Author Archives
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Analysis of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time
The reclusive French writer Marcel Proust, now considered by many scholars as the greatest novelist of the 20th century, labored for more than 14 years and died while still adding to what would eventually be a seven-volume masterpiece. The novel… Read More ›
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Analysis of Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Infante’s Inferno
Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s book “Infante’s Inferno” (1984) is a masterfully crafted, chronological account of a young man’s journey into adulthood in prerevolutionary Havana, Cuba. The author vividly depicts both the triumphant and disastrous aspects of his experiences, interweaving his trademark… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s In Evil Hour
This novel—published after Leafstorm (1955) and No One Writes to the Colonel (1957)— was begun earlier in 1956, completed as This Shitty Town by 1959, and, in a shortened form (purged of “Faulknerisms”) and under its current title In Evil… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alberto Moravia’s The Indifferent Ones
The Italian author Alberto Moravia (1907–90) began writing his masterpiece The Indifferent Ones in 1925, when he was 17 years old. Publication came in 1929, when he was 21. The Indifferent Ones is the story of a Roman bourgeois family… Read More ›
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Analysis of Max Frisch’s I’m Not Stiller
With I’m Not Stiller, the author’s third novel, the Swiss playwright and novelist Max Frisch (1911–91) established himself as a major contributor to postwar German literature. The English title is also the first sentence of the novel, whose central themes… Read More ›
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Analysis of André Gide’s The Immoralist
Despite André Gide’s claims otherwise, his novel The Immoralist is clearly autobiographical. Gide (1869–1951), one of the most significant novelists of the first half of the 20th century and winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in literature, went to great… Read More ›
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Analysis of Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler is a novel by Italo Calvino (1923–85) from late in his writing career. Calvino was an Italian fiction writer well known for stories and novels that range in character from fables to neorealist… Read More ›
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Analysis of Primo Levi’s If Not Now, When?
This novel by the famed Italian author Primo Levi (1919–87) can be read on multiple levels. First, it is an exciting story, with the heroes (and heroines), a roving resistance band of Jews, trying whenever possible to wreak havoc in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Natsume Sōseki’s I Am a Cat
A satire on human foibles from the standpoint of a cat, I Am a Cat is one of the most original novels of the Wagahai wa Neko de aru, one of the best loved works by the Japanese writer Natsume… Read More ›
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Analysis of Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
With her controversial 1986 novel I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem, one of the most respected of Guadeloupe’s several powerful writers, Maryse Condé 1934– ) has produced one of the African diaspora’s literary classics. I, Tituba explores the interwoven psychosocial,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Augusto Roa Bastos’s I, the Supreme
I, the Supreme is based on the life of Paraguayan dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1766–1840). Francia came to power in 1811, and in 1814 he designated himself “perpetual dictator.” He ruled Paraguay with a stern hand and violent… Read More ›
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Analysis of Carlos Fuentes’s The Hydra Head
As a major literary figure and significant contributor to not only literature of the developing world but to world literature in general, Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012 ) is a vital literary tour de force, providing the world outside of Latin America… Read More ›
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Analysis of Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits
The first novel by the Chilean writer Isabel Allende (1942– ), The House of the Spirits remains the author’s best-known and most popular work, despite the subsequent success of her following novels, memoirs, and children’s books. Although the book received… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kawabata Yasunari’s House of the Sleeping Beauties
In House of the Sleeping Beauties, by the Japanese Nobel Prize–winning author Kawabata Yasunari (1899– 1972), the protagonist, 67-year-old Eguchi, visits an inn where old men pay to spend a chaste night with beautiful young women who have been drugged…. Read More ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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