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Raskolnikov

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Posts posted by Raskolnikov

  1. Once upon a time there was a humdrum story...

    There is a better kind of start for a book. But it's not easy for writters to find the perfect fit for a first catch.

    What are the best hooking first lines ever written ?

     

    Here are my favourite 5

     

    - "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way"

    Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

     

    - "Today, mama died. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know".

    Camus, The stranger

     

    - "In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since."Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven

  2. I have just read the thread related to The boy in striped pyjama.

    It reminds me of a very good book from a french-american author now translated in english. The book, released in 2007, is called The kindly ones from Jonathan Littell. These are the memoirs of an ancient SS who met a lot of famous people and was deeply involved in the process of extermination.

    It's a exceptionnal book which goes very far on theme of guiltiness and, for once, the decomplexed nazi point of view (instead of a traditional victim one) is transgressive if disturbing. This is still having a big success in France. I personnally think it is deserved.

    Here are the first lines : "O human brothers let me tell you how it started"

  3. Too late. It was the narrator from A gentle creature from Dostoievsky.

    A great short story I urge you to discover.

     

    I will try with an easier one :

    I am a famous writter. Married. 2 kids. My life slowly slides into fantastic and horror as the characters from my books are becoming real.

    And did you think a teddy bear could be so terrifying?

  4. This book is a masterpiece as long as you like gothic scenery.

    I really like how Hugo writes each chapter in which he develop either the plot (via a character's depictions) or a philosophical point.

    I have read 15 years ago. Above all, 2 images are still imprinted in my mind :

    - The chapter called "This will kill that" in which The priest Frolo (alias Hugo..) tells his mate that this (the fatal book/apgiornamento) will kill that (architecture/Christianism/). Before the apparition of printing-press, the masses were educated via the cathedral's pcitures. With Gutemberg, a fatal breach will appear.

    - I also remember, the very last poignant, macabre and romantic image of Quasimodo getting married...

    For those who gave up : you should read the last chapter.

  5. Three men in a boat from Jerome K Jerome almost made my canoe sink.

    The importance of being earnest is delicious. In the same vein : Alan Bennet and PG Wodehouse's stories.

    As for a dark kind of humour, i truly recommend Journey to the end of the night from Louis-Ferdinand C

  6. As for Dan Brown & JK Rowling. These 2 don't play in the same schoolyard.

    Dan Brown looks, for me, as a pseudo-Umberto Eco, more pretentious and dull.

    JK Rowling is making magical stories for kids. She is, at least, deliberately not competing for the Nobel Prize.

    I guess we all want our children to be raised under Treasure Island, Grimm's tales or Gulliver's travels imaginary worlds. That's what Rowling is trying to do in her ways. But most part of the critics against Rowling would not exist if Harry Potter had been written 100 years ago by JM Barrie...

  7. I'd disagree - contemporariness doesn't make a book bad or unquotable. Excessive popularity (viz. Brown, Meyer et a.), possibly; but there are contemporary writers deserving of remembrance. Whether or not they attain it is, of course, another matter entirely.

     

    You are right Bookjumper / Many contemporary writters are great artists (especially in the anglo-saxon world). Fingers in my hands are not enough to count them. But the rest is doomed to be forgotten within a decade even if they a currently popular. Because of their contemporariness, most popular authors will always get the current bit of criticism, such as displayed in this thread.

     

    As for Sartre, everything from his style / ideas is clumsily taken from elsewhere : Proust, Gide, etc... I like when artist pay tribute to others but not when it looks like a copy/paste. As for his Existentialism philosophical assessments : the best part of it is directly taken from Kierkegaard, the worst of it is a shallow shell.

     

    In France, his artistic splendeur gave (still gives) him an aura hiding his lack of style., his writter of wrongs composure, and his moral exhibitionnism. For instance, after WW2 liberation he became the hero of resistance, calling out for decapitation of many alledged collaborator french artists. In the 50's, his communism and lust for glory blinded him by always trying to denounce/condemn people with judgmental views.

    In doing so, he also tried to hide his own political non-action during WW2 (if not collaboration) with the Nazis.

  8. None of the above readers seem to have been struck by horror the way I was. This book is very powerful, it haunted me for days even after finishing it. Very few artists actually did that to me. I got the same trauma watching Rosemary's baby.

  9. Hello,

    sorry if i am late. My week-endis busy. This sounds like Mrs Dalloway.

    If I am right, let me introduce you to our new quizz character (sorry this one does not look like a fun one) :

    I am a modest bourgeois man who, the whole book through, contemplates the corpse of his suicided wife, the night before she gets buried.

    Speaking to myself and trying remembering the details of my love life with her, I try to understand who was this stranger I yesterday lived with and why she commited suicide.

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