Jane Austen and who? You may not be familiar with the eighteenth-century Chinese master, but if you are intrigued by adolescents striving to discover their emotional and sexual affinities in a society which aims to marry them off before they learn too much about themselves or one another, then I recommend you spend May and June reading Mansfield Park and Dream of the Red Chamber. Continue reading »
Classics Paired
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If you’ve had time during March to start reading Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood or The Group by Mary McCarthy, you will have noticed that psychology and psychiatry feature in both.
Collective ideologies like Marxism and Fascism shaped the political understanding of Isherwood’s and McCarthy’s generation; Freud, Jung and the like shaped their understanding of the mind. In characterizing a group of people, a generation, a clique, Lions and Shadows and The Group both evoke the possibility of a norm, a type, and so they raise the question, What is normal? What is healthy?
At the start of this year, I suggested you read Willa Cather’s The Song of the Lark and James Joyce’s The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, two novels which trace the development of artists in opposition to the provincial communities in which they grow up. During March and April, try two very different accounts of the artistic sensibility: Lions and Shadows by Christopher Isherwood and The Group by Mary McCarthy. These novels are about circles of friends who discover themselves through one another.
Last month, I suggested you read a pair of novels about the development of artists, The Song of the Lark by Willa Cather and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. I’m hoping you’ve read enough to start thinking about why a bird is so important in both of them.
As a lonely music student in Chicago, Thea Kronberg falls in love with a painting in the Art Institute. “She imagined that nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her….She liked even the name of it, `The Song of the Lark.’ The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl’s heavy face—”
Blog. Blah-blah-blah? Or brain log? The word implies a certain ease of posture, if not downright laziness. Like when you’re lying on a sofa reading a good book, and the supine body leaves the mind free. Relaxation can lead to some very tight, very exciting thinking. And it’s all pleasure.
From our Secret Weapons to our Festival Trips, we’ve always been pleased to recommend books we love. So it had to happen - Fifth Estate is finally getting a reading group…
I’m very pleased to welcome back to the blog Katherine Bucknell, author of What You Will and Leninsky Prospekt and a friend of Fifth Estate as far back as our launch in 2006. Continue reading »
