Category Archive: Classic Books
Tender is the Night
"Hello, Mad Anthony Wayne" - William Adolphe Bouguereau, "The Wave" (1896)
(by F. Scott Fitzgerald) (1934) Scott and Zelda, Dick and Nicole – these tempestuous marriages merge in Fitzgerald’s most substantial novel, a complete rendering and realisation of the beautiful people of the cote d’azur between the wars. The author referred to the book as “a confession of faith” in a secular sense and there is a touch of Keats in his portrait of the ambitious Dr Diver and his doomed, chivalrous defiance of the rule against falling in love with your patient. Sheilah Graham justly described Tender as “sheer poetry all through, though the story is not so tightly knit as Gatsby.”*…
Continue Reading →Death in Venice
A template of death
(by Thomas Mann) (1912) (Dir. Luchino Visconti) (1971) Gustave von Aschenbach, an artist questing intensely after spiritual perfection, arrives, exhausted, unhappy, at the end of his tether, at the Lido and is entranced by a family staying at the same hotel, including handsome Tadzio in his little sailor suit. Shaken by his depth of feeling, Aschenbach attempts to skip town but upon a hitch in his arrangements, he decides to return to where he was smitten, and to embrace his doom with a light heart. Mann’s novella is a polished gem, a short and sweet epitome of a bitter quest to…
Continue Reading →Penguin Island
"Now, what would Pyrot do?"
(Anatole France) (1908) A brilliant and literary satire of the rise and fall of civilisation, replacing evolving man with evolving penguin, a flock of whom are baptised by the half-blind Abbe Maël and whose ascent takes the form of first clothes, the nascent concept of property, monogamous marriage, the rise of dogma and the renaissance, even the Dreyfus affair. Along the way, France savages the historian in a way that suggests the opprobrium he got for his Jeanne d’Arc was taken fairly personally. His penguinographer prefaces in perplexity, “We do not know exactly how things have happened, and the historian’s…
Continue Reading →Vanity Fair
(William Makepeace Thackeray) (1848) Well. Rebecca Sharp. She’s a real dilly. Nabokov, apropos Humbert Humbert, pointed out there were not many memorable literary characters we’d like our children to meet: “Would we like our sons to marry Emma Rouault, Becky Sharp or la belle dame sans merci?”* This vivid and wordy book has caused charges of carelessness to be leveled at WMT: the chronology is at times out of whack, different characters seem to age in different time dimensions, for instance. But so what? This is a masterpiece of playful improvisation, and after all, plenty of dull, dud novels have been…
Continue Reading →Pnin
(Vladimir Nabokov) (1953) Say what you like but America and Americans are lovely. In this grand, concise novel, Nabokov sets his fish, Professor Timofey Pnin, given new teeth to match the wounds of his new challenges, in unaccustomed, American, waters, with morbidly hilarious results, in an “almost perfect work” according to Harold Bloom, the man who, like Anna Cunningham, has read everything. Nabokov described the pedantic Professor as “A man of great moral courage, a pure man, a scholar and a staunch friend, serenely wise, faithful to a single love, he never descends from a high plane of life characterized by authenticity…
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