This is an analysis not of Britain, or the British Isles—but purely of the English. Tombs reviewed conventional beliefs about the past such as the Anglo-Saxon liberties, the common law, the influence of Magna Carta, and the cause and effect of the Industrial Revolution. Tombs also examined the ambiguities and aftermath of the Victorian age at the reasons for participating in the First World War, and the divided memories of that calamity.
Kundera has long explored themes of impermanence and fluctuating identity--often to memorable effect, particularly in The Unbearable Lightness of Being and now even more so in Immortality. People believe that they can achieve immortality to a smaller or greater degree by maintaining an identity of themselves in people’s minds up until they die. In other words, death and immortality, ironically, is an inseparable pair more perfect than milk and cookies. When death approaches, so as immortality.
This book carried out a cogent and fervent analysis claiming that the euro is flawed at birth and bound for failure. An immediate reform is required to prevent further devastation. In the absence of reform, an amicable divorce would be far preferable to the current approach of muddling through…
In a science dominated society, it is easy to forget that science and their methods are not inherently objective. Science is a tradition, with its own method of conceptualizing problems and deriving conclusions. Science is hypothetico-deductive. Scientists frame conjectures and test their logical consequences. A proposition is scientific if only it is falsifiable, otherwise it is metaphysical. However, there is no perfect method. The concept that a single method contains firm, unchangeable and binding principles in all situations is perilous.
The century since Franz Kafka was born has been marked by the concept of modernism— a self-consciousness new among centuries, a consciousness of being new. After his death, Kafka epitomizes one aspect of this modern mind-set: a sensation of anxiety and shame whose center cannot be located and therefore cannot be placated; a sense of an infinite difficulty within things, impeding every step; a sensitivity acute beyond usefulness, as if the nervous system, flayed of its old hide of social usage and religious belief, must record every stroke as pain.
Today, the European financial-cum-debt crisis rolls on from summit meeting to summit meeting, where German ideals of fiscal prudence clash with Spanish unemployment at 25 percent and a Greek state is slashing itself to insolvency and mass poverty while being given ever-more loans to do so. In the US, those problems take the form of sclerotic private sector growth, persistent unemployment, a hollowing out of middle-class opportunities, and a gridlocked state. What they have in common is their supposed cure: austerity.
This book is an exhaustive account of human exploitation on a gargantuan scale. It is about the rise and fall of the European-dominated empire of cotton, but more so about the history of human tragedy of war capitalism, imperial devastation, brutal slavery and echelon systems based on involuntary servitudes.
Published in Kundera’s exile in 1984, and without betraying the title, there is certainly a fundamental weightlessness to this book. Even after the third read, I can only recall fragments about the characters. A tangible milieu, a well-paced plot, and the extended passages of straightforward philosophical and political speculation, made it clear that this is not for readers who prefer the conventional storytelling.
The present washed away the past. We forgot the yesterday where the Silk Roads is the bridges between the East and West where great centres of civilisation rose. Ancient civilisation such as Babylon, Nineveh, Uruk and Akkad in Mesopotamia were famed for their grandeur and architectural innovation. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is where the world’s great religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism jostled with each other. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is the cauldron where language groups competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged along side those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. The yesterday where the Silk Roads is where great empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and rivals were felt thousands of miles away.
The Moon and Sixpence is a book about the life of an unassuming British stockbroker, with a secret unquenchable thirst for art that he is willing to abandon the trivial pleasures of bourgeois life for the penury and hard life of an aspiring painter without considering himself ridiculous or vain. He is cold, selfish and uncompromising in this quest for beauty.
Brooding rumination. That’s what people usually get into when they were awakened by absurdity. Once we cross that invisible line in front of our unwary feet, the world falls on its stunned head, and orientation is anyone’s guess. Just as Roquentin said, where truth lies now is in unending aporia. Yet, Camus posits a way out of despair by objectively exploring the Absurd, the topic of suicide, and the dilemma of living or not living in a universe devoid of order or meaning.
When the outbreak of a pandemic swine-flu wiped out 99% of humanity, what will happen to the survivors? This book is not so much about apocalypse as about memory and loss, nostalgia and yearning, and the attempt of art to deepen our ephemeral impressions of the world. Whereas most apocalypse stories push harshly forward into terror or dystopia, this novel moves back and forth in time, illustrating the pre-apocalyptic world and twenty years after civilization has collapsed, when the worst is over and survivors have grouped themselves into isolated settlements.
My favorite novel about Absurdism.
Just like his existentialist comrades, Mersault is buffeted like wreckage in the indifferent waves of the ocean. He is neither cynical nor optimistic. He demands nothing from life or people, and cultivates nothing. His indifference is not stoicism, for he buys into to no larger sense of nature. Nor is he a recalcitrant Diogenes, sneering at convention with derision…….
So people tend to judge others by their size; and people tend to judge books by their size. But here are 9 fat books that later on when you read it, you will mentally kick yourself for not giving in sooner.
This is a world where an institution has perfected the ability to predict when someone is going to die. This same world has a call center named Death-Cast, that’s responsible for phoning individuals during midnight to let them know they are dying in the next 24 hours. Furthermore, this cruel world has an app, Last Friend, much like a dating service, that allows people to find other to-be-dead people to spend their End Day together.
George Tanner provides a lucid, comprehensive introduction to stoicism, adapting the history, philosophy and practices of Stoicism from a weighty and distressing academic venture into a manageable and overall pleasant literary experience.
Mother Night is a work of gothic melange of stygian ideologies. The novel embodies Vonnegut’s dark humor and philosophical introspections regarding the nature of moral ambiguity and what ideals we sacrifice on the altar of war.
Literary masochism required.
His penetrating insight that life is in essence a meaningless process of gradual, inexorable death lead him to his degradation. His feelings that he is a disqualified human being, is driven by his sensitivity to the frailty of human bonds in the urban world. Death is the only escape.
“When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!”
-Miguel de Cervantes
Let me just put it this way: The book is magic. The writing is magic. The plot is about magic. When I said modern literature can hardly measure up to the classics, I didn’t expect to run into this sparkling and mesmerizing prose. The descriptions were immersive, atmospheric and pure enchanting that they encapsulate your emotions at the very point of the book they are placed.
