Author Archives
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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Analysis of Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colors
The third novel by Japanese writer Yukio Mishima (1925–1970) returns to themes earlier explored in his semiautobiographical first novel, Confessions of a Mask. The title, a euphemism for homosexuality roughly equivalent to “forbidden love,” frankly announces the novel’s subject matter… Read More ›
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Analysis of Günter Grass’s The Flounder
The Flounder is a 4,000-year-long history of the sexes, based loosely on the Grimms’ fairy tale “The Fisherman and His Wife.” The narrator of this novel by Germany’s highly revered writer Günter Grass (1927–2015) is a present-day man, Edek, who,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle
Regarded as the author’s most elaborate novel, with a vision, scope, and breadth befitting its topic, The First Circle addresses the recurrent theme of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn‘s oeuvre, namely the “internal freedom” which even the most totalitarian of political and cultural… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat
The Feast of the Goat, the seminal work by Mario Vargas Llosa (1936– ), describes the end of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s regime in the Dominican Republic. The novel begins in the present day with the return of Urania Cabral to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Imre Kertész’s Fatelessness
Fatelessness is the first novel of Imre Kertész (1929–2016), a work that played a significant part in the author’s receipt of the 2002 Nobel Prize in literature. A novel about a Hungarian-Jewish adolescent boy who is deported to Auschwitz and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Vilhelm Moberg’s Far from the Highway
This is the first book in a two-novel set about life on the remote and isolated Ulvaskog farm in Småland, Sweden, at the end of the 19th century. The young farmer Adolf and his family are the fourth generation to… Read More ›
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Analysis of Camilo José Cela’s The Family of Pascual Duarte
The Spanish author Camilo José Cela (1916–2002) started his successful first novel in 1940 and finished it in 1942. After being rejected by several editors, the book was published in Burgos, Spain, in 1942, and it caused immediate opposing reactions…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s The Family Moskat
Published simultaneously in Yiddish and English, the novel The Family Moskat uses straightforward narrative as well as letters and diary entries to cover the decline of a well-to-do Jewish family, the Moskats, living in a shtetl (village) in Warsaw, Poland…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Ba Jin’s Family
This important work by Chinese author Ba Jin (a pen name for Li Feigan) tells an extremely intriguing and memorable story that is often taught in history courses. One snowy night, two young men hurry home. They wear the same… Read More ›
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Analysis of Albert Camus’s The Fall
The Fall, the last novel penned by the Algerian- born French writer Albert Camus (1913–60) prior to his winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in literature, was written as a series of monologues delivered by a French expatriate and former lawyer… Read More ›
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Analysis of Isabel Allende’s Eva Luna
The majority of the characters drawn by the writer Isabel Allende (1942– ) possess some special talent or attribute. Eva Luna, the protagonist of the novel Eva Luna, is not an exception to that rule. In this novel, Allende experiments… Read More ›
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Analysis of Paulo Coelho’s Eleven Minutes
Written by the brilliant Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (1947– ), Eleven Minutes was originally published in Portuguese. This novel differs from the rest of the writer’s oeuvre as it deals with a subject which, Coelho states in the book’s dedication,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Martín Luis Guzmán’s The Eagle and the Serpent
Martín Luis Guzmán’s (1887– 1977) best-known novel owes much to the genre of historical fiction, but it is often described as a seminal novel of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The Eagle and the Serpent, first published in Spain in 1928… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ricardo Güiraldes’s Don Segundo Sombra
Often hailed as Argentina’s national epic and an elegy for a lost frontier past, Don Segundo Sombra is also regarded as the masterpiece of Ricardo Güiraldes (1886–1927). Completed and published just before his death, this novel brought Güiraldes the fame… Read More ›
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