Shreya's Treasures

"I looked up at the mass of signs  and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign difference of the world." THE OUTSIDER ( THE STRANGER ) ALBERT CAMUS FIRST PUBLISHED : 1942 GENRE : Novel, Crime Fiction, Philosophical Fiction, Absurdist Fiction, Existential Fiction The Outsider (previously translated from the French, L’Étranger, as The Stranger) is Albert Camus’ most widely known work, and shows his understanding of Absurdism. Camus utilized The Stranger as a platform for this concept and his questions about the meaning of life. There are a number of elements that are of interest in The Outsider, but most significant is the issue of the protagonist, Meursault, and how he, and his story, represent the philosophies that are portrayed in the novel.  Meursault, the major protagonist of The Outsider is shown as a self-absorbed man in the beginning but ultimately emerges to be a man of truth.  Meursault lives a quiet life of rou...

KAFKA ON THE SHORE HARUKI MURAKAMI GENRE: MAGICAL REALISM, FANTASY, NOVEL FIRST PUBLISHED: 2002 "Kafka on the Shore contains several riddles, but there aren't any solutions provided. Instead, several of these riddles combine, and through their interaction the possibility of a solution takes shape. And the form this solution ta kes will be dif ferent for each reader. To put it another way, the riddles function as part of the solution. It's hard to explain, but that's the kind of novel I set out to write"                                     - H. Murakami It is easier to be bewitched by Haruki Murakami's fiction than to figure out how he accomplishes the bewitchment. His narrators tend to be a bit passive, and the stakes in many of his shaggy-dog plots remain obscure. Yet the undercurrent is nearly irresistible, and readers emerge several hundred pages later as if from a trance, more curious tha...

THE GREAT GATSBY GENRE : SATIRE, TRAGEDY, BIOGRAPHICAL FICTION F. SCOTT. FITZGERALD FIRST PUBLISHED : 1925 "This is a valley of ashes — a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens; where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and, finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air." The Great Gatsby, The Great American Novel, is F Scott Fitzgerald's ultra-modernist novel about jazz-age America. The novel tells the tragic story of Jay Gatsby, a self-made millionaire, and his pursuit of Daisy, a wealthy young woman whom he loved in his youth, which ultimately led to his own destruction. It's highly unreliable protagonist is Nick Carraway, who recounts his story of the two years he spent with Gatsby. Almost 90 years later after its publish, The Great Gatsby is regularly named one of the greatest novels ever written in English, and has annu...