In “Eisenheim the Illusionist” you are led to believe that you should follow the rule of the show and don’t tell, this is, however, a magician’s world. Millhauser has chosen his time frame with care: he tells us in the very first sentence that “[i]n the last years of the nineteenth century, when the Empire […]
Category Archive for 'Mystery'
As I was reading “Eisenheim the Illusionist,” I started thinking about “In the Reign of Harad IV” and how, in both stories, nothing was ever enough. They are both always striving to do more and better work than what they had already achieved to the point that it becomes unrealistic and fantastic. They both are […]
Who Told the Story in “Eisenheim The Illusionist”?
Posted in Longing for Answers, Mystery, Point of View on Apr 1st, 2020
One of the most interesting details about “Eisenheim The Illusionist” is that it is written in third person. This makes the entire story seem like a fable or just a fairy-tale, especially since we’re talking about magic tricks and professional illusions back in the 19th (and early 20th) century. Not only does the telling of the […]
Point-of-View in “A Precursor of the Cinema”
Posted in Fantastic, Longing for Answers, Mystery, Point of View on Mar 30th, 2020
When I first read about the moving paintings in Steven Millhauser’s “A Precursor of the Cinema,” I was reminded of the moving paintings in the Harry Potter series, the ones that talked and moved from frame to frame, interacting with both the students and the subjects of the other paintings. In Harry Potter, we know […]
OHYOS and More Fantastic
Posted in Fantastic, Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 26th, 2020
Of course, as we all know the entire novel OHYOS is fantastic — from the timeline, the gypsies, the incest, and the naiveté of the people of Macondo. In the second half of OHYOS there is many fantastic elements in the story. For example, when José Arcadio dies, the blood from his ear forms a trail that […]
The Gypsies Blur the Lines
Posted in Isolation, Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 24th, 2020
In One Hundred Years of Solitude, some of the big conversations are about how reality meets fantasy. Another conversation relating to that is how does the past meet the present (and how the present meets the future). This is where the Gypsies come into play. For years in the fictional town of Macondo, groups of Gypsies […]
Garcia Marquez’s Use of Time
Posted in Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude, time on Mar 24th, 2020
Time is in flux in One Hundred Years of Solitude. The future is continuously referenced throughout the novel, and the current events are written in the past tense. Because of this, we never quite have a firm stance. Garcia Marquez prepares us for this in the opening line that is both future and past. These […]
Transitioning from Fantastic to Normal in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Posted in Fantastic, fear, Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Social Fears, Transformations, Utopia on Mar 21st, 2020
How many years does it take for something to finally be viewed as fantastic? Five? Twenty? One hundred? I found myself pondering this as I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. As the years go by, we see bits and pieces of the modern world beginning to make their way into the isolated Macondo—the railroad, […]
How 2020 made us go crazy
Posted in Captivity, Desperation, dystopia, Fantastic, Isolation, Loneliness, Longing for Answers, Mystery, Obsession on Mar 19th, 2020
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” We’ve all heard of cabin fever. Well, welcome to self-quarantine during the Coronavirus, with social distancing and young folks who are being advised to stay far away from the Boomers. So far my room is clean; we created an at-home office for me in the old guest room; […]
The Fantastic in OHYOS
Posted in Fantastic, Mystery, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 19th, 2020
Garcia Marquez weaves countless varieties of the fantastic into the first forty pages of his novel. Starting from the opening line, we are given both future and past at the same time. “Many years later,” we are told, “as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his […]
Hints of the Fantastic in One Hundred Years of Solitude
Posted in Mystery on Mar 12th, 2020
Many years later as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. (Garcia Marquez 1) After finishing the first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude, I immediately returned to the story’s opening line; I had always known that it was […]
The detail that stuck out the most to me in my readings of “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” was Father Gonzaga’s initial interaction with the angel. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop […]
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
Posted in Mystery on Mar 3rd, 2020
Chaotic Reading
Posted in Mystery on Feb 27th, 2020
Insecurity and uncertainty are two main themes that come out throughout the story “The Resident.” Not only is the uncertainty obvious inspections, but it is also written in where the readers become uncertain and insecure in the reading of the text. “The woman I did and did not recognize called herself by a name that […]
Not So Glam
Posted in Desperation, Mystery on Feb 23rd, 2020
Machado’s “Real Women Have Bodies” opens with a jarring sentence by the narrator: “I used to think my place of employment, Glam, looked like the view from inside a casket.” The reader instantly knows this is a dark tale and expects death, or something that resembles it, as the story unfolds. The protagonist lives a […]
Steven Millhauser: The Slipping of the Self
Posted in Desire, Mystery, Senses and Words on Feb 17th, 2020
Almost every story we’ve read so far by Steven Millhauser in Dangerous Laughter has centered around a modern, suburban town slowly slipping into madness. It may not even have to be the town itself, but rather just the town’s residents. In the short story “Dangerous Laughter”, we witness a small town fixated on this idea of […]
The domes in “The Dome” are all obvious metaphors for isolationism, but the underlying implication is that isolation is something to be feared; at one point, the phrase “hostile apartness” is even used. Solitude happens to a staple of fantastical fiction; often, there is one character or a place that is separate from the rest […]
Missing In Action
Posted in Desperation, Disappearance, Mystery on Feb 13th, 2020
Yoko Ogawa’s Memory Police is a translated script by Stephan Snyder, this dystopian novel that takes place on this unknown and unnamed island. The residence of this island lives in a world where things are slowly disappearing. For example, at the beginning of the story roses are no longer a thing and the people on this […]
The Memory Police…wow
Posted in Disappearance, Mystery on Feb 11th, 2020
The dystopian novel The Memory Police is reminiscent of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and 1984 by George Orwell, in the ways that it describes the burning of items, the government’s hand in surveillance, and the everyday lives of citizens. There are aspects, as well, of the “Disappearance of Elaine Coleman” by Steven Millhauser, the […]
“Plug Your Women’s Ears with Wax”
Posted in Animals, Desire, Mystery, Obsession on Feb 6th, 2020
To have a fan base is fun in all; we can recall the time we went to our favorite concert and screamed “I LOVE YOU!” into a sea of people in hope that the band would hear you. While reading Julia Armfield’s “Plug Your Women’s Ears with Wax” in Salt Slow, I got the sense of the Fantastic […]
The Great Mystery
Posted in Mystery on Feb 4th, 2020
In “The Great Awake,” it is the narrator that is the most interesting. The reader never gets a clear picture of who Janey is except in small moments. The majority of the story is her narration of what is happening to the other people in the city, to her brother, or to Leonie. Janey […]