Wuthering Expectations

I have been reading Maxim Gorky continue his education in the second volume of his autobiography, My Apprenticeship (1916).   The previous ...

What did I especially like in Jean-Paul Sartre’s debut novel, La Nausée ?   I will list many things.   Some may come from my misunderstandin...

Roquentin is a crisis that in retrospect we will call “existential.”   He is having a crisis of meaning – why am I here, what point is ther...

Jean-Paul Sartre’s novel Nausea ( La Nausée , 1938) is discussed in a substantial chunk of Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending , most of...

The Christian story of the beginning and end becomes damaged, replaced, by scientific discoveries.   Myths turn into literature.   That is h...

Frank Kermode is thinking about literary fiction, fictions more generally, as representing reality in some way.   They do not have to do so....

My imagination was for a time haunted by figures that, muttering “The great systems”, held out to me the sun-dried skeletons of birds, and i...

Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1913/1916/1922/etc.), a great novel.   In the old days I would have chipped at it for a week or more.   It is com...

One great, tangled novel, Andrei Bely’s Petersburg (1916/1922), and two collections of sketches, stories and miscellanea by humorists, let’...

Maybe I should have put Franz Kafka in this category.   I organize literature by language, mostly, but it was Klaus Wagenbach’s little biogr...

The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Stephen Mitchell. Let’s just assume that I did not understand this ...

I forgot a couple.   Perversely, pathetically, since one of them is The Fighter (2018) by Michael Farris Smith, and I am a quarter way into...

The Custom of the Country (1913), Edith Wharton Wharton’s divorce novel.   She had gone through it herself, but here she uses it as a com...

The strange thing about reading Winesburg, Ohio (1919) was seeing a literary tradition suddenly gel, the one that is Hemingway and Faulkner...

Strange sensations reading American fiction lately.   Positive and negative.   The negative is that I am having a bit of an allergic reactio...

Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending (1967) was pretty much what I hoped it would be – hard, really difficult.   Readers less interested ...

I’ve been making notes on each book of D. H. Lawrence poetry as I have gone along.   I suppose I enjoy his poetry as much or more than anyth...

I find it easy to imagine a slightly different D. H. Lawrence, healthier, less weird, maybe a little less ambitious, who is happy to be the ...

The Citadel of Fear was the second Aztec “lost world” fiction I read in the last year.   D. H. Lawrence wrote one, “The Woman Who Rode Away...

Along with Jules Verne, I read another pulpy fantasy recently, a real pulp novel, Citadel of Fear by Francis Stevens (1918), pen name of Ge...