I found Molloy an impossible book many years ago. But picking it up again, I found it a swift and hilarious read.
It is a commentary on the ridiculous challenges of existence, and the associated horrors of bodily dysfunction. Molloy drags himself around with stiffening legs, although he manages a brief joyful bicycle ride before his further descent into hell. A detective called Moran searches for Molloy in the second part of the book, although Moran is transformed slowly into Molloy, I think.
Molloy is the first volume of a trio of increasingly difficult novels written by Beckett in the 1950s. It offers a continuous stream of Beckett’s consciousness, but the precision of his language, the attention to detail in every sentence, make this a remarkably entertaining book.
Molloy, the first of the three masterpieces which constitute Samuel Beckett’s famous trilogy, appeared in French in 1951, followed seven months later by Malone Dies (Malone meurt) and two years later by The Unnamable (L’Innommable). Few works of contemporary literature have been so universally acclaimed as central to their time and to our understanding of the human experience.
What a delightful book! The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling, published in 1749, is a marvelously silly story of love and loss, greed, deceit, and youthful sexual abandon, and provides a happy ending for Tom and his love, Sophia Weston.
The eponymous 1963 movie, starring Albert Finney and Susannah York, succeeds in portraying the pivotal adventures in this epic, but the 900-page novel offers so much more. The author’s preambles to each of the eighteen books (within the novel) are very lively and connect us to his thinking on the sociology of eighteenth-century England.
Fielding’s treatment of women seems surprisingly enlightened in their presentation as the smartest and most powerful characters in Tom’s life, surrounded, as he is, by imbeciles of another gender.
Henry Fielding's picaresque tale of a young man's search for his place in the world, The History of Tom Jones is edited with notes and an introduction by Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakely in Penguin Classics.
A foundling of mysterious parentage brought up by Mr Allworthy on his country estate, Tom Jones is deeply in love with the seemingly unattainable Sophia Western, the beautiful daughter of the neighbouring squire - though he sometimes succumbs to the charms of the local girls. But when his amorous escapades earn the disapproval of his benefactor, Tom is banished to make his own fortune.…
This is the definitive introduction to Canetti’s writing with excerpts from multiple works, including notes from Canetti’s exile in London, political essays, and “Auto-da-Fé,” a novel about a reclusive scholar who owns the greatest private library in Vienna.
The bibliophile in the novel, named Georges Kien, begins each day with a morning walk to look into the windows of booksellers, to confirm the superiority of his own collection. Entropy increases when he marries his housekeeper, Therese, and encounters a series of grotesque figures who contribute to the destruction of his library.
Sounds bleak, yes, but if Kafka makes you laugh, this is for you.
A career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen.
He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison, he never killed anyone. He neither won nor lost a fortune. All he ever did was live in this century. But that alone was enough to give his life dimension, both of feeling and of thought.
Here, in his own words, is one of the twentieth century's foremost chroniclers: a dizzyingly inventive, formally unplaceable, unstoppably peripatetic writer named Elias Canetti, who was awarded the Nobel…
This book is a revelation of the human relationship with the fungi. From the yeasts of the onboard mycobiome in our guts and growing around the roots of our hairs, to the colonies of mushrooms wrapped around the roots of forest trees, the fungi are with us from womb to tomb. Fungi are vital for our health, cause lethal infections when the immune system is damaged, and decompose the body after death. Beyond the body, fungi are essential sources of food and medicine, and as hallucinogens they have spawned religions and are used to treat clinical depression today. In a wider, ecological sense, we depend on the fungi that support plants, create soil, filter rainwater, and spin the carbon cycle.
