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A snowy long weekend meant I could immerse myself in this book. Now I have a serious book hangover.
I don't have much to add to my previous post. This book is an amazing feat of craft and storytelling. Fitzgerald (not quite sure I can call her Penny yet @Graywacke 😉) went for something strange and difficult, and she nailed it. Sure to be one of my favourite reads of the year!
Worth reading just for the Bernhard.
#192025 @Librarybelle

Started this book last night & am utterly hooked! How does she do it, indeed! Reminds me a bit of reading Lauren Groff's Matrix -- an intense character study of someone from a different time & place. In this case the German Romantic poet Novalis. The fact that I know nothing & care little about 18th century German Romanticism means squat. The story, the writing, the everything is so powerful! I get it @Graywacke !!

This is a gem. (17% Litsy rating be damned 🙂) I was so taken by this that I‘m having trouble with my next books. They‘re too wordy. Fitzgerald was so concise and evocative. She opens the windows and lets in fresh thoughts. I know nothing about German romantics in the age of Napoleon, except this, which only inspires us to want to learn more. And i‘m so fascinated and curious now.

My next book, reading with the Booker Award Book Club on Facebook (because it did _not_ make the shortlist in 1995 🙂)

Fictionalized story about life of a Friedrich von Hardenberg - Novalis. He was German poet and philosopher from Early Romanticism era. Focus of this story is on his student time when he falls in love with the 12 year old Sophie. What I liked in the book is vivid portrait of life and customs of the German nobility (opening scene with the laundry day is amusing and beautiful), but I didn‘t like third person narration. Between so-so and pick. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

This book probably means more to people who are familiar with Enlightenment-era German writers, but I enjoyed it anyway. You get the sense of the realities of life set against the intellectual life men of a certain status could have, I suppose. I would rate it somewhere between so-so and pick, honestly; I never was tempted not to finish and I loved the ‘Germanic‘ texture in the writing.

I can‘t read this. The style gave me a headache in just ten pages and then I looked up a plot summary. Apparently it is about justifying a grown ass man sexually fixating on a 12 year old girl.

Extreme ew-factor aside, the prose made Jeff Shaara seem like pleasant reading.

This is about how the discussion went. Few read it and those of us who did were dumbfounded.

I am really struggling with this book. It‘s supposed to be some kind of masterpiece and I feel like an idiot because that mastery is completely evading me. About a third of the way in so would hope that I‘d have a grasp. Not. Am I supposed to know this philosopher or his history?