Thoughts on Andre Gide’s Strait is the Gate

Le Havre

Strait is the Gate is a story of love between a man and a woman. But it is a love beyond the love of a man and a woman. They sought “mental love,” which is akin to divine union: the love through union with God, the fellowship of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit. They sought a love without happiness, a love too elusive between two mortals, a love at once holy, pure and sublime, which our mortal passions would likely taint. In the end they must give up the love between a man and a woman, to reach for that holy and pure love without joy and passion. Andre Gide, through his personal struggle between puritanical virtues and personal happiness, created a thought-provoking story about love, which challenges the reader to assess the variations of love. 

Andre Gide

Podcast of Black-Naped Oriole in Hokkaido Snow

For those of you who are interested, the podcast of Black-Naped Oriole in Hokkaido Snow is available at Pilcrow & Dagger. Enjoy.

Black-Naped Oriole in Hokkaido Snow

This story was first published in the Quarterly Literary Review Singapore. It is now available on Amazon for free.

After a tsunami has taken his daughter and leukemia his wife, Yasahiro Kobayashi goes to the mountains of Hokkaido to commit seppuku, but not before he rescues an old man from several delinquents. "Black-Naped Oriole in Hokkaido Snow" is a story of a man wrestling  with love and lost, and life and death.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera

Florentino Ariza falls in love with Fermina Daza and against the wish of her father, they are engaged. But at a whim, she calls off the marriage and later marries Juvenal Urbino, a distinguished doctor in the city. For fifty-three years, while Florentino rises through the ranks to become the President of the Caribbean Riverboat Company and takes on more lovers than he could count, he waits to possess Fermina, hoping Dr. Urbino would die before him or her. When the doctors dies, he arrives at her house at the age of seventy-eight and proclaims his love for her. And he wins her over and takes her on a voyage that he doesn’t intend to return.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (photograph by Jose Lara)

Love in the Time of Cholera is a tale of carnal love in the early twentieth century Columbia. In a time of epidemics and revolutions, when life was as fleeting as the wind, passion seems more certain than tomorrow. Only Swann’s obsession with Odette—In Search of Lost Time—could match Florentino’s with Fermina. But as much as the premise of the novel is intriguing, I enjoy Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s prose much more than the plot or the characters. His writing creates a dream-like world where the sights, sounds and smells become mesmerizing. A world far away brought back through the magic of words into the reader’s imagination.

Anna Karenina Book Review

To seek happiness Anna left the proper and dull Karenin for the dashing and exciting Vronsky, but in the end, committed suicide to end her misery. Rather than a comment on morality, Tolstoy through Anna Karenina, as in War and Peace, sought to contrast those who like Anna ignored or opposed the ubiquitous force which direct the destiny of individuals and nations and those who like Levin flowed with it. Both Anna and Levin, unlike Stiva and Dolly, could not passively regurgitate accepted behavior to satisfy social conventions and accept a banal existence, but they paved their paths one to the north and the other to the south.

Red Square, Moscow

Passion directed Anna to oppose social conventions and with all a rebel’s defiance pursued in Vronsky’s arms the happiness that Karenin could not provide. They would love as if the whole world belonged to them. But in the end she could not live like Robinson Crusoe and was not strong enough to fend off social forces, which proclaimed reality’s omnipresence.

Levin sought to transform himself and love Kitty as social conventions could only imitate. He sought to transcend social conventions, which were not in sync with the force that directed destinies, to attune to a higher melody, one that resonates wit the natural order of things.

Leo Tolstoy

The diametrically opposing destinies of Anna and Levin revealed, as in War and Peace, Tolstoy’s search to harmonize with a natural force greater than reason, passion or will. For him, to raise the sword against that force would be to embrace the inferno.