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1
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| 1857151003
| 9781857151008
| 1857151003
| 3.75
| 130,569
| Feb 02, 1922
| Dec 30, 1992
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it was amazing
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Who is this about? Poldy the horny goof and Stevie the pisshead and Molly the WAP and the chap in the brown Macintosh and Throwaway and Cashel Boyle O’ Who is this about? Poldy the horny goof and Stevie the pisshead and Molly the WAP and the chap in the brown Macintosh and Throwaway and Cashel Boyle O’Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell and Rose of Castille and Hamlet the Dane and Everyman and Noman and Outis and Metis and Ulysses and Odysseus and the Wandering Jew and Madam Psychosis and met him pike hoses and Sinbad the Sailor and Sinbed the Sickbed and Sinbid the Tinlid and Sinbod the Greensod and Sinbud the Thinbud. What is this about? A shaving and remembrances of a dead mother, a history class, a blank period of time including a walk along the shore and a dead dog, an offal breakfast, a duodenal stuffing and purposeful faeces discharge newspaper in hand with trumpet accompaniment, a bath and the contemplation of the “limp father of thousands”, an advertisement, a burial, a quick stinky snack, a visit to a museum, a book hunt, some music, an acrimonious exchange with a feisty proto-alt-right antisemitic yobo, another blank period of time including a car drive, a wanking firework elicited by a lame young exhibitionist, the prolonged delivery of the English language, a set of miscellaneous genderfluid and scrotumtightening met him more foes’s, a nocturnal stroll, a “heaventree of stars hung with humid nightblue fruit”, the meeting of the wife in bed after she has been well ploughed by her lover’s “tremendous red brute of a thing”, a kiss from the husband to “the plump mellow yellow smellow melons of her rump”, and a yes. Where does it take place? The Martello Tower, Sandycove, 7 Eccles St, the National Library of Ireland, Bedford Row, Merchants’ Arch, Wellington Quay, the Ormond Hotel, the disorderly house of Mrs Bella Cohen, 82 Tyrone St, Beaver St, a Cabman shelter, Butt Bridge, Dublin, Dubh Linn, Dyfflin, Polyphemus’s pub, Ithaca, Gibraltar. When does it take place? Over 24 hours, on the 16th June 1904, the same day James Joyce fell in love with Nora Barnacle. What’s the writing style? No style at all and all styles at once. As per the Gilbert schema: narrative (young), catechism (personal), monologue (male), narrative (mature), narcissism, incubism, enthymemic, peristaltic, dialectic, labyrinth, fuga per canonem, gigantism, tumescence / detumescence, embryonic development, hallucination, narrative (old), catechism (impersonal), monologue (female). Added to this, some legalese, medicalese, journalese and various pastiches of Roman incantations, Latin prose, Anglo-Saxon alliterative prose, Middle English, Medieval travel stories, Arthurian legend, Elizabethan chronicles, Miltonian prose, John Bunyan’s allegorical prose, Samuel Pepys’s diary, Daniel Defoe’s journalism, Jonathan Swift’s satires, Laurence Sterne’s novels, Oliver Goldsmith’s poetry, Edmund Burke’s reflections, Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s plays, Edward Gibbon’s histories, Horace Walpole gothic tales, Charles Lamb’s tales, Thomas de Quincey’s confessions, Thomas Henry Huxley’s scientific disquisitions, Charles Dickens’s novels, Walter Pater’s essays, John Ruskin’s critiques, Thomas Carlyle’s satires, various dialects and barroom slang and Rabelaisian scatology and retrospective arrangements and intrusions and self-parody. Should I read this? U.P.: UP to you and sonnez la cloche and Heigho Heigho and Cuckoo Cuckoo and pprrpffrrppfff. Are there further readings? No. Reread the damn thing or riverrun. Is there a bonus track? Yes. https://youtu.be/rtDy0xQKhBs ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Apr 18, 2023
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Jun 12, 2023
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Nov 21, 2017
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Hardcover
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69
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| 1857159098
| 9781857159097
| 1857159098
| unknown
| 3.85
| 505,394
| Jan 28, 1882
| Jan 01, 1992
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really liked it
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Oct 05, 2017
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Hardcover
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30
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| 0141196645
| 9780141196640
| 0141196645
| 3.58
| 280,285
| 1726
| Nov 25, 2010
|
it was amazing
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Everyone remembers poor Gulliver in breeches and three-cornered hat, pinned down with cords on a beach, by an army of minute soldiers. A young boy’s n
Everyone remembers poor Gulliver in breeches and three-cornered hat, pinned down with cords on a beach, by an army of minute soldiers. A young boy’s nightmare, no doubt, but there is much more to this book than this rosy image, reproduced endlessly on the pediments of toy shops and theme parks. This is indeed an astonishing book. Gulliver’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World presents itself as the plain and faithful account of the voyages of Lemuel Gulliver, a surgeon from Redriff and a captain of ships. The name of Jonathan Swift is omitted, as well as the fact that the whole narrative is a heap of whoppers from cover to cover. Moreover, the straight-faced narrator, fooling his “candid” reader’s credulity, concludes the books and declares that he “rather chose to relate plain Matter of Fact in the simplest Manner and Style; because my principal Design was to inform, and not to amuse thee” (IV, 12). Swift’s novel — a masterful sham — is indeed written in the detailed and earnest manner of an ethnographic documentary. Through the four parts of this book, Gulliver first discovers the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu, with its diminutive inhabitants, off the coast of Java (if you ever fancy going there, the narrator provides a few maps and GPS coordinates); he then sails to the West coast of America and discovers Brobdingnag, where people are, on the contrary, of gigantic proportions; later on, he travels across the Pacific Ocean and visits the flying island of Laputa (no pun intended?) and Balnibarbi, as well as the necromancers of Glubbdubdrib, the immortals of Luggnagg, and finally Japan (spot the odd one out, if you can). On his last trip, around New-Holland (aka Australia), he travels to the idyllic island of the neighing and rational Houyhnhnms and of the despicable Yahoos — the most politically loaded and, in my opinion, best part of this book. A total of seven discoveries. Each time, Gulliver’s ship is caught in a storm and shipwrecked, he lands on a strange island, meets the inhabitants, is the host of an important figure of that country, relates a couple of toilet-humour anecdotes, learns their tongue-twisting language, describes their strange manners, laws, gastronomy and architecture, provides — to his host’s great surprise and dismay — an account of the Europeans habits and customs. However, what makes Gulliver’s Travels one of the significant works of the early 18th century is, apart from the Irish clergyman’s zany imagination in devising fictional countries and populations, his astounding deadpan humour, tongue-in-cheek mockery, and even savage assault, against his contemporaries and human nature in general. The universal ridicule and relentless attacks aim at practically everything, in a sort of encyclopaedic undertaking: nobility titles, impractical scientific achievements and Royal Academies, philosophical jargon, the quackery of physicians, the general falsehood that runs among lawyers, the foolish wish for a long life, European politics and wars, the English constitution, Western colonialism, human grandeur (i.e. vanity) itself, and — apologies to half my Goodreads friends! — the fake gloss of women’s skin. Some of the fiercest invectives against the human race are, of course, put in the mouths of Gulliver’s non-human hosts; for instance, the Prince of Brobdingnag: “I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little odious Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the Surface of the Earth” (II, 6). Sometimes, Gulliver speaks for himself: “having strictly examined all the Persons of greatest Name in the Courts of Princes for an hundred Years past, I found how the World had been misled by prostitute Writers, to ascribe the greatest Exploits in War to Cowards, the Wisest Counsel to Fools, Sincerity to Flatterers, Roman Virtue to Betrayers of their Country, Piety to Atheists, Chastity to Sodomites, Truth to Informers”; adding just after that, with a magnificent irony: “I hope I may be pardoned if these Discoveries inclined me a little to abate of that profound Veneration which I am naturally apt to pay to Persons of high Rank, who ought to be treated with the utmost Respect due to their sublime Dignity, by us their Inferiors” (III, 8). However harsh and offensive these comments might sound, even today, I must confess, there is always something extraordinarily amusing and toe-curling, invigorating even, about Swift’s prose. It is, all in all, an essential book on the human condition. Needless to say, Gulliver’s Travels it at the epicentre of a literary tradition of both adventures on sea (to which it is an obvious parody) and social satire, that goes as far back as Homer’s Odyssey, through Sindbad’s tales, the Travels of Marco Polo, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly, Thomas More’s Utopia, Dafoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Montesquieu's Persian Letters, up to a significant part of modern literature: Voltaire’s Candide and Micromégas, James Cook’s Voyages of Discovery, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Wells’ Island of Dr Moreau, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and all their more recent avatars — say, The Hitchicker’s Guide to the Galaxy, to name just one book, or even Godzilla and King Kong, on the big screen. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Sep 28, 2018
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Oct 08, 2018
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Sep 20, 2017
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Hardcover
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64
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| 0141393408
| 9780141393407
| 0141393408
| 3.68
| 311,319
| Apr 25, 1719
| Nov 28, 2013
|
really liked it
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Around the year 1704, Alexander Selkirk, a 28 years old Scottish privateer was marooned, at his request, on a desert island off the coast of Chile. He
Around the year 1704, Alexander Selkirk, a 28 years old Scottish privateer was marooned, at his request, on a desert island off the coast of Chile. He managed to survive there for about five years until he was rescued and brought back to England. The young man died a few years later on a voyage to Africa, but his story as a castaway became a legend. At the time of Selkirk’s death, Daniel Defoe, an English businessman and journalist, had just published a book inspired by his adventure, taking some liberties, particularly with the setting and timing: Robinson’s ship runs aground off the coasts of Brazil, and he survives there for some thirty years, no less! Supposedly, Robinson Crusoe is one of the first modern novels written in English. To be sure, this book soon became a significant landmark in English literature, translated into almost as many languages as the Harry Potter series. It’s also considered a classic adventure tale for young readers; a claim that isn’t completely clear to me, given the archaisms and relative difficulty of the text itself. The story is told in the form of a journal, but with considerable after-the-fact knowledge of the events and with many tangents along the way. The first few (the Salee pirates) and last few chapters (the crossing of the Pyrenees) are a bit off-topic. I was especially struck by the sheer amount of religious considerations, to the point that this book most strongly reminded me of Saint Augustine’s Confessions: in Robinson, as in Augustine’s book, a mature gentleman recalls his youthful mistakes and, as a new prodigal son, expresses his gratitude toward God for eventually redeeming him. In the meantime, of course, we are instructed in all the uneventful particulars of the protagonist’s existence on the island: how he managed to build himself a shelter, how he learned to grow crop and make his bread, how he used his gun for hunting and later implemented livestock farming around his “castle”… In short, how, through intelligence and industry, 18th-century Europeans could truly become “comme maîtres et possesseurs de la nature.” (Descartes, Discourse on Method). When Robinson finally meets Friday, the noble savage, he also realises that, although casual cannibals are an abomination before the Lord, a man in the state of nature is genuinely good and has an innate intuition of Christian theology. In that sense, Defoe’s book is a harbinger of 18th and 19th-century Western imperialism, and truly epitomises the optimistic views of the Enlightenment. Edit: In hindsight, there are three particularly memorable moments in Robinson’s adventure that come back to mind and are, each time, a bewildering epiphany to the protagonist and the reader: the discovery of the corn sprouts rescued from the shipwreck, which will allow the hero to survive; the finding of the first human footprint on the sand, after many years of solitude; the sickening revelation of the mass grave, just after the landing of the cannibals, which leads to the adventurous epilogue of the novel. If Robinson is at the same time a new Adam, a new Ulysses, a new Sindbad or even a modern Prospero, it is practically impossible to make a list of all the later works that were directly or indirectly influenced by Dafoe’s novel: Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, Edgar Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, L. Frank Baum's Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Robert Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island, H. G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau, Michel Tournier's Friday, or, The Other Island, J. M. G. Le Clézio’s Le chercheur d'or, Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, Cormac McCarthy's The Road, Andy Weir's The Martian, RKO’s King Kong, Tom Hanks’ Cast Away, J. J. Abrams’ Lost, just to name a few. Indeed, Robinson, on his own, has been fruitful and has multiplied! ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Dec 06, 2017
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Dec 17, 2017
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Sep 20, 2017
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Hardcover
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35
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| 0679420428
| 9780679420422
| 0679420428
| 3.79
| 318,200
| May 14, 1925
| 1993
|
it was amazing
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What a lark! What a plunge! There is a famous episode in the first section of Mrs Dalloway where a sky-writing aeroplane flies over London, soaring, s
What a lark! What a plunge! There is a famous episode in the first section of Mrs Dalloway where a sky-writing aeroplane flies over London, soaring, spinning and plunging, writing in white letters of steam on a radiant sheet of blue sky. The onlookers on the ground, strolling down Regent’s Park and Oxford Street, try to decipher the signs above. “Blaxo? Kreemo? Toffee?” Whatever it is, this image is exceptionally profound, for it reflects the very novel we are reading. Woolf wrote Mrs Dalloway using this movement of the aircraft, gliding and spinning, soaring and plunging. As for the readers, it may take a bit of blinking and squinting and misreading before they can make sense of what they are reading — Glaxo? Kreemo? Toffee? Virginia Woolf is famous for her use of “stream of consciousness”, “free indirect speech”, “vignettes”. But this does very little to characterise what happens in Mrs Dalloway. The novel doesn’t take the classic narrator’s transcendent and omniscient (God-like) view over the world. The author doesn’t just transcribe what happens on the narrator’s cerebral highway either. Indeed, Woolf’s narrator flies, freestyle, like the plane over London and all its dwellers, travelling and cartwheeling across different dimensions. Space. Woolf’s novel moves over the West End of London, from St Pancras to Westminster and from Kensington to Holborn, and one can read Mrs Dalloway as a walk around the city, in the wake of the First World War. Here, Woolf’s prose is densely evocative. She makes us see, hear, smell, sense, with lyrical intensity, the earthly delights displayed everywhere: inside a flower shop on Bond Street, atop a bus down Whitehall, inside a cafe by a row of éclairs laid out on a cool marble table, inside a basement kitchen teeming with the preparations of a party, “life; London; this moment of June” (Everyman’s Library, p. 2). Time. The story (as in Joyce’s Ulysses) takes place during one single ordinary day, from morning to evening, each hour marked by the resounding chimes of Big Ben. The events overlap and converge towards Clarissa Dalloway’s evening party. But, deeper still, Woolf displays a multi-layered view of time through her characters’ wistful memories or projects. Clarissa Dalloway, a middle-aged upper-class woman, goes about her day, continually journeying down memory lane to the days of her youth. The same is true of Peter Walsh, her old sweetheart. Again, something similar happens to Septimus Smith, the shell-shocked WWI veteran who gradually drowns into a mental breakdown, schizophrenia, and death. And yet again regarding his wife, Lucrezia, longing for her past life in Milan. In short, there is, in Woolf’s novel — as in Proust, to some degree — a sort of Heraclitean, ever-flowing perspective on time. Consciousness — consciousness, most of all! Woolf’s writing technique could indeed be subsumed under the concept of “interior monologue”. But she has a very distinctive way of using it. Her narrator is like an abstract entity, a receiver that can render various characters’ interior speech. Not like a god; not quite like a movie camera floating and zooming around; rather like a radio set that tunes in and out of different mental frequencies. As if consciousness wasn’t something that belonged to this or that brain, this or that “self”, but a fluid of intersecting waves or threads, ever-present, ever-rippling on the surface of another dimension. As says Clarissa towards the end of the novel: “since our apparitions, the part of us which appears, are so momentary compared with the other, the unseen part of us, which spreads wide, the unseen might survive, be recovered somehow attached to this person or that, or even haunting certain places, after death. Perhaps — perhaps.” (p. 172) And so, beyond the trivia of London life, beyond Clarissa’s joy and Septimus’s despair, beyond the glistening fabric of the world, beyond even all the fragmented, limited, chaotic, insubstantial perspectives of the story, what Woolf’s writing reveals, like a developing solution, is the possibility of a flowing, unifying metaphysical realm. But what is it? Blaxo? Kreemo? Toffee? ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Mar 04, 2021
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Mar 06, 2021
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Jun 19, 2017
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Hardcover
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25
| 
| B00SSLH8Z8
| 4.00
| 397,605
| 1865
| Jan 26, 2015
|
it was amazing
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I remember reading and loving this book as a child. I identified with Alice’s point of view, lost in a world both strange and familiar. All the charac
I remember reading and loving this book as a child. I identified with Alice’s point of view, lost in a world both strange and familiar. All the characters she encountered were mad and funny. There was a sense of playful and sparkling adventure. I loved the vintage illustrations by John Tenniel. I guess the charming Walt Disney adaptation also influenced my perception of the book. My impression, as I re-read Lewis Carroll’s novel recently, is entirely different. The atmosphere of childish innocence is still there throughout: Alice sounds like a smart, Victorian, well-mannered young girl. But she keeps growing and shrinking uncontrollably — like a penis. And Wonderland feels like a sort of dystopia, where strange creatures and objects are incapable of making sense. The funny puns and situations are, in fact, not so amusing and appear instead as a way to mangle common sense with wild logic and absurd, albeit rational reasoning. As a result, as the Mock Turtle says, “it sounds uncommon nonsense”. To me now, Lewis Carroll appears to borrow from the 18th-century satirists, such as Jonathan Swift or Voltaire, and to pave the way for 20th-century surrealism and the black, absurdist comedies of Samuel Beckett, Eugène Ionesco, Tom Stoppard or even Franz Kafka and Kurt Vonnegut. In the end, as I re-read this book, it is getting “curiouser and curiouser”. The edition I am holding (published in the US in 1975) includes meticulous illustrations by Arthur Rackham, best known for his work on fairy tales. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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May 17, 2017
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Jun 23, 2017
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May 17, 2017
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Kindle Edition
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79
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| 2130545467
| 9782130545460
| 2130545467
| 4.26
| 1,287
| Sep 10, 2004
| Sep 08, 2004
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it was amazing
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Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung est sans aucun doute l’une des œuvres majeures du XIXème allemand. Ce monument de la philosophie spéculative est né
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung est sans aucun doute l’une des œuvres majeures du XIXème allemand. Ce monument de la philosophie spéculative est né d’une intuition fondamentale qu’eût le jeune Schopenhauer de la misère de la vie, comme Bouddha dans sa jeunesse, lorsqu’il aperçut la maladie, la vieillesse, la souffrance et la mort. Le livre fut publié vers 1818 alors que son auteur avait à peine 30 ans, puis retravaillé, commenté à foison, dans les Suppléments et dans les Parerga et Paralipomena, tout au long de sa vie. D’abord ignoré au moment de sa publication par des lecteurs et universitaires aveuglés à l’époque par les architectures dialectiques de Hegel, le chef-d’œuvre de Schopenhauer ne devint objet d’étude et d’admiration que tardivement, vers la fin de la vie de son auteur. Schopenhauer fut une source d’inspiration majeure pour Richard Wagner et pour le jeune Friedrich Nietzsche (son opposition entre Apollon et Dionysos dans La Naissance de la tragédie est un calque à peine voilé de celle établie ici entre Représentation et Volonté), mais aussi pour Charles Darwin, pour Sigmund Freud, pour C.G. Jung et bien d’autres penseurs majeurs des XIXème et XXème siècles. À l’évidence, le maître de Francfort est aujourd’hui quelque peu oublié. C’est que, sans doute, Le Monde est un livre difficile, non seulement de par sa longueur (pas loin de 1500 pages, si l’on inclut les annexes et les suppléments), de par l’aspect massif et compact de chaque paragraphe, mais aussi simplement en raison de la nature souvent abstraite et spéculative des arguments. Ce livre, en outre, est écrit, pour une part essentielle, en référence aux Critiques de Kant et aux dialogues de Platon, que Schopenhauer suppose connus de son lecteur. Il donne même, dans la Préface, des instructions précises (et peut-être pas dénuées de bon sens !) sur la manière de lire son ouvrage et bien le comprendre : il faudrait d’abord s’imprégner de sa thèse de doctorat, De la quadruple racine du principe de raison suffisante (1813), puis lire Le Monde au moins deux fois... Schopenhauer a le goût de la tournure frappante et son style est souvent mordant, imagé, mais c’est l’équivalent stylistique d’un moteur au diesel : pesant au démarrage du livre et de chacune de ses parties, avec des démonstrations techniques alambiquées, puis gagnant graduellement en vivacité jusqu’aux envolées finales, vibrantes d’inspiration. Le titre du livre indique de façon très ramassée de quoi il s’agit. Le monde réel est comme un Janus à deux faces : d’un côté la Représentation, c’est à dire l’ensemble des phénomènes observables sous les catégories transcendantales de l’espace, du temps et de la causalité ; de l’autre une Volonté unique, autrement dit la « chose en soi », non observable en dehors de notre sens intime, des forces aveugles et désirantes au tréfonds de nous-mêmes, mais qui se manifeste en dehors de nous, voilée sous les phénomènes, à travers la totalité du réel. Cette thèse se développe dans l’ouvrage à travers quatre grandes parties, traitant l’ensemble des domaines philosophiques en un système complet et cohérent (à la manière des corpus de philosophie antique, tels que celui d’Aristote) : 1) Épistémologie, à travers laquelle Schopenhauer établit la distinction fondamentale entre la Représentation phénoménale et la Volonté nouménale ; Schopenhauer, à cette occasion, élabore une logique et même une petite théorie du rire (§ 13). 2) Métaphysique, où Schopenhauer expose plus en profondeur quelle est la nature de la Volonté, comme poussée aveugle, sans cause et sans but, manifestée à travers l’ensemble des corps, vivants ou inertes, et des forces de la Nature. Ainsi les forces gravitationnelle ou électromagnétique (§ 27), aussi bien que le désir sexuel sont-ils des expressions diverses et particulières de la Volonté. Il y a, dans l’ontologie de Schopenhauer, quelque chose qui rappelle Plotin et les degrés d’émanation de l’Un : la Volonté fondamentale s’exprime par paliers, d’abord à travers les Idées platonicienne, puis à travers l’ensemble de la Nature, depuis les éléments inorganiques, jusqu’aux différentes formes de la vie : les végétaux, les invertébrés, les mammifères, enfin les humains, suprême expression où la Volonté prend conscience d’elle-même. Les thèses de Schopenhauer font, bien plus encore, penser à Spinoza, pour qui, de même, le monde est déploiement de la Substance (Dieu ou, chez Schopenhauer, la Volonté) à travers les Attributs (pensée et étendue, autrement dit les catégories de la Représentation) et les Modes (chaque étant particulier, comme objectité de la Volonté), et pour qui l’intuition du sage est le lieu où la Substance se pense elle-même (Spinoza), où la Volonté se révèle derrière le voile de Maya (Schopenhauer). 3) Esthétique : Schopenhauer y expose une théorie complète du génie et de l’art, les formes artistiques étant considérées comme des imitations des Idées platoniciennes, elles-mêmes objectités premières de la Volonté. La musique tient une place privilégiée, puisqu’elle est une expression directe de la Volonté même, et le § 52 contient des pages immortelles sur la mélodie et l’harmonie (on comprend qu’elles eurent marqué un Wagner). 4) Éthique : Schopenhauer y expose deux tendances fondamentales, résultant de la lutte de la Volonté avec elle-même. D’une part l’affirmation de la Volonté (égoïsme, ou sans doute quelque chose d’assez proche de ce que Nietzsche appellera « volonté de puissance »). D’autre part la négation de la Volonté (compassion, ascèse). Ce livre, sans doute le plus important de toute l’œuvre, contient également une théorie du caractère (§ 55), un exposé de la philosophie du droit de Schopenhauer (§ 62 à 64) et de ses vues sur la religion (§ 68 et 70) et sur le suicide (§ 69). A ce propos, Schopenhauer a été souvent considéré comme un philosophe farouchement antireligieux. Opinion en grande partie démentie par la fin de ce quatrième livre, qui est une apologie de l’ascétisme mystique, qu’il soit d’origine chrétienne (notamment chez Maître Eckhart) ou brahmanique. L’influence de la littérature de l’Inde antique (les Védas, la Bhagavad Gita) est un élément singulier en ce début de XIXème siècle occidental, et la source d’inspiration principale de l’éthique de Schopenhauer. La seule chose qu’on puisse affirmer avec certitude, c’est son opposition répétée au judaïsme. Autre élément curieux : Schopenhauer a souvent été taxé de philosophe « pessimiste », qualificatif qui ne me semble pas tout à fait juste ou adéquat. Il a sans doute été inspiré par certains paragraphes (notamment § 56 et 57), qui traitent de la nature insatiable et éternellement désirante de la Volonté et de l’existence humaine, oscillant entre souffrance et ennui. Cela dit, c’est véritablement en fin de course qu’apparaît cette thématique et, après l’ensemble des développements qui la précèdent. En outre, Schopenhauer offre deux voies de délivrance permettant de s’affranchir de cet univers de souffrance. D’abord, dans la troisième partie, le monde des arts, qui offre, par la contemplation désintéressée de formes pures, une consolation, un calmant à la volonté de vivre. Ensuite, la suppression du vouloir-vivre par la vie ascétique, pour laquelle « c’est notre monde actuel, ce monde si réel avec tous ses soleils et toutes ses voies lactées, qui est le néant. » — consolations que Nietzsche critiquera plus tard de la manière la plus vive, de la même manière qu’il critiquera la musique de Wagner, considérée comme un « narcotique ». Le texte du Monde est suivi d’une Critique de la philosophie kantienne et des Suppléments, qui occupent un volume à peu près égal à celui du texte originel. Borges disait : « Today, were I to choose a single philosopher, I would choose him (Schopenhauer). If the riddle or the universe can be stated in words, I think these words would be in his writings. » Je souscris à cet avis. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Feb 21, 2017
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Feb 12, 2018
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Feb 21, 2017
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Paperback
| |||||||||||||
82
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| 3.99
| 938,674
| Sep 26, 2006
| Mar 20, 2007
|
really liked it
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The Road is a dismal and poignant novel. A man and his son are trying to survive on a devastated (possibly post-nuclear) land, covered by ashes. They
The Road is a dismal and poignant novel. A man and his son are trying to survive on a devastated (possibly post-nuclear) land, covered by ashes. They trudge through on a deserted road that doesn't seem to lead anywhere. They are starving. Occasionally, they either find some food or come up with a group of man-eating panhandlers. Not much of a plot to speak of in this book, and everything sounds like a pointless and painful attempt at surviving in a world that is already charred and dead — in a way, it reminded me of some of Samuel Beckett's plays. There is at all times an undercurrent of danger and threat. Most descriptions are about landscapes or minute details: the man exploring abandoned houses or cobbling rusted things together. Most of the dialogues between the two main characters are about making sure the other one is okay. Cormac McCarthy's narration is extraordinarily subtle and pared-down. In the end, this might sound quite dull and gloomy indeed, but through it all, and mainly through the relationship between the father and his son, I was startled by the genuinely stirring sense of humanity, of compassion, of love, of hope that arises from this story. Edit: Watched the movie starring Viggo Mortensen. Apart from a few flashbacks with the wife (Charlize Theron), it is respectfully adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s novel. It’s a colourless, dreadful, profoundly wrenching film, in the best tradition of father & son movies such as Chaplin’s The Kid. Mortensen, Robert Duvall and the boy Kodi Smit-McPhee are outstanding. ...more |
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1
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Dec 22, 2016
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Dec 30, 2016
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Jan 12, 2016
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Kindle Edition
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17
| 
| 0679410430
| 9780679410430
| 0679410430
| 3.88
| 874,824
| Sep 1955
| 1992
|
really liked it
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Probably everyone recalls that iconic movie poster with a blond teenager peering above her heart-shaped sunglasses, a red lollipop on the tip of her t
Probably everyone recalls that iconic movie poster with a blond teenager peering above her heart-shaped sunglasses, a red lollipop on the tip of her tongue. This picture is directly inspired by a line in Nabokov’s novel, where middle-aged Humbert-Humbert sees “his Lolita” for the very first time. What follows is a tender, sad, and seemingly chaste love story between a man in his forties and (in his own words) a nymphette. Lolita is a novel in the form of a confession. It is unclear throughout H.H’s story precisely what crime he has been convicted with. Paedophilia with Lolita? Paedophilia with another girl? The murder of his wife (Lolita’s mother)? The murder of the mysterious Clare Quilty? The narrator leaves clues, but the suspense remains. What troubles him the most are not the charges against him but the guilt stemming from his past desire, love, lust, and jealousy towards his stepdaughter. This feeling of inner conflict tints almost everything in this book. Lolita is also a great road-novel, a painting of the American landscape and (not without some sarcasm) of the American way of life, as depicted by a foreigner who drops a French line now and then. This aspect of Nabokov’s novel is perhaps the most delicate and personal. And Humbert’s passion for Lolita’s young body is probably a metaphor of the love of an old European for a rolling young country. It is well known that, despite his scandalous subject (the Marquis de Sade would have produced an altogether different treatment of it), Lolita is in no way an erotic novel — nor is Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs a book about kinky sex. It is the novel of an aesthete, fascinated by untouched beauty, by virgin landscapes, and by a language (English) for him to reveal in its unique musicality. ...more |
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1
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Apr 29, 2016
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May 26, 2016
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Dec 31, 2015
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Hardcover
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15
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| 0679405593
| 9780679405597
| 0679405593
| 3.55
| 575,624
| Oct 18, 1851
| Nov 26, 1991
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Jun 18, 2015
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Hardcover
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73
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| B006U1QW78
| 3.89
| 402,796
| 1603
| Jan 01, 2003
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it was amazing
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None
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Notes are private!
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1
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not set
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not set
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Mar 27, 2015
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Mass Market Paperback
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51
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| 1841593591
| 9781841593593
| 1841593591
| 3.99
| 1,910,445
| 1932
| 2013
|
really liked it
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Brave New World is a young man's novel, written in the interwar years. Huxley was then living in a collapsing world: a world where the optimist 19th-c
Brave New World is a young man's novel, written in the interwar years. Huxley was then living in a collapsing world: a world where the optimist 19th-century dreams of progress, of improved humanity, of a new and superior man, had been shattered in the trench warfare of World War I and were about to be burned amidst the horrors of the concentration camps. Huxley seems to be sensing that grave danger is looming on the horizon, and he imagines a utopia where a single superstate is ruling the whole planet. The dream of a “superior humanity” has eventually come true, thanks to the extensive use of eugenics and mass cloning (babies in bottles). Not all people get the best genetic formula, however: some of these manufactured humans are reduced to imbecility, perform the lowest functions, and are nonetheless content with their lot. Children, of course, are all brainwashed and conditioned with hypnotic techniques (sleep teaching). There are no families anymore, and sexual promiscuity is pervasive. Adults get a further supply of silly entertainment (Feelies) and drugs (Soma) that renders them docile, keeps them young, and make them love their voluntary servitude. People have lost interest in art and science, and religion has been replaced by Henry Ford’s cult (i.e. assembly line applied to human beings) and occasional orgiastic ceremonies (orgy-porgies). In short, humanity has achieved happiness and reached the End of History. To some extent, Huxley’s prophecies have become a reality, less than a century later: rational, hierarchical, hyper-efficient and optimised capitalism and cheery consumerism have conquered most of the world. The sexual revolution has indeed taken place — although full sexual libertarianism is still a pipe dream. Pharmacopoeia, narcotics, antidepressants, tranquillisers and rejuvenating treatments are broadly available; as well as irrelevant and mind-numbing 3D entertainment, peppered with commercial slogans. Genetic engineering and biotechnology are everywhere (although not used to select humans as yet). Brave New World is a novel structured around a set of (rather crude) characters and plots; there is, however, no clear protagonist. Huxley has a witty tongue-in-cheek sense of humour throughout. Some passages even have a purely poetic or musical quality: particularly through the use of Shakespeare’s lines for the character of John Savage, or the cross-cutting technique employed in chapter 3. But by and large, the book feels like a philosophical essay or social satire, in the style of Voltaire’s Candide or Swift’s Gulliver's Travels. Obviously, Huxley had Plato’s Republic in mind, when designing his Alpha / Bêta / Gamma / Delta / Epsilon caste system (he was probably also referring to the school grades: A+ to F, already in use when he was a pupil at Eton College, or even to the caste system in India). Certainly, he remembered Nietzsche’s “Letzte Mensch” from Zarathustra’s prologue: a human type that has indeed invented happiness, comfort and social stability, but ultimately a petty and lethargic sort of humankind. A type of humanity that might well be appealing to us right now, who knows… Brave New World is obviously a fascinating political statement that spoke to the European crisis of the 1930s. But its visionary impact and influence on speculative fiction cannot be overstated, from Orwell’s 1984 to Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to Atwood's Oryx and Crake, and to Houellebecq’s La Possibilité d'une île. See also my review of Brave New World Revisited. Edit: Watched Universal’s 2020 TV series adaptation. It is by and large faithful to the novel’s plot and characters, but ends up taking more and more liberties as the episodes go by. It’s also focusing way more on the entertainment potential of the book (especially the erotica aspects of the orgy-porgies) than on the political debate around the problem of happiness vs freedom. All references to Shakespeare have been removed as well, although the romance is a central part of the show (not so much in the book). Ultimately, Huxley’s philosophical novel serves as the rib cage of the series, but its heart is more like Black Mirror, Westworld, The Matrix or even Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Nonetheless, a pleasant “feely” with some nice eye candy! ...more |
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1
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Sep 12, 2017
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Sep 25, 2017
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Jan 31, 2015
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Hardcover
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80
| 
| 0143111582
| 9780143111580
| 0143111582
| 4.28
| 1,450,267
| Jun 01, 1965
| Oct 25, 2016
|
it was amazing
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Dune is often considered a masterpiece of 20th-century American science fiction. In part, the book owes its reputation to the film adaptation David Ly
Dune is often considered a masterpiece of 20th-century American science fiction. In part, the book owes its reputation to the film adaptation David Lynch directed in the early 1980s (although this movie was, and still is, not considered one of his best). Frank Herbert wrote a novel of epic proportions, in other words, a space opera, with its intergalactic feudal society, its decadent (if not evil) empire and its band of rebels: the book was published some ten years before the first instalment of the Star Wars series. Indeed, along with Asimov’s (overrated) Foundation stories, it was George Lucas’ primary source of inspiration. One of the most exciting aspects of Herbert’s creation is the multi-cultural world he depicts. Each house (Atreides, Harkonnen, etc.), each planet (Arrakis, Giedi Prime, Caladan...), each group (the Fremen, the Bene Gesserit, the Guild, the Emperor’s suite and the Sardaukars) has its specific flavour, its own culture, its language — the comprehensive index at the end of the book is utterly fascinating. For each of these cultures, Herbert borrowed traits from traditions (ancient or contemporary) he knew well in reality, especially from the Middle East. In particular, Paul Atreides / Muad’Dib’s story among the Fremen is redolent of the historical events around T.E. Lawrence and the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. And Paul’s crusade on Arrakis is told, as though it were ancient history, in the chronicles by the Princess Irulan at the start of each chapter. Herbert describes his fictional world and characters in great detail, which contributes to the richness of his narrative, but I found these descriptions somewhat boring and, especially, the middle of the book is a bit dragging for that reason. In my view, the most impressive parts of this novel are the dialogues, where Herbert simultaneously reveals what the characters are saying and thinking. This technique lends a sense of duplicity and scheming to almost every interaction. Everyone is plotting one way or another so that the whole thing ends up being like a great Shakespearean play, with dialogues and asides, tyrants and pretenders. What confirms this impression is not only the theme of the exiled Duke (see As You Like It, King Lear, or The Tempest), but also the repeated scenes of fencing duels throughout, with feints and poisoned tips: a clear allusion to the endings of Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance. Edit: A word about Denis Villeneuve’s new film adaptation of Herbert’s novel (part 1, 2021). Comparisons are odious and obviously wouldn’t be to David Lynch’s advantage. This is a Dune version for a new generation of fans and an epic movie on par with Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, in the early 2000s. The settings (filmed in Scandinavia and the Middle East) are breathtaking, and the actors have so much going for them. But what strikes me the most in this new version is the sense that everything is overwhelming and sublime: the massive architecture, the crushing machines, the extreme weather conditions, the earth-shattering landscapes, the thunderous music, the tragic events, the repulsive foes. From the relenting waves of Caladan to the searing and unending skies of Arrakis, everything assumes an oceanic and staggering dimension. ...more |
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1
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Jan 13, 2015
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Jun 05, 2015
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Jan 13, 2015
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Hardcover
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60
| 
| 0385333846
| 9780385333849
| 0385333846
| 4.10
| 1,396,259
| Mar 31, 1969
| Jan 12, 1999
|
really liked it
|
Don’t be fooled: this is a short novel, but a pretty difficult one! Kurt Vonnegut, like his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, witnessed long ago one of the
Don’t be fooled: this is a short novel, but a pretty difficult one! Kurt Vonnegut, like his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, witnessed long ago one of the most dreadful (and now almost forgotten) events during the crepuscular spring of 1945, when the Allies, pretending to eradicate Nazism, utterly destroyed the German city of Dresden and killed tens of thousands of civilians (comparable to the Hiroshima bombing). This event is the bleeding core of the novel. So it goes. What is more bewildering about this book is its disjointed time structure: very soon in the story, Billy Pilgrim, a former prisoner of war, gets “unstuck in time”, thanks to the intervention of a Tralfamadorian flying saucer. He then keeps travelling in time from one paragraph to the next, going back and forth from the days before the Dresden destruction, to his childhood years, to his postwar life as an optometrist who is writing a book about Dresden and suffers a plane crash, to the time of the Vietnam War and Ronald Reagan (the present time when Vonnegut was writing), to a geodesic sphere on the far-off planet of Tralfamadore, to Times Square, and back to the firestorm of World War II. In doing so, we get to know a gallery of quaint yet pitiful characters Billy meets along the way: Weary the bully, Lazzaro the enraged sadist, Campbell the American Nazi, Kilgore Trout the crook sci-fi writer, the Spinozist four-dimensional Tralfamadorians, Montana the porn star, the rich and fat Valencia who dies in her car, Derby the teacher who dies before a firing squad, Jesus Christ a “nobody” who dies on a piece of wood. So it goes. Added to this sense of disorientation (which indeed is that of Billy/Kurt), Vonnegut uses a dry, detached and fatalistic humour, when describing the most unspeakable, even unthinkable, moments of this war experience, that, if amusing, truly conveys a sense of utter despair. So it goes. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Jan 30, 2017
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Feb 07, 2017
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Dec 20, 2014
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Paperback
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34
| 
| 3.80
| 41,509
| 1930
| 1973
|
really liked it
|
Freud rédige ce petit livre quelques mois avant la grande crise économique de 1929. Il s’agit, au départ, d’une étude sur la souffrance, qui tire son
Freud rédige ce petit livre quelques mois avant la grande crise économique de 1929. Il s’agit, au départ, d’une étude sur la souffrance, qui tire son origine de la relation de l’homme à la nature et à autrui, et sur les moyens de ne pas la ressentir : stupéfiants, méditation, sublimation, religion, amour, beauté... Mais assez vite Freud s'interroge sur le rôle de la civilisation dans l'économie libidinale. Ce que l’homme obtient à travers la culture, c’est précisément de se prémunir contre les agressions de la nature et de ses congénères, à travers l’instauration du droit et de la morale. Mais, ce faisant, l'individu doit renoncer à ses pulsions à la fois sexuelles et agressives. Et c’est cette restriction même qui devient problématique et source d'angoisse : comme dans la relation parentale, l’instinct agressif (pulsion de mort) de l’individu est empêché par l’ordre collectif et se retourne contre le Moi à travers le Surmoi (Freud parle même, au sujet de la morale, de « Surmoi collectif »), créant dans le même temps la conscience morale et le sentiment de culpabilité (reprise de la théorie du meurtre primitif dans Totem et tabou). Finalement, l’individu, en passant de la Nature à la Culture, a retourné sa puissance d'agression contre lui-même et troqué une menace de mort contre une autre... Il s’agit d'une réflexion essentiellement spéculative sur la condition névrotique de l'homme civilisé, portée au-delà du cadre strictement familial (lieu de prédilection de la psychanalyse) et pris au niveau du collectif social. Je ne peux m'empêcher d'y entendre un écho des propositions de Nietzsche sur la morale et la culture décadente. Freud conclut par ces mots : « il y a lieu d'attendre que l’autre de ces deux "puissances célestes", l'Éros éternel, tente un effort afin de s'affirmer ». Peut-être y a-t-il là l'intuition de la possibilité d'une civilisation empathique : voir les développements récents de Jeremy Rifkin sur ce thème. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Nov 23, 2014
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Nov 29, 2014
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Nov 23, 2014
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Paperback
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90
| 
| 0349121087
| 9780349121086
| 0349121087
| 4.25
| 94,425
| Feb 01, 1996
| Jun 05, 1997
|
really liked it
|
Reading Infinite Jest feels a bit like when you’ve had some friends over for dinner, you’ve all had a jolly good time, it’s getting a bit late though,
Reading Infinite Jest feels a bit like when you’ve had some friends over for dinner, you’ve all had a jolly good time, it’s getting a bit late though, the guests are leaving one after the other, and but there is this one guy, a brilliant guy, a bit of a show-off, to be honest, a kind of beefy guy you wouldn’t want to mess up with too much, and, above all, a horrifyingly garrulous guy. And he is lying there on your couch, slowly but steadily draining your liquor cabinet, and droning on and on, and oh! but it’s already 4 a.m., and everyone else is long gone, and he is still there telling all sorts of rambling anecdotes you can’t make head nor tail of, so but then at some point your eyes start itching like real bad and he’s babbling and pouring himself another glass of Wild Turkey, and at length, you accidentally drift off and, as you suddenly jump back and open your eyes, the guy is still relentlessly talking, the tide in your drink cabinet is “way out”, and meanwhile, you realise rosy-fingered Dawn is rising across your dead-bottles-littered living room... And but then, right at that moment, out of the blue, in the middle of his sentence, that conversationalist from hell glances at his watch, mumbles something about it being already 1079h or some such, gets up, grabs his coat and leaves. And so but so you realise you really need a fucking shower. Now in all earnestness, Infinite Jest is a pretty beefy beast. And it’s not just a matter of length (just about one thousand densely-laid-out pages + another thick, even tighter cushion of endnotes). The material, the style, the composition are a challenge to the reader as well. It is quite clear that David Foster Wallace is insanely talented and capable of pulling out all the stops literary-wise: a variety of styles and speech patterns and dialects, unearthly situations, deeply layered characters, several-pages-long sentences that still manage to make sense and remain grammatically sound, a blend of casual phrasing and hyper-scholarly pedantic jargon and neologisms, bits and bobs of French (in fact, French-sounding but laced with blunders and mostly borderline gibberish), sudden left turns from hilarious to grotesque to horrifying, and the list goes on. On the other hand, Infinite Jest is in toto and quite literally a puzzling novel — a giant 1,000 piece jigsaw with missing bits. It seems as if DWF had been writing this monster haphazardly, throwing one scene after the next on paper, all over the map, introducing one character after another, without much consideration for any form of consistency or reason or storytelling technique or quite knowing what he was doing. As if he had been throwing stuff against the wall to see what would stick, and in the end, just left everything in (allegedly, he removed some 600 pages from the initial manuscript before publication, but still!). As a result, the book is rhapsodic, bloated, and seems to display a disjointed and sometimes irritating and gratuitous series of vignettes, anecdotes, dreams, hallucinations, esoteric digressions, silly acronyms and endnotes, winks to Homer and Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky and Joyce and Nabokov and Pynchon and Bazin and Deleuze and Scorsese and Lynch. In other words, a jumble of bits and pieces of attempts that, in some cases, would and, in others, wouldn’t adhere so much to the rest of the picture. In essence, perhaps, a “stupefyingly turgid-sounding shit” (p. 911)? This holds even to the very end, which doesn’t provide any sense of closure or resolution or Gestalt. The novel ends in medias res, as abruptly and randomly as it started. In other words, it doesn’t end. So, for the most part, the readers of this sprawling and baroque novel are expected to hone their understanding and piece all this material together into something that might make some sense. As the narrator puts it at some point (talking about something else), Infinite Jest sometimes feels to have “no narrative movement toward a real story; no emotional movement toward an audience” (p. 740). But in the end, and as a result of the sheer length and complicated, disorderly structure, they might find that, although their patience has been tried to the nth degree, there is still a sort of power of accretion which, for want of producing a proper story, does indeed paint the picture of a whole epoch: our time. Infinite Jest is an insane form of speculative fiction. The story takes place in some trippy dystopian alternate reality, where North America has become one single country, governed by a halfwitted show-business-celebrity president (rings a bell?), where mindless consumerism is rampant — even the Gregorian calendar and the Statue of Liberty have become ad spaces — and massive amounts of toxic rubbish and radioactive pollution are catapulted into a large chunk of territory to the N-E Appalachian Mountains, turned into a giant Chernobyl-like landfill. It is also a book featuring (among other things): the daily life of a bunch of kids at an upscale Tennis Academy, a multi-generational family saga (the Incandenzas — compare to, say, the Buendías in One Hundred Years of Solitude), a series of wrecks at a drug and alcohol rehab centre, and a group of French-Canadian terrorists. Most characters in Infinite Jest seem utterly miserable, suicidal, damaged, depressed, obsessed, lonely, lost. The book is also, in a way, an existential study about the struggle of being human in our postmodern reality. But in my view, at the core, Infinite Jest is a book about addiction and its devastating effects. That is addiction in all imaginable forms and shapes: drugs, alcohol, sex, success, mindless entertainment, so on. One of the central and most fascinating threads in this novel is about a movie that is so very entertaining and compelling that anyone who starts watching it won’t be able to stop watching it again, on a loop, to death — the wild dream of any media and entertainment tycoon, no doubt. Incidentally, that movie is titled Infinite Jest. In a way, Infinite Jest (the movie within the novel) illustrates the most extreme version of addiction. Infinite Jest (the book), on the other hand, is a stark satire of a society that has become the slave of cheap and mind-numbing, soul-destroying pleasures, force-fed to everyone by a capitalist system that pretends to bring happiness to humankind but is in actuality driven to endless consumerism only. And so, Infinite Jest is ultimately a book about literature as a form of art and as an industry. Infinite Jest (the novel) is radically, obsessively antiformulaic, “anticonfluential” (to use one of the narrator’s terms); it doesn’t pretend, doesn’t try to provide, even denies the reader any form of low-grade, profit-oriented, passivity-inducing, addiction-inducing literary pleasure. In short, Infinite Jest (the novel) is the direct opposite of Infinite Jest (the movie within the novel). Ironically though, the book’s publication was intensely marketed and hyped in the US (as a comedy, mind you, which cannot be further from the truth!); it has become, in most English-speaking countries, especially since DFW sadly “eliminated his own map”, a cult bestseller of sorts. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 07, 2020
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Oct 11, 2020
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Oct 30, 2014
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Paperback
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32
| 
| 8423346692
| 9788423346691
| 8423346692
| 3.93
| 14
| unknown
| Apr 28, 2013
|
it was amazing
|
Muchas son las noches de Shahrazad, muchas sus versiones (de Galland a Mardrus y a Miquel), muchos sus comentarios (de Marcel Proust a Jorge Luis Borg
Muchas son las noches de Shahrazad, muchas sus versiones (de Galland a Mardrus y a Miquel), muchos sus comentarios (de Marcel Proust a Jorge Luis Borges y a Salman Rushdie). La versión que comento ahora es una traducción española, de la mano de Dolors Cinca y Margarita Castells, basada en la edición que Muhsin Mahdi estableció hace unos años a partir del manuscrito árabe del siglo 14 (una versión siria, denominada “Leiden”) que se conserva hoy día en la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, en París. Esta es, según asevera el prólogo de esta edición, “la versión más antigua conocida” de las Mil y Una Noches. Por supuesto, esto no quiere decir que esta versión sea más “auténtica” que las posteriores; esto solo indica una fecha en la larga historia de este texto cuyo corpus va evolucionando desde siempre. Este volumen de unas 600 páginas no incluye los cuentos que introdujo Antoine Galland en su recopilación y que llegaron a la fama que confirma hoy cualquier edición infantil. Hablo, por supuesto, del cuento de Aladino, del de Alí Baba y los Cuarenta Ladrones, de la odisea de Sindbad el Marino. Otros son los cuentos que cuenta Shahrazad aquí, en cada velada, a su hermana Dinarsad y a su esposo celoso Shahrayar, rey de China y de la India. La historia del Comerciante y el Genio y, más aún, la del Pescador y el Genio, la de Las tres manzanas y la del Enano jorobado son cuentos de índole fantástica, encajados en el cuento principal y que a su vez encajan varios cuentos más (cuentos dentro de cuentos), donde se ven reflejados, tal vez hasta el infinito, la figura del califa Harún Arrashid y la de su fiel visir Gafar. Otras historias son romances de amor; a esta categoría pertenecen la Historia de Nuraddín Alí Ben Bakkar, la Historia de la esclava Anís Algalís, la Historia de Gulanar del mar. Mis cuentos favoritos son los que consiguen mezclar con éxito estas dos tendencias (la de lo fantástico y de la magia, con la del amor y del erotismo), en especial el cuento del Porteador y las tres muchachas y la de Camar Asamán. La versión de Cinca y Castells carece de los arcaísmos y preciosidades que algunas veces arruinan las traducciones de obras medievales. Sin embargo, la versión de Mahdi en la que se basan está salpicada de canciones y pasajes poéticos. En especial cuando se trata de celebrar el amor (o mejor dicho el dolor que lo acompaña) y la belleza de las mujeres, que a menudo son descritas como si fueran pasteles: “de almizcle el aroma y de rosas las mejillas, perlada la boca y cual vino la saliva”. Otras formulaciones son menos pintorescas y no obstante más elegantes: “la joven volvió a montar su mula y partió, dejando detrás suyo algún que otro corazón roto”. Shahrazad es una contadora por talento y por necesidad: su real esposo la sospecha de adulterio y, para ella, contar cuentos es una estratagema que equivale a salvarse la vida. A partir de ahí, brotan las historias y, como ocurre en nuestros propios destinos, nunca se sabe a dónde van a ir a parar. En varios de sus cuentos se repite esa funesta situación. Muchos son los cuentos de estas noches; tantas ocasiones son de celebrar la vida y el amor; tantas ocasiones son de conjurar la muerte. ...more |
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1
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not set
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Dec 2015
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Aug 30, 2014
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Paperback
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12
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| 8420412147
| 9788420412146
| 8420412147
| 3.90
| 280,733
| 1605
| Sep 10, 2015
|
it was amazing
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La figura de don Quijote, lamentable (y a menudo malhumorado) caballero andante, y de su ridículo escudero Sancho, es celebérrima — incluso ha llegado
La figura de don Quijote, lamentable (y a menudo malhumorado) caballero andante, y de su ridículo escudero Sancho, es celebérrima — incluso ha llegado a ser el símbolo de las letras hispánicas. Pero lo más curioso es que casi solo es eso mismo: un símbolo, una figura, que ilustra hasta qué punto se puede llegar a enloquecer tan solo por leer libros. Una figura desde luego universal, ya que hoy día, se podría contar una historia muy parecida: pongamos por caso algún lector obsesivo de novelas (yo mismo ¡o tu, querido/a lector!) o gamer trastornado por los video juegos y series de fantasy. Ese desgraciado sale a la calle, creyéndose de la misma alcurnia que Gandalf, Bilbo o Dumbledore. Lo que ocurre luego es poco sorprendente: demasiado débil para provocar una matanza, hace el ridículo, lo toman por loco, le dan de hostias, lo hacen un cristo, lo echan al calabozo, hasta que al final, lo que podía haber sido un cuento heroico o una tragedia, acaba siendo una deplorable payasada. De hecho, la pareja de don Quijote y Sancho muchas veces me hizo pensar en la tradicional pareja del circo: por un lado, el Carablanca, sofisticado, distinguido y de triste figura; por el otro el Augusto, patoso, tontorrón y alegre. Es muy posible que ambas tradiciones tengan un origen común… El famoso dúo del Gordo y el Flaco (Stan Laurel & Oliver Hardy) es uno de sus recientes avatares. Digo que aquí don Quijote y Sancho solo constituyen una figura, una imagen, porque la verdad es que la narración de la novela de Cervantes (como otras obras picarescas de la misma época) no tiene argumento siquiera. Es una serie de aventuras y episodios extravagantes, que tienen poco vinculo entre ellos y, básicamente, todo eso no va a ningún sitio. De modo que, al cabo de pocos capítulos, Cervantes empieza a insertar otros cuentos dentro del cuento principal. Algo así como Las mil y una noches o el Decamerón, Don Quijote de la Mancha es, al fin y al cabo, una colección de novelas cortas: Grisóstomo y Marcela, “El curioso impertinente” (compárese con Othello), el cuento (más o menos autobiográfico) del cautivo, el discurso de Quijote sobre las armas y las letras, el cuento de Cardenio, Luscinda, Fernando y Dorotea (compárese con A Midsummer Night's Dream), etc. Historias y discursos, pues, insertados dentro del cuento principal; este cuento mismo siendo presentado por su autor como un relato derivado, traducción de un manuscrito árabe de un tal Cide Hamete Benengeli… En fin, que la novela de Cervantes no tiene una forma lineal, de principio a fin, sino un movimiento espiral y desatado, de arriba abajo o desde dentro hacia afuera, y aunque la lectura sea amena siempre, el lector (un poco como Quijote en su jaula) a menudo ignora por donde lo están llevando. Otro punto evidente es el carácter paródico de la novela de Cervantes. Como es sabido, a Alonso Quijano se le va la castaña, no solo porque evidentemente es un viejo chocho, sino porque, al parecer, ha leído demasiadas novelas de caballería. Las referencias a los libros que se encuentran en la biblioteca de nuestro protagonista son múltiples y, en muchos casos, desconocidos o olvidados (al menos del que escribe estas líneas). Algunos de estos libros, sin embargo, siguen siendo obras maestras y hasta best sellers desde el medioevo: Palmerín de Inglaterra, Tirant lo Blanc, Amadís de Gaula, El cantar de Roldán, el Libro del Caballero Zifar, y sobre todo el gran ciclo de las leyendas del Rey Arturo y de los Caballeros de la Mesa Redonda, desde Lancelot y Tristan hasta Le Morte d'Arthur (véase, en tiempos más recientes, The Once and Future King). Es evidente que Cervantes debió ser un fan de este tipo de literatura. El cura y el barbero, que deciden quemar los libros de caballería en el patio de la casa de Quijano, son obviamente unos pavos empedernidos. El largo debate que tienen Quijote y el Canónigo acerca de las virtudes respectivas de la literatura histórica, del teatro y de las leyendas caballerescas (cap. 47-50), es uno de los pasajes más fascinantes de esta novela. En todo caso, la primera parte del Quijote es un intento burlesco de “desmitologizar” las leyendas y convenciones caballerescas. Sin embargo, me parece que también hay otro aspecto quizá, un poco escondido debajo de estas historias de locura y de caballería andante. Bien es verdad que Cervantes se burla de los libros de caballeros; sin embargo, esa burla no parece sincera, ya que por otro lado el autor demuestra un conocimiento y, tal vez, un amor a esa clase de libros. En verdad, yo diría que Cervantes se burla de otro tipo de literatura: cuando los personajes de su novela se refieren a los libros de caballería andante, muchas veces es para compararlos con las Santas Escrituras, y es inevitable pensar que, si los libros de caballería han vuelto loco a don Quijote, los mitos y las leyendas que contiene la Biblia han tenido un efecto similar sobre la civilización Europea. Aun más, no me queda nada claro que don Quijote esté verdaderamente loco, en el sentido de que haya agarrado una sobredosis o algún pedo brutal a base de libros de caballería — para mí que sólo está pasando por una crisis de mediana edad algo intensa... De hecho, es una persona que razona con destreza y trata de convencerse con todas las justificaciones posibles de que la realidad es conforme a lo que esta escrito en sus novelas de aventura. Y cuando no sabe dar más explicaciones, siempre recurre o cede al mismo argumento: es que ahí hay un encantamiento (o sea, un milagro). Una persona religiosa no renegaría de este método de explicación “científica”, ni tampoco del empeño repetido de don Quijote en que la gente con quien se topa confiese, como un Credo o acto de fe, la belleza de Dulcinea sin haberla jamás visto. Por decirlo de otro modo, la figura del Quijote no es más que una metáfora de la santidad, del martirio, e incluso del fanatismo, o sea un anticristo bufonesco. De paso, está forma radical de denegación de la realidad que ilustra don Quijote no solo es aplicable a la religión, sino también a la política (recordemos los alternate facts). Y finalmente, la denegación es la esencia misma del acto de leer ficciones: o sea lo que mejor nos define como lectores de novelas. *** Lo que está en juego en el relato de la segunda parte del Quijote parece bastante trivial: en resumen, don Quijote se da cuenta que la sin par Dulcinea no es más que una labradora bastante cutre y, claro está, concluye que ha sido embrujada. Una forma de volverla a su hermosura inicial es que Sancho se dé 3.330 azotes (¿acabará dándoselos?). Sancho, por su parte, tiene una autentica fijación por conseguir el gobierno de su famosa “ínsula”… ¡A partir de allí, puede empezar de nuevo el cachondeo! El cual, se despliega de forma extensa en las aventuras — un tanto sádicas — de los duques (cap. 30-57, con un montaje alternado entre las aventuras respectivas de don Quijote y de Sancho), de Altisidora, de Sansón Carrasco, etc. Quizás uno de los episodios más notables de esta segunda parte sea la del “retablo de maese Pedro” (cap. 26, puesto en música por Manuel de Falla) — dónde el teatro se asemeja peligrosamente a los libros de caballería —, que curiosamente me recordó la escena de The Murder of Gonzago en Hamlet (III,2) — donde el teatro se asemejaba peligrosamente a la realidad. Sin embargo, esta segunda parte es muy distinta a la primera. Aquí Cervantes se centra bastante más firmemente en sus dos protagonistas, don Quijote y Sancho: las historias insertadas que abundaban en la primera parte ahora ya casi no aparecen (el propio personaje del bachiller hace la crítica de este procedimiento recurrente de la primera parte en el capítulo 3 de la segunda). Sin embargo, aquí hay otra forma de mise en abyme, aun más barroca y vertiginosa, provocada por la publicación apócrifa, entre las dos partes, del Quijote de Avellaneda: en varias ocasiones, los personajes de Cervantes discurren sobre la existencia de la primera parte, de la segunda apócrifa y aun de la segunda que estamos leyendo. Finalmente, y aunque deba confesar que la novela acabó haciéndoseme sobremanera larga y a ratos tediosa, el que realmente es “ingenioso” es el mismo Cervantes, que consigue, a partir de una pareja francamente poco prometedora — un semi-loco que no para de dar sermones sobre lo grande que es la caballería andante, y un semi-cateto que ensarta refranes capitulo tras capitulo — consigue esculpir unas figuras propiamente míticas que, voluntariamente o no, han engendrado un sinfín de pareja literarias de varones: Bouvard y Pécuchet en Gustave Flaubert, Sherlock Holmes y Dr. Watson en Arthur Conan Doyle, Phileas Fogg y Passepartout en Jules Verne, Frodo y Samwise en J.R.R. Tolkien, Vladimir y Estragon o Hamm y Clov en Samuel Beckett, Tintín y Haddock en Hergé, Jon Snow y Samwell Tarly en A Game of Thrones y muchos etcéteras. Tal vez incluso podría decirse que don Quijote y Sancho han llegado a liberarse de la misma ficción cervantina. Recuerdo un viaje que hice hace años por la Mancha: los habitantes se referían a tal aldea, tal camino, tal venta — hoy ya transformados en zonas industriales, en hipermercados o en autopistas — como a sitios donde verdaderamente estuvieron don Quijote y su escudero, recitando las virtudes de la caballería andante y las gracias de la sin par Dulcinea del Toboso. Tal vez Cervantes fue el inventor de la novela moderna, pero lo cierto es que Cide Hamete fue cronista o historiador de una realidad desvanecida. La muerte de don Quijote es un momento verdaderamente penoso: de pronto la realidad fantástica heroica, poética, fabricada por el Caballero de los Leones, se desvanece. Obviamente, no puede soportar la realidad prosaica, ruin y hasta asquerosa de lo cotidiano (las zonas industriales, los hipermercados, las autopistas). En realidad, aunque don Quijote acaba renegando de los libros de caballería, el libro de Cervantes es una exaltación del poder de la literatura (y tal vez de la religión) contra la realidad. Y mientras la primera parte pretendía burlarse y destruir el género caballeresco, la segunda, en particular en su patético final, parece ser una reafirmación nostálgica del mismo. De no morirse don Quijote, Cervantes hubiera podido dejarnos una tercera parte, una novela pastoril, la de Quijótiz y Pancino. Ojalá… Desgraciadamente, Cervantes murió pocos meses después de don Quijote, quizás contagiado por su misma melancolía. Otros muchos autores (Unamuno, Ortega y Gasset, Mann, Borges, Fuentes...), cineastas y músicos se encargarán de la posteridad del caballero de la Mancha; el más reciente siendo Salman Rushdie con su Quichotte. N.B.: La versión del Quijote que he leído es una adaptación al castellano moderno, de la mano de Andrés Trapiello. Puede que esta versión sea algo más legible que el original, pero habiendo comparado ambas versiones, la verdad es que la lengua castellana ha evolucionado bien poco desde los tiempos de Cervantes (no podría decirse lo mismo del inglés de Shakespeare o del francés de Montaigne), con lo cual una versión modernizada es algo de lo que uno puede perfectamente prescindir. También tengo en casa una edición antigua ilustrada por Gustave Doré (con el estilo dramático que caracteriza sus grabados) y una, más reciente, traducida al francés, con pinturas desestructuradas de Gérard Garouste. Revisión: Quiero destacar el maravilloso álbum titulado Don Quijote de la Mancha, Romances y Músicas, a cargo de La Capella Reial de Catalunya, bajo la batuta de Jordi Savall. Esta adaptación musical recoge muchos de los romances, canciones, seguidillas y sonetos que se encuentran integrados (o simplemente aludidos) a lo largo de los capítulos de la novela de Cervantes, y los entregan con músicas y cantos propios del medioevo y renacimiento. Una lectura del Quijote (en ocasión del cuarto centenario de la obra) sobremanera enriquecedora y exquisita. ...more |
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| 8467009101
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it was amazing
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La Divina Comedia es un libro asombroso. Bien es sabido que nos cuenta la historia de un viaje en un trasmundo fantástico: primero un descenso al abis
La Divina Comedia es un libro asombroso. Bien es sabido que nos cuenta la historia de un viaje en un trasmundo fantástico: primero un descenso al abismo del Infierno, luego un ascenso por la montaña del Purgatorio, para terminar con la visión beatífica de los círculos concéntricos del Paraíso. He tratado de leer este libro al pie de la letra, sin preocuparme demasiado de los muchos significados alegóricos o de las innumerables interpretaciones que hay de ello. Estas tres regiones metafísicas se presentan como gigantescos paisajes o arquitecturas, por donde Dante y sus guías (primero Virgilio, luego Beatriz) descubren fascinantes galerías de retratos. Allí se mezclan visiones de la Antigüedad (Homero, Platón, Cesar, etc.), figuras del Cristianismo medieval (San Francisco de Asís, Santo Tomas de Aquino, San Buenaventura, etc.), así como los mismos coetáneos de Dante. El Infierno, donde Dante se encuentra al principio “por haberse apartado del camino recto”, se presenta primero como una serie de nueve fosas o círculos, cada vez mas profundos, donde se encuentran representados cada pecado: la incontinencia, la bestialidad, la malicia, la herejía… Primero se encuentra con grandes poetas, como Homero, que no pudo conocer a Cristo, y a personajes entrañables como Francisca. Pero según va bajando por los círculos de esas extrañas cuevas, Dante divisa a ejércitos que caminan al son de las trompetas que son los culos de los diablos, a reptiles que agarran a sus víctimas para incorporárselas, a huracanes sobre los ríos que recorren las profundidades del Infierno, a almas torturadas que van con los intestinos colgando (Mahoma). (Es muy probable que artistas como el Bosco se hayan inspirado de algunas de estas terribles imágenes.) Digo “almas”, sin embargo, ¡todas estas visiones son sumamente corpóreas! Finalmente, después de cruzarse con Ulises, se descubre la figura de Lucifer que, en una eterna pesadilla, se come a Judas, a Bruto y a Casio, los traidores de Cristo y de Cesar (vale subrayar que el acercamiento de estas dos figuras no deja de sorprenderme). Finalmente, salen “para volver a ver las estrellas” y emprenden la ascensión el monte del Purgatorio y cuando mas ascienden hacia las estrellas, mas ligeros caminan. Descubren esculturas que representan episodios históricos, como la caída de Troya. Discurren sobre temas de filosofía moral y política, como la necesidad del libre albedrío, la responsabilidad, el amor, la edad de oro de la humanidad, la decadencia de la Iglesia. Contemplan el árbol del Paraíso, despojado de sus hojas. Aquí finalmente, Virgilio abandona a Dante y lo deja en manos de la sublime Beatriz. Al entrar en el Paraíso, asevera Dante: “Ahora, lector, permanece tranquilo en tu asiento, meditando acerca de las cosas que aquí solamente se bosquejan, si quieres que te causen mayor deleite antes que tedio”. Esa apuesta es difícil de mantener, ya que Dante se mete en discursos teológicos de índole escolástico (sobre las virtudes teologales) con varios de sus interlocutores y trata, balbuceando y con suma dificultad, de traducir visiones que, se supone, son del orden de lo inefable. Sin embargo, algunas imágenes pastoriles, en las que se complace Dante en varias ocasiones, son de destacar. El viaje se acaba con la visión de la Rosa Celeste, las jerarquías angélicas y el centro infinitamente luminoso de la Trinidad divina, la luz pura y florecida de Empíreo. Acaba Dante rindiéndose con estas conmovedoras palabras: “ahora es preciso que mi poema desista de seguir cantando la belleza de mi Dama, como hace todo artista que llega al ultimo esfuerzo de su arte.” El esfuerzo también es del lector: aún tardaré algún tiempo en digerir semejante gira celestial… ...more |
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| 0307264602
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it was amazing
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Ironically, Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale around 1984. Indeed, it is commonly known that her novel depicts an Orwellian dystopia, as seen
Ironically, Margaret Atwood wrote The Handmaid’s Tale around 1984. Indeed, it is commonly known that her novel depicts an Orwellian dystopia, as seen through the eyes of Offred, a handmaid. This term should not be understood in the ordinary meaning of the word (i.e., a domestic worker), but in the biblical sense, cf. the tale of Hagar (Genesis, chap. 16) or Zilpah and Bilhah (Genesis, chap. 29 sqq.). The novel contains many such subtle biblical references (Gilead, Jezebel). The handmaid, then, is a slave-woman with a gestational surrogacy role, whose sole value is her uterus. Offred’s story takes place in an authoritarian society — the U.S. turned into a totalitarian regime, where infertility is widespread, and men have the upper hand. In a nutshell: a nightmarish theocracy. Every event in the story is seen through Offred’s eyes. Her claustrophobic world, her oppressive routine, everything in her life is fastidiously described in the form of a diary or stream of consciousness: the household, the neighborhood around the house, the people she carefully meets, her room, her dreams, her recollection of how she came to be there… Then, around the middle of the novel, some small changes (often sexually loaded) start to take place and slowly build up until, eventually, her horrific environment starts to crumble. The ending is somewhat abrupt. Margaret Atwood’s major tour de force is indeed to make the reader dive right into the character’s perspective, without the expected exposition that would explain what this “sci-fi” world is about and how it came to be this way. In fact, all the explanatory parts are pushed back at the end of the book, in the surprising metafictional keynote entitled Historical Notes — a narrative device Atwood borrowed from 1984’s Appendix. In so doing, we are left somewhat clueless, guessing at every page. In so doing, the author manages, with a remarkable economy of means, a neutral voice, a lack of spectacular effects, to build an incredible sense of tension and anxiety. In the end, Atwood's representation of an iron-fisted, misogynistic world is so appalling that it seems implausible and revolting. Yet, the author has repeatedly stressed that, as a self-imposed rule, she has refused to make up any of the details in her work. Every injustice, every abuse, every pain inflicted on women actually took place (and sadly still does) at some point or other of human history. Edit: The Hulu TV show, based on Atwood’s barbaric dystopia, is a graphic, breathtaking, and incredibly absorbing adaptation. This is thanks to the excellent actors’ performance and the Bergmanian style of the film, which (as far as the first season goes) remains faithful to the novel while expanding on the plot and characters. The use of explanatory flashbacks dispels most of the confusion the audience might have had while reading the book; yet confusion is at the very heart of Atwood’s work. The following seasons further elaborate on the plot, beyond the boundaries of the novel. The Testaments is Atwood’s own sequel to her book, written more than thirty years later. ...more |
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73
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80
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90
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61
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