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This is the New Weird version of Ivan’s Nightmare I swear to God

Sadly wholly amoral man with a taste for violence and couture pondering over the fabric of the universe WILL win me over. Every single time.

The fact Bernhard put my exact thought processes into words is rather unsettling

The identity horror and the overall atmosphere is excellent but the truly insane element of this book is that we have the proof that Titus placed in Steerpike’s place would have behaved exactly like Steerpike.

Esther is Lizzie from Our Mutual Friend is Agnes from David Copperfield but unlike those two she has a first person pov and I fear Dickens trying to write from the pov of a woman is the great downfall of this novel (which is still great, because Dickens was a terrific storyteller and writer, but sadly suffers from severe angelic-woman syndrome)

When Esther asks herself whether it would have been better for everyone had she died at birth I wished I could tell her she was right

Sometimes you just need to read a book about a man coming back from the dead and building a golem out of cadaver body parts to use him as a proxy to chase his once-promised fiancée into a floating mechanical underworld propelled by the swinging of a pendulum.

There is something always so delectably silly and accidentally comical about xix century medical notions

I have to say I must join the chorus wondering about Charlotte Brontë’s deeply baffling tastes in men

The book is stunning visually but I cannot understand how the author seemingly forcefully removed the queer subtext from several Peake’s characters AND went so far as to say (completely unsupported by documentary proof) that Peake would have voted for the Tories had he been interested in politics where we have evidence of close collaborations with artists affiliated with the British Left

Side note in case this book ever gets reprinted (I bought a copy secondhand): I think it being the biography of an author/painter/poet it could (read: should) very well do without the picture his father (an English missionary in China during the first half of the xx century) took of a severed head of a completely unrelated Chinese man🫶.

Kinda crazy how you can start a random book, immediately feel the influences it had on 500 other novels and feel validated by a quick google search. Quite literally the gang’s all here

I think the average credibility of this book can be summarized by Malaparte saying Sartre in 1947 was out of fashion and that Pirandello was staunchly antifascist

Book gifted by a friend. Weird experience so far. Terrifically written but content-wise it really does feel like going to an house party and finding yourself stuck in a situation with the averagest white man who believes himself to hold the secrets of civilization in his hands. Beautiful prose and nothingcontent

Book that reminds me for the umpteenth time that yes I do love fantasy, but US authors are a plague for the genre (for any genre in truth)