These are posts in which I’ve compared similar passages in different books, with an emphasis on authors who may never have read each other’s writings. They are connections I have made myself, so perhaps they will be new to you too.
In a previous post I made several connections between the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Bhagavad Gita. Here I'd like to make a few other connections for the Gita, with the Gospel of John and "The Grapes of Wrath." Compare this passage in the "Gita" – I am the Unborn and Eternal. I am the … Continue reading Krishna, Tom Joad and the Gospel of John
In a previous post I shared what it was like to read David Ferry's version of the Epic of Gilgamesh twenty years ago. I've just read Stephen Mitchell's version, from 2004. Both versions render the Epic as English free verse. They're similar in that sense: they're English poems that read like complete stories, meaning they … Continue reading Gilgamesh, Smaug and Krishna
In my blog posts I've compared similar passages across different novels, and I've got several passages from "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" that I want to link to other novels: "Moby-Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "Tom Sawyer," "The Lord of the Rings," "Matilda," and one nonfiction book, Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot." Compare this declaration by King … Continue reading Esmeralda, cosmologist
(Here There Be Spoilers) Having just seen the 1997 television adaptation of Victor’s Hugo novel, “The Hunchback of Notre Dame”, I have to say I love this story: the crippled, deformed servant of a creepy but powerful old man turns against his master and drops him from a great height to stop him from murdering … Continue reading The Hunchback of Star Wars
"Makoons" is the last book written, thus far, in "The Birchbark House" series. (Spoilers ahead.) It's a deceptively simple story, which you think is just about the details of ordinary life, but then you realize how many deaths have taken place in the course of the story. Nokomis. Angeline and Fishtail. Two Strike's pet lamb … Continue reading Makoons
It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind
I first saw the "Lonesome Dove" miniseries in 1993, about four years after it had first been shown on television. Essentially a six-hour movie, it was widely credited with resurrecting not only the TV miniseries format but also the genre of the Western, which had been thought of as dead for some years. In fact, … Continue reading Unforgiven in Lonesome Dove
Larry McMurtry published “Streets of Laredo”, his sequel to “Lonesome Dove”, in summer 1993. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution then ran a piece by Michael Skube, who compared “Lonesome Dove” to “Don Quixote”: Living briefly off the luster of its predecessor, a sequel establishes its own grounds as art or it diminishes the work from which … Continue reading McMurtry and Cervantes
I've recently finished Larry's McMurtry's western, "Lonesome Dove," a magnificent novel that I cannot get off my mind. I've been doing a little research about the book, and apparently McMurtry was partly inspired by "Don Quixote." In his 2008 memoir, he wrote: [E]arly on, I read some version of Don Quixote and pondered the grave … Continue reading Don Quixote and Lonesome Dove
“Anna Karenina” is not a book you can read quickly. It just doesn’t move at a hungry pace. You can read a couple of chapters and feel like you’ve moved into a single character’s soul; and you’ve got more than enough to digest for one night, without thinking of moving out into some other character. … Continue reading Anna Karenina – Parts 3 and 4 (of 8)
