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wow looks like i haven't posted here since quitting nausea (which totally sucks). I've read several books since then: pnin and pale fire (by vladimir nabokov), decline and fall (waugh), the cold war (martin walker), mansfield park (austen), jekyll and hyde (stevenson), lies inc. (dick), the tempest, alice/through the looking glass (carroll/dodgson), and i'm sure i forgot to mention some others.
i've reread the boxman and hamlet.
the boxman is kobo abe's eliptical novel about men who chose to live as anonymous hermits in cardboard boxes. narrated by one such anonymous boxman (so he claims), a former photographer who is concerned about a mysterious scheming doctor/nurse duo trying to bribe him to destroy his box. this being an abe novel not many details are resolved (indeed, most end more murky and confused than at the start), and if you're looking for a kick-butt plot you should look elsewhere (what can one hope from a story involving a fraudulent-doctor trying to bribe a vagrant to throw away his home). i don't think this difficulty is due to laziness or craziness on abe's part though, but because of his constant attempt to move the line between what "actually happens", (the real) and what the boxman is merely conjecturing on the inner walls of his sanctum (the fake), and you can be sure any time something seems to be happening, abe will find some new way to undermine it's reality pretty soon. i'll be reading this again in a couple years.
everyone knows about hamlet, there's so much going on with this play that i won't bother covering it in a post, but one thing about it i noticed this last reading. there was an edition which had some review essay about hamlet's indecision and reading some rumination into the play on reaction versus thought (hamlet to ghost:
Haste me to know't, that I, with wings as swift
As meditation or the thoughts of love,
May sweep to my revenge.)
and while i found this explanation of hamlet's character compelling on my second read, i'm a bit ambivalent after my most recent (third) reading of the play, in which i notice that hamlet, generally so wimpy and wordy, in fact does thoughtlessly and ruthlessly murder the king at only the middle of the play (of course it turns out he gets the wrong guy), which would seem to at least wrinkle the argument some.
any thoughts on this, you resident shakespeare experts? of course i plan to keep going back to the play pretty often. it's not something to be digested in a mere three readings.
Last edited by linespalsy; 09-14-06 at 10:27 PM.