In this series I discovered that people know me so well that I can’t come up with the final question in the series. Nothing of interest came to mind. Now, however, I finally have our very last question, after which we will find out the winner. Here is the question:
We all know that I hate collective identities and refuse to join any of them. Except one. Which is this single collective identity that I not only acknowledge but am proud of possessing? (For one point).
And a supplementary question: Why? What makes this identity so much more attractive than others? (For 2,5 points.)
The answers for the previous two questions are under the fold:
My most favorite book ever in the entire world starts with the words:
“harsh homeland, the falsest, most miserable imaginable, I shall never return to you: with eyes still closed, it is there before you, enveloped in the blurry ubiquity of sleep and thus invisible, but nonetheless cleverly and subtly suggested, foreshortened and far in the distance: with even the tiniest details recognizable, outlined, as you yourself admit, with such scrupulous accuracy as to border on the maniacal.”
It is a novel by the greatest living writer on this planet Juan Goytisolo and it is titled Count Julian. It should be read in the original, of course, because there is no translator whose intellect, erudition and linguistic power can rise to the author’s level. I taught it in translation and it was good but not end-of-the-world phenomenal.
And the one I hate the most is the stupid, sexist, woman-hating Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirit. As my bad luck would have it, two of my students are writing their research papers on this stupid book, making me seethe every time they repeat the silly trope that this crap is somehow feminist. I’m sorry, but a female character falls pregnant as a result of being raped by people who torture her and she decides to forgive everybody, never look for the criminals who did this to her because now she has the only thing that can possibly matter to a woman – a baby? That’s feminist? Vomit, vomit, vomit.
My favorite novel in English is, of course, Dreiser’s An American Tragedy.
And my second favorite is Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men.
And my least favorite is Mrs. Dalloway. Does anybody know why the English literature always gives the name Clarissa to its most pathetic, weak, whiny, and boring characters?
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