Wuthering
Expectations

How about some Paris, via the Goncourt journals.  The Universal Exhibition of 1889 is opening! A mauve sky, which the illuminations filled w...

The issue with the Goncourt brothers and Gustave Flaubert is that all three writers were working on related aesthetic problems, and the Gonc...

Soon I will be in France.  Thus some rummaging in Pages from the Goncourt Journals , the 1962 Robert Baldick edition of the enormous journal...

Litlove, of Tales from the Reading Room , was reading a particularly male novel and had this amusing feeling: I was also feeling incorrigibl...

I’ve got one last entry for Spanish Literature Month , the 1886 novel The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán.  My understanding is that i...

The book is An Invitation for Me to Think , a collection of the avant-garde poems of Alexander Vvedensky, the second of the NYRB Poets serie...

The book I will write about now, which might as well be part of Spanish Literature Month , is Miguel Hernández by Miguel Hernández (1910-4...

Favorite single line from The Saga of Gösta Berling : Then he set up this organ, which had such strange tones, whose dreadful bassoon stop i...

Selma Lagerlöf’s first novel, The Saga of Gösta Berling (1891), turned out to be, to my surprise, a Don Juan story transplanted into wester...

Caravana de Recuerdos invited people to read the great 1630 play The Trickster of Seville and His Guest of Stone  by Tirso de Molina, so I ...

Tomorrow is a holiday, so I will be back on Monday with some Spanish literature.  It is the arbitrarily-declared Spanish Literature Month ! ...

The Goncourt journal, or at least the abridgement I read, is full of Zola, who is mentioned more than any other individual.  The index, unde...

Ah ha, I knew it (this is from Pages from the Goncourt Journals , tr. Douglas Parmée): This evening Flaubert, while paying tribute to his co...

Zola, in L’Assommoir , uses arbitrarily chosen objects within the world of the novel to create elaborate patterns that reinforce or undermin...

How is L’Assommoir written?  It is the seventh of the twenty interconnected Rougon-Macquart novels, of which I have read only, I remind mys...

Here’s how you can tell how long I plan to write about L’Assommoir – I’m actually going to try to summarize it. Gervaise Macquart is at a...

The Child was only one of two 19th century French novels about child abuse I read recently.  The other is Émile Zola’s L’Assommoir , publis...

I think of 19th century prose style as elaborate, based on just a few writers, I know – Flaubert, Zola, Gautier, Nerval, Hugo, and so on, wr...

The book I’ll start with, now that I am back from vacation, is The Child by Jules Vallès (1878), a brutal childhood memoir with the names c...

I will be on vacation for a while, returning, with luck, next Thursday, so I will wrap up Ibsen with George Bernard Shaw’s brilliant little ...