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Most recently..

1984 (Orwell)
9/10

I love Orwell's writing style. There something that is so human about the experiences that his characters go through. I guess that's pretty ironic for a novel about dehumanization, but I still feel like that is the case. I'm horrible at reviewing literature, so I'll just skip to the bottom line: Incredible dialog and narration, an intriguing in-depth character study, but a real bummer of final third of the novel.

I prefer his non-fiction. Check out Homage to Catalonia and his collected essays

I finished Heart of Darkness last night, and while it's not a perfect work, I found it very beautiful and thought-provoking. Skimming its Wikipedia article, I saw several times that Kurtz's last words are often taken to be a realization of the horror of many of his actions, but I didn't see that at all. To me, it seemed he was slipping even further into pessimism and realizing the horror of the world and of existence itself. (But it's ambiguous enough that I'm sure plenty of different cases can be made.) And Marlow is turned onto the pessimism, even translating to more "civilized" locales such as London, and the unnamed frame narrator joins in, too, at the end, describing the ocean as leading into the heart of darkness. It's a wave of pessimism carried from one person to the next, and I'm not sure of the implications of that yet, especially considering Marlow's inability to puncture the naivety of Kurtz's Intended. I also liked, however, how Marlow, though always speaking of Kurtz in rather grandiose terms, doesn't indicate that he himself was persuaded by the man - was his "student" - until near the end of the narrative, which throws the veracity of his entire narrative into question. An unreliable narrator who only becomes unreliable nearly after the fact.

The biggest flaw I saw in the novel was how grand and powerful Kurtz's speaking abilities were made out to be, and when we finally meet him, we hardly hear him talk at all. It was a bit of a let down, but perhaps a necessary or intended one that will be more satisfying on a subsequent read. Really intriguing novella, both from a philosophical and a structural point of view, and beautifully written.

Read Miss Lonelyhearts and am now reading Tropic of Cancer and Persuasion. Drew, eat your heart out.

Kind of like the man himself?

And while "the horror" is clearly more than just a dying man's regrets, I think "the horror of existence itself" is a bit of a stretch. To me, it was clearly the experience of the "heart of darkness" that was horrible, from pretty much all points of view (Kurtz's, Marlow's, etc...). I forget exactly what Marlow says about the Intended, but it's something along the lines of saying her naivety serves a necessary function in society as it shields most everybody from the horribleness. Even though "The Lie" is a lie, it certainly makes life livable, which is better than Marlow could do. But yeah, there's a heaviness you feel at the end that isn't matched by many other things I've read.

It is a wonderful novella. The structure of the narrative was to me the most intriguing part. I took an Intro to Literary and Cultural Theories class in which we read only HoD and looked at it through all the major criticisms, and there really is no end to what you can say about it (though try deciphering that language from a post-structuralist point of view, Jesus Christ).

Good points.

I finished the first section of Gravity's Rainbow and decided that I have not been reading it closely enough for the effort to really be worthwhile. Rather than waste my time with an unclose reading, I am going to put the book off until some point when I have the time and energy to give it what it deserves. Right now, after a summer of Finnegans Wake and Ada, or Ardor and about to start graduate studies, is simply not at all that time.

Instead I will be alternating between stories in:

Alice Munro - Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage and
John Cheever - The Stories of John Cheever

I just finished Fahrenheit 451 again. I may post thoughts in it later once I can acess DDD again on my computer because I turned on the selfcontrol app for 4 hours.

Now starting heart of darkness as well. Or finishing blood meridian.

Jose Saramago - "The Double"
Pretty cool book. It starts off simultaneously quaint and spooky, but ends up as quite the saucy thriller. I want to say the ending was predictable, but I predicted about 10 different endings so I suppose one of them had to be correct.

Malone Dies by Samuel Beckett

John Cheever - The Stories of John Cheever
Friedrich Nietzsche - Thus Spoke Zarathustra
Peter Godfrey-Smith - Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection
Kyle Stanford - Exceeding Our Grasp
PAPERS ALL DAY EVERY DAY

Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer is really amazing.

Sudden Sea | The great hurricane of 1938 | R.A. Scotti -- a gripping tale, and well-written.