from wiki ~ Gorky wrote the novel on a trip to the United States in 1906. The political agenda behind the novel was clear. In 1905, after the defeat of Russia's first revolution, Gorky tried to raise the spirit of the proletarian movement by conveying the political agenda among the readers through his work. He was trying to raise spirit among the revolutionaries to battle the defeatist mood.
It has been proven a hundred times that the surest way to the heart of any man, black or white, honest or dishonest, is through justice and fairness.
Though the story took place in the 1880s it sounds a lot like NYC or LA back in the 1960s. Anti establishment types turn their back on their privileged elite backgrounds. But you know what happens - ultimately they come back to it.
Last edited by Brooklyn on Mon Jan 22, 2024 4:14 pm, edited 1 time in total.
It has been proven a hundred times that the surest way to the heart of any man, black or white, honest or dishonest, is through justice and fairness.
I'm rereading Gore Vidal's book 1876, which starts in the waning days of the Grant Administration (remarkably corrupt) and goes into the election of 1876, in which Tilden won the majority of the popular vote and Hayes took the contested election in the House/Committee. A lot of parallels to our current difficult times. And the guy could write.
For years I've been trying to persuade myself to read "War & Peace" and "Anna Karenina" but just can't do it as both are far too long. It was a struggle to get through "Bleak House" and "Les Miserables". Now in my dotage, my attention span is shorter than ever. I've read other Tolstoy writings but this might be the last of his works that I read.
It has been proven a hundred times that the surest way to the heart of any man, black or white, honest or dishonest, is through justice and fairness.
The pseudo intellectual dialog is utterly hilarious.
Sadly, the author did not live long enough to see his book become as famous as it did. Thankfully, his mom worked feverishly to get it published and this is how it succeeded. Here is this very interesting lady:
The last play I attended before the pandemic shut down NYC was something Off-Broadway called Mr. Toole, about the author while he was teaching at a private school. I hate to say it, but I enjoyed the play far more than the book, A Confederacy of Dunces.
FannOLax wrote: ↑Wed Jun 15, 2022 10:17 pm
The last play I attended before the pandemic shut down NYC was something Off-Broadway called Mr. Toole, about the author while he was teaching at a private school. I hate to say it, but I enjoyed the play far more than the book, A Confederacy of Dunces.
I love the book. If the play is as good as you say it is, then I really missed something there.
It has been proven a hundred times that the surest way to the heart of any man, black or white, honest or dishonest, is through justice and fairness.
I remember reading it for a school assignment over 50 years ago. Wasn't quite sure why it appeals so much to the critics who have always considered it one of the finest books ever written. Perhaps it was because of an early reference it makes to The Rising Tide of Color Against the White World by white supremacist and lifelong Republican Lothrop Stoddard [1920]. Stoddard, like many Republicans of his era, strongly believed in eugenics and demanded that Congress restrict immigration in 1924 to white Europeans only. This similar to Republican tRump who referred to Third World countries as shtthold nations and that Norwegians were a better class of people.
The book has been made into a movie but I have yet to see any version of it. Perhaps soon.
It has been proven a hundred times that the surest way to the heart of any man, black or white, honest or dishonest, is through justice and fairness.
Babbitt is a 1922 novel by Sinclair Lewis, a thematic sequel-of-a-sort to 1920s Main Street, the work that had catapulted him to fame (Main Street has been described as the publishing sensation of the century, and ‘not so much a novel as an incident in American life’). Main Street was a dissection of the life of the American small town – so fundamental in its critique that Americans still use its title to symbolise ordinary people and small businesses; in Babbitt, Lewis moved his attention to the big city. In this case, the city is Zenith, a booming Midwestern town, and the focus is middle-aged Republican real estate broker George F. Babbitt, proud upstanding member of the Chamber of Commerce, the Athletic Club, the Boosters Club, and the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks.
The plot is, for the most part, non-existent. Rather than following a simple, coherent narrative, Babbitt meanders back and forth, displaying step by step haphazardly the breakdown of Babbitt’s world of certainty and contentment. Babbitt, you see, may be prosperous, successful, blessed with a wife, three children, a business, the respect of the community, and most importantly a motor car, but all is not quite well somehow. At night, he dreams of a beautiful fairy child, and in dark moments, he remembers that he always wanted to be a lawyer and a statesman – just as his friend Paul Riesling always wanted to be a violinist – and wonders how and why that never happened. He is, in short, in modern terms, a man on the precipice of a mid-life crisis.
It has been proven a hundred times that the surest way to the heart of any man, black or white, honest or dishonest, is through justice and fairness.
I have read a number of books and short stories by Dickens. Without any doubt whatsoever, Bleak House was his greatest writing. Here is a blurb from that first page:
Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little �prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.
Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time � as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.
The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln�s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.
Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
Fog ~ symbolic of a great occlusion. This intro serves as a nutshell of what this outstanding tome is all about. Superb literary craftsmanship by Dickens.
It has been proven a hundred times that the surest way to the heart of any man, black or white, honest or dishonest, is through justice and fairness.
For many years three women have bern known as the three divas of Indian Country. One of them was Osage. When it first came out i asked for her opinion. She said at the time she had not and would not read it. I have wondered off and on if any enrolled members of the tribe read it.
I've been reading a series of espionage novels by a guy named Dan Fesperman, who write for the Sun as its Berlin correspondent just at the time of Perestroika and the opening up of East Germany. Really good. I have read WInter Work, about the US and other agencies competing for Stasi assets and knowledge after the fall of East Germany; Safe Houses; and The Arms Maker of Berlin. Nice books, carefully researched, well written, pretty taut.
