Books of 1916: E.F. Benson Edition Freaks of Mayfair by E.F. Benson E.F. Benson is one of the most reliable writers. He always serves up something tasty. Freaks of Mayfair is not a novel but a series of comic sketches of the kinds of “freaks” who lived in Mayfair, an area of London that I know m...
Books of 1916: Part Two The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka Since childhood I’ve been familiar with the plot of this short novel; people talk about it all the time because it’s so compelling. I even had the first sentence memorized thanks to my older brother. Reciting it was a warm-up exercise in s...
I'm a little late with my reviews of the books of 1915! Then again, what's really the difference between a century, and a century and ten weeks? The Song of The Lark by Willa Cather I’m going to go out on a limb and say this was the best novel of 1915. When I told my brother I was reading T...
The first of Richardson's novels in the extensive Pilgrimage sequence. The first book whose style was termed "stream-of-consciousness" I found this an awful slog. The sense of interior life is there, but it doesn't read as a compelling life. I might continue with Backwater, volume 2 to give Richards...
The "novels" grow shorter, and I believe this is the last one to have been separately published. In this segment, Miriam moves to an apartment, sharing it with one Miss Holland, whose first name we do not learn until the very last pages; that is in fact a fairly clever way to convey Miriam's distant...
Chapter 1 opens as Miriam attends a lecture on socialism. She walks home meditating on her own attraction to and roots in aristocracy (triggered by being in the West End). She has a double nature from her family history: her mother's family was country gentry, loud, boisterous and flirtatious. Her f...
This episode in the series is chiefly concerned with Miriam's relationship with a Russian Jew named Michael Shatov, who meets her at her boarding house. Together they go to the British Museum so he can introduce her to Russian literature, and they attend lectures on metphysics. Eventually they disco...
This is a relatively short entry in the string of novels (or, as they later became, chapters) in Richardson's Pilgrimage. In it, the chief source of interest is the fact that Miriam's landlady, Mrs. Bailey, changes from providing lodgings to running a boarding house. This means that the residents ea...
I read this in the mid-90s, but it is indicative how difficult I find Richardson's style that I remembered little or nothing of it. Indeed, it's the passing moment, the visualization and accumulation of the detail that is everything, and the plot is slight to nonexistent. Nonetheless, I will endeavo...
[These notes were made in 1992:]. Book 3 of Pilgrimage. Miriam becomes a governess in the luxurious home of the monied Corries. Here she finds the kind of comfortable life - a life full of gleaming, polished surfaces - she has always felt herself entitled to. Yet she is aware that she is there on...
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