benedettal's reviews
395 reviews

Dare I say that I didn’t like this as much as the previous entries? The prose is still inebriating and masterful as ever, but the characters floating around the narrator were significantly less likeable and even less interesting to a certain extent.

The narrator himself completely disappears from the narrative, a bystander with little to no input in the conversations before him, eagerly absorbing every moment, every movement, while secretly passing judgment, which we are privy to thanks to our privileged position. 

But still, there is something about the aristocratic salons that is so repulsive. Everyone is so shallow and rude. They think they are so exceptional due to their illustrious lineage, but they out themselves as extremely close minded. The Duchess Oriane des Guermates is elevated as the woman who captures Marcel’s attention in this book, thanks to her charm and mysterious humour at first. His endeavours to enter her salon and be recognised by her are as successful as they seem futile to me, because she is rather unremarkable, no matter how many hundred pages he spends talking about her. The Duke her husband is equally rather crass, and this narrative fully exposes his ignorance and arrogance. They are in everything the polar opposite of what Swann was, and his sad return at the very end was very welcome, as it exposed their irreconcilable differences and elevate him even further as an exceptional being.

The central part of the novel revolves around the Dreyfus affair. It becomes a central topic of conversation in the salons, splitting Parisian society seemingly in half. Although Marcel never bothers to inform the reader as to what exactly is in contention (aka you need to do your own research if you’re not already aware), it provides a poignant depiction of shifting (or perhaps simply emerging) attitudes towards jewish people, which is obviously a very salient topic for Proust. It’s practically an expose in my opinion, as later reflected in the words of Swann. It’s an indictment of French high society at the time, which has perhaps been swept under the rug, but that with impressive foresight Proust was able to capture and denounce. It also shows how the young narrator is influenced by these opinions, uttered by rather important personalities of his time, as he is initiated into the world.

All in all, this reads like a satire of high society, beautifully written of course. But at the same time, I won’t lie and say it doesn’t drag at over 600 pages. Hoping for more in the next instalments.

I guess it’s easier to appreciate this book once you realise our protagonists are effectively the villains of the story, or at least they’re bad people. It took me a while to clock that and I kept getting slightly outraged by the horrible things depicted, but in hindsight it makes sense. Once again, Garcia Marquez is not trying to be aspirational, he’s just pushing the boundaries of what excellent narration can do, weaving an intricate yet self referential epic that combines magic and history. It’s hard to ignore just what a feat that is.

The magical realism, the cyclical nature of time, the ghosts of the past, the generational trauma, memory and then the real life story of colonialism and independence, are only some of the most stunning themes. The ending, when all the threads are pull together, is particularly poetic, coming to a full circle from the very start of the buendia line.

Obviously the enjoyment was hindered by the ickiness of the recurrent incest and various examples of pedophilia to boot. Again, when you realise you’re not supposed to root for these people, and these are just examples of how cursed they are, it makes sense. But generally, Garcia Marquez is not the most charitable author when it comes to women, and I don’t always appreciate the over-sexualisation and sort of animal like descriptions he writes. 

Other than that, the writing is nearly impossible to fault, and the magical realism is just wonderful. It is a really exceptional novel, although it sadly falls short of being flawless in my opinion.

Although plagued by an atrocious translation, I couldn’t not enjoy this novel. It’s an existentialist, slightly absurdist tale of disenchantment with life, feeling like a stranger in society, feeling like life has been lived to its max and it’s just about surviving after this point. It’s about a lack of purpose and the unrelenting feeling of uneasiness in one’s realisation that that’s the case. 

The feeling of nausea can be read as depression, extreme detachment combined with dissatisfaction and also feeling trapped. The allegory built through the plot is so effective. Antoine’s relationship with Anny, his vague longing for her and their ultimate confrontation was super climactic. She is very much underdeveloped as you might expect, but still manages to utter some of the most poignant words about trauma, love, lost chances. 

The juxtaposition with the autodidact, whose experiences and personal philosophy have made him love mankind is also quite inspired. Despite his efforts, the autodidact is ultimately shunned for his association with socialism and what are seen by others as homosexual tendencies. Through Antoine’s eventual compassion for him we understand his own struggle, feeling so distanced from society, but also the ugliness of society itself, which rejects those it doesn’t consider conformant with the unspoken rules, even when said rules are alienating and lead to hardship for everyone. 

Anyway, it’s a solid novel, very much in the realm of Camus and Dostoevsky. Good stuff. 

This was just my thing. Needless to say it was interesting and thought provoking, combined together so many topics of interest to me, and presented absurdism in such a compelling way using literary references which I loved. I don’t think I have much to say at the end of the day, it’s a great piece of work but I don’t have a ton of comments.

Aww this was so good! Such a great romantic novel, very much reminded me of Goethe and Foscolo, and a little bit of Wilde in terms of decadence. It was almost melodramatic, all the love, the boredom, the high society, the intrigues. It’s a stunning picture of Russian high society with a great deal of irony. It’s so pompous that it gets in the way of everyone’s happiness, and that’s the tragedy of it all. 

Onegin is a perfect romantic hero, he feels passions so deeply, but surprisingly he’s honest about his emotional unavailability when Tatjana proposes herself. He very much reminded me of a Dorian Gray with admittedly different principles. I guess they share the boredom of being a dandy. Overall he seems like a great representation and critique of society at the time. Just generally a very enjoyable short novel.

This book is so hard to read for its themes, but so beautiful. de Beauvoir fictionalises her philosophy, her outrage at the female experience in society, especially for older women. She is brutal towards her characters to represent just how cruel life is to women everywhere, and this book reads like a prolonged scream.

The book is made up of three different stories. The first one, the woman destroyed proper, talks about an affair from the pov of the scorned wife. She is objectively a rather weak woman, who gets easily pushed around and sees staying with her husband as her ultimate goal, no matter how humiliating. But through the narrative, the author clearly highlights how absurd it is for her to take the blame for everything, how her weakness is the result of the society around her. I appreciated the two sides of the story, her failure to be supportive etc, it all made it so real. It was so heartbreaking. Monique descends into mental illness very rapidly, as we see her making excuses for herself or pretending like she can stay calm and hold her ground in the face of her husband’s recklessness. The way she alienates herself from her friends due to her obsession, the lack of support from her daughters, her husband’s duplicity toward her. And what’s even more powerful is that she’s not better by the end. She’s significantly worse. It’s so rage inducing but like in a good way.

The second story is about a mother-son relationship. I can’t relate but it was equally as thought provoking and heartbreaking. It must be hard to reconcile the way you raised a son with what he chooses to become once he gets to that point. The second theme is accepting old age, the declining quality of one’s life work, especially in academia, and it’s deeply touching. I don’t know how autobiographical it is but it really felt like it came from a real place for de Beauvoir.

The final part, the monologue, is just the unfiltered rambling of a woman whose husband is cheating on her (I think? It’s been a few days). It’s just female rage on steroids with all the awkwardly translated swear words and obscenities you can imagine. It was probably very modern when it came out, a realistic and super ragey stream of consciousness which very much calls back to the title. I appreciated it for what it was.

Overall, a very interesting piece of work, a great author. 

It’s not that I didn’t like it, maybe I was just a little disappointed (not that I had any right to be). I love Seneca’s Roman sensibilities mixed with his stoic philosophy, a constant in his plays, although perhaps here it felt somewhat misdirected at Phaedra. I have criticised works trying to remove any fault or blame from her, as I firmly believe she is morally grey and ultimately acted out of spite, but in this she is too much of a villain. Lingering on the evil stepmother trope didn’t help in that. The notion that Phaedra was destined to act against the laws of nature like her mother, plus the role of the nurse, who kept pushing her towards being more evil just make her feel too cartoonish.

That is not to say that the writing isn’t beautiful, or that it doesn’t have its moments. I really enjoyed the depiction of Theseus, not a flawless hero, back after having sinned of hubris by going into the underworld, tired and betrayed by the people around him, tricked into killing his son. He’s tragic but there’s no justification for his wrongdoings, which are named and shamed. 

Hippolytus is not the gay icon he was in Euripides, he just mostly hates women. At least he’s kind enough to remove himself from the situations he dislikes, but the nurse of all people just taunting him and pushing him under the bus is just unfortunate. He’s tragic because he’s tainted by somebody else’s sin. 

The removal of the prevalent role of the gods makes for interesting dynamics, but it also makes everyone suck more. Phaedra lacks the power of Medea (the play), the deeper meanings, the modern sensibilities. It’s good but it’s not perfect.

The 50s-60s were such a time to be alive. Moravia, in this book, presents an infectious study of boredom (sounds more like depression but it was 1960 after all) that develops into both a story of personal obsession and a critique of society. 

From the prologue, the first person narrator introduced us to boredom, the feeling that has dominated his life. His privilege allows him to follow each and every one of his whims, but they all inevitably disappoint him, and he quits them out of sheer disinterest. We also see him having difficulty reconciling with his place in his society, represented by his mother, going so far as to break etiquette right in front of her and refusing her lavish gifts. 

But then he meets Cecilia (age redacted for this review because otherwise this turns into a completely different story), a model/lover of his elderly neighbour painter who died while having sex with her. Cecilia is a mix of a manic pixie dream girl and a femme fatale (literally driving men to their death). We only know her through Dino eyes, and she remains an almost total mystery. The painter’s wife tries to tell Dino that she is simply an interested girl who seduces older men for money, which she then uses to entertain relationships with younger men, but Dino at this point is perhaps too blinded, or Cecilia is actually as ephemeral as he’ll have us think. She is mysterious in a rather dull way, always refusing to elaborate in her answers and acting as if she’s completely non-observant. She never questions any of his actions, she never lets go of what gives her pleasure, with zero regards for the feelings of her lovers. It’s interesting because the image we are provided is unsympathetic as can be, but Dino still loves her. It begs the question if there’s more that meets the eye.

Or maybe it’s just about his obsession. He is sure that if he can possess Cecilia, he will stop desiring her. He was even close to leaving her at one point, when she’d proven particularly steadfast, and thus, boring. But she suddenly gets bored first, and Dino is thrown into an insane spiral. It’s a clever critique of a broken man’s inability to perceive human relations beyond the terms of capitalism, possession, transaction. He can buy her love, but he hopes that doing that will turn him off her. It doesn’t because while she accepts the money, she seems uninterested in it. She will stay with him, but won’t give up her other man. It evades all logic for a man who can actually have everything. And that leads him to moral decay and self-destruction, as he’s the only one getting hurt at any given time. 

I found it very interesting and I appreciated that Cecilia’s sexual liberation is never looked down upon. The men in her life really seem to like her for it, she is uncompromising about what she wants, and Dino doesn’t freak out at her having another lover. If anything, it seems like she exploits him, she always seems like the more powerful party in the story. Maybe there is a feminist critique to be made, but that could never be me. She’s winning in my book, I want her to be happy and refuse to read horrible trauma into it. 

The only author I know to be more daring and honest about carnal relationships is Henry Miller, and Cecilia could easily be his Mona. There’s something about these books that just tickles me. They are so raw and decadent they are impossible to put down. I love the hedonism, Cecilia’s unashamed searched for pleasure. And then there’s the study of boredom and obsession, manic and depressive states that drive one mad. Yes, Dino was just bipolar, bless him. I hope it got help, but knowing the 60s, maybe he’d be better if he didn’t.

I don’t know if I can do this book justice. The Stranger is first and foremost an experiment, pushing the boundaries of literature and philosophy. We witness a senseless crime through the eyes of its completely detached perpetrator, an absurdist premise that continues to stun until the end, with the almost farcical trial and execution. 

The absurdist premise of a narrator who feels completely foreign to us human in his absolute apathy to life builds the tension from the first page. He’s obviously unreliable in so far as he convinces himself and the reader that his reactions to the things happening around him and to him are normal. The title is clever because it lets us know that he is different, an outsider, but not so much in the sense of being foreign, more so that of feeling estranged from the human race. There is of course additional subtext to the fact that the victim is Arab, but that theme is not openly explored at all in the text of the novel. Would he not have done the same had the target not been Arab? Would his treatment have been different?

I guess I’m missing some context on French-Algerian relations at the time, but it seemed to me like he was still made an example of in the court process. The second part, focusing on the trial, is a rather jarring critique of the justice system. To what extent is it fair to condemn somebody based on assessment of character drawn from unrelated circumstances. It feels so absurd, it’s genuinely hard to decide who’s right in this situation. He’s obviously a sociopath, but the trial also feels dishonest. 

And then there’s the lack of repentance at the end, which shows how Meursault is just looking for a way out. The entire story read like an exercise in self-destruction. Going through the motions, acting completely unhinged, having nothing to lose. People around Meursault treat him like a peer, expect of him certain reactions. But he seems incapable of communicating in that language. 

I think this is a great example of literature trying to reconcile itself with the struggles of human nature at a time of reckoning, in the history of the world. After WWII, during the post colonial movement, there’s no room for heroes. One has to ask what it even means to be human, when so much effort has been made to dehumanise entire populations and ethnic groups. And what about the people perpetrating these crimes against humanity, what’s moving them? I know Camus didn’t like the existentialist label, but that’s the first thought I had when reading this. Overall fascinating.

This was an excellent piece of literary criticism, thoroughly enjoyable and very insightful. The Odyssey really lends itself to deeper analysis, and the attention with which the author recounts and dissects every passage with so much reverence and admiration is a joy to read.

Ulysses is one of the greatest characters in literature, so much more endearing than Achilles, less tragic yet more aspirational. His relationship with the gods, with Penelope, with knowledge through adventure is explained so well in this book. It very much reminded me of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, though the single focus on Ulysses makes this its own thing. I just really enjoy this genre.