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- The Tale of Peter Rabbit (157)
- By Beatrix Potter
- Finished on May 8, 2013
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- A Vindication of Natural Diet (1)
- By Percy Bysshe Shelley
- Finished on Apr 28, 2013
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- Chants for Socialists, and The Pilgrims of Hope (2)
- By William Morris
- Unfinished since Apr 29, 2013
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- The Wind in the Willows (405)
- By Kenneth Grahame
- Unfinished since Apr 20, 2013
  
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- The English Patient (435)
- By Michael Ondaatje
- Not Started
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- This Craft of Verse (18)
- Norton Lectures 1967-1968
- By Jorge Luis Borges
- Finished on Apr 27, 2013
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- Age Doesn't Matter Unless You're a Cheese (5)
- By Ross Petras, Kathryn Petras
- Unfinished since Feb 24, 2013
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- The Hobbit (3284)
- or There and Back Again
- By J.R.R. Tolkien
- Finished on Dec 2, 2012
  
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- Clockwork (58)
- By Philip Pullman
- Finished on Jul 26, 2012
  
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Clockwork

2 people find this helpful
Putting the -punk in clockpunk.

A tale in which everything, even the tightly constructed plot, is built on the rules of clockmaking.
The ethical principles of this children story are surprisingly in line with the steampunk agenda: a good automaton, not to talk about a truly stunning breathtaking lifelike piece of art, is only re ... (continue)

A tale in which everything, even the tightly constructed plot, is built on the rules of clockmaking.
The ethical principles of this children story are surprisingly in line with the steampunk agenda: a good automaton, not to talk about a truly stunning breathtaking lifelike piece of art, is only realized through workmanship and sweat. And once the gears are turning there's no stopping them, so you better be careful what you set in motion.
DIY for preteens: putting the -punk in clockpunk.

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— Aug 28, 2012 | Add your feedback
- The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed (11)
- By Mary McCarthy
- Unfinished since Jun 15, 2012
  
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- The Lazarus Project (34)
- By Aleksandar Hemon
- Finished on Mar 17, 2012
  
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- The Last of the Valerii (1)
- By Henry James
- Finished in 2008
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- The Turn of the Screw (605)
- By Henry James
- Finished on Jan 17, 2012
  
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The Turn of the Screw

12 people find this helpful
The Jamesian Re-read #3

'A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale'.
- Oscar Wilde.
(being not a proper comment, just notes to be read after the story).
I’ve always enjoyed the anecdote that inspired James to write this novella. On January the 10th, 1895, he was hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward ... (continue)

'A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale'.
- Oscar Wilde.
(being not a proper comment, just notes to be read after the story).
I’ve always enjoyed the anecdote that inspired James to write this novella. On January the 10th, 1895, he was hosted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward White Benson, at Addington Park (the archbishopric country house since 1807). In front of the hearth, after tea, conversation turned to the ghost stories: the good ones, the two men agreed, all seemed to have been told; while the new type, the ‘psychical’, apparently offered little precisely on the grounds of its trustworthiness. The Archbishop then proceeded to tell a story which had in turn been told to him as a child by a lady who couldn’t, anyhow, neither remember nor tell it well enough. James recorded the story two days later in his notebook:
http://bit.ly/zDqzOQ
I love the way James, nearly three years later, managed to turn the missing details and the faulty memories into the very strength of the text: reshaping a story badly told into superb storytelling. I also appreciate the fact that, even before being written, the story already counted multiple retelling. The Turn of the Screw is, first of all, a series of Chinese boxes. James consistently used the framing device as a method to undermine the reliability of his narrator(s), especially in his ghost stories. But here the suspension of disbelief becomes suspension tout court. Even as we accept the reality of one narrative voice, we can’t take for granted what the voice says. Are the ghosts real? Is everything the governess says true? Her manuscript, after all, was written (so we are told) years after the events. Perhaps the manuscript is a fake, and the whole story is invented; and so on. The only fact we can be sure of is James’ own voice, as he dictated the story to his young Scottish typist, William McAlpine (incidentally, legend has it that McAlpine showed no emotion as he transcribed this most scary of tales; that’s one for Scotland). Pointedly, neither the governess nor the 1st person narrator of the prelude have a name: all the voices that say “I” in the text are anonymous.
The unreliability, the gaps and contradictions account for the various interpretations: some more convincing than others, all equally preposterous*. Because, as T.J. Lustig has pointed out, “to read The Turn of the Screw is to establish the reading, and if necessary to defeat other readings” (Introduction to the OUP edition of 1992). It is exactly what the governess tries to do: she tries to assert her own interpretation, with the same “fury of intention” she imputes to Miss Jessel. Easily, and with good reason, her version can be doubted (especially from the point of view of the last chapters); the governess seen as a psychological, even psychiatric case. The very first words of her manuscript are in fact a testimony to her instability: “I remember the whole beginning as a succession of flights and drops” (ch. I). Her self-awareness is indeed quite puzzling: "I go on, I know, as if I were crazy; and it's a wonder I'm not" (ch. XII).
She describes her arrival at Bly in terms that are clearly, almost ostentatiously literary. The governess is a literate person: her manuscript, we are told, is written in a beautiful hand; she makes explicit references to novels. And whereas the governess sees Bly and what happens there through the lens of her readings, we discover that Mrs Grose cannot read: the "stout simple plain clean wholesome woman" (ch. I) is also illiterate. Flora, on the other hand, is learning to write.
And, mind you, all this in a scene crucially involving the letter from the school’s headmaster (a letter whose content is never disclosed to the reader).
Mentions of Fielding’s Amelia, of Jane Eyre and of The Mysteries of Udolpho, however, only mark what the novella fails to be. “Marooned in a novel which refuses to satisfy her narrative desires, the governess seems to use Miles in the obscure ritual she is enacting”, in Lustig’s words.
Her desires are quite explicit, and from the very start, as regards the master of Bly. She readily admits to having been “carried away” when she met him, twice, in Harley St.
Other desires, though, are only uncovered through a close reading of the text; particularly of the governess’s final dialogue with Miles. She confesses to being “infatuated”—namely with her sense of victory over the evil presences; yet the choice of terminology is quite interesting. Towards the beginning of the scene, she compares the silence between her and Miles to that of “some young couple [...] at their wedding journey”. A little later she says Miles has been for her “a revelation of the possibilities of beautiful intercourse”.
The governess seeks possession of the children. When she fears they are secretly being visited by the ghosts, she explodes into: “They’re not mine—they’re not ours. They’re his and they’re hers!” She considers the ghosts, first and foremost, as a threat to her exclusive ownership. At the crucial moment of the final confrontation with Miles, cited above, she gleams with supremacy: “I have you” (ch. XXIII-XXIV).
The Turn of the Screw is one of several texts, such as Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Dracula (1897), and Heart of Darkness (1899), which “examine the crumbling edges of the Victorian edifice” (quoting Lustig again). The accepted sexual and social values are not so much questioned as ignored, rendered pointless.
The gentleman in Harley St. and his wards act as though social distinctions simply did not exist. Miles spent more time than would fit his status with the lowly Quint, who also had a less than commendable relationship with Miss Jessel. The master, meanwhile, did not care. The only ones who do seem to care, in fact, are Mrs Grose and the governess. On interviewing the governess, the master says there are at Bly “a cook, a housemaid, a dairywoman, an old pony, an old groom and an old gardener, all likewise thoroughly respectable”: as if a pony could be 'respectable' in the same sense of a person. Its inclusion in the list undercuts the gentleman’s methods for ascertaining the ‘respectability’ of his employees; which would indeed explain Quint’s and Miss Jessel’s presence at Bly.
*** *** *** *** *** *** ***
Miles & Douglas
There are those who take Douglas to be none other than the grown-up Miles himself. In which case, Douglas’ version of how he first met the governess would be so much rubbish, as well as his profession that the experience in question had not been his own. This hypothesis, though, seems to me to be far-fetched and unsatisfactory. Besides, as Leon Edel has pointed out, the death of the little boy and the survival of the little girl is a recurrent Jamesian trope; the archetype for this being, Edel argues, James’ own suppressed male exuberance as a child.
Miles is not Douglas. The fact that both of them are ten years younger than the governess only proves that, even as a mature woman, she is still attracted to, and trying to attract, younger males.
*** *** *** *** *** *** ***
Time
Interestingly, the governess often looses track of time passing―always during, or immediately after, a visit from the ghosts. There are many other references of this kind: she is late when Miles arrives from school, it takes her a long time to break the seal of the letter... she even speaks of "the small clock of my courage" (ch. VI). And I suppose it is by no chance that the novella has 24 chapters.
*** *** *** *** *** *** ***
The End
The metaphor of the Chinese boxes I used earlier is only partly accurate, since the narrative frame appears at the beginning but not at the end. Actually the novella doesn’t even end, it just stops (cf. the last word of the text). Yet the reader knows more than he believes about what is going to happen. In the preface, Douglas says the governess never saw her employer again, after the two initial interviews. This means, amongst other things, that she did not attend the funeral.
*** *** *** *** *** *** ***
* for the curious and the scholar: http://www.turnofthescrew.com/

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— Feb 5, 2012 | 6 feedbacks
- "The Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (131)
- By Henry James
- Unfinished since Nov 29, 2011
  
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- The Angel Esmeralda (20)
- Nine Stories
- By Don DeLillo
- Finished on Dec 21, 2011
  
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The Angel Esmeralda

19 people find this helpful

Don DeLillo è un romanziere. Poche le interviste rilasciate, poche le apparizioni pubbliche (la sua timidezza è tanto leggendaria quanto fantomatica), nessun corso di scrittura creativa, nessuna delle attività collaterali tipiche del letterato statunitense. Se prescindiamo da una manciata di articol ... (continue)

Don DeLillo è un romanziere. Poche le interviste rilasciate, poche le apparizioni pubbliche (la sua timidezza è tanto leggendaria quanto fantomatica), nessun corso di scrittura creativa, nessuna delle attività collaterali tipiche del letterato statunitense. Se prescindiamo da una manciata di articoli e da una mezza dozzina di sceneggiature tra cinema e teatro, la sua fama si basa unicamente sui quindici romanzi che ha pubblicato negli ultimi quarant’anni. Il segreto meglio custodito della sua produzione, però, sono i racconti. O se non altro, lo sono stati finora. A cinque giorni dal suo 75° compleanno, alla soglia del quinto decennio della carriera di romanziere, DeLillo ha infatti pubblicato la sua prima raccolta di short stories.
The Angel Esmeralda raccoglie in ordine cronologico nove racconti tra i più recenti dell’autore: il più vecchio della selezione, Creation, è del 1979. In seguito DeLillo ha scritto più romanzi che racconti, tanto che il suo editor alla Simon & Schuster ha rivelato che l’idea di questa raccolta è nata solo dopo la pubblicazione di tre nuove storie negli ultimi tre anni (la più recente, The Starveling, è di quest’autunno).
In un’intervista recente DeLillo ha ricordato di aver esordito nei ’60 scrivendo racconti, come molti autori suoi contemporanei (“the American short story is such a classic form”) e di non aver pubblicato che quelli per un decennio. Tanto che il suo primo romanzo, Americana del 1971, rappresentò per lui un traguardo ed un ampliamento di prospettive—da cui il titolo. Nei ’70 DeLillo si sarebbe concentrato unicamente sui romanzi (a tutt’oggi, metà della sua produzione risale a quel decennio) per tornare alle short stories proprio con Creation.
La bella copertina dell’edizione statunitense di The Angel Esmeralda richiama quella originale di Underworld¹, e non a caso: il racconto che dà il titolo alla raccolta, pubblicato nel 1994, sarebbe ricomparso tre anni più tardi proprio all’interno dell’opus magnum delilliano. Le vicende di Sister Edgar e Sister Grace sono leggibili anche come episodio a sé stante, e contengono in nuce alcuni dei temi più importanti di Underworld: da una parte la guerra fredda e la minaccia nucleare, dall’altra le sacche di povertà e degrado che sono il prodotto di scarto del capitalismo; e ancora il potere rigenerativo dell’arte e quello consolatorio di una fede spontanea, genuina e popolare.
L’arte contemporanea, tema ricorrente nella produzione recente di DeLillo, ha un ruolo prominente in Baader-Meinhof, del 2002. La riflessione sul terrorismo, o meglio sui terroristi della Rote Armee Fraktion, prende avvio dal ciclo di dipinti “October 18, 1997” di Gerhard Richter, che è consultabile nel sito dell’artista² per chi fosse curioso di verificare le dettagliate descrizioni di DeLillo.
È interessante cercare, in questi racconti, esempi precoci o tardi dei temi presenti anche nei romanzi. Hammer and Sickle (2010), ad esempio, il più lungo ed uno dei migliori pezzi della raccolta, sembra un aggiornamento alla crisi economica in corso delle tematiche di Cosmopolis—a sua volta il DeLillo forse più attuale, oggi. In un notiziario sui mercati internazionali, parte di un programma per bambini, i titoli di borsa diventano una cantilena che a sua volta lascia il posto al suo contrario: una lista di dirigenti comunisti.
“Stalin Krushchev Castro Mao.”
“Lenin Brezhnev Engels—Pow!”
Certo, all’epoca in Grecia sventolavano già gli striscioni “Peoples of Europe, rise up”: DeLillo in questo caso non è andato oltre la cronaca. O forse sì? Come leggeremo questo racconto fra cinque, dieci anni (o dieci mesi)?
“What happens next?”
“It has already happened.”
Nei romanzi di DeLillo, i capitoli danno a volte l’impressione di essere leggibili come storie indipendenti, unite da architetture narrative rigorose e complesse. Ed è curioso che, anche in questo caso, l’autore sia riuscito a dare una struttura all’opera. The Angel Esmeralda è suddiviso in tre parti, rispettivamente di due, tre e quattro racconti, su base non solo cronologica ma anche tematica. Nella prima parte i personaggi devono fare i conti con un ambiente radicalmente alieno, ed al contempo con l’incapacità di farsi comprendere dal compagno di viaggio. Nella seconda parte è la realtà quotidiana dei personaggi a cambiare bruscamente, lasciandoli spiazzati e bisognosi di conferme. E nella parte finale sono gli stessi rapporti umani a fallire, portando a solitudini ancora più radicali.
The Angel Esmeralda è un tassello prezioso nella bibliografia dell’autore: ce lo presenta in una veste che a molti risulterà inedita—considerando che, nell’era di internet, solamente due dei nove racconti erano già disponibili online: Baader-Meinhof del 2002 e Midnight in Dostoevsky del 2009.³
¹ http://bit.ly/tCKXc1
² http://bit.ly/uuyOJS
³ http://bit.ly/KgWBpD http://nyr.kr/rSnaIE
p.s.:
il mio preferito rimane comunque Human Moments in World War III del 1983, a tutt'oggi forse il miglior racconto di DeLillo. Per una rassegna stampa, ovviamente in inglese, rimando al miglior sito sull'autore, "Don DeLillo's America". Ecco la pagina su The Angel Esmeralda:
http://www.perival.com/delillo/angel.html

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— Jan 2, 2012 | 17 feedbacks