Wuthering
Expectations

Some easier Kipling, Rewards and Fairies (1910).  It’s a book for children, so I hope it’s easier. What children, though.  In each story ...

Maybe one more day of incomprehension, to finish off the week.  A different kind of bafflement, though.  I completed, in the page-turning se...

One more of these, with Eugenio Montale’s first book, Cuttlefish Bones (1925), translated by William Arrowsmith in an edition with far more...

César Vallejo, what a mystery to me.  The theme of the week is “in over my head.”  I have read the H. R. Hays translations in Selected Poems...

I’ve been reading William Carlos Williams much like I have been reading Conrad Aiken – why not shovel it all in, up to a point.  I wrote an ...

Conrad Aiken wrote too much poetry, was too imitative, hammered one bad idea too long, and gave his books terrible titles.  Yet, helped by t...

War and Peace is full of Tolstoy’s unoriginal ideas about history in essay form, and his original ideas about death in novel form.  Tolstoy...

The prose in War and Peace is generally plain, often repetitive – more so in Russian than in the Maude translation – and rough.  Anna Kare...

From the “Chronology” of The Cambridge Companion to Tolstoy (2002): 1863, February 23: reads Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables – “Powerful”; “I...

I wonder how many thinking parts there are in War and Peace .  The major characters all have scenes shown from their point of view, and lon...

I previously read War and Peace (1869) for a Tolstoy class, mixed undergraduate and graduate, mixed language – I was in the easy division, ...

How incomparably the immaterial dream dwarfed the grandest of substantial things, when here, between those three sublimities – the sky, the ...

Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved was published twice, serially in 1892 and as a book, revised – much revised? – in 1897, placing it among hi...

“Of course,” she told the dentist, “I’m no critic, I only know what I like.”  She knew that she liked the “Ideal Heads,” lovely girls with f...

Speaking of miserable, how about some time with Frank Norris’s McTeague (1899).  For once, the “Naturalism” label does me some good, since ...

Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood (1913) is what a few years ago was called a misery memoir.  Maybe that trend is over.  Gorky’s book, the first o...

Against my recent practice, I read an academic edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1985, ed. Jon Stallworthy) rather than some version of...

In 1920 Robert Graves was still a young poet, not the baffling omni-author he later became.  Country Sentiment was his third book, if I am ...

The Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert (1998, tr. Ewald Osers and George Gibian) is 250 pages of genial company with the Czech national poet, a po...

“The Two Faces” (1900) was helpful in decoding the obscurities of The Awkward Age .  It is written on similar principles, but is simpler and...