I feel like I haven’t read a book quite this good in a long time.
There’s a certain sense of unfeeling, of numbness, in this work; it captures a woI feel like I haven’t read a book quite this good in a long time.
There’s a certain sense of unfeeling, of numbness, in this work; it captures a world viewed through a grey and colorless lens. Depression is often confused with profound sadness but, in reality, it is profound nothingness. It is a life without joy or sorrow: it’s just numbness and blankness. The Bell Jar captures this state incredibly well.
“To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream.”
The narrative is fragmented and retrospective; it is confusing and distorted: it captures a dark element of the human mind that is looking back at life without any sense of meaning or purpose. There is regret here and failed dreams, as the novel captures the crushing mundane reality that exists in their failure. It also captures a person who has not lived up to the expectations society has placed on her, and who cannot quite come to terms with who she is or who she wants actually be. It is told through the first person revealing a cold and depressed mind. It is intimate and direct.
In some ways the book highlights the dangers (and brilliance) of first-person narration. Sometimes it’s hard to know where Esther begins and Sylvia Plath ends. There are strong parallels between character, narrator, and author. I don’t want to get too much into the history of Plath’s life, but it’s plain to see when you read up on her biography.
"My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing."
Esther writes these words because she is also an author and I cannot help but see Plath here expressing this sentiment. The novel also focuses on Esther’s experience with men, none of which are positive and none of the relationships she does manage to have are particularly normal or healthy. They are superficial. There’s a lack of emotion in the writing and with her experiences. She just doesn’t seem to care, focusing only on direct perception rather than feelings because there is no feeling here.
“because wherever I sat—on the deck of a ship or at a street café in Paris or Bangkok—I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air.”
Nothing changes, nothing changes the mood no matter the location or experience. It is pure indifference. And it is sad to read about, to get a glimpse at a person this far gone and this unmovable that they think that suicide is the answer.
So, it is a tough read but an important one. It is a fantastic piece of writing, and one that we should all give a try.
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This is like a Jane Austen novel but without the substance, class, character and plot.
I’ll happily admit that I’ve struggled with Forster in the pastThis is like a Jane Austen novel but without the substance, class, character and plot.
I’ll happily admit that I’ve struggled with Forster in the past. A Passage to India was dramatically underwhelming in my estimation. I did, however, quite like Howard’s End but I think that may have been because of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, a fantastic piece of writing that paid literary homage to Forster and made his novel seem better than it actually was.
I feel like I should really like Forster. I should like the way he writes and the themes he plays with. I feel like I ought to appreciate what he does, but I just can’t because I find the writing so dull. Nothing happens! Now I am no stranger to slow writing, but this is something else entirely. Even the premise of the novel, the desire for a room with a view, felt a little lackluster and was in no way worthy of naming the book after.
I’ve been scrolling through the reviews here on Goodreads to see if I can find any critical ones. All the negative ones amount to the same point: it was boring. And I very much agree. This one failed to engage me in any way. So why two stars? I liked some of the descriptions and the dialogue. Forster can certainly write well on the surface, he just can’t create plots. At least, not ones I enjoy.
So I struggled to keep reading, I had to force myself to do so and this seemingly short novel felt much longer than it was. I was glad to finish.
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The beauty of The End of the Affair resides in its ability to capture the multifaceted nature of love in such a marvelous display of tremendous pain aThe beauty of The End of the Affair resides in its ability to capture the multifaceted nature of love in such a marvelous display of tremendous pain and anguish.
Love makes life worth living but it also makes us want to die. Love can drive us into madness or it can make us happy. Love makes us jealous and unreasonable and angry and it can turn us into something we don’t recognize. Love can be possessive and haunting; it can leave us feeling empty and dissatisfied when our needs aren’t met or it can be overwhelming and terrifying if we don’t quite know how to process it or deal with someone else’s love we can’t reciprocate. All this Greene captures in this slender novel. He certainly focuses on the darker side of love.
Human relationships are complex and often tragic especially when they end over banality or a failure to properly communicate needs, wants and desires. So, the writing here takes on a stark introspective nature, exploring the psychology of what it means to live when one’s love has been lost. Moving on from a relationship is difficult, looking at another can feel impossible when one’s heart belongs in the past. Life can feel like an endless sea of grey; it becomes monotonous, tasteless, and expressionless: it feels like an empty void. And then suddenly color returns. Life returns.
For Maurice, the narrator and protagonist embarking on this dark journey into his own psyche, life returns when his lost love reappears in his life and causes him more pain, drama and anguish. But that also comes with hope and a desire to rekindle the past. Without giving the rest of the plot away, what follows is an even more potent exploration of how easily love can turn into hate and how they walk together on a spectrum of sorrow.
This is a special piece of writing; it’s a book that deals with grief and broken hearts, though it does so in a delicate way. It understands that time can cure everything. Life will never quite be the same after a broken heart, everything will feel a little different, but it will make you stronger.
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After finding The Great Gatsby completely underwhelming, I’ve been meaning to try another of Fitzgerald’s works for a very long time.
And I wasn’t disAfter finding The Great Gatsby completely underwhelming, I’ve been meaning to try another of Fitzgerald’s works for a very long time.
And I wasn’t disappointed with this one. I watched the film a long time ago, and I quite enjoyed it, but it failed to capture the perplexing nature of this case. The situation just doesn’t make much sense and there aren’t any real answers to be had, and that’s the beauty of it because it leaves you wondering.
Indeed, a good short story leaves you wanting more. The message is brief and it sweeps over the plot offering you only a glimpse into the character’s lives. Your imagination fills in the blanks as you ponder what else could have happened. And this helps define a truly great piece of writing; it has autonomy and it exists beyond the words on the page: there’s so much more to it. I feel like this short story creates many questions but leaves them totally unanswered.
Why did it happen? Why was Benjamin Button born an old man? Is it a gift or a curse? The story does help to put many things into perspective though about life and aging. It’s a clever idea and a very clever piece of writing.
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Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a mesmerizing novella with a very memorable character
Holly Golightly is quite the charmer. She is the ultimate manipulator Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a mesmerizing novella with a very memorable character
Holly Golightly is quite the charmer. She is the ultimate manipulator, she has so many men running after her all of which are permanently in the friendzone but are fed crumbs from time to time to make them think something could happen.
There’s a strong element of narcissism involved in such behavior, of using people to get what you want and casting them aside when they no longer serve you. Holly keeps people close enough to think they have a real friendship with her, but at the same time keeps them at a distance and hides her true personality and identity. She charms people, beguiles them, and the result is always the same: men run after her and strive to give her everything she wants.
She’s also a bit untouchable. She crashes into people’s lives and is gone like the wind. Like a hint of fragrance or a short piece of music, she has a powerful impact but does not linger for long. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is such a short piece of writing and in this it embodies Holy Golightly. It’s over before it began; yet, somehow, you’re left wanting more. The prose is seductive and charming and it flows beautifully, almost mesmerizing in quality. And in this Capote, again, captures the heart of his character.
It's all about her. The plot, the writing and all the men who lust over her. She’s the center of everything, of her own little world in which she lets people orbit her. This is a fantastic little novella and certainly one that leaves a lasting impression.
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“It is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more.”
The Pearl is a moral allegory in narrative “It is said that humans are never satisfied, that you give them one thing and they want something more.”
The Pearl is a moral allegory in narrative form; it is a revealing and instructional tale. At its very core, the novel establishes that wealth (in the form of a pearl) is not the answer to all our problems. In fact, it can create many more problems than it solves.
When Kino finds the treasure, he dreams of the opportunities it can bring him. He wants to get married in a big fancy church and he wants to send his son to school. However, when he attempts to sell it, he finds himself cheated by merchants (who see him as a dumb uneducated animal) and the object of envy from his neighbors. He finds himself in a dangerous situation as he is targeted by thieves and those who would do him, and his family, harm just to get their hands on the pearl. Kino becomes obsessed with protecting it and protecting the dreams he thinks it can realize.
Set against a backdrop of racial prejudice and a disparity of wealth and opportunity, the short work depicts the rural Mexican experience in the face of a modernizing world. Kino has more decency and respect for others, but often finds himself treated as lesser. He has better values, though for all his good intentions, he doesn’t quite grasp the opportunistic nature of the world. Human greed and materialism are virtues many live by. The Pearl works towards establishing how dangerous and foolish such virtues are.
Overall, it is a very good novel with a powerful central motif. It is, however, somewhat vanilla, and unemotional in its narrative power. The story falls just short of greatness as it fails to capture the intensity of the human experience with its bland diction and expression. The characters don’t really drive the story forward, the pearl does, and because of the brevity of the work they never really establish themselves or develop (until the reversal at the end.)
Moreover, the novel lacks a certain sense of drive and plot. Compared to the complexities of The Grapes of Wrath it’s a bit of a basic story. Indeed, the characters from of Of Mice and Men are well crafted and deeply flawed individuals by comparison. The ones here don’t quite have chance to shine. For me, this is very much a weak novel by a great writer who has done much better. It’s certainly worth a read, but I feel it could be a much better price of writing.
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The Grapes of Wrath is the kind of book that pulls you in and refuses to let go.
There’s just something completely gripping about the way the narrativThe Grapes of Wrath is the kind of book that pulls you in and refuses to let go.
There’s just something completely gripping about the way the narrative begins and the way each sentence is put together, it pulls and pulls with its expertly rendered descriptions that do wonders at capturing a landscape and a people undergoing great change. I didn’t want to stop reading, but I also took the time to savour each chapter because I knew that I could only read this for the first time once. So, I stretched it out, I made it last longer than I wanted to, and for me this is one of the surest signs that I was reading a truly great novel.
There’s so much to talk about here. There’s so much brilliance to discuss and so many themes, characters and motifs that warrant reflection. But I want to keep it simple. I want to talk about the things I liked most about the writing. Firstly, I like the naturalness of it. I like the way Steinbeck’s words felt authentic and real. Now let me explain, he does wonders at capturing the essence of time and the ever-changing nature of it. And he is also remarkably talented when it comes to capturing the bigger picture.
It would be easy to talk about the plot here and what pushes the story forward, though that is just half of the power the writing possesses. Steinbeck interposes his narrative with chapters that capture the heart of a nation: they capture the essence of America and the great American dream. They help to weave together a sense of collective consciousness that establish exactly what the characters are feeling against the backdrop of the Great Depression. He is setting the scene in a way that creates a sense of what the characters and people of this time were experiencing on a large scale. And its intoxicating. It’s a storytelling device that brought the novel to life in an incandescent way.
Aside from this, reading The Grapes of Wrath from an ecocritical perspective is quite rewarding. Above all it is a novel of migration, of discovering new landscapes after mass crop death: it is a novel of changing environments and changing circumstances. It’s also about ecology, about man’s ability to continuously affect his environment in largely detrimental ways. And because of this there is a stress on social community, on working together and learning to coexist and fit into the ecosystem and society at large.
Consider me thoroughly and completely impressed. Now I knew how great Steinbeck was from reading Of Mice and Men but I never really liked the sound of any of his other novels enough to pick one up. They just didn’t sound very interesting to me, but this appeared on a list of eco-fiction reads so I was quite curious to see how it fit the genre. And it seems to me this (important) aspect of the novel is a little overlooked, though (admittedly) there are many other significant themes to consider that do dominate the narrative and take centre stage.
More Steinbeck for me in the future! ___________________________________
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If this story can teach us anything, it is that sometimes you just need to let go. To let go of your selfish ambitions. To let go of your absent youthIf this story can teach us anything, it is that sometimes you just need to let go. To let go of your selfish ambitions. To let go of your absent youth. And to let go of a fish (or a prize) that is going to bring you nothing because life is transitory.
It is a powerful allegory and one that extends far beyond the actual scenario, which I naturally found repugnant because it glorifies fishing. If it didn't have such a strong universal value, I would likely rate this differently. But that aside, I think it says a lot about the idea of chasing our dreams. The chase can be noble, but the actual catch can decay quickly.
Overall, it is an extraordinarily potent piece of writing, I just did not enjoy it as much as others have.
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“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
The protagonist, Meursault, just doesn’t give a fuck about a“Since we're all going to die, it's obvious that when and how don't matter.”
The protagonist, Meursault, just doesn’t give a fuck about anything. He just doesn’t care; he is totally indifferent about where he is and who he is with, and it’s terrifying. He has no emotional responses. He is, without a doubt, dead inside. He can’t feel and he cannot empathise. He lives in the now, utterly unable to comprehend tomorrow or the past: he simply exists in the moment, experiencing all that his senses can detect. And those senses are limited to his own physical sensations.
He murders because the sun is in his eyes. He attends his mother’s funeral and all he can think about is his own tiredness and need for sleep. His fiancé greets him with love in her eyes and he doesn’t see a person, all he sees is a pair of tits. That’s it, whenever she comes near him all he remarks on is the shape of her breasts. She is just a body to him, a means for him to sate his own bodily needs. He cannot understand that she has emotions and that his cold behaviour will affect them. And this makes me think he may be somewhere on the autism spectrum, an extreme pole of the autism spectrum I should say. He struggles socially and engages in a lot of preformative behaviour simply saying things because he must: it is required of him. He doesn’t understand the feelings of others, offering only indifferent comments that are unintentionally cold and quite hurtful to those he speaks to.
Though in depicting such a character, Albert Camus has opened one of the biggest literary mysteries of all time: what happened to this man? Why is he like this? We see his story in its endgame, but there are no mentions as to why he is so detached. Was he born this way? Is this an extreme case of a social disorder? Did someone break his heart? What ever happened to him? I could speculate about this all day. There are so many possible answers, and so many ways a man could become so lifeless. In a way, he reminded me of an awkward child or teen. He has no voice and no way of forming his own opinions or conversation. He’s just drifting through life, acting the motions he doesn’t really understand.
And in such it’s reminiscent of Kafka’s work. It’s certainly more normal. There’s no sense of the macabre or unusual, but there is a sense of detachment, alienation and the feeling of loneliness in an overbearing world. In a way, the book has an almost haunting like quality to it. Well, it certainly has left me feeling unnerved and puzzled as I ponder over what caused such a situation. Meursault just seemed a little bit lost to me, different to all those around him with his introverted personality. He seemed trapped, living in a world he cannot fully comprehend or relate to.
The Outsider is a very strong piece of writing; however, it is ever so subtle. It lacks a certain power and purpose. Some readers think Meursault’s lack of conformity was purposeful, a refusal to be like everyone else and experience the same emotions, though I see him as more of a victim of his own terrible coldness: it’s simply who he is, and this is the story of how he suffered because of it.
Forster is the Jane Austen of the 20th century. He clearly read her novels and fell in love.
And this makes him rather unusual amongst his literarForster is the Jane Austen of the 20th century. He clearly read her novels and fell in love.
And this makes him rather unusual amongst his literary peers. He didn’t do anything new; he didn’t write with any particular passion or any attempt at breaking a literary boundary. His writing is relatively safe compared to the likes of Joyce or Woolf.
But in such safety a certain simple beauty can be found because Howard’s End is a novel about reconciliation; it’s about conflict and resolution; it’s about bringing people who are so radically different together. And I love this. I love the way he spends the entire novel showing how the two families (Wilcox & Schlegel) are so opposed in traditions and values; yet, for all that, he offers no comment on which way is right but instead brings them together in one big union at the end: it’s a celebration of life and love.
"Don't you see that all this leads to comfort in the end? It is part of the battle against sameness. Differences - eternal differences, planted by God in a single family, so that there may always be colour; sorrow, perhaps, but colour in the daily grey.”
The house, Howard's End, is at the centre of the action. It’s bequeathed by Mrs Wilcox to Margaret who (unlike the Wilcox’s) is the only one capable of seeing, and feeling, it’s true value. The remaining Wilcox’s decide to destroy the evidence and rent the house out because they want the money. And with this begins a discussion about the importance of death and life, about respecting wishes and understanding the importance of sentiments.
So the plot was immediate; it didn’t mess around and started flowing from the first page. And that’s kind of important with novels like this, novels that are largely about domestic life and the complications of class and money. The Wilcox’s are overly concerned with money and status (and acquiring more of it.) The Schlegel’s care about education, art, books and the passions of the soul. The two families become unlikely acquaintances and eventually friends (though not without an early embarrassment over an impromptu and insincere marriage proposal.)
It’s a nice easy read (a little lacklustre) but one is quite clearly content with its calm and subtle evocation of the variety of life....more
These four stories capture how easily art can drive the artist to death.
Kafka is so good at what he does, but these have a slightly different flavourThese four stories capture how easily art can drive the artist to death.
Kafka is so good at what he does, but these have a slightly different flavour too them. They’re not what you would term as directly Kafkaesque; they have nightmarish qualities and oppressive undertones to them, but the characters are not aware of their sufferings. They don’t feel trapped like K. did in The Trial. They don’t know that they are being consumed by their own pursuit for brilliance within their respective disciplines. They feel normal.
But it is very clear to the reader that they are not normal. The direction they are taking will one day destroy them in one way or another. They are caged by their art because one day it will kill them because they cannot stop perfecting it. The title story, A Hunger Artist, is the one that develops these themes most strongly. There are suggestions in the others, though that may be because I read A Hunger Artist first and had its weird brilliance lingering on my mind. So I’m going to focus on it in particular.
I’ve never even heard of the concept of a hunger artist before and I found myself researching them to see if they were a real thing. They sound like a Kafka creation, but in a way the story seemed so real I had my doubts. And as it turns out they are real. Hunger artist were performers (most likely part of a circus) that were quite popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Their act, their art, was to starve themselves. They would sit in a cage and not eat for days and weeks why people would come and watch them to see how long they could last. Such a practice sounds extremely dangerous, and I do wonder at the psychology of such a thing. These men would have pushed themselves into anorexia and near to death.
[image] - A Hunger Artist, locked in his cage.
The audience would mark the days for the artist and watch him to ensure that he didn’t sneakily eat any food and that he was genuine throughout. The prospect of doing so, for Kafka’s artist, is revolting. He could never imagine betraying his calling and sinking so low as to be a fake artist. The very thought offends him as he is proud of the forty days he can go without food. He’s done it many times and after each time (where he is force fed when he is let out of his cage because he always refuses it) he finds himself wishing he could take it further and last longer, and perhaps never eat food again. So, he does, I think you can probably guess the ending. Kafka delivered in masterfully all the same.
In a way, I think Kafka has used the story as an allegory for writing (and perhaps other forms of art.) There are so many creative types out their who push themselves so far to make something extraordinary. But they are unrecognised and unappreciated as Kafka was in his lifetime. Their art is wasted so they work themselves to death to better it (or perhaps, and more likely, as they are consumed my it.)
Excellent writing – I really need to read more Kafka! ...more
This book captures the heart of 20th century Paris, and chronicles the city before and after the first world war.
Stein ran an artistic hub from her hThis book captures the heart of 20th century Paris, and chronicles the city before and after the first world war.
Stein ran an artistic hub from her house and around her formed an important circle of writers, artists and thinkers. She met Picasso, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. She spoke to Ezra Pound and exchanged letters with T.S Eliot. She supported artists in Paris and bought their paintings when they were first starting out. All in all, she was a purveyor and supporter of the arts.
She was also a lesbian, living with Alice Toklas who spoke to the wives of the important men Stein met. So this was written by Stein under the guise of her friend and lover. Stein expresses friendship very strongly. Her friends clearly meant a lot too her, and she influenced them as much as they influenced her. She had a constant exchange of ideas with people.
[image] -Gertrude Stein, by Pablo Picasso (1906)
Other than that, it's a bit dull
Stein advocates for the beauty of writing, for creating artistic sentences and prose; yet, for all that, she has little to know skill at doing so. Her sentences are endless pieces of ordinariness. There’s no skill involved in them. At one point she mentions one as being particularly good, but there is nothing to it. It’s no more skilful than I’m writing here. I’m not sure what she is reading in her own work, but I certainly cannot see it. Read a page of Woolf then a page of Stein and you will see precisely what I mean. There’s nothing in her words except endless repetition about her own books. It’s like she was taking very opportunity to sell me one of them, irrelevant for sure to the motives behind an autobiography.
I’ve also read Paris, France and had a similar reaction to the dull nature of the writing. It’s a bit better, only because it’s in the first person, but it has none of the skill the writer professes it contains. I don’t think I will ever try one of her other books. There’s no passion in her words. As I said, the value of this book is with the image it creates of a modern France. And if you’re interested in 20th century Europe it’s certainly something you should read along with Hemingway's A Movable Feast.
I found myself skimming sections, so I was quite glad to finally finish it. It's a curiosity, though a bit of a trudge....more
The first time I read a Woolf novel (Mrs Dalloway) I screamed. I hated it. I hated every word and I hated the inaccessible nature of her style. I wantThe first time I read a Woolf novel (Mrs Dalloway) I screamed. I hated it. I hated every word and I hated the inaccessible nature of her style. I wanted no more to do with her, ever again.
Though somehow I found myself reading a book of her short stories and I was amazed at the sharp imagery she conjured up out of the mundane nature of every day. I was in awe. I couldn’t believe this was the same writer. I had to read more of her work, so from there on I decided I must read each and every one of her novels until I eventually returned to Mrs Dalloway. I’m around half way through that process.
I’ve learnt quite a lot from reading Woolf’s fiction, and even more from reading these essays. Together they form her manifesto on what she thinks fiction and criticism should be. The most important point I took away from it is in regard to obscurity. Woolf argues that just because something is naturally hard to read, it doesn’t give us a right to criticise it based on this single point. Such a thing is naïve and ignores the genius that has gone into the writing. I can’t argue with this. By all means dislike something because of its difficulty, but we don’t necessarily have the right to objectify its quality because of it.
In a way, she is also clearly talking about her own work. The Waves is difficult, Mrs Dalloway is confusing and To the Lighthouse jumps around all over. Woolf is not accessible. She’s not easy reading and at times I find myself having to read most of her stuff twice before I actually know what’s happening. Such is the nature of her form of modernism. She had to break narrative custom to create her idea of fiction or the proper stuff of fiction as she would call it. But that doesn’t make her bad, only problematic for the reader.
And these essays help to explain exactly what she is doing. Woolf is a fantastic essayist. She’s even written an essay in here on the importance of writing essays and how to make them thoughtful, intelligent and even creative. It's hard not to be swayed by her words an ideas.
So I urge other readers who, like me, may have been put of by Woolf initially to give her another go....more
How many of you have even heard of Marianne Moore?
I'm genuinely curious on this point because I hadn't until last week. Her relative obscurity (at leHow many of you have even heard of Marianne Moore?
I'm genuinely curious on this point because I hadn't until last week. Her relative obscurity (at least here in the UK) is a bit of a shame because she has an important voice in the world of poetry.
Her poetry is unusual and it’s very hard to understand because of the multiple voices she uses and constant quotation that runs through the work. It’s very difficult to discern an overall direction of her poems because more often than not, the longer pieces, present opposing opinions. It’s almost like the poetry is in conversation with itself, demonstrating different point of views on a particular topic without giving any of them any particular weight or prominence. So it feels circular at times and contradictory and its unlike anything I have ever read before.
“... we do not admire what we cannot understand.”
[image]
There is no “I” within her poems. There is no poet who has a powerful opinion or is subjecting the world to their all-consuming emotions. There is simply observation, detached and levelled. Moore reports what she sees but offers no comment.
Marriage
"This institution, perhaps one should say enterprise out of respect for which one says one need not change one's mind about a thing one has believed in, requiring public promises of one's intention to fulfill a private obligation"
On reading this it would seem the poem is a feminist statement against the patriarchy and the trappings of marriage, though the poem concludes very differently. It’s like she has fixed on one singular theme, marriage, and has done all she can to show everything marriage can be from the good to the bad, from the warmth to the life sentence. It’s almost like Imagist poetry but with conversational elements. And it’s quite unique.
I think what hampered her development was her isolation. Whereas Pound, T.S Eliot and Williams were in conversation with each other, Moore wrote alone. She didn’t have the same strong literary circle to help hone her ideas. She wrote alone and spent her life living with her mother (rumour has it that they even shared a bed into adulthood and until her mother’s death.) Moore never married and remained a solitary figure throughout her entire life, though she was fiercely independent and functional in her loneliness. Though the real hampering was her confidence: she never new how clever she was. And she didn’t really consider herself worthy of being called a poet.
Well she is worthy. Her peers recognised it and tried to get her published long before she was brave enough to actually put her work out there. Her voice is worth hearing....more
I consider The Hollow Men one of the greatest poems in the English language, and certainly the greatest from the 20th century.
Here’s the start of it:I consider The Hollow Men one of the greatest poems in the English language, and certainly the greatest from the 20th century.
Here’s the start of it:
We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats' feet over broken glass In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour, Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom Remember us—if at all—not as lost Violent souls, but only As the hollow men The stuffed men.
[image]
It just captures so much of the era and so much of the desolation and emptiness that followed the war; it reflects the melancholy that swept through the world. It’s a sad poem. It feels cold, detached and lonely. And I love it because it is so effective. If I was reviewing this book based on my opinion of that poem alone then this would be a five-star rating.
But, alas, I am not because there is also a poem I detest in here. I consider The Waste Land one of the worse poems in the English language because of it’s incomprehensibleness. Every time I read it I get lost. Critically speaking, it a weird and wonderful construction but it is so inaccessible. I’ve read it several times over the years, and it really doesn’t get any easier.
So for me this is a very mixed bag, worth a read though!...more
The Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is an intriguing read.
It’s an odd little novel, more biography than fiction. Hemingway recollects his youth, thThe Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway is an intriguing read.
It’s an odd little novel, more biography than fiction. Hemingway recollects his youth, the days where he had no money and lived from story to story before he had his first major novelistic breakthrough.
The reader that will take most from this will be one that has read a lot of 20th century literature and is aware of the interactions between writers and the ways in which they supported each other through their careers. Ezra Pound was a central figure who helped form a community of writers and organised donations for T.S Eliot so he could quite his job and write poetry. James Joyce was also important though quite hard to actually talk to (and even find.) Hemingway recollects the conversations he had with such men, and how they helped him hone his craft.
More importantly though, Gertrude Stein, writer and homosexuality advocate, was perhaps the one who influenced him most strongly. From reading this, it is clear that she was one of the truest friends Hemmingway ever had. I found the sections with her far more compelling than those with the other literary figures, and I would gladly have read a novel just about their curious friendship. There were some good bits here, though the novel took a repetitive tone as each new section only introduced a new writer and the novel as a whole didn’t feel like it was progressing.
The strength of the writing is at its peak when Hemingway describes Paris (where he met Stein.) He creates a vivid picture of a city that he clearly adored, one that shaped him as an individual.
Although I had my reservations about this work, I know I must try more of his novels in the future. This may have been a bad place to start (quite a few readers suggest that this is the last novel of his one should read) because it is a retrospective piece about how he became a writer. He is looking back from a place of sucess....more
Sean Barrs
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Books:
modernist-movement
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