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For awhile I've been wanting to read an Haruki Murakami novel, but his recent books have scared me off with their length, so when the 191-page After Dark was published earlier this year, I had no more excuses. After Dark takes place over a single...
Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment by David Edmonds and John Eidinow (Ecco, 2006) might have been better titled “When Philosophers Collide.” The book describes in detail a relationship that seemed to begin as a friendship...
Last Sunday I began the 900,000-odd words of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa (1747-1748) and last night I finished it. Reading Clarissa in seven days is not something I'd recommend as a general practice. I don't think I've spent so many consecutive...
"It is my opinion that there never was a lady so young, who wrote so much and with such celerity [ie, swiftness]. Her thoughts keeping pace, as I have seen, with her pen, she hardly ever stopped or hesitated; and very seldom blotted out, or altered...
Central to a successful narrative in an epistolary novel is the free exchange of letters among the characters. Consequently, any interference with those letters can seem like a tear in the novel's space-time continuum — almost like the...
The basic plot of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa is fairly simple and almost archetypal. It seems familiar even if you've never read the novel or even heard of it. Because it's almost impossible to discuss anything about the book without disclosing...
Today, from 9:00 AM to about 5:30 PM in a virtually non-stop reading orgy, I read Letters 174 through 231 of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa , originally published as Volume IV in 1748. Although this is the fourth of seven volumes, the imbalance of text...
As I've been reading Clarissa , Deirdre has been taking photographs of me each day and posting them to her blog: http://deirdre-nyc.livejournal.com This little photographic essay has required that I put on a clean shirt every day. A little word about...
As early as Letter 17 in Clarissa , Clarissa Harlowe is bargaining with her parents to "live single" (Penguin edition, p. 95) in return for getting out of the arranged marriage to Roger Solmes. In the hundreds of pages since then, the ideal...
Artifice seems almost intrinsic to the novel. If the novel is written from an omniscient point of view, how can the author possibly know everything she's writing about? And even if the narrative makes clear that you're reading something penned...
Today I read about the first 100,000 words of Samuel Richardson's Clarissa , corresponding to the part of the novel originally published as Volume I in December 1747. This chunk of the book required about 8-1/2 hours of reading, and I finished just...
Books in the 18th century didn't have back-cover descriptions or dust jackets, so the titles helped to convey the subject of the book. Here's the complete title of Clarissa in an image of the title page from Wikipedia's entry on the novel...
Clarissa is not a novel to race through. Its length has undoubtedly kept off many readers, a fact which may be deplorable but is inevitable.... But the book could hardly be a short one and do what it does. It must be lived with for a while. —...
How did Samuel Richardson's Clarissa get to be so long? Wasn't there an editor who said "Let's tighten up this middle section. I suggest eliminating the character of Belford"? Wasn't there a publisher who laid down the law and...
Although I plan to read Clarissa in one week, there are certainly other approaches that work and which don't reveal an underlying insanity. In a charming essay published in the Hudson Review in 2003, University of Iowa literature professor Judith...
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