http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/a-man-called-berg-who-changed-his-name-to-greb-came-to-a-seaside-town-intending-to-kill-his-father/ Tue, 03 Nov 2009 23:41:37 +0000 http://wordpress.com/ hourly 1 http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/a-man-called-berg-who-changed-his-name-to-greb-came-to-a-seaside-town-intending-to-kill-his-father/#comment-377 jd Fri, 25 Apr 2008 08:28:44 +0000 http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/?p=21#comment-377 good on your for posting this. I like the way the novel evokes, at times, the realist grit of the out-of-season british seaside resort, but mostly uses this same 'setting' as a medium for the exploration of psychosexual/psychosocial [same thing?] paranoia. I find it hard to map the novel onto the real Brighton. It sometimes feels more like a composite portrait of south coast resorts. Or maybe I'm not reading closely enough. Brighton makes relatively brief appearances in modernist literature. Alluded to metonymically in 'The Waste Land' (the proposal of the homosexual romp: 'a weekend at the Metropole'). 'Brighton Rock', of course, uses it as an Eliotic stand-in for other 'unreal cities', but this is Brighton as modern city and not necessarily modernist (depending on how you read Greene and how you want to construe modernism, I guess. good on your for posting this. I like the way the novel evokes, at times, the realist grit of the out-of-season british seaside resort, but mostly uses this same ’setting’ as a medium for the exploration of psychosexual/psychosocial [same thing?] paranoia. I find it hard to map the novel onto the real Brighton. It sometimes feels more like a composite portrait of south coast resorts. Or maybe I’m not reading closely enough. Brighton makes relatively brief appearances in modernist literature. Alluded to metonymically in ‘The Waste Land’ (the proposal of the homosexual romp: ‘a weekend at the Metropole’). ‘Brighton Rock’, of course, uses it as an Eliotic stand-in for other ‘unreal cities’, but this is Brighton as modern city and not necessarily modernist (depending on how you read Greene and how you want to construe modernism, I guess.

]]>