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La Porta Nel Muro E Altri Racconti (1911)

by H.G. Wells(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

8833906485 (ISBN13: 9788833906485)

languge

English

genre

Fantasy

publisher

Bollati Boringhieri

review 1: It's remarkable how a skilled writer like H.G. Wells can write fiction that resonates with readers a century later. This collection is a little gloomy in its view of humanity; one recurring theme is how preferable it is to die than it is to live in a way that restricts liberty. About half the stories of the collection embrace this theme. Most of the collection merited four stars, but one story, the hardest to read of the collection, dropped it down to three. The collection deals with Armageddon, natural disasters, murder and other travesties, but the most horrifying of the collection is "Lord of the Dynamos"—a terrifying reminder of the rationalization widespread in Western society that attempted to excuse the enslavement of whole populations of people. Ideas expressed i... moren this story fall right in line with writings from the likes of Karl Vogt and Samuel Morton, casually dropping references to racially-based intellectual inferiority, a tendency toward instinct over reason in Africans, and even racially correlated brain sizes. By far the scariest part of this collection, this story serves as a glaring and frightening reminder that very few among H.G. Wells' turn-of-the-century audience would have batted an eyelash at these ideas, which were used to defend historical horrors ranging from the trans-Atlantic slave nearly a century earlier to the Nazi eugenics program just a couple of decades into the future.
review 2: "He could not recall the particular neglect that enabled him to get away, nor the course he took among the West Kensington roads. All that had faded among the incurable blurs of memory. But the white wall and the green door stood out quite distinctly.As his memory of that remote childish experience ran, he did at the very first sight of that door experience a peculiar emotion, an attraction, a desire to get to the door and open it and walk in. And at the same time he had the clearest conviction that either it was unwise or it was wrong of him - he could not tell which - to yield to this attraction. He insisted upon it as a curious thing that he knew from the very beginning - unless memory has played him the queerest trick - that the door unfastened, and that he could go in as he chose.I seem to see the figure of that little boy, drawn and repelled. And it was very clear in his mind, too, though why it should be so was never explained, that his father would be very angry if he went through that door.Wallace described all these moments of hesitation to me with the utmost particularity. He went right past the door, and then, with his hands in his pockets, and making an infantile attempt to whistle, strolled right along beyond the end of the wall. There he recalls a number of mean, dirty shops, and particularly that a plumber and a decorator, with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead ball taps, pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel. He stood pretending to examine these things, and coveting, passionately desiring the green door." less

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