Jude the Obscure was Thomas Hardy’s final novel. In it you will find all of Hardy’s trademarks – an intelligent, frustrated heroine; encroaching modernity and tragedy in love. Jude, though, is a far darker and more provocative novel from Hardy, inviting scandal for its attacks on social and religious conventions.
Christopher Isherwood’s mellifluous name is not heard often these days. Until a film adaptation by a fashion designer turned perfumer brought this title back into print, all we had readily available were his Berlin novels, Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin, so this overdue reissue seemed an ideal time to revisit.
Subtitled ‘From This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream’.
January 11, 2017
This is the third time I have recently tried to read ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ – each time previously I gave up simply due to lack of interest. Bunyan’s style is said to be straightforward, but I found the insistent preaching and sermonising soporific. This completed reading was finally achieved only through gritted teeth and from a stubborn determination not to be beaten a third time. Yet here’s the thing – ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ has been in print for almost 350 years, has a strong claim to be the first novel written in English (it has characters, tells a story, and is in prose) and had a profound influence on many novelists. All stories of personal development or growth own a debt to Bunyan, and many including ‘Little Women’, ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Vanity Fair’ acknowledge their debt explicitly. Wikipedia claims that the novel “is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious English literature” and goes on to claim that it has been translated into more than 200 languages. So my challenge was to find the value in this novel despite the teeth gritting.
| Joseph Conrad |
All Time Top 10
Robinson Crusoe – or, as its amazing sub-title would have it ‘The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates’ is quite an extraordinary book. Published in 1719 at the very dawn of the novel, it was widely taken as a true story. It was wildly popular, running through four editions in its first year of publication, and according to Wikipedia, by the end of the 19th century no book in the history of Western literature had more editions, spin-offs and translations (even into languages such as Inuktitut, Coptic and Maltese), with more than 700 such alternative versions.
Edge of Known
September 6, 2018
Book Blurb: Gulliver’s Travels
Gulliver’s Travels describes the four voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon. In Lilliput he discovers a world in miniature; towering over the people and their city, he is able to view their society from the viewpoint of a god. However, in Brobdingnag, a land of giants, tiny Gulliver himself comes under observation, exhibited as a curiosity at markets and fairs.
At around 1,431 pages, Clarissa or The History of a Young Lady beats out Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (826 pages), Bleak House by Charles Dickens (813 pages) and War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (955 pages) for the title of longest book I have ever read. Such a tome seems like an overwhelming task to get through but fortunately they are often divided up into a number of sections, each a mini book in themselves. How I got through War and Peace was that I would read a section and then take a break for a few week and repeat until the book was finished. I am going to do the same for Clarissa.
For a 900-page novel, Tom Jones’s famously well-made plot can be summarized briefly. The titular hero is a foundling raised in the ideal country estate of the benevolent Mr. Allworthy. There Tom’s natural goodness and high spirits are checked by several challenges: the rival but empty ideologies of his two flawed tutors, the brutal cleric Thwackum and the dry philosopher Square; the enmity of his scheming cousin Blifil; and eventually his own immoderacy or imprudence, when he impregnates Molly Seagrim, daughter of his dissolute servant-friend, Black George. In the midst of these adventures, he falls gradually in love with the daughter of the neighboring estate, the auroral Sophia Western, whose drunken, vulgar, alcoholic, hunting-obsessed Tory father and arrogant, cosmopolitan, semi-learned, cynical Whig aunt will unfortunately never let her marry a bastard foundling and instead wish to wed her to the odious Blifil.
Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman is an innovative, digressive, challenging, humorous and philosophical investigation into the relationship between literature and life.
She knew the limitations of her own powers too well to attempt more than she could perform with credit; she wanted neither taste nor spirit in the little things which are generally acceptable, and could accompany her own voice well.
—Jane Austen, Emma
Jane Austen’s detractors always attack the whole premise of her aesthetic: its circumscription. The anti-Janeites, from Romantics like Charlotte Brontë and Ralph Waldo Emerson to Marxists like Raymond Williams and Edward Said, are forever complaining that she leaves too much out—the natural world, the spiritual world, the human body, the Napoleonic Wars, the capitalist system, the British Empire. As Virginia Woolf writes in her Common Reader essay on Austen:
About a book as over-familiar as this—and accompanied by infinitudes of scholarship, criticism, adaptation, and continuation, much of which I don’t intend to consult—there is everything and nothing to say. In two decades, I’ve read it three times, one time in the 1831 version, twice in the 1818 first edition (now preferred by critics), and I even taught it once. I find it elusive, better and worse than it should be, a work of intermittent Shakespearean power linking tragic drama and Gothic romance to modern horror and science fiction, alternating with the dull effusions of the sentimental novel and Romantic travelogue—in fact, it’s such a fantasia on Romantic themes (the sublime and the beautiful, the power of imagination, the solitary outcast, social injustice, the faults of the Enlightenment, domestic utopia, incest and parricide) that this subject of endless secondary sources almost seems to count as secondary literature itself. It was written by a 19-year-old in a radical milieu and is an unmistakable rebuke to radicalism, a reproof that only grew more definite with the novel’s later and more moralized revision.
Calm block fallen down here from some dark disaster
—Stéphane Mallarmé, “The Tomb of Edgar Poe”
Edgar Allan Poe must have the strangest legacy in modern literature: he invented both pulp fiction and the literary avant-garde.
While these two tendencies may—in their shared commitments to sensationalism and formalism—be allies in a high-low war against the middle mind (exemplified in literature by the realist novel and the expressive lyric), it is quite a feat to have birthed them both. But Poe codified several important popular genres that would later flourish in the era of mass literacy and mass media (horror, detective fiction, science fiction) and thereby influenced such proto-pulp and pulp writers as Doyle, Stevenson, Wells, and Lovecraft. At the same time, his theoretical insistence on a “pure” (i.e., non-mimetic) literary writing designed to affect the reader through the manipulation of form and surface, not to mention his depiction of disordered psychological states and waking dream-worlds, bequeathed a legacy to modernism and the avant-garde through Baudelaire and the French Symbolists and Decadents as well as such other admirers as Dostoevsky, Wilde, and Kafka.
Disraeli was one of Queen Victoria’s favourite Prime Ministers. He was a consummate politician & a world-class flatterer, fond of calling Her Majesty his Faerie Queen & referring to “we authors, Ma’am” when discussing the Queen’s published Journals. Disraeli wrote several novels, mostly when he was a hard-up young man. Sybil is probably the most famous because it is one of a group of novels known as the Condition of England novels. Mostly written in the 1840s, these novels explored the effects of the Industrial Revolution in Britain & included Frances Trollope’s Michael Armstrong, the Factory Boy, Dickens’s Hard Times & Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton & North and South. Sybil is also famous for this quote, which seemed to encapsulate the situation in Britain at the time. Charles Egremont, brother of the Earl of Marney, is speaking to a stranger whom he has met wandering in the ruins of Marney Abbey on his family’s estate.