(no subject)

[lethargic_man]

Compare and contrast The Quincunx with The French Lieutenant's Woman. [20 marks]

(rysmiel, have you read the former?)

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Nope. Time is unfortunately finite.

[lethargic-man.livejournal.com]

I think you'd get on with it.

Specifically, that it's a twentieth-century novel pastiching nineteenth-century fiction, but also subtly subverting it, with unreliable narrators and the like, and a grand mathematical structure to the whole thing, and a central mystery that is never explicitly solved, but left to the reader to work out. (As the author points out in his later-editions afterword, one reader had her conceptions so overturned by the last sentence she felt compelled to go back to the beginning and read the whole thing again!)

Your icon reminds me of the other day at work:

GM: ...and James is busy at the moment with Cable.
lethargic_man: Surely you mean James is all tied up with Cable.
GM: That's it! You're fired! Get out!

(Good job he wasn't in a position to fire me. :o))