Stranger on Earth

The theme of the will to power is perhaps most succinctly expressed in “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery,” a crime thriller situated in 1970’s California involving Luisa Rey, a strong-headed journalist, and her attempt to expose a dodgy nuclear power plant. Seaboard Corporation is in itself a miniature version of the dominance hierarchy witnessed in humankind, where the strong and the crafty dispatch the weak to secure their future. The henchmen of Seaboard Corporation double-cross one another to keep the secret of the power plant safe. One of them, Alberto Grimaldi, ponders on the meaning of power: “Power.” What do we mean? “The ability to determine another man’s luck” … the will to power. This is the enigma at the core of the various destinies of men. What drives some to accrue power where the majority of their compatriots lose, mishandle, or eschew power? Is it addiction? Wealth? Survival? Natural selection? I propose these are all pretexts and results, not the root ca...

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004) sets out to achieve two noble goals: to engage the reader in a discourse about human nature and historical continuity, and to entice him to reflect on his relation to the past, the present, and the future. This is no small feat for the Ghostwritten author, and for the reader it is both an incredible intellectual challenge and an irresistible invitation to view life from a perspective not altogether conventional. The new reader is instantly struck by the technically intricate structure of the work: six interlocking storylines, with five of them divided down the middle, separated halfway through the book by a “mirror” – the sixth story inventively entitled “Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After.” The novel begins with the Mutiny on the Bounty -inspired “The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing,” proceeds at a breakneck pace to “Letters from Zedelghem” to “Half-Lives: The First Luisa Rey Mystery” to “The Ghastly Ordeal ...

Albert Camus’ The Outsider  (or The Stranger ) features on most high school reading lists. Teachers of English literature are attracted to it because of its slimness; it is compact and written in startlingly uncomplicated language; its protagonist – a man alienated from society - is someone teenagers have no trouble relating to. But is it really that straightforward? Those of us who teach it year after year – have we really felt the gravity of Camus’ landscape-changing message? The students who skim through it year after year – have they really understood Meursault’s stance as they claim? After all, one of the 20 th -century’s greatest philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre, was completely floored by the novel when he first encountered it during World War II. (His biographer Annie Cohen-Solal says “his intellectual machinery jammed” [5].) In 1943, Sartre, having mulled over the ambiguity of the novel, published “A Commentary on The Stranger ” in the literary magazine Le Cahie...

Writing about F. Scott Fitzgerald or any of his works apart from the immortal The Great Gatsby is often a challenge. The writer is after all the very definition of the Jazz Age, and it is difficult to resist reading the man himself into what he wrote. His biographers have, with varying degrees of conviction, traced characteristics of the man back to his fictional characters. Then there is the mammoth that is The Great Gatsby , which overshadows everything he wrote before and after it. He is often referred to by his detractors as a writer who never quite brought his talent to full fruition, his life wrecked by marital strife, alcoholism, penury, and a deeply entrenched sense of self-doubt. How should the reader then approach his final, uncompleted work ( The Love of) The Last Tycoon ? Read it bearing in mind that the man who wrote it was not the same youthful Dionysus who vacationed in Paris and gave the world The Great Gatsby. It was written by a man having been to the dark side ...