Prospero’s Isle

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• LATEST ARTICLES ↓

  13 July
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  "The Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig)" by Thomas Mann (1912)

  13 July, by Thomas Mann

  We follow the quite famous author Gustav von Aschenbach and his elevated thoughts (at the beginning: they tend to go steadily downhill as the narrative unfolds) from his native Munich to the Adriatic coast and to Venice, where he is plunged into the thralls of physical desire for a very handsome fourteen-year-old boy whose family is staying at the same hotel on the Lido, and who quite innocently (?) sets our man off on dithyrambic meditations on the lessons of Plato’s The Banquet and (…)

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  "Buddenbrooks" by Thomas Mann (1900)

  7 July, by Thomas Mann

  The saga of the rise and fall of a family in the Hanseatic (Baltic) town of Lübeck, written when Mann was only 25, an enormous best-seller at the time and afterwards. Splendidly recounting in many memorable chapters and passages – notably an unforgettable chapter about a catastrophic day at school of the young Hanno Buddenbreooks – the ups and especially downs of a once-distinguished and wealthy family, this masterwork was cited by the jury as the main reason for awarding the distinguished (…)

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  "Hunger" by Knut Hamsun (1890)

  30 June, by Knut Hamsun

  This was the great Norwegian writer’s first novel published under his own name – and what a novel! No doubt somewhat autobiographical, it describes the fight against hunger of a penniless young journalist-writer in the poverty-stricken northern Norwegian town of Christiana who is slowly starving to death for want of food. His fight against the pangs of hunger and his whole relationship with life via the need for nourishment is described in a most effective factual and laconic way that (…)

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  "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)

  24 June, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  Is this Dostoevsky’s greatest book? Hard to say in view of the competition but it very well could be. In any case it constantly sends shivers of aesthetic emotion down the spine of the reader with the power of its writing and the scope of its themes and the grandeur of so many of its scenes – the memoirs of Alyosha Karamazov’s mentor Father Zossima, the transformational experience of Alyosha on leaving his mentor for the last time, the extraordinary conversation of Ivan Karamazov with the (…)

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  "Anna Karenina" by Leo Tolstoy (1877)

  18 June, by Leo Tolstoy

  Anna Karenina and Vronsky, Levin and Kitty, the Prince Oblonsky and Dolly – these are characters that literature is made of, characters that rise up out of these marvellous pages to become as real and as full of life and passion and the drama of life’s experience as any of the people who populate our memories. The characters in this sweeping novel have depth and scope, the central drama of Anna’s passion is as key to the human experience as can be, the background setting (of mounting (…)

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  "The Possessed", aka "Demons/The Devils" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1872)

  12 June, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The central theme of this drama-filled novel about life in a provincial town in Russia in the early 1870s is the growing influence on the local notables of a group of radical revolutionaries led by aristocratic and very articulate intellectuals who under the cover of promoting modern ideas and ideals dream of overthrowing the Czarist regime and imposing an authoritarian system of their own.
  A highly actual theme at the time in a rapidly-changing Russian – that had abolished serfdom in 1861 (…)

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  "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy (1869)

  6 June, by Leo Tolstoy

  Written by Tolstoy to mark the 50th anniversary of the invasion of Russia by Napoleon, this massive work, one of the longest novels ever written, magnificently captures the drama of men and women caught up in the sweep of a major upheaval that dwarfs the individual and his fate in the face of events that can destroy the very basis of the world they live in.
  Tolstoy paints a very broad canvas of people living and loving and longing and working out their individual destinies against the (…)

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  "The Idiot" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1868)

  1 June, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  The central figure in Dostoevsky’s masterpiece, Prince Myshkin, is perhaps the single most moving and unforgettable character in all fiction, the central theme of a saintly man subtly challenging by his very integrity the values of his time is immensely powerful, the very many characters that people this panoramic novel are all vibrantly brought to life by dialogues and descriptions that just couldn’t be better, there’s a special tone of import and intense significance throughout this long (…)

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  "Crime and Punishment" by Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)

  26 May, by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  This is a very Russian novel, as the hero Raskolnikov (surely one of the best-known names in all fiction) commits his crime early on and the rest of the celebrated novel concentrates on the inner workings of the mind of this articulate, intelligent and almost likeable young man, on his introspective soul-searching and on his intense interaction with his police pursuers.
  Translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett for a London edition in 1914.
  (203,350 words)
  An e-book is available (…)