H.P. Lovecraft is famous as one of the venerable fathers of literary horror, weird tales and science-fiction. Some of his short stories, like The CaseH.P. Lovecraft is famous as one of the venerable fathers of literary horror, weird tales and science-fiction. Some of his short stories, like The Case of Charles Dexter Ward or At the Mountains of Madness, have become immensely popular. In a way, he could be considered the most prominent continuator of the gothic genre and, especially, the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Just like Poe, Lovecraft lived a rather lonely, obscure and unsuccessful existence. Still, he has become a cult author, with a large fandom and countless imitations and pastiches in prose, film, graphic design and video games. There is nothing quite like the author from Providence, RI.
Lovecraft wrote almost exclusively tales and short stories for pulp fiction magazines in the 1920s and 30s — and plenty of letters. His prose, mainly in the first-person narrative, told from the POV of a scientific investigator, is full of macabre imagery and atmospheric descriptions. Frightening nightmares, vile vegetation, crawling creatures, buried cities abound in his writing. But his literary endeavour goes much further than a bunch of spooky stories and an intense fascination for everything foul, nasty, slimy and rank. His tales compose, bit by bit, the complete mythology of human doom — the Cthulhu Mythos.
At its core, Lovecraft’s outlook on humanity’s place in the universe is deeply pessimistic: most of his tales are about some occult and brutal truth lurking underneath the perky surface of everyday life, and the discovery of some inescapable cosmic horror. Humankind may take comfort in the belief that there is some benign divinity babysitting us from some fluffy heaven. Yet Lovecraft shows us, on the contrary, that the universe not only doesn’t care about us, poor insignificant apes, but is populated with abominable entities that overwhelm our intellect, horrify our senses and even conspire against us. Lovecraft possibly had the last word on the nature of reality. At any rate, his stories are pretty intoxicating.
The Library of America edition of HPL’s Tales is in keeping with a similar volume on Poe’s Poetry and Tales. It includes some twenty of his most acclaimed stories. I have reviewed a few of these here:
First of three volumes of Philip K. Dick’s works in the Library of America collection, this includes four novels written in the 1960s: The Man in the First of three volumes of Philip K. Dick’s works in the Library of America collection, this includes four novels written in the 1960s: The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (aka Blade Runner), and Ubik. To cut a long story short, these are some of the author’s most famous works, with that mesmerizing blend of pulp sf and metaphysical speculations on the nature of time and reality.
Edgar Allan Poe is probably (with Washington Irving) the greatest initiator of the short story tradition in American literature, later followed by F. Edgar Allan Poe is probably (with Washington Irving) the greatest initiator of the short story tradition in American literature, later followed by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, or Stephen King in the present day. To be sure, the tales included in this volume are fascinating and explore a wide range of genres. All are told in the first person, maybe to convey a sense of intense realism and immediacy. I’ll only (and briefly) review a few of them to give a rough idea of the subject and scope of these tales:
MS. Found in a Bottle and A Descent into the Maelström are tales of the sea, which depict sublime (romantic) and terrifying pictures of man’s derelict state when confronted with the extreme fury of the elements. These tales are in a vein not unlike The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and probably were later an inspiration to Herman Melville and Jules Verne.
The Pit and the Pendulum, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Cask of Amontillado and Hop-Frog are mainly suspense and horror stories, where some deathly or gruesome events take primacy and are described in detail within the narrative. These tales have infused most of the gothic movement, from Oscar Wilde to Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft and, (again) in present time, Stephen King. (I can’t help but think that Valdemar gave J.K. Rowling the initial idea for the character of Voldemort.)
The Murder in the Rue Morgue and The Purloin Letter are, as is well known, the forerunners of the detective story genre. As a result, looking back two centuries away, these stories feel a bit clumsy and tedious. Auguste Dupin (the French detective in Poe’s tales) is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle), Hercule Poirot (Agatha Christie), Don Isidro Parodi (Jorge Luis Borges), Sam Spade (Dashiell Hammett) and so forth. The Man of the Crowd is an odd example of the same genre.
A striking aspect of these tales is that they are midway between Poe’s poems (through the precision of the composition) and his philosophical work, namely Eureka (through the somewhat fantastical conjectures and speculations). In any event, these tales are at the root of most of the contemporary literature. They are, above all, a genuine delight (although sometimes a nightmare) to read....more
“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (Everyman’s Library, p. 125). Midnight’s Children’s ambition is elephantine: a multi-laye“To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world” (Everyman’s Library, p. 125). Midnight’s Children’s ambition is elephantine: a multi-layered, dizzying kaleidoscope encompassing and spinning together the narrator’s phantasmagorical biography, the complicated history of 20th-century India, and the deep-rooted beliefs and cultural archetypes of its people. In a (long) word, Midnight’s Children is a sprawling, swirling historical-auto-meta-fictional-polyglottal-confabulating-Bildungsroman.
In a (different) word: Saleem Sinai was born at the stroke of midnight, on the 15th of August 1947, at the exact moment of India’s independence from the British Empire and its partition into two countries, India and Pakistan. One thousand and one other babies were born during that same fateful and miraculous hour, and their destinies were thereafter intimately connected.
This (unreliable) tale speaks of its narrator and its author just as well: Saleem and Salman, both born in 1947, both of Kashmiri Muslim descent, both raised in Bombay, both bearers of a twitchy nose. The novel starts 30 years before their birth, at the end of World War I, and spans across time, all the way to the late 1970s, 30 years after their birth, to the moment when the tale is being told, the book is being written, and a new generation is being born. Meanwhile, the narrative travels through space, like a flying carpet, from Delhi to Bombay and from Karachi to Dhaka.
In addition, Midnight’s Children subsumes a vast literary tradition. The style of Rushdie’s novel is strongly associated with magic realism, and Cien años de soledad often comes to mind: the archaic, almost mythic beginnings, the surreal elements, the circularity of time, the encyclopaedic scope. In a way, Midnight’s Children is a sort of “David Copperfield goes to Bollywood”, just as Cien años might be “Don Quijote goes to El Dorado”. Midnight’s Children also harks back (sometimes quite explicitly) to an even more venerable body of texts, such as the One Thousand and One Nights, with its frame narrative, the Book of Genesis or the Mahabharata, with their brotherly antagonisms (Abel vs Cain, Yudhishthira vs Duryodhana, Saleem vs Shiva, snakes & ladders, knees & nose).
All in all, Rushdie uses two metaphors to describe his literary project. The first one is at the start of the novel: it is the perforated sheet through which Aadam Aziz discovers, bit by bit, the body of his future wife and the growing love in his heart. The book proceeds in much the same way, like watching life through a keyhole or observing history through the lens of a camera, and putting together a disjointed, dis-chronological, dis-probable set of fragments, intentionally confusing and playfully assorted.
The second metaphor, at the very end of the novel, describes the upshot of this technique: “the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time” (p. 585). Indeed, Midnight’s Children’s ambition is to jam together a complete family saga and the epic of a whole nation. A narrative that gobbles up an entire universe, like the vision of Krishna’s cosmic body in the Gita, with unlimited arms, faces, and stomachs, pureeing everything into a chunky concoction, a supreme turd. Admittedly, the result is, dare I say, tasty, spicy even? And yes, it is a perfect novel, a masterpiece... at times a bit overdone and stodgy as well… In a (last) word… *burp*...more
Le poème de Gilgamesh, composé, dans ses premières versions connues, il a 3 500 ans, bien longtemps avant Homère, est sans doute l’un des plus anciensLe poème de Gilgamesh, composé, dans ses premières versions connues, il a 3 500 ans, bien longtemps avant Homère, est sans doute l’un des plus anciens témoignages de l’activité poétique et littéraire de nos lointains ancêtres de Mésopotamie, à l’aube même de l’Histoire. Cette épopée, comme chacun sait, relate le récit du roi d’Uruk, sa rencontre avec le sauvage Enkidu, l’affrontement du monstre Humbaba dans la forêt de résineux, la querelle avec Ishtar et le massacre du Taureau Céleste, la descente d’Enkidu aux Enfers, puis le voyage de Gilgamesh chez les dieux pour rechercher — en vain — la vie éternelle.
On ne peut manquer d’être touché par le caractère à la fois vénérable et étrange de ce récit, qui ne nous parle pas seulement d’exploits héroïques, mais plus essentiellement de la sortie de la steppe et de l’entrée dans la civilisation, de l’amitié entre deux hommes ; enfin et surtout de notre finitude et de notre condition mortelle, de ce qui fait de nous des humains.
Cette édition de la NRF est admirablement traduite et présentée par l’exégète biblique et assyriologue Jean Bottéro, de manière suffisamment savante pour que nous percevions comment ce texte a été, à grand-peine, reconstitué, mais aussi suffisamment claire pour que nous ressentions la beauté du poème. L’aspect le plus émouvant, sans doute, dans cette édition, est qu’elle fait sentir de manière très nette combien cette Épopée de Gilgamesh, consignée sur d’antiques tablettes cunéiformes, aujourd’hui en débris à travers le monde, est une œuvre naufragée, une épave en morceaux, repêchée des profondeurs de l’Histoire et dont il ne reste qu’un formidable et incomplet puzzle....more
On raconte qu'un rosier et une vigne entremêlés poussent sur les tombes de Tristan et Iseult. Belle du seigneur est probablement l'une des fleurs de cOn raconte qu'un rosier et une vigne entremêlés poussent sur les tombes de Tristan et Iseult. Belle du seigneur est probablement l'une des fleurs de cette double plante. L'impression que je garde de ce gros volume, lu il y a quelques années, est celle de deux récits successifs : le premier, satirique, celui d'une femme dépressive, mariée à un fonctionnaire ridicule et arriviste ; le deuxième, dramatique, celui de cette même femme, poursuivant un amour impossible et fatal avec un homme séduisant dont le destin est menacé. Je retiens en particulier les situations et expression comiques de la première partie et les longueurs intolérables de la seconde. Le clou reste le discours central de Solal sur les babouineries humaines, auxquelles n'échappent ni l'écriture multicolore de Cohen, ni le lecteur qui s'efforce d'arriver au bout de son roman....more
« Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre. » Voilà une maxime éloquente, en u« Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre. » Voilà une maxime éloquente, en un temps d’épidémie et de confinement. Ici cependant, dans un contexte de frivolité Belle Époque bien différent, Proust apporte une réponse spécifique à cette formule pascalienne.
Quatrième volume de la Recherche, donc, et le temps perdu semble s’approfondir encore davantage que dans Le côté de Guermantes. Les dîners mondains s’allongent : garden-party parisienne chez la princesse de Guermantes, puis à Balbec, dans le petit clan des Verdurin, conversations interminables à la Raspelière ou dans le petit train, dont le Narrateur est désormais l’un des hôtes de marque.
Celui-ci, à ce stade du roman, semble engourdi, étourdi, ébloui par le petit monde insulaire et bling-bling de l’aristocratie et de la haute bourgeoisie parisienne, les bavardages, les potins de salon, le champagne, les étymologies latines, les mots d’esprit, les distractions, les gesticulations, l’agitation. Bref, le divertissement. En filigranes, ce moment le plus intérieur, le plus profond (et en même temps le plus superficiel) de la Recherche est le récit d’une fuite en avant, d’une dégradation, presque d’une perversion et d’un épuisement.
S’ajoutent à cela les séries amoureuses et la jalousie qui, fatalement, les accompagne. Après Swann et Odette (vol. 1), après Gilberte et Albertine (vol. 2) après Saint-Loup et « Rachel quand du Seigneur » (vol. 3), c’est au divin baron de Charlus que revient, à travers l’affection qu’il porte au beau mufle Morel, la partition amoureuse, en contrepoint de celle d’Albertine et du Narrateur. Il n’échappera d’ailleurs à personne que l’homosexualité est au cœur de Sodome et Gomorrhe. Celle de Charlus (le sodomite) et celle, présumée, d’Albertine (la gomorrhéenne). Curieusement, le héros lui-même est absolument hétérosexuel, voire pétrifié à l’idée qu’Albertine puisse aimer les femmes. Il diverge en cela des orientations de l’auteur de la Recherche qui, non sans quelque ironie, compare la parade amoureuse « invertie » au mode de fécondation des orchidées… (Comparaison pénétrante — amusante — ridicule, comme dirait Mme de Cambremer.)
Ainsi, à travers les mondanités stériles et les tortures amoureuses, ce que le Narrateur finit par perdre de vue, c’est sa vocation première d’écrivain. Ironie et subtilité suprême, l’écriture même de Proust, par le scintillement de sa prose, ses intarissables pointes d’humour et, disons-le, ses longueurs accablantes, finit par nous le faire oublier aussi, à nous lecteurs et, au contraire, nous faire ressentir cette même fuite, ce même épuisement apathique vécu par le héros de la Recherche.
Et pourtant, nous tenons son livre entre les mains ! Il faudra donc que tout cela cesse et qu’ait lieu quelque chose comme une conversion augustinienne. Et déjà, de loin en loin, un morceau de ciel s’ouvre au-dessus de la vie du Narrateur. De brefs instants de clarté surviennent de manière fortuite et inespérée, comme pour la madeleine de Combray. L’épisode de la bottine, par exemple, qui soudain ouvre la plaie, jusque-là anesthésiée, de la mort de la grand-mère — celle-ci revue en rêve, comme en un rappel des descentes d’Ulysse et d’Énée aux enfers. C’est là qu’émerge le souvenir, l’angoisse ou la prise de conscience fondamentale. Celle de la finitude et de la mort prochaine. Celle de l’urgence de « demeurer en repos » et, enfin, produire une œuvre avant de disparaître.
This novel and the film stem from the same original project. Initially, Kubrick and Clarke had been working together on the same story. While Stanley This novel and the film stem from the same original project. Initially, Kubrick and Clarke had been working together on the same story. While Stanley Kubrick went on to make what is now his masterpiece (and one of the most amazing films in the history of cinema), Arthur C. Clarke wrote his most famous novels, alongside Childhood's End. The narratives in book and movie run parallel and so close to one another, that, while re-reading the novel, I have found it almost impossible to dismiss the images from Kubrick’s movie, except when Clarke throws in some rare scene of his own: the ship approaching the rings of Saturn and the satellite Japetus, for instance. So much so that Clarke’s book feels like a novelisation or literary by-product of Kubrick’s film.
The scope and pace of the story are far-reaching in both cases, especially the section involving the astronauts, the mad computer and the foolish "Mission Control". However, here is probably where the shortcomings of this book reside: compared to the film, Clarke doesn’t find much to expand on, except for technical or scientific trivia (how to restore gravity in space, how many miles are there between Jupiter and Saturn, so forth), which result in rather dull pieces of prose and don’t add much to the pleasure that this narrative may inspire. This is particularly apparent towards the end of the novel, where the trippy and gripping imagery of Kubrick’s film translates into a few chapters of pseudo-explanatory gibberish. Some piece of poetry might have been more fitting....more
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