Category: Book Review

Courage, intellect, and success: three typical characteristics which could easily be attributed to the hero of any story. Take cunning, manipulation, and eventual failure, and you have yourself the typical villain. In The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco has decided to take upon the usual “good triumphs over bad” theme, and twist it in…

Scent and hatred in the novel Perfume Everyone has characteristics that define or individualize them. Without these characteristics, it becomes difficult for one to be considered unique. The novel Perfume, by Patrick Suskind, presents a character, Grenouille, who is distinctive, yet conflicted with his individuality, or identity. For Grenouille, life experiences are defined by what…

The search for identity that the protagonist, Grenouille, in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer occurs differently than others because his identity is driven by the beauty of the innocent scents which appeal to him. Grenouille is brought up with a gruesome environment, thus influencing the indifference between his personal needs and society’s expectations. He…

In Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera depicts a society almost devoid of human connection. Kundera utilizes the characters Tomas, Sabina, Franz, and Tereza to explore the inability for human beings to allow themselves to attach to others, either consciously or subconsciously. Tomas’s tendency to place his own priorities above others renders him…

Bildungsroman novels are identified by the grueling quest a protagonist undergoes in his search for place in society. The experiences the protagonist undergoes within this search contribute to their moral and psychological growth, building to one pinnacle point in their life, the long awaited identification of who they are or in some cases, the lack…

The Unbearable Lightness of Being is as much of a philosophical work as it is a fictional story, not following a typical plotline. The novel includes multiple interwoven plotlines surrounding different characters with the same events being narrated many times from different characters’ points of view. Due to the non-chronological and non-linear nature of the…

In Emily St John Mandel’s 2014 science fiction, dystopian novel Station Eleven, a majority of the world is deceased due to the Georgia-flu pandemic spread unknowingly by a passenger on a flight from Russia to The United States causing an apocalyptic world. All technology and modern inventions during have collapsed but, the Arts remain as…

In The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides has the narrators describe seemingly average daily occurrences as extraordinary, exhibiting the search for something more significant in their uniform, designed-to-be-perfect lives. Through the narrators’ overstatements, it is evident that the boys become increasingly obsessed with the minute details of the Lisbon girl’s lives until it becomes their top…

The year 1924 marked the beginning of the surrealist movement. Aimed at tapping into the subconscious, surrealism became a growing art form that still influences artists and writers to this day. According to Andr Breton, author of “The Surrealist Manifesto”, surrealism is “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express verbally,…

The societal structure of eighteenth century London was grounded in rigid class hierarchies. In Burney’s novel Evelina, the title character is born as an illegitimate child without a name because her father refuses to accept her. This situates Evelina at a particularly difficult intersection of London’s social structure. Evelina has little knowledge of the extent…