Denis Diderot (1713 – 1784, Denis Diderot (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)) was a French man of letters and philosopher who, from 1745 to 1772, served as chief editor of the Encyclopédie, one of the principal works of the Age of Enlightenment. In this novel of 1796 the servant Jacques rides through France with his master. He appears to act as though […]
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As of 2024 William Boyd (Novels – William Boyd) has written 18 novels plus a number of short stories and screenplays. The New Confessions is a good recommendation to start enjoying this author’s fiction. The summary is as follows. From his birth in Edinburgh in 1899, John James Todd was doomed. Emerging from an angst-filled
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This book by Annie E. Proulx (Annie Proulx: ‘I’ve had a life. I see how slippery things can be’ | Annie Proulx | The Guardian) follows the movements of a small green accordion. The accordion maker leaves his native Sicily with his son Silvano in 1890 for ‘La Merica’. The promise of the land of
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Graham Swift (Graham Swift – Literature) is a Booker Prize winning novelist. It was his novel ‘Last Orders’ that took the 1996 prize whilst also becoming the joint winner of the 1996 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. His novel Waterland (1983) won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Both of these have been adapted for the screen,
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If perspicacity and foresightedness are criteria for the greatness of a narrative then ‘Fahrenheit 451‘ by Ray Bradbury (Ray Bradbury – Books, Short Stories & Quotes) stands tall. First published in 1953 the author imagines a dystopian future in which a totalitarian state has prohibited books and reading. The populace is driven into conformity by
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By 2024 it has been 71 years since the publication in 1953 of ‘The Adventures of Augie March‘ by Saul Bellow (Saul Bellow | US news | The Guardian). The book is still held up by many critics as a contender for the accolade of the great American novel. Augie March is Jewish in Chicago
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Marie-Henri Beyle (1783 – 1842), better known by his pen-name Stendhal, wrote this novel at a pointless period in his life, during fifty-three days late in 1838. He was serving at the time as a minor French official in Italy – the Consul at Civitavecchia. Beyle was a veteran of several Napoleonic campaigns and was one of the survivors
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John and Laura Baxter are recovering from the death of their daughter Christine from meningitis in the 1950s when they take a trip to Venice. At a restaurant table they encounter a pair of Scottish spinster twins. One of these, Heather, is a seer and informs Laura that a little girl has been sitting alongside
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Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/schopenhauer/) was scornful of those who could not look at the fundamentals of the human situation squarely. By this he meant the pervasive presence of dissatisfactoriness, suffering and death. Instead, humans manufacture a myriad of avoidance techniques. His view was that if we dare to peer over the perimeter fence of our
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