Recent Posts - page 43
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Analysis of Franz Kafka’s The Castle
The Castle is the last novel written by Czech author Franz Kafka (1883–1924). Kafka began to write the book in 1922 in a village and not, as it is tempting to imagine, in the shadow of Prague’s legendary castle. A… Read More ›
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Analysis of Christa Wolf’s Cassandra
Cassandra was the fifth and final lecture of a series Christa Wolf (1929–2011) presented in 1982. Shortly thereafter, the draft was reworked and published in 1983 with Jan Van Heurck’s English translation appearing in 1984. Cassandra is a retelling of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Arnold Zweig’s The Case of Sergeant Grischa
German author Arnold Zweig (1887–1968) wrote his most famous novel, The Case of Sergeant Grischa, as an account of World War I. Upon its publication in Germany in 1927, the novel’s readers acclaimed the story as the most moving account… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward
This intriguing novel by Russia’s esteemed author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008) begins with a family’s fretful abandonment of the pompous, self-serving apparatchik judge Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov at a Soviet oncology ward, where he is cut off from his customary power and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rómulo Gallegos’s Canaima
Canaima takes place along the Orinoco River, deep in the Venezuelan jungle of the early 20th century. It poetically illustrates the region’s exotic natural beauty while telling a story that is at once as romantic as it is political. The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Carlos Fuentes’s The Campaign
Beginning in 1958 with Where the Air Is Clear, Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) has written several major novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, and numerous critical essays. With The Campaign, Fuentes recounts the history of the Americas and, more important, the origins… Read More ›
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Analysis of Lao She’s Camel Xiangzi
Camel Xiangzi is one of the most touching and successful novels by the Chinese writer Lao She (1899–1966). Lao She, a patriotic people’s writer, is a pseudonym of Shu Qingchun. The novel is based on the author’s fi rsthand knowledge… Read More ›
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Analysis of Naguib Mahfouz’s The Cairo Trilogy
The first great family saga of modern Arabic literature, The Cairo Trilogy tells the story of patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad and his family over the course of more than 30 years, from World War I to eight years before… Read More ›
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Analysis of Jorge Amado’s Cacau
The works of the 20th-century modernist Jorge Amado (1912–2001), one of the most famous Brazilian writers of the 20th century, have been read around the globe. He is particularly remembered for his books Cacao and Dona Flor and Her Two… Read More ›
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Analysis of Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks
Of the many works by the renowned German author Thomas Mann (1875–1955), including Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, none match the epic proportion or literary legacy of the novel Buddenbrooks. Written early in his career, this story of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Juan Carlos Onetti’s A Brief Life
A Brief Life is the first major novel by Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–94), although the work is fourth in chronological order when placed with his related novels. It marks a watershed in the Uruguay-born Onetti’s career as well as in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ivo Andrić’s The Bridge on the Drina
The Bridge on the Drina is the novel that brought international acclaim— as well as the 1961 Nobel Prize—to the Yugoslav writer Ivo Andrić (1892–1975). Written during World War II, this short novel is the best expression of Andric´’s singular… Read More ›
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Analysis of Natsume Sōseki’s Botchan
Botchan is one of the best-loved novels in Japan and a true comic masterpiece. Written at the beginning of the 20th century by Natsume Sōseki (1867–1916), the novel tells the story of a gauche middle school teacher. Botchan, or “little… Read More ›
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Analysis of Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting
Set in postwar Czechoslovakia in the aftermath of the Stalinist purges of World War II, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is “a novel in the form of variations” that explores how totalitarianism affects individual and collective, national and personal,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Juan Carlos Onetti’s The Body Snatchers
The Body Snatchers is arguably the masterwork of Uruguay-born Juan Carlos Onetti (1909–94), a distinction that ranks it above many other great novels. It was written at the margins of the so-called Latin American Boom— a period of intense literary… Read More ›
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Analysis of Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl
Sadeq Hedayat (1903–51) was for many decades the best-known modern prose writer in Persian, the language of a country whose purified literary lexicon and restrictive linguistic formalism he sought to violate by introducing crude idioms and colloquial phrases. He has… Read More ›
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Analysis of José Saramago’s Blindness
José Saramago (1922–2010 ), one of Portugal’s most famous writers, was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1988. His novel Blindness is considered one of his most outstanding literary achievements. A speculative parable reminiscent of Albert Camus’s The Plague,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Joseph Zobel’s Black Shack Alley
Black Shack Alley is Keith Q. Warner’s English translation of the classic French novel La Rue Cases-Nègres by Joseph Zobel (1915–2006). The title of Zobel’s work means “Breaking Negroes [Slaves] Street.” Black Shack Alley is an autobiographical text that evolves… Read More ›
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Analysis of Masuji Ibuse’s Black Rain
Black Rain is one of the most powerful works of literature in any language dealing with the aftermath of a nuclear catastrophe. Comparable, at least on the surface, with American author John Hersey’s Hiroshima (1946), Black Rain by Japanese author… Read More ›
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Analysis of Amos Oz’s Black Box
Written by Israeli writer Amos Oz (1939–2018), Black Box appeared in Hebrew under the title Kufsah Shehorah in 1987. The novel immediately climbed to the top of the best-seller lists in Israel, breaking previously recorded book sales. It was translated… Read More ›
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