Tale of a Whale is a Whale of a Tale.
By Adam Sol
Moby Dick
What do we look for when we read a novel? A gripping story. Memorable characters, who are recognizable but also unique and compelling, even if they are villains. Well-wrought language that occasionally - but not too often - reaches toward the poetic. And perhaps most important, we look for something that takes us outside, or perhaps deeper inside, our own lives. "Spiritual truth" may be too strong a term, but it gets at the essence of our encounter with great art.
The story of Moby-Dick is familiar: Ishmael climbs aboard the Pequod, unaware that Captain Ahab is not just hunting whales, but hunting one whale, the whale, Moby-Dick, an albino monster who had "dismasted" him years before. The fact that the story is so quickly translatable, and has been imitated and parodied so often, is a good indicator of its power.
What you might not know about Moby-Dick is that it is also hilarious, romantic, scientific, satirical and often astonishingly beautiful. There are whole paragraphs that scan in iambic pentameter. There is slapstick comedy. There is romance between Ishmael and Queequeg, the heroic harpooner-cannibal, whose body is covered in tattoos. The Pequod represents a cross-section of humanity that puts contemporary "multicultural" novels to shame. (That is, of male humanity. It must be admitted that while Moby-Dick has enormous amounts to say about a lot of subjects, it has almost no women in it at all. To my mind, this is the only possible reason to keep it off any list of great books, whether that list has 50 books or three.) Ahab's quest is not just the supreme act of revenge, or a hateful death wish. It is also a spiritual encounter with an unjust universe on a scale that rivals the great tragedies of Medea, Oedipus or Lear. For Ahab, Moby-Dick is not just a whale: He is the representative on Earth of that force - God, Fate, the Devil, whatever - that has crippled him and robbed him of his manhood. And because he cannot undo what has happened to him, because he can neither grasp nor accept the spiritual meaning of his fate, he must strike against it. Ahab hunts the whale because he can't throw stones at God.
Meanwhile, we live in the company of Ishmael, a self-proclaimed authority on whales. Much of the humour of Moby-Dick (and much of its length) consists of Ishmael's elaborate and often tongue-in-cheek analyses of whales, particularly sperm whales. It is no small task. Because, like the spiritual realm they seem to represent, whales are ultimately unknowable.
In the end, we sense that Ishmael's quest to understand the whale is no less audacious, no less doomed, than Ahab's quest to destroy it. The powers that are beyond us will always be beyond us, and even someone who has done the scholarly research and "fieldwork" often ends his discourses on the whale with uncertainty. Melville writes: "God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught - nay, but the draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash and Patience!"
Which brings us back to what we're looking for in a novel. When you read the first paragraph of this article, did you agree that you hope for some "spiritual truths" when you read novels? How dare you! Don't you know it's hopeless? But of course, our need to strive for the impossible and the unknowable is humanity's most unique, tragic and heroic character trait.
Moby-Dick aims for the some of the most profound questions about our place in the world. It is also a ripping good yarn, with acts of heroism, humour and daring that still thrill after more than 150 years.
Showing posts with label 50 Greatest Books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label 50 Greatest Books. Show all posts
Sunday, July 20, 2008
Saturday, July 12, 2008
50 Greatest Books - Herodotus
The Father of History.
The Histories by Herodotus Globe & Mail
July 12, 2008
Tom Holland
History, like poetry, began with war. Around 440 BC, some three centuries after Homer, singing of the wrath of Achilles, composed The Iliad, a Greek by the name of Herodotus embarked upon a project no less epic. His goal was to explain what would now be termed "the clash of civilizations": the inability of the peoples of East and West to live together in peace. A fateful and enduring theme - and prompted, in Herodotus's case, by a concern to explain how the King of Persia, the most powerful man on the planet, had recently sought to conquer Greece.
The onslaught had been launched back in 480 BC. Set against the unprecedented juggernaut of the Persian invasion, the Greeks appeared few in numbers and hopelessly divided. The result seemed a foregone conclusion. And yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks had managed to hold out. The invaders had been turned back. Greece had remained free.
Two and a half thousand years later, and the story remains as thrilling and remarkable as ever. So stirringly did Herodotus tell it, and with such an epic sweep, that it has come to serve as the very founding myth of European civilization: as the archetype of the triumph of freedom over enervated despotism. Yet it is a startling fact that what will perhaps most strike the reader of Herodotus is not any tone of xenophobia, but rather the very opposite: curiosity and open-mindedness. "Philobarbaros," one indignant compatriot labelled him: the closest to the phrase "bleeding-heart liberal" that ancient Greek approached.
The truth is that Herodotus was both intensely a man of his background, and inexhaustibly curious about the world that lay beyond that of the Greeks. Indeed, such was his enthusiasm for pursuing the line of a good story that it ended up giving to his great work something of the character of a shaggy dog story. Readers who start The Histories in the expectation of reading about the heroics of Thermopylae or Salamis will find they have a long way to go. Only a couple of pages in, and suddenly Herodotus is giving us a strange tale about a king who presses a bodyguard to have a peek at his naked queen - with predictably fatal consequences.
Then comes a story about a musician who is captured by pirates, and escapes them by jumping into the sea while playing his lute - and is promptly rescued by a dolphin. No wonder that Herodotus, "the father of history," has also been sneered at as "the father of lies."
But that is unfair, for not only does it overlook the extraordinarily subtle ordering of themes that gives such an underlying unity to his material, but also - and even more crucially - misrepresents how he saw his own role. "For my job," Herodotus explains at one point, "is simply to record whatever I am told by each of my sources."
Here, as he well appreciated, was something new. For the first time, a chronicler had set himself to trace the origins of a great event, not to a past so remote as to be utterly fabulous, nor to the whims and wishes of some god, nor to a people's claim to a manifest destiny, but rather to explanations that he could investigate personally. Committed to transcribing only living informants or eyewitness accounts, Herodotus had duly toured the world - the original anthropologist, the original foreign correspondent. The fruit of his tireless curiosity was not merely a narrative, but a portrait of an entire age: capacious, various, tolerant. The word that gave to his achievement was one that well deserved to stick. "Enquiries," he termed it: historia.
I first read Herodotus when I was 10. Since then, I have returned to him many times, and never once been bored. It is hard to think of another author of whom I could say the same, let alone one who wrote two and a half millennia ago. "Herodotus," Edward Gibbon declared, "sometimes writes for children and sometimes for philosophers."
And also, thank goodness, for everyone in between.
Tom Holland is the author of Persian Fire. He is currently translating Herodotus for Penguin.
Gutenberg Project - READ the Histories.
The Histories of Herodotus Volume 1
The Histories of Herodotus Volume 2
This is one classical book I have started reading,several times, but never quite managed to read all the way through.
The Histories by Herodotus Globe & Mail
July 12, 2008
Tom Holland
History, like poetry, began with war. Around 440 BC, some three centuries after Homer, singing of the wrath of Achilles, composed The Iliad, a Greek by the name of Herodotus embarked upon a project no less epic. His goal was to explain what would now be termed "the clash of civilizations": the inability of the peoples of East and West to live together in peace. A fateful and enduring theme - and prompted, in Herodotus's case, by a concern to explain how the King of Persia, the most powerful man on the planet, had recently sought to conquer Greece.
The onslaught had been launched back in 480 BC. Set against the unprecedented juggernaut of the Persian invasion, the Greeks appeared few in numbers and hopelessly divided. The result seemed a foregone conclusion. And yet somehow, astonishingly, against the largest expeditionary force ever assembled, the Greeks had managed to hold out. The invaders had been turned back. Greece had remained free.
Two and a half thousand years later, and the story remains as thrilling and remarkable as ever. So stirringly did Herodotus tell it, and with such an epic sweep, that it has come to serve as the very founding myth of European civilization: as the archetype of the triumph of freedom over enervated despotism. Yet it is a startling fact that what will perhaps most strike the reader of Herodotus is not any tone of xenophobia, but rather the very opposite: curiosity and open-mindedness. "Philobarbaros," one indignant compatriot labelled him: the closest to the phrase "bleeding-heart liberal" that ancient Greek approached.
The truth is that Herodotus was both intensely a man of his background, and inexhaustibly curious about the world that lay beyond that of the Greeks. Indeed, such was his enthusiasm for pursuing the line of a good story that it ended up giving to his great work something of the character of a shaggy dog story. Readers who start The Histories in the expectation of reading about the heroics of Thermopylae or Salamis will find they have a long way to go. Only a couple of pages in, and suddenly Herodotus is giving us a strange tale about a king who presses a bodyguard to have a peek at his naked queen - with predictably fatal consequences.
Then comes a story about a musician who is captured by pirates, and escapes them by jumping into the sea while playing his lute - and is promptly rescued by a dolphin. No wonder that Herodotus, "the father of history," has also been sneered at as "the father of lies."
But that is unfair, for not only does it overlook the extraordinarily subtle ordering of themes that gives such an underlying unity to his material, but also - and even more crucially - misrepresents how he saw his own role. "For my job," Herodotus explains at one point, "is simply to record whatever I am told by each of my sources."
Here, as he well appreciated, was something new. For the first time, a chronicler had set himself to trace the origins of a great event, not to a past so remote as to be utterly fabulous, nor to the whims and wishes of some god, nor to a people's claim to a manifest destiny, but rather to explanations that he could investigate personally. Committed to transcribing only living informants or eyewitness accounts, Herodotus had duly toured the world - the original anthropologist, the original foreign correspondent. The fruit of his tireless curiosity was not merely a narrative, but a portrait of an entire age: capacious, various, tolerant. The word that gave to his achievement was one that well deserved to stick. "Enquiries," he termed it: historia.
I first read Herodotus when I was 10. Since then, I have returned to him many times, and never once been bored. It is hard to think of another author of whom I could say the same, let alone one who wrote two and a half millennia ago. "Herodotus," Edward Gibbon declared, "sometimes writes for children and sometimes for philosophers."
And also, thank goodness, for everyone in between.
Tom Holland is the author of Persian Fire. He is currently translating Herodotus for Penguin.
Gutenberg Project - READ the Histories.
The Histories of Herodotus Volume 1
The Histories of Herodotus Volume 2
This is one classical book I have started reading,several times, but never quite managed to read all the way through.
Saturday, July 5, 2008
50 Greatest Books - Ficcones
Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges
When it comes to imaginative influence, size really doesn't matter. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges, a slim collection of 17 short stories that first appeared in 1944, has, over time, made waves in the pond of literature that only a door-stopper of a prose epic such as Joyce's Ulysses can match. Borges's collection whispered from the library that literature had a new subject: literature itself. A glance at what happened to that collection lets us track how that whisper became a roar, and how a writer could surf a wave that he himself had started.
The anglophone literary world at that time made use of a set of pigeonholes, and the work of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) fit nicely into several. First, it came out of nowhere, because that is where Argentina was for even the most cosmopolitan English-bound sensibility. Spain had shrunk from world-historical empire into wrecked state squeezed into the grip of a fascist dictatorship. Argentina was a place near the South Pole ruled by a Hitler-leaning populist despot whose regime was boosted by his pop-tart wife, the stuff of romance and even - as time proved - musical theatre. The prospect of colonial outposts generating artistic energies powerful enough to thrust that mother tongue into the centre of world literature seemed remote, something out of science fiction. [more]
I have heard of this author, but I have not read any of his books
When it comes to imaginative influence, size really doesn't matter. Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges, a slim collection of 17 short stories that first appeared in 1944, has, over time, made waves in the pond of literature that only a door-stopper of a prose epic such as Joyce's Ulysses can match. Borges's collection whispered from the library that literature had a new subject: literature itself. A glance at what happened to that collection lets us track how that whisper became a roar, and how a writer could surf a wave that he himself had started.
The anglophone literary world at that time made use of a set of pigeonholes, and the work of Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) fit nicely into several. First, it came out of nowhere, because that is where Argentina was for even the most cosmopolitan English-bound sensibility. Spain had shrunk from world-historical empire into wrecked state squeezed into the grip of a fascist dictatorship. Argentina was a place near the South Pole ruled by a Hitler-leaning populist despot whose regime was boosted by his pop-tart wife, the stuff of romance and even - as time proved - musical theatre. The prospect of colonial outposts generating artistic energies powerful enough to thrust that mother tongue into the centre of world literature seemed remote, something out of science fiction. [more]
I have heard of this author, but I have not read any of his books
Saturday, June 28, 2008
Our Mutual Friend - 50 Greatest Books
Our Mutual Friend By Charles Dickens.
Who has not heard of Charles Dickens?
He wrote many well known novels - A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities and The Old Curiousity Shop.
But who amongst you has ever heard of, or read, Our Mutual Friend?
Definitely NOT me.
"Strike the keynote!" Dickens liked to tell himself in the terse working notes for his novels in progress. The opening sentence of Our Mutual Friend strikes that keynote dark and hard: "In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in." Dickens instructed his artist, Marcus Stone, to accompany the scene with a keynote illustration, titled Bird of Prey: The man, one observes, has caught something - but what is it precisely? A corpse, it transpires. "I will make you fishers of men," our saviour said. He did not mean it in the sense that Gaffer Hexam fishes for his fellow kind (suicides, in the main) out of that filthy river, whose "big stinks" in summer would bring the whole city to a standstill.
Our Mutual Friend is haunted by death and God's grim curse: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Dickens himself, during its composition, was lucky to escape being killed (as scores of his fellow passengers were) in the terrible Staplehurst train accident, on June 9. 1865. He, like Hexam in his boat, had a young girl in attendance on that fateful trip - his mistress, Ellen ("Nellie") Ternan. It is plausibly surmised the couple had recently buried their love child (bear the fact in mind reading the death of orphan Johnny in Our Mutual Friend). Plausible too that the angelic Lizzie Hexam may be an idealized portrait of Nellie.
[more]
Better read this article fast or you will have to pay to read it.
Who has not heard of Charles Dickens?
He wrote many well known novels - A Christmas Carol, Great Expectations, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, David Copperfield, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities and The Old Curiousity Shop.
But who amongst you has ever heard of, or read, Our Mutual Friend?
Definitely NOT me.
"Strike the keynote!" Dickens liked to tell himself in the terse working notes for his novels in progress. The opening sentence of Our Mutual Friend strikes that keynote dark and hard: "In these times of ours, though concerning the exact year there is no need to be precise, a boat of dirty and disreputable appearance, with two figures in it, floated on the Thames, between Southwark bridge which is of iron, and London Bridge which is of stone, as an autumn evening was closing in." Dickens instructed his artist, Marcus Stone, to accompany the scene with a keynote illustration, titled Bird of Prey: The man, one observes, has caught something - but what is it precisely? A corpse, it transpires. "I will make you fishers of men," our saviour said. He did not mean it in the sense that Gaffer Hexam fishes for his fellow kind (suicides, in the main) out of that filthy river, whose "big stinks" in summer would bring the whole city to a standstill.
Our Mutual Friend is haunted by death and God's grim curse: "Dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return." Dickens himself, during its composition, was lucky to escape being killed (as scores of his fellow passengers were) in the terrible Staplehurst train accident, on June 9. 1865. He, like Hexam in his boat, had a young girl in attendance on that fateful trip - his mistress, Ellen ("Nellie") Ternan. It is plausibly surmised the couple had recently buried their love child (bear the fact in mind reading the death of orphan Johnny in Our Mutual Friend). Plausible too that the angelic Lizzie Hexam may be an idealized portrait of Nellie.
[more]
Better read this article fast or you will have to pay to read it.
Saturday, June 21, 2008
The Koran 50 Greatest Books
The Koran - 50 Greatest Books
I am posting the entire article today - mainly because the Koran is such a topical book amidst all of the political and economical events happening in the world today.
How do you measure a book's worth? By its sale in millions, by its perennial appeal to generation upon generation, by the beauty of its language and style or because, as in the case of the Koran, the book is considered sacred and venerated as God's very word. With more than one billion Muslims in the world who believe that the Koran is God's last revelation in human history, the Koran, like the Bible, is one of the most widely read, revered and recited books in the world. Its reach is global, its influence is global. It has been the inspiration to one of the greatest civilizations in the world and is the basis for some of the most impressive art, architecture, literature, philosophy and science the world has ever known.
A relatively short scripture, the Koran is the culmination of a series of revelations that Muslims believe were given to Muhammad, a seventh-century Arab who became God's last Prophet and the recipient of God's final revelation. The book was revealed in Arabic and subsequently compiled in Arabic. Though it has been translated into numerous languages, the faithful nevertheless always try to read the original Arabic because the power of the book lies as much in the oral recitation of the verses as its does in its content. For Muslims, the Koran is central to the good and moral life.
Like most Semitic scriptures, the Koran refers to the big themes: God, prophecy, angels, the eschaton (the end of days), punishment and reward. But it also refers to people of other faiths, namely Jews and Christians. These are people who also received divine revelation, who had their own prophets and who might also be saved in the next world. Thus, Muslims have always shared an ambivalent history with the people of both these faiths.
The Koran also refers to what are understood to be more socio-ethical matters: marriage, divorce, sexual relations, slavery, inheritance laws, poverty, penal laws, ecology and ritual practice. Man worships God not just through submission to ritual but through the ethical relations he forms with the world and people around him.
This is where the greatness of the Koran lies. With its insistence on reflection on God's world and its emphasis on the performance of just and charitable acts, the Koran contains a transformative power. The language is poetic, passionate and persuasive. The narrative is both long and elaborate, and short and choppy. The thread that ties all the different themes together is God' mercy, or rahma. The Koran is itself a reflection of God's mercy and compassion, and must be central to the way we think of one another and the relationships we form.
But like all scriptures, the Koran contains another side. In the post-9/11 world, many in the West are suddenly awake to the power of scripture, and to the fact that zealotry and fanaticism can find their roots in scripture just as much as compassion can. Issues of gender inequalities and a justification for violence are being seen as defining descriptors of the Islamic world with their basis in the Koran.
While academic and popular thinking contest or defend these issues, in so doing they keep the Koran alive. Like every great book, the Koran inspires and confuses, it moves and infuriates, it speaks and demands that we listen. Its Arabian setting, its tales of prophets and messengers, its promise of heaven and its threats of hell all mean that in one page we live multiple existences; we live both in the past and the present and we reflect on our mortality. Philosophy, theology and poetry are all sealed intricately in the book.
This is not an easy book to read, but sacred territory is never easy. The Koran has continued to inspire the faithful for hundreds of years, and it continues to shape the lives of millions from birth to death. The Koran may look like any other book, but for the believer, it is quite simply a call to God.
Mona Siddiqui is the University of Glasgow's professor of Islamic Studies and Public Understanding, as well as the director of its Centre for the Study of Islam.
Quotable
It is Allah who causes the seed-grain and the date-stone to sprout. He causes the living to come forth from the dead and He is the one to cause the dead to come forth from the living. That is Allah, so then how are you deluded from the truth? It is He that breaks the day and makes the night for rest and the sun and moon for the reckoning. Such is His judgment, the Exalted in power and the Omniscient. It is He who makes the stars for you so that you may guide yourselves with their help through the dark spaces of land and sea. Indeed we detail our signs for people who know. It is He who produced you from a single soul and then a resting place and a repository. We detail our signs for people who understand. It is He who sends down rain from the skies.
Chapter 5 verses 95-99,
The Chapter of the Cattle
I personally do not accept the Koran as the Word of God - but then I do not accept the Bible as the Word of God either. Does that means I'm neutral?
I am posting the entire article today - mainly because the Koran is such a topical book amidst all of the political and economical events happening in the world today.
How do you measure a book's worth? By its sale in millions, by its perennial appeal to generation upon generation, by the beauty of its language and style or because, as in the case of the Koran, the book is considered sacred and venerated as God's very word. With more than one billion Muslims in the world who believe that the Koran is God's last revelation in human history, the Koran, like the Bible, is one of the most widely read, revered and recited books in the world. Its reach is global, its influence is global. It has been the inspiration to one of the greatest civilizations in the world and is the basis for some of the most impressive art, architecture, literature, philosophy and science the world has ever known.
A relatively short scripture, the Koran is the culmination of a series of revelations that Muslims believe were given to Muhammad, a seventh-century Arab who became God's last Prophet and the recipient of God's final revelation. The book was revealed in Arabic and subsequently compiled in Arabic. Though it has been translated into numerous languages, the faithful nevertheless always try to read the original Arabic because the power of the book lies as much in the oral recitation of the verses as its does in its content. For Muslims, the Koran is central to the good and moral life.
Like most Semitic scriptures, the Koran refers to the big themes: God, prophecy, angels, the eschaton (the end of days), punishment and reward. But it also refers to people of other faiths, namely Jews and Christians. These are people who also received divine revelation, who had their own prophets and who might also be saved in the next world. Thus, Muslims have always shared an ambivalent history with the people of both these faiths.
The Koran also refers to what are understood to be more socio-ethical matters: marriage, divorce, sexual relations, slavery, inheritance laws, poverty, penal laws, ecology and ritual practice. Man worships God not just through submission to ritual but through the ethical relations he forms with the world and people around him.
This is where the greatness of the Koran lies. With its insistence on reflection on God's world and its emphasis on the performance of just and charitable acts, the Koran contains a transformative power. The language is poetic, passionate and persuasive. The narrative is both long and elaborate, and short and choppy. The thread that ties all the different themes together is God' mercy, or rahma. The Koran is itself a reflection of God's mercy and compassion, and must be central to the way we think of one another and the relationships we form.
But like all scriptures, the Koran contains another side. In the post-9/11 world, many in the West are suddenly awake to the power of scripture, and to the fact that zealotry and fanaticism can find their roots in scripture just as much as compassion can. Issues of gender inequalities and a justification for violence are being seen as defining descriptors of the Islamic world with their basis in the Koran.
While academic and popular thinking contest or defend these issues, in so doing they keep the Koran alive. Like every great book, the Koran inspires and confuses, it moves and infuriates, it speaks and demands that we listen. Its Arabian setting, its tales of prophets and messengers, its promise of heaven and its threats of hell all mean that in one page we live multiple existences; we live both in the past and the present and we reflect on our mortality. Philosophy, theology and poetry are all sealed intricately in the book.
This is not an easy book to read, but sacred territory is never easy. The Koran has continued to inspire the faithful for hundreds of years, and it continues to shape the lives of millions from birth to death. The Koran may look like any other book, but for the believer, it is quite simply a call to God.
Mona Siddiqui is the University of Glasgow's professor of Islamic Studies and Public Understanding, as well as the director of its Centre for the Study of Islam.
Quotable
It is Allah who causes the seed-grain and the date-stone to sprout. He causes the living to come forth from the dead and He is the one to cause the dead to come forth from the living. That is Allah, so then how are you deluded from the truth? It is He that breaks the day and makes the night for rest and the sun and moon for the reckoning. Such is His judgment, the Exalted in power and the Omniscient. It is He who makes the stars for you so that you may guide yourselves with their help through the dark spaces of land and sea. Indeed we detail our signs for people who know. It is He who produced you from a single soul and then a resting place and a repository. We detail our signs for people who understand. It is He who sends down rain from the skies.
Chapter 5 verses 95-99,
The Chapter of the Cattle
I personally do not accept the Koran as the Word of God - but then I do not accept the Bible as the Word of God either. Does that means I'm neutral?
Monday, June 16, 2008
Lolita - 50 Greatest Books
Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov
50 Greatest Books
This February, Woolworth's UK incited parental ire with an infelicitously named girl's bedroom set: the Lolita Midsleeper Combi. A spokesperson said, "... the staff had never heard of Lolita. ... We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."
That's the kind of dumb that makes headlines. Even if you've never had the exquisite pleasure of reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, you know its notorious plot: Middle-aged Humbert Humbert is besotted by his 12-year-old stepdaughter, the "nymphet" Dolores Haze. Lolita is one of those rare titles that has been promoted to a term.
Lolita is not just a love story. It is also a jailhouse confession, a picaresque road trip, a parody of the "Freudian voodoo" Nabokov detested, an intricately plotted murder mystery and an impassioned love letter to the U.S. landscape and language. The prose is exuberant and erudite, cantering and bantering, jam-packed with spot-on mimicry and delectable wordplay, as Nabokov revels in his prodigious adopted vocabulary. Uproariously funny and heart-smashingly sad, Lolita is a virtuoso performance, one that leaves other 20th century novels choking on its gorgeous dust.
50 Greatest Books
This February, Woolworth's UK incited parental ire with an infelicitously named girl's bedroom set: the Lolita Midsleeper Combi. A spokesperson said, "... the staff had never heard of Lolita. ... We had to look it up on Wikipedia. But we certainly know who she is now."
That's the kind of dumb that makes headlines. Even if you've never had the exquisite pleasure of reading Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, you know its notorious plot: Middle-aged Humbert Humbert is besotted by his 12-year-old stepdaughter, the "nymphet" Dolores Haze. Lolita is one of those rare titles that has been promoted to a term.
Lolita is not just a love story. It is also a jailhouse confession, a picaresque road trip, a parody of the "Freudian voodoo" Nabokov detested, an intricately plotted murder mystery and an impassioned love letter to the U.S. landscape and language. The prose is exuberant and erudite, cantering and bantering, jam-packed with spot-on mimicry and delectable wordplay, as Nabokov revels in his prodigious adopted vocabulary. Uproariously funny and heart-smashingly sad, Lolita is a virtuoso performance, one that leaves other 20th century novels choking on its gorgeous dust.
Saturday, May 31, 2008
50 Greatest Books
There is no article in todays Globe & Mail Online Edition, specifically identified as one of the 50 Greatest Books. This may have something to do with the email I sent them last week telling them their online edition was wrong, I don't know. Anyway, this review fits the parameters for 50 Greatest Books, so I will assume this is correct. Since it is a short article, I have posted the entire review.
More on memory
MARTIN LEVIN
May 31, 2008
Readers intrigued by hyperthymestic syndrome, the condition that afflicts poor Jill Price with an ineradicable memory, may be interested to learn that hers is not the first such account. In 1968, the great Russian psychologist A. R. Luria published a book that has since entered the limited library of neurological classics. The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory (available from Harvard University Press, 160 pages, $26.50) is a gem of both clinical writing and literary narrative, comparable to the likes of Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Luria founded a new genre with this work, in which a patient was treated not as a collection of bodily syndromes, but as a human in full: He called it "romantic science." The human in this case was a young Russian, S., whose memory bank was limitless and who eventually became a professional mnemonist. Luria's exploration of his gift (and his curse) is fascinating, lucid and compassionate. Do read it.
More on memory
MARTIN LEVIN
May 31, 2008
Readers intrigued by hyperthymestic syndrome, the condition that afflicts poor Jill Price with an ineradicable memory, may be interested to learn that hers is not the first such account. In 1968, the great Russian psychologist A. R. Luria published a book that has since entered the limited library of neurological classics. The Mind of a Mnemonist: A Little Book About a Vast Memory (available from Harvard University Press, 160 pages, $26.50) is a gem of both clinical writing and literary narrative, comparable to the likes of Oliver Sacks's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
Luria founded a new genre with this work, in which a patient was treated not as a collection of bodily syndromes, but as a human in full: He called it "romantic science." The human in this case was a young Russian, S., whose memory bank was limitless and who eventually became a professional mnemonist. Luria's exploration of his gift (and his curse) is fascinating, lucid and compassionate. Do read it.
Monday, May 26, 2008
50 Greatest Books - update
About the 50 Greatest Books (small vent) I posted on Saturday. I sent an email to the Globe & Mail newspaper. This is the reply I received.
In the printed newspaper, it's The Iliad and the Odyssey by Mary Beard.
You appear to be right about what is called the online print edition,
and I have alerted the online editor,
Thank you,
In the printed newspaper, it's The Iliad and the Odyssey by Mary Beard.
You appear to be right about what is called the online print edition,
and I have alerted the online editor,
Thank you,
Saturday, May 24, 2008
No 50 Greatest Books Post today
I went to the Globe and Mail to see todays 50 Greatest Books Selection.
BUT for some reason, they have reprinted last weeks article - Pride and Prejudice - verbatim.
We Are Not Impressed.
BUT for some reason, they have reprinted last weeks article - Pride and Prejudice - verbatim.
We Are Not Impressed.
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Pride and Prejudice - 50 Greatest Books
Pride and Prejudice - by Jane Austen
I'm posting the entire article today because this book is probably the most famous and well know of all Jane Austen's books.
The 18th-century novel was a baggy, sententious affair before Jane Austen gave it bones. Pride and Prejudice has a classic three-part structure, one that modern readers respond to effortlessly. In certain other respects, the novel is more typical of its time. Reading it after watching the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley (a lively version that puts the livestock into the phrase "gentleman farmer"), you're struck by Austen's lack of sensory detail. Dialogue was her medium, and all she needed. The vividness and complexity of the characters, as revealed through conversation alone, is electrifying. Pride and Prejudice makes you believe in the reality of the past, to the extent that you doubted it.
We tend to say that Jane Austen wrote about lives lived in drawing rooms because that's all she knew. And yet (as Carol Shields points out in her gem of a study for the Penguin Lives series), Austen's family offered all sorts of other material: two brothers fighting in the Napoleonic wars, an aunt thrown into prison for stealing a piece of lace from a shop, a cousin's husband guillotined in the French Revolution, a sister's fiancé dying of yellow fever in India. Austen shoved all of this to the side, along with bereavement, religion, servants and children (though as a maiden aunt, she spent years as nursemaid).
Instead, for that "little bit of ivory (two inches wide) on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces so little effect after so much labour," Austen separated out the most poignant strand of her experience - the fact that a woman's station in the world, her independence, her very survival, depended on the uncertain and often demeaning enterprise of attracting a man who could accept the size of her dowry.
There are a lot of smart, self-reliant young women out there who are passionate about Pride and Prejudice. This is partly due to Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet (in the 1995 BBC miniseries) with an irresistible combination of serenity and mirth, in spite of the dreadful armpit-waisted muslin gowns she was forced to wear. Why does this novel resonate so powerfully with women who have so many other options in life?
I blame Pride and Prejudice for the fact that the hero of every romance novel is rotten to the heroine the first time he meets her. In my heart, I also blame it for our persistent and anachronistic tendency to regard a man as an embodiment of personal destiny. Well, not Pride and Prejudice alone. But we carry stories around in our bones, and among novels about the sexes, it's the best there is: Elizabeth snagging Mr. Darcy is romantic heroin for the discriminating reader.
Maybe I'm wrong. There are lots of reasons to love Pride and Prejudice, reasons that have nothing to do with romantic identification: Austen's swift and exact insights into character, her lack of sentimentality, her delicious satire, her fluid, intelligent sentences.
And Elizabeth Bennet is a terrific heroine for any age. Witty, spirited and outspoken, she risks everything in being adamantly who she is. At first, she's too rash in acting by her own lights, but in the end, her fidelity to herself is fabulously vindicated. Mr. Darcy's wealth is both beside the point and to the point: He values Elizabeth for her intelligence and unconventional spirit, which is all we require - but this is payback time.
I did ask a 28-year-old friend about her love for Pride and Prejudice, and most of her appreciative comments came back to its language. The attraction between Elizabeth and Darcy is a talky, civilized, celebration of minds: witticisms over the pianoforte, painful disclosures alone in the drawing room, letters deconstructed strand by strand. By the time they plight their troth, the two have gone some distance down the relationship road. Not so much in learning to know each other as in learning to see their own imperfect selves in the mirror of their interaction. How much more interesting their life together promises to be than the lives of lovers in those turgid 19th-century novels, where passion and mystery (i.e. sex) rise like mist off the moors. At 21, astonishingly, Jane Austen knew that talk is the enduring heart of a marriage.
I'm posting the entire article today because this book is probably the most famous and well know of all Jane Austen's books.
The 18th-century novel was a baggy, sententious affair before Jane Austen gave it bones. Pride and Prejudice has a classic three-part structure, one that modern readers respond to effortlessly. In certain other respects, the novel is more typical of its time. Reading it after watching the 2005 film starring Keira Knightley (a lively version that puts the livestock into the phrase "gentleman farmer"), you're struck by Austen's lack of sensory detail. Dialogue was her medium, and all she needed. The vividness and complexity of the characters, as revealed through conversation alone, is electrifying. Pride and Prejudice makes you believe in the reality of the past, to the extent that you doubted it.
We tend to say that Jane Austen wrote about lives lived in drawing rooms because that's all she knew. And yet (as Carol Shields points out in her gem of a study for the Penguin Lives series), Austen's family offered all sorts of other material: two brothers fighting in the Napoleonic wars, an aunt thrown into prison for stealing a piece of lace from a shop, a cousin's husband guillotined in the French Revolution, a sister's fiancé dying of yellow fever in India. Austen shoved all of this to the side, along with bereavement, religion, servants and children (though as a maiden aunt, she spent years as nursemaid).
Instead, for that "little bit of ivory (two inches wide) on which I work with so fine a brush, as produces so little effect after so much labour," Austen separated out the most poignant strand of her experience - the fact that a woman's station in the world, her independence, her very survival, depended on the uncertain and often demeaning enterprise of attracting a man who could accept the size of her dowry.
There are a lot of smart, self-reliant young women out there who are passionate about Pride and Prejudice. This is partly due to Jennifer Ehle, who played Elizabeth Bennet (in the 1995 BBC miniseries) with an irresistible combination of serenity and mirth, in spite of the dreadful armpit-waisted muslin gowns she was forced to wear. Why does this novel resonate so powerfully with women who have so many other options in life?
I blame Pride and Prejudice for the fact that the hero of every romance novel is rotten to the heroine the first time he meets her. In my heart, I also blame it for our persistent and anachronistic tendency to regard a man as an embodiment of personal destiny. Well, not Pride and Prejudice alone. But we carry stories around in our bones, and among novels about the sexes, it's the best there is: Elizabeth snagging Mr. Darcy is romantic heroin for the discriminating reader.
Maybe I'm wrong. There are lots of reasons to love Pride and Prejudice, reasons that have nothing to do with romantic identification: Austen's swift and exact insights into character, her lack of sentimentality, her delicious satire, her fluid, intelligent sentences.
And Elizabeth Bennet is a terrific heroine for any age. Witty, spirited and outspoken, she risks everything in being adamantly who she is. At first, she's too rash in acting by her own lights, but in the end, her fidelity to herself is fabulously vindicated. Mr. Darcy's wealth is both beside the point and to the point: He values Elizabeth for her intelligence and unconventional spirit, which is all we require - but this is payback time.
I did ask a 28-year-old friend about her love for Pride and Prejudice, and most of her appreciative comments came back to its language. The attraction between Elizabeth and Darcy is a talky, civilized, celebration of minds: witticisms over the pianoforte, painful disclosures alone in the drawing room, letters deconstructed strand by strand. By the time they plight their troth, the two have gone some distance down the relationship road. Not so much in learning to know each other as in learning to see their own imperfect selves in the mirror of their interaction. How much more interesting their life together promises to be than the lives of lovers in those turgid 19th-century novels, where passion and mystery (i.e. sex) rise like mist off the moors. At 21, astonishingly, Jane Austen knew that talk is the enduring heart of a marriage.
Sunday, May 11, 2008
The Critique of Pure Reason - 50 Greatest Books
THE CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, BY IMMANUEL KANT
Kant was a terrible writer. He was honest enough to admit it, and gracious enough to publish his longing for the elegance and clarity of style with which two of his contemporaries - David Hume and Moses Mendelssohn - were born. Kant knew The Critique of Pure Reason was a problem, and his later attempts to revise or summarize it only made things worse. Still, the book is the single greatest work of modern philosophy, and has but one rival - Plato's Republic - in the history of thought. It's not only general readers who are put off by its clumsy, sluggish writing; most university courses spend so much time on the first half that they stop before reaching what Kant said was the point.
So I've taken a quote that many readers never get to, but it shows the Critique at its heart. The book seeks to determine what it means to be real. Unlike many contemporary philosophers, Kant wasn't interested in skeptical puzzles. For him, what is real and what is not was a matter of great moral and political import. The Enlightenment contested the reality of superstitions: Though witches were no longer burned in the 18th century, you could still be sent to jail for denying the reality of demons in free-thinking Holland. Other superstitions were less dramatic but more dangerous: As long as people believed that poverty and illness were God's punishment for one sin or another, they were unlikely to explore ways of eliminating them.
I have vaguely heard of Immanuel Kant, but usually in relation to philosophy - I think. Otherwise, I have never read any of his books.
Kant was a terrible writer. He was honest enough to admit it, and gracious enough to publish his longing for the elegance and clarity of style with which two of his contemporaries - David Hume and Moses Mendelssohn - were born. Kant knew The Critique of Pure Reason was a problem, and his later attempts to revise or summarize it only made things worse. Still, the book is the single greatest work of modern philosophy, and has but one rival - Plato's Republic - in the history of thought. It's not only general readers who are put off by its clumsy, sluggish writing; most university courses spend so much time on the first half that they stop before reaching what Kant said was the point.
So I've taken a quote that many readers never get to, but it shows the Critique at its heart. The book seeks to determine what it means to be real. Unlike many contemporary philosophers, Kant wasn't interested in skeptical puzzles. For him, what is real and what is not was a matter of great moral and political import. The Enlightenment contested the reality of superstitions: Though witches were no longer burned in the 18th century, you could still be sent to jail for denying the reality of demons in free-thinking Holland. Other superstitions were less dramatic but more dangerous: As long as people believed that poverty and illness were God's punishment for one sin or another, they were unlikely to explore ways of eliminating them.
I have vaguely heard of Immanuel Kant, but usually in relation to philosophy - I think. Otherwise, I have never read any of his books.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
50 Greatest Books - King Lear
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Shakespeare's King Lear is magnificent, appalling, soaring, banal, cruel, tender, funny and complex; the virtuous are punished, justice is rarely served (and lawyers are unloved). Its scope is so demanding that it's virtually impossible to stage and its end is simply shattering - in other words, it's very much like life. (from the article)
Shakespeare (whoever he may have been) wrote lots of plays. Any of them could be classed as a great book. But who chose King Lear for this list? I wonder if the Shakespeare Geek had anything to do with this choice? He frequently says that King Lear is his favourite play. But it definitely is NOT my choice of a great Play. I don't think I have read it or seen it on stage.
If I were choosing, I would go with the most famous or the most easily recognized. And those would have to be either Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet. Just as long as it is not Macbeth. I HATE Macbeth.
Anyway, better read the article quick because by next Friday you will have to PAY to read it.
Shakespeare's King Lear is magnificent, appalling, soaring, banal, cruel, tender, funny and complex; the virtuous are punished, justice is rarely served (and lawyers are unloved). Its scope is so demanding that it's virtually impossible to stage and its end is simply shattering - in other words, it's very much like life. (from the article)
Shakespeare (whoever he may have been) wrote lots of plays. Any of them could be classed as a great book. But who chose King Lear for this list? I wonder if the Shakespeare Geek had anything to do with this choice? He frequently says that King Lear is his favourite play. But it definitely is NOT my choice of a great Play. I don't think I have read it or seen it on stage.
If I were choosing, I would go with the most famous or the most easily recognized. And those would have to be either Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet. Just as long as it is not Macbeth. I HATE Macbeth.
Anyway, better read the article quick because by next Friday you will have to PAY to read it.
Monday, April 28, 2008
One Hundred Years of Solitude - 50 Greatest Books
ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE, BY GABRIEL GARCIA MÁRQUEZ
Gabriel García Márquez, then a little-known Colombian journalist, wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude over a period of 18 months, in seclusion, in Mexico City. The book was published in Buenos Aires in 1967, heralding a new literary wave from Latin America and becoming the most important novel ever published in Spanish on this side of the Atlantic.
If you read the full article today, you can get the full article. but it will be gone by the end of the week. I know I said I wasn't going to do any more, but it's habit now, so I will continue to list the books.
Gabriel García Márquez, then a little-known Colombian journalist, wrote One Hundred Years of Solitude over a period of 18 months, in seclusion, in Mexico City. The book was published in Buenos Aires in 1967, heralding a new literary wave from Latin America and becoming the most important novel ever published in Spanish on this side of the Atlantic.
If you read the full article today, you can get the full article. but it will be gone by the end of the week. I know I said I wasn't going to do any more, but it's habit now, so I will continue to list the books.
Saturday, April 26, 2008
50 Greatest Books - Globe and Mail - Venting
I've been posting the 50 Greatest Books from the Globe and Mail Newspaper on my blog since January, and now I discover that you have to PAY to read the article. I posted about Gullivers Travels 4 days ago. The article was originally posted last weekend on 19/04/2008 and now (just 1 week later) you cannot read it unless you pay.
Does that happen with all the articles? If yes then I am not sure that I want to continue covering this series anymore. Its not worth it if my readers cannot read the articles.
I checked all my articles and links. And ALL but one are now pay-to-view. I'd say this is a new Globe policy to make more money. Which is very disappointing to me.
While I did say I was not going to continue with this series, I have decided that I will, as it is educational and its become a habit. BUT you have to read the articles within the first week or you will end up having to pay to read them.
Does that happen with all the articles? If yes then I am not sure that I want to continue covering this series anymore. Its not worth it if my readers cannot read the articles.
I checked all my articles and links. And ALL but one are now pay-to-view. I'd say this is a new Globe policy to make more money. Which is very disappointing to me.
While I did say I was not going to continue with this series, I have decided that I will, as it is educational and its become a habit. BUT you have to read the articles within the first week or you will end up having to pay to read them.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Gulliver's Travels - 50 Greatest Books
Gulliver's Travels (by Jonathan Swift) is one of the best and most important books in the world. First published in London, anonymously, in 1726, it was a howling success, passed from hand to hand among the political class and general readers, and immediately translated into French and German. Voltaire thought it was wonderful.
By the 20th century, heavily expurgated and abbreviated, Gulliver's Travels had survived, but chiefly as a story for children. There is a double irony in this. The first is that it is a savage adult satire on hypocrisy, corruption in politics, the insanity of war and the barbarism that underlies so-called civilization. Swift also exploited - uncomfortably, for the reader - his obsessional disgust with the gross animality of human nature.
By the 20th century, heavily expurgated and abbreviated, Gulliver's Travels had survived, but chiefly as a story for children. There is a double irony in this. The first is that it is a savage adult satire on hypocrisy, corruption in politics, the insanity of war and the barbarism that underlies so-called civilization. Swift also exploited - uncomfortably, for the reader - his obsessional disgust with the gross animality of human nature.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
The Interpretation of Dreams - 50 Greatest Books
Perchance to Dream by Sigmund Freud
Until Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1900, dreams were considered either to belong to the realm of mysticism and superstition, or were the object of unscientific "dream books" that told the reader what the dream meant. After the publication of what must be considered Freud's most important book, dreams were taken seriously in psychotherapy. Today, whatever the school of therapy, it would be rare not to give dreams some significance. This is entirely due to Freud, who called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious."
Freud used this book to reveal much of his inner life. This required courage, and encouraged others to take the same route. Even if we reject Freud's interpretations of his own dreams, or find them lacking in scientific rigour, we cannot fail to admire them as remarkable literary achievements. Probably no other author, ever, has subjected his or her own dreams to such merciless investigation.
Until Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams appeared in 1900, dreams were considered either to belong to the realm of mysticism and superstition, or were the object of unscientific "dream books" that told the reader what the dream meant. After the publication of what must be considered Freud's most important book, dreams were taken seriously in psychotherapy. Today, whatever the school of therapy, it would be rare not to give dreams some significance. This is entirely due to Freud, who called dreams "the royal road to the unconscious."
Freud used this book to reveal much of his inner life. This required courage, and encouraged others to take the same route. Even if we reject Freud's interpretations of his own dreams, or find them lacking in scientific rigour, we cannot fail to admire them as remarkable literary achievements. Probably no other author, ever, has subjected his or her own dreams to such merciless investigation.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Wealth of Nations - 50 Greatest Books
Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which appeared in London and Edinburgh in March, 1776, is to the modern intellect as important as the United States Declaration of Independence signed in Philadelphia that summer. At least 12 years in the writing, and 25 in the thinking, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations established an entirely modern way of looking at history and society.
Up to then, the rise and decay of states had been a theme for moralists or factional politicians, who peddled class and national loyalties, every sort of special pleading and odd bits of the supernatural. In contrast, as Irish philosopher Edmund Burke put it, Smith presented "a compleat analysis" of society not just in its industrial and commercial life, but in the arts, finance, justice, the military, the religious and educational establishments and the public administration.
Smith, a Scottish moral philosopher of peculiarly beautiful character and old-fashioned bachelor habits, was born in 1723 in a windswept country that was then one of the most backward in Europe, misruled by a delinquent aristocracy and a fanatical church just longing for the world to end. Scotland had lately been frog-marched into a forced union with its powerful neighbour to the south.
Smith used his deep knowledge of history and his profound curiosity to address Scotland's plight through a pair of interlocking questions: Why are some countries rich and others poor? What is wealth anyway?
[continued]
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which appeared in London and Edinburgh in March, 1776, is to the modern intellect as important as the United States Declaration of Independence signed in Philadelphia that summer. At least 12 years in the writing, and 25 in the thinking, An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations established an entirely modern way of looking at history and society.
Up to then, the rise and decay of states had been a theme for moralists or factional politicians, who peddled class and national loyalties, every sort of special pleading and odd bits of the supernatural. In contrast, as Irish philosopher Edmund Burke put it, Smith presented "a compleat analysis" of society not just in its industrial and commercial life, but in the arts, finance, justice, the military, the religious and educational establishments and the public administration.
Smith, a Scottish moral philosopher of peculiarly beautiful character and old-fashioned bachelor habits, was born in 1723 in a windswept country that was then one of the most backward in Europe, misruled by a delinquent aristocracy and a fanatical church just longing for the world to end. Scotland had lately been frog-marched into a forced union with its powerful neighbour to the south.
Smith used his deep knowledge of history and his profound curiosity to address Scotland's plight through a pair of interlocking questions: Why are some countries rich and others poor? What is wealth anyway?
[continued]
Monday, March 24, 2008
THE GREAT GATSBY - 50 GREATEST BOOKS
Gatsby? It really is great
How much poorer would our culture be if F. Scott Fitzgerald had, as he originally intended, set The Great Gatsby in the Midwest in 1885, and called it The High-Bouncing Lover? Such a question is impossible to answer, for we can only guess at how barren the U.S. literary landscape would appear without Gatsby's West Egg mansion in it, just as we can scarcely conceive of a U.S. canon of literature without Fitzgerald himself.
There are reasons why this book is engrossing, and then there are reasons why it is important. Among the former are its impeccable style, its nearly flawless execution and its brilliant, charged prose. [more]
How much poorer would our culture be if F. Scott Fitzgerald had, as he originally intended, set The Great Gatsby in the Midwest in 1885, and called it The High-Bouncing Lover? Such a question is impossible to answer, for we can only guess at how barren the U.S. literary landscape would appear without Gatsby's West Egg mansion in it, just as we can scarcely conceive of a U.S. canon of literature without Fitzgerald himself.
There are reasons why this book is engrossing, and then there are reasons why it is important. Among the former are its impeccable style, its nearly flawless execution and its brilliant, charged prose. [more]
Thursday, March 20, 2008
50 Greatest Books March 2008
I totally forgot about the 50 Greatest Books series I am following. I must be really distracted by the new job and the computer crash. I note that the last book I posted about was on March 2nd. I started my new job on March 4th. Anyway, here are the most recent books in the series.
March 8th - 50 Greatest Books
The Confessions of St. Augustine
Few books are more frequently subject to such vain mirror-work than St. Augustine's Confessions. Enter enlightened wonder: At the end of the fourth century, a middle-aged North African wrote an account of himself that's self-conscious, questioning, searching and boldly honest; an account that [never but] roars with a lively literary voice; an account written after the author gave up a life of eloquent wind and elegant debauchery for a life committed to Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church.
March 15th - 50 Greatest Books
THE PRINCE, BY NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, first published in 1532, is certainly the most shocking book ever written about political leadership. No current politician in his or her right mind would ever confess to the black arts Machiavelli so coolly endorses. Heaven forbid! He endures, however, because his work still contains the sting of truth.
March 8th - 50 Greatest Books
The Confessions of St. Augustine
Few books are more frequently subject to such vain mirror-work than St. Augustine's Confessions. Enter enlightened wonder: At the end of the fourth century, a middle-aged North African wrote an account of himself that's self-conscious, questioning, searching and boldly honest; an account that [never but] roars with a lively literary voice; an account written after the author gave up a life of eloquent wind and elegant debauchery for a life committed to Jesus Christ and the Catholic Church.
March 15th - 50 Greatest Books
THE PRINCE, BY NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI
Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince, first published in 1532, is certainly the most shocking book ever written about political leadership. No current politician in his or her right mind would ever confess to the black arts Machiavelli so coolly endorses. Heaven forbid! He endures, however, because his work still contains the sting of truth.
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Das Kapital - 50 Greatest books
Das Kapital by Karl Marx
'Of course," the French theorist Louis Althusser wrote, "we have all read, and all do read Das Kapital." Of course, we haven't and we don't. Even Althusser himself, who produced a book on the subject, eventually confessed in his memoirs that he was a "trickster and deceiver" who had read no more than "a few passages of Marx." Yet, in a broader sense, he was right: Ever since the publication of Das Kapital's first volume in 1867 - the only one completed in Marx's lifetime - we have read it in the world about us, in the dramas and conflicts of contemporary history.
Next week: The Confessions of St. Augustine
'Of course," the French theorist Louis Althusser wrote, "we have all read, and all do read Das Kapital." Of course, we haven't and we don't. Even Althusser himself, who produced a book on the subject, eventually confessed in his memoirs that he was a "trickster and deceiver" who had read no more than "a few passages of Marx." Yet, in a broader sense, he was right: Ever since the publication of Das Kapital's first volume in 1867 - the only one completed in Marx's lifetime - we have read it in the world about us, in the dramas and conflicts of contemporary history.
Next week: The Confessions of St. Augustine
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