Picked it up in a free bin at the dump, needed some easy reading to get back in the habit of novels and longer reads.
Good, after it's fashion - while I'm wary of Castaneda - most of his writings, passed off as true, were later called into some question (amazing they weren't questioned at the time) - but, like a lot of writers his fiction is a means of expressing a deeper metaphysical or metaphorical truth. And despite the queer circumstances of his later life (read the Wiki here and The NY Times and Salon on his legacy), it was worth giving him the chance - don't judge the book by it's author, as it were. Vaguely inspiring.
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My foray into Victorian eroticism, merely rounding out my reading, why not? Everyone else is reading "50 Shades of Bullshit", my eroticism can be a little more literary.
It isn't, the prose and style is better, by a long-shot, but it suffers the gross repetition of ideas - a Victorian "Gentleman" has furnished and soundproofed a torture room wherein he rapes and converts to decadence some poor girl that has spurned his advances. The first volume is good - for the genre, he's no Nabokov or De Sade by a long shot, but he's thorough and realizes his elaborate fantasies upon the reluctant-come-enthusiastic victim.
Standard rape fantasy, where the woman (women) learn to enjoy themselves despite their noble inclinations...fodder for both men and women. I have some criticisms, the word "Bubbies" for "Tits" or "Breasts" for example, makes me laugh, and some of his "depravities" are not particularly to my taste, but it does have something...
You can read the book yourself online here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Way_of_a_Man_with_a_Maid
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I like Sir Walter Scott. He gets a bad rap for his romances, they were good, competent, of the time, period pieces, he was reasonable, intelligent, he did well, why not?
Picked this up in a dollar bin. Good so far.
If only I could have found a first edition, or at least one with a less garishly illustrated cover...
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Finally finished, not through any fault of the author or translator, but like a lot of good books it demands pause to process...
The rhyming - occasional, good, although I stumbled to find the rhythm, to satisfy the false rhymes, reading, on the left page, the original, and my Italian is near nonexistent but I know all the rhymes there are true. But that's not what it's about. It's about the images, the aspects and degrees of hell that he conjures up, the punishments he inflicts upon his enemies or those he considers worthyn- eternal and cruel in the extreme, not what you would imagine from someone so apparently enlightened. And the people - the population of hell, I miss most of them, the references often to people Dante knew himself, and so perhaps the work was as much a political satire, but this is speculation.
There's an essay there, in how our view of the world (and God) has changed, I'd always taken it for granted that like minded people with modest education thought pretty much the same, but this is not true, and we are as much a product of our times and culture as we are of ourselves.
Great book. And the translators notes are at the end, bonus, to try and puzzle what I didn't first understand.
Read a portion of it online here: http://www.purgatorio.com/divine_comedy/inferno1.html
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