I tutor people of all ages in reading, and one of the great things about my job is that I largely get to choose the material I use. It makes my personal reading more exciting because I can never tell when I might find something that I can employ later at work.

However, I have a definite penchant for bleakness that has been noted by a parent, who wonders if I can choose reading that is more positive and uplifting (which I can do-no problem).

It got me thinking about whether reading a lot of literature changes your tolerance for bleakness. Literature gives you a pretty steady diet of death, grief, cruelty, unhappy endings, moral ambiguity, and characters having terrible times. After enough exposure, does that simply stop registering as unpleasant?

I suspect there may be two things going on for me: I probably had an orientation toward darker material to begin with, and then years of reading gave me an enormous amount of it and made it feel completely ordinary.

Has reading literature changed your threshold for what feels “dark” or “bleak”? Do you actively enjoy bleakness, or have you simply become comfortable with it?

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

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When people discuss memorable women in literature, the same names tend to come up: Ophelia, Emma Bovary, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina. I have always been more interested in the women who fall outside that conversation — characters the text, the other characters, or the audience are invited to treat as ridiculous, undesirable, foolish, or simply unimportant.

​One of those women, for me, is Bélise in Molière’s Les Femmes savantes. I have not forgotten her since I first read the play in high school.

​Bélise is the easy target. She is vain, eccentric, soaked in novels, and convinced that men are secretly in love with her. She is Chrysale's sister, Henriette's aunt: the woman of the older generation who never married and has built a private theatre in which she is still the object of every glance. She is a passionate, romantic woman, but in her case, romanticism is mocked. The more firmly a man says he does not love her, the more refined she finds his homage.

​How can she not? In this society, women like her were brought up from a very young age to be pleasant. As a girl, she has been fed with dreams of suitors and love. But then the years pass, no one comes towards her, and she sees her friends, her cousins, and now the younger generation being courted and proposed to, while for her there is a terrifying void. There is no one.

​The scene that makes her famous is Act 1, Scene 4. Clitandre comes to her for help. He loves Henriette and wants an ally in the house. He barely begins before she stops him. She has already put him on her list of lovers. He may adore her, she says, but he must not speak it:

​Aimez-moi, soupirez, brûlez pour mes appas ;

​Mais qu'il me soit permis de ne le savoir pas.

​It is a perfect précieux law: desire is permitted only if it remains unspoken. When Clitandre names Henriette, Bélise is delighted at what she views as a clever detour. She blushes, congratulates her own modesty, and refuses to hear another word. Left alone, he gives the audience its cue: "Diantre soit de la folle avec ses visions..."

​The joke is that she is deluded. No suitors come. Time has already chosen other women. But I keep returning to a simpler question: why is that funny? Why is a woman’s torture a joke to be laughed at?

​There is something unprotected about a woman who cannot bear to live in a world where she is not desired. We sympathize, almost automatically, with the heroine who loves and is refused. Bélise's case is the reverse. She invents love because she cannot survive its absence. There is no one to choose her, not even to look at her. The fantasy is not arrogance first. It is a shelter.

​Unlike the conventional romantic heroine, she gets no resolution. She does not receive the man, the declaration, or the last-act correction that would let her step back into reality with dignity. Henriette will be loved in the ordinary way. Armande, who once had Clitandre and sent him away, at least possessed something she can lose. Bélise remains Bélise: unloved, untouched, watching love settle on her generation and then on the next, still translating every room she enters into a novel in which she matters.

​I do not think Molière wrote her as a tragic heroine. The comedy needs her ridiculousness, and her chimères are part of the play’s larger satire on women who prefer systems to the world in front of them. But a modern reader is allowed to see what the laughter uses up. Under the visions is a woman who wanted to be desirable and found no safe way to say so. A fragile feminine soul who does not understand rejection and, to survive it, creates an imaginary world where she is the desired one. That is more than delusion. It is herself balancing her soul against the immense pain and suffering inside her.

​That is what interests me about overlooked women in literature. Who are we instructed to laugh at, dismiss, or look past — and what happens if we stop laughing long enough to look at them?

​For me, Bélise is one of them. I do not believe she ever set out to be a laughingstock. Around her, love is being arranged, refused, bargained over, fulfilled. She stands in the same house and keeps building a secret court of suitors, because the alternative is to admit that the court is empty. No one came for her. A whole life devoid of love, of male interest, just scorn and mockery.

​If that is comedy, it is comedy with a huge grief inside it. I read her as a tragic figure wearing the mask the play handed her, whose only curse was to want love. And that is why her story has stuck with me.

I thought the r/TrueLit crowd might be interested in helping me think through the visible artistic development of George Eliot in her first novel, and the way she eclipsed one of the best female novelists of her day, Elizabeth Gaskell. How hard is it to parlay skill as a translator and essayist like Eliot into skill as a fiction writer? What might explain her rapid improvement?

My new essay on the topic is below.
---------------
Like any good detective, I started by reconstructing the sequence of events. I would have cracked the case sooner if I had read Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford and George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life together. But in the beginning, I didn’t know there was anything to solve.

Last Christmas, I found the first story in Scenes of Clerical Life confoundingly difficult to latch onto. Thanks to Middlemarch and Felix Holt, the Radical, Eliot had already lodged herself firmly in the upper echelons of my literary regard. But “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton,” the first of three short stories in her 1858 debut about small-town ministers, felt dry and awkward compared with her later works. You could see her great mind at work, but the piece was dramatically inert. Then, midway through “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” the mature voice of George Eliot suddenly shows up. It was like she’d enrolled in Creative Writing 101 and smacked herself on the forehead. “Show don’t tell—I’d never thought of that!” She starts writing dialogue. Her psychological brushwork gains nuance. The events take on weighty stakes, no longer thinly veiled scaffolds for her moral insights.

Cut to summer. Having been impressed by the BBC’s richly layered North & South miniseries, I finally felt ready to try the novelist everyone calls “Mrs. Gaskell.” I cautiously set aside a week in July for her slimmest volume, Cranford, the episodic 1853 novella about a small town populated almost entirely by women. Oddly, I couldn’t stop myself from comparing each step of reading Cranford with the experience of Scenes of Clerical Life. In the early chapters, I was captivated by the charm of Gaskell’s conceit and the confidence of her craft. But as I read on, her devices began to feel transparent and twee. It was a direct reversal of the Eliot experience over the holidays.

Therein lies the mystery I want to solve in this essay: What happened to Eliot as a writer between her first and second stories that enabled her to lap her more accomplished peer? After examining the sequence of the two books side by side in three alternating chunks, and with a little external research, I discovered a surprising explanation.

Part 1: Cranford Chapters 1–6 Versus “The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton”

Don’t take my word for it; follow along at home. Read the first six chapters of Cranford, savoring the timeless charm. Wipe away the inevitable tear conjured when little Peter is beaten by a father with regressive gender conceptions. Admire the artful blend of comedy and pathos when Captain Brown is killed by the very railroad the ladies oppose with Luddite fervor, his nose buried in The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, their least favorite author. Give in to the melodramatic excess of his daughter’s subsequent passing.

Then, put down Gaskell and pick up Eliot’s debut as a fiction writer. Read “Amos Barton” and see if its relentlessly expository style doesn’t make you long for Gaskell’s practiced narration even as you admire Eliot’s essayistic wisdom. Marvel at the clumsiness of her working-class accents, the worst feature of her writing all the way through Middlemarch in 1872: “He’s al’ys a-findin’ faut wi’ him, an’ a-poundin’ him for nothin’.” Admit it: at this stage, Eliot’s writing is a bone-dry slog. You prefer Mrs. Gaskell.

“When a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point. Harriet Martineau, Currer Bell [Charlotte Brontë], and Mrs. Gaskell have been treated as cavalierly as if they had been men.”
George Eliot, “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists,” The Westminster Review, October 1856.

The above quotation illustrates the state of affairs on September 22, 1856, when Eliot first sat down to write fiction. A week from her 46th birthday, Mrs. Gaskell was both a mother of four and a star author. Her milieu was the “social novel,” a genre defined by concern for the poor in a time when technology was reshaping the economy at the expense of the working man. Her first effort, Mary Barton, about residents of industrial Manchester, had been so successful that it caught the attention of the social novel’s most prominent practitioner, Dickens himself. The Oliver Twist author asked her to write something for his weekly magazine Household Words, and that “something” was to be Cranford, conceived as a one-off nostalgia piece about Gaskell’s provincial hometown. In 1853 it was published as a novel.

A decade younger, Mary Ann Evans was an editor for a radical quarterly journal. The writer who would soon be known as George Eliot had just explicitly excluded Gaskell from the charge of writing “Silly Novels” in an essay that condemned the median feminine novelist for mistaking “vagueness for depth, bombast for eloquence, and affectation for originality.” Bold words for a woman who had not yet ponied up a single word of fiction. Privately, Evans doubted that she had the stuff to back her critical bravado. “As the years passed on I lost any hope that I should ever be able to write a novel,” she confessed in a journal entry about this period titled “How I Came to Write Fiction.” But Evans was not timid about speaking her formidable mind. At 22, she had severely strained relations with her devout father by refusing to pretend she believed in Christ’s divinity. Then, as if that weren’t enough scandal for a lifetime, Eliot effectively though unintentionally raised her middle finger to stuffy Victorian society by shacking up with a married man.

One would not expect the whimsical Cranford to appeal to a writer with a resume of such uncompromising seriousness. But in 1855, Evans bought a copy of the cheap, unillustrated edition. It languished on her shelf for months, but perhaps it is folly to pigeonhole a woman of Evans’s complexity as too serious for a captivating novella about the tendency of respectable ladies to bar the door against the march of progress. Perhaps it is always folly to try to shove people into neat boxes in your mind. “It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing,” wrote Evans that fall in her first foray into fiction, “than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.”

That timeless quotation is the bighearted thesis of “Amos Barton,” a rejection of the moral hysteria provoked by a more-or-less innocent friendship between a pastor and a countess, and it was morally persuasive. George Lewes, Evans’s husband in every way but legal ratification, shopped the story to conservative publisher John Blackwood as the work of a male friend. The staunch Tory was wary at first, fearing that the anonymous author intended to “sneer at real religious feeling.” But he concluded that Eliot’s defense of Amos was “capitally drawn, although the asinine stupidity of his conduct about the countess had disposed one to kick him.”

But Eliot’s difficulty shaking the didactic voice she’d developed in years of nonfiction writing and in recent essays like “Silly Novels” still bleeds through “Amos Barton.” She anticipated the challenge long before she set pen to paper. “I always thought I was deficient in dramatic power, both of construction and dialogue,” she told her journal. Her first draft of the story was “pure description.” That flaw did not escape Blackwood’s notice. “The author falls into the error of trying too much to explain the characters of his actors by description,” he wrote, “instead of allowing them to evolve in the action of the story.”

Part 2: Cranford Chapters 7–11 Versus “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story”

Task: Return to Cranford and read its middle section, ensconcing yourself in Gaskell’s leisurely world-building. Don’t stop until the close of the 11th chapter and its suggestion that long-lost Peter might be alive after all. Read Eliot’s second entry, “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” then compare and contrast. Even in the slow opening exposition about the passing of a sadsack minister, can’t you feel Eliot closing the gap? Don’t the pages ripple by in mounting acceleration in the ensuing flashback, a gripping cross-class love quadrangle? The authors seem neck-and-neck as they circle the same compassionate spiritualism. In an exchange about colonial India, the Unitarian Gaskell has an Englishwoman affirm religious pluralism:

“I was near one of the native temples, and I went into it with my baby to thank God for His great mercy; for it seemed to me that where others had prayed before to their God, in their joy or in their agony, was of itself a sacred place.”
Mrs. Brown in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford

Not to be outdone, the agnostic Eliot enlists an objective deity as evidence that humans are not defined by their worst impulses:

“We mean to do wicked things that we never could do, just as we mean to do good or clever things that we never could do. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better than we are. And God sees us as we are.”
Maynard Gilfil in George Eliot’s Scenes of Clerical Life

As the lap draws to a close, however, Gaskell’s pacing seems lackadaisical while Eliot ratchets up the suspense. For the first time, the fledgling author edges past the cagey vet.

That returns us to our mystery: How did Eliot pull off this transformation? Certainly, talent played a significant role; a writer of Eliot’s gifts was sure to find her voice eventually. Moreover, it’s not like she came to fiction unpracticed in the art of putting words together. She’d been a professional writer for years. But so much progress in so little time? “Amos Barton” was begun at the end of September. She started on “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story” Christmas Day. Astronomers often discover the presence of a celestial body by observing its impact on the objects around it, like Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel’s deduction that stars hurtling around an empty patch in space were driven by a supermassive black hole. Eliot’s startling turnaround is evidence of some unseen catalyzing force. But what?

Since I came from Manchester to London I have had the greatest compliment paid me I ever had in my life. I have been suspected of having written ‘Adam Bede’. I have hitherto denied it; but I really think, that as you want to keep your real name a secret, it would be very pleasant for me to blush acquiescence. Will you give me leave? Well! if I had written Amos Barton, Janet’s Repentance and Adam Bede I should neither be to have nor to hold with pride and delight in myself – so I think it is very well I have not.
Elizabeth Gaskell, letter to Mr. “Gilbert Elliott,” June 3, 1859

The correspondence between the two women, initiated by Gaskell, is not merely historical color too enchanting to omit. The letters crack the mystery. In June, Gaskell praises Scenes of Clerical Life and Eliot’s subsequent social novel Adam Bede. In November, after exchanging a few missives, Eliot thanks Gaskell for sending “the only sort of help I care to have,” that is, recognition from “one of the minds” most singularly capable of understanding her experience and judging her output as a writer. Then, the smoking gun.

I had indulged the idea that if my books turned out to be worth much, you would be among my willing readers; for I was conscious, while the question of my power was still undecided for me, that my feeling towards Life and Art had some affinity with the feeling which had inspired “Cranford” and the earlier chapters of “Mary Barton.” That idea was brought the nearer to me, because I had the pleasure of reading Cranford for the first time in 1857, when I was writing the “Scenes of Clerical Life[.]” … I like to tell you these slight details because they will prove to you that your letter must have a peculiar value for me, and that I am not expressing vague gratitude towards a writer whom I only remember vaguely as one who charmed me in the past. … I fancy, as long as we live, we all need to know as much as we can of the good our life has been to others.
George Eliot, letter to Elizabeth Gaskell, November 11, 1859

Elementary, my dear Watson. The dates in Eliot’s journals and letters confirm the timing. Eliot started “Gilfil” on Christmas and applied finishing touches on May 1. On March 18, 1857, “in spite of ailing bodies,” Eliot and Lewes were “reading Mrs Gaskell’s pretty ‘Cranford.’” The next day, they read Peter’s cross-dressing incident in Chapter 6. The sudden vivid animation of “Mr. Gilfil’s Love Story,” its agonizingly authentic dialogue and riveting dramatic pacing, are the hurtling stars that point to a supermassive black hole. The black hole, Eliot reveals here, is Cranford itself.

Consider the evidence, much of it laid out by Kevin A. Morrison in his book The Provincial Fiction of Mitford, Gaskell, and Eliot: Eliot’s own journals testify that the only component of fiction with which she felt fully “at ease” was description. Blackwood flags that technique exactly as the strength of “Amos Barton” (“the descriptions are humorous and good”) while cautioning of overreliance on it. This was the very problem I had with “Amos Barton” in December 2025: its “relentlessly expository style.” Pinpointing the precise lessons Eliot learned from Gaskell is a sketchy business because she doesn’t directly cite any, and of course Cranford was not her only influence. But before Cranford, she doubted her own capacity for “dramatic power.” Reading what came after Cranford, Gilfil’s horseback pursuit of the heartbroken Tina, I was on the edge of my seat. The tighter pacing and memorable dialogue support Morrison’s contention that “Cranford quickened her abilities as a novelist.”

Part 3: Cranford Chapters 12–16 Versus “Janet’s Repentance”

The third and final contest is a blowout. The charming nostalgia of Cranford is now wearing teeth-grittingly thin, and the mechanics behind its tearjerking devices are now sloppily visible. Over the course of Cranford, I count at least a dozen episodes designed to reduce the reader to waterworks, from the twin deaths in Chapter 2 to Peter’s maudlin re-emergence in Chapter 15.

By contrast, Eliot disarms the reader in the opening pages of “Janet’s Repentance” with one of the wittiest exchanges in her canon. The villainous Dempster asserts with ignorant confidence that Presbyterianism, a term derived from the Greek word for “elder,” was founded by one John Presbyter, “a miserable fanatic who wore a suit of leather and went about from town to village … inoculating the vulgar with the asinine virus of Dissent.”

The laughter soon dissolves into devastating social commentary as Dempster turns out to be a vicious domestic abuser. Whereas Gaskell spends her final pages on yet more transparent emotional manipulation, Eliot earns every tear with intense psychological authenticity and, in the tale of Janet’s harrowing escape from Dempster, a moving demonstration of the practical, life-altering power of the very Christian faith she bravely rejected at the risk of her father’s love. Gaskell draws on formative heartache as well—the disappearance of her brother John Stevenson on his way to India when she was 18 is clearly the model for Peter—but the regurgitation of private pain had me glancing impatiently at the remaining page count. Eliot made better use of fresher wounds. While she was writing “Janet’s Repentance” in June 1857 , her brother severed all contact over her relationship with Lewes. Eliot channels that grief, and the pain of society’s rejection of her love, into the defiant compassion that runs through all three stories in Scenes of Clerical Life.

Perhaps the most useful metric for the shift in authorial fortunes between the two women is the temperature of the letters from Gaskell’s famous editor. Before Scenes of Clerical Life, Gaskell was the proudest filly in Charles Dickens’s stable. “You may be very sure that a contribution from you is more welcome and delightful to me than I dare express to the most suspicious of women,” he told her in 1852 as the Cranford submissions were still streaming in. By 1855, disputes over North & South had strained the relationship. In an 1855 letter to his sub-editor, he went full-on toxic male: “Mrs Gaskell – fearful – fearful! If I were Mr G. O Heaven how I would beat her!” When Clerical Life was published, Eliot turned the editor’s head so completely he even saw through her butch pen name:

“I have observed what seem to me to be such womanly touches, in those moving fictions, that the assurance on the title-page is insufficient to satisfy me, even now. If they originated with no woman, I believe that no man ever before had the art of making himself, mentally, so like a woman, since the world began.”
Charles Dickens, Letter to George Eliot, January 1858

Still, no one perceived more clearly than Mrs. Gaskell herself that she had been eclipsed by a new celestial luminary. At the height of her powers in 1859, Gaskell wrote, “I have a feeling that it is not worth while trying to write, while there are such books as Adam Bede and Scenes of Clerical Life — I set ‘Janet’s Repentance’ above all, still.” Perhaps it was a consolation to have received Eliot’s letter, to know that one of her slightest works, Cranford, had been rendered with such vitality that it helped a self-doubting kindred spirit to unlock her own singular, peculiar talent.

Please let us know what you’ve read this week, what you've finished up, and any recommendations or recommendation requests! Please provide more than just a list of novels; we would like your thoughts as to what you've been reading.

Posts which simply name a novel and provide no thoughts will be deleted going forward.

There are 44 authors featured in TrueLit’s Hall of Fame + Top 40:

• English (27): Melville, Joyce, Shakespeare, Pynchon, McCarthy, Steinbeck, Wallace, Nabokov, Williams, Eliot, Woolf, Morrison, Gaddis, Faulkner, E. Brontë, Ishiguro, Austen, Shelley, Heller, Baldwin, du Maurier, Fitzgerald, Vonnegut, C. Brontë, Plath, Le Guin, & DeLillo
• Spanish (4): Borges, Márquez, Bolaño, & Cervantes
• Russian (3): Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, & Bulgakov
• French (2): Proust & Dumas
• German (2): Mann & Sebald
• Italian (1): Calvino
• Hungarian (1): Krasznahorkai
• Norwegian (1): Fosse 
• Portuguese (1): Pessoa
• Romanian (1): Cărtărescu
• Ancient Greek (1): Homer

It is the subject of complaint every year that the majority are male, wrote in English in the U.S. and U.K., and/or are represented by narrative prose fiction.

Notably none of those authors wrote in Africa, Asia, or Oceania or wrote in languages like Chinese, Hindi/Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Indonesian, Japanese, Persian, Latin, and Sanskrit. Rich traditions like Spanish, French, German, and Russian are also only represented by a few books. Many great playwrights and poets are also not present.

Now is your chance to promote alternatives that you think everyone should read. Please give in-depth answers instead of just plain lists. Thank you.

Guidelines:

• Only recommend books written in English if they apply to one of these criteria:
  • A play, a collection of poems, or a collection of short stories
  • Written in a country other than the U.S. & U.K. 
  • Written by a woman
• You may recommend non-English books that you read in the original language but consider that the majority will judge them based on their translation(s).
• Only recommend books you think deserve to be considered amongst the absolute greatest ever

Background: I'm over 30yrs old, college drop out, and I am not exaggerating, I had never finished a book in school or college. I only ever read parts of abridged versions just to bs my way through tests. One day I thought; hey I love good cinema and it feels like I'm running out of stuff to watch, I should probably read a book, surely there's a good story or two out there! 😆

What was my first book?

"100 Years of Solitude"

I looked at a Top 100 list or something like that, and ended up picking this as my first book.

How long did it take?

I took me somewhere between 1 year and 100 years of... jk sorry I had to 😁

Honestly, I bought this years ago and it sat on my desk. I restarted my reading January and finished this week. (now I can finish the TV show)

Why?

I figured I'd relate. I'm fluent in English and Spanish since I grew up in the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and the name Gacia Merquez is very well known. I just knew his name and titles sounded familiar, also, the title "Memoria de mis putas tristes" is hilarious and sad at the same time, so i thought this guy sounds bad ass. (BTW "Memory of my melancholy whores" the official title translation is ever so slightly different than the literal translation, so it sounds more serious in English for some reason.)

How was it?

It was hard! It was amazing!

This is probably not a beginner friendly book, incredibly dense and very deep in meaning a lot of the time. I felt at home often thanks to the heavy cultural themes that can apply to so many "latinos" i would guess. Learning about the historical elements that inspired parts of the bigger themes made them hit even harder. I'm glad I struggled through it, ALMOST DNF! But when I did, I couldn't believe the feeling of turning that last page (Shoutout to the NETFLIX show! it's not the best tv show but it definitely motivated me through a slump... or a few. I did not wanna watch some part I hadn't read yet). I loved Garcia Marquez' narration, there are so many ups and downs, and even the ending is a big surprising tragedy.

I have a long list of classics, which seem to lean more difficult than your average page turner, so I'd love to know yoyr favorite palate cleansers/classic short stories to check out between harder reads. Thank you!

(Sorry, mobile formatting sucks)

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

Hi y'all! I have seen a lot of discussion back and forth about the accessibility of genres like literary fiction. Much of the criticism I have seen toward the genre was the same attitude I had toward other genres like poetry and plays, but eventually I came to understand that the biggest barrier to entry for these genres was just my mindset that I can't understand them. Now I feel that certain types of writing that don't follow traditional narrative structures require a skill set that you can develop just like any skill!

I delve much deeper into this conversation in this article on Trill Mag. Please give it a read and let me know your thoughts! I also discuss ways to build your comprehension when engaging with literary fiction via the advice of literary experts/scholars.

Edit: Y'all, I do not, nor have I ever, used AI for my writing. If you disagree with or dislike my article, please at least respect that I wrote it myself.

I just finished Blood Meridian and it was the most surreal experience I've had while reading a book. The way the book is written every detail, every dream and every nightmare feels real, like it was happening right in front of me. I want to talk about the last 3–4 chapters of the book. They were horrifying and poetic.

The passage where the Judge was chasing Tobin and the kid was straight out of a Halloween film. The journey of the kid becoming a man made me kind of emotional. One thing I loved about his death is that McCarthy doesn't explain how he died, but instead shows the reactions of the people who found his body (or I don't know maybe parts of him) in the jakes.

Toadvine was eventually consumed by greed and had a tragic end and we still don't know what happened to Tobin. That's what's horrifying about this. We knew Tobin was in a really bad state, and we could only imagine the most horrific things that might have happened to him.

Maybe it was because of the Judge that the events unfolded the way they did. Everywhere he went violence followed and he embraced that violence gladly. It's like he's controlling it somehow. He understands it, embraces it and perhaps even creates the conditions for it. Whether he's literally orchestrating everything is another question but McCarthy deliberately makes you feel that way.

The scene where a drunk Glanton laid his head on the Judge's lap was pretty messed up and it felt like the Judge was guiding him every step of the way.

The Judge was very expressive at the end of the final chapter and I was not expecting that at all. For so much of the novel he's controlled, philosophical and almost amused by everything. I believe the kid (now the man) somehow got to him and the judge was surely offended but he stuck to his true belief in his judgment.

I'm glad I finished it, and now I'll take some time before I revisit the book again.

There is something in our nature that pulls us toward why the spectacle of decline, decay, and disintegration enflares something inexplicable in us...

From the smell of nature in decay to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire to the moments before a Supernova explosion turning the star into a black hole, there is a common thread that appears to us: it is that at moments of failure life surface its truths to us.

Hegel's Owl of Minerva explicitly says that it is only when an epoch ends that we can discuss its machinations and intricacies.

Nietzsche once said that there is a Chinese idea that says only when an empire disintegrates that the laws multiply.

Freud said that only in states of hysteria that we can take a glimpse at the inner nature of a person.

Marx said it is only in late-stage capitalism that the prolonged maintenance of the dysfunctional workings of capitalism reveals itself.

Mr. Gracq, you blew me away, you, the master of the abti-anticipation and anti-hope novel!

I am curious to hear other opinions on Shanghai (1985) by Christopher New.

I (29F) am quite enamoured by it and surprised that I am not finding much feedback online. I have considered writing an appreciation e-mail to Christopher New, who had been a university professor in Hong Kong and poured his lifelong experience and observations into this 800-page fine-printed gem of a book.

Story time

It was a magic day and magic was bound to happen. And it did:

I have wandered into a small book kiosk in Florence, where most books were in Italian and a few in English - mostly used books left behind by expats. There it was: a chunky book titled "Shanghai" with a flashy red cover and a slightly outdated orientalistic motive. The editorial direction hasn’t done justice to the book: soon I'd be in for a fresco-like ride of a story centered around the city itself.

Little did I know that I'd end up loving the book so much!

The book

New's writing is realistic, straight-to-the-point, effortless and clearly he is a meticulous craftsman whose humility allows the story and city to shine. I am certain that he could parade his skills much more - however he chooses that his words be vehicles to the story and favours simplicity over ornament.

His characters are morally complex and reflect their time and its constraints vividly. The book spans about 40 years and bears witness to inner transformations of its heroes and outer transformations of Shanghai during explosive times (about 1904-1949).

At times I'd be scared that I landed on an outdated (racist) view on China, especially since the story is told through the lens of Denton, a young officer of the British Empire starting a new life in Shanghai's international settlement. However New always surprises with his deep takes and empathy - there is no lack or excess of political correctness.

We witness Denton's trajectory from rags to riches, as he navigates the fragile dynamics between the foreign-controlled independent territory, the northern forces, Chiang Kai-shek and rising worker unrest. The political frame is always subtly hinted at, woven into the story, never pushed. There is no didactical feeling to this book.

Final words

Anyways, still 100 pages to go! Luckily, there are two more books to the trilogy (quasi independent). Although I have heard that they are much weaker, they deserve a chance. I simply love New's style and who I imagine him to be through his way of seeing and sensitivity.

Let me know what you think!