This is a reader's guide to Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness as art, not as a page-turner but as art. As he has done with other works of Conrad, Anderson traces Conrad's art in a line-by-line analysis of most of this short novel. Anderson traces the unifying theme of the novel to Nietzsche's ideas in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche interpreted ancient Greek tragedy as a reflection of Dionysian and Apollinian life experiencesof the Greek audience. Apollo was a Greek god of the higher orders of civilization and the civilized restraint and control that is necessary for getting along with others....

This non-academic author explores Conrad's classic Lord Jim as a clinic in the psychology of the self, a novel whose characters are designed to reflect various degrees of integration of self-image and action and independence from the approval of others. Conrad's character construction anticipates the findings and theories of modern psychology, particularly those of psychological differentiation and to a lesser extent Jung and Freud. The main contrast in the clinic of the self is between the independent Marlow and the dependent Jim. After Jim fails to do his duty as First Mate on a ship named...

This is a detailed reader's guide to the power of Conrad's novel Victory. This non-academic author analyzes Conrad's format as a conflict between the life philosophies of Buddhist separation and Holy Spirit connection, a conflict played out dramatically in the emotional relationship of one man and one woman living on a remote south sea island. Anderson identifies the major themes as follows. Baron Axel Heyst, living alone to avoid emotional entanglements, nonetheless rescues Lena from a touring orchestra, and they escape to live together 24/7 on his remote island. Lena's connection to Heyst...

This non-academic author has previously brought you reader's guides to the depths and subtle pleasures of works by Joyce and Faulkner. With this book he brings you to the ultimate pleasures of Gustave Flaubert's masterpiece. This author treats Madame Bovary as the Zen novel, working on the reader in the same way Zen works on a disciple. He shows how Flaubert uses a radically new style in order to create a literary breakthrough of a similar order as Zen and has composed the ultimate music of this novel in the counterpoint of style and plot. The style of the novel is grounded in Zen-like...

This non-academic author, a retired lawyer, brings William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom to life as uncertainty in Dixie. He traces Faulkner's portrait of the efforts of Thomas Sutpen to create a family dynasty in wealth and community respect and of Rosa Coldfield to revenge Sutpen's treatment of her as a mere reproduction tool. Both efforts are analyzed as life sterilizers inevitably doomed to failure by the uncertainties in life and as examples of the tension between control of the future and love, a choice Faulkner had to make in his own personal life. Line by line analyses of critical...

An analysis of Faulkner's novel Light in August based on the death of his daughter, Alabama. BACK COVER: This non-academic author exposes the poltergeist lurking in the cellar of Faulkner's uncanny and haunting novel Light in August as the ghost of Faulkner's first child Alabama. She was born prematurely and died tragically after only nine days, apparently in the clutches of fetal alcohol syndrome. Faulkner couldn't write anything substantial for 7 months and then started this disturbing novel. The author demonstrates how Faulkner's own grief experience shaped the characters and the action...

This non-academic author brings the Garden of Eden myth alive as sophisticated poetry and a polemic for women and the consciousness of freedom. The myth is explored line by line using the tools of literary analysis and modern ideas, including Freudian concepts. The analysis shows how its "J" author, thought to be a woman in the royal court of Judah around 1000 BCE, uses the techniques of sound association, puns and other sophisticated means to get her messages across. The analysis probes how after thousands of years this myth still speaks to us about the critical human experiences of sex and...

This is a readers guide to Manns classic novel that attempts to answer the most compelling question of the 20th century-how could millions of Jewish men, women and children have been murdered by the government of a country that prided itself as the civilized "land of music," the land of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven? Mann gives a new answer to this question-the land of music produced not only the freedom-based music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven. It also produced twelve-tone row music, "serial" music composed without freedom but with strict controls. This new and ultra-control German...

This non-academic author presents his key to opening James Joyces infamously difficult and endlessly playful novel Finnegans Wake. The key was fashioned in Kabbalah, an ancient Jewish mystical tradition that as interpreted by Joyce champions independent individualism as the path to the highest spirituality. Kabbalah images a universe excreted by the ultimate god, a universe that is necessarily finite and limited that came with its own secondary god that is finite and limited, the god presented in Genesis that issues blessing and curses designed to make mankind fearful and dependent- the curse...