UNESCO Part XI

I read Haut le coeur and de la Parra's Iphigenie. Haut le coeur is a novel of Japan's militaristic interwar period, with the protagonist a violent right-winger who frequents prostitutes. If the author's goal was disgust, he succeeded. Iphigenie is supposed to be a proto-feminist south American novel, but I found it a conventional novel of a young woman loving a man who marries someone else, and eventually refuses to become his mistress. Hohum. I read an issue of The New Yorker and The Economist. At present I reading Tagore's Gora, which I would call a philosophical novel about caste.