Beyond the Letters

It’s is difficult to evaluate a book which tells about a culture so different from your own, and it’s even more difficult to review it, but nevertheless, I decided to try. I have struggled to read Asian authors for the last two years and each time I picked a book and started reading, I had real troubles analyzing the text as the symbolism and inner meanings were indecipherable to me due to the lack of appropriate cultural background. This novel written by an American author turned out to be an encyclopedia of Chinese culture and answered a lot of questions that have previously arisen, so now I’m much more prepared to read something by a Chinese writer. Lisa See has done a profound research preparing to write this novel and I really appreciated that, for this text managed to preserve Chinese symbols and cultural peculiarities but present them in a way understandable to a western reader. “Snow Flower and the Secret Fan” gives you an insight into the life of Chinese women in...

One of the brightest representatives of British literature on the verge of 19th and 20th centuries, Forster depicted the life during fin de siecle, the transition from Victorian era to more modernised and technological 20th century. "Howards End" is an exquisitely successful description of the social issues of the time through the lives of three families - aristocratic Schlegels, bourgeois Wilcoxes and poor Basts.  "Howards End" as a novel "Howards End" crowns the first period of E.M. Foster's literary activity which means it was written by a young artist and consequently it is very idealistic in many ways. the idea this book reveals seems way too optimistic still it has the right to exist and the outer representation of this idea is perfect (I mean the style, the atmosphere and the plot of the book). Although it is not an epistolary novel, it does start with letters. Helen Schlegel writes to her sister Margaret describing her visit to How...

My first acquaintance with Thomas Hardy in four key-points The bridge between times What has stricken me most about this book is how oddly it looks among other novels written on the verge of 19th and 20th centuries. The style of Hardy, strangely enough, reminds me of Jane Austen and Bronte sisters. It seems like this book has been lost in time and was written in 1891 by mistake. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is full of long descriptions and... the characters wear their hearts on their sleeves which is so rare for the novels of the period. What also makes it feel like an earlier novel is Gothic elements in the plot (by which I mean the scene in Stonehenge and strange dreams of Angel Clare which are depicted masterly I must say, they are best-written episodes in the book in my opinion). You won't find here the profound psychological study of characters like that of Henry James or Emile Zola nor blunt erotic scenes of David Lawrence. Still it couldn't be wr...

"Far from the Madding Crowd" is one of the first novels by Hardy which makes it much more optimistic than his later works like "Tess of the D’Urbervilles" or "Jude the Obscure", still if you think that early work always means "imperfect" I can assure you that it is not the case. In fact already here the author reveals his outstanding talent and produces one of his most bright and multifaceted female characters - Bathsheba Everdene. Not quite Victorian character The name of the main character - Bathsheba - was taken from the Bible. Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of the soldiers of Kind David's army and she was "very beautiful to look upon". When King David saw her bathing he couldn't stand her beauty, though Bathsheba herself didn't know he was watching her and didn't want to seduce him, and he ordered to bring the woman to his palace so that she would share bed with him. Thus Bathsheba's beauty...

"Madame Bovary, c'est moi" (Gustave Flaubert) Very often to understand a work of literature, a real work of literature I mean, it is necessary to know the background. Often the reasons that caused the author to write his book can become a key to its understanding. Often the key is the episodes of the author's biography or his beliefs. Here the key is Flaubert himself. Before I begin speaking about the novel itself I'd like to say a few words about Flaubert's concept of "ivory tower" . Flaubert liked to say that a real writer, metaphorically speaking, should lock himself in an ivory tower, which will separate him from the vulgar and trivial world, only then will he be able to produce a real work of art. What does this mean? Ivory was always considered to be a noble material, as it is very rare and expensive and only chosen ones can afford to have things made of it. Ivory tower symbolizes the nobility of writer, his moral superiority over oth...