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alundeberg 's review for:
Arcadia
by Tom Stoppard
It's a good conversation when Tom Stoppard's play "Arcadia" is discussed. It is a book permeated with happy memories: reading it with my study group for the graduate exam in literature, the couple of years when every playhouse and its brother was performing it and seeing them all, and then requiring my students to read fiction about a real issue and one wanting to read about chaos theory and me handing him my copy of this play. My recent conversation made me realize that it had been a long time since I last read it. Would I still enjoy it as much today?
Yes. Yes, I do. In its 97 pages and set in the same room of a manor house, it jumps back and forth between the Regency and modern eras as the two sets of characters hash out literature, math, science, sex and love, and all that is knowable and that left to chance. Sly and witty, Stoppard requires you to read between the lines. You have to pay attention. He deals with the themes of trying to create order in a disorderly world, and the order itself eluding our logic. It is also about how the pursuit of knowledge is what makes us human even if we fail in our understanding, because it is ultimately, "all trivial-- your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in" (75). If you want a quick dip into something fun and makes you feel smarter after you read it, I highly recommend "Arcadia".
Yes. Yes, I do. In its 97 pages and set in the same room of a manor house, it jumps back and forth between the Regency and modern eras as the two sets of characters hash out literature, math, science, sex and love, and all that is knowable and that left to chance. Sly and witty, Stoppard requires you to read between the lines. You have to pay attention. He deals with the themes of trying to create order in a disorderly world, and the order itself eluding our logic. It is also about how the pursuit of knowledge is what makes us human even if we fail in our understanding, because it is ultimately, "all trivial-- your grouse, my hermit, Bernard's Byron. Comparing what we're looking for misses the point. It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in" (75). If you want a quick dip into something fun and makes you feel smarter after you read it, I highly recommend "Arcadia".