Kai

Factotum chronologically follows Ham on Rye. As we witness a Chinaski in his early 20s he bums around the states working one shit job after another. As usual it's full of rage and resentment with brief comic relief, it's fun to see the eyes of the world through Bukowski, if anyone's ever worked a string of dead end jobs then you'll find a kindred spirit in this book. The misery, boozing and self destruction is unrelenting and it feels a bit repetitive after a while. It was a fun read with good writing but that was about it.

A book replete with ideas, Mann is a craftsmen in creating an environment that constantly verges on the absurd and the real. As we follow Hans Castorp we are introduced to situations and characters that resemble a Studio Ghibiri film and ideas that must've been widely discussed during the intellectual ferment that precipitated the Great War. Given Mann's revision of the novel following the catastrophe, we can witness Mann's critique of the hubris that pervaded Europe's intellectual elite and educated middle class. It reminds one of Hesse in his condemnation of the ‘bourgeoisie' but in Mann's sense it feels more like a pointed attack on how self indulgent intellectual babble can be meaningless and pernicious enough to condemn millions of men to their death. Whenever Mann paints an image of the sanatorium and its zanny character's, it invokes a surrealism, a strange blend of reality and dreamscape; time feels distorted, the weather defies seasonal convention, people behave strangely in public and no one bats an eye. There are times when the novel carries on, Mann seems to enjoy verbosity and it is hard not to feel like he's doing it for humours sake. But I enjoyed it. It's funny when someone describes at length a year as being a complicated arrangement of the earth orbiting the sun. The final chapter tied everything together. In contrasting the brutality of WWI with our bashful ‘good engineer' and his playful residence, one can appreciate the tragedy of idealism crushed by reality. How the self-assured, overconfident middle class and their abstract ideas on politics, society and philosophy could cause a militarism that resulted in unprecedented violence. Perhaps there is a moral in The Magic Mountain that is relevant to our times. As a newbie to German literary classics, this book makes me want to dig deeper into the canon, I loved it.

Lawrence's commentary on English industrial society is pointed and vitriolic. It's clear he sympathises with the working class and disdains upper class hubris. It was useful having background on the time period from reading Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier and Hommage to Catalonia. Both Lawrence and Orwell share similar perspectives on the pernicious impacts of industrialisation, consumerist society and the consequential demise of romanticism and celebration of the human spirit. The period is a pretty fascinating one as it seemed that the old aristocracy were on their last legs, recognising (albeit reluctantly) their irrelevance in a society that was growing to recognise modern ideas of social mobility and egalitarianism. The characters felt a bit one dimensional, each one having a strong point of view, never really questioning their own perspectives. The novel is a sucker for romantics, with a lot of romantic literary techniques used by Shelley, Eliot and what not. Overall, I liked Lawrence's criticism on social injustice and entrenched class norms in modern England but found myself eye rolling at the shallow characters and cliche romantic narrative. I appreciated the provocative language and (for its time) unconventional focus on a woman's sexual desires and sexual fulfilment.

Crime and Punishment throws you into a dark, danky world where a fetid rot emanates from each page. I would read the book, put it down and get the feeling that a thin layer of grease had covered me head to toe. I can understand it's appeal and reverence through the years but I found it difficult to settle into the prose and tangential conversation. Dostoevsky puts you right in the mind of Rodin, it's a little unsettling how immersed you are in the mind of the protagonist. This was a grind, glad to have completed it and emerge intact.