Blindness by José Saramago
My rating: 4 of 5 stars The whole world is right here In an anonymous city, a car stays stopped after the light changes to green, infuriating other drivers. Approached, the driver shouts, “I’m blind! I can’t see!” A good Samaritan drives him home, saying, “Not at all. It’s your turn now. Later it will be my turn.” And then he drives off in the blind man’s car! Such is human nature in Portuguese author Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness (1995): “This is the stuff we’re made of, half indifference and half malice.” Saramago imagines a sudden plague of blindness that makes the victims’ see only white. The “white sickness” has no known origin and is highly contagious. The authorities quickly quarantine anyone who has gone blind and anyone they’ve contacted, but from the start it’s too late. The first half of the novel concerns the hellish experience of the first newly blind people—imprisoned in an abandoned insane asylum, monitored by jittery soldiers, and left to fend for themselves without any support other than occasional food drop offs. Luckily for our group of first internees, among their number is an ophthalmologist and his wife, and she has mysteriously remained sighted and is only feigning blindness to stick with her husband. Thus, she is able to help organize her party for toilets and beds. As in H. G. Wells’ potent short story “In the Country of the Blind,” however, it’s not an unalloyed advantage to be able to see when confined with a bunch of blind people. The wife wants to keep her sight secret from the blind internees to avoid being exiled or enslaved by them, but it’s not easy to maintain the pretense, and as time passes and the inmates become ever filthier without being able to wash their bodies or clothes or use the toilets hygienically, the things she can see become ever more unpleasant. She at times wishes to become blind like the others, or to die. In vivid detail Saramago depicts the internees’ hellish situation, exacerbated by the frightened soldiers ordered to shoot any inmates who attempt to flee the asylum and by a group of well-organized blind thugs. They commandeer all the food and extort valuables and sex from the other internees, who are too cowed to resist. The more one reads, the more one fears there will be no explanation for the plague, no intrepid researchers to find a cure, no return to “normal.” I’m not spoiling the novel but merely pointing out how I felt while reading, far before I approached the end. Faithful to the concept that “these distasteful realities of life also have to be considered,” Saramago’s novel is not cheery. He vividly demonstrates the fragility of our modern “civilization,” dependent on electricity, running water, and systems of government, infrastructure, security, transportation, sanitation, and finance, etc. He does depict some of the best of human nature, as in a quasi-prostitute (“the girl with dark glasses”) who adopts a child (“the boy with the squint”), “the old man with the black eye-patch” who provides needed wisdom, and of course the doctor and his wife who are natural leaders. But the story is painful precisely because they are sympathetic characters we care about and because the people evincing the worst of human nature seem more numerous. Also, Saramago is so clinical and detailed in his account of what it would feel like to lose one’s eyesight, to become one of the asylum inmates, and yet to (of course) desperately want to survive, that his novel at times moves past the bracing into the unbearable. Indeed, when the blind thugs start gloatingly gang raping women, I almost quit reading. Although much of the novel is (nearly unbearably) bleak—and has long paragraphs and no chapters to take rest breaks after—it is worth persevering till the end, for there are many moving, memorable scenes, like the doctor’s wife and the girl with dark glasses hugging each other, the doctor’s wife finally using a pair of scissors, a timely fire wreaking havoc, the dog of tears gaining its nickname, the three graces washing themselves in the rain on a balcony, a shocking scene in a church, and two mismatched people confessing their love for each other. Furthermore, although many scenes in the book recall Bruegel’s appalling painting The Blind Leading the Blind, in which six blind men are following each other tumbling into a ditch, in the novel, after all, Saramago’s six blind main characters have a sighted saint to lead them. And if his characters say things like, “One way or another, we are all murderers,” they also say things like, “The only miracle we can perform is to go on living.” It’s also worth persevering through for its cool lines, like “A glass of water is a marvelous thing,” and “Animals are like people. They get used to anything,” and “If before every action, we were to weigh up all the consequences in earnest, immediate ones, probable ones, possible ones, and imaginable ones, good and evil from our deeds would go on apportioning themselves through all our days till the endless ones after we are gone, which might be a form of our immortality.” Saramaga’s novel reads like a fusion of Camus' The Plague and something by Kafka. It has the former’s awful and objective detail, ineffectual authorities, religious questioning, system limit revealing, human limit pushing, terrible suffering, unheroic heroes, and random fates, as well as the latter’s surreal quality, fatally absurd authorities, and anonymous city and characters (who are referred to by attributes). Blindness also recalls McCarthy’s The Road, though there are “seven pilgrims” instead of a father and son. The audiobook is read by the excellent Jonathan Davis, whose voice and manner enhance the text. View all my reviews
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Mistress of Mistresses: A Vision of Zimiamvia by E.R. Eddison
My rating: 5 of 5 stars ‘When I kiss you, it is as if a lioness sucked my tongue’ OR A Renaissance Game of Thrones Featuring Four Eternal Lovers and a Bestial Machiavel After an odd “Overture” in which the narrator attends the funeral in our world of his great friend Lessingham, E. R. Eddison’s Mistress of Mistresses (1935) shifts to the Renaissance fantasy world Zimiamvia, where Lessingham is alive and twenty-five and the cousin/troubleshooter of Horius Parry, the Vicar. The Vicar is a noble but brutish Machiavel who wants to rule the land as Regent for the new eighteen-year-old Queen Antiope, the King her brother having recently been assassinated (the hand behind the poisoning rumored to have been the Vicar’s). Because the dead king’s bastard half-brother Duke Barganax (whose hobby is painting his gorgeous goddess of a lover Fiorinda and then destroying his paintings for failing to capture her essence) and his allies chafe at being ruled by the duplicitous Vicar, war breaks out, both sides claiming to support the Queen. Against the odds, Lessingham wins a big battle and then attempts to force a peace on the stubborn Duke and the enraged Vicar, after which he heads north to the court of the young Queen in Rialmar to shore up her defenses against the perennial enemy of the realm Akkama, ruled by the loathsome King Derxis. Will the Vicar accept the peace? If he starts scheming again, what will the Duke and Lessingham do? And what will happen when the consummate courtier and captain Lessingham meets the beautiful and clever Queen Antiope? And won’t Derxis, who’s been egregiously wooing Antiope, do something dastardly? And why does the old “logical doctor” Vandermast, a philosophical wizard, tell Lessingham he’ll be dead within a year or two? “What is fame to the deaf dust that shall then be your delicate ear, my lord?” The basic plot is like a compact Game of Thrones with far fewer players, far more metaphysics and romance, and no dragons or undead. But the plot is not where lie this novel’s charms and fascinations! These largely derive from Eddison’s splendid and ornate style, painterly descriptions, epic similes, dry humor, and pleasure in nature, architecture, music, poetry, beauty, love, etc. Characters occasionally lace their speech with Greek or Latin quotations—which fortunately they often translate. (How Sappho and Shakespeare made it into Zimiamvia, I don’t know…) Eddison’s “Elizabethan” prose is savory, e.g., “The horror and ugsomeness of death is worse than death itself,” and-- ‘Philosophic disputations,’ said Fiorinda, ‘do still use to awake strange longings in me.’ ‘Longings?’ said the Duke. ‘You are mistress of our revels tonight. Breathe but the whisper of a half-shapen wish; lightning shall be slow to our suddenness to perform it.’ ‘For the present need,’ said that lady, ‘a little fruit would serve.’ ‘Framboises?’ said the Duke, offering them in a golden dish. ‘No,’ she said, looking upon them daintily: ‘they have too many twiddles in them: like my Lord Lessingham’s distich.’ He writes great similes, like “Only there sat in his eyes a private sunbeamed look, as if he smiled in himself to see, like a sculptor, the thing shape itself as he had meant and imagined,” and-- “Again her eyes crossed with Lessingham’s: a look sudden and gone like a kingfisher’s flight between gliding water and overshadowing trees.” And evocative descriptions, like “The falcon was perched still on the crag, alone and unmerry,” and-- “So they had passage over those waters that were full of drowned stars and secret unsounded deeps of darkness.” The battles and duels here have neither magic nor the supernatural but are man against man with armor, weapons, numbers, and tactics. The novel does introduce, however, fantastic things: immortal shape-changing Hamadryads, a time-free garden and cottage, a leaf to open any locked door, and most provocatively the two pairs of lovers, sensual Barganax-Fiorinda and spiritual Lessingham-Antiope, vibrant, distinct individuals who at times merge into each other. Lessingham and Barganax gaze into different mirrors and see each other’s reflections, Lessingham’s voice and manner recall Fiorinda’s, and Lessingham looks at Barganax and sees Antiope. As the Duke muses to his lover in a letter, “My thoughts growe busy that some way there bee IV of us but some way II only.” All of this suggests interesting things about gender and love and identity. Although the real-politic world of intrigue, assassination, and war drives the plot, Eddison often seems more interested in the two-couple romance he’s writing. The main characters are larger than life—archetypes—Eternal Lovers prefiguring Michael Moorcock’s later Eternal Champion. Lessingham dies in our world and yet vibrantly lives in Zimiamvia; he says to Antiope, "I love you … beyond time and circumstance" and calls her “Mary,” the name of his wife in our world; and the novel closes with Fiorinda, Mistress of Mistresses, looking at her nude reflection in a mirror and musing on all her female identities, from Aphrodite to Zenobia. All that said, Eddison isn’t only writing metaphysical romance. The novel features heroic violent action: a few battles, a bath time brawl between the Vicar and his dogs, Lessingham’s horse ride down a two-thousand foot cliff, and so on. And it features plenty of life wisdom like, “There was often more good matter in one grain of folly than in a peck of wisdom,” and “That which can be done, ’twas never worth the doing. Attempt is all.” Just keep in mind that it's not The Worm Ouroboros (1922), Eddison’s more famous epic fantasy, which has much more action and much less romance. Mistress of Mistresses has a lot of conversation and description, and the ending feels rushed and incomplete, but I relished reading it for moments like this: “As a man awakening would turn back into his dream, yet with that very striving awakes; or as eyes search for a star, picked up out but now, but vanished again in the suffusing of the sky with light of approaching day; so Lessingham seized at, yet in the twinkling lost, the occasion of those lines, the thin seeming memory blown with them as if from some former forgotten life.” And this: “And now his bee-winged kiss, hovering below her ear, under the earring’s smouldering of garnet, passed thence to where neck and shoulder join, and so to the warm throat, and so by the chin to that mocking spirit’s place of slumber and provocation; until, like the bee into the honeyed oblivion of some deep flower incarnadine, it was entertained at last into the consuming heaven of that lady’s lips.” Eddison was an English civil servant?! View all my reviews
Drinking Sapphire Wine by Tanith Lee
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Leaving Utopia to Remake Eden In Tanith Lee’s Don’t Bite the Sun (1976), the anonymous 25-year-old narrator repeatedly burns her mouth by biting the sun--challenging the system of her perfect, post-scarcity, dome-enclosed city run by QRs (quasi-robots or androids) and worked by robots for their pampered human charges—by trying and failing to do meaningful things like work or make a baby. She and her Jang (young) friends take drugs, “have love,” play sabotage, make social circles, pay for things with “emotional energy,” change genders, commit suicide, and exit Limbo in new bodies ready to resume their hedonistic lives. All that continues in the sequel, Drinking Sapphire Wine (1977), but the narrator is now a he (wearing the body of a handsome consumptive Romantic poet) and is immersing himself in the History Tower, researching forgotten customs of humanity like God and dueling. As his frenemy and occasional lover Hergal “the Turd” tells him, “You sit up there on your tail in the History Tower, in the dust with a couple of rusty robots that don't know what rorl [century] it is. You read about things that don't exist anymore and won't ever exist anymore. Adventures, wars, illness, obsolete social behavior patterns--poets.” Needless to say, the narrator is still unfulfilled by life in his society, and his friends can’t understand him: “And your vocabulary!” she bawled. “Those words! Factory? What's that?” “A place where they make audio plugs,” I said. The plot of this second novel begins with the return to the narrator’s city Four BEE of a former lover/friend Danor (currently female), a duel to the death with an envious jerk called Zirk (currently male), and an exile from the utopia-dystopia city into the harsh, hostile, beautiful desert: “Now’s your chance to prove you can do more than sit on your tail complaining and drinking sapphire wine with your tears of self-pity. Come on, come and do battle with me, come and fight me. I'm more than a match for you. I'll devour you if I can, but I'll do it cleanly and openly, not with words and dark little tanks in Limbo. Don't be afraid of human death and human age. I've seen it all, and I know it. It's just dust blown over the rocks. Look at me, how dead and old I seem, and yet, watch me grow, watch me live. Come on. Come and find me. I'm waiting.” Will the narrator find a way to stop drinking sapphire wine and to live a “real” life? What gender body will he (she?) choose to live out his (her) life in? Will he (she?) go crazy in isolated exile in the desert? Will dome city life continue carrying on stagnantly and safely without him (her?)? Like the first novel, this one is bleak and humorous, Lee revealing how, despite all their gender and body changes, people remain essentially the same, and how living an immortal life of ease with robots doing all the work and androids making all the decisions may not be so enjoyable, if you are a thinking person who wants to live a meaningful life. There are some neat surprises and twists and developments and characters. I like the love between the Jang Danor and the Older Person Kam and between Hatta the Horror and the narrator. I like the narrator trying to make “My Garden” in the desert. I like the benevolent QR Committee starting to act a little less benevolently. And the rediscovery of the ancient human past here and there is neat. I also liked the Jang slang used (though it’s really not necessary, because Lee uses plenty of regular slang): “My name’s Esten,” he said. “Derisann to meet you.” “Damn you, you’ve got a farathooming bloody cheek. What are you up to, you bastard? What’s the grakking game, you--” I like the decadent sf descriptions: “Kley was female right now which meant watch out, but when I glanced about, in a new body. Dazzling. Hair like lava, eyes like raw gold, skin like polished brass, and dressed to kill in see-through pattern with gold daggers, and with a brazen skull--of all antique masterpieces--grinning on her groin shield.” The novel is pretty conservative re gender despite all the gender changing. There are hints of the narrator in her female body being attracted to another Jang in a female body, but she never acts on that and remains heterosexual, like almost everybody she knows (apart from her makers—parents—who do live together as males). Though it is neat to find out that Hatta became female for a while to try to understand the narrator, he says he’s 80% male, and everyone is predominantly one or the other. There are no hermaphrodites or neither nor or neutral or non-gendered bodies; there are only male or female bodies. Although the novel is promoting living a real life in the real world rather than in a druggy VR, does Lee make it too easy (via “water mixer” machines etc.) for the narrator to make her My Garden in the desert? There apparently aren’t any predators, and the insects don’t bite or bother but just make pleasing whispering noises with their wings. Is this really “real” life?! Anyway, for 1977, the novel feels ahead of its time and is a compact, strong, stimulating read, and fans of Tanith Lee (like me!) should like it. View all my reviews
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Life is trouble, Boss,” or “My faith is a mosaic of unbelief” The anonymous 35-year-old narrator is a learned, intellectual book-worm (a “pen pusher”) writing a book on Buddha when he decides to go to Crete to run a lignite mine and hires a craggy 60-something year old rogue called Alexis Zorba, who seems to have been everywhere (Constantinople, Bulgaria, Greece, Anatolia, etc.) and to have done everything (worked, fought, married, fathered, danced, sang, etc.) and to have an inexhaustible wealth of anecdotes and questions and opinions about human nature, men and women, life, love, God, and so on. Zorba’s duties will be supervising the workers, cooking, talking, and playing his santuri (when he’s in the mood to do so). Zorba, the narrator soon realizes, is a free man, a living heart, a great soul, a voracious mouth who experiences everything in life as if for the first time. The narrator knows that while he has been reading and writing, Zorba has been fully living: “I stopped, ashamed. That is what a real man is like, I thought, envying Zorba's sorrow. A man with warm blood and solid bones, who lets real tears run down his cheeks when he is suffering; and when he is happy he does not spoil the freshness of his joy by running it through the fine sieve of metaphysics." He knows the happiest days of his life will be spending time with Zorba. Will he be able to exorcise the non-human perfect nothingness of the Buddha and depart from his careful, detached book learning and philosophy to embrace life? Nikos Kazantzakis' Zorba the Greek (1946) consists of various episodes involving Zorba (usually as instigator and main actor) and the narrator (usually as observer and side player). Zorba quickly seduces Madame Hortense, an “old Siren,” a faded and flabby French ex-chanteuse hotel owner, and takes over the work of the mine, letting the narrator, “Boss,” work on his book on Buddha or muse on life, the divine, and human nature. Being a “pen pusher,” the narrator is attracted to Zorba’s charismatic, passionate, earthy, frank, wily, irreverent approach to religion, patriotism, war, love, marriage, and life. Many impressive moments: a voluptuous widow running through the rain; Zorba and the narrator visiting a mountain-top monastery; Zorba going to Candia to buy materials to make a cable-train; Zorba consecrating (with the help of the monks) said cable-train; the villagers attacking the widow; a death and a funeral; the narrator writing letters to and receiving letters from his dear friend; Zorba telling the narrator about God. It is a lyrical, earthy, funny look at the Cretan countryside and people, still somewhat under the afterimage influence of the decaying Ottoman Empire. Lots of Greek and Cretan culture, like food, religion, work, music, religion, etc. Interesting how they kind of not-completely seriously talk or sing or bless about getting Constantinople back from the Turks. Throughout there are many references to world literature and art and religion, like Rodin, Dante, Buddha, Rembrandt, Homer, and Hindu statues, and many observations and conversations on spirit and body and world and marriage and religion and soul and body and human nature and food and icons and so on. When the narrator is trying to get to know his workers and to kindle in them the idea that we are all brothers, Zorba warns him not to open people's eyes unless you have something better to show them. If all you have is darkness, then what's the point? And there are some fine lines on human resilience in the face of tragedy and unhelpful (if not malevolent) gods. I liked Zorba’s frank disdain for organized religion and monks and all (he’d rather a priest curse him than bless him!). Rich stuff! Like in the following description of drinking Cretan wine: “We clinked glasses and tasted the wine, an exquisite Cretan wine, a rich red colour, like hare's blood. When you drank it, you felt as if you were in communion with the blood of the earth itself and you became a sort of ogre. Your veins overflowed with strength, your heart with goodness! If you were a lamb you turned into a lion. You forgot the pettiness of life, constraints all fell away. United to man, beast and God, you felt that you were one with the universe.” One thing that felt dated in the novel was, despite its woman-worship, its sexism. Zorba says things about women, “the female of the species,” like God made woman not from Adam’s rib but from Satan’s horns, so anywhere you touch a women you’re touching Satan, and “women have an unhealable wound making them desire to be desired by men,” and “Only people who want to be free are human beings. Women don't want to be free. Are they human?” The old siren Madame Hortense is a comic figure for the narrator, the young widow a frightening pantheress. It is a male-oriented book, with the main relationships being male-male (the narrator and his best friend from his class and background and the narrator and Zorba). Male-female relationships are necessary but transitory and secondary here. (view spoiler)[The fates of the two women we see involved with Zorba and the narrator, the Old Siren and the widow, are unnecessarily awful and or violent, with little real sadness or outrage from the narrator. (hide spoiler)] It is a talky novel, though Zorba is sure fun to listen to, and the audiobook reader George Guidall is great as Zorba--hectoring, leering, savoring, seducing words with his voice—and readers into passionate, lyrical, philosophical novels about life and Greek/Cretan culture should like it. View all my reviews
The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars Chippewas Fighting Congress and Searching for a Sister Louise Erdrich organizes The Night Watchman (2020) around two main 1953 plots. First, in between his duties as night watchman for the jewel bearing plant on the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reservation in North Dakota, middle-aged Thomas Wazhashk (based on Erdrich’s grandfather) finds out about a new bill (House Concurrent Resolution 108) introduced in Congress to “emancipate” several tribes, including his, by terminating all government support for and supervision of them, abrogating all treaties with them, turning them into non-Indians (by dissolving their tribes) so as to open for them a path to American lives equal to the white man, and relocating them to cities of economic opportunity. Seeing the bill as a land grab and a final solution to their part of the Indian problem, Thomas and his tribe set about fighting it. Second Thomas’ nineteen-year-old niece Patrice (don’t call her Patty or Pixie) Parenteau attempts to find her sister Vera, who’s moved from the reservation to “the cities” (Minneapolis), had a baby, and gone missing. Into those two plots Erdrich weaves various minor ones involving things like the courtship (?) of Lloyd “Haystack” Barnes (the white reservation math teacher and boxing coach) and Wood Mountain (one of his pupils and boxers) of Patrice, her painstaking work at the plant where her uncle works, her relationship with her best friend Valentine Blue, a boxing rivalry between Wood Mountain and a white boy called Joe “Wobble,” Patrice’s horrible alcoholic father and formidable “old-time” (traditional) mother, a pair of Mormon “elders” (young missionaries) on mission to the reservation, the University of Minnesota “Chippewa scholar” Milly Cloud visiting the reservation to study her people first-hand, the haunting of Thomas by the ghost of a childhood friend, Vera’s ordeal, and so on. Many supporting point of view characters—including a horse, a dog, and a ghost! Erdrich inhabits anyone or anything and reveals the world through their points of view as she moves her story along. Many short chapters with enticing titles that are only understood by reading on. Much fine writing-- vivid: “The precision of the world took her breath away, the crisp lines of brick, the legibility of signs on doors, the needles of pines standing out sharp against more needles, and the darkly figured black of the trunk.” numinous: “Outside there was resounding silence. The black sky was a poem beyond meaning. This world is not conclusion. A species stands beyond, invisible as music but positive as sound.” grotesque: “Mr. Walter Vold stepped down the line of women, hands behind his back, lurkishly observing their work.” painful: “He was home, snarling, spitting, badgering, weeping, threatening her little brother, Pokey, and begging Pixie for a dollar, no, a quarter, no, a dime.” or powerful: “There was a hollow feeling, a thrumming, a sense that his body had become a drum. That anyone could knock on him and get a sound. That the sound, even if defiant, would be meaningless. And that whoever used the drumstick knew this and was pitiless.” She writes greats similes, like “There were times when Patrice felt like she was stretched across a frame, like a skin tent,” “When Thomas thought of his father, peace stole across his chest and covered him like sunlight,” and “Her body was quivering like an arrow that has just struck its mark.” She includes interesting Native American (Ojibwa) culture, like the fashioning, use, and significance of cradle boards; high school homecoming on the reservation; contemporary vs. “old-time” things like foods, smells, tastes, medicines, clothes, funerals, and certain dogs; switching between English and Chippewa in conversation; and food like “Zhaanat’s pemmican--deer meat, sweet juneberries, musky Pembina berries, sugared tallow, all these ingredients dried and pounded to a fluff.” Erdrich is sympathetic to Indian survival, world view, and people, but she also approaches their egregious treatment by white people (including Mormons) objectively, trying to understand the thinking behind such treatment. Her politics are in service to a compelling story. Her novel features Native American magical realism, whereby characters have dreams that reveal reality, see real ghosts, are visited by owls, accurately feel if absent characters are alive or dead, would-be rapers may be cursed, and so on. Some of these are given possible rational explanations, as with Thomas being half-asleep and half-awake during his night watchman work, but the ghost of his childhood friend Roderick becomes independent of Thomas as the novel progresses. It also features plenty of female strength, often in the face of awful male behavior like domestic violence and rape and sexual exploitation. At the same time, she loves good men like Thomas and his friends, Wood Mountain, and Lloyd Barnes. The story is moving, amusing, appalling, and absorbing; beautiful and awful. However, I found the ending too abrupt, partly because (view spoiler)[after satisfyingly resolving the Vera situation, it abandons the bill crisis! After detailing Thomas and his friends’ efforts to fight the bill (researching, explaining, petitioning, recruiting, fundraising, traveling, and testifying), to end her novel after their testimony in DC without revealing whether or not they were successful is too provocative. Telling us what happened in her Afterword (which she does) isn’t good enough. (hide spoiler)] Erdrich is a fine audiobook reader of her novel. She doesn't change her voice so much to try to be old or young or male or female or Indian or white, though she does affect a kind of sleazy educated drawl for Jack Malloy, but she knows what each word means and where each pause should come, and she reads clearly and appealingly, and she is the author. I have only read several of her many novels (Love Medicine, The Round House, and the Birchbark House series), but I have really liked them and recommend this one to people who like her writing or want to find out what it’s like to live on a reservation (in the 1950s). Hey—it won the Pulitzer! View all my reviews |
Jefferson Peters
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by Sabaa Tahir
A Young Adult Epic Fantasy with Lots of Violence & Romance
Elias is an elite Martial soldier, Laia a naïve Scholar slave. As they alternate telling their stories (in trendy Young Adult first person, present tense narration), we soon rea...
"It must be due to some fault in ourselves"--
George Orwell's Animal Farm (1945) is an anti-totalitarian-communist allegory in which the exploited animals of the Manor Farm kick Farmer Jones out and set about running the farm. At first...
by Lu Xun
Perfect Stories of Life in Early 20th Century China
Chinese Classic Stories (1998) by Xun Lu is an excellent collection of seven short stories by perhaps the most important 20th century Chinese writer of fiction. Lu Xun (1881-1936) stu...
Fine Writing, Great Characters, Immersive World
The Surgeon's Mate (1980) is the 7th novel in Patrick O'Brian's addicting series of age of sail novels about the lives, loves, and careers of the British navy captain Jack Aubrey and the ...
An Overwritten, Oddly Compelling Gothic Father
Matthew Lewis' notorious and influential Gothic novel The Monk (1796) takes place during the heyday of the Spanish Inquisition. Ambrosio, the monk/friar/abbot/idol of Madrid, is nicknamed ...
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