jasmeet

I have read most of Saramago's books; reading the ones that remain,, and I can say with my own conviction this is his most palpably woven tales of humanity that Saramago has created. If only someone wishes to observe, contemplate and question the lives we lead, the decisions we make, well, what we are, he/she has to read this book. That's my opinion too of some of the most lovingly rendered human characters in the novel. Read it for your own read and experience.
To say the least, this one is a tour de force.

The orchard and the thudding throes of its vast but stifling space creates a landscape-on-stage that combines the sensual world into an emptiness of sorts. One could see, smell and of course hear the sound of a hopelessness which screams with longing to be filled again with something substantial; not the same dead-habits of effluent but numb and cold gestural drift ... but with a slightly more deeper sense, to be sensed by two individuals.

. . .

Unprecedented classic whose Edenic resonance is of a timeless quality. East of Eden is an experience which manifests the story of every human by enabling to express the immanent questions we live with through a form purely dedicated to allegory. Words, language and thought all coagulate to present the Story of all stories and transform the act of reading into a meditative ensemble that helps deliquesce the stiff structures we often find difficult to move on ahead in.

Fragility of that human core, the essence of emotion, and the sensitization of a human mind, that of the reader's, is at the helm of this dramatic experience. Glass being the minimalist element whose ‘softness' isn't visibly projected, is forever endangered by the harshness that surrounds or permeates the living world.

Williams's achievement lies in bringing out the fragile by winnowing the broken from the infrangible.

Motivational stuff I am in least need of...
The style of the book which is so contrived, sort of over-hyped for its storytelling. Well, that is the first thing about the book which turned me off. While writing a book whose subject matter be fantasy, would you carry this sort of poetic license always in your pocket?
The style didn't click with me.
The subject matter gives me the feeling of sweet pills wrapped in cartons with deliberate inspirational illustrations over them.
Not my kind of reading.

Figures of Speech' by Arthur Quinn, encourages the reader to write and flourish, keeping good faith in writing more openly, attuned to the rhythms of the intent and complexion of thoughts; rather stylishly,
revisiting the very idea of what constitutes style.

Quinn peppers many of these reflective, and often lying ‘dormant' or even ‘redundant', ‘figures' and its descriptions with a plethora of examples, many of which beckon to the true stylistic heritage of the literary greats.

Whether it is through Voltaire or Shakespeare, Montaigne or Milton, the writer's intention is to bring into light our deeper inclinations to not merely say something but to toil just enough and express our feelings, in the finely balanced swaying scale of language.

“every human heart beat is a universe of possibilities.”

This is inspired storytelling by someone who values words, voices and experiences; the stuff that goes in making our lives cherishable. The narrative voice is reliable and the style original.
Thoroughly vivid and profound in parts, the story takes on hell of a journey, and I have to say that I find candid honesty in the voice as far as portrayal of India; the life in places, the values of people, strands of cultural fabric, if you will, human first, then Indian, Afghan, European or Australian, is concerned.
A page-turner as it is, the text renders equal justice in character build-up and the way the city breathes through the pages, you end up giving the author credit for seeing with a keen eye. I had to, initially, placate a concerned reader's voice inside me as to where it is going and the almost impossible gestural magnanimity being projected and displayed towards most things, most characters that the narrator ends up bumping in. But as the world of Lin opens up through the crevices of a city's underbelly as well as the whiff of its island-beauty, you find yourself excitedly taking a stroll with the characters. Eventually, it turns into an infectious and irresistible tale you don't want to take your mind's eyes off.
Having learned that the book is a part of a planned quartet, I would look forward to another book by Gregory Roberts. On of the many reasons why I liked the book is that irrespective of an overtly conscious effort to build upon literary styles much dominated by fashion, the tale unfolds and embraces without inhibitions. The reader starts, breathes and walks, takes a plunge, and is back. Home; enriched with words from some world.

Is nostalgia an eternal lack, or an alternative ironic fulfilment? Is it a disorder; or even a disease? Is nostalgia the manifest of the body-mind dynamic only humans are known to affect? Is nostalgia, in its spectral forms, human condition itself?
There are issues spinning around threads such as these and other philosophical & psychological, social & historical queries which Svetlana Boym, the Russian-American-nostalgic, has undertaken to address.

In this brilliantly focussed meditation on the philosophy of Nostalgia, Svetlana becomes increasingly interested in unveiling the creative potential of the concept in terms of that ever-ambivalent but human-all-too-human idea, known to us as ‘Modernity'. She covers pretty much enough art history of the time: such as Paul Klee's ‘The Angel of History' as emphasized by Walter Benjamin's discourse about its possibilities to traverse and go beyond fixed categories or isms.
In the first part of the book, Boym argues how nostalgia became a polarized or binarized category, in terms of the local and the universal.

Subsequently, the space and time vis-a-vis ‘modernity' is unpacked by Boym daringly close to and in relation to the postmodernist concepts from critical theory. The paradox of our age emerges out of culture, art history, and the lives of the exiles whose sharp literary wisdom enable the past, present and future to coexist; in their poetry, architecture, essays and installation art.
...
With a vision of the ‘reflective nostalgic', the author commentates on the capitalist outlook, and along with its perpetual commodification of our world, anticipates the ‘ersatz nostalgia' / ‘armchair nostalgia” (Appadurai) – guides the reader detour and return to our age – where everything could be put on sale, in a constantly advertised space, packed and delivered at the scale of the arenas of the metropolis/megapolises. As a corollary of that system, memories (genuine or manufactured and projected endlessly) are commodified. This effects the fine-tuning of the scrutinizing light of enquiry on ourselves amid our nostalgias.
...
and tells thus of the politics of nostalgia welded with politics of nationalism:

“American popular culture is growing more and more self-referential and all-embracing; it quickly absorbs the inventions of high culture, but as in Clement Greenberg's good old definition of kitsch, the entertainment industry still mass reproduces the effects of art and stays away from exploring the mechanisms of critical consciousness.”

All ideas, as they come to life, given thus by those who think them, emerge and advance towards their natural evolution as philosophical concepts. Svetlana Boym, in the ‘Future of Nostalgia' achieves not only charting out the inception, conception, the historical evolution of the idea of ‘Nostalgia' but conceptualizes it with the eyes of our paradoxical worlds. This means that what we are discussing here with respect to the ‘modern condition' which stretches up to the postmodern times, and read or rather consumed now in a post-truth environment, is available as an essential reading of our most urgent inhibitions, as well as the concerns of the day, in general. For instance, the writer's injunction that unlike the popular conception, postmodernism was first developed in the post-soviet Russia, is a revelation of sorts, with respect to the human-nostalgic-condition.

In a comprehensive chapterization on tracing the historical roots of ‘nostalgia' and re-reading it in the age of AI, the book facilitates our faculty of critical reading. The chapters on the city and the metropolis identify credibly our generations' existential strife: “The city, then, is an ideal crossroads between longing and estrangement, memory and freedom, nostalgia and modernity.”
The way Svetlana Boym sees the three cities (which are always more than three cities) in philosophical detail, opens us a novel way of visualizing the phenomenon of a city; as a simultaneous perception of the authentic and fake experience.

In particular it is those sections that argue for the enabling side or power of Nostalgia, which is the core of the book for me: The Proustian return to the home is a return to his self.
...

Nostalgia, regardless, is a dynamic movement between forgetfulness and remembering ...
this dynamic keeps shaping into metamorphosed forms, informed by erased memories, enforced forgetfulness, manufactured recollections, or manufactured nostalgia of memories, and so on.

... leading up to reveal to ourselves the nostalgias: local, domestic, national, individual, social, personal, collective, commercial, political, ... and the ‘nostalgia for world culture' in Mendelstam's words, or Benjamin's ‘ironic nostalgia'...
not to mention the selective nostalgia/memory...
... and the nostalgia of the “many potentialities that have not been realized”...
... and what about “nostalgia for nostalgia” ...
to be read and perceived from the point of view of the ‘ethics of remembering'...

The author devotes considerable space to the politics of the erasure of nostalgia, and thereby projecting/planting a reconstructed one:

“There are no ruins on the site ..... The obliteration of memory is at the foundation of each new project. .... enforces a collective amnesia about past destructions...”
...
Thus, reading ‘into' nostalgia, to deepen understanding of its inherent paradoxes, allows accessing the philosophic vision of nostalgia... which is the most enabling force to take away the veneers and veils that shroud the immanent ambivalences of reality; nostalgically speaking then, would be seeing into the fissures, the interstices that embodies the nature of reality.

Boym approaches nostalgia, through the alleyways of memory and forgetfulness of memories; through accounts and rumours and misrepresentations of information, through the visible and the invisible both; the modus operandi to access human condition, which refuses to be pinned down: such as Nabokov's mediations:

“The literal is less truthful than the literary” ~ in Nabokov's seeing the photographs o
....
“Nostalgia is akin to unrequited love, only we are not sure about the identity of our lost beloved.”
...

“Homecoming does not signify a recovery of identity; it does not end the journey in the virtual space of imagination. A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, at
once...“
... because sometimes the homecoming doesn't cure; it rather aggravates the longing.

‘The Future (+Past+Present) of Nostalgia' is a significant book simply to traverse cities from the eyes of a modern nostalgic ... and meet, in other nostalgics, with authors and artists introduced by way of sensitive excursions taken to the museums, houses, the places where the literary augments the literal ... steering away the idea of nostalgia from the Russian ‘poshlost' and the German ‘kitsch'... or the sentimentalization of emotions and human feelings entrenched in nostalgia; ... like Kabakov's much ubiquitous “horizontality of the banal”...

There is much that would require coming back to this book for a well deserved repeat reading, a revisiting; even as I felt the deliberation to slow down finishing it the first time, to escape bringing it to the inevitable close, and with that the advent of a pining nostalgia that is brewing already–being nostalgic about all the peers, people and places that Svetlana has documented or archived with love.

There is a germ of things and thoughts that determines flight/fall of one's being ... If Hamlet had it on his sleeve, albeit disinclinedly, then Stephen has it in his shadows, which threaten himself to pass by from a mere distance.

The germ here very much breathes in the ‘vagueness of his wonder', as Stephen would call it; in the stillness of the stare he would elicit when the most important moments of his being's life are discussed or dished out by others but not himself. In this sense of wonderment, which would easily eventually be seen as bewilderment of sorts, Stephen lets the germ to grow.

The style of Joyce's writing here determines quick and fast the slow dropping of words from a certain order, one by one, and persist longer; so that words, as they re-appear, in the parallel tributary of more words and more thoughts, appear in the crystal form of the piece.

Nonetheless for Joyce, the meaning of the tale does not lie in explicating the essential, but it hovers around in the symbolism of the immanent.

Is ‘vagueness' then the point of departure through which Stephen initiates himself in the world; “Was that boyish love? Was that chivalry? Was that poetry?” Is it the very “dross of earth” that eventually evokes a splitting stinging pain of ‘conscience'. And isn't it in the quagmire of a peculiar setting which Stephen claims to reject in imbibing that his disinterested “soul is born”?

If there is a so called epiphanic moment for the reader of Stephen's account, it certainly gets enmeshed within the stylistic-structural ‘fall' and ‘flight' the protagonist's henceforth constitution of a ‘soul' whose aesthetic consciousness unfolds in the saudadic manifestation of memory enabling him to render art:

“And if he had judged her harshly? If her life were a simple rosary of hours, her life simple and strange as a bird's life, gay in the morning, restless all day, tired at sundown? Her heart simple and willful as a bird's heart?”

The shadowy vagueness and the disinterested disposition of the son or the student begins to take up something on his own – ‘paper' beckons the ‘pencil' beckons the words that are winged by memories that Stephen endears his life with.

‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' is the kind of a book which attempts to resist valuation; what could be termed as epiphanic moments of being, may not readily match the reader's impulse, for the latter would have to partake in it as an experience for its own accord.

What an amusingly interesting start to the book...
And an equally interesting ending.
Beautifully written in crisp and clear sentences, Fitzgerald presents a flow of life imagined in reverse.
The story succeeds in capturing many conflicting instances of relationships and the reverse order device works out well in projecting human tendencies, moods as well as emotions.
The direct and light tone blends the comic and somewhat serious well.
A good read undoubtedly.

Provided that we are dealing with Histories, it is apparent that Richard the Third is the first true villain in the Shakespearean world of characters. Richard so conceives the scope of unscrupulousness that he makes it absolutely his own.

His character, with the self-blinding belief, lives beyond the pages of the text. As it seems, he's going to stay with you. How many characters have done that so far, I wonder. Surely, Sir John Falstaff, Henry the Fifth and his father, Henry the Fourth, to an extent.

To the playwright's credit, force and stance are welded to Richard's soliloquies; a hint of which we get in the previous play in the so called tetralogy. The play opens up with the memorable line which manifests Richard's own perturbation at not being at the centre of the royal attention:


Now is the winter of our discontent
. . .
But I,–that am not shap'd for sportive tricks,
. . .
I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion,
. . .
And therefore,–since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,–
I am determined to prove a villain,


His ‘discontent' bred out of maliciousness for others, ambition of power and bitterness about his physical deformity results in the intent to deceive through political manipulation and instinct to kill whoever comes in his way between him and the throne;

And thus I clothe my naked villainy
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

In the end, it is by manipulation through words that Richard presents a series of misdeeds which internalizes his crimes. His evil-ness is more of an inward belief in his deformed self rather than his physical deformity; that he ‘believes' to be the only one the way he is,

No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity.
But I know none, and therefore am no beast.

Surely, the play works on the basis of heightened dramatization of a character's villainy led by extreme, selfish actions rather than the torments of mind one would encounter elsewhere in Shakespeare; and even though the play ends in somewhat of a whimper, the realizations of Richard's wrongdoings seemingly sudden (once we look back), it is hard not to get charmed by the import of its character portrayal.

What's commendable to me about Wynne Jones's writing is the deft hand with which she undertakes the children's / teenage fantasy genre. To be more precise, the deft hand which makes the story unfold in tens of confident plot strands, turns as well the most obvious–and perhaps most base–
readerly expectations of loud or bombastic showdowns of witches/wizards into a narrative ultimately entrenched in endearing-intelligent sense of humour.

One requires perhaps a patient tracking down of the narrative movement, following the t0-be-tied-down-later threads of the plot, the eventual ‘understanding' of the metaphoric import, however, emerges as a rewarding and satisfying read. That someone like Miyazaki would be convinced by the tale to be brought to the celebrated Ghibli anime repertoire, is testament to Diana Wynne Jones's command over craft.

In the world of the ‘moving castle', dogs, cats and people (the eldest of siblings take special mention) – (discount not the hats and dresses) are so much more than who we might expect them to be.
The final image that would stay with me, and which the book crystallizes into, is the inevitably ‘moving' castle, which accommodates as many and much as the colours of the door-knobs would allow.

“The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.”
― Wilkie Collins, My Miscellanies

The ‘literary exertion' Collins refers to, in the above cited quotation, is something Dickens wilfully exhibits as one glides through the self-consciously rendered train of thoughts and images, linked together as they are, in a whole different world of novelistic space from what modern literature readily deviates. Notwithstanding the effort, reading, first hand, about what is portrayed like a minutely observed phase in society the way Dickens does, seldom amounts to ‘waste of time'.

Years after this prodigious construct of realist imagination, expertly expressed with wit whet with irony, had been conceived and realized, as I sift through the word-voluble thickness of the ‘dull' Victorian life, I can't help feel the descriptive vividness of the towns, the school grounds or the sheer landscape of a reality depicted through the warm and snuggling narrative voice.

The novel of education presents a protagonist whose romantic idealism determines a natural inclination towards an infatuated sentimentalism. However, circumstances conditioned for a character as endearing as David, warrant the need for fancy:

‘From that blessed little room, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that place and time'.

That Copperfield does not merely remain confined to and projected upon a saccharine-coated screen has been duly demonstrated by Dickens through David's patiently handled or developed point of view with respect to dear friends and lovers.

As David's education ensues—especially at the hands of those whose hands do not miss the chance to spare the rods—he learns, as well, an essential aspect of discipline, the over application of which instills a shuddering shadow of guilt:
‘The length of those five days I can convey no idea of to any one. They occupy the place of years in my remembrance'
. . .
‘being ashamed to show myself at the window lest they should know I was a prisoner—the strange sensation of never hearing myself speak'

Early lessons of ‘firmness', at school and home, usher our ‘hero' into a phase of inevitability:

‘In the monotony of my life, and in my constant apprehension of the re-opening of the school, it was such an insupportable affliction'.

Dickens does not leave a stone unturned in presenting the stark contrast between David's imaginative garret of life and the real store-room of troubles.
If David is able to find a corner wherein the romantic idealism breathes, he is bound to, as it is made sure to witness, get handcuffed by the vagaries of the time. It's something beautifully portrayed, at times, in sprawling expressions:

‘A certain mysterious feeling, consequent on the darkness, the secrecy of the revel, and the whisper in which everything was said, steals over me again, and I listen to all they tell me with a vague feeling of solemnity and awe, which makes me glad that they are all so near, and frightens me'.

Soon, however, master Copperfield begins on his own and learns to choose . . . albeit waywardly and sentimentally. Infatuated with untested ideals, David receives life not as he would but as he must, laying the foundation of a character which is as much his as it is to be earned and deserved.
Being receptive to life is David Copperfield's biggest quality. When he is not among his peers because he can't be, David exhibits the capacity to respond humanely:

‘curious equality of friendship, originating, I suppose, in our respective circumstances, sprung up between me and these people, notwithstanding the ludicrous disparity in our years'.

Another attribute accredited to the protagonist's growth is time itself, which David knows he has aplenty to learn from. In many of the firsts, he learns to hold on to the young years of affliction, only to assimilate differences that prove to be pivotal for David Copperfield:

‘When my thoughts go back, now, to that slow agony of my youth, I wonder how much of the histories I invented for such people hangs like a mist of fancy over well-remembered facts!'

As he is aptly called by another character, David also is, notwithstanding what coming of an age would mean to himself, a very ‘Daisy!' proudly blowing in the wind as an emblem of sensitivity. Yet, who is the real David Copperfield; he would live to learn and, hence, be able to discern through the trifling details life bestows upon him.

Character is built as much from love and affection as it does through the ‘humble' concern measured by hatred. And in Heep does Copperfield find his rival to be:

‘I was so haunted at last by the idea, though I knew there was nothing in it, that I stole into the next room to look at him. There I saw him, lying on his back, with his legs extending to I don't know where, gurglings taking place in his throat, stoppages in his nose, and his mouth open like a post-office. He was so much worse in reality than in my distempered fancy,'

Strangely enough, though, David Copperfield gets goaded by what stands in the face of his being. It's odd for a sensitive character as he is; but there he does get, holding on. What drives him away from the comfortable world of fancy is exactly what makes him arrive to himself, where he would rather be.

But what would David be. Who is he? One could immediately hear him whisper, ‘I don't know' sitting on the anvil of uncertainty which permeates his life, right from where the narrative voice begins the story. However, he learns to wait and receive what doesn't turn up or what just shows up nonchalantly:

‘Whenever I fell into a thoughtful state, this subject was sure to present itself, and all my uneasiness was sure to be redoubled. Hardly a night passed without my dreaming of it. It became a part of my life, and as inseparable from my life as my own head'.

Learning comes from loss. David Copperfield suffers at the hands of not knowing what. It, however, does not stop him from breaking new ground with his effort. David has experienced absence, separation as well as disquiet of guilt. It leads him back to himself, where David searches and finds best: ‘I wanted to be cutting at those trees in the forest of difficulty, under circumstances that should prove my strength'.

And yet, Copperfield does not find; even as he does not know what to find. Again does he fixate life within the idealistic, in the fancy of beauty that sweeps him off his feet. Again does David recognize the constant gnawing at his heart, which is taken care of only by more toil from his character:

‘I was a boyish husband as to years. I had known the softening influence of no other sorrows or experiences than those recorded in these leaves. If I did any wrong, as I may have done much, I did it in mistaken love, and in my want of wisdom. I write the exact truth. It would avail me nothing to extenuate it now'.

The writing is soon on the wall for David, as he reads without repentance: ‘There can be no disparity in marriage like unsuitability of mind and purpose'. In more than a single way, David Copperfield manifests someone who grows up to consider, ‘The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart'.

Death too catches up. The sense of loss after his wife's death had never been stronger with David. Restlessness tests him all the more:

‘There are some dreams that can only be imperfectly and vaguely described; and when I oblige myself to look back on this time of my life, I seem to be recalling such a dream. I see myself passing on among the novelties of foreign towns, palaces, cathedrals, temples, pictures, castles, tombs, fantastic streets—the old abiding places of History and Fancy—as a dreamer might; bearing my painful load through all, and hardly conscious of the objects as they fade before me. Listlessness to everything, but brooding sorrow, was the night that fell on my undisciplined heart. Let me look up from it—as at last I did, thank Heaven!—and from its long, sad, wretched dream, to dawn'.

Finally, Copperfield is able to cope for he is able to express. As he finds the vehicle of his being, David writes: ‘I worked early and late, patiently and hard. I wrote a Story, with a purpose growing, not remotely, out of my experience'.

No more an ‘undisciplined heart', David Copperfield is finally able to feel when he least expects or desires: ‘And yet they awakened something in me, bringing promise to my heart. Without my knowing why, these tears allied themselves with the quietly sad smile which was so fixed in my remembrance, and shook me more with hope than fear or sorrow'.

Absence, loss, incompleteness and frustration leads him back to his own self, as he returns to the ideal he missed and overlooked for another which beckoned him in his impatience: ‘My lamp burns low, and I have written far into the night; but the dear presence, without which I were nothing, bears me company.'

Apparently, ‘retrospect' is a word that Dickens has profusely used, among others; and I get this feeling strongly about how David Copperfield is a book about going back; or the importance of retracing one's steps back, lest one forgets one's own, precariously poised, divergent self. This marks David's character as someone who manifests, eventually, an assiduous walk on the track of life which tracks forward as well as backward; which presents ‘absence' as an essential presence in life. In the end, he is ... because of realizing he is more than and beyond what he thinks he is.

It is a kind of book which, for me, gets populated with words, conversations, scenes and images, as well as the most important base to bring them all together, a narrative cohesion that sketches diligently one shade after another; that is perhaps the biggest strength of the book. And charmingly as it is, Dickens achieves this by employing what he sincerely believes in, that is;

‘trifles make the sum of life'.

Story-telling and characterization are the strengths here. Literary fiction where I encountered the literary form in various avatars. Each tale is crisply told. Perhaps the best of them, for me, was the fourth voice, that of Timothy Cavendish. It's trapped in its own adversity but is humorously told. Each narrative voice tells a tale you could put your trust in.
Would have no qualms revisiting this one.

The heart of darkness that is profusely referred to in this novella could come to mean so many things. And what it really means, what is really meant, why it means so, who means and for whom, to my mind, reflects the appreciations and apparent criticisms of the book.
Man's own capacity; a capacity to corrupt and get corrupted, man's ultimate inability to comprehend and rend the thick shards of ambiguity life catches us in, sort of feeds that impenetrable heart of darkness. Do we not all own it, have it, exhibit it? And then, if that is so, Heart of Darkness is a parable of human nature.
Despite hearing about the reservations on the racist tones and the not so anti-imperialist stance, I feel that there is more to this work than just that. Nowhere am I determinedly able to maintain that the text gives way to an authorial voice depicting a for or against sign, let alone some agenda to obey. If anything, it is a rich and complex novella with a promise to yield thoughtful discussion.
Degradation of human beings, material and spiritual, is what is at heart of the tale. And the language that captures the prose captivates aspect and attention with poetical sensitivity.
Still, I can hear reserved echoes of criticisms leveled against the ‘dark' heart (particularly in its treatment of the natives of Congo, attributed as well to the racist tradition existent in Western literature). But if the dark treatment of Africa is to be considered as representative, what about the ‘light' that is coming from the other side. Is it, in Conrad's view, all the more redeeming or ‘civilised'? And can we say then which does the voice means when it sighs profoundly the word, ‘Horror'? I don't know yet. In that I find the book more open-ended than we presume probably.
Somehow, style is central to narration and is thus worthy of re-readings. The narrative voice is aptly unreliable. Never do we really get to know what Marlow thinks in his own heart; he is a voice telling but somehow devoid of an intimacy towards readers. Perhaps, through what he sees on the outside, he sees the all too dark heart of his own and is unable to reveal it to us as Kurtz does. Marlow envies Kurtz for “He had something to say. He said it.”

The well-intentioned play by Shakespeare is a first for me, in the series of some great historical plays of his, which deafeats the purpose of building up a plot with threads that, as soon as they are attempted to be stretched to measure the structural scope and substantial import of its themes, outdo-outstretch their fragile limits.
So much so that the plot-strands wouldn't bear upon them the evolutionary entanglement of thoughts which the other histories endeavour to present.
The characters of King Henry, his wife Katherine, Anne Boleyn, and especially Cardinal Wosley, all promise the beginnings of reflections upon human nature but serious breaks in the latter half of the narrative structure couldn't help scupper whatever deliberation – monarchical, hierarchical or anything overtly thematical – the play is able to conjure.

It gets a bit heavy or, should I say, tedious with the sound and the fury packed within the confilcts among the dukes, the houses. But shows it in flashes the plots, the intrigues and wit to come and appear in a myriad of voices and characters. As a part of the trilogy among the history plays and the context of power though, the play holds well enough. The sequence moves forward now.

Like being able to breathe freely when one's calling calls it, gliding into a Terabithia is supposed to be everyone's prerogative.
It is the bridges that must be willed into shaping access, entitlement, and expressiveness.

Jesse and Leslie are like those characters who have never not met; their rendezvous are reassuring for the earnest reader beyond requisites or expectations.

Here's to a tiny hidden branch, a modest creek of a stream, an unassuming arch over which to instate even a mere pedestal, for that is reasonably enough.

The process of character cultivation must also be in part getting manifested at some point in time...
Would it be an exaggeration to reckon how highlights of a world to be populated by some of the delightful human beings, begin their journey with this early melodrama...

O, how this spring of love resembleth
The uncertain glory of an April day,
Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,
And by and by a cloud takes all away.
(Proteus, Act 1 Scene...)

She dreams on him that has forgot her love,
You dote on her that cares not for your love.
‘Tis pity love should be so contrary:
And thinking on it makes me cry ‘Alas'.
(Julia, Act 4 Scene 4)

“JULIA They do not love that do not show their love.
LUCETTA O, they love least that let men know their love.
1.2

“The journey is never over. Only travellers come to an end.”

Saramago ends this wonderful book on a note which is most most appropriate in the hands of a master storyteller. One really ‘feels priviledged' in the company of a sensitive writer; sensitive to the place he belongs to, a place which is effortlessly shown to us to be more than just a place.
I had started Journey to Portugal a few months ago and I knew right away that it is just the way with this book. I literally savoured the descriptions of the country in the words of an author whose novels, almost consciously, avoid being set within definitive spaces of geography. The Journey however, is about Portugal from the eyes of the ‘traveller'.
I must start by saying that the experience had been unlike all others; I'd never read a travelogue from the point of view of a traveller with keen sense of imagination and appreciation of things witnessed by him.
The journey is beautifully given a start by the element of an unconditional prayer, as the traveller sets off to embark his homeland's untouched, unventured corners.
The second part of the book (two of three) is narrated in a slightly different complexion. The ‘traveller' is beautifully shown to have associated with the places he visits people he meets. There's more of human emotion involved in the narration as he moves deep into the Portuguese landscape, especially going through the lowlands and reaching the soft-stone mountains of the Guarda... a thoroughly considerate traveler who is sensitive to the crumbling artifacts and cultural symbols of Portugal. ... almost every page of the book captures your imagination by catching you unawares and introduces words of imagination, witness and feeling...
And it takes much longer to read this book for me than any other.. a ten-page session cannot take less than an hour; normally more.
I am wondering why the traveller's much anticipated visit to Lisbon starts on a somewhat dejected and somber note. Here he is, ready to witness the marvel of this port city, the museums and the monasteries whose architecture takes you on a journey through various ages. But all he could muster is the bitter memories evoked by objects revealing horrendous crimes committed in the past. He is thankful to the museums for preserving some of the objects in order to testify what, according to him, is “necessary” for us to remember.
The traveller is clearly occupied with these thoughts as his indecision gives way to questioning:
“The traveler regains the street and feels lost. Where should he go now? What is he to visit? What shall he leave aside, either on purpose or because of the impossibility of seeing and commenting on everything? And anyway, what does it mean to see everything?”
~ Journey to Portugal

Undauntedly however, the traveller reaches the end of an exhilarating journey. But stops he does not. Ceaseless passion to discover once again, provides impetus to the traveller to begin again what would be nothing short of an experience. And we are all invited.

About the states of acceptance, and realization, reluctance, and resistance, ‘Lincoln in the Bardo' is a streams-of-consciousness tale that is about the points of view which often get fiercely ignored once they cease being ‘around'; and attempts to implore: how could a form or the formless stop simply being.

The epigraph and the illustration before the first chapter sort of takes you by hand, makes you sit, start and read... hoping for another tour de force by an excellent author.
(after reading):
And so it proves to be. Apart from the political themes that this book evokes, the heart of the story (as always) is in the exact place that you would see Saramago himself placing: within the human experience of togetherness, universal mystery and the belief in the inseparability of truth from fantasy.

Memorable characters tread the ground in this work of fantastical truths. One would love to accompany them on any journey undertaken. One by one, Saramago not just populates his canvas wit fascinating characters, but evokes emotions out of Nature itself.

Undoubtedly one of the difficult books to write, there are themes aplenty to appreciate and connect with. The raft is travelling because it is inhabited by living souls.