Deceit, desire, and the novel

Name: Deceit, desire, and the novel
ISBN: 9780801802201

René Girard · 1961

Discussion of the thesis that any goal which the protagonist of a novel seeks has been suggested by a mediator and that this "triangular desire" is the form of all great novels.

Fiction & Literature

Open Library Amazon

Stats for nerds

1recommend

2mentions

2people

2013–2021years

50% recommend50% neutral

Mentions per year

What Hacker News says

youngbennyMay 2013
Looking for good books to read. Any recommendations? I liked these:
Everything and More, David Foster Wallace
Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter
Collected Fictions, Jorge Luis Borges
In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell
Antifragile, Nassim Taleb
The Long Way, Bernard Moitessier
Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Rene Girard
The Wu-Tang Manual, RZA
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius
Essays, Michel de Montaigne
We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live, Joan Didion
thread
photojoshSep 2021
I read Don Quixote as a teen, in Spanish, and reading this now makes me think I very definitely read an abridged version!
It was one of the novels behind René Girard's early development of his theory of mimetic desire+, in Deceit, Desire and the Novel ([0] is a review).
I'm fascinated that OP sees the book as offering subtle life advice, while Girard sees it as an analysis of an aspect of human nature we all share.
+as made famous by Peter Thiel... but there's much more to the theory than just a paradigm to build social media on.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2010/feb/08/theo...
thread