Author Archives
-
Analysis of Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch
Hopscotch is not only Julio Cortázar’s most celebrated literary achievement, it stands alongside Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as one of the most important and influential novels of the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s. Referring… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Max Frisch’s Homo Faber
The life of 50-year-old engineer Walter Faber is suddenly disrupted by a series of odd but intertwining coincidences in the splendid novel Homo Faber by the Swiss author Max Frisch (1911–1991). The novel opens with the protagonist on a flight… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Thomas Mann’s The Holy Sinner
The novel immediately following the publication of the epic work Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann (1875–1955), The Holy Sinner led Mann and his readers through an entirely different literary experience. Published four years before the author’s death, The Holy Sinner… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Camilo José Cela’s The Hive
The Hive was the second great success in the career of one of the most influential Spanish writers of the 20th century, Camilo José Cela (1916– 2002). Written in the bitter aftermath of the Spanish civil war (1936–39), the novel… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Mihail Sadoveanu’s The Hatchet
Romanian novelist Mihail Sadoveanu’s The Hatchet is the most widely translated Romanian novel, except perhaps for Mircea Eliade’s works, though the latter’s audience was tremendously increased by the author spending most of his life in the Western world and by… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Alejo Carpentier’s The Harp and the Shadow
The Harp and the Shadow (1979) is the fifth novel by Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier (1904–80). Carpentier, a master of the modern Latin American novel, is credited with coining the term magic realism. As implied by its title, the novel… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Heinrich Böll’s Group Portrait with Lady
The German author Heinrich Böll’s (1917–85) Group Portrait with Lady is widely considered one of his most important novels because it was likely the deciding work in his selection for the 1972 Nobel Prize in literature. Though the text reaches… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House
Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Green House won the Crítica Prize in Spain (1966), and the Rómulo Gallegos Prize in Venezuela (1967), the latter being most important literary prize in Hispanic America. The novel was inspired by a trip that Vargas… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Ngugi wa Thiong’o A Grain of Wheat
Following the shocked response in Britain to the author’s two first novels, Weep Not, Child (1964) and The River Between (1965), and in response to what he considered distorting revisions, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (then writing as James Ngugi) abandoned his master’s… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier
The most famous novel by the Czech writer Jaroslav Hašek (1883–1923), The Good Soldier Schweik and His Fortunes in the World War was published in sections from 1921 until the author’s death in 1923. The book is actually a third… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Carlos Fuentes’s The Good Conscience
A follow-up to the first novel by legendary Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012), Where the Air is Clear (1958), The Good Conscience is a taut character study of a young man: Jamie Ceballos, who hails from the provinces of Mexico,… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Ousmane Sembène’s God’s Bits of Wood
God’s Bits of Wood is the third and most famous novel of award-winning author and filmmaker Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), who was born in Ziguinchor, Senegal, then a French colony. God’s Bits of Wood, a panoramic novel of social realism, chronicles… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game
The last novel by the Swiss German author Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), The Glass Bead Game is a serene bildungsroman conceived in the form of a “eutopia” (positive, happy utopia) set in the year 2200, somewhere in the German-speaking areas of… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Gift
The Gift is the final and most important Russian novel (English translation, 1963) by Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977). The semi-autobiographical story of a young Russian émigré writer living in Berlin in the 1920s, The Gift was first serialized in the Paris… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s The General in His Labyrinth
More than 20 years after first gaining international acclaim with One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Márquez (1928–2014) fulfilled a lifelong ambition in The General in His Labyrinth, an historical novel about the last months in the life of… Read More ›
-
Simon Vestdijk’s The Garden Where the Brass Band Played
Simon Vestdijk (1898–1971) wrote The Garden Where the Brass Band Played in the form of a memoir, narrated in the first person by Nol Rieske, the younger son in a bourgeois household, who is looking back on his youth. The… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum
Foucault’s Pendulum is the second novel by the highly prolific Italian writer Umberto Eco (1932–2016), and continues the pattern of linguistic games and narrative proliferation established in The Name of the Rose. This time the focus is more contemporary, with… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged
Considered by most critics to be either the most important or one of the two most important works of modern Chinese literature, Fortress Besieged, by Qian Zhongshu (1910–98), depicts the complicated and often conflicted lives of a set of Chinese… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Elie Wiesel’s The Forgotten
“For the dead and the living, we must bear witness,” Elie Wiesel stated in his work And the Sea Is Never Full: Memoirs, 1969–, a motto now adopted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. But how… Read More ›
-
Analysis of Mircea Eliade’s The Forbidden Forest
Mircea Eliade (1907–86) considered his epic novel The Forbidden Forest to be his best work. Written between the years 1949 and 1954, the novel was originally published in French as Forêt interdite the following year. It finally appeared in Eliade’s… Read More ›
You must be logged in to post a comment.