European Fiction

- Brian Maston & Lucia Nankoe -

Turks Fruit by Jan Wolkers

What the critics say… Translation of Hans Schoots’s (film critic De Volkskrant, Het Parool etc.) essay on “The Sex Wave in Dutch Cinema”. Turkish Delight (Turks Fruit) showed how open, explicitly sexual themes can play an integral and accepted role in a ‘normal’ film. The audience has almost no other choice but to choose the [...]

The Ethics

by Benedict de Spinoza – 1677 Translated from the Latin by R.H.M. Elwes (1883) PART I: CONCERNING GOD APPENDIX.–In the foregoing I have explained the nature and properties of God. I have shown that he necessarily exists, that he is one: that he is, and acts solely by the necessity of his own nature; that [...]

Lost Samuel Beckett Play

Scholars Discover 23 Blank Pages That May As Well Be Lost Samuel Beckett Play —Just weeks after the centennial of the birth of pioneering minimalist playwright Samuel Beckett, archivists analyzing papers from his Paris estate uncovered a small stack of blank paper that scholars are calling “the latest example of the late Irish-born writer’s genius.” [...]

Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’

April 20, 1956 Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’ By BROOKS ATKINSON Don’t expect this column to explain Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot,” which was acted at the John Golden last evening. It is a mystery wrapped in an enigma. But you can expect witness to the strange power this drama has to convey the impression of [...]

About Hable con Ella

A film by Pedro Almodóvar.  

Kundera versus Nietzsche

Conclusion: The Unbearable Lightness of Being… The Gay Science, Section 341 (Nietzsche) The heaviest weight. – What if some day or night a demon were to steal into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it you will have to live once again and innumerable [...]

Nietzsche on the Modern European Identity

“Modern Europe” From: The Gay Science (La gaya scienza) Book V ‘We Fearless Ones’, Friedrich Nietzsche (1882) 352. How morality is scarcely dispensable.— A naked human being is generally a shameful sight—I am speaking of us Europeans (and not even of female Europeans!). Suppose that, owing to some magician’s malice, the most cheerful company at [...]

Nietzsche and his/the “German” Identity

From: Ecce Homo Why I am So Wise, 3 Friedrich Nietzsche (written in 1888) (published in 1908) This dual series of experiences, this means of access to two worlds that seem so far asunder, finds an exact reflection in my own nature,—I am a Doppelgänger, I have a “second” face, as well as a first. [...]

Le Provocateur

Michel Houellebecq is the most controversial French novelist in decades. But what’s shocking about ‘The Elementary Particles’ isn’t all the anonymous sex — it’s his attack on everything the 60′s generation holds dear. By EMILY EAKIN Anomie is a disease that disproportionately afflicts French novelists. But even by the standards of the country that gave [...]

About James Joyce

NY Times review – January 14, 1941 Editorial: James Joyce If there was something ambiguous and enigmatic in Joyce’s genius, the conflicting elements in it were the cause. He was naturalistic, symbolist and fantast. He was steeped in medieval philosophy and in studies of the unconscious. In his later years pedantry possessed him. His mostly [...]

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