perhaps this would be best as an audio book with a serenading siren to lure one on in. then again as bad as I could try and knock this book, it wouldn't compare to the zingers thrown about by the professor himself. Give it a century or two before censuring . . .

scrivener - the ones who dictate the truth, divine; the ones who divine the truth, dictate

Sooo actually I didn't read the whole book, not by any means, managing merely a single story, in short, which upon reflection, is about the amount of effort I felt it deserved, perusing this particular story as a mundane modicum of the Short Story club. I actually made the effort to read, and I kid you not, Bishop Berkeley or Mariana of the Universe, and no, I'm not confused as to which story I read, that's actually the moniker attached to this postulate repository. There's some didactic dabbling amongst Sybil siblings that borders uncivil. The old I think therefore I am (or am I really someone else who only thinks they're me) spiel is falteringly countered by a shared perception ratification, that shortly folds in the confounding countenance of the senior senorita. Alas, absence of mom, time, and space equates to agonizing anxiety in the face of the abyss. All of this is which to say being only red herrings, whereas the story within the story is not a mere prop but buttresses the entirety. Referring to Mediocre Man of course. In a made-up universe, which it logically is, one way or another, unless one defers to nihilism, there are idols and ideals. But to flush out the scenario requires the mundane, mere ideas, and the tortuous effort to merely maintain the same, as poor Mariana feels herself becoming indelibly induced (duped?). To the rescue, the everyday (hu)man. We may not all be great, indeed, logically we cannot be so, but we can be so-so, which can be so, so show more useful. Who else to imagine what occurs down the cul-de-sac, in living, to take away the trash, and fix the plumbing, and imagine all the minute workings of the world, thus saving "higher" man to concentrate on his ideals.
Thus, when I rate this tale a mere 3-stars, I am merely embodying it into the great work ethos. show less

There is fantastic and then there is fantastic, there it is:
this may actually rate four or so stars, but who's counting, yet after reading with the Short Story Group and all the wonderful insights, I'm bumping it up a bit more.
And with further ado, lifted from the dedication:
"A knowledge that another has felt as we have felt, even as they are little things, not much otherwise than we have seen them, will continue to the end to be one of life's choicest pleasures." (RLS)

Required reading oops thrown overboard - the kind of funny that hurts because it's true and we're hurting, fish this out of the water and wake someone up !

a finely spun taut tale (or is it flimsy with loose ends), although it is clear where it is leading one into, it is dark there so yet not very clear at all, nevertheless the main character (or is he?), the narrator, and you dear reader, are at times raptly drawn into and at other times when we should perhaps reconsider the lulls still lures us on to the bitter, biter end, or is it just the beginning of some new mystery . . . ?

does anyone else realize that this book is a veritable cornucopia of numerics, whatever that means? 72 of them to be precise (I'm Kidding)

Concernig the titular story only:
Right, so this was a pretty good one, in spite of getting near mired in the muck (literally).
It begins with some subtle foreshadowing: “I . . . journeyed out TO SEE THE TREE.”
There is more in this vein, or should I say, xylem, e.g. “the COMELY neck of the [tree] limb.
“Fathers like ours don’t know how to love. They live too much indoors.”

The red herring – “Idolatry is the abomination . . . not philosophy.”

The damning epigraph that leads to this epitaph-tale. Whereas Shakespeare once penned “What’s past is prologue,” yet here the overwhelming weight of underlying indoctrinated culture irreversibly sets the mold.

Of the several stories we have read (Short Story Club) highlighting and self-deprecatingly lowbrowing Yiddishness (Mishnaicness?) this one certainly rings the bell. (Although I found it hard to pin down specific quotable examples to present here, nevertheless the aura succeeds in this regard spectacularly.)

The uniquely colorful phrases; for an avid reader – “wearing the look of a man half-sotted with print.”
The line about uttering “Bring the tea.” Again, “He could concoct holiness out of the fine line of a serif.” By the way Sans Serif is a flutingly fanciful moniker meaning, simply, plain.

The Yogi-ism to consider:
“What are they like, those people?”
“They’re exactly like us, if you can think what we would be if we were like them.”
Ponder that thought in this age of discordancy.

Another show more harbinger of trouble brewing, “To them their bodies are holy.”

Then there is the clever dichotomy of having the wife Sheindal (“beautiful”), once physically liberated from a concentration camp, married to a man who becomes convinced escape comes from release of the soul from the incarnation.

Then there is the clever dichotomy of having the wife Sheindal (“beautiful”), once physically liberated from a concentration camp, married to a man who becomes convinced escape comes from release of the soul from the incarnation.

It’s true that there’s a lot of what comes across as pedantic theological philosophizing. However although the author places Isaac on a bit of a pedestal, later Ozick pulls the carpet (and stand) away, leaving the character and us dangling momentarily, until cutting away to something else. No biblical-like reprieve for Isaac on this occasion! And all the time set against the backdrop (“fringing’) of the fetid stagnant undercurrent. Musty as it must be aside, the decay process spews forth again in later passages renewed.

It was briefly intriguing to consider, although perhaps I just ran momentarily with a tangent, that Moses chastising the “idol” worshippers actually drove them away from their “real” spiritual underpinnings. As they say, history is written, not necessarily specifically by the victors, but by historians, and when their tale survives, it makes them victors in a sense. (The pen is mightier than the sword.)

Later the author, expressed through the (looong note, goes off on another tangent himself . . . It seems to me that, if man is the exception to some rule, then there may be an exception to the exception, as in I before e, except . . . except . . . just except it show less

not supposed to talk about it

first of all, I've already rated/(short) reviewed another similar (SAME?) compilation, without having read Autumn Mountain, with the Short Story Club.
So as for this pinnacle tale, perhaps every point below the apex is less, but more revealing.
A point in time; a paint in time.
Another tale regarding differing perspective for sure,
such as with In A Grove, sometimes confused with Rashomon.
then there are stories in between which I never got to.
library transfer loaner (vagaries of reading)

Ok, I'm not researching who came first, but this story suffered from its hindsight position in a plethoric string of likeminded tales (but never being able to get back to that original origin myth ha), imagine getting to the get back place and finding oneself in another story's version instead.
Then there has been a heaping of that old "you'll never believe this" spiel overdone and read repeatedly lately likewise . . .
I'll settle for Dusk to Dawn's shortened version of disaffirming affirmation, "Now I don't want to hear anything about "I don't believe in vampires", 'cause I don't f***ing believe in vampires, but I believe in my own two eyes, and what I saw is f***ing vampires!"

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of steam engines, it was the age of estimable imaginations. Can’t stop now, I'm losing my train of thought, getting off track, tunnel vision be damned. Waving bye, Imma ‘bout to ghost on this review

Okay, being a tad hazy on Bacon egged me to google/wik, and thus now being a newly minted Holiday Inn Express expert on all things breakfast, I strongly recommend purveying Temporis Partus Maximus (the Greatest Birth of Time) in conjunction with this horrible, er, horror tale, to better glean some insight into all the what I suppose to be witty references, but of course the text does not exist, making for a fifth wall within this (the story). Indeed one can speculate that this very text was the one lost (in the cottage) in the woods. I too am lost in these woods. This does have the trappings of a modern-day horror slasher B-movie (barbecue arm anyone?), which would undoubtedly bring trepidation to the original partakers therein likewise.
Anyhoo, this "short" story only appears to really drag along, because, in fact, a quick and furtive glance reveals but slight passage of time, and furthermore (but barely), slight passage progress at all. The trees in the background hover so up close, that they must indeed be painted differently from one another, but I have digressed into collective short story land. If only that other bloke had moved so ponderously through his woods, he might have stumbled upon his lost Eden. Regardless, the characters et al. get old quick. Was Bacon onto some Einsteinian concept of space-time - I would have to extend my festal stay to delve into this, and already another short story awaits.
A quick bolt for the door becomes like the arrow that only show more advances half again, ad infinitum. Phew finally on the slow train to Heaven, which uncoincidentally likewise runs to hell. Choose your doors carefully, as they forgot to tell that last guy. show less

Okay but did anyone stop and think with the way the wishes were going, wouldn't a third one just be more macabre . . . For further analysis, we'll have to go spoiler alert, even though it is more about what we know that we don't know:
So the second wish (basically an unwish) evolves into a horror exercise in the mind of Mr. White, and while it would be fascinating to see the spectral reality, we are set off on a new tangent when Mr. White wishes, presumedly, to unwish the unwish. So now we won't actually ever know the form and nature of the incarnation, nor are we told the specific ins and outs of the third wish, but all of these unknowns pale in comparison to the ultimate unknown (relayed above), which many people might not catch, that is, there's no reason to assume the third wish will go any better than the previous ones. In fact, I propose that the horror reverberates in crescendo, culminating in soon to be unimaginable horrors unleashed

Unspoiler alert, there are no spoils to spoil, only soils to toil in, cosmonauts not encountering especially adventurous events, other than the obvious giddy glory of the whole space travel and interplanetary bit, which while admittedly amazing in its own right, doesn't correlate into an exciting read. There's a few good lines and philosophizing however much more meh of the same. So maybe it is just too real in the sense of comparable to the actuality of highly trained biologists hired to feed and clean up mice in a lab and, and that's it. When what we facetiously yearn for are for those mice, having been fed an unapproved secret-serum, mutate into giant, cunning, killer, apparently near-indestructible super-mice. There's one bit where one of the crew realizes that some "space monsters" may be responsible for consuming small islands whole, with implicit danger to the mission set-up, ok, now we're on to something, but what follows remains mundane par for the course.

Call of the wild morphs into planet of the . . . what the foxes, alas the lass will be no white fang, perchance the progeny . . . a muted impassioned plea against the hunt . . . a philosophical traipse neighboring the nature of man and (humanity of) beast . . .a rom-com or even untethered romance novella . . . a nod to Reynard . . . a lyncanthrope-like light take . . . a farce on fake news . . . and a take on the animal/nature immersion tales of the day e.g. Wind in the Willows
Now, does it achieve any of these aspects along its lengthy passages? - to an extent, and the oscillating aspect of the vixen's trajectory along with the light and semi-humorous wording, is just enough to drag us alongst to the torpedo terminus of this folly without exiting orbit early

Somebody somewhere I suppose wished for a twist on the three wishes genie in a bottle contrivance so we ended up with this slightly bloated change up involving downward change; I would give my two cents worth, but that would leave me in a perilous predicament

I suppose at the time Pushkin was being oh so clever

A prolonged, yet languid posterized postulation of this story, temporized, when critical mass acceptance was untimely achieved, accelerated up to five stars, from the midly, medlum medium, as representations collided headfirst a persona with an annoyingly irascible, lingering, not malingering, not-femme finale embodied reality finality in, well, a split second; very magically mundanely distracting; time compresses about inbounding gravity-space must have sufficed to tip this vortex

reread this yarn from my youth and it still causes my heart to skip a beat - used to lie down asleep in those quainter, quieter days and feign frighten myself with the sound of my own heartbeat reverberating eerily in my ears, not like a normal sound, but a muffled beat as though that of a body buried alive, under the blankets that is, or sounding like some stranger ominously pacing just beyond reach or reason, but attached to my very being, which of course it was; and as for the eye association, and acts of lucid insanity, those are stories for another day, now go to sleep

I'm just not feeling Poe as much as I did as a kid . . .
Being not yet dead, not quite mesmerized, when read; just following along when the narrator led us on with the dismembered ends at hand; had another thought on the tip of my tongue, but it’s gone now . . . Aah here we go full tongue in cheek
Written in the spirit of mind over body temporal when, with moribund-realized inception, a cadaverous being, whilst being freed in short order from both the chains of corporal carnage en masse and from ethereally expectant agonies, leaves us all in limbic limbo, pending an impending implosive terminus
The weirdest narrated de facto concept suggests one having to be not under the sway of the unconscious in order to duly die:
Makes short shift of it’s better to die in your sleep – transposing to It’s better to sleep in your death, guess that ties in with the very short story read with the Short Story Group - Virgilio Piñera's Insomnia

I would consider adding another star (as if it matters) to this for holding my interest momentarily, but when an author not so subtlety bashes his co-authors for lack of complex development, and then proceeds quite circuitously in a similar failing flailing manner, the only saving grace could lie in the anticipated ending, which also fails to materialize . . .

Okay, honestly I've been finished for some time, try as hardly as I might not to flip through to finis, when much to my dismay I realized that finish without an h was well done as well, perhaps we should all leave off leaving off the end and consider the matter complete - which makes me consider why the French have a silent letter at the end of their words, and, more importantly, being so, why we cannot choose our own silent endings as in now I'mr writingq creativex frencw. Anyhoo, mini-spoiler, but in the spirit of savingc time, I'll just go aheadd and spilll the beans, it's not about promoting the I think I'll stay under the covers today, why mess with a good thing, but more of a Red Queen kindp of thinj as in you've got to run faster to stay in the same place i.e. much ado about nothing - or maybe I'm just tooo blithely unconcerned with conceptualizing real effortfully to understand the actualk concepg as neither of us is Frencg anyhoww. Now the Americans on the other hand like to shorten their words through and thru, doughnot, I repeat donut try to dissuade us, perhaps we epitomize the status of lull marginally over null so in short go ahead and strategically place this book in your office space for those awkward moments when the subterranean boss-types show up expecting a flurrry of activity in the name of progres

Deconstructing the Destructors:
Upon the surreal landscape demarcating the aftermath (carnage) of great wars, antagonisms paused for effect more than paucity of affront, a charismatic leader arises out of the rubble to lead the rabble. As in most origins, he is prophetically versed and vested in the ways of the world, even as a child.
It is not merely the dearth and death of the overtly developed man - no mere coincidence, that the renewed resistance stems from the youth, as surely as they are innately prepared to arise from the ashes of adolescence, likewise to the constraining strictures and structures of communal confinement.
Quiescent days of leisure dictated nominally by the pillars of the monetary artifice only enable the antithesis as idle hands become the devil’s workshop. Ah, but “destruction is a form of creation,” as the author famously inscribes.
It begins with the underground; movement, furtive stabs in the dark, gradually unravelling in the enveloping enclosure, contained yet unconstrained, like the stairway, propped up by the moral mythos as much as mortar. They partake with an inner fire burning crisper than the notes alit, consuming all man’s artifacts and constructs. Quintessentially elemental factors are at play: fire, water, earth, and the winds of change. Eventually inevitable collapse will ensue; once the framework to unlay is laid, the skeleton muscles forth, revealing the inner workings, before their vanquishment to nether regions, now flooded show more with the mouldering residual excreted from stagnated distribution cisterns and systems.
Eclosure of the chrysalis necessitates ruining of the enclosure. The rising tides have subdued the vestiges of decorum. Eventually the masses become constrained or complicit to the conspiracy and a tipping point is realized. Nothing left. Nothing left but to revel in the revelations. The revolution of generations. show less

I imagine this to be a masked story, but it is beyond me to unravel it at this time

Hot read! - One tome to bring them all pages and in the darkness bind them (until opened)

It was a dark and stormy night is such a classic opener, please don't tell those so called writing instructors, they will insist on it being made active; and such redundancy, I mean, come on now dark, stormy, and night all pretty much equating; likewise ism't this merely a demonstration of the commutative property, you might just as well say A dark and stormy night, was it? but then that sounds rather questionable as well; but why are we leading off with an unspecified pronoun to begin with; wait, what, was this written by a beagle or something, back to English 101 prison for you, to be forevermore chastised by tired proffs whose own attempts at writing never took off

Okay some say this isn't science fiction since the diablo dialed up the time transformance, whereas, I say, regarding time travel, the devil is in the details, what the diff between a time machine chalked up to the scientific renaissance of the era claiming on faith to surely and shortly resolve all matters of the universe, create life, and solve momentous circumnavigation, now zoom forwards a century and the bars are lowered as the standards are raised and progressed, versus utilizing the spiritual sphere apropos?
Are Max's "predictions" of the future mere merry canoodling of the fantastic science of the era going along with the acknowledgement of vanity in the other arts and sciences, or the vestige resonances eminating from the untimely artifact artifices of the unholy unfashionably addressed?

hopefully the" immense design of things" was attractive enough for him at the end

A sprinkling of sparkling snippets in an otherwise bit obscure rendition. So supposedly KAP sees this "couple" through a window while she's self-exiling in Mexico, and years later determines to use these window views of her time abroad, coupled with the pair, not knowing whether she knew more about them specifically and transpose onto paper a fitting backdrop for all this. There's some sonic passages here, some cobbling of concepts, in a fitful delivery. It's almost as though she's purposefully writing at the agonizing inducing level one must have felt from the discordant serenades to an afficionado and the multiple other grating moments consuming the wilting main character. If so, then we must give her due credit for so pervasively offending our sensibilities.