Wuthering
Expectations

The first big joke, and it’s a good one, in László Krasznahorkai’s Seiobo There Below comes at the very beginning of Chapter 2, pp. 17-19, ...

If it took me so long to read the latest László Krasznahorkai book, Seiobo There Below (2008), it was because the novel has, based on the n...

Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks is a 1902 collection of the French humorist Alphonse Allais.  I had assumed that the hum...

The Idiot is a murder story, a mystery story investigating a homicide, the death of this man: Image from Wikipedi a . The Hans Holbein pain...

Prince Myshkin is alone in one of the finest scenes in The Idiot , Part II, Chapter 5, in which he wanders around St. Petersburg, thinking. ...

“Exceedingly strange people!” thought Prince Shch., for perhaps the hundredth time since he had begun to associate with them, but… he liked ...

A ratio of one post of complaints  to three or four of appreciation seems allowable for any book, much less a big Dostoevsky novel.  By any ...

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot , serialized from 1868 to 1869.  I want to start with two scenes, so mostly just some quotes today.  David McDu...

He had bought a large map representing the sea,     Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it t...

Lewis Carroll is the hard one for me to write about.  When I read the Alice books last year, I had no interest in writing about them, altho...

W. S. Gilbert hardly used any nonsense at all, so it is entirely appropriate to include him in Nonsense Week.  He used it once in a while. O...

César Aira makes a perfect transition to mid-Victorian nonsense.  Samples from the Golden Age of Nonsense.  Three authors – Lewis Carroll, E...

November and December 2013 is the perfect time to sample the Argentinean Literature of Doom, says Ricardo de la Caravana de Recuerdos.  Why,...

Michael Drayton, a contemporary of Samuel Daniel, skipped the anagram.  He did not hide the Ideal behind Delia or the idea behind Délie, but...

The fact is that we have been corrupted by Shakespeare and the Romantic poets into thinking that early modern poems are artistic forms for e...

The Góngora post went all right.  I’ll try another tough one, the Délie of Maurice Scève, a collection of poems published in 1544 in the mo...

Today I revisit to an old favorite of Wuthering Expectations, the baroque genius of the Spanish Golden Age, Luis de Góngora.  I last mention...

D. G. Myers wrote a review of Local Souls , the new Allan Gurganus book, that was so convincing I actually read the book, a rare thing for n...

The section of My Past and Thoughts about Alexander Herzen’s childhood, I covered that, more or less, just great, and I brushed against the...

Herzen’s father was a living example of Turgenev’s literary creation, the Superfluous Man, educated and Westernized to a point that alienate...