billybookblog

*contains spoilers* Look at the title closely, and you will have a much more precise idea of what you are about to let yourself in for: The Life and OPINIONS of Tristram Shandy. Think of this title as an alternative to the classic examples of the likes of “The Life and Times of…”, where the reader is typically treated to a chronological history of a particular character dealing with specific themes. With Tristram Shandy , however, Sterne is tearing up the rulebook, and Shandy is given free rein to indulge his attentions on whatever seems to pop into his head when he happens to put pen to paper. As a result, on dealing with his own birth, Shandy only manages to finally be born a third of the way into the book. Before this occurs, the reader is informed of his (mis)naming, the injury to his nose, his circumcision, and, as well as this, one may notice more has been said about Walter Shandy’s pseudo-scientific inclinations than anything else. Sterne has Shandy digress on an insurmountable...

*contains spoilers* As any experienced reader will tell you, one should never put too much stock in the title of a book. In many cases, it can simply be a label by which a work may be known and catalogued henceforth, as opposed to an encapsulation of the tangled threads encased in its covers. Whilst much could be said on this subject, the main point here is that A Brief History of Seven Killings is neither brief nor just a book about only seven killings – there are seven killings, and it can in places be brief, but on the whole it is so much more in both respects. James starts us off in Jamaica in 1976, and one can gauge quite vividly the attitudes of the time, place and culture simply through the way those of Kingston speak of their greatest export, Bob Marley; “Nobody who kill a police is going to hell but is something else to kill the Singer.” Marley’s power and influence over not just Kingston but the thousands of people who inhabit and are drawn to Jamaica from all over the world...

*contains spoilers* Born in Newgate Prison, and thus seemingly destined for a life that will lead her in due time back to where she first saw light and drew breath, the eponymous Moll Flanders is a triumph of characterisation. This remarkable novel, published in 1722, is presented by Defoe in the reflective voice of an elderly Flanders who is finally settled, secure and content after a somewhat long and arduous life of poverty, whoring, thievery and deceit, and so us readers experience what feels like a genuine first-hand report of the lifelong goings-on of a woman of true wits, wiles and courage. Defoe’s ability to step into the mind and shoes of his characters is so admirable, in fact, that he is therefore able to deal up-front with a wealth of issues and how they personally affect those to whom the reader can relate. Moll relays her position of disadvantage as a woman in mid-to-late seventeenth century Britain (Moll signs off in the late 1600s) as she discusses the offended reaction...

*contains spoilers* “I sing of knights and ladies, of love and arms, of courtly chivalry, of courageous deeds – all from the time when the Moors crossed the sea from Africa and wrought havoc in France.” From this first complex sentence we get more than just the explicit promise of tales of knights errant in the time of Charlemagne, as he fights off the Saracens laying siege to Paris – we also begin to understand the way in which Ariosto will tell his story: like a tapestry unfurling, episode by episode, with pockets of treats hidden in the cloth if you’re willing to look hard enough. The weight of the historical context of the piece is imbued in each fibre, and the temptation to quickly pop open your laptop to get to grips with the complex nature of Ariosto’s Europe is simply too much, but each venture into the past is as rewarding as the last – as is each page of this thoroughly beautiful piece. And it’s refreshingly forward thinking for its time. Consider how Ariosto constantly derid...

*contains spoilers* Once again entering the world of knights errant intent on feats of nobility and chivalry, I was immediately reminded of Cervantes’s satirical take on just such texts in his extensive masterpiece ‘El Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha’, as the pathetic titular hero surged at his more-often-than-not-undeserving foes atop his withered steed, Rocinante. To begin with I would have to stifle the need to chuckle as Chrétien spoke so painfully of the passions of these knights errant on their quests, but firmly conquered this impulse by the time I reached the most majestic of these tales, ‘The Knight with the Lion’, a tale of one of Arthur’s most highly-esteemed knights, Yvain. You see, Chrétien de Troyes has earned the right to have his tales, originally written in the vernacular French of the late twelfth century, read with the light of the satirical works that follow dimmed to a respectable if unavoidable hum – I am talking mostly about the very worthy ‘Don Quixote’, as alr...

*contains spoilers* In a daze on the Malvern Hills is where we meet our narrator, Will, who dreams a vision of Heaven, Hell, and Middle Earth in between, as represented by a tower, a dungeon and a green field full of toiling human folk, respectively. What follows is a journey of theological allegory and social commentary on the conflict between the demands of Heaven and the impulses of Man, which, of course, can come to no good at all. Written in the fourteenth century, circa 1370-90 (there are three texts, A, B and C – the edition I read was a recent translation of the supposedly more poetic Text B, by A.V.C Schmidt), ‘Piers Plowman’ absorbs and questions the suppositions of some of the most profound texts on the nature of being and doing, including Cato’s ‘Distichs’, St Augustine’s ‘On the Trinity’ (after two millennia, someone must now be able to work out what this “Trinity” guff all means, surely…), Bede’s ‘Ecclesiastical History’, and Jacobus a Voragine’s ‘Golden Legend’, amongst ...

*contains spoilers* Henry James, whilst he lambasted this great work rather unfairly as “great trash”, went on to concede that for the first time the author’s novelist, Wilkie Collins, had brought the sensational mystery right “at our own doors”, making room for at least some understanding for the huge anticipation that awaited each instalment in the All Year Round magazine – not unlike the kind that Collins’s good friend and fellow All Year Round contributor, Charles Dickens, could expect. In fact, Walter Hartright’s opening narrative voice followed on immediately from Dickens’s own ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, which, incidentally, I often cite as my favourite book if I’m ever pushed that far in immediate conversation. But enough of Dickens – let us instead discuss Collins’s incredible novel, ‘The Woman In White’, which throughout kept me enthralled in a page-turning daze because of its hugely complex and yet gratifying story. I could go on and on about the story, which ducks and weaves th...

*contains spoilers* Where to start with this rich tome… Let me begin by saying that ‘Ulysses’ is a text that simply oozes allusions; whilst it is clearly a postmodern work that bends and breaks the rules of common literature, it is a structuralist’s wet dream – Joyce expects us to have read and understood all the works to which he refers, and in doing so the reader can then fully grasp what Joyce is trying to achieve in this here masterpiece. It is a book about books, a story about stories, but unlike his countryman Yeats, who is adamant that the heroic must remain as a core quality of literature, Joyce both understands that the heroic stories exist as didactic texts for the common person and believes that the common person must now take their place at the centre of the heroic text – so that they can explore the big questions for themselves. As a result, Joyce places the story of Odysseus’s journey (Ulysses is the Latin name for Odysseus) in 1920s Dublin, and places the heavy crown of ...

*contains spoilers* I shall start this blog as I mean to go on: I think this book is awesome. And I am in good company – Virginia Woolf once remarked that ‘Middlemarch’ is “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people”. This is true: George Eliot (real name Mary Ann Evans) has a way of writing that assumes the reader is as clever as she, and each word is imbued with an experience and an understanding of the truth of things – we feel assured that we are in the hands of a master. Only recently I have been inwardly debating the power of the signifier and the effect of the signified (thank you, Ferdinand de Saussure), and Eliot, with barely a sideward glance during the consideration of a character’s knowledge of surrounding events, relates her viewpoint on this matter as a freebee; “Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable…” The place, Middlemarch, is itself a boundary that is always crossed by its inhabitants and outsiders, local or no – from pen...

*contains spoilers* Some would say that I have done this the wrong way round, but it was the result of circumstance that meant I read the New Arcadia before attempting the Old Arcadia. You see, Sir Philip Sidney wrote the Old Arcadia, then simply called Arcadia, obviously, after visiting his sister the Countess of Pembroke following a quarrel with the Earl of Oxford in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. Sidney’s flight of fancy was initially merely a device to entertain his sister; this attempt at a Greek-style romance evolved somewhat, however, as Sidney hoped to add a serious and didactic tone with an extended prose version that unfortunately remained unfinished due to his death at the very young age of thirty-one: the New Arcadia. The Countess of Pembroke consequently took it upon herself to piece together this attempted extended version after seeing so many badly compiled manuscripts finding their way around society’s libraries, resulting in Maurice Evans’s 1987 edition which I came a...

*contains spoilers* This bounteous collection of stories, both classical and contemporary (for the age in which it was written, which was circa 1351; their contemporary is relatively classical to us, of course), both noble and bawdy, both comedic and tragic, is one of my favourite reads to date. The Decameron takes its name from the Greek for ‘ten days’, and does what it says on the tin, in providing ten stories told by ten people over the course of ten days – notably in a pastoral landscape. Written in the Italian vernacular in prose form, which allows Boccaccio the scope to explore a wealth of tales without compromising the nitty-gritty details, it affords us readers a magnified look at the context in which the piece was written; warts and all. In the introduction, here called the ‘Author’s Foreword’, Boccaccio even begs the pardon of the faint-hearted women reading, and does so again in his closing ‘Author’s Afterword’ – but don’t worry, women are presented as both noble and strong...

*contains spoilers* There is something about The Ingenious Hidalgo Don Quixote de La Mancha that will resonate with us lovers of books willing enough to pick up thick tomes such as this in the first place: he absolutely loves books – the chivalric tales of knights errant, specifically. As each of these pages is folded over and over, and as each tale winds its way through towns, plains, forests, and fields, Don Quixote teaches us about the knights of old, such as Amadis of Gaul, and the romanticism of a bygone literary era. Don Quixote is, of course, a madman. On reading all of his beloved chivalric tales in the stacks of volumes he keeps at his house, he decides one day to pull together a rusty and haphazard armour, dons it, mounts his scabby horse, Rocinante, employs a local idiot farmer, Sancho Panza as his squire, and they all set off on their adventures. The world into which these two fantastic characters ride is astonished by them, almost as much as they are by it; some of the wor...

*contains spoilers* Arden, the forest to which the Duke and his people are banished at the very beginning of this play, has something about it that resembles the Eden from which Adam and Eve were also banished in the anonymous work of fiction, The Bible (ha!). Of course, we see all sorts of biblical (as well as classical) allusions in what I believe to be one of Shakespeare’s greatest comedies, As You Like It , as the beloved characters ponder the nature of life, death, family, enemies, wisdom, folly and the self – just like many do in those classical and biblical stories of old, including in this list Shakespeare’s greatest work, Hamlet. There are no ponderings on the whys and wherefores of flesh and being whilst holding aloft skulls of long lost beloved fools, but there are moments of reflection on the cycle of life itself, and most notably the stages of growth and the acquisition of wisdom or descent into folly. Rosalind, Shakespeare’s most prominent leading female character (she sa...