The White Nurse in Ian McEwan's Atonement

In 1977 the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit published Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, a study of the ephemera of the proto-fascist interwar German paramilitary, the Freikorps. He analyzes the letters, memoirs, propaganda, and prose of the Freikorps officers in order to understand fascism’s psychic logic, in particular the role of women in the unconscious of fascist men.

Thoughts on Lolita

 

I just re-read Lolita.

Nabokov’s most controversial novel is by far his most widely read, and, with the possible exception of Pnin, the best of his I’ve read so far. It’s a twisted love story, a travelog, a noir, a Western, a mystery; it’s the ramblings of a madman. And, not unimportantly, it’s a seemingly effortless frolic in the beauty of the English language (One would expect nothing less from Nabokov.)

Reading and Re-reading William Faulkner

Recently my friends and I organized a William Faulkner reading group. We read Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and then The Sound and the Fury (1929). While Sound was published first, Absalom takes place first chronologically, so we read that one first.

Stylistically, the two novels could hardly be more different. Absalom, written in third person, consists almost entirely of long, complex, lyrical sentences (one of them running some seven pages), a prose-poetic text in which Faulkner holds back nothing. He makes no attempt to create realistic dialogue; each character is simply a puppet for his show. Although some have leveled this as a criticism, I actually think it works perfectly fine. I have no commitment to strict realism. Sound, on the other hand, is mostly in first person, and only rarely does Faulkner wax lyrical here. Dialogue is simplified and stream-of-consciousness abounds.