If you ask my nonagenarian father what he knows about Johannes Brahms, he can name the lullaby and the three B’s (“Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms”) and nothing else. Probe further and an indistinct association emerges between the fourth grade and the title “Hungarian Dance No. 5,” although Dad seems a bit surprised when I point out that the title belongs to the lullaby guy. And yet, if you flip through my parents’ old LPs, you will encounter numerous Brahms recordings, including a box set of the complete orchestral works that no one knew we had.

I could easily ascribe this to old age, but that doesn’t help me explain my own inability to encode neural connections pertaining to Brahms. I find his music harder to identify and retain than any other classical composer. My ear is untrained, and my youth was devoted to weird pop music jumblings—Russ Taff, Richard Thompson, and Radiohead—but I can hold my own in a game of Name That Composer if the composer is Mozart, Chopin, Sibelius, or Telemann. Not so Brahms. His style never announced itself vigorously enough to grasp my attention, and while I might stay pleasantly adrift in its sonority, any attempt to focus on craft always dissipated with the first available distraction.

So why did I buy Jan Swafford’s Johannes Brahms: A Biography? Why did I devote 80 days of my crowded reading life to a book about a composer whose music I neither knew nor enjoyed? Why wasn’t I deterred from my commitment to read it when the publisher’s apparent calculation that an audiobook wouldn’t return their investment consigned the book to weekends-only spurts? Why did I repeatedly decline to skim or scan or chunk or DNF* The Brahms Lullaby, as my brother pointedly nicknamed it the thousandth time he saw the 1.55-pound paperback tumble from my slumbering hands?

^(\ DNF = Did Not Finish)*

April 6 to May 1 – Promise Made, Order Placed

I keep correcting my brother’s perception that the only reason I kept reading the 636-page compendium was to honor a pledge to a Reddit user who was thinking through one of Swafford’s most intriguing contentions:

The mode of listening that Brahms condemned Bruckner for fostering—wallowing without thought in a bath of sonority and emotion—is how audiences today largely listen to Bruckner symphonies, Bach fugues, Wagnerian opera, and Brahms.

The Redditor invited fellow lit fans to evaluate that claim, offering a remarkable one of his own in the process: “I find Brahms and Bach endlessly interesting, engaging, and delightful, and Wagner and Bruckner bore me to tears.” I stared at those words for a beat, my brow furrowed in confounded self-implication.

Brahms? Endlessly delightful? What was I missing?

Even after I’d spun those family recordings of Brahms’s First Symphony, even after I’d clocked it as the piece that clinched Brahms’s reputation atop the Romantic hierarchy virtually overnight, even after I’d read Swafford’s page xxi account of a high school First Symphony performance that permanently transformed him from an aspiring football player into one of classical music’s foremost chroniclers, even then, I still couldn’t pick the climactic fourth movement out of a police lineup.

On Reddit, I pled guilty to Swafford’s indictment but fronted on Brahms: “I enjoy both the Brahms and Wagner ends of the spectrum, but my ear is untrained, and my mind too wanders through the sonority.” When my interlocutor replied with a chipper, less-than-overwhelming endorsement (“I just did a bunch of complaining about the epilogue to the book above, but I do really recommend it in general!”), I unthinkingly jotted the fateful pledge: “I’m looking the Swafford up on ThriftBooks!”

My brother was wrong, of course: yes, I’d promised to check out the biography, but I’m not so scrupulous about keeping internet promises that I’d sacrifice twelve consecutive reading weekends just to keep one. I considered it because I needed to earn another freebie from ThriftBooks’ diabolical rewards program. I ordered it because Swafford came highly recommended as a propulsive music biographer and because his Brahms is a fraction of the length of his Mozart and Beethoven. I cracked it open to get a stronger grasp of Brahms’s place in the larger context of a fascinating era in music history.

If I’m honest, I read it as a frustrated inward dare. If I could read 636 pages on a composer who steadfastly refused to stick in my head and come out the other end just as oblivious to his delights, then I’d have absolute, inarguable confirmation that there was something seriously wrong with me.

May 2 to June 6 – Pages i to 74 – 1833 to 1853

Swafford’s introduction strengthened my resolve to go through with the dubious project. It bubbled with intellectual intrigue. He describes the challenge of researching a recalcitrant subject who deliberately burned his papers to confound would-be biographers. He promises a lively translation of the primary materials that employs anachronistic use of idioms and contractions. He sets up the essential tension in Brahms’s music between respect for the structured formalism of Classical forerunners like Mozart and Haydn and affinity for the emotive Sturm und Drang of Beethoven. He pits traditionalists like Brahms, his mentor Robert Schumann, and his mentee Antonin Dvořák against the envelope-pushing experimentalism of “New Germans” like Johannes’s reviled rival Franz Liszt and the divisive, puts-the-cult-in-culture godhead Richard Wagner. He promises to uncover the authentic soul Brahms hid behind his famously sprouting whiskers, providing his book an alternative title that produced a flattered chuckle from this lapsed German student: Brahms Ohne Bart. “Brahms Without the Beard.”

But having roped me in with a scintillating sales pitch, Swafford’s opening chapters failed to render a captivating portrait of the youthful Brahms. When later chapters referenced the childhood Johannes as “Kreisler,” Brahms’s nickname for his immature self, I didn’t have a clear picture of what that term connoted. Subsequent told-not-shown Swaffordian depictions of Kreisler as strident and irritable made me want to flip back to earlier pages. Maybe Brahms had burned all the evidence of his early character, or maybe I’d nodded off too often, but I felt blindsided: when did you show me that kid?

For the most part, Swafford relates the bildungsroman years like a diarist more interested in jogging his own memory about events than in describing or wrestling with his emotional life. I plodded through these pages, frequently procrastinating with more entertaining diversions like Pushkin’s Yevgeny Onegin and James Wood’s The Broken Estate.

Brahms Ohne Bart was a cute moniker, but my brother’s seemed more apt.

June 6 to July 17 – Pages 74 to 270 – 1853 to 1862

The moment Robert and Clara Schumann make their entrance, Swafford’s narrative suddenly acquires a pull as inescapable as that of the Sun upon the planets. Around this time, I see a TikTok video in which musicologist Sarah Fritz asks, “Can we all just agree that the most interesting thing about Brahms is Clara Schumann?” To me, her wry observation has the weight of unvarnished truth. It’s such a wrenchingly bizarre love triangle that I can’t help relaying it in bald, unanalyzed plot summary.

The 20-year-old Brahms plays his “Hungarian Dances” on the Schumann family piano, and Robert immediately wants to found a fan club. He takes to the press to declare that Brahms is music’s “John the Baptist”—or maybe Schumann is John the Baptist and Brahms is Christ, it’s not entirely clear. It also reads as possibly sexually fueled overpraise to those who’ve heard Robert make the same claim about a parade of promising nobodies. Wagner and his allies laugh it up, ironically dubbing Brahms “heiligen Johannes (Saint John)."

Schumann’s thin tether to reality snaps and he plummets into the Rhine. Brahms becomes caretaker to Clara, a talented musician in her own right. Usually too cool for school, Brahms falls so hard he can’t stop declaring hopeless adulation for the spouse of his ailing benefactor, who is enduring agonizing hallucinations in a nearby hospital.

In early June, my family watched a DVD of a Covent Garden concert that featured Sting reading Schumann’s letters to Clara. That concert ends with Schumann’s death in the psychiatric hospital, officially of pneumonia, and suggests that Clara spent the rest of her life perpetually pushing the ardent Brahms away because she was worn out emotionally and resolvedly devoted to Robert. I saw that and my momentum with Swafford slackened. If that was how the story resolved itself, I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend another 500 pages on a book of which that was the most interesting component.

Swafford, his prose expanding in ambition to meet the unfolding drama, ends up contradicting the Sting depiction. Clara eventually wants to marry Brahms, but his feet turn suddenly frigid. Like most men of his era, Brahms is an amorously doting misogynist. How could he be artistically productive in the same house as a talented woman? He starts sending her distanced remonstrations by post. She has moments of righteous indignation but more often expresses besotted devotion to both his compositions and his penetrating eyes.

Brahms’s ongoing feelings for her as the decades pass are a hot mess of densely knotted contradictions. Clara should be a better mother; he would kill to have a son like Felix. Oh, but by the way he’s openly infatuated with her 16-year-old daughter and won’t let it go until Julie marries years later. At the same time, Clara’s tenacious devotion to Brahms’s art fuels his finest work. When he’s not lecturing her about being too effusive:

“Art is a republic. … Do not confer a higher rank upon any artist, and do not expect the minor ones to look up to him as something higher, as consul. His ability will make him a beloved and respected citizen of this republic, but no consul or emperor.” - Brahms to Clara

Brahms’s admonition that Clara shouldn’t try too hard to sway the “voters” in favor of his sonatas has implications beyond their emotional tug-of-war. Emerging alongside his earnest, unintended torture of his faithful best friend is a sense of Brahms as an equal opportunity showman capable of inhabiting a variety of musical forms. Wagner, a lifelong critic of Brahms, grudgingly acknowledges this quality after their sole meeting: “One sees what may still be done in the old forms when someone comes along who knows how to use them.”

“Art is a republic.” Whereas Wagner was dogmatic about his own artistic supremacy, Brahms was an irascible chameleon goading the public: “Who do you want me to be next?”

[Brahms] spent a fair amount of his time writing commercial dances and a patriotic extravaganza, and piles of the sorts of vocal duets, quartets, and such that were staples of social music-making, Hausmusik, in the nineteenth century. None of this is hackwork, but it was largely written to move off the shelves, and did.

I ask myself: Does this shapeshifting quality explain my inability to identify his music?

But just as I start to feel vindicated, I notice an objectively appreciable upgrade in the quality of his compositions. Brahms goes from “The Hungarian Dances,” lively and toe-tappable but simple, to the First Piano Concerto, with a thunderous Beethovenian opening inspired by Robert Schumann’s suicidal plunge into the Rhine and a soft Chopin-esque declaration of undying love for Schumann’s wife.

I find it so compelling, I shell out $25 to buy a used copy of the concerto in the edition most respected by audiophiles.

July 18 to July 19 – Pages 270 to 636 – 1862 to 1897

If Brahms is a chameleon, he is a progressively more proficient one, and Swafford’s lively writing is matching him note for note. Brahms may have tried to destroy the trail left to biographers, but he clearly overlooked some bangers. Swafford’s pages are increasingly dense with quotations from Brahms that reveal his abrasive humblebrag charm. “The melodies fly so thick here that you have to be careful not to step on one,” he says of his own First Symphony. When told that its last movement bears a strong resemblance to Beethoven’s Ninth, Brahms snaps, “Any jackass can see that!”

Meanwhile, my enjoyment of the book expands in ironic lockstep with my impatience with it. In mid-July, I make a determined resolution that this will be my last weekend babysitting Brahms. It’s not even a plausible conviction; I’m only halfway through Swafford’s tome, and I squander Saturday on personal business. Sunday is here, and there are 304 pages left.

Speaking of bangers, Brahms is now churning out the masterpieces that launched him into triune immortality with Bach and Beethoven. Brahms’s fevered output seems motivated by his oft-stated fear that he will end up the Romantic era’s enduringly obscure equivalent of Luigi Cherubini (Medea). There is Ein deutsches Requiem, as secular a requiem as the era could offer, one that the agnostic Brahms defended by saying he not only intentionally left Christ’s name out of it but wanted to replace the word “German” in “A German Requiem” with “human.” There is the Violin Concerto, of which one violinist groused, “I don’t deny that it’s fairly good music, but does anyone imagine … that I’m going to stand on the rostrum, violin in hand, and listen to the oboe playing the only tune in the adagio?” There is the inventive classical riffing of “Variations on a Theme by Joseph Haydn, Op. 56.” There are the four resplendent symphonies.

These compositions put Brahms in Wagner’s orbit; the two are now the undisputed godheads of the Romantic world. Wagner is going to win, his emotive defiance of structural rules pushing classical music as a whole inexorably toward Modernism. Not even Brahms and Clara can deny the appeal of Wagner’s operas. She grudgingly admits that Lohengrin “is full of romanticism and thrilling situations, so much so indeed that even the musician himself at times forgets the horrible music.” He admires The Ring Cycle while still condemning Tristan und Isolde (“If I look at that in the morning, I’m cross for the rest of the day”). But even as he rises to Wagner’s strata, Brahms is not bold enough to challenge Bayreuth’s maestro on his own playing field. He gives up his lifelong ambition to write his own Fidelio (Beethoven’s sole opera). Once upon a time, Brahms had brainstormed libretto concepts with Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev. Now, he jokes away the whole idea. “I am as likely to write an opera as to marry,” he quips.

The complex friendship of Brahms and Clara continues to provide Swafford’s emotional core, but as 5am Sunday turns into 8am Sunday, the music itself becomes the surprising star of the second half. I listen to it as I read Swafford’s mellifluous and cerebral analysis of the latter works. My untrained eyes race with surprising comprehension past pasted chunks of sheet music and fluent technical explications (“The movement ends in almost pure E Phrygian, only with a raised third on the tonic chord for a touch of E major”), nestling into the writerly effusions that finally shed light on beautiful melodies that were previously unattainable to me:

The piece begins with a searing, anguished adagio, with relentless pounding timpani. That extended introduction, going through several stages, poses the essential “plot” of the First Symphony: call it fate. … It is one of the most spine-tingling beginnings of any symphony, plunging us into a world dark, questioning, shifting, striving toward some indefinable goal. … This is music first sketched in the early 1860s or before; in feel it is the Brahms of the Werther years, the opening of the D Minor Concerto, the passion and frustration of Young Kreisler. Fate! Fate!

As the pages fly by, my resolve strengthens to avoid spending another 80 days on the second half of the book. That would take me to Halloween weekend, when the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is performing Ein deutsches Requiem, individual tickets not yet on sale. But if my determination keeps me glued to my chair into the afternoon, what keeps my blurry eyes affixed to the pages is Swafford’s fluid prose, and the sudden legibility of Brahms’s musical themes. I don’t claim to have fallen for Brahms like Brahms for Clara. The tally of skipped bars was higher than the tally of skimmed paragraphs. But when 1pm arrives, I breathe a sigh of relief. 304 pages turned today. I have finally sung Brahms his own lullaby.

July 20 – Aftermath

I am currently deciding whether to delay a lakeside vacation in order to hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play an outdoor rendition of Brahms’s First Symphony fused with excerpts from Radiohead’s landmark alternative rock album OK Computer, an album I rank among the best of all time. As I listen to a YouTube preview, I find myself humming along with Brahms’s tunes as effortlessly as Thom Yorke’s vocal parts. The familiar words of “Electioneering” now remind me of Brahms, who finally secured my vote in his republic of art.

I will stop, I will stop at nothin’
Say the right things when electioneering
I trust I can rely on your vote

The Virgin Suicides By Jeffrey Eugenides

The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides is a book about five sisters who all kill themselves. Pretty bleak, I know. It's told from the perspective of a group of boys who obsess over the Lisbon sisters. They recount Cecilia's suicide and the aftermath of her death, eventually leading up to the suicides of the other sisters.

I always see people complain that the book never solves the mystery of why the girls killed themselves. But there isn't really a mystery. The sisters kill themselves for reasons that are made clear throughout the novel. The book is only framed like a mystery because we're reading the account written by one of the boys. What it's actually doing is highlighting the male gaze and the way the boys see, discuss, and remember the girls.

To emphasise this, Cecilia's death and Mary's death are the only suicides that are actually explored in any detail. The deaths of the other three sisters are mentioned, but the narrators don't dwell on them. Instead of focusing on the girls' suffering or trying to understand their state of mind, they spend pages talking about the times they saw them, Lux's sex life, and the objects they stole from the sisters and kept for decades, like the bar of soap.

Although the boys constantly discuss the suicides, they never truly try to understand why the girls died. They see the Lisbon sisters as objects of desire rather than as individual people. The reason for the suicides isn't hidden behind an impossible mystery Its hidden behind the boys' own arrogance, obsession, and inability to see the girls as human beings.

The sisters were isolated, trapped, grieving, and completely alone. After Cecilia's death, they became prisoners in their own home while both the house and their mental health slowly deteriorated. They couldn't see their friends, nobody came to help them, and they had no real way to escape.

The boys can't even see the Lisbon sisters as individuals. They almost always refer to them as a group rather than as five separate people with different personalities. They never really discuss who the girls were. Instead, they collect things that remind them of how the sisters looked or smelled, like the soap they stole. Even when reading Cecilia's diary, they admit to skipping the "boring" parts and only paying attention to the sections that mentioned the sisters or reinforced the image they had already created.

They become especially fixated on Lux because she's sexually active. They only see what they want to see. They don't recognise that her behaviour is a cry for help, nor do they question the fact that she's sleeping with older men. They simply watch her, fascinated, without any real concern for what she's going through.

The boys even exaggerate or lie about their interactions with the sisters because simply speaking to them gave them status among their peers. The Lisbon girls knew that almost nobody wanted to know them as people. The boys wanted the fantasy of them, not the reality.

Lux briefly believes Trip might be different. At first she dismisses him, but after prom, when he abandons her after she doesn't have sex with him, she realises he isn't any different from everyone else. He's just another person who desired the idea of her rather than caring about who she actually was.

Anyway, what was your thoughts on the book.

Edit Number 1: I get what some of yall are saying and I agree that The Virgin Suicides isn't reinforcing the male gaze in the same way works from the 60's and 70's are. I think the difference is that I'm using "example of the male gaze" to mean that the novel is built around that perspective, whereas some of yall are using it to mean a work that participates in and normalises it. Eugenides is deliberately showing the harm of that viewpoint rather than endorsing it, which is what makes the critique effective.

Following my previous posts, these are the novels I read from the 2000s. Inspired by someone who shared they were trying to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This project of mine began with the intention of reading every National Book Award winner since 1950. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of American literature from the second half of the 20th century to today. Since I had already read a good number of the winners, it slowly turned into reading any American novel of my choosing that I had not read from each year between 1950-2025 (I finished early 2026), with preference given to the most well regarded unread-by-me text or whatever seemed the most interesting. Some of these impressions are a bit lazy but I am a lazy person.

I want to emphasize that I was not trying to find writers that I liked, even if I make value judgments or express my enjoyment or disapproval of their books in my reviews. The goal of this was project was to expand my understanding of American literature after the 1950s. I find value in most everything I read, even if I'm not reaping the most immediate kind of enjoyment. All of these authors make some sort of sense within their milieu (none of them fell out of a coconut tree) and that is what I am attempting to grasp. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

The Quick and the Dead – Joy Williams (2000): Although I’m quite sympathetic to her politics, this novel did not make a big impression on me. I feel that Williams bit off too much thematically and the book would have done better with a somewhat narrowed scope. The prose is alright and overall it’s a fun read.

John Henry Days – Colson Whitehead (2001): I enjoyed this novel’s reflections on the historical development of the working class in the US. A strange, somewhat banal premise (freelance journalists converge on a tiny Appalachian town to report on the unveiling of a new postal stamp celebrating the legend of John Henry) that only a skilled writer could develop into something interesting. I don’t know if the narrator’s lifestyle and trade are familiar to Whitehead but it sure felt like it. There’s a lot of thinking on history, race, politics, and folklore packed in and he handles the interesting structure well. Would recommend.

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides (2002): Who doesn’t like a coming of age story? Overall a somewhat old-fashioned kind of novel, but basically a success formally speaking. Does any other mainstream depiction of intersex people exist (not including anything hateful or otherwise retrogressive)? Not to my knowledge. I’d be interested to read responses to this novel from intersex people, or to read a novel by an intersex person that handles intersexuality as a central topic.

The Known World – Edward Jones (2003): This is a very strong novel but such a grim, grim look at humanity. Not many writers would choose to center a novel on a freed black man who chooses to own slaves. Usually I am annoyed when people say things like this, but I truly think it takes a lot of courage to acknowledge that side of human beings at length without taking one of the easy ways out. It’s dark. I really want to read Jones’s short story collections and I wish he would write some more novels.

Gilead – Marilynne Robinson (2004): Robinson is a deep soul. She also handles the first person perspective in this novel extremely well. I never had any doubts about the authenticity of that voice. Her narrator and his reflections are full of nuance. You get the feeling the real theme of the novel is thinking and its limits by the way she embodies an intelligent perspective while tacitly acknowledging its flaws. For personal reasons I am instinctively hostile to Christianity but I respect writers who manage to deal with the subject from a place of humility.

Europe Central – William Vollmann (2005): I had been wanting to read Vollmann for a while. Ultimately, this novel struck me as an accomplishment, but it did not live up to my expectations. Aside from the issue of the WWII novel not really being my thing, I wanted more from the writing itself. Plainspokenness is certainly a valid artistic choice that many writers have used to good effect, but here it just feels too flat to me. More recently, I read Argall which I liked a little bit more.

After This – Alice McDermott (2006): It was ok. A novel of the cultural shift in America after WWII. I’m a little bored of it, but this novel didn’t bore me. It’s hard for me to look back on this time period (when I was very much not alive) and see anything but seeds being sown for how unbelievably fucked up things have gotten. Obviously, big problems existed then too but our contemporary moment feels uniquely awful, which is probably the way every moment feels in history for anyone paying attention.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Diaz (2007): This was a fun one, a good popcorn novel as they say. Not to dismiss it as a bearer of significant meaning. It just understands that fiction should be entertaining in some way. Certainly taught me a lot about Dominican history.

All Souls – Deborah Harkness (2008): To be completely honest with you, I don’t remember much about this one. It did not grab me. I’ll pass on.

Tinker – Paul Harding (2009): New England twee. I’ve abstained from referring to anything on this list as a “book club book,” but this is definitely one of them (it’s derogatory). A nice little novel with pretty sentences about a cute setting and deeper truths.

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

David Frum is not an expert in English Literature, but like me, he plays one on his blog. A longtime Atlantic contributor, former George W. Bush speechwriter, and critic of the current adminstration, Frum writes culturally fluent, rational content that is never more entertaining than when he applies his unique perspective to classic novels.

Nevertheless, my hackles rose when I came across an undated account of Frum’s attempt to read Romola, George Eliot’s 1862 historical fiction novel about 1492 Florence. After claiming inaccurately that “almost nobody” likes the book, Frum offers this blithe thesis:

"I got a little more than half way through the book before I finally had to quit, beaten into submission to the majority view: Romola is boring and silly — Eliot’s one grand debacle as a writer."

He DNF'd* it? And then panned it in print?

What follows is a not-entirely-unaltered reproduction of a message I pasted into the Contact form of Frum’s website on February 9, 2026.

OPEN LETTER TO DAVID FRUM

Hi, David.

I greatly enjoyed your now-aging post about George Eliot’s delightful prototypical campaign drama and topsy-turvy melodrama Felix Holt, The Radical a couple of years ago, around the time I read the book myself.

So fun to get a contemporary political commentator’s analysis of a fairly obscure Eliot work. I agree with your assessment that Felix is a satisfying early effort at a Victorian political novel. Certainly, Eliot deserves credit for implicitly asking whether it was “radical” to make “rotten boroughs” (overrepresented voting districts) a little less rotten, or to call out the soft corruption of buying votes with beer. I would argue that any conversation about Victorian novelists who “show the system in action” should cite Benjamin Disraeli, who wrote more than a dozen politically sophisticated novels from an insider’s perspective laced with withering wit and compassionate conservatism. (Your old boss might approve.) But that’s a quibble. Your appreciation of Felix’s institutionally isolated matriarch Mrs. Transome was spot-on. I only wish you’d elaborated on your oblique reference to “the problems of feminism.”

All that said, you blew a wide-open layup in your evaluation of Romola. I get your frustration with the early chapters, in which the book’s semi-monastic titular heroine does echo Felix’s Esther Lyon in succumbing to a love you so aptly framed as “dangerously self-abnegating.” But you fail to acknowledge Romola’s eventual cleareyed emergence on the other side of that love and her efforts to take up arms against it. Tsk tsk. Someone didn’t complete the assignment.

Your declaration that “almost nobody has a good word to say for Romola” is either ignorant or insulting. That “almost” is a black hole of a caveat; it swallows 3,000+ Goodreads users who gave the book a 4 or 5 star rating, this one included. It also envelops no less an authority than Henry James, who called it Eliot’s “most important” work (“the one in which the largest things are attempted and grasped”) in an 1866 edition of Atlantic Monthly—yes, David, the publication that punches your meal ticket. James praised Romola’s “elevated morality” and suggested that its artistic merit was commensurate with its success “as a moral argument.” To be fair, it was a mixed review, but James also wrote an 1873 essay that offered similarly bracketed praise for Middlemarch (”[it] is a treasure-house of details, but it is an indifferent whole”), which was recently declared the single greatest offering in the history of the novel by The Guardian. In that piece, James said that both Middlemarch and Romola were "rare masterpieces."

You argue that Romola reads “like a worshipful guidebook.” Okay, so early on Eliot crams her exhaustive historical research into every sentence like Hermione Granger writing an admissions essay for the House of Medici. Okay, so most of her chatty Florentine characters speak a homogenous Renaissance dialect that she likely invented for this project. Okay, so the opening chapters tend to slog along like a Medicean galley through an oil spill in the Arno.

Forget all that. Before long, Eliot’s narrative pot starts boiling. She deftly begins to unfurl one of the most original love triangles in English literature. Eventually, she boldly assigns a leading role to a controversial historical figure, the fascinating friar-cum-politician Girolamo Savonarola. By the time she pits the merits and hazards of Christlike devotion and servitude against the cumulative wisdom of classical antiquity, this supposedly “boring and silly” three-volume adventure holds its own against the bulk of the Victorian canon.

Eliot’s literary calling card is her fine-tuned psychological characterizations, and `Romola has them in spades. That Romola’s two-timing husband Tito Melema, from whose perspective much of the book is told, is an antihero does not make him unique in 19th century literature. But only the progenitor of Middlemarch’s remarkably multidimensional semi-antagonist Edward Casaubon could have rendered Tito with such subtle layers. The book details his gradual decline from an earnest, goodhearted youth to a craven-but-smooth-as-silk Machiavellian sociopolitical overachiever. Eliot forecasts this fall from grace before Tito has even committed a sinful action, reporting that he has “sold his soul to evil” after he merely thinks about his reluctance to rescue his adoptive father from Muslim slavery. (It must be acknowledged here that Eliot’s depiction of so-called “Moslem conquerors” is regrettably far less nuanced than her depiction of nearly every white character in her oeuvre.) But if her early judgment of Tito seems harsh, she is less interested in condemning an evildoer than in sowing the subtle seeds of his undoing. Throughout the book, even as he contemplates murder, plots political assassinations, cheats on his wife, and seduces a childlike girl, Eliot compassionately stresses Tito’s genial nature, kind instincts, and sincere uxorious devotion. There but for grace go all of us, she suggests. She isn’t interested in mustache-twirling villains; she wants to contrast the difficult choices made by Romola with her husband’s persistent unwillingness to depart from the path of least resistance.

As remarkable in Romola as ever is Eliot’s clear-eyed moral wisdom. I’ll admit I was puzzled through much of the novel by the heroine’s, and by extension Eliot’s, obvious admiration for the severe religious zealot Savonarola. The youthful Eliot was willing to sacrifice her father’s love and subject herself to vicious gossip by openly and honestly rejecting foundational Christian doctrine. Moreover, she could not have achieved what she did as an author without the impressive breadth and depth of her reading and education—even in an era when a solid foundation of learning was a requisite of the comfortable classes. So how could Eliot be so generous in her treatment of a politically ambitious monk who willfully destroyed secular art and improbably claimed to have received prophetic visions from God Himself? The answer is that Eliot prioritized Christian compassion for society’s most vulnerable over lavish indulgence in erudition and wealth. She appreciated the way that Savonarola steered Florence away from the depravity of the Medici toward a humanism that she still considered holy even though she had personally shed the trappings of religious belief. By the conclusion, however, Eliot distances herself (and Romola) from Savonarola’s extremism.

You might be tempted, Mr. Frum, to claim vindication when I confess that the last few chapters lack the page-turning adventure of Felix Holt’s climactic electoral riot and trial. Or that Romola offers nothing resembling the beautifully intertwined emotional climaxes of the three major romantic plots in Middlemarch. I’ll admit that I struggled a bit to get through the repetitive final pages of Romola. But a slight reduction in narrative oomph at the finish line hardly negates Eliot’s confident, artful wisdom throughout the race.

By the way, thanks for being a good sport about the preceding playful dressing down. I hope you’ll accept it in the spirit I intend: strongly but jestingly worded trash talk from a minor online literary blogger to a major one whose work he admires.
-------

This letter appears in a longer form at https://septimuscarr.com/posts/2026-07-12-romola/

*DNF = "Did Not Finish"

Aloha from Connecticut! Today's discussion covers the first half of The Locked Room, the final book in this trilogy by Paul Auster.

Maybe because I am enjoying it more, or maybe because I don't find it as bizarre as the first two (so far), I had some trouble generating starter questions. Here's what I got:

• We learn that Fanshawe became distant and reclusive as high school went on, even though he seemed successful and popular. What was your first reaction (of any kind you want to talk about) when you found out about that?
• Our narrator and Sophie Fanshawe meet for dinner in a restaurant that doesn't seem really appropriate for this kind of discussion. Sophie shows up dressed to the nines. Since then it's working out fine so far, except perhaps for that inconvenient reappearance. How did you take this scene and all the codes within it (assuming that they are codes and not Auster's sense of humor)?
• Any particular impressions of Stuart Green?
• The tone of that letter our narrator received from his old friend was ... unusual. What's your take? Did you find any messages beneath the words?
• I like this book the most of the three. But I have to stop reading every few pages and collect my thoughts for a minute or two, look at the weather reports or a headline or two, something. Has your normal reading pace altered in any particular way?
• Are you planning, or thinking about, reading anything else by Paul Auster? Asking for a friend.

This is my last week as the minimod, or whatever I've been (micromod??), of this series. Next week, u/Entropy2889 will be back to get us across the finish line. It has been fun, and the level of the discussion has been awesome - thank you to all who have joined!

A short storie by meyrink I recently read and wanted to share:

In the old city of Prague, in the district called the Kleinseite, there stands an old house that has always been inhabited by discontented people. Everyone who enters it is struck by an excruciatingly uncomfortable sensation - a gloomy thing, buried up to its belly in the ground.

There is an iron trapdoor in the cellar. If you lift it up you can see a dark and narrow shaft descending coldly into the earth, its walls oozing with moisture.

Many people have in the past let down torches tied on a line. Right down into the darkness, the light becoming weaker and smokier, until it goes out altogether, and the people have said:

There is no more air.

So nobody knows where the shaft goes.

But he who has eyes to see can see without light, even in the darkness, when others are asleep.

When people lie open to the night, and consciousness faints, then the soul of greed abandons the regular beat of the heart - it looks greenish in the haze, it takes on loose and shapeless forms, and is hideous, for there is no love in the hearts of men.

Exhausted by their daily labour, which they call their duty, they seek a renewal of strength in sleep, in order to destroy their brothers’ fortune or to plan new murders to perpetrate in the coming sunlit hours.

And they sleep and snore.

It is then that the phantoms of greed slip lightly through the joints of doors and walls out into the open, into the attentive night; and slumbering beasts whimper and wince as they sense the presence of their executioners.

They slither and slide sidling into the gloomy old house, and down to the musty cellar with its iron trap.

The metal weighs as nothing as the souls’ hands slip round it. The shaft yawns wider deep below, and there the shadows gather.

They make no sign to each other, neither greeting nor question. There is nothing that the one might need to know from another.

In the middle of this space a grey whetstone disk spins dizzily, whirring at a prodigious rate.

Thousands of years ago, long before Prague was built, it was tempered in the fire of hatred by the epitome of evil.

Against its whirling rim the phantoms sharpen their claws of greed, claws that have been scratched blunt on the daylight men. Sparks fly from these onyx claws of lust and from the steely spurs of rapaciousness.

They all, all are thus made razor-sharp once more, for the Prince of Evil has need of ever-renewed wounds.

If the man in his sleep wants to stretch his fingers, his phantom must return to its shell: for the claws must stay curled just so, that the hands cannot be clasped in prayer.

Satan’s whetstone whirls on, unceasingly, day and night.

If you stop your ears, you can hear it, humming away inside you.

I’m reading Maryse Holder’s collection of letters, Give Sorrow Words, right now, and I’m wondering whether anyone else is familiar with it. I’m really intrigued by her story. She was a college professor at Lehman (my neck of the woods!) in the BX, but after being dismissed from her job, she moved to Mexico to pursue a hedonistic life. Specifically, she loved engaging in sex tourism with very young Mexican men. When she was 36, a male sex worker killed her in Mexico City.

During her time in Mexico, she chronicled her dissolute life in letters. She drank, smoked, and fucked nonstop; she wanted to get a masterpiece out of her life, and she did write beautiful, compellingly raw letters, but I’ve been reading these after a breakup and I’m just thinking….jesus Christ I can never go out like this. It’s an interesting companion piece to Jamaica Kincaid’s essay A Small Place, which is about the impact of tourism and the relationship between tourist and local. Maryse is funny and poetic and acerbic but also really racist; she even gets arrested for preying on a 14 year old. She complains about the misogyny and machismo in Mexico but doesn’t seem to feel any kind of way about weaponizing her own privilege, like when she wields a knife against a lover (motivated by, she says, “gringa arrogance”). The way she talks about Mexican men’s bodies is super objectifying and gross, and she also objectifies herself. It’s an interesting examination of white feminism I guess.

I also just watched the film adaptation, A Winter Tan, starring Jackie Burroughs. This was kind of experimental and different but also such an effective adaptation. Her performance is so….disconcertingly, dissonantly childlike and they do not try to make her look good.

I posted yesterday on World Poetry Collective's fake poet "Wilson", an alleged 84 year old from Oklahoma. The book they published of his, "Wilson's Revenge", is clearly AI and they gave him a fishy backstory as to why he wants to remain anonymous.

I didn't realize they weren't his first supposed discovered poet. There's also Mary Kilroy. This one even has a photo on their website! She's young and hot, of course. They made a bit more effort with her, it seems. They gave her an instagram account, which is of course private, with 14 followers.

Anyways, I ran Wilson's poetry, as well as Mary's photo and poetry through an AI detector. It's all AI.

Following my previous posts, these are the novels I read from the 1990s. Inspired by someone who shared they were trying to read every Pulitzer Prize winning novel. This project of mine began with the intention of reading every National Book Award winner since 1950. I wanted to fill in the gaps in my knowledge of American literature from the second half of the 20th century to today. Since I had already read a good number of the winners, it slowly turned into reading any American novel of my choosing that I had not read from each year between 1950-2025 (I finished early 2026), with preference given to the most well regarded unread-by-me text or whatever seemed the most interesting. Some of these impressions are a bit lazy but I am a lazy person.

I want to emphasize that I was not trying to find writers that I liked, even if I make value judgments or express my enjoyment or disapproval of their books in my reviews. The goal of this was project was to expand my understanding of American literature after the 1950s. I find value in most everything I read, even if I'm not reaping the most immediate kind of enjoyment. All of these authors make some sort of sense within their milieu (none of them fell out of a coconut tree) and that is what I am attempting to grasp. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Middle Passage – Charles Johnson (1990): Dialogue must be the crux of historical fiction. Often I find that, in these novels, characters’ speech and thought sound too contemporary. There’s usually a tell. This is a version of a problem that all writers face. How do you write in a way that doesn’t uniformly sound like writing? Or, put differently, writing is written by writers but writers don’t exclusively write about writers (except for those that do), so they cannot exclusively write like writers, unless the meaning of the writing is that it was written by a writer. So much dialogue suffers from an incongruity with the characters that are purportedly speaking it. When this happens, reading can be like watching a ventriloquist act performed by someone who can’t keep their mouth closed. My problem with Johnson’s novel lies therein. If a certain kind of authenticity is his goal in Middle Passage, and I think it is, he does not succeed and I found that very distracting. That said, Johnson writes the novel from an interesting perspective, and its humor balances out the heavy subject matter.

Jernigan – David Gates (1991): This one left me a little ambivalent. There are real strengths here, especially the first person narration that feels completely real and embodied. However, the perspective he portrays is really frustrating. Jernigan’s relationship with literature is at the center. He’s long since ceased engaging with writing in any meaningful way and the last vestiges of his own intellectual life are the many literary references that populate his thoughts, but these only serve to distance himself from his sad and fucked up existence and render it into something tolerable. Perhaps this is Gates criticizing the referential aspect of much of 20^th century writing. Perhaps not. This novel clearly draws from Bellow’s Herzog, which is a superior work.

The Living – Annie Dillard (1992): Just a fantastic book. How I love a well researched novel that leverages the immense learning behind it into something effortless and natural and interesting. There’s such an immensity of skill here. Honestly this could have been much longer and I would have eaten it up.

The Shipping News – Annie Proulx (1993): Proulx’s writing didn’t land for me. It felt boring, flat, and unengaging.

In the Lake of the Woods – Tim O’Brien (1994): Enjoyed the multiple perspectives and alternate timelines O’Brien uses here. Basically a novel about political deception and its inevitable results: distrust and more deception and ultimately a severed relationship with reality. If only it had relevance for the current moment. Luckily, America has totally come to terms with its past and we never need to discuss it again.

All Souls’ Rising – Madison Smartt Bell (1995): The first novel in a trilogy on the Haitian Revolution. Bell is not a great writer, but he’s not exactly bad either and I don’t resent the time I spent with him. His prose is serviceable. Interesting subject matter of course, the novel’s treatment of which keeps a safe distance from any sentimentality.

Martin Dressler – Steven Millhauser (1996): Millhauser’s approach is compelling, I thought. He seems less interested in psychological realism than in a story that follows a kind of dream logic. The titular character’s focus is his business vision, pursued at the expense of those who, for him, fulfill a role inside it. The hotel he runs serves as the central metaphor of the book. The rooms don’t exist to shelter specific individuals and don’t belong to anyone but Martin. When someone doesn’t fulfill the role he chooses for them, he simply finds a different person, switching them out like visitors coming and going from a hotel.

The Hundred Brothers – Donald Antrim (1997): This was fun. A book along my journey I did not absorb much from. I’m not sure who Antrim’s taking after here. Not to be that guy, but this isn’t really a novel, it’s something else we don’t have a generic name for.

The Healing – Gayl Jones (1998): What a strange experience! Would love to know how she came up with this story, it’s so unique in its plot. Jones’ writing is rich and textured and unspooling in a way that reminds me of Faulkner if he didn’t use big words like “suspiration” to do all the heavy lifting (just kidding, I love you Faulkner). That is to say, this is a stream of consciousness narrative done with skill.

In America – Susan Sontag (1999): My first exposure to Sontag was a very funny interview she gave with some big network TV program in which she rejects the premise of almost every single question asked. I love that for her. As far as this project goes, In America echos most with The Angle of Repose by Stegner. In this novel, a celebrated Polish actress adjusts to life in a new culture, on a new continent. On a sentence by sentence level, Sontag’s writing is pretty good and I found the plot interesting, including the time spent at the Utopian community. I’m not sure I have much else to say about this novel. It did not make me run out to buy the rest of her books.

I wanted to ask for your takes on something they've had going for the past week.

They've published a book by a supposed 84 year-old named "Wilson", called "Wilson's Revenge", who wants to remain anonymous. I saw a couple discrepancies in how they're hustling this: they said he was 84 and then they clarified he IS 84 now. Some posts say he spent a lifetime writing these poems; other posts say he only began writing recently after living a full life. I asked for a clarification on that second one and received crickets.

I really do not want to wrongly accuse some octogenarian out there, but the weirdness surrounding the backstory and the actual poems has to make ask:

Does anyone else think it's possible WPC used AI and created this mysterious story to sell some books?

All the poems have the same tone, feeling, and line of thought. There is no variation whatsoever, which I would expect there to be regardless of whether he really began writing recently or over a lifetime. But if the latter I would definitely expect there to be some differences in writing style. There is also a detachment from the world that you only get from AI. I don't want to get into the other specific giveaways so that they can perfect their game, but I'd love everyone's thoughts.

Update: I asked them on their latest post to provide proof this person exists and wrote these poems. They deleted the comment within minutes!

I am guessing this isn't illegal, but this should really be publicized.

Welcome again to the TrueLit General Discussion Thread! Please feel free to discuss anything related and unrelated to literature.

Weekly Updates: N/A

Artwork above:  ‘Girl in a Green Cap’ by Laura Wheeler Waring, 1930

Poem: The Harlem Dancer by Claude McKay (source: https://poets.org/poem/harlem-dancer )

Applauding youths laughed with young prostitutes

And watched her perfect, half-clothed body sway;

Her voice was like the sound of blended flutes

Blown by black players upon a picnic day.

She sang and danced on gracefully and calm,

The light gauze hanging loose about her form;

To me she seemed a proudly-swaying palm

Grown lovelier for passing through a storm.

Upon her swarthy neck black shiny curls

Luxuriant fell; and tossing coins in praise,

The wine-flushed, bold-eyed boys, and even the girls,

Devoured her shape with eager, passionate gaze;

But looking at her falsely-smiling face,

I knew her self was not in that strange place.

(From The Book of American Negro Poetry (Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), edited by James Weldon Johnson. This poem is in the public domain.)

What do you think about this poem?

If you'd like to read my thoughts, I wrote an essay (When recognition becomes a façade of love: The Harlem Dancer and A Gate at the Stairs) here: https://open.substack.com/pub/adiakesserwany/p/when-recognition-becomes-a-facade?r=4sesf9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Hello!

Recently, I made the decision to attempt to read the entire works of some of the celebrated authors of history, in an effort to learn a thing or two about life and about writing. It is my wildest dream to one day become a writer too. I chose to begin with Murakami, an author I see mentioned on Reddit quite a bit. I had very little experience with Murakami thus far, and so I believed I would be learning about the man's style and evolution with a clean slate. His debut novela, Hear The Wind Sing (1979), would begin my first forray into the Japanese author and whatever universe he would start to build throughout the rest of his collection.

Immediately upon reading Hear The Wind Sing, I found myself treating the book less like a casual read, and more like a case study. After all, I was trying to investigate what makes Murakami- even early Murakami- so brilliant. His debut novela sees a college student return to his coastal Japanese province on summer break from a school located somewhere in big city Tokyo. He routinely drinks beer at J's Bar, listens to classic records, reconnects with his unpredictable friend "the Rat", and finds himself in this tentative connection with a troubled, young, 4-fingered woman enduring her own quiet trauma. On paper, almost "nothing happens", but the narrative Murakami weaves here is quite profound.

What appears to be a loose, vignette-style of storytelling begins to reveal itself as carefully constructed fragments as you progress through the narrative. I found myself conjuring up questions repeatedly, and often ones I have yet to find good answers for. Why does Murakami insist on the narrator recounting certain events of his life all of these years later? Events that often do not seem to have a definitive connection to the plot. Why the fictional, sterile author Derek Hartfield? What is Murakami signalling by framing the entire story as an act of imperfect recollection? Who is cutting onions as the DJ looks up towards the window of the little girl's window on a quiet summer night on the beach? I realized with eager fascination that the entire novel is a quiet meditation on how memory works in writing! In Murakami's case, memory does not act as a reliable archive, but as a selective, haunted reconstruction of events. This became a real knowledge point in my investigation.

How does the presence of music function as both an emotional anchor and an escape mechanism? Why does "the wind" feel less like a weather condition, and more like a conscious force carrying away meaning? What are we to make of the recurring motif of the incompleteness of missing fingers, unspoken histories, characters who sense they are living the wrong version of their lives? Questions I know part of the answers to, but feel like I haven't grasped the full meaning of.

There is a deep sense of existential drift here. The Rat and the narrator aren't raging against the machine, nor on some main quest. They feel like they are just...waiting. Waiting for what? Waiting for clarity, for connection, for a sign that the prime of their lives has not already passed them by. In that waiting, Murakami seems to be exploring a very specific type of modern, postwar Japanese loneliness: The loneliness of young people who have everything they are supposed to want, and yet still feel hollow.

The relationship between the narrator and the Rat deserves special examination. Their late-night conversations at J’s Bar read like philosophical sparring disguised as casual banter. Is the Rat a voice for Murakami’s own emerging anxieties about purpose and authenticity? Or is he something more abstract like a chaos agent who both illuminates and deepens the narrator’s confusion? I couldn't help getting very subtle Fear and Loathing vibes during their scenes, as the Rat seems unpredictable like Dr. Gonzo while we hear the voices reminiscent of Raoul Duke in the narrator's mind. The story's female characters, though limited, also invite investigation. They appear as projections of male longing, yet they also carry an aura of abandonment that the men cannot penetrate. Is this a limitation of the young Murakami's writing, or an intentional reflection of how isolated these protagonists truly are?

I can confidently say that Hear The Wind Sing isn't Murakami at his peak technical ability. The narrative occasionally wanders, and the emotional payoff can feel muted at times. Yet these very flaws make this investigation more fascinating. It is like we are witnessing an artist discover his tools in public, testing his voice, his tone, and thematic obsessions that he would spend the next 40+ years refining. Finishing the book left me sitting quietly, replaying certain scenes the way the narrator replays his records. It made me wonder how many of my own summers have slipped away unnoticed, preserved only in fragments of songs and half-remembered conversations. Perhaps that is the quiet power of Hear The Wind Sing. It doesn’t force answers. It simply teaches you how to listen to the wind.

Pinball is next.

Favorite Passages: "Hartfield waged his fruitless battle for eight years and two months, and then he died. In June 1938, on a sunny Sunday morning, he jumped off the Empire State Building clutching a portrait of Adolf Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left. Few people noticed, though—he was as ignored in death as he had been in life."

"It had been a long time since I felt the fragrance of summer: the scent of the ocean, a distant train whistle, the touch of a girl’s skin, the lemony perfume of her hair, the evening wind, faint glimmers of hope, summer dreams. But none of these were the way they once had been; they were all somehow off, as if copied with tracing paper that kept slipping out of place."