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Showing posts from January, 2024

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (audiobook read by Leslie Odom Jr.)

Mr. Gatsby is greater than the author of his story and greater than the book itself. Gatsby is a very real character. I much enjoyed listening to the free audiobook provided by the app Books on my iPhone. Leslie Odom Jr. was just the perfect person to read this story, his voice, very enchanting.  About the story I'd comment that the tragedy of two lovers torn apart is the same Rome & Juliet story that is here clothed as Daisy and Mr. Gatsby. If Heathcliff is an abominable character in literature then Tom Buchanan is much more so, the epitome of everything ugly concerning white masculinity. Besides I have sympathy for Heathcliff but non for Mr. Buchanan.  I could write in great lengths about how Fizgerald describes Daisy and I don't really appreciate how mindless he made her on the "pages" of the story. But I could appreciate the saga of Mr. Gatsby who had a million friends when things went well and none at his burial site.     

Jaqueline Harpman - I who have never known men

 A perhaps post-apocalyptic science fiction about one woman's stride across earth spaces in a world where she is the only one left behind. It's a story of survival in the sense that surviving is to keep going, keep pressing on, keep looking for life on a barren land. At the very beginning I found it hilarious that Harpman writes (the book came out in 1995 in French) that the captive women only had vegetables to eat and how this was a sign of total depravity. For those modern day perhaps ultra feminist readers who might have taken upon themselves a vegan way of life, I smile at the thought of that circle of readers. Non the less, the main character who is nameless, later finds frozen meat of various kinds and together with her survived companions eat the meat for strength, so much for veganism.  I've understood that this particular book as it came out in English in 1997 and later again in 2019 has in the past year 2023 by chance of book-Toc and other online phenomena became

Kerstin Thorvall - Det mest förbjudna

A book about The Mother Wound and how it takes shape in the author who calls herself Anna throughout this semi autobiography, it's about her life, her failed marriages and her insatiable lust for sex. Ultimately it's about a neurotic and loveless mom and how it inflicts a seemingly incurable wound in the daughters self. The book is insightful and well paced, Thorvall was a good writer. The book is a Swedish classic and it caused it's uproar in late 60's because it broke taboos by allowing a well known female author to show the brutal, truer side of herself. She was known for writing children's books and shorter stories for youth and she worked predominantly as a  journalist alongside being an author.  Personally I had many take-aways from the story, many helpful insights and I'm grateful that she shared her story in the format that she did. In the 80's she'd already written the words that she wanted on her tomb stone, but I googled and I saw that her son

The woman who stands alone

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Well, I seem to have plunged into the heart of the matter that I formerly addressed, namely classic male authors who don't understand the nature of women. It is hard to say weather Nathaniel Hawthorne understood women in The Scarlet Letter however D.H. Lawrence in his afterword on the work clearly did not. I quote "As a matter of fact, unless a woman is held, by a man, safe within the bounds of belief, she becomes inevitably a destructive force, She can't help herself." D.H. Lawrence basically describes woman as evil and Hester Prymme in particular, as a witch. That's not original, it's a common response, however Hester was not a witch. O how many women have burned and died in vain for a similar mindset like his. I think that The Scarlet letter is about a woman who stands alone. She is an outcast of society and she's an alone mother. Her daughter Pearl, so precious yet so peculiar awakens the suspicions of the society as well, they wonder "is she the