Category: books

Thomas Mann, Translated By John E. Woods

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Magic Mountain is hard to read—dense and slow moving, but that is part of the plot, distortion of time. Mann follows Hans Castrop, “one of life’s problem children” during his stay at a sanitarium in the Swiss Alps in the years preceding World War I. The characters who inhabit the sanitarium and the valley around it are just that, complete characters displaying every possible aspect of all the varied cultures of Europe in the early 1900’s. A good book, but it must have lost something in the translation because at times it just did not hold my attention.

Italo Clavino, Translated By William Weaver

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I just finished If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, it’s absolutely amazing. The whole idea behind it is so unique and so engrossing that it’s hard to describe the book without taking away some of it’s charm to a first time reader. Calvino’s imagination runs rampant in If on a Winter’s Night, every chapter taking the Reader in a different direction and engrossing them in a new story. Just read it.

Author

Fyodor Doestoevsky

Translator

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsk

I have heard a lot of people refer to Brothers K as author:Dostoevsky’s crowning work, and it is a great book, but I liked Crime and Punishment more.

The Brothers Karamazov is a massive book filled with Dostoevsky amazing insight into human nature. Dostoevsky uses the novel to attack everything from Utilitarianism to Christianity and all things “Russian” or at least all things “Russian” he takes issue with. Ivan, Dmitri and Alyosha are some of the most complex characters I’ve ever encountered. The three of them form a kind of id, ego and super ego of Dostoevsky’s Russian any man.

The Brothers Karamazov is a must read in Dostoevsky’s canon, and one of the best books ever written. It helps cement Dostoevsky’s place as one of the best novelist of all time. However the sheer expansiveness of the Brothers K works against it for me and I think Crime and Punishment [confusion.cc] is a better, perhaps the best, novel.

Author

Fyodor Doestoevsky

Translator

Richard Pevear

Larissa Volokhonsk

Crime and Sartre’s Age of Reason are my favorite novels. The writing is absolutely amazing, even in translation it flows effortlessly along carrying the reader slowly at first then quicker, eventually building to a fever pitch. Dostoevsky weaves a timeless tale of guilt in Crime and Punishment because he focuses not on the crime but on the criminal’s state of mind. Raskolnikov may be an anti-hero, but the reader is drawn to him and feels his suffering. Dostoevsky’s insight into the mind of Raskolnikov keeps the reader turning the page, wanting to know what he will do and think next. Crime is an amazing insight into the strange in irrational behavior of man.

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Author

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translator

Gregory Rabassa

This book won Marquez the Nobel Prize for Literature. It’s that good. It follows the rise and fall of the Buendia family and the village, Macondo, which they founded. Along the way there is incest, gypsies, insomnia, civil war and true love. Marquez magical realism shines through and somewhere along the way the reader forgets the distinction between the magical and the real. Characters pass in and out the the narative as the world around passed in and out of Mocondo. The main conflict of the book, civil war, seams to be Marquez’s comentary on the state of his homeland, Columbia.

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