The Name of the World: A Novel

Average customer rating:

Oh boy - more navel gazing

He drops the ball

Writer's Exercise

Fantastic Yet Realistic

The Bone Details

The Name of the World: A Novel
Denis Johnson
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0060929650

Amazon.com

The Name of the World finds Denis Johnson the visionary poet and Denis Johnson the sober novelist engaged in a puzzling tug of war. What begins as a muted evocation of grief takes increasingly strange turns, until the novel's second half spins away from the narrative logic of the first. The result is, well, mixed, a beautiful mess glued together mostly by the power of Johnson's transcendent prose. The protagonist this time around is not a junkie or a drug dealer or even a writer, but a college professor whose wife and child died four years earlier in an automobile accident. Michael Reed walks, he talks, he teaches, but inside his thoughts rip "perpetually around a track like dogs after a mechanized rabbit." Not much has happened since their death, and numbed by the habit of grief, he thinks that's just fine. "Nothing was required of me," Reed thinks. "I just had to put one foot in front of the other, and one day I'd wander wide enough of my dark cold sun to break gently from my orbit."

That occasion comes when Reed reaches the premature end of his university appointment--and meets a redheaded cellist, the sort of wild, witchy, and becomingly deranged coed often found in books but perhaps less often in life. Flower Cannon (not, as one may imagine, the name she was born with) also shaves her pubic hair as public performance art and offers stripteases for fun and profit on the side. As the novel grows less coherent, Reed blunders into her childhood dream, or memory, which echoes his own dream and is also somehow haunted by the ghost of his daughter, or maybe Flower herself is the ghost of his daughter, or, well, something to that effect. (Dialogue such as "You. Are you a siren? A witch?" does little to clarify the situation.) But in the end it doesn't matter, because the dilemma this student presents Reed is as old as all time, and as easy to describe: "To let my wife and child be dead. I didn't think I was cruel enough for that. Because that is what the imperfections in Flower's skin invited me to do. There was a sense in which Anne and Elsie had to be killed, and killing them was up to me."

Actually, this sort of straightforward psychological exposition isn't really Johnson's bag. Like his antihero, he's after "the unforeseen"--that which can't be explained in words but only suggested through imagery, the more shocking the better. "In my current frame of mind I'd hoped for warnings much stranger and not so obvious," Reed thinks after reading a religious tract. In a similar vein, Johnson instructs us how to read his book: "I think this narrative might cohere, if I ask you to fix it with this vision: luminous images, summoned and dismissed in a flowering vagueness." Vagueness does indeed flower here, but it does so amid flashes of genuine brilliance, the kind of writing that gave the classic Jesus' Son its particular brand of unhinged lyricism.

Reed, for instance, is surrounded by characters in memorably Johnsonian states of desperation. History professor Tiberius Soames, fresh on the heels of a nervous breakdown: "Michael, we must get out of this flatness. The flatness and the regimented plant life. The vastly regimented plant life"; the caterer, a Peter Lorre look-alike who calls herself the Froggy Bitch and has the "smashed sinuses of an English bulldog"; the head trauma patient who wanders the grounds of a former lunatic asylum, holding aloft a small, imaginary object like an invisible torch: "I don't know. I can't see it. It's very light." No one but Johnson could bestow such radiant strangeness upon the inhabitants of a Midwestern college town. And if Reed's final, defiantly unreflective stance isn't much of a revelation, well, one hates to request a man with a knife sticking out of his eye in every Denis Johnson book. As brief and vivid as a hallucination, The Name of the World is the work of a prose musician who wisely refuses to play the same note twice. --Mary Park

Book Description

The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him.

Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances -- he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life -- he's a dead man walking.

Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war."

Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth.

Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today.

Customer Reviews:

Oh boy - more navel gazing.......2005-01-11

So unmemorable I'm not even sure I read it. Books about damaged college professors have begun to blur for me. Please, can these supposed writers of fiction just stop writing about the faculty of small liberal arts colleges? I can't remember what happened in which. There was a coed involved. And some drugs, I think. Or maybe that was The Corrections.

He drops the ball.......2004-04-10

For the first nine-tenths, maybe, this novel is almost perfect; I got the sense that no _word_ could be replaced. The measured complacency of the prose gives a perfect sense of character; a sense of a man, in fact, who doesn't have a great deal of character, and is aware of it. It's seamless. I never questioned anything about the book - never found myself thinking of it as a novel, or of the narrator as a narrator; I just kept reading it. Near the end, though, it starts to fail. Its climax is so enigmatic - so self-consciously engimatic, it seemed to me - that it doesn't give any real sense of closure, and the small hole that this opens up is absolutley ripped open by the sudden, inexplicable developments on the last few pages (not to ruin anything; the narrator goes through a transformation which didn't seem believable or precedented to me). I think this novel's strongest trait, in the end, is its dignity. Johnson doesn't go overboard with the metaphors or the sense of religious longing; everything is very quiet, subtle and dark, but the sense of something greater still comes through. Again, though, with the right conclusion, it could have been overwhelming; as it is, it's just interesting.

Writer's Exercise.......2003-06-15

This is my first Amazon.com review. I was compelled to do so because of Denis Johnson's short novel. It is a quick read, one-sitting. This is my first introduction to the writer. While I enjoyed the underlying structure: expansion and collapse of the narrative I found the story itself very frustrating. We read of academic life and its random structural changes - money for some projects, not others. Very little interaction between professor and students. There is an elusive sprite who (surprise?) makes money as a caterer, art class model, stripper, artist, who is also part of a pseudo-new-age religon for the singing? The main character's introversion is severe throughout, but then turns to direct observation with the reader, as if we are the character's confident - it doesn't work. Ultimately, I feel like this work was an exercise by the writer that got him to another, better place - based on some passages I'd recommend the writing - avoid this example.

Fantastic Yet Realistic.......2002-11-15

Denis Johnson does here what so many others have tried to write and failed: a coming-of-age novel for adults. And it's good--real good. He doesn't know how to close it, and it's essentially a short story--but then again, so is one's life.

The Bone Details.......2002-04-09

This is very much novel as abstract painting (and Johnson is very much novelist as abstract painter), in that (as with Don DeLillo's last book, The Body Artist) here is a novel that attempts to get to grips with the passage of a human being through the many varied and difficult stages of grieving. This is serious. It requires thought and patience.

Michael Reed is a college professor whose wife and child were killed in an automobile accident four year's previously. Over the course of a single summer, he develops an attachment with a student, loses his job and is forced to examine again the way he deals with - and his own place in - the world. Johnson's writing is both stark and beautiful (there is something terrible about a mind that has abnegated responsibility due to a conflict too great to be resolved), and the details accrete like so much hard bone: the novel is episodic, but each episode remains in your mind like freed and bleached shoulder blades erected in a pile.

The Name of the World inhabits similar territory to The Sweet Hereafter (both Russell Bank's book and Atom Egoyan's film) and the aforementioned Body Artist (although The Name of the World succeeds - transporting you to a world where Joy Division's Atmosphere is the only soundtrack - where The Body Artist fails: yes, both deal in chilly abstraction, but Johnson's book attempts to achieve a kind of adult resolution, where DeLillo withdraws further and still further from the abstractions he chooses to create).

Johnson is the kind of writer you champion knowing he isn't to everybody's tastes (he is difficult, at times, and unyielding, but that just goes to make for writing that makes demands upon the reader, challenging you to interpret what it is you are faced by).

Average customer rating:

Terse vivid prose unfurls a war story from the other side

Full of Pain and Sorrow

Novel Without a Name, a very realistic book

Giving war a face

Interesting but flighty

Novel Without a Name
Duong Thu Huong , Phan Huy Duong , Nina McPherson , and Thu Hng Dng
Manufacturer: William Morrow & Company
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books
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ASIN: 0688127827

Customer Reviews:

Terse vivid prose unfurls a war story from the other side.......2006-03-09

It should be noted that Duong Thu Huong has done prison time for her writings.

How interesting to see the other side of the same Vietnam War coin and find such vivid prose delineating a story of endless sacrifice, party corruption and bitter cynicism.

U.S. soldiers had 13 month tour of duty. The North had as long as it took- 15 years in the hero's case.

She writes expertly and hammers together a story of one man's experience of the war moving full circle from party ideologue to spent survivor leading an ever diminishing group of veterans

Full of Pain and Sorrow.......2006-01-09

As an American, I have only read about the Vietnam war from a US perspective. During my visit to Vietnam this year, I went to the Vietnam War Museum in Ho Chim Minh city which provided a Vietnamese perspective on the war. I was extremely moved and so upon returning to Tokyo (where I live) I came across this Novel Without A Name. The author really captured the pain, sorrow and loss of innocence that faced young Vietnamese men during these decades of war. I can't imagine being at war for over a decade (if we include the French war) when you life can be taken-away from you and your loved ones at any moment. Admist all this, the cental character tries to find a reason for being in all that he loves. A real sad book that I would not reccommend unless you have the heart to understand the psyche of this generation of Vietnamese youth. I enjoyed it.....

Novel Without a Name, a very realistic book.......2003-06-13

Novel Without A Name by Duong Thu Huong is a terrific novel that lets the reader into the head of a Vietnamese soldier fighting for the North Vietnam side during the Vietnam War. A twenty-eight year old man, Quan, is the narrator of Novel Without A Name. Quan's view of life is much different from what it was when he was a naive 18-year-old, enlisting in the army with his childhood friends. Back then, Quan had thought of war as a glorious time; a time when heroes and legends were made. At this point, Quan has begun to see the Vietnam War for what it really was; a brutal massacre needlessly killing his fellow Vietnamese people. Luong, once Quan's childhood friend, and now his commander who's life has become the Communist Party, sends Quan on a mission to find Bien, their childhood friend. The other task that Quan is given is one that Luong does not report to the officials, he asks Quan to go to their home village. Luong wants Quan to do this for a variety of reasons. First, he knows that the war will be going on much longer than was ever intended, and he knows that Quan misses his home. Second, Luong wants Quan to reassure all the families back home that they are doing well, even if this is partially a lie. Quan sets out on his long journey, and unfortunately is met with bad news. The war has driven Bien to insanity. This insanity was caused by the fact that Bien has a life threatening form of malaria, which he got from a mosquito; a very common occurrence during the Vietnam War. The cell that holds Bien was on par with others during the War, but was nonetheless despicable. The crazy man eats, lives, and sleeps in his own waste, and is malnourished.
After seeing Bien, Quan returns home to his village. He finds that it is not only he who has changed during the 10 years that he has been absent. His childhood girlfriend, Hoa, whom he had planned to marry, has become pregnant by a passing soldier. Her life is in shambles and there is nothing he can do to help her. In addition, Quan learns that his brother had died. This came as a shock, as Quan had not even known that his brother had enlisted. After Quan learns that it was his father who encouraged Quang to join the army, he is enraged. His father, like many other fathers during the time, had been sucked in by the Communist propaganda. He had volunteered his son as a way to attain some personal honor. The shaky relationship between the father and son grows worse, and Quang leaves his home village unhappy with his life.
During the course of the book, Quan encounters many people, all who give the reader an idea of what the society that existed in Vietnam during the war was like. Novel Without A Name by Duong Thu Huong is a great book. Because the book was told from the point of view of a boi doi, otherwise known as a soldier, the book seems so much more real. By reading Novel Without A Name I feel that I have learned so much about the Vietnam war in a way that was much more interesting than a book full of dates and facts.
Reading this book also gave me information about the Vietnam War that could never have been obtained from a textbook. No textbook could have fully expressed the horrors of the Vietnam war like Novel Without A Name did. A textbook would not have told the real life experiences people went through. For example, Quan, the narrator of the Novel Without A Name tells of a skeleton he discovered in the forest. The decomposed body was lying in a hammock hidden by trees deep in a Vietnamese forest. Quan deduces that the man must have become lost in the maze of trees, and after becoming too week from starvation to move on, made a hammock and died a painful death. After searching the area, Quan found a knapsack with items of clothing, and a letter requesting that the soldier's remains be brought to his mother. No textbook would have told this story. I never would have known about how notorious the Vietnamese forests were for being traps that easily ensnared humans passing through. Basically, Novel Without A Name took me behind the scenes of the Vietnam War. There are thousands of books on the Vietnam War, but these books cover only what occurred on the battlefields, not what was going on in the lives of the people living in Vietnam during the time of the war.
Another example of how Duong Thu Huong took me behind the scenes of the war, was her description of a woman with whom Quan came into contact on his journey. This woman who collected the bodies of the dead in her area, was beastly, but kind. She took Quan into her home because he needed food and shelter. During the course of the novel, two other families took in Quan when he was in need of food and shelter. During the Vietnam War, people throughout the country pulled together and took care of their men in action. This was a common practice during the Vietnam War that I would not have known had I not read the book.
Novel Without A Name can at times be gruesome, but thus is the nature of war. If a book about the Vietnam War did not include parts that sickened one, then that book would not be accurately be informing readers of what occurred during the Vietnam War. I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book. Though by reading Novel Without A Name I do not know about all the battles that took place or the famous commanders that reigned during the war; I can honestly say that I understand what happened during the Vietnam War.

Giving war a face.......2002-11-18

War is never a good thing. This book can give us a picture of what we were fighting against. We were not just fighting for our country we were fighting a people. A people with thoughts and dreams for an uncertian future. Let this book be a statement to all that there are two sides to every war.

Interesting but flighty.......2001-07-14

While I generally enjoyed this book, I'm only giving it three stars because it's a bit goofy. Not goofy in a HAHA sense, but, goofy in a "got hit on the head" sense. While I enjoyed Quan's travels as well as the supporting characters, the author waxed lyrically too long and too often. While a dab of this language would have made the prose sparkle, a thick coating only made things more dull.

Amazon.com

Kali Israel offers much more than a traditional biography of an eccentric Victorian in Names and Stories. Instead, Israel, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, uses her subject--art historian, writer, and socialite Emilia Dilke--as the focus of a well-researched analysis of 19th-century Britain. Israel examines the stories by which Emilia Dilke is made known to us today, and how those create, contain, extend, and multiply the subject. Forgoing the traditional historian's tendency to sort through texts--judging them as more or less truthful reflections of a "real," retrievable person--she critically examines the texts themselves, and in relationship to each other, then uses them to delineate multiple representations of Dilke.

Each of her seven chapters focuses on a particular period of Dilke's history. There are stories about families that circulate around Dilke's childhood, stories about her making (and being made into) pictures, about both her marriages, and about her life at Oxford. Israel also offers compelling readings of Dilke's own texts about sex in marriage and the "adulterous" texts and tales by and about Dilke and each of her two husbands. Although frequently academic, Israel's prose remains tightly focused around her subject, and her argument unfolds logically. Names and Stories offers an insightful examination of the relations and contradictions of diverse political, intellectual, social and aesthetic histories of Victorian England. --Bertina Loeffler Sedlack

Book Description

"Emilia Dilke" (1840-1904) was christened Emily Francis Strong and known by her middle name throughout her childhood as the daughter of an army officer-cum-bank manager in Iffley, England, near Oxford, and her days as an art student in London. During her first marriage, she was Francis Pattison or Mrs. Mark Pattison, while her published works of art history and criticism were neutrally signed E. F. S. Pattison. Later, in the 1870s, she privately changed her first name to Emilia, a switch made public when she remarried in 1885. By this second nuptial union she became Lady Dilke, the famous intellectual, feminist, art critic, author, and, eventually, the active and popular President of the Women's Trade Union League for nearly twenty years. A rich work of biography, literary criticism, aesthetic history, and sociocultural inquiry, Names and Stories traces the life of this fascinating and remarkable woman as it was lived under many different appellations and guises. In doing so, the book investigates the full spectrum of nineteenth-century British thought and custom. By studying not only an individual life but the many stories that informed, determined, and challenged that life, author Kali Israel considers Dilke as both subject and object--author and character, player and pawn--in the Victorian world of which she was a part. As they are chronicled, explained, and contextualized in this book, these stories--however they were created, told, or interpreted--move through realms both historical and fictional. Israel's central character experienced not one but two highly visible marriages marked by rampant gossip, high-profile sex scandals, and inconclusive courtroom battles; was considered by some to be the model for the character of Dorothea in Eliot's Middlemarch; and similarly "appeared" in many other novels, plays, and even poems in her own time and up through the mid-twentieth century. Names and Stories is not a conventional "life and times" book, even though it recounts a birth-to-death adventure that is both unique and epochal. Rather, the work utilizes Dilke's myriad narratives as the means to broader critical, historical, and theoretical engagements. Debating the very nature of life-study and biography-writing, Israel employs a wide array of published and primary sources to argue that the "names and stories" of Emilia Dilke can help us understand key conflicts and tensions within Victorian Britain, as well as ongoing cultural arguments. This book thus examines several nineteenth-century pressure-points in this light, among them gender, representation, authority, authorship, knowledge, and political thought. Israel's contemporary and cross-disciplinary study also illuminates such broader themes as the family, the body, narrative, figuration, and historical writing and reading.

Average customer rating:

The Names of Rivers: A Novel
Daniel Buckman
Manufacturer: Picador
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

Contemporary | General | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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Family Saga | Genre Fiction | Literature & Fiction | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0312314604

Amazon.com

With honesty and depth, Daniel Buckman creates a memorable account of trauma and loss with The Names of Rivers. Buckman's novel focuses on the Konicks, a broken family in a poor Illinois town whose nature and experience seem to lead them hopelessly toward misfortune. Patriarch Bruno Konick, an expert in obsolete crafts, lives a meager, largely isolated life, haunted by the horrors he witnessed as a soldier during World War II. His emotional distance and anger alienated him from his sons, who nonetheless followed him into military service and returned from the Vietnam War with similar psychological damage. Elder son Bruce, a violent alcoholic with a gruesome facial scar, harasses the townspeople and steals from his father. Memories of wartime atrocities, a long-standing heroin addiction, Bruce's childhood sexual assaults, and his father's neglect have left younger son Len a weakened shell of a man. Bruce's abandoned son, Luke, possesses an intelligence that offers him a possible escape from this familial cycle, but it's at odds with the aimlessness and resentment he inherited from his father and the limited options around him.

Though troubling in its subject matter, Buckman's perceptive yet restrained characterizations offer The Names of Rivers resonance and poignancy. Brutally precise yet compassionate descriptions help convey the helplessness and regret of this gallery of displaced, lonely characters, lending the book's hard lessons a sense of disquieting accuracy. A persistently sad novel, The Names of Rivers rewards readers with the kind of wisdom gained from such a painful journey. --Ross Doll

Book Description

In a rustbelt town south of Chicago, three generations of Konick men attempt to assemble lives lived in the shadows of war. Bruno Konick is the patriarch, haunted by his actions during the World War II liberation of Dachau. His middle-aged sons, Bruce and Len, struggle for happiness while living with the disfiguring traumas of combat in Southeast Asia. Bruce's son, Luke, is torn between the influences of father and grandfather, a precarious bridge between the aftershocks of violence and valor.

Average customer rating:

"Mr. Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children"
Great Ninteenth Century Chessmatch - One of Wilkie's Best
tons of fun
Page-turner
A piercing look at social mores

No Name (World's Classics)
W. Wilkie Collins
Manufacturer: Oxford University Press, USA
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

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ASIN: 0192816489

Book Description

Condemned by Victorian critics as immoral, but regarded today as a novel of outstanding social insight, No Name shows William Wilkie {ollins as the height of his literary powers. It is the story of two sisters, Magdalen and Norah, who discover after the deaths of their dearly beloved parents
that the parents were not married at the time of their births. Disinherited and ousted from their estate, they must fend for themselves and either resign themselves to their fate or determine to recover their wealth by whatever means.

Download Description

Wilkie Collins's investigation of illegitimacy and 'the woman question' in No Name (1862) compels with a wholly different order of suspense from that of The Woman in White or The Moonstone. For its family secret - the Vanstone daughters' illegitimacy, their consequent disinheritance and fall from social grace - is revealed early on, and as Magdalen Vanstone struggles to reclaim her identity, the plot uncovers many a moral, social and legal skeleton in the cupboards of Victorian society. Mercurial and unscrupulous, Magdalen is Wilkie Collins's most exhilarating heroine, one of the rare subversives in Victorian fiction and a woman dazzlingly versatile in her powers of self-transformation. Through her, with great comic vigour, No Name exposes how social identity is constructed, and how it can be dismantled, buried, borrowed or invented.

Customer Reviews:

"Mr. Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children".......2005-03-30

4 1/2 stars, but I rounded up.

No Name is the story and portrait of Magdalen Vanstone... or as Wilkie introduces his novel in the preface, "Here is one more book that depicts the struggle of a human creature, under those opposing influences of Good and Evil, which we have all felt, which we have all known." It's a fairly accurate description as throughout the course of the story, we see the evolution of the character of our heroine; we see her heading down a shady path, but yet somehow from a 21st century perspective, Magdalen manages to make it seem not so immoral. Often times I see her trying to act as morally as she can in the unmoral situations she chooses to involve herself in. Part of No Name's strength, arises from the deftness in which Collins creates Magdalen. She posseses such an enormous range in character and emotion that if No Name were ever to be made into a movie, actresses would vie to have her role.

When Magdalen and her sister's inheritance are taken away due to unexpected familial circumstances, Magdalen resolutely follows a reckless path of revenge. While not exactly your Victorian equivalent of your "Kill Bill," the novel seems closer in spirit to Alexander Dumas's novel: The Count of Monte Cristo. Of course it doesn't have the swashbuckling quality of Dumas's novel as there are no fight scenes to the death. Collins's novel is set in a domestic scene with a female protagonist and the action is far tamer. It is equally gripping though because it's the chase of the revenge that's the fun part; the deceit and swindling involved, the careful measuring of your enemy's abilities that is part of charm. Collins was genius to embroil a female in a revenge type of plot and I'm just amazed at how much free agency Collins bestows upon Magdalen - a female living in Victorian times. He completely cuts her off from the ties of society and gives her free reign.

While I was reading, I felt that the novel could be loosely separated into 3 quite different parts - each with it's own distinct pacing and mood. It goes quite well with the divisions of the triple-decker novel they had long ago. I'm not spoiling much because the novel covers such massive ground, but the first part covers the idyllic times of the Vanstone family and we come to see how the inheritance is stripped from the Vanstone daughters. The second part (the best and my favorite) follows Magdalen as she pursues her revenge with the superior help of the rogue Captain Wragge, a self-proclaimed, "moral agriculturist" (I'll leave you to discover what he means by it). Wragge is one of Collins' best creations (he even beats out Count Fosco in my mind). A short, brown eyed, green eyed creature with enormous talents and verbal abilities, he is very resourceful, calculates very well, and is able to adapt quickly to whatever is needed in each situation. One of the highlights of No Name resides in Wragge's chronicle describing Magdalen's progress. The other crowning achievement is the cat and mouse game played between Captain Wragge and Madame Lecount (the housekeeper and keeper of the interest of Magdalen's victim). Both are directors of people and there is a large amount of plotting and counter-plotting that goes on that keeps the pages turning. It is here that No Name rivals that of The Woman in White, and if Collins had continued to write in this vein, No Name could have been on an equal footing to Woman in White.

However it is in the third part -dealing with the fallout of the revenge- that No Name becomes more flawed. I would say especially so in the ending. Quite a lot of Victorians found the ending distasteful, but the modern reader might find it a little dissatisfying for a completely different reason.

As No Name was delivered right after Collins's magnum opus, The Woman in White, there was a possibility of being in its shadow. However, Collins more than safely overcomes such a hurdle. He's crafted an entirely different story. Although in a way, I almost see No Name as an inverse of Woman in White. Think of a story looking and rooting from the side of Sir Percieval and Count Fosco--the nefarious plotting to take away an inheritance--and in a way, it is the story of Madgalen and Captain Wragge. Of course our sympathies are on completely different sides and this is due to the strength of Collins's characterizations. But that said, the books feel almost nothing alike.

In the end, although not as tightly plotted as The Woman in White and a bit more flawed, No Name is more ambitious, covers more ground, more character development, a lot more stories, introduces way more secondary characters, and is pretty amazing as a whole. It's a massive novel in which Collins fleshes out so many people (and for Collins that usually means, so many people to like) and Collins is able to accomplish a measurable change and growth in the character of Magdalen. The more I reflect on the novel, the better it gets for me, and the more amazed I am at all that Wilkie attempted and accomplished.

I recommend reading the Oxford World's Classics edition for its excellent introduction by Virginia Blain. It hits spot-on about everything that is good and bad about the novel as well as going into the themes of acting and of plotting (both human plotting and writer plotting).

Great Ninteenth Century Chessmatch - One of Wilkie's Best.......2005-01-17

Wilkie Collins, best know for "The Moonstone" (which I have read and loved) and "The Woman in White" (which I have not read yet) is at his best in "No Name". I do not compare it to the "Moonstone" for the "Moonstone" is a great mystery for which the reader must wait to the end for it to be revealed. "No Name" is not a mystery but one great chessmatch, that oddly enough is not played by Magdalen and Noel Vanstone. It is played by the wonderful character of Captain Wragge and Mrs. Lecount. Reading and seeing the game as it is played out is one great ride.

Although many, at the time the book was published, were shocked at the ending. I found it to be very good. It was shocking to those at the time that Wilkie would allow a woman who had done the things Magdalen had done to find happiness. As a reader, I was very much glad that she did find it (one litte bit of the ending revealed) for she deserved it (in my opinion).

In the beginning of the book, I came to very much like Magdalen and wished her success in her quest to regain her rightful inheritance - although I knew what she was doing was wrong. I also found that I very much liked Captain Wragge, for all of his "moral agriculturalism", he had a soft spot for Magdalen which came through in the story. For her part, Magdalen, trying her best to be unemotional and strong, kept her soft side when it came to Mrs. Wragge (even though she was her downfall).

All in all, this was a very good book that kept my interest through the 700 pages. For those of you that liked the "Moonstone" and the "Woman in White", "No Name" will no disappoint and I recommend it to anyone that enjoys Wilkie's style of writing.

P.S. I did not write too much about the story line for I did not want to give too much of it away.

tons of fun.......2002-12-27

This is the best-plotted book I have ever read. The intricacies of the ingenious cat-and-mouse game kept me unable to put the book down (despite its length, and my general impatience as a slow reader). Unlike other books I've read by Collins, this one is also extremely funny, largely because of one character who is an incredible rascal and scoundrel. This is really one of the most enjoyable novels I've ever found.

Page-turner.......2002-11-20

Engrossing, densely textured read.
Could claim greatness on the basis of the Wragges and Madame alone, but also contains one of the most original heroines in Victorian fiction,and draws a fascinating portrait of venality, social corruption and hypocrisy -- at times, it reminded me of both 'Pere Goriot' and 'Les Miserables'.
And it's full of those little concrete details that make nineteenth century fiction so deliciously materialistic. Don't miss out on the Oriental Cashmere Robe!

A piercing look at social mores.......2002-03-06

It is to Wilkie Collins' credit that more than a century after he wrote his novels, they still engage the reader and make sense in social terms. In "No Name," two sisters by the last name of Vanstone find out that they are illegitimate. Their formerly comfortable lives are disrupted to the core as their lose their places in society, their friends, their inheritances, and even, literally, their names. Collins makes their predicament alive and vital despite the fact that today this sort of news would barely stir a social ripple.

Novel Without a Name.: An article from: World Literature Today

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Novel Without a Name.: An article from: World Literature Today
James Banerian
Manufacturer: University of Oklahoma
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

Book Description

This digital document is an article from World Literature Today, published by University of Oklahoma on June 22, 1995. The length of the article is 849 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Novel Without a Name.
Author: James Banerian
Publication: World Literature Today (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1995
Publisher: University of Oklahoma
Volume: v69 Issue: n3 Page: p653(2)

Article Type: Book Review

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