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Review of Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

September 20, 2019

Book Review, Criticism

book, fiction, Gothic, Japan, literary fiction, literature, Murakami, review

As I might have mentioned before, I am a fan of Japanese literature. I’m really drawn to the minimalist, abstract, sometimes absurd and sometimes mundane style of many Japanese authors. Haruki Murakami is such an author, but when I began reading his Killing Commendatore I would never expect that a review of Killing Commendatore would include the tag “Gothic”.

As a typical Murakami book, it’s not quite simple to put it into a prefabricated shape. It’s many things, and yet it isn’t. It has a beginning and an ending, and yet it doesn’t. It’s one of those novels that you’ll either love or hate. The good news is, fans of Haruki Murakami will most definitely love it.

Review of Killing Commendatore
The (Gothic) conflict between natural and unnatural, real and unreal, becomes literally true in Killing Commendatore
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Religion in Frankenstein: Dialectics of Authority

August 30, 2019

Criticism

academia, criticism, frankenstein, Gothic, religion

Note: the following article on religion in Frankenstein is a modified excerpt (pp. 110-111) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.

You can also find an article about religion in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and another about religion on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Religion in Frankenstein: A Secular or Religious World?

In the context of Frankenstein, a story replete with moral dilemmas and dichotomies based on otherness, it is perhaps not surprising to discover a multitude of religiously charged temporal dichotomies.

Punter and Byron argue that Victor, although a modern Prometheus (as the subtitle of the novel underlines), lives in “a notably secular world with no gods against whom to rebel, and … his search is conceived of in scientific terms” (2004, 199).

religion in Frankenstein
Religion in Frankenstein is a matter of understanding the dialectics of authority involved in the story
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Five Questions about Dracula Answered

July 16, 2019

Literature, Society

academia, Gothic, popularity, questions, social masses

Let’s do something fun this time. Or rather, let’s combine fun with knowledge and – horror of horrors – the academia. Before you run away from this page, shrieking in horror, hold your breath and wait: I’m planning to take the five most popular questions about Dracula as they appear on Google searches and answer them.

As you probably already know, Google’s autocomplete feature reveals the most common questions about a certain topic as you begin typing. Now, this also reveals some incredible stupidity out there. For instance, if you begin typing “is the moon”, the first results include “is the moon a star”, “is the moon a planet”To be absolutely fair, there might be a legitimate question there., and even – brace yourself – “is the moon made of cheese”.

At this point, I have no idea what I’ll get if I begin typing questions about Dracula, so I’m ready to be surprised myself. Let’s get started!

Questions about Dracula
Five questions about Dracula and vampires you always wanted to ask
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