LITERARY BENT – Writing at its best

The setting is the Italian city of Ferrara on the eve of the Second World War. The rich and detached Jewish family of Finzi-Continis keep themselves secluded in their ostentatious property behind an imposing garden wall. The narrator, Giorgio, a poorer member of the Jewish community, falls in love with their lovely daughter Micol. Having met her […]

An elite and detached group of six classics students at a small Vermont college murder one of their number. How has this come about? The students are steeped in the cold, hard, and pure reality of the ancient Greek culture. Their characters undergo small steps and changes of mind that makes it possible for them to

This is an account of an American personal and family tragedy. The author does not disguise the character of this novel – it is a Garden of Eden tale set in the post-war United States with some rather nasty serpents. The Chapter headings are ‘Paradise Remembered‘, ‘The Fall‘, and ‘Paradise Lost‘. Playing by all the

Solzhenitsyn (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solzhenitsyn) presents us with a group of cancer patients in a Soviet hospital in 1955. Together they are representative of Russian society of the time. Politics and ideology come under discussion on the ward. It’s the author’s understanding of how patients crumble under the pressure of their disease, though, that gives the novel its power. Vadim,

The eponymous dying man is a former soldier of the Mexican Revolution (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Revolution) who has become wealthy and powerful through ‘violence, blackmail, bribery, and brutal exploitation of the workers’. The novel explores the corrupting effects of power and criticizes the distortion of the revolutionaries’ original aims through ‘class domination, Americanization, financial corruption, and failure of

Millions of people have watched the star studded 1965 David Lean film adaptation (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059113/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm#cast) with Omar Sharif and Julie Christie (Available on DVD at http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Zhivago-DVD-Omar-Sharif/dp/B00005MHNO/ref=pd_sim_b_1.) Why not give this classic a read? A love story set amid the swirling chaos of the Russian Revolution. First published in Italy in 1957 Pasternak’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boris_Pasternak) masterpiece was not allowed to

This masterpiece of introspection was published by Bellow (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saul_Bellow) in 1964. The reader is given epistolary revelations in unsent letters from Moses E. Herzog whose life is a failure and whose wife has left him, but who remains defiant and wryly perceptive about the world around him. 368 pages in Penguin Modern Classics edition. ISBN 978-0141184876

Huckleberry ‘Huck’ Finn escapes the guardianship of Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson who are trying to ‘civilize’ him, and also subsequently abuse from his alcoholic father ‘Pap’. Setting off down the Mississippi on a raft he teams up with escapee slave Jim. And so the adventures begin. Brought to the screen in 1960