An enjoyable blend of biography, literary criticism, literary influence, and travelogue. I downloaded the sample after seeing it recommended by the AmAn enjoyable blend of biography, literary criticism, literary influence, and travelogue. I downloaded the sample after seeing it recommended by the Amazon algorithm, enjoyed it, and so read all of it.
Kafka is so impossible to place geographically, linguistically, ethnically. Is he Czech? Austro-Hungarian? German writer? Jewish? He was all of these and none of these. To learn more about him Karolina Watroba travels around to all of these places and more--including Oxford where many of his papers are and Korea. We learn a little more about Kafka's person, writing and impact in each of these places. She has a deeper discussion of a few of his works (Metamorphosis, The Judgment, The Trial) and also some discussion of a lot of works influenced by Kafka.
Most of all Watroba's relatively light and enthusiastic and curious tone shows through from beginning to end, making the book particularly enjoyable....more
An excellent short book about how George Eliot came to write Daniel Deronda, the broader philosophical and intellectual questions the book was engagedAn excellent short book about how George Eliot came to write Daniel Deronda, the broader philosophical and intellectual questions the book was engaged in, and some about its afterlife. It vividly portrays just how intellectually engaged George Eliot was, situating her novel in a broader set of political philosophical debates about the meaning of citizenship, nationality, rationality, and religion.
The book is well organized in six parts that cover: (1) the debates over the "Jewish question" in France, Germany and the UK--the big question being whether Jews could be citizens of countries, especially ones like England that were based on an official state religion, (2) George Eliot's initiation into this question, including through some of the work she did as a translator engaging with important texts that debated it, (3) a summary of Daniel Deronda, focusing on the ways it was in philosophical dialogue about this issue, (4) a discussion of an essay she wrote after Daniel Deronda expanding on the Jewish themes, and (5) a discussion of the changing reception to Daniel Deronda, from skepticism about the Jewish parts, to her falling out favor, to her regaining stature.
I learned both some interesting intellectual history and gained even greater appreciation for George Eliot....more
A scholarly book on the ways in which parts of Cervantes' work are him working through the trauma from his five years in captivity in Algiers.
What I pA scholarly book on the ways in which parts of Cervantes' work are him working through the trauma from his five years in captivity in Algiers.
What I particularly liked about the book was its in depth look at this five years of Cervantes' life along with the broader of context of captivity--including enslaved people and hostages held for ransom--in the Mediterranean struggle and mixture of Muslims (including ethnically different ones and different rules), Christians, and a few Jews as well. It then shows how he reworks this experience in several plays, the Captives Tale (an interpolated tale in Don Quixote that makes for excellent standalone reading), and a few other parts of works.
What I found interesting and novel was the comparison of this part of Cervantes literature to Holocaust literature, particularly by Primo Levi. That Cervantes went through horrors and was workin through his traumas through his writing.
What I disliked, or at least was not for me, was that it had a decent amount of Freud, Lacan, Derrida and the like. It wasn't overly heavy but it didn't add anything to me--and I'm not sure it would add much for a specialist (but I'm not competent to judge).
Finally what I wished the book addressed was whether any of this is relevant for the 90%+ of Cervantes work that does not address captivity. For Don Quixote, in particular, the book discusses the captives tale as well as the incident with the lion and Don Quixote being taken home in a cage. But it does not really relate to anything thematic, plot, character, or anything else beyond that. Does that mean the only the explicit captive bits of his work were really affected by his captivity? Or did it shape more of it? I wanted to know and this book never said....more
I listened to the audiobook of this short biography of James Joyce. I did not know much about Joyce's life before but this presented a relatively compI listened to the audiobook of this short biography of James Joyce. I did not know much about Joyce's life before but this presented a relatively comprehensive portrait from birth to death, with a lot of detail about both the writing and publication of Ulysses and a summary/literary criticism of it with less space devoted to Joyce's other books. A lot of the focus is on Joyce's relationships to women, including Nora Barnacle (the women he spent his life with) and a series of mostly nameless prostitutes. Although Edna O'Brien asserts that all of this is complex and multifaceted overall Joyce comes across as mostly a self-obsessed jerk--albeit one who produced towering masterworks.
The biography itself is beautifully written with some almost poetic turns of phrase. The audiobook is narrated well with an Irish voice....more
I came for Dickens but stayed for Prince. "Dickens and Prince" is an extended essay that is overflowing with enthusiasm and worship for two very diffeI came for Dickens but stayed for Prince. "Dickens and Prince" is an extended essay that is overflowing with enthusiasm and worship for two very different artists, modesty about his own role, and a paen to the genius that emerges from a combination of protean talent and relentless obsessive drive. I listened to the Audible version which is 2.5 hours (at 1.3X).
I'm a huge Dickens fan and have enjoyed the movie versions of Nick Hornby's books (have not read the books themselves). I know the most famous Prince songs and once saw him in a truly stunning concert, a late night jam session in the East Room of the White House, at one point joined by Stevie Wonder. But beyond that I knew absolutely nothing about Prince and was not particularly intrigued.
The Dickens parts of the books were very familiar, most of them coming from the excellent Claire Tomalin biography Charles Dickens. But they were still enjoyable, one professional craftsman admiring another.
But the Prince parts blew me away, mostly because of my own previous ignorance. Learning about how young he started, how sure of himself he was, performing all the instruments and backup vocals on his first five albums, his prolific recording and performing career, and the perhaps thousands of unreleased songs he left behind in his vault. All of this is presumably just as familiar to Prince fans as the Dickens parts were to me but also the way in which Hornby expresses his enthusiasm and appreciation is infectiously exciting.
The book alternates between the two, going through their youth, their twenties, thematic issues (e.g., women) and their deaths. There are a surprising number of parallels but Hornby does not push them in any sort of forced of awkward way. Instead his book is ultimately a meditation on what he sees as the most important parallel between them: "This book is about work. And nobody ever worked harder than these two or at a higher standard while connecting with so many people for so long."...more
An excellent life of Charlotte Brontë as well as her siblings. It starts in medias res with Brontë in Belgium but then goes back the beginning with heAn excellent life of Charlotte Brontë as well as her siblings. It starts in medias res with Brontë in Belgium but then goes back the beginning with her father, his marriage and his children. The story really picks up in the third chapter when Charlotte and her siblings start composing their imaginary worlds of Glass Town, Angria, Gondol and more. The descriptions of the three girls and their brother lost in their imaginations are almost worth reading standalone even without the full life. It then goes through the father's belief in the son Branwell, his failure, drug addiction, and death juxtaposed against the sisters all doing their writing, the rejection of Charlotte's first novel, the success of Jane Eyre, the release of the other sisters' books, Charlotte's difficulty in capitalization on her initial success, her sisters' death, her introduction to the literary scene in the capital, her marriage, and then her tragic death--with a postscript about the people and letters that survived.
Overall Claire Harman does not encrust Charlotte Brontë with saintly simplicity but instead underscores her turbulence, her unrequited love for the Belgian schoolmaster, and other passions that were mostly contained in her own head and her own family. I haven't read Elizabeth Gaskell's classic biography (but will some day) but Harman both seems to owe her a tremendous debt for writing the first draft of history, including interviewing various people she knew, but also Harman seems to be trying to overcome and rewrite the myths that Gaskell helped to form and perpetuate.
As someone that only knew the barest of the outline of the lives of the Brontë's I was really glad to be able to be absorbed in it and even enjoy some of the suspense (e.g., I didn't know if her true identity was known during her life--it turns out it was).
I should say that I loved Jane Eyre, enjoyed The Professor but could not get through Vilette. But enough of Vilette was autobiographical that now that I have this context--and know better what to expect from it--I'll try again....more
When you read about Charles Dickens’ life it is striking how much he did other than write his novels. He edited journals, starred and produced in amatWhen you read about Charles Dickens’ life it is striking how much he did other than write his novels. He edited journals, starred and produced in amateur theatricals, did readings, engaged in charitable works, and much much more. After a frenzied start to his writing career (e.g., the writing and publication of The Pickwick Papers and Oliver Twist overlapped), he could go years at time without even working on a novel. It is tempting to wonder whether all of this was time well spent when he only produced 15 novels, much less than the similarly energetic and peripatetic but more focused on writing Honoré de Balzac. The amateur theatricals were, presumably, entertaining for the few hundred people who were involved or saw them but the time could have been used to build on the permanent legacy that Charles Dickens created for humanity.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst’s The Turning Point helps to partially answer this question by providing a detailed biography of a single year in Dickens' life: 1851. It is an interesting choice because Dickens published nothing of note that year (just some articles in his journal Household Words and much of A Child's History of England). None of the dramatic events of his life (e.g., meeting Ellen Ternan) happened that year, beyond the death of his father, and the year does not even appear in some chronologies of the major events of Dickens’ life and career.
Douglas-Fairhurst, however, chooses this year because Dickens wrote the first several chapters of Bleak House towards the end of 1851 with serial publication starting in March 1852. Bleak House is my favorite Dickens novel and widely considered the beginning of a new darker more complex phase of his writing. By putting the year 1851 under a microscope it is interesting to come across various serendipitous events or thoughts that eventually get reworked into the novel.
Douglas-Fairhurst does not write retroactively, he doesn’t start out to say let’s find everything that led to Bleak House. Instead he writes prospectively, talking about a minute series of events, some of which end up mattering for Dickens’ writing but most of which h do not. In a way, that helps address the question I began with.
I would not recommend this book for newcomers to Dickens. You don’t need much knowledge of his writing (although if you haven’t read Bleak House it would be hard to find this interesting), but there are much better biographies of his entire life or of another turning point year, the one in which he wrote A Christmas Carol, of even Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens: The Invention of a Novelist. But if you’re a big Dickens fan you’ll want to read this one too....more
If you really like Charles Dickens or Massachusetts you should consider reading this book, if you absolutely love both then you should definitely readIf you really like Charles Dickens or Massachusetts you should consider reading this book, if you absolutely love both then you should definitely read at least the first half which is a mini-bio of Dickens and his two visits to Massachusetts. Fanatics, of which I number myself, should read much or all of the scholarly essays in the second half that concern aspects of Dickens' trip and its role in his works. (One essay laments "Dickens' visits to Springfield have been almost universally ignored.")
Charles Dickens made two trips to the United States, both of which played a major role towards the beginning and end of his professional life, and in both cases he arrived in Massachusetts first and his trips went downhill from there.
Dickens first trip was in 1842. He was the incredibly famous author of The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop, and Barnaby Rudge. A few years earlier, legendarily, Americans had crammed the docks when the ships came in bringing the latest installment of The Old Curiosity Shop to find out the fate of Little Nell. Barnaby Rudge was not as popular as the previous books and there were some concerns Dickens was losing his mojo, part of the reason he agreed to make the uncomfortable, long and somewhat dangerous journey to America (he took an early steamship so make the trip in a relatively rapid 18 days).
He arrived in Massachusetts, met with all of the writers and luminaries of the time, gave lectures, was celebrated at dinners, etc. Everywhere Dickens went he was mobbed with admirers, letters, callers walked into his hotel room unannounced, people tried to take bits of his coat and hair as souvenirs.
Dickens made a visit to Lowell and then on his way to his way out of the state he went through Worcester and Springfield before crossing the border to get to Hartford. His trip went downhill from there when he started complaining about the new republic's lax copyright rules and in response got lambasted in the press. The result was a travelogue American Notes For General Circulation a lot of which got recycled into an extended interlude in America in Martin Chuzzlewit, an interlude that goes beyond humor and insight into more petty vindictiveness and lifeless mockery that is one of the only failed segments of a Dickens novel.
Dickens' second visit to America was in 1867-68. This time he was even more famous having produced all of his complete novels (the incomplete The Mystery of Edwin Drood was the only one left). Looking at it now we think of this as Dickens towards the end of his life, a valedictory trip, but he was only 55 and although he had some weaknesses and infirmity it must have seemed more like the middle. This time his motives were less curiosity and more profit--he had become a fabulously successful reader/performer of his own works and had an incredibly demanding tour of dozens of cities scheduled. The Massachusetts part went well but he got sicker as the tour went on and ended up having to cut it short. People treat it as contributing to his death two years later but I don't know how much that is narrative arc or actual scientific causation.
The first half of Dickens and Massachusetts tells the story of these two visits in some detail along with a brief biography of what came before, in between and after the trips. It was written as a guide to a museum exposition in Lowell Massachusetts for the two-hundredth anniversary of Dickens' birth. It does not aim for originality or depth, it has a lot of pictures, but it is easy writing and fills in some depth in some places.
The essays that follow are more scholarly with lots of footnotes, but relatively light on literary theory, with most of the authors publishing in places like Dickens Quarterly. Briefly on some of them:
"Dickens, the Lowell Mill Girls, and the Making of A Christmas Carol" argues that a publication Dickens read on his visit to Lowell helped inspire A Christmas Carol (which he wrote a year later). It is a fun thesis, I was not fully persuaded given some of the relatively high-level connections.
"Dickens, Longfellow, and the Village Blacksmith" is a fascinating account of Dickens and his friendship with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow along with another fun thesis that links Longfellow's poem to Joe Gargery in Great Expectations.
"Dickens's Visits to Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1842 and 1868" is the sort of piece that makes you happy that there are people in the world who really dig into the archives to shed light on some mostly forgotten and not very important moment in Dickens's life without claiming any particularly great importance for it but just using it as a window into the life and time. Was enjoyable.
Finally, if you are looking for a regular Dickens biography, I would recommend Peter Ackroyd's Dickens as the most novelistic and Dickensian biography (in fact it has italicized parts between chapters which are actually fictional), Michael Slater's Charles Dickens is an all-around excellent biography with particularly vivid and detailed descriptions of the publication process, and Claire Tomalin's Charles Dickens: A Life is also excellent, particularly on Dickens' relationship with his wife and Nellie Ternen....more
The second book I have read (or in the case of the other one, listened to) this year with the title "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Like the audioboThe second book I have read (or in the case of the other one, listened to) this year with the title "The Mystery of Charles Dickens." Like the audiobook of the Peter Ackroyd play The Mystery Of Charles Dickens, A.N. Wilson extensively uses the words and works of Charles Dickens to tell elements of his life story and character and how they fused with his writing. And like the other Mystery, A.N. Wilson's enthusiasm for a writer he has clearly loved, read and re-read since childhood comes through on every page. It is not a chronological life but instead seven chapters each organized around a different mystery including Dickens' cruelty to his wife, his charity, his public readings, The Mystery of Edwin Drood itself, etc. As such, it seems better suited to someone who has read most of Dickens and has a basic familiarity with his life.
Occasionally the tendentious speculation that evidently (according to the reviews) has marred some of A.N. Wilson's other books shows up here. For example, he effectively asserts that Dickens' suffered his fatal stroke while having sex on a surreptitious visit to his mistress Ellen Ternan, who then put his unconscious body in a cab and brought it back to Dickens' house with all of it covered up by Dickens' family and household staff. Wilson doesn't name his source for this but it appears to be Claire Tomalin, perhaps the biggest authority on Dickens and especially Ternan, who in her biography Charles Dickens has both the conventional story but this one (minus the sex) with the major caveat: "It seems a wild and improbable story, but not an entirely impossible one, given what we know of Dickens’s habits." He also speculates that difficulty plotting out The Mystery of Edwin Drood killed Dickens. But, fortunately, there is relatively little of this.
Wilson is particularly strong on writing about Dickens' many ways of thinking about and presenting himself, his double character, the genuineness of his charity while depicting charitable hypocrites, his social commentary that often outdated, missed genuine solutions, but was powerful in its own rights, the role that public readings played etc. Ultimately Wilson argues that Dickens' grounding in pantomime and fairy tales made his books more real than the more "realistic" and journalistic fiction of his contemporaries and that it is his characters--not his plots--that have become immortal and inimitable....more
An inspired triad, Imraan Coovadia presents a hybrid of history, biography and literary analysis of Tolstoy, Gandhi and Mandela (plus a bit of Coetze An inspired triad, Imraan Coovadia presents a hybrid of history, biography and literary analysis of Tolstoy, Gandhi and Mandela (plus a bit of Coetze in the epilogue), the ways they learned from each other, built on each other, and brought about moral and practical change with a combination of radical philosophies and each of their unique life paths involving some combination of violence and peaceful non-resistance. Throughout the book Coovadia brilliantly draws on many strands of thoughts, combining and recombining them in novel ways, all of which help support a passionate argument about the present and future particularly of South Africa but also of the world more generally.
Tolstoy lurks a bit more in the background than the foreground of this book, existing more as an influence on Gandhi than a fully fledged character in his own right. Moreover, it is not just the late Tolstoy one might have expected in thinking about non-violence and moral influences, but War and Peace in particular that shows up again and again, particular the model of Field Marshal Kutuzov as a model for a combination of violence but also minimizing violence and doing it all while achieving victory.
Gandhi gets the most attention, particularly his time in South Africa, his interactions with Tolstoy, the formation of his philosophy, and how it worked in practice. Coovadia makes something of Gandhi’s role in organizing military units for the British, likening it to Tolstoy’s start in the military and Mandela’s role in the armed wing of the ANC. It seemed like a bit of a stretch but I could be wrong about that.
Mandela gets the most creative and sympathetic treatment of the trio, a robust defense of his vision and legacy against what Coovadia sees as the alternative presented by Winnie Mandela, a corrupt/criminal approach that justifies itself in language that rejects the nonviolence and accommodation of Mandela.
What a dream. A one man play about the life of Charles Dickens, written by Peter Ackroyd in collaboration with Simon Callow and performed by Simon CalWhat a dream. A one man play about the life of Charles Dickens, written by Peter Ackroyd in collaboration with Simon Callow and performed by Simon Callow. It tells the story of Dickens' life from beginning to end, including his personal life and literary evolution, largely through the relevant readings from Dickens' fiction but interspersed with some expository connective tissue. Spellbinding from beginning to end, I'll be listening to this again....more
A fantastic biography that tells the tragically short life of Pushkin in short chapters that go chronologically from birth to death with an epilogue aA fantastic biography that tells the tragically short life of Pushkin in short chapters that go chronologically from birth to death with an epilogue about the evolving interpretation of Pushkin over time. The chapters cover both the life and the works, explaining the composition of each of his major works and many of his minor ones along with some interpretative commentary and contextualization.
What makes this biography by Robert Chandler (a translator and also editor of the great collection Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida) so good is that he rescues Pushkin from the layers and layers of meaning that have been thrust on him. He does not have him stand for Russia, representing the aristocracy or the people or anything else. Instead he is an immensely talented author, one whose path was plowed by a few lesser know Russian poets and foreign examples (Byron and Shakespeare, among others). He was never immersed in the major historical events around him because he was so focused on his own reading of history, his writing, his affairs, and more. This restores Pushkin as a writer and also as someone that everyone can have a personal connection to.
A particularly interesting aspect of Pushkin’s story, like so many Russian/Soviet artists (e.g., Bulgakov and Shostakovich) is his fascinating relationship with the Tsar, going from exile to personal poet, with the Tsar (pretending) to act as his personal censor, patron, but also humiliating him and perhaps contributing to his death.
Often the ~150 page biographies tend towards speculative interpretation or superficial recounting of events, this one suffers from neither problem and instead presents a fast moving, enjoyable and sophisticated story that is interesting in its own right and will help you better understand Pushkin’s works....more
A generally excellent biography of Balzac, but I would have been happy with a decent amount less detail. Graham Robb has an excellent feel for his subA generally excellent biography of Balzac, but I would have been happy with a decent amount less detail. Graham Robb has an excellent feel for his subject, his literature and 19th century France. It is a birth to death story that takes until about page 150 (of small print) for Balzac to write what was essentially the first book under his name, The Last of the Chouans, around age 30. over the next 20 years of Balzac’s life—and 250 pages of the biography—he writes what there is of the Comedie Humaine. Robb does a great job rescuing Balzac from some of the myth’s that have encrusted around him, showing how he worked (lots of coffee and writing about 30 words a minute from late night until morning), how he handles his debts, his travels, and his many different failed schemes for work as a printer, playwright and more. He also shows his relationship with Eveline Hanska in great detail, the nearly 20 years of correspondence followed by less than a half year of marriage. Remarkable, one-fifth of Balzac’s writing in the last five years of his life was to Hanska making it, as Balzac says, like another one of Balzac’s novels. What emerges is a writer who invented the concept of an overlapping work populated by recurring characters, more than 500 of them, and through revisions and re-revisions brought an increasing coherence to this fictional world, creating a form of realism that helped to rescue literature from the romanticism that pervaded it at the time....more
Murder By the Book is a true crime account of what, according to the author, was one of the most sensational murders in 19th century London: that of LMurder By the Book is a true crime account of what, according to the author, was one of the most sensational murders in 19th century London: that of Lord William Russell by his valet, François Courvoisier. Claire Harman documents the night of the murder, the crime itself (his throat was cut presumably while he was sleeping), the investigation, trial, hanging and aftermath. This is interspersed with an account of the role that William Harrison Ainsworth's novel Jack Shephard played in inspiring the murder, by depicting a criminal as a hero in a genre then known as Newgate novels. Different pirated versions of Jack Shephard were also playing as plays simultaneously at multiple London theaters. Another writer who also wrote a book that depicted the criminal life plays a big role in Harman's book, Charles Dickens. He was at pains to distinguish Oliver Twist from the "Newgate" label, according to Harman after the criticism of the entire genre made more of an effort to distance himself from it in future novels (starting with Barnaby Rudge which was writing at the time), and thus he diverged from Ainsworth with two initially parallel novelists going very different directions in their abilities and history's memory of them. Dickens himself was very absorbed by the entire genre, writing letters to the editor about it, going to the execution (an event that features prominently in his biographies), partly turning it into fiction, and then into an argument against public executions.
Overall, the book was relatively short and interesting, steeped in its time, murder, Victorian London, and the early part of Dickens's career. But the links between the murder and the book were a little weak and not every detail was equally interesting. ...more
A reliable, comprehensive short biography of Mikhail Bulgakov by J.A.E. Curtis who also edited his letters. It is a standard birth-to-death story thatA reliable, comprehensive short biography of Mikhail Bulgakov by J.A.E. Curtis who also edited his letters. It is a standard birth-to-death story that also incorporates a little bit of the historical context (but not much), some description/analysis of Bulgakov's major works, and lots of description of his tangles with the authorities as he kept trying, most of the time unsuccessfully, to stage his plays. Curtis also includes some broader reflection on whether Bulgakov was morally compromised to have survived the terror, a question I had never heard posed before (as compared to, say, Dmitri Shostakovich where it is the subject of numerous books).
This is the only complete english-language biography of Bulgakov I am aware of (but let me know if there are others), many more are needed. In addition to a fuller biography with more historical context, Bulgakov could use a biographer like, well, Bulgakov, whose amazing biography of Moliere does a much fuller job of fleshing him out as a person and character in his own right....more
A short, straightforward biography of Edgar Allan Poe that goes from birth to death and provides some brief literary criticism/literary context for hiA short, straightforward biography of Edgar Allan Poe that goes from birth to death and provides some brief literary criticism/literary context for his major stories, poems and novel. I listened to it on Audible and most of his life and his context in American publishing and periodicals of the time was particularly interesting. Paul Collins was most enthusiastic about Poe as the inventor of the detective story, almost treating everything else as sui generis dead ends....more
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