Lewis Carroll, "Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland"

-  Djvu Editions, Copyright 2002 by Global Language Resources, Inc. Illustrations by John Tenniel and Arthur Rackham. Tenniel illustrations scanned by Michael Richter.

Read from June 5^th to 20^th 2018

My Rating: 

‘I make you a present of everything I’ve said as yet.’

When my daughter asked me about the role of the Cheshire cat in the narrative and all I could remember was (you bet) her smile lingering long after she was gone, I suddenly realized how long a time ago (pleonastically speaking) I had read Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Therefore, I decided it was time for a re-acquaintance with the famous book, and here I am, even more mesmerized than the first time – because I had read Alice then as in Romanian, so it is only now that I can truly and delightedly savour every single pun and other linguistic joke the best of translators could not transpose from one language to another, for it is only in English you can say a lesson is called a lesson because it will lessen in time, or tell a sad tale in the form of a tail (here goes, Apollinaire, the originality of your Calligrammes J), or draw treacle from a treacle-well even though you are in the well – that is, well-in.

Gail Honeyman, "Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine"

 – e-book

Read from May 5^thto June 1^st2018

My vote: 

I understand that Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fineis the first novel Gail Honeyman has published. As a debut, it is a very interesting novel indeed, with its fresh and lively voice that leaves the readers with a smile on their lips after closing the book. 

I must confess I have had some trouble in establishing its genre, though. To label it chicklit seemed to me a little unfair, since this label carries a soupcon of superficiality, of light reading. The author of the Kirkus review appears to have encountered the same problem, calling it “part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story” – a little too many parts, in my opinion, from which at least one an exaggeration and/ or wishful thinking. Nevertheless, it could be all three (and a few others), if you encompass them in a satirical approach, with a touch of neo-modernist psychological (melo)drama (hum, more and more confusing, told you, not so easy to classify).