Wuthering
Expectations

Yesterday I was trying to get to a wonderful book, Music 109 by Alvin Lucier (2012), an adaptation of the music history class Lucier has be...

The fiction of César Aira is conceptual.  It is created under a restriction that is not part of the text itself.  Aira talks about his metho...

Nobody cares what I think about César Aira or his 2002 novellisimo Varamo .  Nevertheless I will write something about it.  No , it is all r...

A hazard of being interested in books is that I pay too much attention to the books within books.  I admit that.  But there is a contrast of...

Reading Erich Auerbach’s literary history Mimesis (1946), I came across a description of Anthony Trollope’s novels in a surprising place, t...

The Gentleman in the Novels of Anthony Trollope – this is a topic I have bounced against before.  Trollope is a man of his time, yet he is h...

I think I have no more than one real point to make about The Last Chronicle of Barset , but I am going to back into it, so to speak.  Trollo...

I go away for just a few days and can’t write a dang – wait, here I go. Never mind. Perhaps the problem is actually that I want to write ...

I had a second literary encounter in Husum, a surprise, one that reinforces a common Wuthering Expectations theme. An attractive brick hig...

The town is Husum, on the North Sea coast of Schleswig-Holstein, home of Theodor Storm and inspiration for much of his fiction.  It is now, ...

Reading Buddenbrooks and Thomas Mann’s early stories has led to questions, most of which do not have ready answers.  Turning to Mann himsel...

The family saga is such a common form now that I at first did not notice how unusual Buddenbrooks was.  If Thomas Mann did not invent the ge...

What is Buddenbrooks ?  In Erich Auerbach’s description, it is “the first great realistic novel [in German, he means], which, despite its co...

“What does this mean. – What – does this mean….” (I.1, p. 3) That’s a funny way to start a novel, isn’t it, as Thomas Mann starts his first ...

This is the last pre-vacation post.  It is an odd one to have atop Wuthering Expectations for two weeks, but it provides a clue as to where ...

Thomas Mann, “The Blood of the Walsungs,” 1905.  A story in two scenes. Scene 1:  Lunch with the Aarenhold family, massively wealthy Polis...

It has been twenty years or more since I read Thomas Mann, in the old Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories collection.  I do not want to...

The worst thing in Oblomov today.  The boring part, I mean.  The novel is a comedy, a great one.  The long first single scene is the comic ...

The best thing in Oblomov , Part 1, Chapter 9, “Oblomov’s Dream.”  It is a long episode, 8% of the book, 29% of Part 1.  My understanding is...

I promised on Twitter that this piece would be more coherent than yesterday’s.  Likely an error.  But I will number my points for clarity.  ...