jasmeet
This is one of the earliest plays of Shakespeare. Despite the fact that sometimes too many things, sub-plots if you will, are taking the action forward, I enjoyed the exchanges between characters; like that of Talbot and his son and even as Joan is first introduced to the stage.
The character of Joan, however, seems problematic and calls for a re-look at Shakespeare's sources.
Early writing. Historical play. This is the first of a trilogy; so perhaps it is better to view this play in light of the rest in the trilogy. To do that I say, “On to the next!”
Getting a teenager hooked on to ideas of Philosophy, that too diligently wanting to follow its steady arc chronologically, is always going to be an uphill task. But not if you believe in the imaginative power of ideas yourself; certainly not if you figure an ingenious way out to break away from the classroom tediousness, to take those ideas with you and sail across in a boat ride, and then to hold them back just enough until you start again, and even more so if you know how to get dogs deliver them mail for you.
Sophie's World is a fresh way to look at the history of thoughts thought by the most genius minds over the millennia. The innovation in telling the history enjoins the imagination of telling a story; the story of Sophie Amundsen who, could it be argued, is more real than her real counterpart.
The coming of age for Sophie involves the creative play of splitting or rather multiplying her self ... to evolve into her indubitable double. Is it Hilde reading Sophie or the other way round, turned frantically over the pages, truly amounts to the best bits of the book. The postmodernist blend of fiction and history enables the flight of philosophy which the readers, much like Sophie, would be comfortable to take.
About the ‘philosophy' as such, it would be better to hark as much at those other counterparts of the Western world. That the narration jars towards the final scenes is probably an outcome of the literary pull of closing down the circle that deserves to start all over again.
One cannot complain much albeit when at your helm is a girl who knows what is she dealing with and who is firmly taking steps to affirm her journey.
Sheer brilliance. In terms of an author toiling with honest description and putting heart and soul in the vacant word-bodies, here is a reading which without doubt makes the reader toil too, but one of the many rewards I received by reading it was a meeting with few of the most wonderful characters I have come across. The book ends brilliantly. Again, like most Saramago books, it ends to begin again. Marvellous.
I believe it is doing as much injustice to put a novel into categories we so like to label and start discussing them in wake of the so called stalwarts of so and so masters of those genres, as it is to express concerns like one's inability to keep up with an author's tiring style of writing , his oblitreration of punctuation in writing.
Sometimes, it is far more important to persevere with the tale and especially when itis a result of pure and honest imagination.
Here is a novel wherein, once again, the novelist so aptly questions our notions of dreams and realities. Once again, Saramago addresses the lone human heart and its ramblings that , I am convinced the author believed, are the true sustenance of human beings.
Vividly imagined and beautifully written, ‘A House of Pomegranates' turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me. The finesse and flow with which Wilde writes is on full display of imagination especially in the stories, ‘The Birthday of the Infanta' and ‘The Fisherman and his Soul'.
I am particularly impressed by the capacity of the author to venture into a fantasy world that looks so real and that too with lesser detail. Indubitable credit goes to Wilde for having the ability to bring literary qualities out of the Tales. Recommended to the readers of all ages.
Read long ago, The Mill on the Floss is among the first books which introduced to a world that books of this magnitude portray. A lot to relate to the character of Maggie Tulliver... the places, the subdued sentiment of the nineteenth century character and a sensibility I could imagine as that of George Eliot's own, everything is still fresh... In the mind's eye doth cherish the mill and the floss.
The next time I am going to read Ficciones I am sure my rating of the book is going towards a considerable increase if, at all, there is scope for it actually in my wonderment of an author who I believe writes with words which I felt were more like ebullient grains of sand. These stories are like essential morsels in the world of literature which, on discovery, leave you speechless and jubilant at the same time. Crisp sandy granules perfecly symmetrical and assymetrical alike is what I fill my palms with once I'm in the middle of a nameless tale... only to end up with empty clean hands once agian at the end of it. Only this time, I look at my own hands and they feel strangely transformed for they touched something entirely new.
Writing is an art. And the structural mazes conceived by the words of Borges makes you believe so. I loved the experience of reading each story in its own way... There are some I could get more deeply into than others but maybe with Borges it's not the story that you read but perhaps it is that each (Borgesian) story leads to stories... to those uninhabited steps which somebody did tread and... there you are... all of a sudden... a witness to the tracks.
More than anything, I believe, Borges checks the reader, tests and contradicts him/her with another possibility of another perception which you thought has not been and would not be perceived. What we think is there surely, he has the power to render fictive... and vice versa.
INTRIGUING. SPECULATIVE. PERCEPTIVE. PROFOUND.
In particular, I enjoyed ‘Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote', ‘An Examination of the Work of Herbert Quain', ‘The Library of Babel', ‘Funes', ‘Theme of the Traitor and Hero'. I took time to finish this anthology... I relished each moment... I visited a literary space rife with palpable words of imagination... I read and breathed beautiful forms of literary fiction.
I read this book in fewer sittings than I had anticipated. Going back to its first page now and re-sounding its aptly rendered epigrams have nudged me in seeing how.
Perhaps the writer, I thought, initially anticipated and situated the ‘darkness', being ‘sensed' or felt, taking over the landscape and everything inside it, a bit too much; but it never took too long for the story to accompany the reader, who starts moving along the subsequent narrative progression.
Prophet Song starts with that feeling... the night darkness envelops or takes everything one by one – and brings that with it which is simply understood as the presence that overtakes the rest – or has always been there.
“This feeling that came into the house has followed.”
Paul Lynch deserves an earnest read for the effort he's been able to put in sensitizing the central character, disallowing it to enter any sentimentalized loops, and yet carving the hand of a tale that hits, as it must, at the right place. In that capacity, this book is a story of our times, and a story for everyone; people who actually constitute society, countries, institutions, states-and-their-constitutions, and ultimately history.
Thanks to the dedicatedly invested narrative focus on the character of Mrs. Eilish Stack, the reader is enabled to delve into the suffering of an upright human being. The near nauseating atmosphere, is also liberating in the way of seeing us, or the ones of the many of our fellow ‘privileged' inhabitants on the planet, to have turned away from the others' suffering, more often than could be deemed common...
“Something inchoate within her knowledge has spoken...”, only to transform into “some inchoate feeling of death, of victory and slaughter in vast numbers, of history laid under the feet of the vanquisher...”.
At its most vulnerable self, suffering through her body and mind, Eilish shows unbelievable resilience, which is testament to what the human self is worth, and which is why our policy makers must attest to it beyond their rhetorical word speak. Else, we are working day and night in speeding towards manifesting the author's deepest concerns legitimizing the thought that,
“History is a silent record of people who didn't know when to leave ... a silent record of people who could not leave”.
I just finished this book,, and ran straight to the computer, searched reviews and views, and here I am, reading your thoughts on the novel.(already read I mean)
Well I am from India, the place where most of the action from the novel takes place, and I can say that I didnt find the book as difficult as some readers express; lengthy, though, it is.
Reading the reviews and hearing the views, as I settle back in my chair and contemplate my own experience, I could say that, for me too, the book has been more of an experience than a joy of reading. Ofcourse, it has so much to say as far as the history, mythology and culture of the subcontinent is concerned. And yes, the author has spent much creative energy in exhibiting a style of his own. And then the gamut of characters really.
As far as I am concerned, I could not enjoy this book as much, didnt stir me from inside, couldnt connect with my I dont know what, perhaps for the reason that too much of dramatic happenings, too much of action, starts taking away the essential space for your own thought process to unfold and connect with the essential nature of the piece of art you come across or the book you hold on for days and eyes fixed on the page to get your being requited somewhere.
There is a writing which is the result of a clear conviction born out of an emotional depth irrespective of the genres it is weaved in; and there is writing which is more a product of a sleight of hand and talent.
Midnight's Children is, I am afraid, for me a book of the latter category.
Not taking away the book's assured promise of the magic box contents, it nonetheless would not matter a great deal to leave it for a single reading.
‘The Lives of Things' is a collection of six short stories originally published as ‘Objecto Quase' in 1978. The epigraph by Marx marks, uninhibitedly, themes political and social which the author essentially elaborated upon in his later fiction, especially in ‘The Stone Raft', ‘The Cave' and the tour de force, ‘Blindness'.
‘The Chair' opens the book, in the stream of consciousness narration, and obliquely reflects on the political state of affairs under the Salazar regime. The subject of the fall of the chair takes the reader on a trip to imagine, understand and question the conceptual contours of this fall which, in the case, was inevitable. Still, the approach of presenting the manifestation of the rot, the behind-the-scenes work of an essential and yet seemingly inadvertent opposition set up by the too much-ness of one's proclaimed authority, is tongue in cheek to say the least.
‘Reflux' and ‘Things' basically construct the Oppressor-Oppressed dialectic. Yet, Saramago's expression holds the bite, early fiction as it is:
“All kings are great, by definition and birth:
any king who might wish otherwise will wish in vain...”.
The surreal premise of ‘Things' discloses how everyday objects like doors and stairs are up in rebellion against the authoritarian state and its comfortable and safe ‘class' representatives. It is ‘things', here, which question the one thing which is at grave and hopeless danger of being overrun by death: the humane in humans; what is it to be human? Do they need to care?
‘Embargo', another political allegory, alludes to the fears and apprehensions instilled in human mind through control over resources which depend upon technology to get realized. Fear turns into a device of power, while authority exploits the vicious circle set in and maintained over time; the result being a nightmare situation for the vulnerable human subject.
With ‘The Centaur', allegory moves away from connotations underlying the first four stories within the socio-political discourse. A parable enthused with philosophical enquiry into the being of man, the tale presents a lone-surviving centaur, banished from the realms of gods and driven out to roam endlessly on Earth. The tale is charged with existential situations, talks about the horse, the man and the centaur; characters with individual selves and also a common self (or neither of the two): “Half a man. A man.”
The final story, ‘Revenge' is more of an image-story, portrayed with not more than a double stroke of a narrative-brush; captivating and disturbing it is nonetheless.
I really don't know if I am going to review this book just here and now.
This is my first of any Murakami works and though I did find it monotonous, repetitive at times, I ended up wanting more of what and how these principal characters were playing in my mind's eye.
What I do want to say, first of all, is that it made me want more... and I firmly feel I am going to read more, much more by the author. The ending of the book was a bit abrupt for me and certain plot references in the first half of the book seemed contrived and intentional as far as the lives of the characters double up... or the way these lives are introduced to the foreign reader. But there are a few things that must be given a mention in my view. In the end, you feel you have acquainted yourself with the character mentality thoroughly and it seems you know them, met them and started following up there lives somewhere. This is made possible for the expansive dimensional space Murakami chooses to exert over the reader.. It goes bit by bit and this presumably threefold space sort of sucks the reader into the world of 1Q84.
I found some of the literary references concise and well placed...
Apart from Aomame and Tengo, I could really feel Ushikawa develops into a full blood and bones character. His and Tamaru's interaction, for me, is one highlight of the book.
I feel like writing more on this book... just as I have stated that it makes me read more by Murakami. The possibility of story-telling manifests pretty crisply through this book, and though I don't find it a great book I'd say you cannot put down or ignore the parallel magical world witnessed so.
What I had suspected to be its apparent weakness turned out to be its spirit by the time the book approached its ending. For all the myriad images of life's many ironies, there is a seething intended unemotionality with which Flanagan goes about describing, narrating, and weaving the tales around characters that come alive as and when they give themselves up in the face of their daunting lives one by one.
With themes of loneliness and its likeliness in life amidst the great hopes and expectations that human beings harbor in their minds, only to gradually fleet away as unfulfilled feelings, the author spans through lives that are connected by suffering on the Burma Death Railway and beyond.
In not attempting to pretend and find explanation for why the world is as it is or isn't, the book is able to illuminate more moments of the palpable human space with a strangely aloof but rooted sincerity of observation:
“It was as if life could be shown but never explained, and words – all the words that did not say things directly – were for him the most truthful”.
The Narrow Road to the Deep North is able to portray human nature in its raw and complex form; through a manifestation of a spectrum of choices, actions and responses grounded within domains of love and war. The incessant being of being painfully human, in more pain than otherwise, is deftly stringed by the author in a stream-of-sorely-poetic-consciousness:
“When he was away from her he tried remembering more of her perfect imperfections”.
Flanagan ensures that his characters remain flawed; the imperfections manifesting in an abundance of words, and gestures. He would rather not endorse you to really like or dislike anyone. That's one thing I have the taste of in my mouth after leaving the text. For a large part, as a reader, I found myself on a narrow road which eventually led my mind to a deep north, or a deep somewhere.
Post-reading, the surprisingly abstract title of the book got its pulse to start beating; it gradually
settled within the structure of ironies and paradox of remembrances and forgetting. The poetic warmth of haikus with which the timelessness of time is treated around the unbearable physical pain and drudgery of war is one of the glimpses the narration portrays:
“Days and months are travellers of eternity, he read. So too the years that pass by.”
Ultimately, however, the book is about the strange milieu humans are made up of; and their heart that is sinewed with what is fragile and yet what is stoically strong like an endlessly enduring quest.
Definitely a novel of thoughts; read it some time back in my course. But even though the haziness with which I remember the central plot and its offshoots clouds my perception about the work, I would say Bellow's themes beautifully reflect that which we call ‘the modern' human being.
A need to resolve for a re-read. Sure.
Evocation. Tabucchi's Requiem is expressive of simple and honest feeling. Feeling of what one sees, observes, remembers, shares and cherishes. A day in the city of Lisbon is what it is about; but more than that, it gives the place back its voice from the past; the footsteps of an anonymous and not so anonymous a past accompany the city's space. I liked Tabucchi's approach to keep things simple and let the tale or story, if you will, unfold... like the day that unfolds and folds to welcome that which does not stop.
The review caption asks, “What do you think?”
what do I think?
certainly think and see to it that thinking lies in thinking in layers ... of mainly the same thing. And after this bomb of a thought, regarding what have been and are being deemed as things, are to be thought and rethought...
from here, until next time
The words just speak for themselves... great command over writing. Interesting plot. Enjoyed it.
Joseph Walser's Machine
~ Goncalo Tavares
The machine weighs heavy on everything it seems in ‘Joseph Walser's Machine'. Heavier still is the common metaphor running throughout the novella which binds the allegory-laden, sparse and stoic landscape of the book. History is a machine. War is a machine. And the scant rare emotions as well as the excitement, thus generated if at all in the characters' routine existence, get imbued by the machine.
Set somewhere that could be anywhere, the context of war that inspires, terrifies, numbs and disgusts in equal measures, reflects our times bursting at the seams.
“Joseph Walser's expression of perfect concentration irritated Klober
and the other workers, but at the same time it was clear that the act of
pulling the table didn't constitute an affront. It was unthinkable that Walser
could commit an affront.”
In Joseph Walser, Goncalo Tavares creates the hero of this age, the apparently unassuming, self-effacing lead who would survive anything by doing the least, by not interfering, and not questioning the status quo. And yet, here is an existential hero who a Camus or a Kafka would probably be keen to look into. Would the same not go for Dostoevsky?
Walser embodies his own alter-ego, a character trait that defines the postmodern protagonist. While his counterpart, Klober, interweaves the third person narrative with an endless monologic tirade of rhetoric, and thus expressing a closed circuit surveillance device that runs the danger of exploding itself for has it worked or laboured the machine a little bit too much.
The narrative framework gets only a scattered cast. They dice, they play; whittling the weekends of their lives. On the machines they work, assuming to revel in alternating the perfectly ‘rational' rhythm of reality of the times.
Even so, the wars that are fought or avoided, carry a common humming thread. It projects a life that breeds inactivity within an impassioned sense of the mechanical. Guilt, shame, pride or passion are evenly unfelt.
And yet, the writing deploys, emerging slowly like life's own invisible designs, the element of the unexpected, however weak:
“An absurd thought even popped into his head, that he should start
stealing a piece, albeit a tiny one, from each weapon in the city, and thus,
through almost imperceptible means, put an end to all the bother. “A oneman
conspiracy,” said Walser, and he couldn't stop smiling at how
ridiculous the idea was.”
Tavares attempts to halt his tale in an interesting-unforeseen turn of events, in a situation where a series of monotonous actions get overwhelmed by their own mechanistic discipline. In the end, something must give way to the human oddity. For being odd in the perfectly even levelled life is something that still remains at the heart of humanity.
The writing is deliberately succinct, which allows the reader to remain vigilant of the paragraphic climb. The reader feels what lies behind the façade without an actual commonplace deployment of that much used device, irony. The dual character of the linguistic register could be perceived, at times, almost immediately. As a semantic whole, Joseph Walser's Machine must be considered a definitive unit in the “Kingdom” series.
Life is an ‘aesthetico-existential process'. Among the many arguments stringed to the thread of human ecology, it is perhaps this that Guattari would kindly nod to the most. In ‘The Three Ecologies', it is the artists who are considered to provide the most profound insights into the human condition:
“ ... that poetic utterances can anticipate scientific advances by decades”.
As a conceptual construct our life is a work in progress ... to learn to develop or respond to the chance events and the singularized points that take us in a new direction; or let us recognize a situation as a potential ‘new' direction.
Ecosophy as an idea is illuminating in the sense that ‘involves', it allows to dissolve the various forms of mental attitudes we develop. The philosophy of ecology, of human environment within the natural world, which we are mainly a ‘part' of and not owners or bearers.
In light of the model of ‘Ecosophy', Guattari stresses the generation of these singular events that mark one's ‘mental ecosophy', as well as their regeneration for subsequent resingularization of such moments, most importantly, to combat what is depicted as “fatalistic passivity”.
This sort of ‘idle' passivity which results from the mass media's “infantilization of opinion” is what freezes whatever discourse our ‘social ecosophy' is engaged in, and thus emanates an atmosphere of a mass-passivity which endangers our already fragile ‘environmental ecosophy'.
As a document of cultural theory, ‘The Three Ecologies' is an interestingly relevant read for our times. Guattari proposes what he terms as a ‘heterogenesis' – a ‘process of continuous singularization' of subjectivity.
The poetic utterance and a simultaneous discursivity attached to its innumerable ambiguous chain of signification allows us to reject reductionist dominant interpretations of the individual, the society and the natural ecosystem. And the relevance of individual as well as collective participation of human beings in questioning the homogenization of a mass-discourse is restored.