1884
4 books
- You spend time with Des Esseintes as he retreats from ordinary life into perfumes, jewels, books, and increasingly elaborate private experiments. It’s strange, static, and sometimes gloriously overripe, but if you enjoy ornate sentences and a mind turning its own tastes into a prison, you’ll find plenty to linger over.
- You get a sly, surprisingly sharp narrator in A. Square, whose two-dimensional world turns geometry into a satire of class, gender, and intellectual complacency. The diagrams and Victorian social rules can feel eccentric, but the book rewards you with the odd pleasure of watching a small mind strain toward a larger reality.
- Huck's voice carries the whole thing, a kid lying his way down the Mississippi while slowly realizing his conscience is smarter than his upbringing. It's funnier than you expect and heavier too, and the raft chapters with Jim have a calm that stays with you.
- You get a sprawling, old-fashioned adventure through the Cossack uprising, with the stern Skrzetuski, fierce Bohun, and wonderfully shameless Zagłoba carrying a romance, battles, and siege scenes. It can be digressive and unabashedly Polish in its loyalties, but the vivid campfire humor and rough, crowded world make the long journey worthwhile.