Joey Anderson > Recent Status Updates

Their dances are courtship rituals that they constantly almost, but not quite, consummate. Other than menial labour, this is the place of a male in Portia’s society: adornment, decoration, simply to add value to the lives of females.

I read this novel years ago when it first came out in the eighties, and I did not find it memorable except for the clothing and the more horrific scenes. A bit slow at the beginning, but it does get more interesting. For me, the handmaid's memories are quite nostalgic.

The Furies still pursue Orestes:

“First the children eaten, the cause of all our pain, the curse. And next the kingly man’s ordeal, the bath where the proud commander, lord of Achaea’s armies lost his life. And now a third has come, but who? A third like Saving Zeus? Or should we call him death? Where will it end? -where will it sink to sleep and rest, this murderous hate, this Fury?”

I recently finished "Mourning Becomes Electra," from this collection, and it was one of the finest plays I have ever read. O'Neill follows "The Orestia" quite closely in structure and character. Lavinia as the Electra character is one of the most diabolical women ever created; her vengeance is incredible.

The play is so compelling; rarely do I read a work that I find hard to put down. It rivets.

Having read this trilogy forty years ago, I decided to read it again in companion with Eugene O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra." I have just finished the first play "Agamemnon."

Although not like a modern play as characters converse with the chorus (society), the unfurling of the tragedy of the House of Atreus is vivid and captivating as familial murder, revenge, and treachery span over generations.

A surprise in apocalyptic science fiction where the writer does not depend on stereotype or cliche. Not only is the character unique and so sympathetic, but the style and structure is complex. I hate to say it, but the males are reprehensible and turn out as the ugly side of the human race.

If you want to read a history of the novel, here it is. Quite enlightening.

The Duchess of Gloucester expresses her grief about the loss of her murdered husband by what is assumed to be by King Richard’s hand:

“Grief boundeth where it falls,
Not with the empty hollowness, but weight.”

Grief never ends, but always comes back to us, harder than what it did the first time. Grief over the loss of a loved one is heavy and eternal, and strikes back when we least expect it.

The novel has two settings: in 1990 at a Los Angeles retirement home that actually exists where Armenian survivors live, and in 1915 Turkey where the forced relocation and extermination of Armenian Christians occurs. The scenes of 1915 are brutal and are some of the most harrowing I’ve ever read. It’s difficult to keep reading at times. But there is a sliver of hope in all of this despair.

Such a sad and desperate story about a family caught up in the Armenian genocide of 1915 and a grandson’s journey to Los Angeles in 1990 to secure the dismissal of a 90-year old woman’s rights to a Turkish family’s house that his grandfather left her in his will. This story is quite painful and reminds us of how despicable and evil human beings can be to each other.

In the second part of his examination of Flaubert and his creation of Madame Bovary, Vargas Llosa leaves his impassioned review of his love for the novel and why we readers fall in love with the characters in novels that we do to backgrounds and sources of the work as well as a justification of why Madame Bovary was the first modern novel. I find it fascinating.

“Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

I started this book as a lark since Flaubert’s novel has also been a favorite of mine and I liked the idea of reading why Madame Bovary was Vargas Llosa’s favorite. He also explains the kinds of novels he likes on a personal basis, not the ones others told him he should like. Fascinating so far, but a warning: Flaubert uses quite coarse and obscene language in his letters that the author cites.

Much better than I thought it would be. A story about how a good military compromises his conscience by following orders, and how fate delivers us into situations we never thought likely. An optimistic tone: the determination of good women and men can save societies and worlds.

More later

Philip Dick always delivers. This time the story centers upon bounty hunters, illegal immigration of androids, the value of empathy, and the worthlessness of intelligence in defining a person’s value. People who empathize with others will save our civilization; people with fine intelligence will not.

I’ve finished the title story, a novella of just over a hundred pages. The author makes the tragic point that sacrificing our children for pride and power originated in the ancient world of Greece, and the dictator of Albania (thinly disguised) is no different. Yet it is not only dictators that sacrifice their sons and daughters; democratic leaders do it as well.

The paranoia is excruciating.

I’ve always liked everything she has written. This novel is no exception. Her portrait of the Judge is masterful.

It is difficult to imagine what life would be like living in Albania under a dictatorship without freedom of speech when I have never known any other kind of life. It does make one appreciate his social situation.

It’s 1812 and, from the Moslem perspective, they find it astonishing the Christian nations are always at war with each other. World powers never seem to understand or care what instability or fear they cause in the peoples of smaller countries. Myopia seems to be a condition of the powerful.

I like this novel in how it shows how small countries are quite powerless to stop the dominance of more powerful ones. Here, the Bosnians have to tolerate the Ottoman Empire, the French, and the Austrians, alien civilizations (except for the Turks) who do not respect their customs and their culture. They expect the Bosnians to be just like them. Sound familiar?

Although the author Ivo Andric (Nobel Prize, 1961) sets his novel in his native Travnik, Bosnia in 1804 during the Napoleonic era, he adopts an interesting strategy to tell it. While I expected the story to be told through the perspective of Bosnians, it is not. The primary characters are consuls from France and Austria who would rather be elsewhere since they find Bosnia an inferior country.

“Like the others, Daville was lightheaded with irrational happiness, as weak and befuddled people often are when they stumble on a catchall and generally accepted formula that holds out a promise of meeting their needs and catering to their instincts at the cost of other people’s harm and ruin, while at the same time freeing them of responsibility and a nagging conscience.”

Melkior, despite his efforts to starve himself so that he would fail the weight requirement, is drafted and what follows is a humorous satire on the military during a serious time when Germany is bombing London. What is best though is the blending of external and internal realities that furthers the allusion of the Cyclops, a one-eyed cannibal who will be defeated by “nobody.”

A very male-oriented novel (although European, Americans fit in quite well). Published in 1965, it illustrates the male fear of death in a variety of ways: war, conflict with other males, romance, sex, and especially women. There is a sense that Melkior fears the power that women hold over men.

Incredibly good. Europe stands poised on the eve of WWII, and Melkior and his associates in the Give and Take (bar) try in vain to live normal lives as the intuit the end of human (istic) history.

Set in Zagreb, Croatia before WWII, Melkior, the main character, and the inhabitants of the Give and Take bar take part in comic intellectual discussions about literature, especially nihilistic works, to avoid, it seems, the coming horrors of the Third Reich. Hitler is rarely mentioned, but he looms in the background as a Cyclops whose singular vision haunts these characters.