skopia
No more passionate voice ever sounded in twentieth-century Russian poetry, the poet Brodsky said of Tsvetaeva. She came back from exile to Stalin's Russia, where the secret police took her husband and daughter.
At a country club on Christmas Eve, a Pennsylvania Cadillac dealer throws a drink in the wrong man's face. O'Hara tracks the next three days with pitiless attention to who outranks whom.
Protestants kill themselves more often than Catholics, single people more often than married. Durkheim turned the most private act into a social fact, and every social science since counts the way he counted.
Snowbound on a failing Massachusetts farm, Ethan Frome works beside a wife who is perpetually ill and the young cousin he has fallen for. Wharton makes poverty and duty feel like weather.
This is the saddest story I have ever heard, an American begins, then tells it out of order, circling two couples whose friendship at a German spa hid adultery, debt, and ruin.
The only serious philosophical question, Camus opens, is whether to kill yourself. His answer: the universe will never explain itself, so you live anyway, unreconciled, like Sisyphus happy pushing his rock uphill forever.
Werther writes to a friend about Lotte, who is engaged to a decent man, and about feelings he cannot govern. Young men across Europe dressed like him and read themselves into his condition.
Anna leaves her husband for a young officer while, in the other half of the book, Levin farms and marries and worries about God. Tolstoy gives both lives the same total sympathy.