New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen

The Longing for Love:
Marie Grubbe by Jens Peter Jacobsen

In the nineteenth century the discoveries of Charles Darwin not only revolutionised science and introduced the idea of evolution into human thinking, they also changed literature inspiring authors to a new approach to fiction writing. One of the first in Northern Europe to break with Romantic narrative tradition and to begin telling stories in a naturalistic style that showed man as a beast driven by instincts and urges was Danish botanist and writer Jens Peter Jacobsen (»»» read my author’s portrait). After his successful literary debut with a short story, he published in 1876 the historical novel Marie Grubbe. A Lady of the Seventeenth Century (Fru Marie Grubbe. Interieurer fra det syttende Aarhundrede). It is loosely based on the true story of a Danish noblewoman who died in 1718.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: The Adventure of the Black Lady by Aphra Behn

A Young Woman’s Flight:
The Adventure of the Black Lady by Aphra Behn

The English prose novel as we know it today is an amazingly recent invention. Its rise began only in the seventeenth century thanks to writers like Daniel Defoe (c.1660-1731), Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)… and Aphra Behn (1640-1689) whose work was rediscovered only in the early twentieth century (»»» read my author’s portrait). Although in her time Aphra Behn was first of all a renowned playwright, she also wrote several novels in her later years. By modern standards, however, these novels are hardly more than novelettes or even short stories. One of these little known prose works from the pen of the first Englishwoman who was able make her living as a writer is The Adventure of the Black Lady first published in 1684. It’s the story of a young woman called Bellamora who has come from Hampshire to Covent Garden in the hope to find refuge and help with a cousin of hers.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

* * * * * 

This review is a contribution to
(images linked to my reading lists):

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot

Health and Social Gradient:
Status Syndrome by Michael Marmot

It’s a generally known fact that poverty makes sick, but in our modern Western world people usually don’t fight for mere survival every day and poverty doesn’t equal penury any longer. In Austria, for instance, the net of social security is so densely-knit that everybody can get health care – unless for one reason or another, a person prefers to go underground and therefore doesn’t appear in the system. Nonetheless, data show that those with by comparison fewer material resources, less high education and lower standing have poorer health than those who are better off in these aspects. In his book The Status Syndrome. How Your Place on the Social Gradient Directly Affects Your Health first published in 2004 epidemiologist and public health expert Michael Marmot summarises the results of over thirty years of research and draws his conclusions with regard to what is needed to close the health gap.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana’s Kalliopeion)

Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda

A Suffocating Village:
Death in Spring by Mercè Rodoreda

Less than a year ago I reviewed a novel by Catalan author Mercè Rodoreda (1908-1983) who is much celebrated in her country but virtually unknown elsewhere. I was so impressed by the book that I felt like reading also others of her works and from the two novels published posthumously, both of them unfinished, I eventually picked the one available in English translation, namely Death in Spring or in the original Catalan La mort i la primavera, i.e. Death and Spring. At first the title seems a bit strange, if not contradictory because it links death with nature’s rebirth after winter, but given that the novel flows over with powerful as well as poetical symbols and metaphors of life and death it’s quite appropriate. It’s a complex and well-constructed story about society that reminds me a lot of the works of Franz Kafka although it’s different in style.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

related reviews on Edith's Miscellany:
»»» In Diamond Square by Mercè Rodoreda

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: The Famished Road by Ben Okri

A Child’s View of Africa in the 1960s:
The Famished Road by Ben Okri 

It was in autumn 2016 when one of those e-mails offering the free copy of a book for review that I regularly receive unasked for and that I use to delete without even reading attracted my attention. The last hardly ever happens, but for some reason that I can’t remember I had a closer look at the message concerning The Famished Road by Ben Okri. The story sounded interesting and just right for me, especially because it was the new edition of a novel first published twenty-five years ago in 1991, thus not an entirely new work. Without giving it a second thought, I signed on to Netgalley and downloaded the book. Now, months later, I finally found the time to read this award-winning novel from the pen of an African writer now living in London, U.K., that deals with the political turmoil and confusion following the independence of an African country, probably Nigeria, from a boy’s magical-realistic point of view. 

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Edith's Lagraziana: Gustav Mahler by Alma Mahler-Werfel

The Unpopular Genius: Gustav Mahler by Alma Mahler-Werfel

As beautiful, highly educated and endowed for the arts as Alma Mahler-Werfel (1879-1964) was, she could have achieved a lot in the world, but during most of her life she remained in the shadows of her famous husbands and lovers. She had the bad luck to have been born at a time, when women only made their first tentative steps to claim their rights and their own place in society. Although her family and the circles that they frequented were among the most liberal of the fin de siècle, young and shy Alma quite naturally obeyed the command of her much older first husband Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) to give up for good all her own musical ambitions and activities. In 1939, when the Nazi regime defamed his work because he had been a Jew converted to Protestantism and refused him his place in the world of music, she brought out her very personal tribute to him under the title Gustav Mahler. Memories and Letters.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach

A Widower’s Grief:
Bruges-la-morte by Georges Rodenbach

Women or men who need to come to terms with the loss of a loved one are popular figures in literature. Since readers like happy endings, the grieving often find new joy, maybe even new love by the end of the story and at first this also seems to be the case in the late nineteenth-century novel Bruges-la-morte by almost forgotten Belgian journalist, poet and novelist Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898). But he was obsessed with death and so it’s little wonder that his symbolist chef-d'œuvre first published in 1892 is a thoroughly gloomy piece of prose poetry, a short Gothic novel in the vein of his contemporary Oscar Wilde. The book focuses on the melancholy scene of dead or moribund Bruges in Belgium at least as much as on the woebegone protagonist who has chosen the city to indulge in his infinite sorrow after the death of his adored wife and in keeping her memory alive.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō by Yasuko Claremont

An Author’s Fictionalised Experiences:
The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō by Yasuko Claremont

All his life Gustave Flaubert claimed that only the story counted and that its author should disappear without trace behind it, but however passionately a writer may assure that her or his work has nothing whatsoever to do with her or his life, such complete objectivity is an illusion. It’s impossible to achieve because nobody’s soul is an empty slate. Every word that a person jots down, be it on the spur of the moment or after long thought, be it in fiction or non-fiction, inevitably mirrors past experiences, education and views. To truly understand a literary work it can therefore be helpful to know the biography of its author, notably when the writings are complex or full of symbolism. In her critical study The Novels of Ōe Kenzaburō Yasuko Claremont from the University of Sydney analyses the literary oeuvre that the recipient of the 1994 Nobel Prize in literature produced between 1957 through 2006 and links it with important events in the Japanese author’s private life beginning in his childhood. 

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Vita Brevis by Jostein Gaarder

Saint Augustine and His Abandoned Concubine:
Vita Brevis by Jostein Gaarder

During much of European history men shaped the world of things and thought as they believed right and passed over women in silence, if they didn’t hold them in contempt. Highly revered Fathers of the Christian Church like Saint Augustine of Hippo Regius further institutionalised this contempt of women… and of earthly pleasures altogether as shows his autobiography titled Confessiones. In this theological key text he admits that before his conversion to Christianity in 385 he was a man who tasted life to the full. For over ten years he lived with a concubine (probably law forbade a formal marriage) and had a son with her, but in retrospect he regrets this sinful and immoral relationship because it kept him from true love of God. In Vita Brevis. A Letter to Saint Augustine (also translated into English as The Same Flower) the Norwegian writer, philosopher and theologian Jostein Gaarder gave this abandoned woman a voice.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: The Professor by Charlotte Brontë

To read the first work of a much adored writer can be either a revelation or more likely a deception, sometimes even a big one because not many succeed in producing outstanding literature already in the very first try. Writing like any other occupation needs practice. And experience of life usually isn’t a disadvantage, either. Quite a lot of the great men and women of literature that we know today saw their first novels (poems, short stories,…) rejected by publishers, often by more than just one, as show their biographies. In the Victorian age this wasn’t any different from today. Charlotte Brontë, for instance, never saw her first novel in print. The Professor was first published under her pen name Currer Bell in 1857, i.e. only two years after her premature death, and to this date it’s less widely read than her masterpieces Jane Eyre and Villette or even Shirley.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee

A History of the Book Trade:
The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee 

However much we love reading, we seldom think about the book trade in general or about bookshops in particular. We take both for granted until something unexpected happens: the one-man bookshop around the corner that has been there ever since you can think closes because sales have constantly gone down and costs up; a small local publishing house files bankruptcy because it can no longer compete with transnational media companies swamping the market with cheap books; the middle-aged writer whose career you’ve been following with interest and something bordering on awe for many years sells hot dogs in the street because literary magazines don’t pay for short stories and revenues from her books are low thanks to pirated copies multiplying like rabbits on the internet. But none of this is new. The book trade has always been tough for everybody involved as shows The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop by Lewis Buzbee.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: The Jib Door by Marlen Haushofer

When a Woman Loves a Man:
The Jib Door by Marlen Haushofer 

It’s a well-known truth that love has the potential to make blind for anything unpleasant involved and at all times writers gladly took up the theme to dwell on the tangle and the suffering that results from it. In the history of literature there are scores of novels – all-time classics and probably many more forgotten ones – surrounding ill-matched couples whose relationships are doomed from the start however much they try to bridge the factual, emotional, social or psychological divide. The Jib Door by Marlen Haushofer is an impressive, though often overlooked example of an Austrian novel dealing with passionate love leading into a marriage that is based on the desperate longing to escape loneliness in a “normal” life with a husband and self-denial. First published in 1957, the primarily male critics of the time showed all but enthusiasm for the book because they had neither an interest in nor an understanding for what might be called the female condition in a patriarchal society.

read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Ravel. A Novel by Jean Echenoz

The Decomposition of a Musical Brain:
Ravel. A Novel by Jean Echenoz

There are melodies so unique that it’s enough to hear their first notes to know what is coming. Without doubt the Boléro by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) is such a memorable piece of music. Although it’s a classical orchestra tune and not actually new – it premiered as a ballet in November 1928 –, virtually everybody knows it at least partly; most people will even remember the name of its French composer notwithstanding that they may never have heard any other work of his. After all, Ravel was celebrated already during his lifetime and his fame hasn’t faded since his tragic death following the desperate attempt to stop or even reverse his mental decline with brain surgery. But what kind of a man was Maurice Ravel apart from his compositions? In his short critically acclaimed biographical novel Ravel, which first appeared early in 2006, the French author Jean Echenoz evokes the last decade in the life of the musical genius starting with his 1928 grand tour of America.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict

The Variety of Standards of Human Behaviour:
Patterns of Culture by Ruth Benedict

Confronted with other cultures or just life-styles we all tend to be rather judgemental classifying the one as primitive, the other as aggressive, yet another (usually our own) as civilised, and so forth. Moreover, we use to think in the categories of good and evil like we who were born into an environment marked by Christian-European customs and values have been taught from early childhood. However, what seems perfectly normal behaviour to us may look completely absurd or even immoral in the eyes of a person socialised in a different culture... and vice versa. For many centuries Westerners – almost as a rule – looked down on other cultures. Not even scientists exploring all corners of the world were free of this arrogance. It is thanks to anthropologists like Ruth Benedict (1887-1948) and her likes that today we seek a wider and less biased picture. In her 1934 book Patterns of Culture she brought the then relatively new approach to the attention of the public.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New On LaGraziana's Kalliopeion: By the Open Sea by August Strindberg

Multi-talented and restless as he was, August Strindberg (1849-1912) never limited himself to only one trade. In his life he was active as painter, photographer, natural scientist, and sinologist, but his lasting worldwide fame is based on his writing that was too controversial in his own country – Sweden – to earn him one of the early Nobel Prizes in Literature as many expected abroad at the time. Today the author is best known for his more than 60 plays of which a considerable number keeps being performed regularly on stages around the globe. And yet, they are only part of a much larger and more versatile œuvre. August Strindberg also wrote poems, essays, autobiographical works, narrations… and last but not least, ten novels that were mostly acclaimed by critics outside Sweden. One of these novels is By the Open Sea that first appeared in print in 1890.

Read more » (external link to Lagraziana's Kalliopeion)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Bombay Anna by Susan Morgan

Nobody will deny that Anna Harriette Leonowens (1831-1915) was an impressive woman who led an extraordinary life for a woman in the Victorian Age. Nonetheless, nobody would still remember her, hadn’t her memoirs gotten into the hands of a Presbyterian missionary called Margaret Landon who wrote the biography of the English governess at the Royal Court of Siam in the 1860s. Anna and the King of Siam (»»» read my review on Edith’s Miscellany) quickly became a best-seller in 1944 and has been adapted for the stage as well as for the screen many times since. But how much of this story is true? In her biography Bombay Anna released in 2008 American scholar Susan Morgan ventures at telling The Real Story and Remarkable Adventures of The King and I Governess.

Read more (external link) »

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Constantinople by Roger Crowley

With thousands of refugees streaming to Europe along with (mostly illegal) immigrants and with terrorism being a futile though popular kind of “battle” preferably used by those who know nothing but violence to make their point, there is much talk about the clash of cultures. The most obvious tensions certainly are between the Christian and the Islamic world, but they didn’t just arise out of the blue. In fact, they date back a very long time and to understand them properly it is essential to know their historical as well as socio-political background. Undoubtedly, one of the key events in Muslim-Christian relations is the end of Christian Byzantium. In his book Constantinople. The Last Great Siege 1453 English writer Roger Crowley paints a vivid picture of the last weeks of the glorious capital of what remained of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire.

Read more » (external link)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán

As I already remarked two years ago, when I wrote a biography of Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921)  (»»» read her author’s portrait here), the important Spanish author unlike her male counterparts from English-speaking countries and France began to fall into oblivion rather soon after she gained considerable fame for her work. Several of her books have been translated into English. Two of them are her most famous novel The House of Ulloa from 1886, which has been reissued in English translation only in 2013, and its often overlooked sequel Mother Nature from 1887. As an example of Spanish Naturalist writing above all the first deserves a closer look.

Read more » (external link)

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: Romain Rolland by Stefan Zweig

The Great War of 1914-18 had been raging in Europe and other parts of the world for over a year, when in December 1915 the little known French writer Romain Rolland was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “as a tribute to the lofty idealism of his literary production and to the sympathy and love of truth with which he has described different types of human beings”. In reality, he may have been chosen because in his work he advocated peace and stood up against warmongers in his own as well as other countries. Just a few years later, in 1921, the by then already renowned Austrian writer Stefan Zweig (1881-1942) portrayed the Nobel Prize laureate who was also his friend in the book Romain Rolland. The Man and His Work. But the biography isn’t a usual one because Stefan Zweig focuses on the artistic mission or rather vocation that his gifted friend felt in him from an early age and that he was determined to live although it meant sacrifice and even exile for a while.

Read more (external link) »

Related posts:

»»» Book Review: Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman by Stefan Zweig

»»» Confession of an Infatuation: Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig (book review on Lagraziana’s Kalliopeion)

»»» Austrians & Their Writings

New on Lagraziana's Kalliopeion: A Woman’s Story by Annie Ernaux

There will be very few who deny that the mother has a very special place in the heart of a person and that when she dies, it uses to be a particularly painful loss in most cases even if she has been suffering for a long time. It means the irrevocable end of an era – of “childhood” in a wide sense – since even the last remaining bond is cut and we can no longer submit like a child to her loving care if we feel like it. After the death of her mother, the renowned French author of autobiographical prose Annie Ernaux (born 1940) set out to trace the course of life of the woman who brought her into life and raised her. The result is A Woman’s Story first published in 1989, a touching literary portrait of a strong and powerful woman who was more than just the author’s mother.

Read more (external link) »

related content on this blog:
»»» Book Review: A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux