"There are four kinds of readers. The first is like the hourglass; and their reading being as the sand, it runs in and runs out, and leaves not a vestige behind. A second is like the sponge, which imbibes everything, and returns it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtier. A third is like a jelly bag, allowing all that is pure to pass away, and retaining only the refuse and dregs. And the fourth is like the slaves in the diamond mines of Golconda, who, casting aside all that is worthless, retain only pure gems." --Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Stefan Zweig's The Post-Office Girl.
Doris Lessing substituted The Sweetest Dream for the third volume of her autobiography, although she claims no parallels to actual people in the novel. London in the 1960s, the nuclear disarmament controversy, contemporary Africa, and, according to reviewer Laura Miller, a merciless detailing of "the hypocrisies and selfishness of the party members and barricade manners" Lessing "knew during her days among Britain's radicals."And another NYRB classics reprint, of which the editor says: The Post-Office Girl is fastpaced and hardboiled—as if Zweig, normally the most mannerly of writers, had fortified himself with some stiff shots of Dashiell Hammett. It's the story of Christine, a nice girl from a poor provincial family who gets a taste of the good life only to have it snatched away; and of Ferdinand, an unemployed World War I veteran and ex-POW with whom she then links up. It's a story, you could say, of two essentially respectable middle-class souls who wake up to find themselves miscast as outcasts, but what it's really about, beyond economic and psychological collapse, is social death. Set during the period of devastating hyper-inflation that followed Austria's defeat in 1918, Zweig's novel depicts a country grotesquely divided between the rich and poor, so much so that it has effectively reverted to a state of nature."
This is the wild card of the bunch. I'd never heard of Richard Marsh's The Beetle before yesterday. A late-Victorian horror novel, it outsold Dracula in its day and it might be interesting to discuss why the Bram Stoker's become a classic and this one's faded into (no doubt deserving) obscurity. According to Amazon, "From out of the dark and mystic Egypt come The Beetle, a creature of horror, 'born of neither God nor man', which can change its form at will. It is bent on revenge for a crime committed against the devotees of an ancient religion. At large in London, it pursues its victims without mercy and no one, it seems, is safe from its gruesome clutches."