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I have read only two of Bellow's books: Dangling Man and Seize the Day. I read both books with interest but enjoyed the latter more - probably because I was at the 'right' age to read it and could find some of myself in the book and in the protagonist's dilemmas and troubles.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virgil
On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died, at the age of seventy-five. The details of Johnson's last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) or Mrs. Thrale or Fanny Burney or Boswell or later biographer-critics, but his large personality seems to escape, or confound, any one perspective. According to Harold Bloom (The Western Canon, 1994), Johnson may be beyond reach in all ways: "There is no bad faith in or about Dr. Johnson, who was as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree."
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On this day in 1640 Aphra Behn was baptized. The details of her birth and much of her "shady and amorous" life are unclear, but her place in literary history is certain: first epistolary novel, first philosophical novel, and a fifteen-play career which made her the first woman to earn her living by writing. "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," wrote Virginia Woolf, "for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
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On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (originally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices") was published. Like many friends and acquaintances, Virginia Woolf thought Eliot an odd case, but her diary notes how compelling she found his after-dinner reading of his poem: "He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure. . . ."
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Didn't realize this had occured on my birthday. I love The Waste Land.
On this day in 1848 Emily Bronte died at the age of thirty. Of all the death and drama in the Bronte household over the surrounding eight months -- events which now stand as famous and poignant as any in the Bronte novels -- none seems to impress or import more than Emily's. In September, thirty-one-year-old Branwell had died in his exuberant manner, the last stages of his dissolution and tuberculosis expressed in delirium tremens cursing and despair. The following May, twenty-nine-year-old Anne would die in her co-operative, affirmative manner, also of tuberculosis. Squeezed between the two, also tuberculosis but typically as if on her own mysterious terms, came Emily's death.
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On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a string of bannings from the book's first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began "Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP. . . ."
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On this day in 1879 Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House opened in Copenhagen. One critic compared the play to the dropping of "a bomb into contemporary life," and "a death sentence on accepted social ethics"; another described Nora's exit from her house and her gender-roles at the end of Act V as "a door slam heard 'round the world."
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On this day in 1849 twenty-eight-year-old Fyodor Dostoevsky was at the last moment granted pardon from a mock-execution orchestrated by Czar Nicholas I. Instead, Dostoevsky received four years in Siberia and indefinite military service for his crime of belonging to an underground group which championed "communism and new ideas." This exchange left him "reborn for the better," and eventually found him a wife.
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On this day in 1914, the "Christmas Truce" of WWI, tentatively and spontaneously begun the previous evening at many places along the Front, held. The "outbreak of peace" has been commemorated by play and poem (and by Blackadder: "Both sides advanced more during one Christmas piss-up than they managed in the next two-and-a-half years of war") but nothing captures its spirit as well as the first-person accounts. These include those of the Khaki Chums who reenacted the event in 1999.
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His political shift had little to do with finding a wife. He was only a half-hearted utopian in the first place and ther were plenty of available young women in the revolutionary movement.Quote:
Originally Posted by Scheherazade
As for Czar Nicholas' grim charades like the one he pulled on Dostoevsky, they were part of what earned his grandson a death sentence when the Bolsheviks took over in 1917.
On or about this day in 1909 Marcel Proust dipped his madeleine in tea and tumbled into the childhood memory that triggered the seven-volume, fourteen-year, Remembrance of Things Past (or, as some now prefer, In Search of Lost Time). Those who have read it, or who want an alternative to doing so, might try Monty Python's fifteen-second, Summarize Proust Competition. . . .
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On this day in 1885 Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge began serialization. This was the first novel Hardy had written for weekly rather than monthly serialization; some early reviewers balked at its steady stream of drama and its "improbabilities of incident." When Virginia Woolf visited Hardy forty years later, shortly before his death, she told hm that she could not put his novel down.
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On this day in 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car crash outside Paris, at the age of forty-seven. The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, the autobiographical novel that Camus was working on at his death, was found in the mud at the accident site and published by his daughter in 1995. Camus hoped that it would be his masterpiece and some critics think it is, even unfinished.
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On this day in 1825, twenty-three-year-old Alexandre Dumas (Sr.) embarked on his self-proclaimed "career as a romantic" by fighting his first duel, and having his pants fall down. Dumas's memoirs are about as reliable as his mountain of historical fiction and drama, but they tell the pants story in glorious, comedy-of-errors, Three Musketeers detail.
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