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| 3.72
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| 1835
| 1977
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Gogol is primarily known as the father of Russian realism and for his grotesquely evocative descriptions, but 'Taras Bulba' represents a completely di
Gogol is primarily known as the father of Russian realism and for his grotesquely evocative descriptions, but 'Taras Bulba' represents a completely different mode for the author. Taking inspiration from the Greek epics and the nationalistic poems of French knights, Gogol creates his own story of national identity. Though elements of realism and satire creep into the book, its tone is largely that of an action film: exciting, gritty, and passionate. Like almost any such national work, this fervor often overwhelms the story, romanticizing the Cossack life and ridiculing its enemies. This one-sided hyperbole is most infamously represented by Gogol's Jews, who aren't painted in a particularly flattering light. The antisemitism isn't any worse than Shylock or The Jew of Malta, but Gogol's evocative characterization did inspire racist depictions by later authors; though anyone would seem like a schlub when compared to the epically handsome and strong-willed Cossacks. Most of the work is simple and unadorned, sometimes to the point of repetition and inelegance. There are some stylized descriptions here and there, and these stand out as some of the most lovely and thoughtful passages. The philosophy tends to be as simple as the prose, though again, there are some subtler shades here and there. The plot itself is straightforward, but not oversimplified. It resembles in many ways the stories of love, war, and honor that Shakespeare adapted for his plays. As an adventurous romance, the story is amusing, fast-paced, and uncomplicated. There are promising hints of Gogol's strengths as a characterist and satirist, but the unsophisticated nationalism leaves much to be desired; even if such romantic sentiments never really die. There are still those to whom warlike manliness and jingoistic pride in both country and faith are worthy ideals. Violent propaganda rarely goes out of style, and the manly warmongers still pull out Taras Bulba now and again as a reliably uncomplicated vision of righteous war. But war and politics are the subjects of art, not its masters; simple patriotism cannot elevate this work to the level of Gogol's more thoughtful and layered works. Like 'The Song of Roland', such short-sighted epics may be of historical interest, but not social or literary interest. ...more |
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Jul 31, 2009
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Jul 15, 2009
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| 045121658X
| 9780451216588
| 045121658X
| 3.78
| 19,955
| Oct 1935
| Oct 04, 2005
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liked it
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Lewis' greatest strength as a writer is his sense of social satire, bolstered by his humanist treatment of characters. He sees people as ultimately fl
Lewis' greatest strength as a writer is his sense of social satire, bolstered by his humanist treatment of characters. He sees people as ultimately flawed, always in danger of succumbing to their fears, insecurities, and egos. However, this is no reason to condemn man or his works. Humanists do not expect people to overcome their flaws, like idealists, nor to descend into apologetic guilt in hopes of redemption. The hope for humanists is that we may come to recognize our flaws, and then to limit their effects. The danger in this is treating it with self-righteousness, since basing self-worth on a recognition of one's flaws rather defeats the point. Coming to terms with our faults is not a superlative act, but merely a definition of how we live our lives. Thus, the work of the satirist is to make clear and obvious the faults that we humans share. It is often delightful to read satire: the author takes something hidden in our society, something unspoken and taken for granted, and pulls it from the darkness, so that it appears as if by magic, now undeniable and unable to slink back into hiding (at least until we stop looking). Magicians and comedians may pull this same trick again and again, and it will always delight us to realize that there is no such thing as 'ordinary', there are only unquestioned assumptions. It takes an active and a creative mind to archive the effect of revealing the normal to be strange, and this is what we call 'wit'. Lewis has wit, and he is able to uncover the things we take for granted, to startle us or make us laugh with little, innocuous things. In 'Elmer Gantry', he takes on a very grand assumption--religion--and its related hangers-on, and deals blind faith a deadly blow. In 'Elmer Gantry', there is no need to ask about god, since all the faith sent his way is intercepted by righteous men before it has a chance at anything holier. In 'It Can't Happen Here', Lewis provides commentary on another favorite target of satirists: politics. In particular, he aims at the rise of totalitarian tyrants who are granted power by the frightened masses. He was inspired by the rise of Hitler and Mussolini in Europe, and even though his book was written before World War II, it still reflects the fears such regime changes inspired in America's liberal republic. The most evident of these fears, as presented by Lewis, is the idea that the unwashed American masses might enthrone their own warlike tyrant. His grand political critique is an early example of the literary movement to critique and explore the methods of totalitarianism, from which sprung Koestler's 'Darkness at Noon' and the dystopian politics of '1984', 'Fahrenheit 451', and 'Brave New World'. Unfortunately, Lewis is not content with poking holes, as he was in 'Elmer Gantry', but also falls to the temptation of presenting some his own ideals, his own solutions to the problems of totalitarianism. His condemnation of the uneducated and the self-serving tempts him to become occasionally righteous about his own intelligence. The protagonist sometimes acts as a fairly transparent author surrogate, especially in the philosophical unfolding of the denouement. Other times he allows him to be small, flawed, and narrow-minded, but the lows are more infrequent than the highs. The satire becomes incomplete because there are places Lewis himself cannot or will not extend it. Since Lewis fails to see the place that totalitarianism has for Academia, for intellectualism, he also fails to present the rise of totalitarianism as entirely credible. As Machiavelli observed, a people who are unused to being ruled openly by a prince will chafe at that rulership. For them to progress into a political state with which they are unfamiliar requires a dramatic social and economic shift. Though America had experienced a comparatively drastic low in the Great Depression, it was never as serious nor as pervasive as the effects of the global economy in Europe. It was this level of poverty and desperation which allowed a few men to gather up power, because the majority of people were too concerned with getting food to properly resist. Lewis could have posited a more severe extension of the Depression to account for the American political shift, or an event grand enough to create a culture of fear by which the dictator could grab power, as Hitler did after the burning of the Reichstag, or Crassus in the Third Servile War. Perhaps it was Lewis' intent to present a more gradual and insidious shift in America, but if so he quickly abandons this for a more extreme depiction. To show both becomes merely hyperbole, and hyperbole without sarcasm is disingenuous. It conflicts with his ostensible purpose of presenting an otherwise realistic progression of events. The wavering of his satire, whether in character or facts, weakens it as a whole, and though the purpose and vision of the work have borne fruit in others of the genre, from Orwell to Heller, Lewis' seminal and enjoyable totalitarian critique falls short of the less biased satire of 'Elmer Gantry'. ...more |
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not set
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Jun 07, 2009
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Apr 24, 2009
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Paperback
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| 0141439521
| 9780141439525
| 0141439521
| 3.79
| 50,032
| Sep 1885
| Jan 29, 2008
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Sep 03, 2008
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Aug 13, 2008
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| 1585424579
| 9781585424573
| 1585424579
| 4.15
| 1,366
| 1950
| Mar 23, 2006
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None
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not set
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Jul 15, 2008
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Hardcover
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| 0192835505
| 9780192835505
| 0192835505
| 3.57
| 13,338
| 1887
| Oct 22, 1998
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liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Dec 10, 2008
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Jul 08, 2008
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Paperback
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| 0679772871
| 9780593688137
| B0CBYNXV4Z
| 4.13
| 50,557
| Nov 1924
| 1996
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None
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not set
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not set
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Apr 17, 2008
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Paperback
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| 0307265439
| 9780307265432
| 0307265439
| 3.99
| 923,280
| Sep 26, 2006
| Oct 02, 2006
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did not like it
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The Road is unsteady and repetitive--now aping Melville, now Hemingway--but it is less a seamless blend than a reanimated corpse: sewn together from d
The Road is unsteady and repetitive--now aping Melville, now Hemingway--but it is less a seamless blend than a reanimated corpse: sewn together from dead parts into a lumbering, incongruous whole, then jolted to ignoble half-life by McCarthy’s grand reputation with Hollywood Filmmakers and incestuous award committees. In '96, NYU Professor Alan Sokal submitted a paper for publication to several scientific journals. He made it so complex and full of jargon the average person wouldn't be able to make heads or tails of it. He wrote a conclusion that would deliberately flatter the preconceptions of the journals he submitted it to. As he predicted, it was accepted and published, despite the fact that it was all complete nonsense. TheSokal Affairshowed the utter incompetence of these trusted judges. They were unable to recognize good (or bad) arguments and were mostly motivated by politics. The accolades showered upon works like The Road have convinced me that the judges of literature are just as incompetent (and I’mnot the only onewho thinks so). Unlike Sokol, McCarthy didn't do it purposefully, he just writes in an ostentatiously empty style which is safe and convenient to praise. Many have lauded his straightforward prose, and though I am not the most devoted fan of Hemingway, I can admire the precision and economy of a deliberate, economical use of words. Yet that was not what I got from The Road: "He took out the plastic bottle of water and unscrewed the cap and held it out and the boy came and took it and stood drinking. He lowered the bottle and got his breath and he sat in the road and crossed his legs and drank again. Then he handed the bottle back and the man drank and screwed the cap back on and rummaged through the pack. The ate a can of white beans, passing it between them, and he threw the empty tin into the woods. Simple? Yes. Precise and purposeful? Hrdlt. The Road is as elegant as a laundry list (if not as well punctuated). Compiling a long and redundant series of unnecessary descriptions is not straightforward, but needlessly complicated. We're supposed to find this simplicity profound--that old postmodern game of defamiliarization, making the old seem new, showing the importance of everyday events--but McCarthy isn't actually changing the context, he's just restating. There is no personality in it, no relationship to the plot, no revealing of the characters. Perhaps it is meant to show their weariness: they cannot even muster enough energy to participate in their own lives, but is the best way to demonstrate boredom to write paragraphs that bore the reader? A good writer can make the mundane seem remarkable, but The Road is too bare to be beautiful, and too pointless to be poignant. Once we have been lulled by long redundancy, McCarthy abruptly switches gears, moving from the plainness of Hemingway to the florid, overwrought figurative language of Melville: "The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves." There is no attempt to bridge the two styles, they are forced to cohabitate, without rhyme or reason to unite them. In another sentence he describes'dead ivy', 'dead grass'and'dead trees'with unerring monotony, and then as if adding a punchline, declares them'shrouded in a carbon fog'--which sounds like the world's blandest cyberpunk anthology. Another example: "It's snowing, the boy said. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire like the last host of christendom." McCarthy seems to be trying to reproduce the morbid religious symbolism of Melville when he plays the tattered prophet in Moby Dick. But while Melville's theology is terribly sublime and pervasive, McCarthy's is ostentatious and diminutive, like a carved molding in an otherwise unadorned room. Nowhere does he produce the staggeringly surreal otherworldliness Melville achieves in a line like"There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within". Often, McCarthy's gilded metaphors are piled, one atop the other, in what must be an attempt to develop an original voice, but which usually sounds more like the contents of a ‘Team Edward’ notebook, left behind after poetry class: "...Query: How does the never to be differ from what never was? I love how he prefaces that like an Asimov robot. Sardonic Observation: I'd almost believe he was one, since he has no understanding of beauty or human emotion. Biting Quip: However, he violates Asimov's first law, since his awkward prose harms human ears. Sometimes, smack in the middle of a detailed description of scraping paint with a screwdriver, we suddenly get a complex jargon term which few readers would understand. These terms are neither part of the world, nor are they aspects of specialized character knowledge, so I cannot assign them any meaning in the text. One of the basic lessons for any beginning writer is 'don't just add big words because you can', it's self-indulgent and doesn't really help the story. It would be one thing if it were a part of some stylistic structure instead of bits of out-of-place jargon that conflict with the overall style of the book--more textual flotsam for us to wade through. The longer I read, the more mirthlessly dire it became, and the less I found I could take it seriously. Every little cluster of sentences left on its own as a standalone chapter, every little two-word incomplete sentence trying to demand importance because it actually had punctuation (a rare commodity), every undifferentiated monosyllabic piece of non-dialogue like a hobo talking to himself--it all made the book overblown and nonsensical. It just stared me down, like a huge drunk guy in a bar daring me to laugh at his misspelled tattoo. And I did. I don't know if my coworkers or the people on the bus knew what 'The Road' was about (it was years before the movie), but they had to assume it was one hilarious road, with a busfull of nuns hiding a convict in disguise on the run from a bumbling southern sheriff and his deputy; a donkey is involved. Without mentioning specifics, I will say the notorious ending of the book is completely tacked on, in no way fits with or concludes any of the emotional build of the book, but instead wraps up, neat and tight. It certainly bears out McCarthy's admission on Oprah that he"had no idea where it was going"when he wrote it. We can tell, Cormac. As you may have noticed from the quotes, another notorious issue is the way the book is punctuated, which is to say, it isn't. The most complex mark is the a rare comma. It's not like McCarthy is only using simple, straightforward sentences, either---he fills up on conjoined clauses and partial sentence fragments, he just doesn't bother to mark any of them. He also doesn't use any quotes in the books, and rarely attributes statements to characters, so we must first try to figure out if someone is talking, or if it's just another snatch of 'poetic license', and then determine who is talking. Sure, Melville did away with quotes in one chapter in Moby Dick, but he did it in stylistic reference to Shakespeare, and he also seemed to be aware that it was a silly affectation best suited to a ridiculous scene. It's not only the structure, grammar, figurative language, and basic descriptions which are so absurdly lacking: the characters are likewise flat, dull, and repetitive. Almost every conversation between the father and son is the same: Father: Do it now. Remember, you won't get little tags so you know who's speaking, it'll all just be strung out in a line without differentiation. Then they wander around for a bit or run from crazy people, and we finally get the cap to the conversation: Son: Why did (terrible thing) just happen? And that’s it, the whole relationship; it never changes or grows. Nor does it seem to make much sense. The characters are always together, each the other's sole companion: father and son, and yet they are constantly distant and at odds, like a suburban parent and child who rarely see each other and have little in common. McCarthy never demonstrates how such a disconnect arose between two people who are constantly intimate and reliant on one another. But then, McCarthy confided to Oprah that the is book about his relationship with his own son, so it makes sense why the emotional content is completely at odds with the setting. Perhaps he just sat down one say and thought“I’m an award-winning author and screenwriter who has a somewhat distant relationship with my son. You know what that’s like? That’s like the unendurable physical suffering of people in the third world who are trying to find food and escape crazed, murderous mobs.”So then he wrote a book equating the two, which is about the most callous, egotistical act of privileged self-pity a writer can indulge in. At least now I know why the characters and their reactions don’t make much sense. The boy is constantly terrified, and his chief role involves pointing at things and screaming, punctuating every conflict in the book, like a bad horror film. Cannibals and dead infants are an okay (if cliche) place to start when it comes to unsettling the reader, but just having the characters react histrionically does not build tension, especially when the characters are too flat to be sympathetic in the first place. Another Creative Writing 101 lesson: if you have to resort to over-the-top character reactions to let the audience know how they are supposed to feel, then your 'emotional moment' isn't working. It's the literary equivalent of a laugh track. You know what’s more unsettling than a child screaming when he finds a dead infant? A child not screaming when he finds a dead infant. And really, that’s the more likely outcome. The young boy has never known another world--his worldisdeath and horror. Anyone who has seen a picture of a Rwandan boy with an AK can see how children adapt to what’s around them. And you know what would make a great book? A father who remembers the old world trying to prevent his son from becoming a callous monster because of the new one. But no, we get a child who inexplicably reacts as if he’s used to the good life in suburbia and all this death and killing is completely new to him, even though we’ve watched him go through it half a dozen times already. The characters never grow numb to it, they never seem to suffer PTSD, their reactions are more akin to angst. Every time there is a problem, the characters just fold in on themselves and give up. People really only do that when they have the luxury of sitting about and ruminating on what troubles them. When there is a sudden danger before us, we might run, or freeze, but there’s hardly time to feel sorry for ourselves. There is no joy or hope in this book--not even the fleeting, false kind. Everything is constantly bleak. Yet human beings in stressful, dangerous situations always find ways to carry on: small victories, justifications, or even lies and delusions. The closest this book gets is ‘The Fire’, which is the father’s term for why they must carry on through all these difficulties. But replace ‘The Fire’ with ‘The Plot’ and you’ll see what effect is achieved: it’s not character psychology, but authorial convenience. Apparently, McCarthy cannot even think of a plausible reason why human beings would want to survive. There is nothing engaging about a world sterilized of all possibility. People always create a way out, even when there is none. What is tragic is not a lack of hope, but misplaced hope. I could perhaps appreciate a completely empty world as a writing exercise, but as McCarthy is constantly trying to provoke emotional reactions, he cannot have been going for utter bleakness. The Road is a canvas painted black, so it doesn't mater how many more black strokes he layers on top: they will not stand out because there is no contrast, there is no depth, no breaking or building of tension, just a constant addition of featureless details to a featureless whole. Some people seem to think that an emotionally manipulative book that makes people cry is better than one that makes people horny--but at least people don’t get self-righteous about what turns them on. This is tragedy porn. Suburban malaise is equated with the most remote and terrible examples of human pain. So, dull housewives can read it and think‘yes, my ennui isjust like a child who stumbles across a corpse’,and perhaps she will cry, and feel justified in doing so. Or a man might read it and think‘yes, my father was distant, and it makes me feel like I live alone in a hostile world I don’t care to understand’;he will not cry, but he will say that he did. And so the privileged can read about how their pain is the same as the pain of those starving children they mute during commercial breaks. In the perversity of modern, invisible colonialism--where a slave does not wash your clothes, but builds the machine that washes them--these self-absorbed people who have never starved or had their lives imperiled can think of themselves as worldly, as ‘one with humanity’, as good, caring people. They recycle. They turn the water off when they brush their teeth. They buy organic. They even thought about joining the Peace Corps. Their guilt is assuaged. They are free to bask in their own radiant anguish. And it all depresses me--which makes me a shit, because I’m no more entitled to it than any other well-fed, educated winner of the genetic lottery. So when I read this book, I couldn’t sympathize with that angst and think it justified, just like I couldn’t withHolden’s.I know my little existential crisis isn’t comparable to someone who has really lost control of their life, who might actuallyloselife. But this kind of egotistical detachment has become typical of American thought, and of American authors, whose little, personal, insular explorations don't even pretend to look at the larger world. Indeed, there is a self-satisfied notion that trying to look at the world sullies the pure artist. And that 'emotionally pure, isolated author' is what we get from theOprah interview.Sure, she's asking asinine questions, but McCarthy shows no capacity to discuss either craft or ideas, refusing to take open-ended questions and discuss writing, he instead laughs condescendingly and shrugs. Then again, he may honestly not have much insight on the topic. Looked at in this way, it's not surprising he won the Pulitzer. Awards committees run on politics, and choosing McCarthy is a political decision--an attempt to declare that insular, American arrogance is somehow still relevant. But the world seems content to move ahead without America and its literature, which is whyno one expects McCarthy--or any American author--to win a Nobel any time soon. This book is a paean to the obliviousness of American self-importance in our increasingly global, undifferentiated world. One way or the other, it will stand as a testament to the last gasp of a dying philosophy: either we will collapse under our own in-fighting and short-sightedness, or we will be forced to evolve into something new and competitive--a bloated reputation will carry you only so far. But then, the Pulitzer committee is renowned for picking unadventurous winners--usually an unremarkable late entry by an author past their prime. As William Gass put it: "the prize is simply not given to work of the first rank, rarely even to the second; and if you believed yourself to be a writer of that eminence, you are now assured of being over the hill" To any genre reader, this book will have a familiar and unpleasant taste, the same one LeGuin has often lamented: that of the big name author slumming. They pop into fantasy or sci fi with their lit fic credentials to show us little folk 'how it's really done'--but know nothing about the genre or its history, and just end up reinventing the wheel, producing a book that would have been tired and dated thirty years ago. Luckily for such writers, none of their lit fic critics know anything about other genres--any sort of bland rehash will feel fresh to them, as long as you have the name-recognition to get them to look in the first place. So, McCarthy gets two stars for a passable (if cliche) script for a sci fi adventure movie, minus one star for unconscionable denigration of human suffering. I couldn't say if McCarthy's other books are any good; I will probably try another, just to see if any part of his reputation is deserved, but this one certainly didn't help. All I see is another author who got too big for his editors and, finding himself free to write whatever he wanted--only proved that he no longer has anything worth saying. "Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are merely lists... Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what's always distinguished bad writing--flat characters, a narrative world that's... not recognizably human, etc.--is also a description of today's world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world... most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?"...more |
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1
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not set
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May 05, 2008
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Apr 01, 2008
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Hardcover
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| 0802130208
| 9780802130204
| 0802130208
| 3.89
| 278,884
| May 01, 1980
| Jan 1994
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I'm hesitant here, as anyone self-important enough to commit suicide is likely too self-important to be a thoroughly enjoyable writer, but even great
I'm hesitant here, as anyone self-important enough to commit suicide is likely too self-important to be a thoroughly enjoyable writer, but even great cynics are sometimes impressed by the procession of reputation. Just a little bit.
...more
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0
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not set
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not set
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Dec 14, 2007
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||||
| 0486298574
| 9780486298573
| 0486298574
| 4.05
| 87,002
| 1892
| Jan 01, 1997
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it was ok
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Roland Barthes talked about 'writerly' and 'readerly' books. I've struggled for a long time, myself, in trying to come up for terms to talk about the
Roland Barthes talked about 'writerly' and 'readerly' books. I've struggled for a long time, myself, in trying to come up for terms to talk about the differences between deliberate works and those which are too bumbling, too one-sided, or too ill-informed to make the reader think. While The Yellow Wallpaper brings up interesting points, it does not really deal with them. The text has become part of the canon not for the ability of the author, which is on the more stimulating end of middling, but because it works as a representational piece of a historical movement. As early feminism, this work is an undeniable influence. It points out one of the most apparent symptoms of the double-standard implied by the term 'weaker sex'. However, Gilman tends to suggest more than she asks, thus tending toward propaganda. It may be easy to say this in retrospect when the question "is isolating women and preventing them from taking action really healthy?" was less obvious back then. However, I have always been reticent to rate a work more highly merely because it comes from a different age. Austen, the Brontes, Christina Rossetti, and Woolf all stand on their own merits, after all. This symbolism by which this story operates is simplistic and repetitive. The opinions expressed are one-sided, leaving little room for interpretation. This is really the author's crime, as she has not tried to open the debate so much as close it, and in imagining her opinion to mark the final word on the matter, has doomed her work to become less and less relevant. This is the perfect sort of story to teach those who are beginning literary critique, because it does not suggest questions to the reader, but answers. Instead of fostering thought, the work becomes a puzzle with a solution to be worked out, not unlike a math problem. This is useful for the reader trying to understand how texts can create meaning, but under more rigorous critique, it is not deep or varied enough to support more complex readings. Unfortunately, this means it is also the sort of story that will be loved by people who would rather be answered than questioned. It may have provided something new and intriguing when it was first written, but as a narrow work based on a simplistic sociological concept, can no longer make that claim. The story is also marked by early signs of the Gothic movement, and lying on the crux of that and Feminism, is not liable to be forgotten. The symbolism it uses is a combination of classical representations of sickness and metaphors of imprisonment. Sickness, imprisonment, and madness are the quintessential concepts explored by the Gothic writers, but this work is again quite narrow in its view. While the later movement was interested in this in the sense of existential alienation, this story is interested in those things not as a deeper psychological question, but as the allegorical state of woman. Horror is partially defined by the insanity and utter loneliness lurking in everyone's heart, and is not quite so scary when the person is actually alone and mad. Though it does come from the imposition of another person's will, which is horrific, the husband has no desire to be cruel or to harm the woman, nor is such even hinted subconsciously. Of course, many modern feminists would cling to the notion that independent of a man's desire to aid, he can do only harm, making this work an excellent support to their politicized chauvinism. I won't question the historical importance or influence of this work, but it is literarily very simple. A single page of paper accurately dating the writing of Shakespeare's Hamlet would also be historically important, but just because it is related to the threads of literary history does not mean it is fine literature. ...more |
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not set
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Oct 2002
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Dec 14, 2007
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Paperback
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| 0192836730
| 9780192836731
| 0192836730
| 3.62
| 1,085
| 1834
| Aug 03, 2000
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really liked it
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Alright, so he's an old bastard. I know. He was generally wrong-headed and entirely conceited. He's also hilarious and witty. I would that all those w
Alright, so he's an old bastard. I know. He was generally wrong-headed and entirely conceited. He's also hilarious and witty. I would that all those who disagree with me could do so in such a pleasing fashion.
...more
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not set
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Mar 2006
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Dec 14, 2007
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Paperback
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| 0874068134
| 9780874068139
| 0874068134
| 4.02
| 25,203
| 1890
| 1996
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it was amazing
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In Asia, aphorism is a high art; there, the greatest of poems may be said in one breath. In the West, our greatest poems come in books numbered twelve
In Asia, aphorism is a high art; there, the greatest of poems may be said in one breath. In the West, our greatest poems come in books numbered twelve, and only the greatest of men can remember the length of them. However, we still maintain our aphorists, though often consider them as comical wits, would do well to remember the skill of indicating truth is with them. There is the poet, Nietzsche, who is also a philosopher and who summed up the goal of the aphorist well: "It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a whole book — what everyone else does not say in a whole book." There is the politician, Disraeli, who found that ruling men meant understanding a plural and remarkable simplicity. There is the self-concerned wit Wilde, who told us that genius lies in misunderstanding and is so widely and unknowingly quoted that it is a cliche. Speak what you will of Twain, but Bierce is America's entrant into the minute art. For his part, Vonnegut considered 'The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge' to be the single greatest short story of all Americans, and suggested anyone who hadn't read it was a 'twerp'. The man who copies the Psalms onto a grain of rice has condensed space, but the author who places the depth of a novel into a short story has condensed meaning. The utterly deliberate and unfettered Owl Creek is a definitively superior work, for the same reason that the man who strikes the bull's eye with his arrow by chance is never the equal to the one that may do so at his leisure. There is also an old French film which makes an excellent adaptation of this work, and which was once featured on the Twilight Zone, if that lends any notion of its quality. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Nov 2007
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Nov 29, 2007
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ebook
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| 0140449264
| 9780140449266
| 0140449264
| 4.30
| 928,294
| Aug 28, 1844
| May 27, 2003
|
liked it
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A sort of evil picaresque which I found too narrowly-focused to engage an ongoing interest. I love pere's Musketeers, but this one proved too melodram
A sort of evil picaresque which I found too narrowly-focused to engage an ongoing interest. I love pere's Musketeers, but this one proved too melodramatic and free of levity.
...more
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Nov 28, 2007
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 058601036X
| 9780586010365
| 058601036X
| 4.01
| 5,956
| 1927
| 1960
|
really liked it
|
This send up of religious institutions was so devestating that many religious leaders called for Lewis to be stoned to death for writing it. His bitin
This send up of religious institutions was so devestating that many religious leaders called for Lewis to be stoned to death for writing it. His biting, insightful, and humorous look at religious hypocrisy is as pertinant today as it was when it was first written. The pure strength of Lewis's prose is refreshing after reading more recent authors. His control and understanding of syntax, grammar, and words maintains a strength and clarity of voice throughout the work. However, he does not sacrifice wit or levity for all his precision. There are occasions when his passion overcomes him and his critiques fall a little heavy-handed, but these moments are rare and short. He never falls to the sort of surrogate lecturing that many 'political' authors do, and so does not risk boring or underestimating his reader. He certainly never partakes in the more grievous sin of lecturing the audience as the narrator. Indeed, he rarely makes a point towards his own opinions without undermining it with a little hypocrisy or hubris on the character's part. The absurdity of Voltaire's satire has nothing on the ridiculous yet believable world created by Lewis. Hyperbole is the haven of the idealist. Realism is more interested in engaging reason than inciting passion, and while Lewis's understated wit never insults his reader's intelligence, it still presents an unsettling and prescient view of power, ignorance, and the masses. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Aug 11, 2008
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Nov 28, 2007
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Mass Market Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0684843323
| 9780684843322
| B000CP5I9G
| 4.29
| 36,673
| 1987
| Jan 01, 1987
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liked it
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A writer whose self-absorbed mendacity cannot but shine through even in his completely unadorned and occasionally witty style. One wonders what he mig
A writer whose self-absorbed mendacity cannot but shine through even in his completely unadorned and occasionally witty style. One wonders what he might have been without the inescapable self-hatred which ended him.
...more
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Mar 2005
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Oct 27, 2007
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 3.93
| 5,326,925
| Apr 10, 1925
| 1925
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||||||
| 0525467564
| 9780525467564
| 0525467564
| 4.36
| 331,160
| Oct 14, 1926
| Oct 01, 2001
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it was ok
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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Hardcover
| ||||||||||||||
| 0974607800
| 9780974607801
| 0974607800
| 3.93
| 66,307
| Dec 1853
| May 01, 2004
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
|
Oct 2004
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Oct 26, 2007
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Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| B00196YR4E
| 3.68
| 211,524
| 1899
| Nov 01, 1994
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
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not set
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not set
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Oct 25, 2007
|
Mass Market Paperback
| |||||||||||||||||
| 0743237188
| 9780743237185
| 0743237188
| 3.97
| 66,609
| 1996
| Jan 24, 2002
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it was ok
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None
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Notes are private!
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0
|
not set
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not set
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Oct 24, 2007
|
Paperback
| ||||||||||||||
| 0140390650
| 9780140390650
| 0140390650
| 3.91
| 9,315
| 1902
| Aug 01, 1988
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really liked it
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I cannot believe that I sat in American Lit reading Hawthorne when I could have been reading this. If you have never heard of this book, then I am not
I cannot believe that I sat in American Lit reading Hawthorne when I could have been reading this. If you have never heard of this book, then I am not sure why; just as I am not sure why I had never heard of it. It is surely Romantic, and sometimes Heroic, but there is a depth of emotion, wit, and thought in this work which made me question how American it could be. Of course, the author spent some schooling-time in Europe, and holds a dear enough place for Austen and Shakespeare not to descend into the self-important drear which has so long left American Literature moth-eaten. However, it has also the rawness and adventure which we have been lead to expect from this frontier land. Both the dime-stores and megaplexes have profited so much from this sense of adventure that red-plumed explosions have become ho-hum. There is then a certain irony in the fact that in opening this book, I was shocked and surprised by its emotion more than I have been by an exploding car or knife-weilding killer. Perhaps that says something in and of itself about the repetetive nature of our arts: that we will make something uninteresting two times instead of something interesting once. I could not resist the gentle humor nor the deep-felt influence of both the high British and the Russian realists in this book, and found it surprised me not in the least because it took a road other than either the expected or the contrary. Though the author sometimes falls to that most grievous of sins: telling instead of showing, one gets the impression that this is because he knows his limits and would spare us the blunder of exceeding them. One also sometimes gets the sense of his desire to fondly remember this era, and to Romanticize it, but if that was ever a crime of Literature, it was only laid upon those we didn't like. I like The Virginian, and not the least of which because the author is humble enough to excuse himself from his crimes before making me do it for him. Too many modern books are started by the authors but finished by the readers. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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Oct 2007
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Sep 30, 2007
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Paperback
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J.G. Keely
>
Books:
fiction
(28)
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my rating |
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| 3.72
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liked it
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Jul 31, 2009
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Jul 15, 2009
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| 3.78
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liked it
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Jun 07, 2009
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Apr 24, 2009
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| 3.79
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liked it
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Sep 03, 2008
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Aug 13, 2008
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| 4.15
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not set
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Jul 15, 2008
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| 3.57
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liked it
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Dec 10, 2008
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Jul 08, 2008
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| 4.13
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not set
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Apr 17, 2008
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| 3.99
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did not like it
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May 05, 2008
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Apr 01, 2008
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| 3.89
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not set
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Dec 14, 2007
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| 4.05
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it was ok
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Oct 2002
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Dec 14, 2007
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| 3.62
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really liked it
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Mar 2006
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Dec 14, 2007
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| 4.02
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it was amazing
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Nov 2007
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Nov 29, 2007
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| 4.30
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liked it
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not set
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Nov 28, 2007
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|||||
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| 4.01
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really liked it
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Aug 11, 2008
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Nov 28, 2007
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| 4.29
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liked it
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Mar 2005
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Oct 27, 2007
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|||||
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| 3.93
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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||||||
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| 4.36
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it was ok
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not set
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Oct 26, 2007
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|||||
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| 3.93
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really liked it
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Oct 2004
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Oct 26, 2007
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|||||
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| 3.68
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not set
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Oct 25, 2007
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||||||
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| 3.97
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it was ok
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not set
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Oct 24, 2007
|
|||||
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| 3.91
|
really liked it
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Oct 2007
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Sep 30, 2007
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