Saneatsu Mushanokoji (1885-1976) was one of the first great Japanese modernist writers. He is acknowledged to have founded the I-novel (shishosetsu), a specifically Japanese confessional genre in which the author speaks directly and colloquially to the reader (e.g., Lippit 28). Mushanokoji was also a painter of still lifes, […]
Welcome to the final dramatic chapter of Baron Montez of Panama and Paris. We witness the culmination of Louise and Harry’s romance and the end of Fernando Montez. Readers have been eagerly anticipating the final revenge against Montez, for every time they pick up the yellow-back novel to […]
The reader is treated to the resolution of affairs with Baron Montez, so far as the Larchmont family is concerned. This is orchestrated by Harry, with the unexpected assistance of his brother, who is still flitting between mental states. This penultimate chapter opens with Baron Montez deliberating on […]
Open Access Review | Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (2019) by Hannah Frank | The truly monumental film director Sergei Eisenstein, pioneer of the “montage of attractions,” creator of the intense Russian masterpieces Battleship Potemkin (1925), Strike (1925) and Ivan the Terrible (1944), loved […]
The previous chapter closed dramatically with a frightened and frantic Louise at the door of Larchmont’s hotel clutching ‘THE BULKY, BIG POCKETBOOK OF BARON FERNANDO MONTEZ!’ Gunter’s decision to end the previous chapter like this, with Louise rejoining Harry, means that this coming chapter falls into retrospective: detailing […]
Harry has returned to Paris, and in this chapter he has to deal with the dangerously paranoid delusional antics of his brother, and the effect of his behaviour on everyone around him. The use of the word ‘lunatic’ in a medical sense serves to remind the reader that […]
As the title suggests, this chapter, the last in Book Three has a sense of haste and urgency about it. Louise has to navigate a series of diverse interactions and does so skillfully and with a will, including another encounter with Domingo in which she deftly uses his […]
In a gradual increase in intensity over the past chapters two relics have been revealed. First the tintype image of Alice Ripley, then the contents of the powder canister: a string of pearls and a note inscribed in blood on a cuff. These have only reinforced Louise’s belief, […]
On a tour of Silas Winterburn’s museum, Louise set her eyes on a powder canister embedded in a tree branch (Ch. 15). At the time it seemed rather odd Silas had not opened it, sufficiently so for Louise to question his lack of curiosity. Yet he puts off […]
It’s hard not to appreciate Fernando, our polyhaemic ex-mule boy, pearl salesman, opportunistic thief, kidnapper and killer, assumed Baron, self-taught financier. He is literate in at least two languages, no doubt through his own efforts. A man of the world, or as Gunter fancies him, a monstrous cannibalistic […]
Furin Chime 