// rohitsrealm.com / archive / category / literature
I'm going back to school on Monday. I've been dreading this day and thought all week. The knowledge of having to go back to school: back to the lack of sleep, to the horrible cooking, eating out everyday BECAUSE of horrible cooking, the hate for life, the loss of weight, the...too much to talk about.
Below are my first impressions for my classes this semester.
I was reading Eugene Onegin
by Alexander Pushkin for my English class today, and first of all, I would like to say that this is truly an awesome undertaking by the author. The entire novel is in verse, that actually rhymes and stuff! Thinking about it further, I realized that it rhymes when I'm reading it in English and has a flow, much like other poems. But it wasn't written in English! Thus, whoever translated it from Russian even emulated Pushkin's rhyming verse. Pretty awesome. I haven't been this impressed with a novel since reading The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner. Anyway, check out a this excerpt:
I just started reading Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert for my Slavic 133 class, and I thought I'd share what I got from reading the first part, because it seems as though something that one would post in an (online) journal.
Nearly one year after first diving into Fyodor Dostoevsky's last, longest, and perhaps greatest novel—The Brothers Karamazov—I finally finished it today. Though an unquestionably long read that takes quite a lot of motivation to get into (then again, what Russian novel does not?), I would venture that it is simultaneously one of the most prolific that I have had the opportunity to complete.
This might very well be the final evidence one needs to confirm that I have, in fact, totally lost my mind, but last weekend I had a long nightmare about Gulliver's Travels that actually caused me to wake up sweating. The catch: I've never even read Gulliver's Travels.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.
Though Dickens may have been writing about the French Revolution when he opened his much-exalted A Tale of Two Cities, his proverbial words could just as easily apply to a very different revolution: the RSS revolution, and its still nascent descendant, Atom.
Though I did almost meet my soulmate last night coming home from Omaha, I would argue that my greatest accomplishment of the trip had to be finding the time to finish up a book that had been on my reading list since March: L'Âge de Raison (The Age of Reason, in American), the first novel in Jean-Paul Sartre's famed trilogy Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom). Though often extremely weighty (sometimes unbearably so), the book went by for me rather quickly (I finished half of it on the flight to Omaha, and the other half waiting at the airport to return), and moreover, left me disquieted in a way that only truly despondent novels (and authors) can.
Considering my predilection for reading (and writing) about such dour and oppressive subjects as Russian literature, William Faulkner, and existentialism, it may come as no uncertain surprise to many readers that I simultaneously possess a consummate, almost inexplicable affinity towards Magic Realism. And yet, since my earliest exposure to the genre with El Coronel No Tiene Quien Le Escriba in high school—incidentally in the original Spanish—and later, Cien Años de Soledad in college (this was in English translation), both by famed Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, I have been fascinated by the manner in which stories in this genre combine both the intensely real and the utterly fantastic to weave a truly hypnotic tale of human existence. As such, one can imagine the excitement with which I picked up Haruki Murakami's (one of the few contemporary authors I read—thanks nrt for the introduction) latest book, After Dark, after reading a review in the Economist, and only a few weeks after its U.S. release.
About a month ago, I wrote an entry about Schrödinger's Cat (among other things) in which I argued that the people who do end up making especially prescient observations distinguish themselves in a way that we should allow people to be distinguished.
No where is that statement more relevant than in discussing George Orwell's (the nom de plume of Eric Blair) prophetic dystopian vision of totalitarianism: 1984.
