Graham Greene - A Tribute

The invisible side of exoticism: Phuong's character in the Quiet American

Phuong's character in The Quiet American is one of the most difficult to define, as she holds no real leading part in the novel and her particular characteristics are shown to the reader through the eyes of Fowler, the narrator, that is through the deforming prism of both a male vision and a European spirit. Attempting thus an approach to Phuong's character, one should beware of a number of traps liable to mislead one's judgement - if it is ever possible to fully analyse a character whose only known aspects are those revealed to us by the author himself through the character mostly acting as his mouthpiece.

Samuel Beckett - A Tribute

Beckett's view of the human condition in Waiting for Godot

Written in the mid-'50s, in other words shortly after the end of World War II, Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot offers a most perceptive, bitter and yet quite sympathetic vision of the human condition in the trying times Europe was then going through. Vladimir and Estragon, the two principal characters, spend their lives "waiting for Godot" in an almost desert scenery. The characters of the play are very few, five only, plus Godot, the invisible sixth, who is all the same omnipresent due to the continual reference to him by Estragon and Vladimir. In a dramatic environment where the animate element, as well as the non-animate, appear reduced to the absolutely functional, an entire existential reasoning is amply presented to the audience.

Jane Austen - Nonsense & Insensibility

The place of rank & money in Jane Austen's world

In Jane Austen's Emma, one of the author's best known novels beside Pride & Predjudice, the homonymous main female character is described as "handsome, clever and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition". It is not by chance that Emma's wealth is mentioned in the very heart of the description, among natural personal qualities such as beauty, intelligence, generosity and pleasant temper: amusingly implanted in the middle of the list of conventional moral and physical attributes, Emma's fortune immediately suggests the social dimension, or perspective, of both the novel character and the novel itself. Austen's world is one of more or less financially self-sufficient middle class provincials, successors probably of the mediaeval feudalists, or otherwise liberal professionals having acquired a certain economic sufficiency through hard work, like the naval officers in Persuasion.

Amos Oz: Black Box

Love's debris & the irreversible of written speech

In his article on Black Box (in a superb English translation by Nicholas de Lange), published in New Statesman on the 1st of July 1988, Sean French expresses his surprise for the epistulary form of this novel; he also locates the inevitable problem of doubtful verisimilarity presented to a novelist by the application of this writing technique. In any case, the epistulary novel, especially when consisting of a letter exchange among individuals of different characters, mentality and origins, could always constitute a temptation to the writing skill of an author, as the heterogeneousness it entails makes it a first class exercise of style.