Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake (2003) Boston: Mariner-Houghton Mifflin, 2004 In Anne of Green Gables, Anne muses: "How do you know but that it hurts a geranium's feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else?” The act of naming is one of primary importance -- from PEI to India
Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891) Penguin, 1978 She's "goodness made interesting". That's what Irving Howe calls Tess, the main character in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Interesting is one way to put it. Not all of his Victorian readers found it so however. His religious skepticism and his
Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 SPOILERS ABOUND (not only for this novel, but for Anna Karenina, too) If you've been following along, you might recall my brief and unsatisfactory meeting with Emma Bovary, about twenty years ago: a passing acquaintance, which offered only a brief glimpse of the
Gustav Flaubert's Madame Bovary (1857) Trans. Alan Russell Penguin, 1987 If you've been following along, you'll know that I was thrilled to join, and have wholly enjoyed the early discussion connected with, Frances' readalong of this classic novel, one which I had false-started with as a younger woman but had
Jonathan Franzen Freedom Harper, 2010 If you happened to have read my response to The Corrections last month, you might well have expected my response to Freedom to appear here sometime in 2020. But although it took me nearly ten years to get around to reading the first, it took only
