Things Fall Apart (1958) tells how Okonkwo, a great warrior of an Ibo village in Nigeria falls from grace in his tribal world. The conflict between the individual and society is no better or more wisely illustrated. A second story depicts the proselytizing European missionaries who threaten to destroy the existing indigenous culture. Writing from an insider vantage point […]
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First published in 1847–48, Vanity Fair satirizes society in early 19th-century Britain and in particular the attachment to material things. No one is better equipped in the struggle for wealth and worldly success than the alluring and ruthless Becky Sharp, who defies her impoverished background to clamber up the class ladder. Her sentimental companion Amelia, however,
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Patrick Victor Martindale White (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_White) was an Australian author who was widely regarded as a major English-language novelist of the 20th century. From 1935 until his death, White published 12 novels, two short-story collections and eight plays. His fiction freely employs shifting narrative vantagepoints and a stream of consciousness technique. In 1973, he was awarded the
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In five linked episodes in A Hero of Our Time (1839), early Russian novelist Mikhail Lermontov (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lermontov) builds up the portrait of a Byronic hero officer, Grigory Pechorin, caught up in and expressing the sickness of his age. The sickness is a certain ennui, nihilism and indifference to the world. The setting is Russian military
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A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) is V.S. Naipaul’s (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V._S._Naipaul) unforgettable third novel. Born the ‘wrong way’ and thrust into a world that greeted him with little more than a bad omen, Mohun Biswas has spent his 46 years of life striving for independence. But his determined efforts have met only with calamity. Shuttled from one residence
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In A Farewell to Arms (1929) a young American volunteer goes to Italy during the First World War. This is a love story interwoven with a savage indictment of the brutalities of war. It is all the more remarkable given the coolness and impartiality of tone with which the author delivers the narrative. One may not warm
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Interested in sex? No? OK, you need not read this recent history of social attitudes towards the grisly function. Philip Larkin famously wrote in ‘Annus Mirabilis’ Sexual intercourse began In nineteen sixty-three (which was rather late for me) – Between the end of the Chatterley ban And the Beatles’ first LP. The observation is both
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Written by an anonymous English monk during the late fourteenth century, The Cloud of Unknowing is a sublime expression of what separates God from humanity and is widely regarded as a hallmark of Western literature and spirituality. It stands in the tradition of the ‘Via Negativa’. This suggests that one must give up all conceptual
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Le Grand Meaulnes is a modern French classic. François Seurel, the narrator, is the son a village schoolmaster in the Sologne, a region of lakes and sandy forests in North Central France. A new boy Augustin Meaulnes, who comes from a poor background, arrives in class but soon disappears. Later he returns from an escapade
