Home
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 940
Reading Vasily Aksyonov's "The Burn" - which places it's comic heroes in a dystopian society (early 70's Russia), - a relentless drunken stream-of-consciousness tirade that pits the narrator - and his American friend "Patrick Thunderjet" - against the State, the World, and recalls me to reread "The Master and Margarita".
I will come back to "The Burn" in another review, I promise.
Now this is a book that I actively proselytize, along with "Confederacy of Dunces", "Lolita", and "The Discovery of New Spain", Herodotus, a few dozen others, that I place joyfully in another's hands to have them read and discuss, only to discover the book again not a day later in a thrift shop or curbside library.
So goes literacy.
In any event, while looking for it online I came across this translation:
Online Translation: https://www.weblitera.com/book/?id=205&lng=1
Which I took a few hours to reread. I'm not certain this is a translation by either Mira Ginsberg or Michael Glenny, but - aside from typos, this was not so bad. And yet again I found myself - after the Ball - both laughing and crying on the same page, the circumstance, characters, the details - forgotten, or perhaps never in the editions I recalled.
Anyways, a joy once again.
The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 983
n. a wistful omen of the first sign of autumn—a subtle coolness in the shadows, a rustling of dead leaves abandoned on the sidewalk, or a long skein of geese sweeping over your head like the second hand of a clock.
n. a friendship that can lie dormant for years only to pick right back up instantly, as if no time had passed since you last saw each other.
Zuni Fetishes - Frank Hamilton Cushing
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Books
- Hits: 819
Another first person anthropology, basically confirming everything I read in Bruhl-Levy. Not a bad read, short, more noteworthy for the author than the book, though.
White Noise & A Catastrophic Event
- Details
- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Blog
- Hits: 682
I mean, barely a month out on Netflix and then there's the train derailment in Ohio. And - while the book is some 40 years old (??), the movie foreshadows the - quite literal - Catastrophic Event - in Ohio - and not only are the parallels uncanny extras from the movie were actually evacuated from their homes for this. Life imitating art?
Since when - as the news has veered away from the shooting down of garbage bags, weather balloons, it's now ALL train derailments.
Sadly, all of this has been building for quite a while now and can't be in the least bit seen as a surprise, what is surprising is the inadequacy of the response and the dearth of good advice/damage control at ground level. Also extraordinarily well predicted...
Page 223 of 1089