Wuthering
Expectations

The rest of my April reading.   Novels and stories and such. Herman Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund (1930) and Lao She, Rickshaw (1937), a...

I forgot a book yesterday, an odd bird. James Agee, Permit Me Voyage (1934).   A few good lyric poems.   A weird prose dedication/manifes...

English-language poetry I read in April. I’ve read a lot of D. H. Lawrence over the last few years, including all of his short fiction, al...

I’m going to try to grind through everything I read in April.   I have never thought I had to write about everything I read.   It is a value...

Since I was promised a book about solitude in Bosco’s Malicroix and did not really get one, I thought I would mention a real one that I rea...

It was the East-West motif that helped me solve the Malicroix puzzle.   Our hero Martial comes to the island that is at the center of Malic...

I need to pin down the narrator of Malicroix first.   He is a first-person narrator in 1948, so I can assume in advance that he is unreliab...

A translation of Henri Bosco’s mystical swamp-quest novel Malicroix (1948) recently appeared, translated by Joyce Zonanna, who fell in love...

How about one more novel where the protagonist moves around all the time.   Mostly within one city, Peking, in this case, Rickshaw by Lao S...

I. J. Singer’s Yoshe Kalb (1932, tr. from the Yiddish by Maurice Samuel) is another novel about wandering, contemporary with Narcissus and ...

After the inventiveness of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and the first big chunk of The Man Without Qualities (1930), it was a surprise to ...

A number of people are readalonging or have readalonged Henri Bosco’s 1948 novel Malicroix , newly translated by Joyce Zonana.   I’ve mentio...

Argentinean Doom begins when Argentinean literature begins, with The Gaucho Martín Fierro , “the 1872 epic gaucho poem by José Hernández,” “...

Caravana de Recuerdos is for some reason encouraging people to read some literature from Argentina this year – a “full year of “’the strain...

The Makioka Sisters begins in late 1936 and ends on April 26, 1941.   It was published in three parts from 1946 to 1948.   The beginning was...

The Makioka Sisters (1946-8), Junichiro Tanizaki’s UNESCO-stamped novel, was a puzzler.   It has two conceptual levels.   One of them took ...

Lately I have read a number of novels that depend on Big Historical Ironies.   The Big Irony is a big part of the point of the novel.   I me...

Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police (1994, tr. Stephen Snyder 2019) is a conceit-heavy fantasy about a novelist who lives on an anonymous island...