Morgan > Recent Status Updates

Rushing through just to get to the end

I'm getting right sick of Zweig. On a micro level, this book is insufferably romantic, utopian, and every Real Life Person becomes some particular Archetype (of kindness, sensitivity, cosmopolitanism etc). Zweig is a fanboy! This is surely NOT real life. It's Zweig little fantasy.

On a macro level, I can't really respect Zweig as a man. Stuck in his ways, he failed DISASTROUSLY to see the writing on the wall.

Oh hod WWI is about to start and I’m scared

Ok the worst part about this book is how Zweig always speaks in superlatives. He’s always saying “everyone” believed this, or things “always” happened, or “never” happened a certain way. That cannot be reality, he just had blinders on.

Sometimes Zweig is saccharine, overly romantic and prone to cliches. Panama Canal, the joining of two oceans! Looking into the eyes of someone who looked into Goethe’s eyes once!

Sometimes Zweig allows his nostalgia to override everything else and he gets cheesy, corny, overly romantic in a Hallmark-movie like way about how “good it was back home.” It’s not original. It’s just overwrought. The chapter about talking to an old lady who as a baby was held by Goethe is similar.

I’m just now seeing the real genius of this memoir. Yes, it’s a chronicle of a bygone world. Yes, it has a sad and elegiac character. But the growing up! The Bildungsroman aspect of it, the individual voice of its author coming into his own, regardless of the time and the place but deeply enmeshed in it nonetheless, is the hidden crown of this book. I love Zweig’s voice.

Prep for upcoming theater performance

Def some magical realism going on

Roaming the streets of San Francisco getting no closer to solving the mystery.

I can’t keep track of all the weird one-off characters.

They just cut off Hippolyte’s leg. I’m gonna have to DNF this book for the medical trauma content. Didn’t know this was a trigger of mine.

Will read a summary and maybe the ending and that’s it.

Ok so now Emma’s been seduced by a rake.

Chapter 5

Part 2

Mandatory readying according to VN. A slow start focusing on Charles - why did Flaubert do that? It doesn’t really suck you in.

Things are heating up. What will become of Sandy?

This is gonna be a funny book.

Ultima Thule? Alders, mauve, “when I think of those I love…”(this book) echoing “whenever I start thinking of my love for a person… (Speak, Memory), and “process at work behind commonplace reality” and the “secret arranger of chance events” echoing all of Nabokov.

He’s so obviously influenced by VN, but I only see where he falls short. Maybe this isn’t his best book.

Is this guy consciously aping Nabokov? He’s doing a bad job of it.