Joel Miller has been reading classic novels this year and reviewed Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter this week.
“If you peel away the layer of ideas and conceptions that are particular to your own time period,” Undset once said, “then you can step right into the Middle Ages and see life from the medieval point of view—and it will coincide with your own view.”
In Sigrid Undset’s skillful hands, it’s impossible to imagine any other outcome.
Day was breaking. The dawn Swept the last stars, bits of ashes, from the sky. Of the vast rabble, Mary allowed Only the Magi to enter the cleft in the rock. He slept, all luminous, in the oak manager, Like a moonbeam in the hollow of a tree.
from Boris Pasternak’s “The Christmas Star”
Reading in 2023: Joel Miller plans to read 12 classic novels next year and review one each month. His choice for July is one Lars had talked about here: Sigrid Undset’s The Wreath: Kristin Lavransdatter (Book 1).
Arthur Machen: Dale Nelson reviews a collection of essays and stories by Welsh author Arthur Machen (1863-1947), called, “Mist and Mystery.”
Forgotten Books: Steve Donoghue had this quote nagging him recently: “Some books are undeservedly forgotten; none are undeservedly remembered.”
Books and Meals: “I cannot remember the books I’ve read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” Many attribute this to Ralph Waldo Emerson but the best source a version of this statement could also be attributed to another man also named Emerson.
Heist movies have many examples of criminals slipping into a crowd and becoming essentially invisible. Either there are too many similarly looking people to spot the ones the cops want or there are too many people period. Without an identifier of some kind, the criminals have gotten away without consequences, at least for the moment.
In H.G. Wells’s The Invisible Man, a gifted chemist works out his theory for making things invisible. Recklessly, he applies his experiment to his own body and becomes an inhuman and invisible man.
His glassy essence, like an angry ape
“Measure for Measure” Act 2, scene 2
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep.
When the invisible man tells his own story, you see his arrogance runs deep. He attempts to live without any social obligations, taking food or clothing for himself without payment, assuming these things would simply disappear like he has. He quickly learns it won’t work that way, because he isn’t an incorporeal ghost; he’s a naked man that no one can see. If he weren’t such a hot-tempered fool, he might have worked more methodically and converted a set of clothes into invisibility before converting himself.
After a few months of experimental living as an invisible man, the chemist wants to terrorize people. He wants to pursue his scientific interests without having to earn anyone’s favor or deal with normal social pressures. He probably blames his father, his old boss, and all of his research colleagues for his jaded view of the world, but I think Wells may intend these people to represent everyone. There are no contrasting noble characters in this story. Even the chemist’s closest friend may have been just as self-seeking as everyone else.
Wells provokes readers to ask what anyone would do if he or she could be invisible, or to put it another way, what would you do if there were no consequences to pay? Would you plagiarize? Steal someone’s research? Slander someone’s character to get rid of them?
Answering a question no one was asking (and possibly procrastinating on other projects (or likely having lost a bet (or very likely using grant resources that they’d otherwise have to return (and/or definitely exercising strong nerd power)))), physicists have found that many great works of literature resemble fractals.
The academics put more than 100 works of world literature, by authors from Charles Dickens to Shakespeare, Alexandre Dumas, Thomas Mann, Umberto Eco and Samuel Beckett, through a detailed statistical analysis. Looking at sentence lengths and how they varied, they found that in an “overwhelming majority” of the studied texts, the correlations in variations of sentence length were governed by the dynamics of a cascade – meaning that their construction is a fractal: a mathematical object in which each fragment, when expanded, has a structure resembling the whole. (via Prufrock et al)
Harper Lee’s Watchman has captured the hopes of many readers, and now the author’s lawyer has announced the discovery of papers that may be yet another manuscript. Yes. That part’s true. Not even the lawyer appears to know what those papers hold, but The Onion has gotten hold of the title, “My Excellent Caretaker Deserves My Entire Fortune.”
Electric Lit reports that several publishers are now announcing newly discovered sequels to many of your favorite classics:
These look good, but when are publisher going find real blockbusters like these:
