I am both a writer and a teacher of writing at the university. I have always wanted to be a writer, even though one of my aunts lied to me when I was five that writers would be poor and would die of tuberculosis. I like listening to stories of ordinary people and can learn so much from them. I studied English literature and psychology in my undergraduate studies. I hold a PhD in applied linguistics. I enjoy reading about the subject of philosophy and am fascinated by the theories revolving around ethics. Naturally, I challenge my characters with moral dilemmas so I can write about their struggles.
I wrote
Mother's Tongue: A Story of Forgiving and Forgetting
I love All the Names so much that I read it twice in a gap of ten years. I love it for two main reasons: how ordinary people can be immortalized by powerful writing and what decisions good people make in a moral dilemma. In his Nobel Prize award ceremony speech in Stockholm in 1998, Saramago said that his writings were to transform ordinary people into literary figures in order that he would not forget them.
He did exactly that in this book. An unknown woman was immortalized by the main protagonist, who was portrayed as an unloved, lonely clerk working at the Registry of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Lisbon. As I was reading his story, I wondered what turned this unassuming, timid worker into a forger. Given the opportunity, would a good person turn into a tyrant?
José Saramago's mesmerizing, classic narrative about the loneliness of individual lives and the universal need for human connection.
Senhor José is a low-grade clerk in the city's Central Registry, where the living and the dead share the same shelf space. A middle-aged bachelor, he has no interest in anything beyond the certificates of birth, marriage, divorce, and death that are his daily routine. But one day, when he comes across the records of an anonymous young woman, something happens to him. Obsessed, Senhor José sets off to follow the thread that may lead…
First published in German in 1939, I find this book still relevant to our time. One lesson I have learned is to examine my feelings toward those who are less fortunate. Other than feeling a sense of pity, how else should I react? The book makes me think about whether our pity as an outsider really helps or whether this feeling only serves as a defense mechanism that helps relieve our guilty feelings over living a life of abundance and security.
Hofmiller, the main protagonist of the book experiences such a moral dilemma: should he do more for a young woman who is less fortunate? The juxtaposition of his actions and those of the young woman’s father works exceedingly well.
Wes Anderson on Stefan Zweig: "I had never heard of Zweig...when I just more or less by chance bought a copy of Beware of Pity. I loved this first book. I also read the The Post-Office Girl. The Grand Budapest Hotel has elements that were sort of stolen from both these books. Two characters in our story are vaguely meant to represent Zweig himself — our “Author” character, played by Tom Wilkinson, and the theoretically fictionalised version of himself, played by Jude Law. But, in fact, M. Gustave, the main character who is played by Ralph Fiennes, is modelled significantly…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
If you are looking for a classic that tells a tale of adultery, murder, and revenge set in nineteenth-century Paris, you must read this book. I was completely absorbed with the story even though I was so busy moving across states at the time.
No one was a born murderer, and Laurent did not seem to be one. I was eager to not just finish reading the book but to study the psychology of the murderer. What made him turn cold-blooded and evil? His downfall was brought about by no one other than his own deadly sins—sloth and greed.
Perhaps his most famous work, Emile Zola's Therese Raquin is a dark and gripping story of lust, violence and guilt, set in the gloomy back streets of Paris. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes and an introduction by Robin Buss.
In the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop on the Passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, Therese Raquin is trapped in a loveless marriage to her sickly cousin, Camille. The numbing tedium of her life is suddenly shattered when she embarks on a turbulent affair with her husband's earthy friend Laurent, but their animal passion for each other…
I love the fact that the book makes my mind busy. If the tragic hero of the story, Michel chose duty over freedom, he wouldn’t be a very bad person, would he? He remained faithful to his wife until her death. When it was not necessary to perform his duty anymore, he freed himself from worldly ties and indulged in his own pleasures.
I love this book because it has so many layers. I love Michel because he dares to show his badness. One scene describes Michel’s beard being shaved off as though he wants to reveal what lies underneath. He compares himself to a Palimpset that contains the most ancient writing on its first layer. He is probably old Adam who feels compelled to act upon his original desire.
“The humanist has four leading characteristics—curiosity, a free mind, belief in good taste, and a belief in the human race—and all four are present in Gide. . . . The humanist of our age.” —E. M. Forster
A Penguin Classic
In The Immoralist, André Gide presents the confessional account of a man seeking the truth of his own nature. The story’s protagonist, Michel, knows nothing about love when he marries the gentle Marceline out of duty to his father. On the couple’s honeymoon to Tunisia, Michel becomes very ill, and during his recovery he meets a young Arab boy whose…
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
We have all heard of this book. We all know something about the plot either by watching the film or hearing something about it at school. If you haven’t yet read the book, you must put it on your reading list. We can only give Mary Shelley’s work full justice by reading it from beginning to end; not until then will you be able to feel Victor’s internal struggles. In his attempt to achieve immortality, he created a monster.
I never get tired of reading chapter five where Shelley describes Victor’s utter disappointment upon watching his creation coming to life. I love the choice of language. The thoughts that went through his mind and his guilty feelings mixed with pride and excitement present an unsolvable moral dilemma. Should he destroy his own creation?
One of the BBC's '100 Novels That Shaped Our World'
'That rare story to pass from literature into myth' The New York Times
Mary Shelley's chilling Gothic tale was conceived when she was only eighteen, living with her lover Percy Shelley on Lake Geneva. The story of Victor Frankenstein who, obsessed with creating life itself, plunders graveyards for the material to fashion a new being, but whose botched creature sets out to destroy his maker, would become the world's most famous work of horror fiction, and remains a devastating exploration of the limits of human creativity. Based on the third…
By naming my novel Mother’s Tongue, I already broke a language rule, so I can’t afford to break another one. In case you wonder if it is a typo, the blurb at the back of the book assures you of its accuracy. It is really about the tongue and language use of a mother. The story tells how a woman struggles with making choices in her life, including her choice of language.
If I am allowed to break another rule, I’d like to put the word “forgetting” before “forgiving.” For me, we have to forget what happened in order to forgive. All the characters are ordinary and yet good people, but somehow, circumstances force them to act in a way that is not morally correct.
