This is a book about love: The narrator tells us about her attempts to belong. She wants to belong to the sorority, be one of those smooth, lovable girls - but all too soon she realizes that this cannot be: she's different. Maybe this feeling of being different from the "normal" people around her attracts her to the graduate student Vernor, although she falls in love with his clever voice before she sees his African American face. Vernor hates himself; he is drawn to philosophy because it seems to be a spiritual realm untainted with self; so it is no wonder that he cannot accept the narrator's love. The narrator's family seems to be devoid of love. Her mother died shortly after the narrator was born, who finds herself accused of being the one to blame for her mother's death. Her father, brothers, grandparents are taciturn, elusive strangers; and yet... This powerful novel shows how you create yourself, trying to be who you want to be; at the same time it proves that there are basics - roots? - from which you cannot escape.

Oates is a master at evoking physical and spiritual reality. The reader can smell the nightmare of the sorority house; the physical encounters with Vernor are so shocking because they are so real.
Maybe some readers' judgments are clouded by their expectations which come from reading other novels by Joyce Carol Oates. This is the first novel by her I have read, and I am deeply impressed by her mastery of the English language, by the beautiful rhythms and vivd descriptions which reminded me of Woolf and Mansfield.

Some of the reviews here are quite disturbing. Lewis in the dock? Filth? - Those people must be talking about a different book, surely. Wilson clearly admires Lewis and loves and knows his works. Most of the claims attributed to his biography by other reviewers are not actually made in the book. It seems to me that many people find it hard to accept that Lewis's lifestyle differed from the one accepted among American Evangelicals... Wilson never accuses Lewis of not being politically correct, on the contrary, he points to the times he lived in to make us understand. It's a pity many fans of Lewis will be deterred from reading this book by some of the other reviews here; this is a fair and compassionate biography which helps the reader understand Lewis and his world; above all, however, it is excellently written, and I found it hard to put it down once I had got started.

It is incredible what Ruth Prawer Jhabvala manages to do in well under 200 pages: Two women's lives, two periods in Indian history are the material for a fascinating tale about living in a foreign country. Olivia is married to a dutiful Raj official, but fascinated by a local prince. Fifty years later another woman travels to India, a descendent of Olivia's neighbours; she tries to find out what happened to Olivia, but she cannot do that as a distant observer. Just like Olivia, her life is beginning to become part of the Indian lives going on around her...

There is much to learn from this book: about love, about India, what it means to live in a foreign country. It is a great book, but somehow - compared to other books by the brilliant Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - there was a little bit too much didacticism in it for my taste: It seemed to me that the narrators were always trying to explain India to the reader. Which is, in a way, a good thing, isn't it?

There is no denying that the Oxford Companion to Christian Thought is a very expensive book, but as it is something like an entire library in one book, it sure is worth its price.

You can have a look at the table of contents to see what you can find in the Companion. The essays are written by brilliant and committed theologians, there isn't even a whiff of the dead prose of encycolpedias.

The stress is on contemporary theology, but the excerpts which are accessible here show you that the history of Christian thought is well represented too.

Christianity is more than just your local church and your local preacher's views. This book gives you an idea what has been going on all around the world in the past 2000 years. There is much to learn!

"Brigitta" was the first story by Stifter I ever read, and I am sure it will always be one of my favourite stories. All of Stifter's stories are about how to live. Brigitta is the tale of a woman who finds a life of her own after her husband betrayed her and she threw him out.
Stifter is different from any other writer of the 19th century. His main interest is not in dramatic events but the everyday. Ordinary lives fill him with wonder and admiration. He will make you look at life in a different way.

Welshman R.S. Thomas is the author of some of the most memorable religious poetry of the century. As a clergyman in rural Wales Thomas had to face a country and a church in decline; this inspired poetry of an austere beauty. The poem "The Bright Field" seems to me to capture the essence of Thomas' poetry:

"I have seen the sun break through / to illuminate a small field / for a while, and gone my way / and forgotten it. But that was the pearl / of great price, the one field that had / the treasure in it. I realize now / that I must give all that I have / to possess it. Life is not hurrying // on to a receding future, nor hankering after / an imagined past. It is the turning / aside like Moses to the miracle / of the burning bush, to a brightness / that seemed as transitory as your youth / once, but is the eternity that awaits you."

The aim of his book is a fascinating one: Recently many historians, such as Regina Schwartz or Jan Assmann claimed that monotheism was always linked to intolerance - in contrast to the polytheism it had replaced. Santner argues that, on the contrary, the Judeo-Christian legacy opens up a unique way of seeing and accepting the other as he or she really is.

The hero of this book is Franz Rosenzweig, a German-Jewish philosopher (1886-1929) who is best remembered for his enigmatic opus magnum "The Star of Redemption", which outlined a philosophy founded in Judaism, but which Rosenzweig refused to call religious. I doubt that anyone has ever claimed to have fully understood "The Star of Redemption"; Santner offers one way of coming to grips with this great work: He offers a Freudian reading of Rosenzweig and a Rosenzweigian reading of Freud, or he at least claims he does.

Rosenzweig refused the brilliant career of a conventional university professor of philosophy; he was looking for a different kind of rootedness, which he finally found in the Judaism he had been born into but had so far neglected: There an "ancient treasure chest whose existence he had never forgotten but which he had never fully explored was found to contain his most personal possessions, things inherited, not borrowed." He feels that now he does no longer step outside the flow of life, as he believes academic philosophy does, but can see things in their particularity and singleness even in their "everyday life".

Both Rosenzweig and Freud know that man can never know everything about himself; we feel and "excess of demand", but we cannot really explain why this is so and how it works - even with the help of Psychoanalysis. A real "encounter" with the other must be aware of this "surplus"; the other can only be accepted as a B=B, any attempt at categorizing in the manner of B=A will always be off the mark:"To put it most simply, the Other to whom I am answerable has an unconscious, is the bearer of an irreducible and internal otherness, a locus of animation that belongs to no form of life." This, according to Santner, creates the perspective of an "Ethics of Singularity".

Santners thesis culminates in the chapter "Responsiblity beyond the Superego". Rosenzweig feels that the capacity to say "I" "only becomes manifest (...) in and through the response to the passionate call of one's proper name". In my opinion there can be no doubt about it that for Rosenzweig this call is God's call, which in turn enables us to see others in a kind of "revelatory love" not as representatives of some kind of universal but as individuals.

In contrast to Martin Buber's vision of encounter as a meeting of perfect understanding, however, here the "paradox of revelatory love (...) is, thus that in some sense it reveals nothing."

This is exciting stuff, but I somehow feel the book lacks some kind of conclusion. Instead, Santner offers a discussion of the German poet Hölderlin, which may be due to the fact that Santner has worked extensively on Hölderlin.

My main qualm about this challenging book, however, is that in many parts it is very hard to read because of its somewhat clumsy language. Both Rosenzweig and Freud are masters of the German language, their style is always clear, Rosenzweig's often particularly elegant (which does not mean he is easy to understand). In contrast to them Santner is at least partly infected by a kind of postmodern academic sociolect which makes him write sentences like the following:
"The libidinal component of one's symbolic identity must be thought of as being "ibidinal" too: a largely unconscious citation of the authority guaranteeing one's rightful enjoyment of the predicates proper to it." If you think this is perfectly normal English you will enjoy the book even more than I did.

"Madame Bovary" is of course THE classic novel of adultery (together with "Anna Karenina"), and it is also on of the most-respected representatives of 19th-century realism; that might be enough to deter many readers, which is a pity, because "Madame Bovary", is, above all, an excellent read.

As the subtitle "Scences from provincial life" suggests, the novel is a brilliant satire of small town life. In contrast to Dickens or Thackerey, however, Flaubert's sense of humour is excessively grim and merciless. His insight does not lead him to excuse any of the weaknesses of his protagonists.

Mr Bovary is a decent chap, a doctor of mediocre talent and intelligence. A kind of misunderstanding leads the daughter of one of his patients to marry him. All to soon, alas, she recognizes that ther romantic ambitions will not be fulfilled. Her two affairs are presented as a story of moral decay. In the end her trusting and doting husband still has not found out what is going on, but unfortunately Madame has ruined the family financially.

The story in itself is not exciting, but Flaubert is a master at depicting the expressions of Madame's ambitions and Monsieurs naivety - and the ruthless machinations of the pharmacist who claims to be working for progress in the spirit of Voltaire. It will take you some time to recover from facing up to this dark vision of humankind, but Flaubert's precision, black humour and masterful storytelling make reading this book a very entertaining experience!

"Effi Briest" is not just a German version of Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina - it is quite unique in its depiction of a not untypical 19th century marriage. At the age of 17 the impetuous Effi Briest is married to a man 21 years her senior. He is decent enough in his treatment of her, but for Effi being married is a horrible experience, mostly because her husband's job forced her to move to the small town of Kessin where hardly anybody is fit to become her friend.

What always strikes me about Fontane is the fairness and the understandig he shows towards his characters. "Effi Briest" is Fontane's psychological insight at his best. None of characters is gloryfied, none vilified. You can identify with Effi and understand what drives her into the arms of another man; but you can also see that her husband simply doesn't understand what he is doing to Effi; actually he's doing his best to make her happy.

When the attractive, ageing womanizer Major Crampas moves into town, Effi pities him at first. Later, her attitude changes, but Fontane does not give any details of what's going on between the two. He shows what made it happen - and how Effi and her husband will deal with it. - It is a very entertaining read, not least because of Fontane's excellent low-key sense of humour.

This is one of the most fascinating books I have ever read. The story is simple: A boy and a girl get lost in the mountains on their way home; it's Christmas Eve, and the two are somewhere in the Alps. What makes the books so unique is the way in which the children's ordeal is described: They are moving through a landscape that is made almost abstract by the snow; this is pure poetry! - Stifter is a forgotten genius of 19th century European literature; I'm glad that his touching Christmas Tale - and ideal Christmas present, by the way - is now available in this beautiful edition!