Rebecca Goldstein gaf zaterdag in The Wall Street Journal haar lijstje van vijf aan te bevelen ideeënromans. Ze noemt deze vijf.
1. Herzog By Saul Bellow (1964)
2. Middlemarch By George Eliot (1873)
3. The Holy Sinner By Thomas Mann (1951)
4. The Black Prince By Iris Murdoch (1973)
5. Einstein's Dreams By Alan Lightman (1993)
Haar tekstje over George Eliot's Middlemarch vind ik wel passend om op dit weblog geciteerd te worden:
"George Eliot turned her hand to writing "Middlemarch" only months after completing her translation of Spinoza's "Ethica," and the novel is imprinted with many of Spinoza's ideas, as well as by Eliot's robust wrangling with them. The main plotline follows the passionate knowledge-seeker Dorothea Brooke, who blunders her way toward moral clarity, on the way making an unfortunate marriage to a dry pedant, Edward Casaubon. "We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves," Eliot writes. "Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity." A great ethicist as well as a supreme novelist, Eliot unobtrusively operates the intricate machinery of reflections about self-interest and morality, determinism and freedom, that move her interlacing stories along."
Over George Eliot had ik 16 dec. 2009 een blog n.a.v. publicaties van Moira Gatens over haar.
