By Bergotte No work of literature begins more universally than the Divine Comedy. Not with a king or a war or a cosmogony, but with a man — any man, every man — who has lost his way in the middle of his life. Dante Alighieri wrote the greatest poem of the Middle Ages andContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Dante”
Category Archives: Literature
The World According To Garp
Essay · Literature & Ideas A Novel About Everything That Can Go Wrong, Written With Love The World According to Garp is a novel about a novelist, which gives John Irving permission to make it about everything else: about mothers and sons, about feminism and its discontents, about the randomness of violent death, about theContinue reading “The World According To Garp”
Tove Ditlevsen
Essay · Literature & Lives The Copenhagen Trilogy and the Cost of Seeing Clearly Tove Ditlevsen wrote about the interior lives of women — their desires, their loneliness, their addiction, their marriages, their children, their slow suffocation inside the arrangements that society had made for them — with a directness and a formal precision thatContinue reading “Tove Ditlevsen”
Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument
He was thirty-five years old, exiled from his city, stripped of everything that had defined him, when he began the most ambitious poem in the Western tradition. He set it in the middle of his own life because the middle of a life is where the crisis comes — when the path forward is noContinue reading “Nel Mezzo del Cammin: Dante and the Journey That Is the Argument”
The Human Condition According to Ovid
By Bergotte If Homer is the poet of what we lose, Ovid is the poet of what we become. Writing at the height of Roman civilisation and dying at its edge — exiled, cold, forgotten on the shore of the Black Sea — Publius Ovidius Naso produced a body of work that is dazzling, troubling,Continue reading “The Human Condition According to Ovid”
Bret Easton Ellis
Essay · Literature & Ideas The Novelist Who Refused to Flinch Bret Easton Ellis published his first novel at twenty-one and his most notorious at twenty-six, and spent the following three decades being misread by people who wanted him to be either a moralist or a monster, when he was in fact something rarer andContinue reading “Bret Easton Ellis”
The Ten Novels That Capture the Soul of America
America has always been a country unusually dependent on story. Before it became a superpower, before it became a marketplace, before it became a screen onto which the rest of the world projected desire and dread, it was already narrating itself: as wilderness, covenant, republic, frontier, refuge, opportunity, innocence, exception, destiny. No nation has beenContinue reading “The Ten Novels That Capture the Soul of America”
Difficult Men: The Heroes of the Brontë Novels and What We Have Made of Them
Rochester broods. Heathcliff rages. Huntingdon drinks. The men of the Brontë novels have been romanticised for nearly two centuries. It may be time to look at them more carefully. By Bergotte There is a moment in Jane Eyre that readers have been arguing about since 1847. Edward Rochester, master of Thornfield Hall, has just revealedContinue reading “Difficult Men: The Heroes of the Brontë Novels and What We Have Made of Them”
The Human Condition According to Homer
By Bergotte There is a moment in the twenty-fourth book of the Iliad that has no real parallel in world literature. Priam, the aged king of Troy, has crossed enemy lines in the dark, slipped past the Greek sentinels, and entered the tent of Achilles — the man who killed his son, who dragged thatContinue reading “The Human Condition According to Homer”
A Room with a View
Essay · Literature & Ideas The View From the Window and the Cost of Looking A Room with a View is a comedy, and it is a love story, and it is a novel about Florence, and it is a sustained philosophical argument about the relationship between the body and the soul that Forster dressedContinue reading “A Room with a View”
My World of Interiors 