella bounces gracefully between intense amorous excitement and disheartened grief and sorrow, as both the imagery and Johannes’ mood is victim to the whims of his beloved. When love is on his side, love is compared to ‘a summer night with stars in the sky and fragrance on earth’ and Johannes harnesses his joy into frantic writing and singing to the heavens, the latter much to the chagrin of his neighbors, creating an opportunity for Hamsun to allow Johannes to tell of his off-stage escapades in artistically expressive language prone towards exaggeration. In these manic, feverish states, he can live, eat and drink off the feasts of love, ‘coatless, he looks out on the world like a half-clothed madman who has gotten drunk on happiness during the night’. However, when love is withheld, the world around him is bleak and love is only as pleasant as ‘ugly toadstools’. When Victoria implies that social class and social expectations make any union of their hearts impossible, revoking any possibilities of a future between them after days before having pledged her love to him, Hamsun sets Johannes off down a dingy street lined with impoverishment to highlight these social conditions. Unlike the protagonists in Hamsun’s previous novels, Johannes has a steadier grip of his faculties and does not lash out irrationally despite dipping, or elevating, himself into feverish moods. In fact, the central scene of the novel displays Johannes in a calm, sociable demeanor during a party, a scene in other novels where disaster and outlandish behavior was certain to erupt. Johannes takes compliments and aggression with class and dignity, being the one who comes out smelling of roses. Perhaps this reflects upon the character of Hamsun. There is a strong autobiographical aspect to many of his novels, and his early works which document the rise and fall of irrational moods and behavior may have been a method through which Hamsun was able to step back and observe himself from an outsider’s vantage point in an attempt to gain some insight into his own character. Having aged in experience and wisdom, such irregular nuances may have dulled leading to a more composed and collected protagonist. Little hope for a sustainable happiness is to be found from the story of Johannes and Victoria as Hamsun further emphasizes his jaded desire to watch love burn in flames than shine with the stars. ‘That’s the way things are,’ lectures an old poet, ‘naturally, you don’t get the women you should have’. Yet, somewhere in this bitter fate, there is a bittersweet sense of beauty. In the burden of never obtaining the one we really love, we can forever desire them and remain in the emotionally intense and radiant infatuation stage forever. However, true love is only reached through accepting and wholly embracing the good and bad of a person, making the ‘love’ more obsession than actual love. Either way, this book is a great example of how many of our problems are of our own doing. So many times does the object of desire lay itself at a characters doorstep, only to be turned away to satisfy some inner angst and pride that will be regretted later. When two individuals become a pair, one inevitably seeks the affections of another, newer infatuation. Hamsun displays quite a bit of pessimism towards young love. The author was quite the wanderer in the younger half of his life, much like most of his protagonists, and was very popular with women. As this was how he understood life, his protagonists are always graced with the same attractive force, even when they are as famished and foul as Hunger’s narrator. The brief and many affairs he may have encountered or observed in his travels must have given him this outlook, and the apparent heart-breaker status of his that can be read between the lines of his books may be the driving force of creating so many characters just to watch their hearts crumble. The passion and the devastation of his tragic romances are sure to ring true in the hearts of an empathetic reader. Through the use of what James Wood describes as ‘free indirect narration’ in How Fiction Works, Hamsun skillfully threads the non-participatory narration with Johannes participatory observations and opinions, dipping in an out of his head with a clever word choice, exclamatory phrase within the larger sentence or brief interjection of perspective. Take, for example: ‘The starlings were chattering from the branches above their head. Well and good. God grant them a long life… He had made a speech for her at dinner and torn his heart out; it had cost him dearly to correct and cover up her impertinent interruption, and she hadn’t even thanked him. She had picked up picked up her glass and taken a draft. Skoal! Look at me, see how prettily I drink…[sic]’ Johannes and the narrative voice are threaded so tightly you can pass over the seams without even noticing Hamsun has gone back and forth between third and first person perspectives. It is especially difficult to readily deduce as Johannes is a poet and author, and what the reader may first attribute to Hamsun as a poetic turn of phrase or choice of word really belongs to Johannes. This affords the novella its vast prose and poetical form and allows lenience and forgiveness for turning to such exaggerated flowery language. The metafictive duality of the novel is served through the technique as well. We have Hamsun, a writer creating a novel with traces of autobiography about a writer with similar traits who takes the loves and losses from his own life and molds it into his own poetry and novels. Through the small but exquisite samples of Johannes own work, we see Hamsun writing poetry in full-fledged Norwegian romantic-style that retells the recent events of Johannes life, contained within a novel that serves as a poetical literary concoction of events from Hamsun’s life. The meta-language of Victoria comes in many, many layers. Sverre Lyngstad seems to be one of the better, if not the best, English translators of Hamsun's work. After sampling a few other translations through reading several other Hamsun novels, Lyngstad seems to enact the best balance of flow, prose, and accessible syntax. As an added bonus, his introductions are always stuffed with excellent biographical knowledge and viewpoints on the novel. However, the reader should be warned that the 'introduction' would better serve as an 'afterword' as they are rampant with spoilers and other various plot points that could really ruin the book. While this book did not strike me quite as powerfully as his others, notably Pan, with which is it best compared to, Victoria shows the Norwegian novelist at a crucial turning point in his career and is a short, sharp and intense work that highlights and amplifies many of the themes from its predecessors. While Pan offered more of the emotionally charged and ambiguous behavior that bound Hamsun’s novels forever to my heart, mind and soul, Victoria provides an impressive poetic depiction of the emptiness felt when love, which had previously swelled and burst free from the heart, is denied, covered up, or gift-wrapped and given to someone detestable. This book invokes true, uncomfortable feelings, yet delivers them so exquisitely that we can only be comforted and left desiring more. 3.75/5 I would recommend starting with Hunger or Pan ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 25, 2012
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Sep 27, 2012
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Dec 31, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0141180676
| 9780141180670
| 0141180676
| 3.84
| 11,087
| 1894
| Sep 01, 1998
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really liked it
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-I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth. -And which do you love best? -The dream. With his succinct 1894 novel, Pa -I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth. -And which do you love best? -The dream. With his succinct 1894 novel, Pan, Knut Hamsun once again displays his prowess of capturing the human psychology and detailing the internal conflicts that arise through the sudden rise and fall of moods. Through Glahn, the capricious man who has taken up residence within the northern wilderness and the socialite Edvarda, Hamsun demonstrates how even the slightest romantic collision of two souls can create a spark whose burn is felt long after the romance has begun to smolder. The irrationalities that exist in such a torrid affair between man and woman come alive in his prose and fiery dialogue as the reader experiences the pains and paranoia of chasing after an elusive lover. Appearing in print only two years after Mysteries, an incredible account of an irrational stranger much like Glahn (and my favorite of his books), Hamsun appears much more matured, confidant and focused in his writing. While Mysteries was slightly bloated, Pan is trimmed down to a potent simplicity and directness. Returning to the first person narration similar to Hunger, the reader is treated to a troubled and unreliable mind to lead them through this tragic love story. The first section of the novel is Glahn’s journal, which he insists was purely ‘ to while away the time’ and amuse himself, shows him reflecting on the events of a previous summer. While he repeatedly mentions that Edvarda no longer crosses his mind, he continuously winds his way back to her in his accounts. The second section, written from an acquaintance of Glahn’s a year a short time after the journal, offers a slightly different image of the man. While Glahn portrays himself as socially inept, unattractive and clumsy, the second narrator displays him as a powerful foreign force in the world with a charm and chiseled looks that make him irresistible to women. As the title would imply, this is a story of the forest with Glahn as a ‘Pan’ of sorts. He is a perfect blend of man and nature, coexisting with the wild in perfect harmony. While he is a hunter, he only kills what he must for bare survival, never taking more than what he needs to eat in the immediate future. He is also seemingly superhumanly in-tuned with nature, being able to tell the exact time through the flowers and trees and seemingly able to commune with the land on which he dwells. While his descriptions of society and the people he interacts with are exceedingly simplistic, the true prose of the novel blossoms in his depictions of nature and the reader feels the glowing sun, hears the rushing waters and smells the trees and grass through his words. In a novel of love and lust, the intimate scenes between him and his various lovers occur primarily offstage while the sexual imagery is reserved for nature: ’In the night hours of the forest, great white flowers have suddenly opened out, their chalices spread wide, and they breathe. And furry hawk-moths bury themselves in their petals and set the whole plant quivering. I go from flower to flower; they are in ecstasy, and I see their intoxication.’ He is Hamsun’s image of pure masculinity and a ideal blend of both creative and destructive powers, a mythical being both beast and man. Hamsun decorates the novel with allusions to fables, the most obvious the name of Glahn’s dog, Aesop, to help bring this idea of Pan alive in a realistic setting. If Glahn is a symbol of the wild, then Edvarda is a symbol of society. She is well of high standings both financially and socially, playing hostess to many soirees and moving between multiple suitors. The pair are doomed from the start as Hamsun illustrates the infinite divide between well groomed society and the primal realm of the wild. Glahn is at ease in the forest, yet feels completely awkward and ill at ease in social settings and displays bizarre behavior and strange outbursts. Edvarda is a creature of irrationality as well, playing men off of one another and escaping into the wilderness in secret to satisfy more basic instincts of passions under the cover of night. The frustration felt by Glahn as he grapples with his passion practically chokes the reader. He is just as in-tune with the body language of others as he is with nature, and is constantly analyzing Edvarda in social settings. In the forest, she goes wild with emotion, yet in society she is cold, calculating and inaccessible. She dismisses his advances yet keeps him on the line with one sweet smile or insistence that he be the last to leave, yet refuses to let on to any romantic entanglement in the company of others. It is a blockage of passion that crushes souls and forces one to act out if only to be acknowledged. Always being one with nature, the romance is played out with the seasons with fall darkening the tone of the novel and ushering us towards certain chilly doom and destruction. Never has there been an author whose words have sung better harmony to the melody of my soul as Hamsun. His characters come alive wonderfully through his careful prose and marvelously plotted out shifts and moods. This is a novel for anyone who has loved, anyone who has lost, and anyone who has squirmed in frustration over a ill-fated tryst. Despite the meager size of the novel, Pan is another knock out and delivers just as much emotional impact and literary brilliance as Hamsun’s other novels while being much warmer and heartfelt than his previous works while setting the grounds for a further investigation of the rift between nature and society that he explores in Growth of the Soil. Satisfy your primal instincts and enter the dark forest of Hamsun’s mind. The dream of love always burns brighter than the loves we use to bandage our wounds. 4.5/5 A quick note on the translation I read the James W. McFarlane translation, an older translation published by Noonday (of which Goodreads seems not to have in their various editions). While it still delivers, I would direct anyone towards a different translator. The newer Penguin edition would probably be a better choice. While Hamsun’s poetic might is strong enough to punch through, I felt I was missing some of the flow that I glimpsed in his other books. It was as if McFarlane was hitting all the right notes, but not letting them truly flow. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 14, 2012
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Aug 20, 2012
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Dec 31, 2011
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Paperback
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| 0811215040
| 9780811215046
| 0811215040
| 4.16
| 4,831
| 1989
| Jun 17, 2002
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really liked it
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The Melancholy of Resistance is a novel that truly haunts long after the reading has ended. Krasznahorkai creates a dark allegorical novel that is sat
The Melancholy of Resistance is a novel that truly haunts long after the reading has ended. Krasznahorkai creates a dark allegorical novel that is saturated with dread and overflowing with malice as he depicts a city overrun by strange happenings and menacing mobs of strangers during the icy winter. Even if you were to read this on a warms summers day, he would make you feel as if the world outside your window was frozen over and treacherous. This novel deserves a more wide-spread critical acclaim and its infectious nature has lead me to recommend it to nearly everyone I know, and now I am recommending it to you. Krasznahorkai employs a nearly opaque style of loquacious, dense prose, penning beautiful long sentences with no breaks. The whole novel reads as only a handful of paragraphs. Like a train, this dense prose starts to slowly pull away and the novel picks up a frightening momentum as the reactionary chain of event pushes forward on pure dreadful inertia towards an apocalyptic-like resolve. You will not be able to stop once you the momentum has picked up; this novel will have such a hold on your mind that you will be compelled to drop everything and keep reading. The reader is strapped to this and watches it all unfold in nearly real-time. It is no surprise that Bella Tar's film portrayal is built with a mere thirty nine long flowing camera shots as the novel seems to follow along the characters without ever blinking or breaking the slow grinding pace. We watch a woman ride a train, return home and be visited by Mrs. Eszter, then the 'camera' of language follows Eszter from this scene, home, through the entire evening, hovering about her room as she sleeps, and far into the next day before there is ever a break from the constant flow of the scene. Krasznahorkai's ability to keep this up and maintain an even, continuous flow is highly impressive. I understand the comparison to Herman Melville that this novel receives, and it goes beyond the mere fact that both are allegorical tales surrounding a large whale. Krasznahorkai's verbose style is as eloquent as Melville and both maintain a fluent vocabulary that will keep a dictionary by your side. Fyodor Dostoyevsky is another author used for comparison with this novel, which also has merit. While the two authors style of writing is quite varied, their use of characters flows in a similar vein. Like the great Dostoevsky, the characters in Melancholy are often used to represent a specific idea, value, or force of nature. This is not a detractor of the characters however, as they are fully fleshed out and multidimensional and exist in a realistic sense appropriate and fitting to the world of the novel. There are many characters, each one a bit bizarre and frayed by the world, but each offers an insightful look into their humanity. The philosophical musings that furnish the story are the real meat of this novel. Krasznahorkai has some very brilliant and occasionally controversial ideas that he is compelled to tell you, and the reader will soon realize this novel is an allegory for his philosophical thoughts on existence. In his world, order and chaos, creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin and must coexist in a proper balance. Krasznahorkai shows how all is meant to end in chaos and destruction eventually and to try and deny this is futile and foolish. Yet this is what allows for creation and rebirth. He even shows how biology is wired for its own destruction after death in a brilliant, highly medical descriptive fashion. All his discussions of heavenly bodies in space begs the question, is there a natural order, or are we all spinning at random and merely victims of empty chance and reaction. The question of faith is brought up and Krasznahorkai shakes some ideas loose upon the reader. There is an excellent passage where this question is brought about through the metaphor of musical theory. It is easily understandable by all, but a bit of knowledge of music theory and research into theory and classical composition will shed light on Krasznahorkai's stunning intellect. Also, the idea of power is a overarching theme here. This is an incredible novel, although it should be noted that it is a bit dense and difficult and isn't a quick read. Krasznahorkai is a verbal virtuosos and this should be read if only to view his ability with language and to marvel at how seemingly effortlessly he maintains a constant, unblinking flow through the few days that make up this novel. There is plenty to read into in here, as the whole novel can be taken as allegory and you will have much to ponder for days to come. Months later I still think about this book and have revelations into its meaning. The Melancholy of Resistance is a frightening look into the world, but is at times laugh out loud funny as it pokes at humanity and the ridiculousness of it all. Please find and read this novel, Krasznahorkai should be much wider read than he is. 4/5 ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Oct 06, 2011
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Oct 21, 2011
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Sep 24, 2011
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Paperback
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