A Quiet Journey through Literary Depths
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who believes that if life is absurd, you may as well squint at the sun and be late to your own trial) Some novels begin with a bang. Others begin with a body. The Stranger begins with a sentence that feels like both and neither: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, […]
Litsketch 21. The Stranger: Existential Ennui, Murder, and Meursault’s Emotional Day Off Read More »
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that if your family road trip doesn’t involve a flood, a fire, and a decomposing matriarch, you haven’t truly earned your Faulkner) Welcome to the most dysfunctional funeral procession in American literature. William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying (1930) is the kind of novel you read, then reread,
Litsketch 20. As I Lay Dying: One Coffin, Many Voices, and an Unplanned Family Road Trip Read More »
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that if life is a courtroom, Kafka never gave us the charges—just the echo of footsteps in a never-ending corridor) Once upon a time in the grey, gaslit corners of modernity, a man woke up to find himself arrested. Not cuffed. Not jailed.Just politely, mysteriously, fatally… accused. Of
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that if repression had a user manual, Victorian men wrote it and then promptly tore it in half by moonlight) Before there were dual SIM phones, there were dual personalities.And before Marvel gave us Hulk-smash and Bruce Banner’s brooding remorse, Robert Louis Stevenson handed us a cautionary tale
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes Florence should be prescribed for all cases of cultural constipation and gender-based claustrophobia) There are novels that arrive like grand trains—majestic, well-scheduled, and heavily metaphorical. And then there’s A Room with a View (1908), which breezes in like a sunbeam through lace curtains, carrying with it the scent
Litsketch 17. Room with a View: When Travel Cures Victorian Repression (Kind Of) Read More »
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that every woman needs a room, a lock, and a polite sign that says “Not now, I’m writing history.”) Before coworking cafes and aesthetically filtered writing retreats… before motivational mugs and #BossLady hashtags… before anyone thought of monetizing silence… there was Virginia Woolf, walking across a cloistered university
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes that giving a bunch of unsupervised British schoolboys a conch and some coconuts is not a social experiment—it’s a horror story waiting for footnotes) Somewhere in the literary wild, past the pipe-smoking headmasters and the crisply ironed uniforms, lies a novel that dared to ask: What if we
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes the real danger wasn’t in the caves—it was in the assumptions everyone walked in with) You know you’re reading a classic when it begins with polite colonial tea and ends with the complete dismantling of friendship, trust, and any illusion that East and West will ever politely agree
Litsketch 14. A Passage to India: Empires, Echoes, and Awkward Cave Conversations Read More »
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who firmly believes no baby name ever escapes its baggage—especially if it comes with a Russian novelist and parental expectations) In the tender chaos of immigration, one thing always seems simple: the name. A syllable. A sound. A label. But when Bengali parents in America name their child after a Russian
By ABS, The Literary Scholar(Who knows that sometimes literature doesn’t rescue you—it just sits beside your sorrow with quiet understanding) There are books you read. And then there are books that read you back, like a tailor measuring you for a suit you’ll never grow out of. Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance is one such