I hadn’t considered adding Polish novels to this blog because truthfully the end game for Second Chances has been planned for quite awhile, and the selection of books for the final posts was made long ago. An Amazon algorithm disagreed. Amazon recommended a novel called The Doll by Boleslaw Prus. The online description intrigued me. […]
The name William Golding should be very familiar. Not only is Golding a Nobel Laureate, having been awarded the Literature Prize in 1983, but his best known work, Lord of the Flies (1954), is a staple of high school curricula. The To The Ends Of The Earth trilogy consists of three novels: Rites of Passage […]
In The Power And The Glory by Graham Greene, an unnamed priest attempts to outrun the authorities in a Mexican state that has outlawed the priesthood. The premise might sound implausible except that from 1926-1929 the Cristero War waged in Mexico between Catholics and an intensely anti-clerical Mexican administration, and prohibitions on Catholic priests were […]
Usually when a quotation is familiar, you know its origin. The Go-Between By L.P. Hartley (1953) opens with the lines, “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there.” I knew the lines. Until now, I had no reason to associate them with what to me was an obscure novel. The Go-Between opens […]
Shooting parties like the one depicted in Isabel Colegate’s The Shooting Party (1980), are a quintessential pasttime of the British aristocracy, though now celebrities are often invited for the festivities and carnage and women form a higher percentage of the shooters or “guns.” Game-shooting has always been a sport for nobles, but soared in popularity […]
It is the fall of 1913, and Sir Randolph has arranged a shooting party at his estate Nettleby Park. In between massacring game and indulging in lavish meals, Sir Randolph mourns the imminent passing of landed gentry like himself. His class is living on fumes. Parliament has done nothing to boost agricultural prices. Instead, it […]
Daniel Kehlmann is a best-selling German-Austrian writer whose works have garnered major literary awards. In Tyll, Kehlmann injects a jester out of German folklore into the Thirty Years’ War to expose the hypocrisy and stupidity of kings, scientists, priests, aristocrats, and even villagers. Kehlmann’s Tyll, (the original folkloric fool was Till Ulenspiegel who appeared in […]
1. What was the Thirty Years’ War? The Thirty Years’ War started as a civil war within the Holy Roman Empire before transforming into a larger European conflagration. The conflict lasted from 1618-1648. 2. What was the Holy Roman Empire? As Voltaire famously said, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an […]
The Adventures Of Simplicius Simplicissimus by Hans Jakob Christoffel Von Grimmelshausen (1669) was written twenty years after the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War, a conflict in which Grimmelshausen himself participated. That war forms the backdrop for Simplicius Simplicissimus, one of the earliest and best known German novels. Despite its bawdiness and omnipresent scatological humor, […]
Prejudging things handcuffs you to your comfort zone. If we’ve learned not to judge books by their covers, we should be smart enough not to judge them by one sentence synopses either. I almost missed out on Go, Went, Gone by Jenny Erpenbeck, deterred by a one-line summary: retired classics professor befriends African refugees in […]
Second Chances 