Tag: Modern Literature

The Self and Identity in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Murakami is my comfort read if not my guilty pleasure. So, it is no surprise that I turned to him to get me out of a reading slump caused inevitably by my A-Levels. Reading Murakami is a surreal experience much like reading someone’s dream diary: he is the commercial postmodern Kafka. What puts him in … Continue reading The Self and Identity in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Tralfamadorians & A Red Hunting Cap

I have recently read two amazing novels about loss of innocence by authors who had similar experiences. Both witnessed the horrors of WWII: Kurt Vonnegut was at Dresden as it burnt down to ashes and J. D. Salinger was one of the first American soldiers to enter a Nazi extermination camp. Yet, they dealt with … Continue reading Tralfamadorians & A Red Hunting Cap

“Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

  …Thus, we start to follow Clarissa Dalloway for a warm day of July as she walks through the streets of London, getting ready for one of her celebrated dinner parties. The city of London is almost presented as a character with large breadth and movement, hourly marked by the bell. It changes within the … Continue reading “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.”

When Satan Visited Moscow

The Master and Margarita is a complex, multi-layered satire of the Stalin era. Mikhail Bulgakov started writing the novel in late 1928, not long after the reign of Tsar Nicholas II, the Russian Revolution and Lenin’s reforms. The writer who had witnessed all these continued to work on this masterpiece until his death in 1940. … Continue reading When Satan Visited Moscow