The Cask of Amontillado and Other Bits and Pieces

By -
Montresor coat of arms
All month I've been especially wanting to read Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado."  I don't know why that story popped into my head; I'm not a specially big fan of Poe or anything.  I do remember reading this story in 8th grade and hardly understanding a word of it, which was the case with all the Poe stories we read that year.  (No one explained, for example, what an MS. was, which made "MS. in a Bottle" kind of opaque, and I seem to have spent all of my school years under the impression that I couldn't ask questions.)

Anyway.  "The Cask of Amontillado" is the story of a perfect revenge-murder.  Very creepy and unsettling.  Montresor drops hints to Fortunato the whole time, but Fortunato does not heed the warning.  But everyone knows the story, so I don't have much to say about it.

I've also been reading a couple of other things; I'm most of the way through the story of the Caliph Vathek, though to be honest I'm skimming a bit.  It's nowhere near as good as The Italian.  I also started reading Isak Dinesen's Seven Gothic Tales, and wow, her writing really takes me back.  I am enjoying it a lot--the writing is gorgeous--but I seem to have misplaced the book for the moment.  I think I'd like to revisit all of Dinesen in the future.  

I would still quite like to take a look at Wieland, since it's a homegrown article.  But that won't fit into October.  And I really need to be reading Greek literature!  I've been working my way through Aristotle's Rhetoric, but my goodness it's dull.  I must get back to Herodotus.

Comments

  1. AmyOctober 29, 2012 at 10:07 AM

    I love Dinesen also--the Gothic Tales are very, very enjoyable, and if you like those you'd also like the Winter's Tales. I've got her Anecdotes of Destiny on my TBR list, too.

    ReplyDelete
  2. JeanOctober 29, 2012 at 11:02 AM

    You're right--I do like the Winter's Tales! I think I own pretty much all of Dinesen's books, because I took a course on her at college. We read everything AFAIK. But I remember little, so I'm thinking I should revisit her works--as well as the other Scandinavian lit I studied back then.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I'd love to know what you think, so please comment!

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Ages of Poetry

By -
Image
  "The Four Ages of Poetry," by Thomas Love Peacock I am becoming fond of Thomas Love Peacock.  Besides his unbeatable name, he was a lot of fun.  Peacock was a minor literary figure of the early 19th century; he tried his hand at poetry but mainly succeeded in satire.  I read his short novel Nightmare Abbey last year, but at the time I didn't know that the young hero of the story, Scythrop, was modeled on Peacock's good friend Percy Shelley.  He and Shelley were quite close and Peacock was the executor of Shelley's will. Thomas Love Peacock Percy Bysshe Shelley "The Four Ages of Poetry," a tongue-in-cheek essay on the history and development of poetry, was published in 1820 in a new magazine called Literary Miscellany , which promptly died.  It would probably have been completely obscure and unknown--it nearly is anyway--but for Shelley.  Peacock sent a copy to his friend, who I guess didn't really have much of a sense of...
Read more

A few short stories in Urdu

By -
Image
 Back in August, I got hold of a book of Urdu short stories translated into English.  It's a large book, so I wanted to read just the women authors for WIT, and that would still be a good amount.  August got away from me, and I only read one or two stories back then, but I've continued reading them since.  I've now finished all the short stories in the book that were written by women (luckily for me, there are short biographies in an appendix, since I could only tell from the name about half the time).  I'll just highlight a couple: "The Wagon," by Khalida Asghar, is a hallucinatory, apocalyptic story.  The narrator meets three strange men who are watching the evening sky and point out that it has become red.  No one had noticed until they said so, but the sky is now strangely red.  Then a smell arrives, so offensive and sickening that it causes real pain -- but only once it's pointed out.  And finally, a mysterious wagon, which may be the s...
Read more

Faerie Queen Readalong I: Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness

By -
Image
I did it, I read all of Book I!  My minimum requirement was two cantos a day, but I managed three a couple of times.  I'm hoping to read ahead, because I'll be gone for two weeks in the middle of this event and I'd like to be able to prep a post ahead of time...but the schedule is already pretty demanding.  The reading is not terribly difficult, but it is slow.  I keep thinking that I've read a large chunk, only to look back and realize that in fact I have read six verses.  So here we go with analysis... Each book in the Faerie Queene features a knight, and a story, about a particular virtue.  The Redcrosse Knight, to be known as St. George after he accomplishes his feats, is all about Holinesse .  This does not mean that Redcrosse already exemplifies holiness; he doesn't.  Holiness is what he's working towards and struggling with.  His foes symbolize various forms of unholiness, and he falls into their clutches at least as often as he ...
Read more