François Mauriac, winner of the Nobel Prize and recipient of France’s Legion d’honneur, was among the last century’s most pre-eminent men of letters, and a devout Roman Catholic.Vipers’ Tangle is one of Mauriac’s most famous works, a book of bruising beauty that explores man’s capacity for love and hate, bitterness and forgiveness, sin and redemption, [...]
The Guardian essay on Joseph Conrad
December 4, 2007 Leave a Comment
The Guardian recently ran an essay on the works of Joseph Conrad to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The author, Giles Foden, embraces Conrad as one of the first and greatest modernists of the English language. Though that point is indisputable, Foden’s obsession with Conrad’s “moral relativism” as central to his enduring legacy [...]
Dirda on Chesterton
December 2, 2007 Leave a Comment
Michael Dirda, a Pulitzer-prize winning columnist for the Washington Post, has recently authored a book called Classics for Pleasure, about the abiding joy of reading “duh classics,” as Tony Curtis would say. Included in Dirda’s book is an essay on G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which G.K. fans should be pleased-as-punch about. In [...]
Nostromo (1904) by Joseph Conrad
October 13, 2007 1 Comment
reviewed by Rachel Murphy In the fictional South American Republic of Costaguana, the small town of Sulaco is sheltered from the rest of the state by mountain and plain—near the edge of the sombre Gulfo Plácido whose still waters are protected from the ocean gusts—“as if within an enormous semicircular and unroofed temple open to [...]
The American by Henry James
May 29, 2007 Leave a Comment
reviewed by John Murphy “You are not afraid it may be rather a mistake for an American man of business to marry a French countess?” The American man of business is certainly not afraid it’s a mistake; it seems only too natural. Christopher Newman, a captain of American industry in his mid-thirties, travels to Europe [...]
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