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Showing posts from March, 2021

After Us

AAFTER US In this poem, the poet uses a surplus of imagery to allow the reader to fully see what she is trying to get us to picture. In the first line, she talks about how rain, which can be destructive or helpful, is seeping into a room where books and other material things reside. In the lines to follow, she writes about how everything that flourished under the sun, turned away to try and find the light that they so desperately need. This shows the destructive side to rain because it paints the picture of a dark day with rain falling and silencing all activities that happen during the day. In the second paragraph, the poet writes about a portrait, which has sketches of boats and barns and this creates the image of a perfect utopia where everything is peaceful and nothing has disturbed it. The paragraph that follows this peaceful picture, is where the foreboding and evil rain begins to make its appearance again. She writes about how everything that was ever thought of or invented or t

THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS

TTHE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS  The Magnificent Ambersons is a 1918 novel written by Booth Tarkington, which won the 1919 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It is the second novel of his trilogy called Growth. The story is set mainly in a fictionalized version of Indianapolis and was greatly inspired by the neighborhood of Woodruff Place. The trilogy follows the aristocratic Amberson family as their fortune declines over the course of three generations. Major Amberson built his family’s fortune during the 1870s. His daughter, Isabel, is courted by two men: Wilbur Minafer, a quiet businessman, and Eugene Morgan, a debt-ridden lawyer. Before long, Morgan ruins his chances during an incident on the Amberson estate in which he becomes intoxicated and proceeds to make a fool of himself. Isabel marries Wilbur, and they have a child, a boy they call George Amberson Minafer. Isabel dotes on her son, spoiling him rotten. George runs wild, treating others with great disrespect, and being expelled from his

THE GINGER MAN

TTHE GINGER MAN  Originally published in France in 1955, The Ginger Man is the humorous National Book Award-winning picaresque novel by Irish-American author J.P Donleavy. Set in post-war Dublin in 1947, the story follows the episodic misadventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, an irresponsible young American studying at Trinity College in the Irish capital. As Dangerfield skips his studies, hides from bill-collectors, drinks and womanizes excessively, the charming but reprehensible rogue does everything in his power to avoid a lifetime of hard work. The Ginger Man was banned in Ireland and the United States during its initial publication on the grounds of obscenity. Still, the book sold more than 45 million copies worldwide. In 1998, it was named one of the 100 Best Novels of the Twentieth Century by Modern Library. The novel has been called “lusty, violent, wildly funny […] The Ginger Man is the picaresque novel to stop them all” by famed author Dorothy Parker. Narrated from alternating

THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

TTHE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE  A married woman and a drifter fall in love, then plot to murder her husband. —Shannon Patrick Sullivan <shannon@mun.ca> Drifter Frank Chambers arrives at a quiet California roadside restaurant where he meets and falls for drop-dead gorgeous Cora, the wife of restaurant owner Nick Smith. After weaseling his way into a job, the two begin a deadly love affair and cook up plans to end her marriage and start a new life together. After a few botched attempts at a clean break, they are forced to put their honeymoon on hold after being rerouted into the arms of a D.A. hot to convict and a corrupt lawyer with designs on Cora. Frank and Cora thought they packed just enough luck to avoid what should be unavoidable but the duo failed to account for the possible intervention of a formidable force that doesn't need a badge. —Mae Moreno Nick Smith, the middle-aged proprietor of a roadside restaurant, hires drifter Frank Chambers as a handyman. Frank eventual

THE SHELTERING SKY

TTHE SHELTERING SKY  The Sheltering Sky is a 1949 novel by American author Paul Bowles. Centered on New York couple Port Moresby and his wife, Kit, it follows their journey to the North African desert accompanied by their friend George Tunner. The trip initially intended to help Port and Kit resolve their marital difficulties, soon becomes a battle for survival as their ignorance of the dangers around them comes back to haunt them. Exploring themes of colonialism, privilege, and existential despair, The Sheltering Sky is considered one of the pioneering post-colonial novels and was critically acclaimed. It was named as one of the hundred best novels of the 20th century by both Time Magazine and The Modern Library. In 1990, it was adapted into a feature film directed by Bernardo Bertolucci and starring Debra Winger and John Malkovich. The Sheltering Sky has been influential on musical artists, with artists, including The Police, using motifs and references from the book on their albums.

SOPHIE’S CHOICE

SSOPHIE’S CHOICE  Sophie’s Choice is narrated retrospectively by a successful novelist named Stingo, who reminisces about events that took place more than twenty years earlier in the summer of 1947. That summer, Stingo was twenty-two. Having grown up in Virginia, he moved to New York City to pursue his ambition of being a writer. After working briefly in the publishing industry, he lost his job and decided to spend the next several months focusing on his writing while living off of a family inheritance. He rented a cheap room in a boarding house in Brooklyn where he made friends with two of the other tenants, Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska. Nathan was a Jewish-American biologist, while Sophie was Polish and Catholic. After being interned in a concentration camp during World War II, Sophie had immigrated to the United States, where she found work and learned English. Nathan and Sophie had a volatile relationship with both intense sexual passion and violent arguments in which Natha

UNDER THE NET

UUNDER THE NET  Under the Net (1954), a novel by British author and philosopher Iris Murdoch, follows aspiring writer Jake Donaghue as he stumbles from place to place through Europe in search of illusory ideals. The novel falls into the genre of the picaresque, a comedic form in which a clever, lower-class protagonist makes his way up in the world using his wits. For advice, Donaghue looks to his old philosopher friend, Hugo Bellfounder. The novel puts a modernist spin on this old form, depicting Donaghue as a freeloader who, ironically, succeeds due to the serendipity of encounters that the chaos of the modern world provides. Part of the modern canon, the novel is often considered one of the greatest works of the twentieth century. The novel begins as Donaghue returns to London after a brief visit to France. His relative, Finn, informs him that they have been kicked out of their benefactor Madge’s house to make room for her wealthy new boyfriend, Sammy Starfield. While packing, Donagh

WIDE SARGASSO SEA

WWIDE SARGASSO SEA  Antoinette's story begins when she is a young girl in early nineteenth- century Jamaica. The white daughter of ex-slave owners, she lives on a run-down plantation called Coulibri Estate. Five years have passed since her father, Mr. Cosway, reportedly drunk himself to death, his finances in ruins after the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833, which freed black slaves and led to the demise of many white slave owners. Throughout Antoinette's childhood, hostility flares between the crumbling white aristocracy and the impoverished servants they employ. As a young girl, Antoinette lives at Coulibri Estate with her widowed mother, Annette, her sickly younger brother, Pierre, and gossiping servants who seem particularly attuned to their employers' misfortune and social disrepute. Antoinette spends her days in isolation. Her mother, a beautiful young woman who is ostracized by the Jamaican elite, spends little time with her, choosing to pace listlessly on the

THE MAGUS

TTHE MAGUS  The Magus is a literary suspense novel by John Robert Fowles. First published in 1965, the book follows a young man who befriends a dangerous and alluring millionaire when he accepts a teaching position on a remote island. The Magus is one of Fowles’s most popular novels, and critics believe it is his smartest work. Fowles was a bestselling author who taught across Europe before he became a full-time novelist. He had a very strict and traditional upbringing. Consequently, he often wrote about escaping from oppressive authority figures. Alongside novels, Fowles wrote numerous critical essays, introductions to other novels, and book reviews. The protagonist, Nicholas Urfe, doesn’t have a clear purpose in life, although he has everything going for him. He is rich and he graduated from Oxford with a great degree. He is also a teacher who works at a prestigious public school in England. Unfortunately, nothing satisfies Nicholas. Whether a new relationship or a new project, Nicho

IRONWEED

IIRONWEED  The main action of Ironweed takes place over two days in the life of its 58-year-old protagonist, Francis Phelan, a onetime professional baseball player and family man who is now homeless. As the novel opens, Francis and his friend Rudy earn a few dollars by shoveling dirt in a cemetery in 1938 Albany, New York, Francis’s hometown to which he recently returned. Narrated from an omniscient third-person perspective, the text reveals Francis’s grief-stricken thoughts as he visits the grave of his son, who died as an infant when Francis accidentally dropped him 22 years earlier, prompting Francis to leave his wife and remaining children. His work over, Francis goes looking for his longtime girlfriend, Helen. Throughout the novel, ghosts from his past haunt him, including several men that Francis killed, accidentally or otherwise. The author describes these ghosts as matter-of-factly as anything else in the text, and Francis regularly converses with them, though only he can see t

TOBACCO ROAD

TTOBACCO ROAD  Tobacco Road is a 1932 novel by American author Erskine Caldwell. Set in rural Georgia on the outskirts of the city of Augusta, it concerns a family of impoverished white sharecroppers, the Lesters, who struggle economically during the Great Depression. The Lesters and their neighbors strive to build a brighter future as the cotton picking market is absorbed by advances in industrial technology and the increasing urbanization of Georgia. Many of the characters commit brutal and reckless acts in the process. The novel’s main character is Jeester Lester, a morally corrupt and ignorant man who experiences a change of heart when he learns to respect the land and people who make his life possible. The novel is controversial for its anti-natalist undertones, which have been interpreted as supporting the views of Caldwell’s eugenicist father, Ira Caldwell, who argued for the sterilization of poor whites in Georgia in 1930. Nevertheless, the novel is widely considered one of the

MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN

MMIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN  Saleem Sinai, the narrator of Midnight’s Children, opens the novel by explaining that he was born on midnight, August 15, 1947, at the exact moment India gained its independence from British rule. Now nearing his thirty-first birthday, Saleem believes that his body is beginning to crack and fall apart. Fearing that his death is imminent, he grows anxious to tell his life story. Padma, his loyal and loving companion, serves as his patient, often skeptical audience. Saleem’s story begins in Kashmir, thirty-two years before his birth, in 1915. There, Saleem’s grandfather, a doctor named Aadam Aziz, begins treating Naseem, the woman who becomes Saleem’s grandmother. For the first three years Aadam Aziz treats her, Naseem is always covered by a sheet with a small hole in it that is moved to expose the part of her that is sick. Aadam Azis sees his future wife’s face for the first time on the same day World War I ends, in 1918. Aadam Aziz and Naseem marry, and the couple

LOVING

LLOVING  The story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple whose arrest for interracial marriage in 1960s Virginia began a legal battle that would end with the Supreme Court's historic 1967 decision. —Kenneth Chisholm Richard Loving, a white construction worker in Caroline County, Virginia, falls in love with a local black woman and family friend, Mildred Jeter. Upon Mildred discovering that she is pregnant, they decide to marry, but knowing that interracial marriage violates Virginia's anti-miscegenation laws, they drive to Washington, D.C. to get married in 1958. Richard makes plans to build a house for Mildred less than a mile from her family home. 1958. Having grown up in the racially integrated rural community of Central Point in Caroline County, Virginia, it surrounded by the largely segregated American south, Richard Loving and Mildred Jeter, a white bricklayer and black woman respectively, fall in love and get married in a civil ceremony in the District of Columbia. How

THE CALL OF THE WILD

TTHE CALL OF THE WILD  Buck, a powerful dog, half St. Bernard and half sheepdog, lives on Judge Miller’s estate in California’s Santa Clara Valley. He leads a comfortable life there, but it comes to an end when men discover gold in the Klondike region of Canada and a great demand arises for strong dogs to pull sleds. Buck is kidnapped by a gardener on the Miller estate and sold to dog traders, who teach Buck to obey by beating him with a club and, subsequently, ship him north to the Klondike. Arriving in the chilly North, Buck is amazed by the cruelty he sees around him. As soon as another dog from his ship, Curly, gets off the boat, a pack of huskies violently attacks and kills her. Watching her death, Buck vows never to let the same fate befall him. Buck becomes the property of Francois and Perrault, two mail carriers working for the Canadian government, and begins to adjust to life as a sled dog. He recovers the instincts of his wild ancestors: he learns to fight, scavenge for food,

THE OLD WIVES’ TALE

TTHE OLD WIVES’ TALE  The Old Wives’ Tale is generally considered to be Benett’s masterpiece. It captures both the provincial and cosmopolitan worlds that were the basis of both his life and his fiction. In this work, Bennett attained an exquisite balance between his two homes, England and France, and between his romantic and realistic sides that are mirrored in the lives of his two heroines, Constance and Sophia. Constance and Sophia are the daughters of a well-known draper in Bursley. Constance finds it no trouble at all to accustom herself to the drab atmosphere of the shop, to obey her mother in every respect, and to wait upon her invalid father. The beautiful Sophia dreads commerce and is bored by it, preferring a career as a teacher, which her parents strictly forbid her to pursue. Of a romantic disposition, Sophia is quickly taken with Gerald Scales, a traveling salesman who persuades her to elope with him. Book 1 of the novel is finely balanced between Constance and Sophia, so

RAGTIME

RRAGTIME  Ragtime follows the intertwining stories of three families around New York City at the turn of the 20th century. The novel is divided into four parts. Part One introduces an upper-class white family: Father, Mother, Grandfather, Mother's Younger Brother, and The Little Boy. The family lives in New Rochelle, a wealthy suburb outside of New York City, where they enjoy an easy, orderly life dictated by traditional gender roles and social expectations. Their quiet lives are shaken up when the famed magician Harry Houdini visits after his car breaks down outside the family home and Father leaves for an expedition to the North Pole. In his absence, Mother is left alone to run the house and business; in the process, she discovers she thrives in a leadership role, and she feels deflated upon Father's return. While Father is away, Mother discovers and rescues a newborn black baby who was buried in her garden. After finding out the baby's mother is Sarah, a neighborhood was

LORD JIM

LLORD JIM  Jim the well-loved son of an English parson, goes to sea to make a name for himself. Just how he is to become "Tuan Jim" or "Lord Jim," however, remains to be told. With his youthful, romantic aspirations for the sea, he is physically powerful; he has "Ability in the abstract." He roams the Asian south seas as a water-clerk, moving from place to place, always trying to outrun, it seems, a particular fact of his past. The story then cuts to an early incident where Jim lost an opportunity to prove his mettle: he "leapt" too late, missing his chance. Then, after a long injury and hospital stay, instead of deciding to return to England, Jim accepts the position of chief mate of the Patna, an old local steamship carrying 800 Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. There are five white men on board, as crew, and the voyage is led by a fat, crazy, German captain. One night, as the ship sails quietly through the Arabian sea, the crew, including Jim, feels a

THE DEATH OF THE HEART

TTHE DEATH OF THE HEART  Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, published in 1938, chronicles heroine Portia Quayne’s loss of innocence and coming-of-age. Bowen referred to the work as a “pre-war” novel, set in the time between World War I and World War II, and characterized it as a reflection of British society’s growing tensions and anxieties in the days before World War II. Bowen is remembered today for her novels on life in wartime London; The Death of the Heart can be read as a prelude to later works like The Heat of the Day and the short story “The Demon Lover.” In 1948, Bowen was appointed a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE) for her body of work. The novel opens when 16-year-old Portia Quayne moves in to her half-brother Thomas’s London home after her mother’s death leaves her an orphan. Portia is the product of an affair between her mother and her already-married father, but with an unusual twist. After Portia’s mother became pregnant, her fat

A BEND IN THE RIVER

AA BEND IN THE RIVER  A Bend in The River, the 1974 novel by Nobel Prize winner VS Naipaul, takes place in an unnamed postcolonial African town. The main character, Salim, narrates the story, which begins when he moves away from his family to the interior of the country to run a town shop. Salim is of Muslim Indian descent, but his family has lived in coastal Africa for many generations. He is neither fully Muslim Indian nor fully African.  Salim travels through the African bush, hundreds of miles to his new home. He has purchased a shop from an old family friend who has filled his head with images of a quasi-European sophisticated town life. When Salim arrives, however, he discovers a town that has virtually returned to the bush. Salim begins his new life, makes friends with other expatriates, and meets Zabeth, a local woman who buys items from his shop to resell in her village. Zabeth has a son, Ferdinand, who will be at the lycée in the town, and she asks Salim to keep an eye on him