Beyond the Letters

Nina Simone, Mr. Bojangles and all that jazz I started the review with this song because even if you are not a jazz fan you absolutely have to listen to it before you read the book (and preferably while you are doing it and immediately after you’ve finished). Otherwise you won’t be able to fully appreciate the atmosphere. This tiny novel is simply jazz age reborn, and if you have ever read Fitzgerald you certainly have an idea of how it feels to read Bourdeaut. Jazz music  can be found in every corner of this story, the characters listen to it, dance to it, and live according to the ways of jazz age – drinking, having fun, enjoying their lives while they can, even though the world around them is breaking into pieces. This book is about escapism, about sacrificing reality to happiness and common sense to feelings. When you open the first page, you immediately meet  the narrator – a nameless boy of an uncertain age . What may seem indifference to the character in fact ser...

It’s very difficult to write some quality historical prose and even more difficult to set it in a foreign country, as it demands tons of research into the subject but Dinah Jefferies seems to be very hard-working in this aspect. I had some novels that I failed to finish, as throughout the text they felt awfully off-key with the period and the culture they described, but here I knew at once that the author knows what she is writing about. The setting is colonized Ceylon (presently Sri-Lanka) at the beginning of the 20 th century . From the very beginning the reader can feel that the author is in love with this country (the fact that she willingly admits in the postface telling about her childhood year spent in Malaya very similar in culture and wildlife and her trip to Sri-Lanka while writing the book). The novel vividly describes Sri-Lankan wildlife and people touching upon several cultural milestones. Anyway Sri-Lanka is not the main topic of the novel. This book is about pre...

With Ray you never know what is real and what is imagined. This was supposed to be an autobiographical novel but Bradbury always leaves space for magic in his works, so the reader now is able to enjoy a good piece of fiction with autobiographical notes in it. “Green Shadows, White Whale” partially consists of stories reprinted from other collections, like “The Haunting of the New”, “The Beggar on O'Connell Bridge” or “Banshee” , and partially of new sketches describing the time Ray Bradbury spent in Ireland in 1953 when John Huston, a famous Hollywood director, invited him to work at the script for the screen version of Melville’s “Moby Dick” . For more than six months the White Whale has become a daily companion for the writer and a ticket to the country that he would favour for the rest of his life. “There is no figuring us,” said Finn. “We Irish are as deep as the sea and as broad. Quicksilver one moment. Clubfooted the next.” Ireland is a land of contrast an...

Our century is marked by increasing tolerance to diversity, which makes me feel very optimistic about the future, and although the problem of tolerance is still very topical and notable and I’m not sure it could ever be solved once and for all, the changes in this sphere are very visible. One thing we all need to learn is to accept and communicate with people who have certain mental conditions and here the books like “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” are highly helpful. If we compare the images of such people in modern novels and in the works of previous centuries, we can notice that the focus has obviously shifted. For instance, in Victorian age people with mental disorders were described mainly in a gloomy key and appeared to create gothic atmosphere or contrast the positive character (let’s remember the infamous wife of Mr. Rochester in “Jane Eyre” or “The Secret of Lady Audley”). This happened due to the lack of understanding of the problem and slow development...

Virginia Woolf is very difficult to write about.  She was an innovator of her time and like many modernists was very decisive in breaking all connections with the traditional form of a novel. Therefore unusual plot structure, stream of consciousness technique and excessive expressionism that are only several unconventional features of “Jacob’s room”. After an outrage of emotion, which any book of Virginia is, one longs for something more rational and systematic so I decided to present this review in several key points. The form “The march that the mind keeps beneath the windows of others is queer enough. Now distracted by brown panelling; now by a fern in a pot; here improvising a few phrases to dance with the barrel-organ; again snatching a detached gaiety from a drunken man; then altogether absorbed by words the poor shout across the street at each other (so outright, so lusty)—yet all the while having for centre, for magnet, a young man alone in his room.” Stream o...

In Bradbury’s galaxy no world  shines brighter than the fourth  planet from the sun. Composition It is rather difficult to define the genre of “The Martian Chronicles”, perhaps, the most appropriate term for it is novel in short stories. The text of the Chronicles consists of two different types of stories – the main short stories that make up the major plot line of the work and something similar to intermezzi intervening with them. The latter are short, mostly plotless, sketches, which help the author to create the necessary atmosphere and the sense of a measured time flow, sometimes to describe the culture of Mars, but more often to show the interaction of Earthlings and Martians, the changes on the planet caused by people. The stories are arranged in chronological order, describing the period from 1999 to 2026, besides, each of them contains a character, an artistic detail, an action which connects it to other stories of the collection. Nevertheless, each part c...