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Check out my reading interests and some reviews.
recent_books
Haruki Murakami: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
"Kumiko Okada has a satisfying career and comes from a wealthy family.
Toru, her husband, is a lawyer. Little mars this young Tokyo couple's
life other than the disappearance of their cat. From that minor event,
however, their life together devolves into a confusing web of intrigue.
Kumiko disappears, telling Toru not to look for her. Then a collection
of mystics, clairvoyants, and healers enter Toru's life. Reeling, he begins
to spend hours in meditation at the bottom of a dry well, becoming a healer
of sorts, until his work brings him into conflict with Kumiko's powerful
brother-in-law. A conflict cast in moral terms, with Kumiko's soul in
the balance. This very long journey is much less magical than simply strained."
(© Reed Business Information, Inc., 1997)
Murakami, Haruki (2000): Mister Aufziehvogel. [764 pages]
Oscar Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray
"Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul
for eternal youth and beauty is one of his most popular works. Written
in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams
and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration
caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was
attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence, and a few years later
the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in
the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted
in his imprisonment. Of the book's value as autobiography, Wilde noted
in a letter, 'Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the
world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps.'
" (© by amazon.com)
Wilde, Oscar (1994): The Picture of Dorian Gray. [256 pages]
Henry Miller: Tropic of Capricorn
"A riotous and explosive mixture of joys and frustrations, Tropic
of Capricorn chronicles Miller's early life in New York, from his repressive
Brooklyn childhood spent amongst 'a galaxy of screwballs' to frantic,
hilarious years of dead-end jobs and innumerable erotic adventures. Irreverent
and ironic, Tropic of Capricorn is both a comic portrait of the irrepressible
Miller himself and a scathing attack on respectable America, the very
foundations of which he hoped to shatter. Publication of Tropic of Capricorn
and its sister-volume Tropic of Cancer in Paris in the 1930s was hailed
by Samuel Beckett as 'a momentous event in the history of modern writing'.
The books were subsequently banned in the UK and the USA for nearly thirty
years." (© by amazon.co.uk)
Miller, Henry (2002): Wendekreis des Steinbocks. [336 pages]
Haruki Murakami: A Wild Sheep Chase
"His life was like his recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But
an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl
whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold,
a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor and
a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep,
that may or may not be running the world, and eth upshot is another singular
masterpiece from Japan's finest novelist." (© by randomhouse.co.uk)
Murakami, Haruki (2000): A Wild Sheep Chase. [304 pages]
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Sven
Eppert | |
2005-12-04
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