Jonathan Widell > Recent Status Updates

Just provocative enough not to be anything more than a product to be consumed while traveling to another city. A new thought, a new word here and there to keep one turning the pages. Tales of successful people make me feel good. So what if they have problems? Who doesn't?

There are a lot of dead bodies in the book but the question that is repeated is: what happens to the souls? In Chapter 2, the narration shifts to one of those souls. Even if the story is based on historical events, the narration is dreamlike, the goriness is seen through a mist. Chapter 3 refers to a play that may never be performed. The italicized passages throughout the book may be jumps to the literary viewpoint.

Seems like a random collection of love letters but their author's knowledge about different cultures and about the etymologies of such words as God and man, which he takes back to Sanskrit, makes the reader anticipate something more. We'll see.

I would probably read this book in one sitting if I had no other things to do. It is so easy to read that one wonders if one is learning anything that one did not already know.

An astounding book. At this point, I would be wary of the stuff he says about Badiou. No matter how much more coherent Badiou seems to be in comparison to Zizek, Badiou 's apparent coherence is always permeated by nothingness, which can erupt at any point. Badiou's view captures the "Real" in the sense of being full and empty at the same time. Thus, he avoids relegating God to a quilting point to paper over the void.

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This is more like it. Teresa talks sincerely though discreetly about her ecstasies and mortifications. The "plot" of visiting one mansion at a time keeps her otherwise rambling account together quite well. Most charming are her momentary lapses, the moments when she admits she can't recall what she was saying because she got carried away by the memory of her rapturous experiences.

The book is getting a lot (!) better towards the end once the author lets go of her sneering attacks against science and organized religion of her day and focuses on what she perceives to be the core of religion, notably Christianity (though she still sneers at "our Christian priests and ministers"). Many of the things she says about hell fire etc. have been adopted even in mainstream Christianity iof our day.

The book is getting a lot (!) better towards the end once the author lets go of her sneering attacks against science and organized religion of her day and focuses on what she perceives to be the core of religion, notably Christianity (though she still sneers at "our Christian priests and ministers"). Many of the things she says about hell fire etc. have been adopted even in mainstream Christianity in our day.

I am halfway through the book. Jones has taken all this time to convince the reader that he is going to psychoanalyze Hamlet. How do you do that to a literary character? Jones just says that it is common sense to think that Hamlet is alive. It is clear that history is in the making here. This book must have paved the way for Lacan to be adopted in literature departments in the US while thrown out of everywhere else.

I am halfway through the book. Jones has taken all this time to convince the reader that he is going to psychoanalyze Hamlet. How do you do that to a literary character? Jones just says that it is common sense to think that Hamlet is a alive. It is clear that history is in the making here. This book must have paved the way for Lacan to be adopted in literature departments in the US while thrown out elsewhere.

Getting halfway through this book of exorbitant length and cannot help wondering how hard it would it have been to make it shorter.

I think this novel is unusual in the sense that, usually, the plot is in the foreground and everything else in the background. A lesser novelist would dispense with the plot to foreground everything else that is at place in the novel but Greene can develop an elaborate plot just to make it disappear by that magic of his. The plot is a crutch for the characters' pseudo-activity: "Life always repeated the same pattern.

I think this novel is unusual in the sense that, usually, the plot is in the foreground and everything else in the background. A lesser novelist would dispense with the plot to foreground everything else that is at place in the novel but Greene can develop an elaborate plot just to make it disappear by that magic of his. The plot becomes a crutch for that desperate pseudo-activity of the characters.

I think this novel is unusually in the sense that usually, the plot is in the foreground and everything else in the background. A lesser novelist would dispense with the plot to foreground everything else that is at place in the novel but Greene can develop an elaborate plot just to make it disappear by that magic of his. The plot comes across as a crutch for that desperate pseudo-activity of the characters.