billybookblog

*contains spoilers* ‘The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial.’ David B. Morris. I have to say from the outset that I wrote more notes during the reading of this book than I have while reading any other text – which, given its wordcount relative to the likes of War and Peace , Don Quixote , Middlemarch , etc., speaks for itself. That so much can potentially be plumbed from so few words reflects, I think, both the philosophical depths of the content and its relevance to the experiences of those within our time. In fact, it is so densely packed with suggestion that questions and ideas kept irrepressibly springing forth. However, that may also have a lot to do with my own philosophical ponderings at the time of reading. This blog post will only pertain to a few, choice threads which specifically resonated with me; but, be assured, there is so much more that ...

*contains spoilers* It is tempting to say that if The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is Mark Twain’s Iliad , then his follow up, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , is his Odyssey . The earlier text, Tom Sawyer , published in 1876, concerns the fun but also frequently violent exploits of its titular character alongside his friends in and around the town of St Petersburg, Missouri (based on the town of Hannibal, in which Mark Twain – or Samuel Langhorne Clemens – spent his own boyhood years) between the years of 1830-40. This would make the American South in which the adventures were specifically situated, and indeed in which the book was written and published, pre-civil war (1861-5) and pre-Emancipation Proclamation (issued by Abraham Lincoln on 1 st January 1863). Whilst the former point on the context of the narrative is also very much true of Huckleberry Finn , taking place ‘forty to fifty years ago’ according to the frontispiece to the 1884 edition published in London by Chatto and Wi...

*contains spoilers* The Chouans , the first of Honoré de Balzac’s many contributions to his panoramic narrative world, latterly titled La Comédie Humaine , should have been the text with which I began my likely long adventure through this author’s works. On a whim of sorts, I read Cousin Bette (1847), unaware of its place in the corpus; and then, once cognisant of the galactic extent of La Comédie Humaine , and as a way for me to gain a surer footing going forwards, I moved on to Père Goriot (1835), which appears towards the front end of the narrative arc. One constraint that exists at the outset for those readers who cannot speak nor indeed read French is that of accessibility to the words on the page in one’s given language. Considering the wealth of material to-hand, examples of translators either willing or able to step forwards to build those bridges over the last two centuries, and thus allow readers of other languages entry into the afterlife of the original texts (Walter Benj...