ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT Innocence, Youth, and Friendship Crushed by the Brutality of World War I
Tag: Literature
HOMO SOVIETICUS On the Actuality of Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time”
Ten years ago, Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time. The Last of the Soviets” came into being. In twenty stories, collected between 1991 and 2012, the author releases usually unheard voices of people from the former Soviet Union, reflecting on their own lives before and after perestroika. The question of how the regime managed to remodel its subjects into creatures of a perennial authoritarianism, infuses this work with urgent actuality in the current context.
Continue reading “HOMO SOVIETICUS On the Actuality of Svetlana Alexievich’s “Secondhand Time””PARADISE Abdulrazak Gurnah’s East African World of Dreams, Nightmares, and Rude Awakenings
The winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021 takes us with his novel Paradise (1994) to a highly stratified East African society at the turn of the twentieth century. Against the backdrop of an increasingly pervasive European domination and surrounded by a breathtaking incommensurable landscape, a boy’s transition into adulthood is determined by complex power relations and the increasing awareness of being a stranger in his own country.
Continue reading “PARADISE Abdulrazak Gurnah’s East African World of Dreams, Nightmares, and Rude Awakenings”LADY IN BLACK Tolstoy, Anna, and the Unveiling Power of the Color Black
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