Friday, July 28, 2017

Thanks for everything - leaving the 19th century

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With a deep sigh of relief, the traveler turned back to France.  There he felt safe.  ( Education , Ch. XXXI) The Education of Henry Adams ...
18 comments:
Thursday, July 27, 2017

without understanding a single consecutive page - advice for book bloggers

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Henry Adams is for some reason reading Poincaré’s La Science et l’Hypothèse , which purported to be relatively readable.  Trusting in its ex...
1 comment:
Wednesday, July 26, 2017

no beginning, middle or end - the professor who taught me literary history and literary anti-history

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At some point it occurred to me that I might get an English degree.  I began taking survey classes to see what they were like, and because t...
4 comments:
Tuesday, July 25, 2017

Education begins - a note about a professor and class that led me here

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As yet he knew nothing.  Education had not begun.  ( The Education of Henry Adams , Ch. 4) Those are the last lines of the chapter titled “...
4 comments:
Monday, July 24, 2017

I’m going to France – so the long wind-up begins

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I’m going for a long time, I mean, for ten months or so.  I’m going in a week.  What an adventure!  But it means this other adventure will h...
39 comments:
Saturday, July 22, 2017

Jürgen Osterhammel's enormous global history of the 19th century, read by me, breezily discussed here

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Jürgen Osterhammel is a German historian at the University of Konstanz, a specialist in Chinese history and globalization.  His 2009 The Tra...
Friday, July 21, 2017

criminals, prostitutes, weirdos - Luc Sante's The Other Paris

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The other Paris in Luc Sante’s The Other Paris (2015) is that of the criminals, flaneurs, ragpickers, prostitutes, anarchists, saloon singe...
11 comments:
Thursday, July 20, 2017

Galsworthy at the summit of his efflorescence - there are things which are things

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For some reason I had the idea that John Galsworthy’s prose was on the heavy side.  I had had the same idea about Arnold Bennett, but The Ol...
Wednesday, July 19, 2017

not individually, but as a family - so many Forsytes

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John Galsworthy must introduce more characters in fewer pages than – well – it seems like a lot.  The first chapter of The Man of Property i...
Tuesday, July 18, 2017

innumerable transactions concerned with property of all sorts - John Galsworthy's The Man of Property

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For the purposes of these posts, I am going to pretend that there is no such thing as The Forsyte Saga .  No Nobel prize, no BBC series.  Ju...
4 comments:
Sunday, July 16, 2017

the convenience of any artless theory - The Golden Bowl's discriminations against the obvious

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I’m working backwards.  Volume One of The Golden Bowl is “The Prince,” ending with a thirty-page book club discussion.  Then comes “The Pri...
4 comments:
Friday, July 14, 2017

Characters in The Golden Bowl discuss The Golden Bowl - very helpful

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The heroine of The Golden Bowl enacts the style of the novel in her story, which is a good trick, but Henry James has a second one nearly a...
3 comments:
Thursday, July 13, 2017

"They thought of everything but that I might think." - The Golden Bowl on how to read The Golden Bowl

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The Golden Bowl is a quartet novel, with two couples and an adulterous affair.  The second turn of the screw is that the wife and husband o...
4 comments:
Wednesday, July 12, 2017

Henry James brings it out roundly - The Golden Bowl, the nerve-wearing stuff first

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Sometimes I start a round of posts on a big book with my complaints.  Let’s do that again.  It works.  The book is The Golden Bowl (1904). ...
8 comments:
Monday, July 10, 2017

soup plates like crow's nests - Jean Giono's Blue Boy

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The Horseman on the Roof (1951) was so unusually good that I tried another Jean Giono novel, Blue Boy (1932, tr. Katherine A. Clarke), one...
4 comments:
Monday, July 3, 2017

for my joy in the tooth of the wheel - a glance at Lorca's poems

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The Selected Poems of Federico García Lorca (New Directions, 1955) was an early overview of the poems of Lorca in English, not just a look ...
6 comments:
Sunday, July 2, 2017

a sort of intoxication with his own identity - Thomas Mann and his dog

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The last three novellas in Death in Venice and Other Stories form a “bourgeois trilogy.”  Thomas Mann, white-collar professional, an ordina...
Saturday, July 1, 2017

single words of the sentences shaped in his disordered brain - some progress with Thomas Mann

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I last read Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories , the Vintage International collection of Thomas Mann’s novellas, when I was an undergra...
11 comments:
Thursday, June 29, 2017

He saw a countryside without cholera or revolution, but he found it sad - how, Giono asks, should a man live?

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But did they know what he had turned to in the meantime?  Victor Hugo – no more, no less.  (Ch. 13, 396) It had been niggling at me, as I re...
3 comments:
Wednesday, June 28, 2017

it was impossible to recognize anything familiar - Jean Giono makes it strange

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The Horseman on the Roof is full of magnificent, original imagery of the Provence landscape.  The story is about Angelo, the horseman, tryi...