casparb's reviews
943 reviews

'...Polo answers, 'Traveling, you realise that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.'

The above quote hopefully demonstrates the quiet beauty of Calvino's prose. I think much of this arises from a tendency to understate.
A review is (for me) a manner of infraction - so this is a little daunting. I love this book, and refuse to muddy the waters through redundant use of terms such as 'kaleidoscopic' or 'concentric'.

Invisible Cities will invite comparisons to Escher, Scheherazade, Borges, and Dali. Something about this frustrates me - perhaps to do with the impulse to compartmentalise. But I can't deny there is a validity to these comparisons.

Calvino always invites the reader (sometimes teasingly) to participate in his narratives, and I think this novel is perhaps the key example of this. Read it. I promise you won't regret doing so.

A rather macabre, but amusing novel with flashes of absolute genius - even in translation.
Going into a 21st century Polish novel, I wasn't expecting comedy, so there were pleasant surprises.

'There are some people at whom one only has to glance for one's throat to tighten and one's eyes to fill with tears of emotion. These people make one feel as if a stronger memory of our former innocence remains in them, as if they were a freak of nature not entirely battered by the Fall.'

This is one of those novels that fit into that peculiarly popular vein in contemporary fiction that I like to succinctly call: Novels In Which The Protagonist Is An Elderly Person That Is Alone In The World (NIWTPIAEPTIAITW). Tokarczuk's style reminds me of Anna Burns' Milkman in its anonymity, but here there is a certain clawing for names: Janina, the aforementioned elderly protagonist nicknames everyone around her (including herself). It's something I have recently been informed is true to life.

Plenty here for ecocritics to go ham (or preferred substitute) on , there's overall a wonderful balance between wacky hysterical realism and saccharine post-irony.

Very delicately written, but not altogether my cup of tea.

It's very transposable, but I can't get over Camus saying that his very obvious self-insert protagonist is, to him at least, 'the only Christ we deserve'.

Does what it says on the tin.

Surprisingly light hearted for Russian lit - I struggle to think of other 19th century Russian novels that actually attempt comedy. There's a sort of charm to it. It's a novel about the Russian people cross-sectionally: I think of The Canterbury Tales as an english equivalent to this.

Gogol, in Dead Souls comes across as chronically insecure - he is constantly appealing to the reader to judge or not to judge, to disregard this or that character (often women), and to move on from scenes without too much thought. It's an unfinished novel, so it must be said that the last third is pretty chaotic tonally as well as in terms of narrative. In truth, the novel does not resolve itself.

I was much amused by the incredibly backhanded description of a woman as 'not wholly of an unpleasing exterior'.

Much more interesting on the reread - never quite clicked with this before. Perhaps it was the somewhat ludicrous amount of literary theory chucked in by the author of the introduction that got me thinking differently.

This novel is a house of cards.

End of the line for this sneaky reread. Reminded of how much I enjoy the ending.

I don't think there's anything much to say that hasn't been said before:)

Bonjour
This is a whole lot so many many pages
It sits somewhere between The Count of Monte Cristo and War and Peace - only complicated in different areas. What a busy busy time.
It's a far more complex tale than The Count - perhaps this is a strange thing to say of a book that's 1200 pages long, but Hugo seems invested in complicating Everything.
I think much has been said before of his many (MANY) extended tangents (digressions?), which vary from interesting and Tolstoyan as in his 19-chapter long detail of the Battle of Waterloo, to the frankly inexplicable - not 200 pages from the end of the novel, Hugo embarks upon a long description of the history of Paris' sewers. At times, there's much of real interest there! Love stories of orangutans in sewers. Don't care much for how many yards long each section is.
What a difficult beast this was:)
I thought a lot about adaptations, and of the nineteenth century, I think this is the least-adaptable novel written. I don't know an awful lot about the musical, but I'm aware that it chooses to avoid any real degree of textual accuracy to this text. For the best I think.
ANyway lovely time see you all soon xoxo

at least it feels like there's more Thinky stuff going on than in The Dragon.
I think it'll become more interesting over time - it's also oddly prescient to war in the 21st century. Wild how it do be like that.