tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62891729491296073392024-03-13T14:09:40.121-05:00A Certain SlantEssays, Book Reviews, and Thoughts on Literature, by David WileyDavid Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.comBlogger138125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-88194197481835108132022-03-17T00:02:00.018-05:002023-03-19T02:18:58.961-05:00Gayl Jones’s Palmares<h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">A Review of</span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;">Gayl Jones’s <i>Palmares</i></span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: times;">Originally published in the</span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><a href="http://raintaxi.com" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Spring 2021</span></span></h2><p><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><h3><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b>Palmares</b></span></i><i><b><br /></b></i><b>Gayl Jones</b><b><br /></b><b>Beacon Press ($27.95)</b></span></h3><p></p><p class="MsoNoSpacing"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH27KA_n2ZE5FIB0IwpEYcjL2hw9G0iQ7UBempTMQNUoKAWc7ywiyuU_0rewfOymy5s6sEzS8G02_3MP3mZAt_xodEG9cwA_Wl5Ew3sEOWuiqYbonTLjnrPLVOCbcTUagwac35Gn8AEmy6JYl5mmilnjPloic6rlGs35sBvqAWHYGv_5b9ogP611B9/s2700/336470805_609744980598729_2379374900324323798_n.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2700" data-original-width="1800" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH27KA_n2ZE5FIB0IwpEYcjL2hw9G0iQ7UBempTMQNUoKAWc7ywiyuU_0rewfOymy5s6sEzS8G02_3MP3mZAt_xodEG9cwA_Wl5Ew3sEOWuiqYbonTLjnrPLVOCbcTUagwac35Gn8AEmy6JYl5mmilnjPloic6rlGs35sBvqAWHYGv_5b9ogP611B9/s320/336470805_609744980598729_2379374900324323798_n.png" width="213" /></a></span></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In his lamentable pan of Gayl
Jones’s 1999 masterpiece, <i>Mosquito</i>, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. recounted the
rumor that Jones had several completed novels in the can that she’d written
when she was in graduate school. Both prolific as a writer and sparing in her
publication history, Jones’s major work until now breaks down into two distinct
eras: her brilliantly dark and edgy mid-1970s novels, <i>Corregidora</i> and <i>Eva’s
Man</i>, which were released a year apart, and her virtuosic and inspiring late-1990s
novels, <i>The Healing</i> and <i>Mosquito</i>, which she also released over
two successive years. Reportedly recanting the pessimistic view of love and sex
in her first two novels, Jones attempted to have them taken out of print in the
1990s, and her editor suggested she publish new books instead. Jones’s response
was to submit two of the best novels of the decade. So comprehensively explored
and artistically integrated were these already completed novels that one of the
characters in 1998’s <i>The Healing</i> is reading a copy of the 1999 <i>Mosquito</i>
in its opening pages, a masterstroke that she generously includes as a gift to
her rapt rereaders. Rivaling the mastery and vision of her earlier novels’
editor, Toni Morrison, Jones asserts herself with these two works as a truly towering
artist. Repeatedly referring to and riffing on Chaucer, Cervantes, and Joyce in
her exultant word- and world-play, Jones’s exhaustively swirling narrative
voices and techniques make a strong case for her inclusion among even their rarefied
company.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">’s exorbitant capaciousness and
finger-on-the-pulse relevance—its plot follows a Black woman trucker who joins
the Sanctuary movement to transport migrants from Mexico into the United States
in a new kind of Underground Railroad—resulted in a joyfully playful dream/nightmare
vision of America that should have set it alongside </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Infinite Jest</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, but
instead it tanked and has almost completely disappeared. </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Healing</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
garnered some of the attention and praise its brilliance deserved, but </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
isn’t even mentioned on the list of Jones’s books on the back of her newly released
novel, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">. Gates’s review lambasted </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">’s narrative
inconsistencies in almost exactly the same language that </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
explicitly praises the narrative inconsistencies in </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Don Quixote</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, and
this kind of play between the author and her novel’s voices is one of its great
merits and pleasures, rather than one of its flaws. Jones’s multiplicious curiosity
requires a consciousness far larger than any realistic narrator could provide,
and so she bends the post-Flaubertian rules of naturalism in all the most
deliberate and pleasurable ways, and does so with a deeply structured concinnity that orchestrates her effusion into symphonic order. Nodding to the playfully
messy early novels that Jones loves so much, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> recalls the mad yarn-spinning
of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Tristram Shandy</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, had Sterne had any idea where his novel was going,
or any capacity for revision. In this, Jones is firmly among the great
Twentieth-Century Modernists, especially her beloved Joyce, who brought a
Miltonic rigor to the loopy narrative structures he was parodying.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-7huBSQXKYEUwH09P2adws0DR8k0cufuRSz6mII7gM00F5E1SzesmbWSr_CIvJGJwQ-IQQV_Eo21018KzXlGzuee0B8yf7IhDyGHVTTLGyPbvz4LQdJpiJ8RnkYFSMGWZAJtiPjtuHZYF85nOFfh5WwGvFCkfN47iodZKrTwLw4XW4HxLAfKgPuUM/s295/s-l300.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="295" data-original-width="204" height="295" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj-7huBSQXKYEUwH09P2adws0DR8k0cufuRSz6mII7gM00F5E1SzesmbWSr_CIvJGJwQ-IQQV_Eo21018KzXlGzuee0B8yf7IhDyGHVTTLGyPbvz4LQdJpiJ8RnkYFSMGWZAJtiPjtuHZYF85nOFfh5WwGvFCkfN47iodZKrTwLw4XW4HxLAfKgPuUM/s1600/s-l300.jpg" width="204" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Readers may or may not want to
look into Jones’s shocking personal life, but taking in the few
glimpses we have of the literary mind outside of her novels affords an
illuminating view of her scope and aims and aesthetic. Famously reclusive and
tight-lipped, Jones has given few interviews, and the 1998 QPB edition that
collects </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Corregidora</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Eva’s Man</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Healing</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> includes
a 1978 interview she did with her former academic adviser and mentor, poet
Michael S. Harper. Not yet thirty in the interview, Jones displays an
astounding range of knowledge and interest, and hearing her thoughts on
literature here is like witnessing a magic pyrotechnic parade. One of the major
shifts in Twentieth-Century literature—and perhaps its greatest source of
innovation—was in all the new voices and perspectives that arose from
previously unheard demographics, with each one speaking a version of their language
that brought new vitality to that language’s capacity for expression, in both
content and form. Jones in this interview speaks of the burgeoning literatures
of the Americas—especially Latin, Native, and African American, discussing each
in great detail and complexity—as an inspiration for her approach, portraying these
new voices as the avant-garde that she wants to explore in her own writing.
Riffing on the radical aspects of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Canterbury Tales</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Don
Quixote</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Finnegans Wake</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, Jones rightfully regards these
disorienting works as forerunners of the innovation that so many new voices were bringing to her century</span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 48px;">’</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">s exciting new era of Multicultural Modernism.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In the decade after her groundbreaking
mid-Seventies novels Jones published a number of collections of short stories
and poetry, and then in the next dozen years before </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Healing</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
her creative voice was silent as she presumably honed those two novels to
perfection. But then after </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">: complete silence for more than two decades.
Was the failure of her masterpiece to blame for this silence, and was this
silence permanent? Or was she working on something even bigger and better? With
the newly released </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, a vast novel that explores the vein of
history that served as the distant backdrop for Jones’s debut novel, these
questions remain unanswered. Beacon Press announces </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> as the
first of five new works by Jones to be released over the next few years, but is
</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> actually new? Or is it one of the cache of novels she reportedly
wrote in graduate school? The information from Beacon Press seems deliberately
cagey about this question, and just as Jones’s peak era of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Healing</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> feels a world away from the voices of her early novels, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
creates another cesura in her </span></span><span style="line-height: 115%;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">oeuvre</span></span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, almost seeming to be by a completely
different author. And one not anywhere near her peak powers.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZLugXzGsmgIFr4xGPOSuWz-9-sC_U0Wp9FWh4Ja8qWzgP5dG9ELqkiJROarZ3FXDd9B7BOr99Kdj-idre64RcYJcthw9oBM84DxptMnd3jaqD_iI6IpbkxRCVY0zy7iWKu1VguPt4WXrGT89wDCLuSr3_TtzVOlte32Fb2lSaDfBpUp5Mtx-NTa8P/s380/37ca8b3cc295da4ecfa249af34035397.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="380" data-original-width="300" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhZLugXzGsmgIFr4xGPOSuWz-9-sC_U0Wp9FWh4Ja8qWzgP5dG9ELqkiJROarZ3FXDd9B7BOr99Kdj-idre64RcYJcthw9oBM84DxptMnd3jaqD_iI6IpbkxRCVY0zy7iWKu1VguPt4WXrGT89wDCLuSr3_TtzVOlte32Fb2lSaDfBpUp5Mtx-NTa8P/s320/37ca8b3cc295da4ecfa249af34035397.jpg" width="253" /></span></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-small;">Gayl Jones</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Narrated by a
Seventeenth-Century Brazilian slave named Almeyda, who joins a fugitive slave
state that struggles for autonomous existence, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> certainly fits
in with many of Jones’s recurring themes and methods. There’s the quietly observant
female narrator, the indistinct mother and vivid, magic-wielding grandmother,
the search for a stable sense of belonging and self in a hostile world, the
nightmare of colonialism and its effect on how individuals and groups perceive
themselves, especially in questions of racial quiddity—all these are vintage
Jones territory. But what’s missing is the dazzling Jones voice and the
forward-moving sense of narrative inevitability that holds together the
disparate themes and episodes and keeps the reader enthusiastically swept up in
the momentum. In terms of voice, Jones is barred by her historical subject
matter from using her highly cultivated African-Kentuckian version of English,
which becomes more virtuosic and intoxicating in each of her first four novels,
instead writing in the flattest and most declarative “standard” English.
There’s no slang, no play, and almost no Jones to be heard and felt in these
sentences.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">At her peak, Jones is capable of
pulling off set-pieces and bits worthy of Proust or Hurston or Pynchon and
stacking them one after another so that every part of the novel is the best and
most fun part. </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="line-height: 115%;">Like Henry Fielding, whose outrageous narrator in <i>Tom
Jones</i>’s proto-meta discussions of itself hilariously points out each time he
elides the tedious parts of the story</span>, she seems to have saved up all the juiciest and
most magical morsels of life to put into each scene, whether joyful or tragic, and
left everything else on the cutting-room floor. In </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, however,
Almeyda seems to drift through an eldritch dream that’s full of meaning and
portent for the person experiencing it but a boring drag for the person hearing
or reading about it. And this is a novel about slavery, which is some of the
most inherently interesting subject matter possible. Most of the scenes are
just people coming into rooms, waiting, having some sort of uninspired
interaction, and then leaving. This aspect of the novel serves as a good
argument for it being Jones’s college writing, because she doesn’t seem to have
developed the narrative strategies that made her other novels so seamlessly
engaging and effective.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxQU2kT6e13cgN-TOmX8VjNERtTnjbj4fMh-ZUcwQDFOz7rWih1GagwHTk7__jg5MA6Rb3ZHj-VV6bpCTtbofExz058XU1ZZ0tw0sSpj0WU7EyWCWRtTBLC_DgQwJMlEv-e6K8qFhkJRTLmLQiRdgATrov1PkxV2XJ6ANeyEu0Wl9MQQ6LgdZ1wuTU/s1767/81zOsPi4-JL.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1767" data-original-width="1171" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxQU2kT6e13cgN-TOmX8VjNERtTnjbj4fMh-ZUcwQDFOz7rWih1GagwHTk7__jg5MA6Rb3ZHj-VV6bpCTtbofExz058XU1ZZ0tw0sSpj0WU7EyWCWRtTBLC_DgQwJMlEv-e6K8qFhkJRTLmLQiRdgATrov1PkxV2XJ6ANeyEu0Wl9MQQ6LgdZ1wuTU/s320/81zOsPi4-JL.jpg" width="212" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">One of Jones’s best strategies
for cramming all of her multitudes into novels that are peopled by feasibly limited
characters is to have her narrators quote and ruminate over things they heard
from characters they admire and think of as wiser and more knowledgeable than
themselves, so that there never has to be one character who serves as Jones’s
encyclopedic mouthpiece. In </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Healing</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> the narrator frequently
discusses topics she learned about from her complexly brilliant friend Nadine
(aka Mosquito), and in </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> Nadine is the limited character who
ponders the topics introduced to her by her hyper-curious friends Delgadina and
Ray. It’s a very clever and effective way to keep the novels’ information and
meanings diverse and decentralized, so that the book’s dizzying disquisitions
are never just a lecture straight from Jones. In </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> this device
seems yet to be discovered. The narrator has almost no access to information or
meaning, despite her intimate connection to the leader of Palmares, as well as
her having been taught to read at a young age by a priest with quite
interesting tastes, and this leaves the texture of the historical tapestry that
surrounds Almeyda seem as blank as the walls that contain most of the novel’s scenes.
This missing texture could be construed as Jones’s comment on how little access
women historically have had to the information and powers that dictate their
lives, but if so, she doesn’t compensate for the blankness with much of
anything vivid or compelling.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Jones does allow herself some
literary leeway by having a few characters appear who are clearly walk-ons from
her favorite novels—most notably Don Quixote and Ahab—but there’s little resonance
in these intertextual anachronisms, and no play in them at all, which may be
why there’s so little resonance. Jones doesn’t seem to be having any fun with
the writing of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, leaving the reader just as joylessly unengaged,
which compared to the trajectory of her first four novels makes yet another
argument for this being very early work. Jones’s first two published novels
depict a bleak, humorless world where almost everything’s negative, especially
human connection, but the writing in these novels is joyfully inventive and luscious
and works as a positive creative force. Then in </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Healing</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
the exuberance of the writing explodes into the subject matter to create
uproariously pleasurable worlds of deeply meaningful play. </span></span><span style="text-align: left;">One of the best cantrips in </span><i style="text-align: left;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-align: left;">
occurs at a reading by an African-American woman writer who’s published a
“blues novel” that sounds almost exactly like Jones’s </span><i style="text-align: left;">Corregidora</i><span style="text-align: left;">.
Nadine approaches the author afterward and discusses how she thinks the book’s
monochromatic shades of blue don’t capture a full enough story, and the author
agrees with her and seems to see the chromatic light that led Jones away from </span><i style="text-align: left;">Corregidora</i><span style="text-align: left;">
and </span><i style="text-align: left;">Eva’s Man</i><span style="text-align: left;"> toward the much better book she’s in. This hilariously
meta metanoia in the blues novel’s author, who is clearly Jones, is worthy of
Fielding or Proust, and it seems unlikely that after such a damascene turn away
from the minor key that Jones would return to such muted tones in a later novel.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjSnoNr2dHmiKBXnwguYqKCoVQHJfhbNoUNb1NsaDT5ev32Tj1ISMkURJfzGHk20yR1aKV9cTkljQrA57DUaz2t5Ndi4to1R5MZXDCk2pAgk1z93tkNgfqt1ebo8g_QAxxinvQSJGpBo2U-p7LNUsVw4DswoX46k_KmAu1mOR9qlEX9fA0kmk5ouYt/s1359/336638067_775869580724814_216583286916223442_n.png" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1359" data-original-width="1079" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjSnoNr2dHmiKBXnwguYqKCoVQHJfhbNoUNb1NsaDT5ev32Tj1ISMkURJfzGHk20yR1aKV9cTkljQrA57DUaz2t5Ndi4to1R5MZXDCk2pAgk1z93tkNgfqt1ebo8g_QAxxinvQSJGpBo2U-p7LNUsVw4DswoX46k_KmAu1mOR9qlEX9fA0kmk5ouYt/s320/336638067_775869580724814_216583286916223442_n.png" width="254" /></span></a></div><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Aesthetic bliss may not be the
criterion that works for everyone when judging literature, but </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Mosquito</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
is just about as much fun as it’s possible to have with a book in your hand, while
<i>Palmares </i>simply feels like work, rather than play. Many readers will value the
gravely crucial subject matter of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Palmares</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> and not worry about its
artistic flatness, and for its subject matter alone this novel is worth
reading. Few will </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>want</i></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><i> </i>to read it,
though, and fewer still will want to reread it. </span></span><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Let’s hope that Jones has been working her eremitic
gramarye these past few decades and will soon emerge with another magic masterpiece.</span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: 0.5in;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">—David Wiley</span><o:p></o:p></p><p></p>David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-86812098579815258282021-11-30T23:49:00.005-06:002023-01-30T21:15:11.706-06:00Cynthia Ozick’s Antiquities<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b>A Review of</b></span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b>Cynthia Ozick’s <i>Antiquities</i></b></span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b><i><br /></i></b></span><span style="font-family: times;"><b>Originally published in the</b></span></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b><i><a href="http://raintaxi.com" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Winter 2021</b></span></span></h2><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><b><br /></b></span></div><div><br /></div><div><h3><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i style="font-weight: 400;"><span style="font-family: times;"><b>Antiquities</b></span></i><i><b><br /></b></i><b>Cynthia Ozick</b><b><br /></b><b>Knopf ($21)</b></span></h3></div><div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggPrz1f1nYvUGl_crIjkh-BSKJ5AFSTjTwEIAphlU9KZGoV8M_oX7l0jlsHz1YhBBL_A1ONBANP6dQpu3uMmLhEXjxSxrBbuJlE87u41I8dm2B8wba7G-xaOm1j21QH-0UaerLL1Flc6DNKzhvzTPDWJe1WhX6Bkyero30IYE7ZAw2-abrTW3vgD3H/s1123/o0793112315221997264.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1123" data-original-width="793" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEggPrz1f1nYvUGl_crIjkh-BSKJ5AFSTjTwEIAphlU9KZGoV8M_oX7l0jlsHz1YhBBL_A1ONBANP6dQpu3uMmLhEXjxSxrBbuJlE87u41I8dm2B8wba7G-xaOm1j21QH-0UaerLL1Flc6DNKzhvzTPDWJe1WhX6Bkyero30IYE7ZAw2-abrTW3vgD3H/s320/o0793112315221997264.jpg" width="226" /></a><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Literary wizard
Cynthia Ozick has long been fascinated by idolatry, imposture, and imitation, perhaps
in art even more than in life, and at age ninety-three she’s conjured up yet
another magic ventriloquism act to impersonate and mock and outdo her greatest literary
idols. Studying Henry James in graduate school in the 1950s, she cherished her
master’s Jane-Austenian chess games, but she was also under the spell of
William Gaddis, whose techniques and themes exploded James’s two-dimensional
playing board. Emerging in the postmodern 1960s alongside a tiny palmful of
peers such as Thomas Pynchon and Angela Carter, Ozick created an aesthetic and
moral order for her fiction that was all its own—especially in its subversion
of Matthew Arnold’s notions of Hellenism and Hebraism—and her new novel, <i>Antiquities</i>, takes her already warped
chess game into a whole new dimension.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Set in midcentury-modern
New York (an aesthetic that the narrator decries and the author almost certainly
holds dear), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Antiquities</i> begins as an
octogenarian character’s attempt at writing a brief memoir that’s to be
included in an anthology commemorating the tony boys’ school he’d attended in
the 1880s, and where he’s again become lodged with the few remaining trustees,
who are dying fast. The narrator, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, a wealthy former lawyer and casual
anti-Semite, had been a distant relative of the renowned Egyptologist Flinders
Petrie, and among his most cherished possessions is a cache of supposed
antiquities that his father had brought back from his attempt to join Petrie’s excavations. The memoir strives to unearth the mysteries of the narrator’s relationship
with the novel’s curiously named deuteragonist, Ben-Zion Elafantin, who’d
briefly been his friend at the even curiouserly Hebraic-sounding Temple Academy for
Boys, and to reconcile these mysteries with the relics his father had brought
back from Egypt’s Elephantine island. As his memoir and Ozick move both
backward and forward, the modern world continuously interrupts Lloyd’s
haphazard composition process, with his fellow trustees literally attacking his
typewriter, which is his most tangible link to his beloved former secretary, who
also becomes part of the memoir, which increasingly spirals out of control and
into the most deliriously twisted digressions.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsXoI4ZcI1RottfzBp9_1iKuUK0INYxIUAFWt0-Ais-l0DQYVgFX0z2c9x692_ncJ60FasRqB57x8nuH4DwOwC0w42lthZVWMiBBi0yPihMIQoo3JGWd3aYMsh70ghZfO3meWZRbRetDQuTWoOAbArWHyvdKhV_BlEevn2tl-KXkvjNWIuErYARRCP/s2048/o0793112315221997264.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1697" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsXoI4ZcI1RottfzBp9_1iKuUK0INYxIUAFWt0-Ais-l0DQYVgFX0z2c9x692_ncJ60FasRqB57x8nuH4DwOwC0w42lthZVWMiBBi0yPihMIQoo3JGWd3aYMsh70ghZfO3meWZRbRetDQuTWoOAbArWHyvdKhV_BlEevn2tl-KXkvjNWIuErYARRCP/s320/o0793112315221997264.jpg" width="265" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cynthia Ozick</td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">The wizardry of
Ozick here is in her absolute control of these seemingly random digressions, which
she wields as precisely as a conductor’s baton, and in her loving yet damning
impersonation of her befuddled narrator. Ozick undoubtedly adores much of the
world he inhabits—the midcentury of her own youth, the gilded age of her
early reading, and the Jamesian links of memory threading between the two—but she
also keeps a clear, masterful head for the moral and spiritual valences that
organize and direct her narrative, despite her narrator’s loopy ineptitude. Lloyd’s
voice and mind and memory are so strikingly particular, and his preoccupations
and habits so deeply embedded in how he attempts to conduct his narrative,
that Ozick’s impersonation of him is clearly the result of the most profound
exploration and revision. His longueurs are comically out of touch, but Ozick’s
prose—which is precisely conterminous with her narrator’s—is brilliantly sharp
and relevant and knowing, recalling the Borges story “Pierre Menard, Author of
the Quixote” in how the exact same words can have radically divergent meanings
and power when composed by different people in different times.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Ozick’s attentiveness
to all the other characters, no matter how seemingly minor, also reveals the
depth of her care and patience and empathy in crafting each of their unique haecceities.
Every character in this tiny novel has a backstory, and living emotions and
motivations and complexities, and Ozick never forgets a single one of them, displaying
a sense of canny organization and heartfelt commitment that directly belies her
narrator’s confused lucubrations, which, again, inhabit Ozick’s exact same
words in the exact same order. It’s truly remarkable how fully realized this
novel and its denizens are, and how many varied windows Ozick has created for
us to see and hear them through.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><o:p><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="3728" data-original-width="2522" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRCiorMVeAxlCn9I5LtnpobIJ2gTEZYyZeYJVcNCSN0p4gK11AI7qCJsGDmgXGCwkb7-Y09KvQAl_cFyGwf-cqFWBWu0mvlTRX6IhoAIT3G-RZh3iwwZhCEgSKaRDsnNcxafpUvDA38F0RCADldtgiIGAZRpZT_HDbNtiH_ZInKFIPHpR1iLhbza7m/w270-h400/o0793112315221997264.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="270" /></span></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;">My ancient copy of <i>Levitation</i></span></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In her 1997
masterwork <i>The Puttermesser Papers</i>, a
five-chapter novel that Ozick composed at the pace of a chapter a decade, the
protagonist creates a golem that grows completely out of control and
proportion, so that its appetites devour virtually everything. Always conscious
of the creator/creation aspect of literature, Ozick tempers her narrative
homunculus in <i>Antiquities</i> so that his
clueless divagations remain in perfect counterpoint to his long-absent chess
opponent, Ben-Zion Elafantin, who may not actually exist—or whose proboscidian stature
may in fact exist on a level that relegates the elite Lloyd to irrelevant heathenry. <span style="text-align: left;">Is Petrie the rock that this novel is founded upon, or is he and his kind merely foundering in Egyptian sand? </span>In her brilliant 1979 short story “Levitation” Ozick describes a party in which
all the Jewish guests float up into the air, and perhaps <i>Antiquities</i> plays with this chosen-people leavening too. Is Lloyd
an abomination, or is he the custodian of the true relics of a true history?
And do we need to choose which? Culminating the novel (and perhaps her career)
with an enigmatically open end that can be interpreted differently by different
mindsets, Ozick confronts the reader with the mystery of life in a way that
recalls the most inscrutable of Kafka’s parables. Making everything in her
literary universe a metaphor for writing, Ozick’s last line calls attention to the
gamey play of her novel’s chess pieces, and not in a Jamesian way, but rather
in a Lewis-Carrollingian way. Or, ultimately, in an Ozickian way. Levitating
into the ether as she nears the end of her life, Ozick’s apotheosis elevates her
among the very greatest of literary luminaries.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">—David Wiley</span></p><br /></div>David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-36331446103944866672021-09-01T01:14:00.001-05:002022-10-18T02:32:41.544-05:00Richard Wright’s The Man Who Lived Underground<p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b>A Review of Richard Wright</b>’<b>s</b></span></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><b><i><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;">The Man Who Lived Underground </span></i></b></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b><br /></b><span>Originally published in the</span><span><br /></span></span></h2><h2 style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><i><a href="https://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Fall 2021</span></h2><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><p style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></p><h3 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><b>The Man Who Lived Underground<br /></b></i><b>Richard Wright<br /></b><b>Library of America (22.95)</b></span></h3><div><span style="font-family: times;"><b><br /></b></span></div><span style="text-align: justify;"><div><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: times; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisbZ16v0pfg27ByeKRa8k3Yhy6fTJJnVczjNVCXRd-XZCglNkkXsbBABRbfT1VRCkMs5Fj5IRlcC1Xukwp7tseIb0y5GIg3xt5aGA8sJtAz9n-jlE2avEVcs-tTk6A9m1-GAaZoX9Af5WivuY-LrpiXWK8LyjM8Kxl_34IMs7-svzzyn_6GPQdBf06/s500/51FDs1NUUNL._AC_SY780_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="328" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisbZ16v0pfg27ByeKRa8k3Yhy6fTJJnVczjNVCXRd-XZCglNkkXsbBABRbfT1VRCkMs5Fj5IRlcC1Xukwp7tseIb0y5GIg3xt5aGA8sJtAz9n-jlE2avEVcs-tTk6A9m1-GAaZoX9Af5WivuY-LrpiXWK8LyjM8Kxl_34IMs7-svzzyn_6GPQdBf06/s320/51FDs1NUUNL._AC_SY780_.jpg" width="210" /></a></span></div><div style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">After publishing his 1940 novel <i>Native Son</i>, Richard
Wright became a literary superstar who had the freedom to pursue any inspiration
he chose. Those disparate inspirations included a photo-documentary, an
uncompleted novel about black domestic workers, and a surreal experimental
novel called <i>The Man Who Lived Underground</i>, which was rejected by his publishers
and which has only now appeared in its complete form.</span></div><div style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Exploring the bizarre adventures of
a black man who descends into the sewers to escape the police after he’s wrongly
accused of murder, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Man Who Lived Underground</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> is like nothing else
Wright had written by then, following a dreamlike logic that reads far more
like German Expressionism than like the Urban Realism of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Native Son</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">. Short
excerpts of the novel appeared in 1942, and among its fans was Ralph Ellison,
who ran with many of its concepts and approaches in his 1952 masterpiece </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Invisible
Man</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">. Disappointed by the novel’s rejection, Wright honed it into a much
more effective short story that appeared in a journal in 1944, and then much later
in his posthumous story collection </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Eight Men</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">.</span></span></div><p style="font-family: times;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; font-family: times; font-size: large; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxff158YO6t4Xa8eZokxX6mEh7na2T1KLniUltAnms43FNnaYpdT07wfoZLLyIqXZyWJeBidUwDB4-Rw13VGxpBvebEEtTBgLEpyl14467VJ_z4GoG-xKxYOea_I5juI5rx57Q6vIaedd8mXIVUaD42DWOWq9RklA4w2J8LjRjnNzJ0L7j3h_S30_o/s475/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="286" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxff158YO6t4Xa8eZokxX6mEh7na2T1KLniUltAnms43FNnaYpdT07wfoZLLyIqXZyWJeBidUwDB4-Rw13VGxpBvebEEtTBgLEpyl14467VJ_z4GoG-xKxYOea_I5juI5rx57Q6vIaedd8mXIVUaD42DWOWq9RklA4w2J8LjRjnNzJ0L7j3h_S30_o/w194-h320/1.jpg" width="194" /></a></div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">In addition to the full novel, the
present volume contains the remarkable essay “Memories of my Grandmother,” in
which Wright explicates what he was trying to do in </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Man Who Lived Underground</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,
while also pointing forward to his genre-defining memoir, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Black Boy</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,
which clearly grew out of this underground seam of exploration. Wright’s essay opens
with this astonishing claim:</span></span><p style="font-family: times;"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="font-family: times; margin: 0in 0.5in 0.0001pt;"><span style="font-size: medium;">I have never written anything in my
life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration, or executed any piece of writing
in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that
flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences,
and feelings than <i>The Man Who Lived Underground</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><o:p> </o:p> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">This statement seems undeniably true, but that doesn’t mean
that the novel works as an organic whole or that it accomplishes what Wright
intended.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; font-family: times;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiChSdNQxgu_luZt8sVB5v6WeGlCsTwQhBjt32W1oaT3DM6F7UFh_Prvc3IImyTXRtk3NoFCWqTfzDoROQ9o7ENoTc6BIxemF0zuJYK-m4F1rub19gOk-kC1OrfjIOnH4FEJuOFFDxN9ajo9I3ws7jw8gHCLgFrSK4AYdRZpwZ_IwaDtYLmsz4wx38_/s800/wright3%20(1).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="793" data-original-width="800" height="317" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiChSdNQxgu_luZt8sVB5v6WeGlCsTwQhBjt32W1oaT3DM6F7UFh_Prvc3IImyTXRtk3NoFCWqTfzDoROQ9o7ENoTc6BIxemF0zuJYK-m4F1rub19gOk-kC1OrfjIOnH4FEJuOFFDxN9ajo9I3ws7jw8gHCLgFrSK4AYdRZpwZ_IwaDtYLmsz4wx38_/w320-h317/wright3%20(1).jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Richard Wright</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">The first section
of <i>The Man Who Lived Underground</i> reads like hard-boiled detective pulp, appearing
to the reader to be mostly realistic and believable, with a brutal focus on the
protagonist Fred Daniels’s shocking mistreatment by the police, who extract a
false confession from him. After a weirdly unconvincing series of events, Fred escapes
into the sewers, where he almost immediately attains a detached, transcendent
viewpoint on the world and its woes. Fans of <i>Native Son</i>’s crystalline naturalism
would have been terribly put off to see Wright’s progressions not making
seamless sense—and not because of Fred’s trippy mental evolutions, which are
quite intriguing, but because the novel’s wild arcs don’t encompass a foundation
to support themselves.</span></div><div style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br />Tunnelling
through the sewers, Fred somehow scrapes his way into basement after basement,
observing and judging the world’s unfortunate souls while somehow never being
heard or seen. He witnesses a church choir and pities their obsequious
self-denigrations; he shakes his head at a theater full of moviegoers, who he
feels are just living a ghost-life and laughing at themselves; he easily finds all
the tools and sustenance he needs to survive underground; and he cracks safes
and breaks into jewelry shops to liberate untold riches, which in his newly
alienated state he sees as entirely without intrinsic meaning or value. He
plasters his cave with hundred-dollar bills, and he mashes the jewels into the
ground to look like stars in the firmament, and eventually he begins to feel
that he must reemerge into the world with a message for humanity—and to assume
the mantle of guilt.</span></div><p style="font-family: times;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: large;"></span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; font-family: times;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjohcMkpa8fcQtOs-2s1kHdeICoY1EIJfOVewclx0iShUa2bV95ZEOG1KgvlkdpjiXjmniuBFWHCNKcV37g6cxwvfzpGYrogwpylk5lm14yW-i7oWbc6REy01NOSMJya63PpJeN1WNOO0NFVqVCaEZ0wj_DgiSuPxelQr5d5If46eAsv_LbR__yDNoJ/s556/311901410_634026174859536_3643525318894292994_n.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="552" data-original-width="556" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjohcMkpa8fcQtOs-2s1kHdeICoY1EIJfOVewclx0iShUa2bV95ZEOG1KgvlkdpjiXjmniuBFWHCNKcV37g6cxwvfzpGYrogwpylk5lm14yW-i7oWbc6REy01NOSMJya63PpJeN1WNOO0NFVqVCaEZ0wj_DgiSuPxelQr5d5If46eAsv_LbR__yDNoJ/w200-h199/311901410_634026174859536_3643525318894292994_n.png" width="200" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A drawing by Franz Kafka</span></td></tr></tbody></table><div><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Wright’s
grandson Malcolm Wright contributes an afterword to this volume, making a convincing
argument that the novel is an inverse take on Plato’s cave allegory, but the
most immediate and obvious literary influences at play here are certainly Kafka
and Dostoyevsky. The unjustly accused man (<i>The Trial</i>) digs into the
earth to escape his persecutors (“The Burrow”) and then goes through a series
of inner transformations that work in counterpoint to his physical degeneration
and lead to a bizarrely Christ-like apotheosis (“The Metamorphosis”). In the later
short-story version Wright goes so far as to have Fred navigate his way with
fingers that “toyed in space, like the antennae of an insect.” Likewise, the
hated man who lives beneath the world (<i>Notes from Underground</i>) grows to
accept and cherish his guilt and yearns to pay the consequences (<i>Crime and
Punishment</i>). It’s a startling literary landscape for the author of <i>Native
Son</i> to </span><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">explore, and it would have drastically altered his own landscape—and that of his contemporaries—had he been able to make it work on the scale he envisioned.</span></div><div style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><p style="font-family: times;"></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKcIk1VMnI_TR58dHzBIXzJr0D6MbbvTC3hRbMigp5UIaVFrZbaG3HYpA7RKQYT8C4T0xl8cZpQo45unHpsBrohcg6uaXa3ir6yFn7f2k7ojxbyqFn1pTXFjrmEosJhs-0kpxyFqP6QqM92vd7R_N5Wh8hnrc0EHALmz5yBXiI2NTNcC2BsdEQGCuP/s300/269877799_456169079504877_6568366445296344247_n.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="300" data-original-width="300" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKcIk1VMnI_TR58dHzBIXzJr0D6MbbvTC3hRbMigp5UIaVFrZbaG3HYpA7RKQYT8C4T0xl8cZpQo45unHpsBrohcg6uaXa3ir6yFn7f2k7ojxbyqFn1pTXFjrmEosJhs-0kpxyFqP6QqM92vd7R_N5Wh8hnrc0EHALmz5yBXiI2NTNcC2BsdEQGCuP/s1600/269877799_456169079504877_6568366445296344247_n.png" width="300" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-small;">From the <i>Invisible Man </i>films</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;">Without
Wright’s accompanying essay, many of the novel’s aims fail to land, in part
because the writing is neither realistic enough nor daringly magical enough to
hold it all together. This is terrain that requires an Ellison, who somehow
divined the <i>Invisible Man</i> theme from it and took it to another literary universe.
In the essay Wright discusses the <i>Invisible Man</i> films as a key influence
on creating a character who exists completely apart from humanity and who
observes and judges it in secret. But the word “invisible” appears nowhere in
the novel itself. Perhaps Wright let Ellison read the essay, which has only become
publicly available in this volume, or perhaps Ellison was just a magician.
Either way, <i>The Man Who Lived Underground</i> serves as a fascinating bridge
between drastically different literary sensibilities and has now revised the
trajectory of American Modernism.</span><p style="font-family: times;"></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><o:p><span style="font-size: medium;"> </span></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;">—David Wiley</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><br /></p></div></span><div><p></p></div>David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-35433353617301431752021-07-29T20:27:00.001-05:002023-01-30T21:11:27.160-06:00Ben Hopkins’s Cathedral<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><h1 style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b>A Review of</b></span></h1><h1 style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b><span style="text-align: left;">Ben Hopkins</span><span style="text-align: left;">’</span><span style="text-align: left;">s </span><i style="text-align: left;">Cathedral</i></b></span></h1><h1 style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b><br /></b></span></span></h1><h1 style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b>Originally Published on the Online Version of the</b></span></span></h1><h1 style="line-height: normal; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://raintaxi.com" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Literature</a>, Summer 2021</b></span></span></h1><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"> </span></p><h3><span style="font-family: times; font-size: small;"><i>Cathedral</i><i><b><br /></b></i>Ben Hopkins<b><br /></b>Europa Editions, $26</span></h3><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"> <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2QacjWYP_TvMUuhZAkAF6x_XzA2t53aR7nmIKE7VBCID0N48IwaHBRz4xZwzQZTpyDzrlfRGvBUSInPgZSz3HdM2_tnAymzx8E8qPNgFp6q9ph9OJwhf2JdMjCbqgV1lLwZdG9iFplHb_Hhcq-qdod_fW9ZjbSV2Cvy3sBKkAjINEe_kD2zE3BHf/s2480/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2480" data-original-width="1606" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjO2QacjWYP_TvMUuhZAkAF6x_XzA2t53aR7nmIKE7VBCID0N48IwaHBRz4xZwzQZTpyDzrlfRGvBUSInPgZSz3HdM2_tnAymzx8E8qPNgFp6q9ph9OJwhf2JdMjCbqgV1lLwZdG9iFplHb_Hhcq-qdod_fW9ZjbSV2Cvy3sBKkAjINEe_kD2zE3BHf/s320/1.jpg" width="207" /></a></span></div><p></p><div style="line-height: normal; text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;">In </span><i style="font-family: times;">F for Fake</i><span style="font-family: times;">,
his fraudulent documentary about fraudulence in the art world, Orson Welles
pauses in his descent into imposture to hold aloft Chartres Cathedral as
perhaps the one true thing that our culture has created. It will be our legacy,
he posits, and it will “testify to what we had it in us to accomplish.”
Cannily, Welles fails to mention that the Gothic grandeur of Chartres was also
founded upon an epic fraud, its majestic marshalling of spiritual and artistic
and economic and political forces predicated on the absurd pretense that the
pilgrimage site housed the tunic that Mary wore while birthing Jesus.
Encompassing a labyrinth of these kinds of interconnected dreams and
deceptions, screenwriter and filmmaker Ben Hopkins’s monumental debut
novel, </span><i style="font-family: times;">Cathedral</i><span style="font-family: times;">, constructs an edifice whose design ranges from
the most sublime heights of inspiration to the most degenerate political
depths, with all of them counterbalancing each other and maintaining each
other’s intricate facades.</span></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></span></div><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: times;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Hopkins begins the novel
with a bit of Wellesian legerdemain, enticing the reader into believing that
this will be a kind of pilgrimage into artistic and spiritual fulfillment, with
stock characters to root for and expect to develop, and the great trick is that
these initial cliches are as enjoyable as they are blatantly dubious. There’s
the visionary master-builder who’s visited the newly constructed Gothic
cathedrals of medieval France and who’s been given charge of redesigning the
cathedral of Hagenberg, a burgeoning city on the Rhine, in this soaring new
style. Then there’s his callow disciple, who we expect to grow to
self-realization and mastery of his own over the long course of the
building’s <i>bildung</i>. Then there’s the master-builder’s outrageously
idealized muse, an ethereal magician’s daughter whose beauty and purity stretch
the reader’s credulity and patience. Countering these three, there’s the
Bishop’s treasurer, a brilliantly Machiavellian schemer who holds the purse
strings for the cathedral’s construction and who has no problem manufacturing
heretics to squash in order to plunder their loot. In a traditional novel of
this sort, he would be the dark underside of the matter that the author
portrays as important and true, but in Hopkins’s medieval world of <i>realpolitik</i>,
he and his kind <i>are</i> this novel’s true matter.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ43Fo-dRvo0-bQK2JNbeuXqw3xjRji_ry1TapsQcY5rNFNhYidbbRLkUn0J2co-0mqlq9gSY5ltIPJKcmhtrKwIbLYjawnfqOjuRss8YG04lBq39CA8WiYZhRi8w6ZHf6S-LRUqks3KEWX_kU0lxXyoHzl8dlubrbgFGUjhv0CpVEjxB5tzpgN2tu/s1159/Chartres%20-%20Labyrinth%20with%20candles.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1159" data-original-width="770" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQ43Fo-dRvo0-bQK2JNbeuXqw3xjRji_ry1TapsQcY5rNFNhYidbbRLkUn0J2co-0mqlq9gSY5ltIPJKcmhtrKwIbLYjawnfqOjuRss8YG04lBq39CA8WiYZhRi8w6ZHf6S-LRUqks3KEWX_kU0lxXyoHzl8dlubrbgFGUjhv0CpVEjxB5tzpgN2tu/w213-h320/Chartres%20-%20Labyrinth%20with%20candles.jpg" width="213" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The nave of Chartres Cathedral</span></td></tr></tbody></table></span><span style="font-family: times;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Rapidly subverting the
agony-and-ecstasy cliches of the artistic <i>Bildungsroman</i>, Hopkins
largely discards the idealistic cathedral theme and plunges the reader into the
most brutally pragmatic political machinations, taking as much time and
interest in teasing out the intricacies of the local clergy, nobles, merchants,
and bureaucrats as he does in explicating the vast Papal and Imperial intrigues
that keep the locals in constant adaptation and evolution. A truly Darwinian
novel, <i>Cathedral </i>never remains static as its denizens build
and rebuild the structures of their lives, both in competition and in symbiosis
with each other. Alliances and friendships arise and fall and rise again in new
forms as they balance and rebalance against all the other forces around them,
the characters’ anthill associations scattering and regathering like a sped-up
version of the incessantly redrawn and renegotiated plans for the cathedral,
which despite everything continues its ascent.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span><span style="font-family: times;"><div style="text-align: justify;">Readers looking for medieval
literature’s cathedral-like <i>summa</i> aesthetics—and
ever-ascending spiritual edge-play—may be disappointed by this novel’s
ultimately ghostless machine. A great Gothic cathedral is like the cosmos, with
its every section and subsection forming itself into an ever-fractaling and
ever-ornate atomic density. Visiting the lacy whorls of Strasbourg cathedral is
like walking up to an enormous thumbprint that becomes more astoundingly
elaborate with each step forward, as if you were gradually descending into an
electron microscope. Hopkins’s novel is nothing like this. His prose isn’t at
all lapidary, but instead rapid and vigorous, and you don’t pause on it in rapt
wonder, but rather get swept along by its force. He has a powerful vocabulary,
but his readers won’t get the easter-egg-hunt joy of searching the dictionary
or internet five times a page to discover the names of clothes and carriage
parts and architectural details that they’ll recognize from medieval paintings,
as they do when reading Victor Hugo’s <i>Notre-Dame de Paris</i>. They
also won’t find themselves immersed in a heady web of Scholastic theology, as
in Henry Adams or Jorge Luis Borges or Umberto Eco. Nor will they encounter a
penetrating exploration of the math that consumes some of the book’s characters,
with the “sacred geometry” that undergirds the great Gothic cathedrals going
completely unmentioned. Hopkins’s master is history, not aesthetics or
metaphysics.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span><span style="font-family: times;"><div style="text-align: justify;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHApe2DETkXSoMeoa18Z1BmDZoReGMQG1MCAIOHktxA8E_L9P5TmdgmX-c84jjb-mbMpyNqcEalLN1F4W6Nk9dpzCg-6r8CpOHXrJ-M35QdhY2WXBUD-Zjb7C7vyFGDDX90nK_kC43hXZVPXqlTXXssCN9k23wJfMW-3zEQonZQ-bUTg_N9WdKGYcH/s600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="600" height="192" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhHApe2DETkXSoMeoa18Z1BmDZoReGMQG1MCAIOHktxA8E_L9P5TmdgmX-c84jjb-mbMpyNqcEalLN1F4W6Nk9dpzCg-6r8CpOHXrJ-M35QdhY2WXBUD-Zjb7C7vyFGDDX90nK_kC43hXZVPXqlTXXssCN9k23wJfMW-3zEQonZQ-bUTg_N9WdKGYcH/s320/1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Ben Hopkins</span></td></tr></tbody></table>As a screenwriter and
filmmaker, Hopkins also employs far more filmic allusions than he does literary
ones. He stonefacedly references Monty Python at two very unfunny moments, and
he also makes a few glancing nods toward <i>The Princess Bride</i>, which
was written by another great screenwriter/novelist, without ever alluding to
that novel/film’s origins in Greek prose literature, particularly
Longus’s <i>Daphnis and Chloe</i>. He does seem to echo some of Hugo’s
celebrated “Feast of Fools” scene, but only in subject matter, not in language
or method or aesthetic. Nicknaming his jejune stonecutter “Rettich” and placing
great stress on the association with the word <i>radish</i>, Hopkins
almost certainly invokes the celebrated Chartres scene in <i>F for Fake</i>,
during which Welles mistily refers to the contemporary human as a “poor forked
radish,” an allusion to Thomas Carlyle’s riff on Falstaff’s description of
Robert Shallow in <i>Henry IV, Part 2</i>. It’s quite a thread of
association from film to architecture to literature, and Hopkins dispenses with
that thread on the novel’s first page. Otherwise largely literature free in its
associative language and aesthetic order, this brilliantly imagined, gorgeously
designed, and deeply profound novel is nonetheless a magnificent work of
literature itself. It took Hopkins eight years to construct this extraordinary
novel, and it will likely stand as his lasting legacy.</div></span><span style="font-family: times;"><div style="text-align: justify;"> </div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></span><span style="font-family: times;"><div style="text-align: justify;">—David Wiley</div></span></span><o:p><div style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div></o:p></div><p>
</p><p></p>David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-20141073891946782342019-06-01T00:19:00.001-05:002021-05-12T11:09:57.798-05:00Nella Larsen’s Passing<br />
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<h2 style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">A Review of Nella Larsen’s <i>Passing</i><br /></span></h2>
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<div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div><div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;">With an Examination of the</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Literature of Passing </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Originally published in the</span></div>
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<h2 style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><a href="https://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Spring 2019</span></h2>
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<i><b>Passing</b></i></div>
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<b>Nella Larsen</b></div>
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<b>Restless Books ($19.99)</b><o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F_pa6jp3mbs/Xl87tN5ab5I/AAAAAAAAB50/UNWRjz_QhusN59wnkW4cBzW17Rw8h27vACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/1.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1501" data-original-width="1000" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-F_pa6jp3mbs/Xl87tN5ab5I/AAAAAAAAB50/UNWRjz_QhusN59wnkW4cBzW17Rw8h27vACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/1.jpg" width="213" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In 1922, a year before
publishing his monumentally unclassifiable “holy avalanche of words,” <i>Cane</i>,
Jean Toomer responded to a query by the editors of the literary journal
the <i>Liberator</i> asking him to describe his background and
history, which like his fiction also defied simple classification:</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Racially, I seem to have (who knows for sure) seven blood
mixtures: French, Dutch, Welsh, Negro, German, Jewish, and Indian. Because of
these, my position in America has been a curious one. I have lived equally amid
the two race groups. Now white, now colored. From my own point of view I am
naturally and inevitably an American.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">It’s telling that
Toomer, who had such a broad American mix of bloodlines, would refer to living
amid just </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">two</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;"> race groups, white and “colored,” a brutally
simplistic but also blurry divide that he was to pass back and forth between
again and again. He describes himself in this biographical letter as a
spiritual fusion of the races, but in discussing the literary exploration that
was leading him toward </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">Cane</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;"> he was clear about which
connection most nourished his art:</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Within the last two or three years… my growing need for
artistic expression has pulled me deeper and deeper into the Negro group. … It
has stimulated and fertilized whatever creative talent I may contain within me.</i></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Mxhc82Zurwc/Xl89nniknhI/AAAAAAAAB6A/4emAMVM8jXc-2zoJfpqiT_TNX4jv-dk1ACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/Jean_Toomer.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="450" data-original-width="450" height="200" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Mxhc82Zurwc/Xl89nniknhI/AAAAAAAAB6A/4emAMVM8jXc-2zoJfpqiT_TNX4jv-dk1ACLcBGAsYHQ/s200/Jean_Toomer.jpg" width="200" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Jean Toomer</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Forced to live as a
complex mix in a country that only saw black and white, it’s no surprise that
Toomer’s art leaned toward the demographic and aesthetic that encompassed the
most number of shades and that wasn’t singularly bent on excluding him. In the
early twentieth century a number of novels addressed the subject of African
Americans “passing” for white, and the personal and artistic gravitation that
Toomer describes in his letter mirrors and defines one of the most striking
aspects of this very American mini-genre. “Passing” as a concept derives from
the act of passing from one race (usually black) into another (always white),
so that a mixed-race person “passes” for white. But there’s much more to the
term, both personally and artistically, and the fiction work that has not
surprisingly come to represent this subject matter most to later readers, Nella
Larsen’s succinctly named 1929 novel <i>Passing</i>, traces this arc out
of and then back toward blackness, as do nearly all the other novels dealing
with this subject.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GnDy60s0F9g/Xl89_S8t3_I/AAAAAAAAB6E/1xf3pLYHaf4QfrEAS0GGiTPIgYiOJyfTwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/7b041c456b7cdcc3886daa593d20102c.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="637" data-original-width="500" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GnDy60s0F9g/Xl89_S8t3_I/AAAAAAAAB6E/1xf3pLYHaf4QfrEAS0GGiTPIgYiOJyfTwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/7b041c456b7cdcc3886daa593d20102c.jpg" width="251" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Nella Larsen</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In Larsen’s <i>Passing</i>,
which has been newly republished by Restless Books, one of two light-skinned
childhood friends, Clare, has passed into white society and married a wealthy
white man, and after a chance reunion with Irene, who occasionally passes for
white when going to restaurants and stores, the two adult women rekindle an
uneasy friendship. Despite living a luxurious life as a white woman, Clare is
lonely for the community she grew up with, and she spends more and more time
with Irene and Irene’s husband, Brian, and probably (but not definitively)
begins an affair with Brian. Just as Irene starts to get suspicious and has
fantasies of outing Clare to her shockingly racist husband, John, she and
another clearly black woman run into John in downtown Manhattan, which makes
him realize that Irene is black too, and that by extension his wife Clare may
be as well, which quickly leads to a disastrous denouement.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The timing of this
episode’s unlikely coincidence challenges the novel’s believability, but what’s
fascinating is that along with the theme of characters passing for white and
then yearning to pass back into blackness, this narrative contrivance appears
in all four of the major novels on this subject written by
early-twentieth-century African-American authors. A novel about passing has to have
a scene of exposure, or near exposure, and <i>Passing</i> employs the
device of coincidence to bring about this crucial scene in much the same way
that Jessie Redmon Fauset did in her 1928 novel <i>Plum Bun</i>, which
imported many of the themes and devices of James Weldon Johnson’s 1912
novel <i>The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man</i>, which in turn
derived much of its method from Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1900 novel <i>The
House Behind the Cedars</i>. This is not to dismiss these landmark novels at
all, but rather to examine their artifices seriously, because the study of art
is all about pattern recognition, and it’s fascinating to trace the design of
theme-and-variation though each of these four radically different works.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VY-cw-_0Mbs/Xl8-m7IzJ_I/AAAAAAAAB6Q/noa-vkSVV-UTAlgatYWlmN_VCumUZYXqACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/51gncXz83LL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VY-cw-_0Mbs/Xl8-m7IzJ_I/AAAAAAAAB6Q/noa-vkSVV-UTAlgatYWlmN_VCumUZYXqACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/51gncXz83LL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="213" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In Fauset’s <i>Plum
Bun</i> an African-American family of four has two light-skinned members,
the mother and the protagonist daughter, and two who are much darker, the
father and the other sister, and when the protagonist, Angela, recognizes what
access to the world this gives her, she moves from Philadelphia to New York,
changes her name, and begins her adult life as a white woman. As she explores
both the outer world and her inner self from this new vantage point, however,
she becomes increasingly isolated and yearns to reconnect with her roots. A
coincidence almost exactly like the one in <i>Passing</i>, which was
published a year later and </span><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">which </span><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">was clearly riffing on Fauset’s version, nearly outs
her in downtown Manhattan to her shockingly racist beau, and then another
astonishing coincidence that same day sets in motion the events that lead to
the novel’s final re-shuffling of connections, which while being a bit overly
neatly arranged is nonetheless deeply moving and satisfying. While </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">Passing</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;"> is
a tightly controlled and formally deliberate Jamesian novel of manners, </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">Plum
Bun</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;"> is a luxurious and expansive work, with a luscious prose style and
a narrative voice whose freshness and verve overwhelm all of its shortcomings.
Of these novels on the subject of passing, </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">Blum Bun</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;"> is the
deepest pleasure to read, because Fauset’s voice and mind are the most alive
and modern and generous, seizing all the newness of the literature of the 1920s
and leaving behind the labored weight of the Victorian era, which Larsen
curiously returns to the next year in </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">Passing</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">.</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dW_C4ZRJek8/Xl8_ZLeMkWI/AAAAAAAAB6c/7qT5ey7_-SsiQVQ3e9wmPJ97S06-EALoACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/41CVu5daUML.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="400" data-original-width="256" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-dW_C4ZRJek8/Xl8_ZLeMkWI/AAAAAAAAB6c/7qT5ey7_-SsiQVQ3e9wmPJ97S06-EALoACLcBGAsYHQ/s320/41CVu5daUML.jpg" width="204" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Plum Bun</span></i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">’s immediate (and also somewhat distant) precursor,
Johnson’s <i>The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man</i>, was originally
published in 1912 as an anonymous memoir purporting to be true. Then in 1927,
at the height of what for lack of a better term we call the Harlem Renaissance
(see Langston Hughes’s 1940 memoir <i>The Big Sea</i> for an astute
criticism of this problematic designation), he republished the book as a novel,
and under his own prestigious name, just a year before Fauset published <i>Plum
Bun</i>. Johnson was one of the few polymaths of his era who can legitimately
be compared to the towering Paul Robeson, and this far-ranging novel captures
an extraordinary amount of his vast scope.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Johnson’s unnamed
narrator is the natural son of a southern black mother and a white patrician
father who sends mother and child away to the north when he plans to marry.
Apparently white, the narrator discovers at school that he’s in fact considered
black, and he subsequently learns how to navigate the color line when needed as
he pursues a life as a pianist who can play both concert music and ragtime.
Becoming the personal musician and confidante to an unnamed millionaire, the
two go to Europe, where the narrator has an epiphany and decides that his
calling is to go back to the American south to study black musicology as a
black man and to transform it into a new kind of formal concert language. It’s
this profound calling that most matches Toomer’s description of finding his
artistic nourishment in African-American culture, and in how he recasts it into
complex new voicings, but then as Johnson’s narrator is collecting source material
in the south he witnesses a lynching, which the book describes in excruciating
detail, and as a result he abandons his blackness entirely. He then goes to New
York, eventually becomes a successful businessman, marries a white woman, and
has two children. The two coincidences that warp the thread of this exceptional
novel come when the narrator happens to be seated next to his white father at
an opera in Europe, and again later when with his white fiancée at a New York
museum he runs into a black childhood friend from the south, which leads him to
admit his history. In the end his fiancée accepts him but later dies during
childbirth, and as the narrator looks back on his life he deeply regrets
abandoning his musical mission and the race that fostered it, having exchanged
his birthright, like the Biblical Esau, “for a mess of pottage.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Like biological life,
art replicates itself in fascinatingly mimetic ways, and Chesnutt’s <i>The
House Behind the Cedars</i> seems to serve as all of these later novels’
structural blueprint and precedent, even as each of their styles and voicings
radically diverge. Wildly outdoing all of the later novels’ improbable aspects,
to the point where the pattern of stagy coincidence seems to have become
unshakably embedded within with the theme of black return in novels that take
up this subject, <i>The House Behind the Cedars</i> reads like a
no-holds-barred gothic extravaganza as it builds its outrageously artificial
hall of mirrors around its very real and very grave subject matter.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Kx59KxwJNH0/Xl9AEZkZMiI/AAAAAAAAB6k/XNPZSQwXUigHL7Guz1loXsAB8BFZkgAbwCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/House_Behind_the_Cedars_book_cover.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="837" data-original-width="501" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Kx59KxwJNH0/Xl9AEZkZMiI/AAAAAAAAB6k/XNPZSQwXUigHL7Guz1loXsAB8BFZkgAbwCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/House_Behind_the_Cedars_book_cover.jpg" width="191" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">Born the lefthand son
of a black mother and a rich white father in an obscure town in North Carolina,
the light-skinned John Walden changes his name to John Warwick and leaves for
South Carolina, where he becomes a successful white lawyer. Surreptitiously
returning home ten years later, he induces his sister Rena to leave their
mother alone and join him in South Carolina to help raise his newly motherless
children. After a nine-month interim at finishing school, so that she can
plausibly join her brother in living among the codes of white people, Rena
arrives in John’s South Carolina town just in time to become the belle of a
mock-chivalric jousting tournament, attracting the favor of the knight who
takes all the honors and who in triumph crowns her the Queen of Love and
Beauty. This faux knight, George, happens to be John’s client, and he’s in town
from North Carolina for an extended legal entanglement, and when Rena dreams
that her mother is dying and then receives a letter confirming her mother’s
sickness, she writes George a cryptic letter and rushes home. Left alone for a
while with time on his hands, George decides to go take care of some unfinished
family business in the selfsame North Carolina town where Rena and John come from,
ushering in a dizzying series of coincidences that involve several mislaid
letters, including one that’s blown by a gust of wind into a neighbor’s hands,
and a flurry of other letters that have to wait to be read by someone present
who’s literate. A tragicomedy of errors of course leads to Rena being outed to
George, which leads her to renounce her whiteness and to dedicate her life to
teaching black children in the south’s newly established black post-bellum
schools. But the school where she’s assigned happens to be in the vicinity of
George’s distant hometown, which leads to a labyrinth of even more outrageous
artifice, including a case of Brontëan brain fever that ultimately leads Rena
back to her hometown to die among the only people who really love and
understand her. It’s perfectly outlandish, and a bizarre prelude to Chesnutt’s
gravely harrowing 1901 novel, </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">The Marrow of Tradition</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">, but as
things keep forging forward, the reader eventually realizes that this novel is
a mirrory maze of words and letters, and despite the very real gravity of
what’s at stake—or perhaps </span><i style="font-family: Times, serif;">multiplied</i><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;"> by it—it’s a riot to sit
back and watch Chesnutt’s mad puppet show play out.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Brilliantly shrugging
off all of these thematic and formal skins, it’s naturally the groundbreaking
maverick Toomer who disregarded all precedent as he addressed the subject of
passing in “Bona and Paul,” one of his quasi-novel <i>Cane</i>’s oneirically
interrelated vignettes. Building on the overwhelming influence of Sherwood
Anderson’s 1919 story cycle <i>Winesburg, Ohio</i>, Toomer imports a
disorienting and revitalizing dose of Gertrude Stein and James Joyce into the
conversation, just the way that fellow Anderson acolyte William Faulkner would
do years later, but with a rigorous artistry on Toomer’s part that preempts and
undercuts Faulkner’s first-draft versions of Joycean Modernism. Dreamily and
nightmarishly following a light-skinned college student, Paul, as he and his
Nordic roommate Art go out to a fancy Chicago restaurant with their dates, Bona
and Helen, the episode elliptically weaves Paul in and out of connection with
his companions, who all suspect that Paul isn’t really white. After a series of
contretemps that may or may not actually take place, the group leaves together,
but Paul stops to confront the restaurant’s black doorman, who seems to
understand and judge all of what’s happening. Reluctantly and angrily caught up
by his connection to blackness, Paul loses sight of Bona, and when he goes out
to look for her afterward, she’s gone. It’s an untidy and unresolved ending,
but one that fits both the complexity of the subject matter and the
disorientating technique of the new Modernist aesthetic.</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3IzEEYm2scw/Xl9BcAZH0SI/AAAAAAAAB6w/JSiaNfyQHd04twm9yeydPYgH23IeJFh4QCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/CLI%252BPassing%252BFinal%252B2%252BWEB.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1050" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-3IzEEYm2scw/Xl9BcAZH0SI/AAAAAAAAB6w/JSiaNfyQHd04twm9yeydPYgH23IeJFh4QCLcBGAsYHQ/s320/CLI%252BPassing%252BFinal%252B2%252BWEB.jpg" width="210" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">An illustration from <i>Passing</i><br />
by Maggie Lily</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: "times" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Regarding the new
edition of <i>Passing</i>, Restless Books has commissioned a solidly
useful introduction by novelist and critic Darryl Pinckney, as well as
beautifully surreal illustrations by the artist Maggie Lily of the novel’s
stole-and-cloche-clad flapper characters, but the text unfortunately lacks
explanatory notes, which in the current Penguin edition fill in much of the
book’s missing referents and contexts and assumptions. This is not a novel or a
subject or an era of literature to be taken lightly, and every nuance matters
when unfolding its portrayal of the insane and mutating relativity of our
country’s brutal racism. Looked on from an outside observer, books on the
subject of passing must seem like some kind of bizarre dystopian science
fiction, where pasty white people are considered to be black because they have
a single drop of black blood in them, and where in order to escape the stigma
of blackness they have to live a lie as a white person, which by all objective
measure they actually are, and then despite their pallid hue they end up
finding their native integrity among the black people they’ve tried to leave
behind and don’t </span><span style="font-family: "times" , serif;">at all resemble. It’s absolute lunacy. But that’s life on Earth,
where the madness of reality outstrips the madness of any art we could ever
invent, so that even the theatrical artifices that Larsen and her peers employ
in dealing with this subject read like pale-fire reflections of the wholly
artificial roles that we all walk through every day. Should these novels all
be more realistic? Perhaps. But so should reality.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">—David Wiley</span><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-30453866887397798222018-09-01T14:55:00.001-05:002022-01-31T01:40:08.231-06:00Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><span style="font-family: times;"><br /></span></b></div>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;">A Review of Zora Neale Hurston<span style="text-align: justify;">’s</span></span></b></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;"><i>Barracoon: </i><i>The Story of the</i></span></b></h2>
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<i><b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;">Last “Black Cargo”</span></b></i></h2>
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;"><i><b><br /></b></i><b>Originally published in the</b></span></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;"><i><a href="http://raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>,</span></b></h2><h2 style="text-align: center;"><b><span style="font-family: times; font-size: x-large;">Fall 2018</span></b></h2>
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<h4 style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-family: times;"><i><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Barracoon:<br /></span></b></i><i><b><span style="font-size: medium;">The Story of the Last “Black
Cargo”<br /></span></b></i><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Zora
Neale Hurston<br /></span></b><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Edited
by Deborah G. Plant<br /></span></b><b><span style="font-size: medium;">Amistad
($24.99)</span></b></span></h4>
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
1931, anthropologist and future novelist Zora Neale Hurston attempted to
publish <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Barracoon</i>, her narrative of
the life of Cudjo Lewis (aka Oluale Kossula), the last surviving passenger of
the last slave ship to bring human cargo to America. It was to be her first
book, but it received unanimous rejection because of her use of dialect to
capture Cudjo’s remarkable voice. Hurston’s subsequent fiction and nonfiction
revolutionized the literary use of dialect, however, transforming readers’ and
scholars’ ideas of what kinds of American language could be considered
artistically and intellectually acceptable, and so nearly ninety years later, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Barracoon</i> finally arrives in a landscape
that Hurston herself helped create.</span></div>
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A barracoon is a seaside holding
station for slaves on the coast of Africa and is thus the last transition
between the slaves’ old and new worlds. It’s a curious turning point to use as the title for a book on this subject, but Hurston’s <i>Barracoon</i> is nearly unique among American slave narratives in that
it portrays the worlds before and after capture, told by a native African who wasn’t
born into slavery. The barracoon was Cudjo’s first glimpse of the enormous,
malevolent sea, which in the terrifying account of his Middle Passage strikes
the reader as a kind of Homeric monster, and while most slave narratives can
only portray the dramatic transition from slavery to emancipation, giving the impression
that emancipation equals freedom, Cudjo’s narrative encompasses the arc from
freedom to slavery to a different and compromised kind of freedom, allowing him to
focus at great length on the totality of the world that first created him. Hurston
was initially frustrated by Cudjo’s reticence to answer her questions about the
aspects of his story that she was looking for, and at his insistence on giving
his full family history and painting an expansive picture of his lost world,
but she quickly discovers that his memory of Africa is the goldmine that she
didn’t know she was seeking.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-left: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MnVDyVqm0r0/XXVgBEgieaI/AAAAAAAAB4s/Ouezqj7-Wdox_UIttJXQ9KvSHagbLw-4gCLcBGAs/s1600/1256.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><img border="0" data-original-height="792" data-original-width="441" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MnVDyVqm0r0/XXVgBEgieaI/AAAAAAAAB4s/Ouezqj7-Wdox_UIttJXQ9KvSHagbLw-4gCLcBGAs/s400/1256.jpg" width="222" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;"><span style="font-size: 12.8px;">Cudjo Lewis, photographed</span><br />
<span style="font-size: 12.8px;">by Zora Neale Hurston</span></span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; text-indent: 0.5in;">Letting Cudjo (mostly) speak for himself, Hurston gives free
rein to his astonishing memory and narrative power as he describes an entirely unknown
universe to her. This is the book’s most arresting material, portraying a
paradise lost that’s as complex and problematic as it is beautiful and
fascinating and delightful. It’s uneasy reading to see Cudjo’s idealized society
also include a savagery that led to his capture and sale by a rival tribe to
the American slave-trading savages who dragged him across the sea to hell, but
this ugly larger picture is a necessary part of the book’s enlarged scope,
leading Hurston to some of her most important and disturbing conclusions about
human nature.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; text-indent: 0.5in;">Cudjo’s life in America stretches out much longer, with five
years spent in slavery and more than sixty years spent scraping out an
existence in postbellum Alabama, but he never stops thinking of himself as
African. After emancipation he immediately starts planning to return home, and
when this proves impossible he helps found an enclave of freed Africans called
Africatown, which recreates a mini version of their homeland and buffets them a
bit from the discrimination that they received from white and black Americans
alike. He marries another African, has five children, and over the ensuing
decades he buries them all in the family graveyard that mirrors some of the
African death customs that he’d described to Hurston. Near the end of the book,
when he allows Hurston to photograph him, he puts on his best American suit but
leaves his shoes off, because he wants to be seen and remembered as African.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; text-indent: 0.5in;">This is as heartbreaking a story as could ever be imagined, and
in Hurston’s brilliant mimicking voice it sings as a kind of epic song. Her
prose isn’t yet the silky instrument that it would later become, and she pads
the story a bit with material gleaned from other sources and surreptitiously
puts it into Cudjo’s voice, but Cudjo’s extraordinary mind and personality
burst through the pages as the primary force of his narrative, even as
Hurston’s artistry (and lapses) make themselves palpably apparent. While we
feel Cudjo with the deepest immediacy, readers of Hurston’s later work will
also see that her dense literary sensibility adds layers of reflective color
and shading to how we perceive his story.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W3UIXSipdDU/XXVcJWyOIgI/AAAAAAAAB4g/IkN-oKhvLvkWWMWAytHPGJPt0Runy1vIgCLcBGAs/s1600/zoraneale.jpeg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: times;"><img border="0" data-original-height="853" data-original-width="749" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-W3UIXSipdDU/XXVcJWyOIgI/AAAAAAAAB4g/IkN-oKhvLvkWWMWAytHPGJPt0Runy1vIgCLcBGAs/s320/zoraneale.jpeg" width="280" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: times;">Hurston the enchanter.</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">A writer of the highest sophistication, Hurston has the
ability to tell a story that’s entirely original and moving and “real” while
also weaving itself into a dazzling tapestry of literary allusions and games, as
when in her 1937 masterpiece </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Their Eyes
Were Watching God</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> she has brilliant fun playing with the Bible and Dante
and Cervantes and Proust. Arriving at the end of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Barracoon</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">’s last chapter, entitled “Alone,” Proust’s woundedly nostalgic
ghost seems to whisper through Hurston as the final words of the book leave
Cudjo “full of trembling awe before the altar of the past.” Cudjo strikes the
most resonant and lasting chords in the reader’s mind, but as in </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Don Quixote</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, where we realize that it’s
Quixote who’s the enchanter who has himself and Sancho under a narrative spell,
and that as an enchanter he’s also a reflection of the larger enchanter, Cervantes
himself, Hurston’s readers will see her embarking here on this same kind of
artistic odyssey. Cudjo couldn’t be more real to us, but in this first sally
Hurston the enchanter begins to make her presence nearly almost as real.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: times; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman";">—David
Wiley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-30240041611590517272018-04-18T12:14:00.002-05:002021-05-01T12:22:00.215-05:00Marcel Proust’s Letters to His Neighbor<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">A Review of Marcel Proust’s</span></b></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i>Letters to His Neighbor</i></span></b></h2>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></b><b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Originally published in the</span></b></span></h2>
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<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><i><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/letters-to-his-neighbor/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Spring 2018</span></b></h2>
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<div class="MsoNoSpacing"><b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><i>Letters to His Neighbor</i></span></b></div><div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">By Marcel Proust<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Translated by Lydia Davis<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><b><span style="font-size: medium;">New Directions ($19.95)</span></b><span style="font-size: large;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Marcel Proust, author of the world’s longest and perhaps
greatest novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Search of Lost Time</i>,
was a near-invalid who sequestered himself during most of his novel’s
composition inside a cork-lined, shuttered bedroom, banishing pollen, noise,
sunlight, people, and everything else in the world other than his own voluminous
memories. Stories of his reclusiveness have become so legendary and proverbial that
inside views of his life—such as his housekeeper Céleste Albaret’s profoundly illuminating
memoir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Monsieur Proust</i>—read like gospel
to pilgrims in search of more shards of the true Proust. He didn’t write any
memoirs himself, unless you count his great <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">roman
à clef</i> as a memoir, but his epic correspondence forms a kind of double
mirror to his endlessly refracting novel, and so when any new artifacts
documenting this monster of neurotic hermeticism come to light, it’s like the
discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the caves of Qumran. Who knows how much of
Proust’s correspondence lies unread in private collections, or lost in
someone’s attic, but the latest discovery of twenty-six of his letters to his
upstairs neighbor, written over a decade during the composition of his novel,
will delight any Proustian and will tide the faithful over until new relics
come to light.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;"><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">An American dentist named Charles
Williams lived and worked in the flat just above Proust’s—a nightmare for any
sensitive person, let alone one who only slept during the day—and nearly all of
the letters in this volume are hilariously labyrinthine requests for quiet.
Three are addressed to Dr. Williams himself, while the twenty-three others are addressed
to his wife, Marie, who like Proust also had ongoing health problems and whose
sensitivity and intelligence very slowly made their mark on her complaining
neighbor’s empathy. Some of these letters are simply ingenious in how they wend
their way toward their true purpose—</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">quiet,
please!</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">—but Proust couldn’t help becoming connected to his fellow sufferer
upstairs, and while almost never actually coming into contact with her he nonetheless
gave her much of himself, and he received perhaps just as much in return.
Responding to a letter she wrote him while she was on vacation (and thus not
even around to complain to), he revels in her perceptive descriptions and
reflects his own crepuscular experience right back at her:</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">You, with your pictorial and sunlit
words, have brought color and light into my closed room. Your health has
improved you tell me, and your life become more beautiful. I feel great joy
over this. I cannot say the same for myself. My solitude has become even more
profound, and I know nothing of the sun but what your letter tells me.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Gradually recognizing each other’s finely attuned minds, the
two eventually began exchanging books—always through intermediaries, despite
being a floor apart; in fact, he even sent some of his letters to her via the
mail—and early on he began offering her published samples of his ongoing novel,
despite his qualms about their level of polish and completion. Sending her magazine
excerpts of what eventually became the work’s second and third volumes, he
illuminates his expansive method as he subtly impresses her with why she and
her husband need to give him the quiet that his labors require:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">But will these detached pages give
you an idea of the 2nd volume? And the 2nd volume itself doesn’t mean much;
it’s the 3rd that casts the light and illuminates the plans of the rest. But
when one writes a work in 3 volumes in an age when publishers want only to
publish one at a time, one must resign oneself to not being understood, since
the ring of keys is not in the same part of the building as the locked doors.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">Those Daedalian keys eventually took seven volumes to become
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">almost</i> integrated into the novel’s full
ground plan, Proust’s fully articulated vision halting just short of completion
when he died eight years later, his revisions and expansions having ballooned
the three volumes that he mentions in this 1914 letter into seven nearly
perfect halls of mirrors.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Renowned
Proust translator Lydia Davis reproduces the author’s idiosyncratic usage and orthography
faithfully, mimicking the improvised quality of these dashed-off letters with a
slashing verve, and she includes photographs of many of the letters so that
readers can see their slapdash nature for themselves. The volume’s original
French editors Estelle Gaudry and Jean-Yves Tadié contribute helpful endnotes,
which Davis translates, expands, and emends to great effect, although Davis unfortunately
has her hands tied with Proust-biographer Tadié’s labored foreword.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: medium;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Davis’s
afterword also indulges in a few too many of her own peccadillos, such as way
too much extra-Proustian information about what the bank that occupies Proust’s
former apartment looks like now, which is totally irrelevant to what Proust
experienced himself. The real magic of her afterward comes in its coda, which
tells the story of the grandson of a Norman florist reading extracts from these
letters online and subsequently disclosing Proust’s flower-buying habits and
etiquette with the Williamses and others, noting the thirty-two times that he
visited the shop between 1908 and 1912. Unearthing these intricately revealing
records is the true Proustian pursuit, redeeming Davis’s mini-gospel of its few
apocryphal lapses and elevating this volume’s host of testamentary material to
nearly the level of the letters themselves. A tiny reliquary, this book’s illuminated
codex now serves as a minor pilgrimage site </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">for </span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">all true Proustian communicants.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: medium;">—David Wiley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-13261920908620757442018-03-01T11:07:00.000-06:002019-03-07T14:20:41.758-06:00Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey<b><br /></b>
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><span style="line-height: 107%;"><span style="font-size: x-large;">On First Looking into Wilson’s Homer</span></span></b></h2>
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<h3 style="text-align: center;">
A Review of Emily Wilson<span style="text-align: justify;">’s Translation of Homer<span style="font-size: 18.72px;">’</span>s <i style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0393356256/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=odyssey+wilson&qid=1551633966&s=gateway&sr=8-3" target="_blank">Odyssey</a></i>,</span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<b style="text-align: justify;">Including a Discussion with the Translator</b></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="text-align: justify;"><b>Originally published in the</b></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<b style="text-align: justify;"><i><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Spring 2018</b></h3>
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<i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Odyssey-Homer/dp/0393356256/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=odyssey+wilson&qid=1551633966&s=gateway&sr=8-3" target="_blank">The Odyssey</a><o:p></o:p></b></i></div>
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<b>Homer<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="text-align: justify;">
<b>Translated by Emily Wilson</b></div>
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<b>Norton, $39.95</b></div>
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Book clubs have always had a dubious reputation among elite readers and writers. From <i>soi-disant </i>elitist Jonathan Franzen deriding the Oprah Book Club for picking what he called “schmaltzy, one-dimensional” novels (note that Oprah’s second selection for the club was Toni Morrison’s staggering <i>Song of Solomon</i>), to bona fide elitist Vladimir Nabokov mocking book clubs in the introduction to his second English-language novel, <i>Bend Sinister</i>, serious literary folk have always turned their noses up at the amateur reading public, despite greatly profiting from it. Being almost totally antisocial, my own proclivities have mostly leaned in that direction too, but after moving to the East Coast a few years ago with no job, no contacts, and no plan—and being the virtual definition of the word <i>amateur </i>myself—I cautiously dipped my toe into a few area book clubs as a way of meeting likeminded people, and the results have been illuminating. A few groups were just people who wanted to get out of the house and gossip, with some attendees not even having read the book, while a few other groups treated the books with more seriousness and sophistication, and after some trial and error I eventually discovered a magic cabal of serious readers who were devoted to examining classic literature in profound depth. The first discussion I attended with this group was for Dante’s <i>Inferno</i>, and I was amazed to discover that the group’s facilitator had named her only child Dante. These were my people.</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LFpC8EHQ9Tc/XHwyo50uMjI/AAAAAAAABxk/-qg0F0voMPwVstXJzC7yr7AvzNlmRWpogCLcBGAs/s1600/880px-Cropped_image_of_Homer_from_Raphael%2527s_Parnassus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1309" data-original-width="881" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LFpC8EHQ9Tc/XHwyo50uMjI/AAAAAAAABxk/-qg0F0voMPwVstXJzC7yr7AvzNlmRWpogCLcBGAs/s320/880px-Cropped_image_of_Homer_from_Raphael%2527s_Parnassus.jpg" width="214" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Homer and his homeys on <i>Mount Parnassus</i><br />
(detail), Raphael, 1509–10</td></tr>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; text-indent: 0.5in;">We immediately went on to read the rest of Dante’s <i>Comedy</i>, which I was thrilled to reread along
with such a diverse crew of barkmates, and since then we’ve gone on to discuss a
virtually Dantean panoply of my old favorites: </span><span style="line-height: 107%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Virgil’s <i>Aeneid</i>, Longus’s <i>Daphnis and Chloe</i>, Cervantes’s <i>Don
Quixote</i>, Flaubert’s <i>Madame Bovary</i>,
Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” Hurston’s <i>Their
Eyes Were Watching God</i>, and Nabokov’s <i>Lolita</i>,
among many, many others. We’ve also surged forward into territory that’s been
new to me, finally getting me around to Andrei Bely’s <i>Petersburg</i>, Jean Toomer’s <i>Cane</i>,
Karel Čapek’s <i>War with the Newts</i>,
Adolfo Bioy Casares’s <i>The Invention of
Morel</i>, Jean Genet’s <i>Our Lady of the
Flowers</i>, as well as the aforementioned <i>Bend
Sinister</i>. The general trend these past two years with them has been toward
digging deeper into the foundations, though, as the three-meeting Dante
discussion eventually led us to a two-meeting discussion of the <i>Aeneid</i>, which has now finally led us
back to Homer. We spent two pitched meetings on the <i>Iliad</i>, and then we went straight into the <i>Odyssey</i>, and in an amazing stroke of authorly coincidence, a new version
of the <i>Odyssey</i> came out in the short time
between our two meetings, and it was by a translator who works just blocks from
our meeting-place: University of Pennsylvania Classics professor Emily Wilson.
So we invited her to our second <i>Odyssey</i>
discussion, and she agreed to attend, seemingly descending from the skies as if
she were Athena.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Amg_zdDVWOI/XHwSkK5MCbI/AAAAAAAABw4/91ya08Mbq-UClQKPATxP_x4UsPm-YK22wCEwYBhgL/s1600/emily.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="580" data-original-width="961" height="192" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Amg_zdDVWOI/XHwSkK5MCbI/AAAAAAAABw4/91ya08Mbq-UClQKPATxP_x4UsPm-YK22wCEwYBhgL/s320/emily.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Emily Wilson</td></tr>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Five
years in the making, Wilson’s </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Odyssey</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
stands unique among modern Homer translations—as well as among </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">all</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> English translations of the poem. Written
in unrhymed iambic pentameter, upending the entrenched modern practice of creating
a more freeform Homer, Wilson’s is also the world’s first translation of the </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Odyssey</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> into English by a woman, an
astounding anachronism in a time when there are more women than men in the
Classics field, as well as far more women book-buyers and readers in general, with
women being statistically more educated overall now than men. This </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Odyssey</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> is a much belated achievement,
and in Wilson’s bold hands it slashes through decades and centuries of
overgrown brush to create a dramatically fresh and relevant Homer for the
Trump/#MeToo era. Eschewing the circumlocutions that English translators have
long used to mask much of Homer’s most unsettling elements, Wilson calls a
slave a slave (rather than a “thrall” or a “maid”) and makes no attempt to
soften the poem’s brutal sexism, classism, and imperialism. Our hero marauds
and pillages, happily destroying cities and tearing apart families in his quest
for fame and riches, and even in his own hometown his closest friends are merely
his property.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Wilson
also deliberately leaves in the narrative gaps and inconsistencies that other
translators usually try to minimalize or smooth out. Answering the group’s
questions about some of the poem’s imperfectly organized power relationships,
Wilson stressed how she let the poem stand as close as she could to the original,
letting Homer make his own mistakes:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%;">It’s unclear how much you are supposed to interrogate the central
fantasy of the poem, that Odysseus is going to be always in exactly the same
position in his household, as the father, son, husband, slave-owner, and
dominant member of the community on Ithaca…. In real life, things change;
fathers get older, sons inherit, relationships change. The poem is in some ways
committed to obscuring that fact, but it also reminds us of it. Odysseus, in
his “disguise” as a wrinkled, bereft old beggar, looks the way he might in real
life, if twenty years have passed; yet Athena, the goddess who steers the plot,
insists that his “real” self is immune from time or age. I wanted readers of my
translation to be able to see where the gaps are in the narrative, to notice
the interesting tensions and contradictions.</span></div>
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Of course, Odysseus is also returning to Ithaca to become the things that he never really got to be before departing for the Trojan War twenty years earlier—he’d been a very young man then, with a newborn son and a still-active father, so he’d never really gotten to be a father, patriarch, or king yet—but Wilson allows us to debate these points ourselves by letting all the text’s confusions stand. Why isn’t Odysseus’s father, Laertes, still the king of Ithaca? And how would the line of succession work if Odysseus’s wife Penelope married one of her suitors? Would that man become king, or would Odysseus’s son Telemachus merely pay a dowry and become king himself? We asked Wilson all these questions, and she told us that her translation leaves these points deliberately unresolved because Homer doesn’t clear them up himself and in fact often implies widely contradictory lines of resolution.</div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2mhpgN_qbhA/XHwv9mDLJLI/AAAAAAAABxQ/ZVPyyetY30YmMvD2i2HmQWIYlJ_eextRACLcBGAs/s1600/th.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="623" data-original-width="474" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-2mhpgN_qbhA/XHwv9mDLJLI/AAAAAAAABxQ/ZVPyyetY30YmMvD2i2HmQWIYlJ_eextRACLcBGAs/s320/th.jpg" width="242" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Athena and Owl </i>(detail), Mycenaean</td></tr>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In
contrast to this </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">laissez-faire</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> attitude
toward the original text’s foibles, Wilson necessarily has to make her own active
decisions about how to marshal Homer’s farrago of Greek dialects—which in its Babel
Tower of inherited lines and phrases ranges over hundreds of years and miles of
ancient Greek culture—into a modern English that holds together as a unified and
pleasurable reading experience. Her decision to recast Homer’s dactylic hexameter
into blank verse is a bold and fascinating move, because like her choice to leave
in all the poem’s archaic textual and moral problems, the form of her
translation also stands as both a modern and a fascinatingly old-fashioned
statement. Her cadences read as freshly as the latest Internet gossip, allowing
readers to devour her seamless song in headily intoxicating gulps, but her
deliberate and mesmerizing rhythms constantly remind us that this poem is also pure
artifice, reproducing for modern readers a good portion of the formal artistic experience
that ancient Greek listeners and readers would have had with the original. Discussing
how as a pan-Greek poem Homer’s text would have sounded wholly artificial to
every single person it attempted to encompass within its linguistic sphere,
Wilson described to us how outlandish and archaic this work would have seemed
even the day it was completed:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Imagine that there are
some phrases which are Chaucerian English, and then there’s a little bit of
Brooklyn English, and then there’s a little bit of Cockney in here, and then a little
bit of Irish. Homeric Greek is a mix of different dialects, from different time
periods and different places in the Greek-speaking world. . . People must have
got accustomed to this artificial language, which was how poetry sounded.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Few modern translators
attempt to cast Homer into a line-by-line mirror of the original, instead
letting their verses spill over onto each other and spread out as they endeavor
to capture the full scope of each line’s and book’s meanings. Robert Fagles’s
acclaimed translation exemplifies this freeform/free-verse expansiveness,
creating a prosy but very useful and enjoyable edition that captures much of
Homer’s resonances within its brimming-over verses. Before Wilson’s version,
the only line-by-line translation I’d read was by Richmond Lattimore—another
poet-scholar who worked and taught just a few miles from where I live now—but his
version doesn’t stick to any kind of regular meter. Compared to the
approximately eighteen syllables of Homer’s dactylic hexameter (which includes leeway
for occasional spondaic substitutions), Lattimore usually sticks to a mere
fourteen syllables, and so despite giving himself great freedom with the rhythm,
he necessarily has to condense Homer’s sense into a consistently tighter line each
time. Taking this approach to an even further extreme, Wilson’s iambic
pentameter telescopes this already dense condensation into a pithy ten
syllables per line, making her identical number of lines about 5/7ths the
length of Lattimore’s syllable-count, and about 5/9ths the length of Homer’s, but
as with every other aspect of her translation, Wilson’s meter is a slashing
knife that clears the area of many of her readers’ preconceived notions and
expectations. Not everyone will approve of this highly pointed version of
Homer, but the readers in our group—many of whom had read several other
versions before, including the original Greek—were unanimously enthralled by her
poetry’s intense economy.</span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Bc9pU1oiNRY/XHw068SyRHI/AAAAAAAABxw/5OKxROqkfEA3uCPBfqjPVLHLeilldjwlgCLcBGAs/s1600/39c2218e8da26f1ef5a09db60d740d04.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="873" data-original-width="1600" height="172" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Bc9pU1oiNRY/XHw068SyRHI/AAAAAAAABxw/5OKxROqkfEA3uCPBfqjPVLHLeilldjwlgCLcBGAs/s320/39c2218e8da26f1ef5a09db60d740d04.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Odysseus and the Sirens</i> (detail)<br />
Carthaginian mosaic, 260 CE</td></tr>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Another
big departure in this translation is how Wilson eschews most of Homer’s ubiquitous
metrical repetitions (“rosy-fingered dawn,” “the wine-dark sea,” “wily
Odysseus,” etc.), instead creating a fresh and varied look at each epithet and cliche
each time it comes up, which allows the reader to experience a different shade
of it each time—shades that are all accounted for in the original but that get
lost when a translator picks just one color and sticks with it for the entire
poem. “Everyone knows Homer repeats,” Wilson told us as she explained her
license with Homer’s deep-rooted rhythms:</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Each of the epithets
means multiple different things, and I translate them one way here and a different
way somewhere else…. I think there’s a fake authenticity evoked by translators
who say to themselves, “I’m going to just do it like this, because that’s what
the dictionary says,” or who try to replicate Homeric repetition by a rigid
repetitiveness of their own. You can still tell that it’s a repetitive text in
my translation, and that’s still central to the experience of reading the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Odyssey</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In addition to
their function as conveniently snug metrical plug-ins, Homer’s repetitions
served as a way of remembering, and of stressing to the readers and listeners
of a much less literate epoch than ours <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what
was important to remember</i>. Repetitions in our era often serve a diametrically
different purpose, both artistically and rhetorically, and Wilson made some of
her most compelling points about the thrust of her new translation as she teased
out its aggressive stress on fresh verbal expression: “I want to feel that you
can feel every word,” she told us, in part addressing the poetic demands of her
exceptionally keen and modern ear, which refuses to bore her readers with rote
recitation, but her approach also strives to keep her readers awake and engaged
in how it frames the things that it actually <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">says</i>:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If somebody says for
the gazillionth time, “Crooked Hillary,” you’re not pausing and thinking, “What
exactly does he mean by that? Let me go check some facts.” No, the purpose of repetition
in that instance is, “Let me not check any facts. Let me glaze over.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8H2h_iVAM8/XHxKssUdVpI/AAAAAAAABzc/aCV5xCC6bSwOIcPPHeTl_awGKw-PdZ80ACLcBGAs/s1600/Antin--Judgement%2Bof%2BParis%252C%2B2007.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="824" data-original-width="1600" height="164" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q8H2h_iVAM8/XHxKssUdVpI/AAAAAAAABzc/aCV5xCC6bSwOIcPPHeTl_awGKw-PdZ80ACLcBGAs/s320/Antin--Judgement%2Bof%2BParis%252C%2B2007.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Judgement of Paris (after Rubens)</i>, by Eleanor Antin,<br />
from the <i>Helen’s Odyssey </i>series, 2007</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As the first
woman to translate the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Odyssey</i> into
English, Wilson refuses to glaze over the elements of Odysseus and his world
that earlier translators have either tacitly given a pass to or deliberately
manipulated into self-perpetuating misnomers. Many translators fallaciously have
Helen accuse herself of being a “slut,” while Wilson points out that Homer has
her use the word “Dog-eyed,” a term that’s generally used to describe powerful
female deities, such as the Furies, who “hound” people in the same way that
Helen can. Not everyone will like Wilson’s stress on original expression,
because it doesn’t reproduce Homer’s relentless refrains, a decision that elides
a major part of his songs</span>’ hypnotic songiness—a musical effect that’s now largely
lost anyway, as a modern reading public won’t be hearing the poem performed
with musical accompaniment—but no serious contemporary reader will miss the sedimentary
accretions that centuries of male translators have spuriously built up around
their own biases.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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</div>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">In
forcing us to see and hear Homer afresh, Wilson conversely accentuates many of
Homer’s own biases, and without at all detracting from his artistry’s thrilling
grandeur or making us childishly resent his overwhelming poetic achievement,
she allows her readers to interrogate the text much more clearly, because we can
see and hear it so much more clearly now. Rather than trying to get us to
accept Odysseus’s impious cruelties without question, and rather than assuming
that we’re all signed on for the archaic assumptions of Homer’s warlord state,
Wilson confronts her readers with a world that’s starkly unsavory and unfair:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 8.0pt; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: .5in; margin-top: 0in; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It’s important to make
sure that the poem’s double standards are visible, just as they are in the
original. One set of double standards has to do with poor people, beggars,
outlaws. We think that if they’re elite people or gods in disguise, they’re
great, and we should be super nice to them, and if they’re real beggars… then
we should beat them to a bloody pulp and humiliate them.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qzu_SinEZyU/XHxNISwO9FI/AAAAAAAABzw/L4n3D8DWQ6EVFqY_q-3QHhI3UCfMzJQXQCLcBGAs/s1600/DkUcJJPX0AAQ1LK.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="740" data-original-width="1200" height="197" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Qzu_SinEZyU/XHxNISwO9FI/AAAAAAAABzw/L4n3D8DWQ6EVFqY_q-3QHhI3UCfMzJQXQCLcBGAs/s320/DkUcJJPX0AAQ1LK.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Charybdis</i>, aka <i>Vagina Dentata</i>,<br />
which is also the name of my favorite album<br />
by the Police, <span style="font-size: 12.8px;">artist unknown</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Pointing out how many of the poem’s repeating tropes and images are deeply misogynist, Wilson told us, “I think there is also a focus on ‘How are women’s mouths dangerous?’” Addressing the Sirens, who lure seamen to their death with their voices, and Scylla, who devours passersby with her six heads, and Charybdis, a devouring whirlpool who’s <i>all </i>mouth, Wilson draws attention to the poem’s portrayal of the seductive and destructive power of feminine orifices. She also notes how at the end Telemachus slaughters the slave women who’d ostensibly betrayed their master by sleeping with Penelope’s suitors: He draws a rope around all their necks and hangs them as a group, silencing them in the most immediate and final sense. Nodding to Homer’s grotesquely clever artistry, Wilson also points out how this is part of his way of “tying up” the narrative’s loose ends.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TT0OBQCOjI0/XHxNiWodoPI/AAAAAAAAB0A/Mqiuz-fuGaMwR81AElijE_fCbJ6yv3jrwCLcBGAs/s1600/a10d2c8e462f363013246d4296cab894.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="265" data-original-width="463" height="183" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-TT0OBQCOjI0/XHxNiWodoPI/AAAAAAAAB0A/Mqiuz-fuGaMwR81AElijE_fCbJ6yv3jrwCLcBGAs/s320/a10d2c8e462f363013246d4296cab894.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A poster for a production of<br />
Margaret Atwood’s <i>The Penelopiad</i>, 2012</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Another of Wilson’s Herculean feats
with this new edition is that she wrote all of its nearly one hundred pages of introductory
material, added twenty-five pages of illuminating endnotes, compiled an erudite
and handy glossary of every proper name found in the book, and consulted with a
cartographer who contributed maps of Homer’s fantastical geography, essentially
ushering this entire project into existence under her own aegis. It’s a
staggering accomplishment, and each facet of it is superlative. Few verse translators
should ever be trusted to write their own extra-textual material, because
they’re either not scholarly enough, are <i>too</i>
scholarly, are not good at organizing their ideas, or are simply not good prose
writers. The go-to English-language team for the past few decades has been
Robert Fagles’s lucid verse translations highlighted by Bernard Knox’s luminous
prose, but Wilson’s voice and approach dazzle from page one of her
introduction, making it seem difficult to believe that she could maintain such
a momentum in the actual translation itself, which is in fact even <i>more</i> captivating.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
Wilson’s combination of translation
and extra-textual material opens such a window into the original text and
reveals so many of the nuts and bolts of her creative and intellectual
processes in transforming it into English that it allows even lay readers to
come up with their own alternate solutions. She explains in her notes that
Odysseus’s name derives from the word <i>odussomai</i>,
which means “to be angry at [somebody]” or “to hate,” so why not refer to him
as “odious” one of the four times that she notes Homer punning on his name?
Likewise, when Odysseus is trying to pull himself out of the sea and onto the
beach at Phaeacia, a wave washes over him and pulls him back, and Wilson notes that
the verb for “covered” is <i>kalypsen</i>, a
pun on Calypso, whom Odysseus has just escaped. Wilson translates the line as “A
mighty wave rolled over him again,” but why not use the word “eclipsed,” to pun
on Calypso’s name in English? As with all of the large-scale aspects of this
edition of the <i>Odyssey</i>, not everyone
will approve of every single one of Wilson’s word choices, but such is her
illuminating power that she allows even us amateurs to see what she did and
why, and to feel such a rich impression of what Homer intended us to feel.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-usQ6mZc5rTM/XHw6F7SUfEI/AAAAAAAAByY/tFfTcSlgtdkjxwyp7BT4RAJX7-yQa1OdQCLcBGAs/s1600/odysseus-and-calypso-1943_max-beckmann.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1191" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-usQ6mZc5rTM/XHw6F7SUfEI/AAAAAAAAByY/tFfTcSlgtdkjxwyp7BT4RAJX7-yQa1OdQCLcBGAs/s320/odysseus-and-calypso-1943_max-beckmann.jpg" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Odysseus and Calypso, </i>Max Beckmann, 1943</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Because
no translation could ever encompass all the contents and valences and effects
of Homer’s vast and vastly alien poetic universe, there could never be a
translation that could mirror all of his songs’ realms of gold, or that could fully
satisfy every individual reader or scholar, or that could be in any way definitive
or lasting, because translations are entirely ephemeral, as all things are, but
Wilson has captured so much of him and us in her edition that it will likely
make her the new go-to Homer translator of our time as she eclipses all of her gasping
predecessors in her wavely surge. Both a Hercules and an Athena, Wilson left
our book club overwhelmed and enlightened and eager for more. Feeling our
enthusiasm—a word that in the original Greek means “possessed or inspired by a
god”—she teased us at the end of the meeting by confirming that she’s now
diving into the </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Iliad</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> to complete the
full Homeric picture. All we can say is, “Please come back and sing us another one.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><o:p><br /></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 107%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">—David Wiley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-8924362437948427032017-09-01T10:20:00.000-05:002018-09-03T10:48:05.044-05:00Sholeh Wolpé’s translation of Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s The Conference of the Birds<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">A Review of</span></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">Sholeh Wolpé’s Translation of</span></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;"><br /></span></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-large;">Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conference-Birds-Attar-dp-0393292185/dp/0393292185/ref=mt_hardcover?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1535986682" target="_blank">The Conference of the Birds</a></i></span></h2>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><i><br /></i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><br /></b></span></div>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b>Originally published in the</b></span></h3>
<h3 style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><br /></b></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><b><i><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Fall 2017</b></span></h3>
<b><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<i><b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conference-Birds-Attar-dp-0393355543/dp/0393355543/ref=mt_paperback?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1535986682" target="_blank">The Conference of the Birds</a><o:p></o:p></b></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Farīd ud-Dīn Attār<o:p></o:p></b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>Translated by
Sholeh Wolpé</b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<b>W.W. Norton &
Company, $25.95</b></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KAN7poJVVyk/W41MsVRaLBI/AAAAAAAABvQ/v6E4H5_q_H8pCuWQLCG9piH2ionI14D4ACLcBGAs/s1600/9780393292183-uk.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="500" data-original-width="331" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KAN7poJVVyk/W41MsVRaLBI/AAAAAAAABvQ/v6E4H5_q_H8pCuWQLCG9piH2ionI14D4ACLcBGAs/s320/9780393292183-uk.jpg" width="210" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The Persian poet Farīd ud-Dīn Attār’s twelfth-century Sufi epic
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Conference of the Birds</i> stands
alongside Dante’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Comedy</i> and John
Bunyan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Pilgrim’s Progress</i> as
one of the great creative works of spiritual self-discovery. Straddling a place
somewhere between Dante’s high fantasy and Bunyan’s naked allegory, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Conference of the Birds</i> is also one
of the most ingeniously conceived and plotted narratives in all of world
literature, the denouement of its quest as astoundingly transformative as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oedipus the King</i>, but without the
horrific eye-gouging. Exactly the opposite, in fact: Like Dante’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Comedy</i> (which had the working title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vision</i>), Attār’s poem leads from near blindness
to all-encompassing sight, its self-revelation a wholly moving and satisfying transfiguration.
The poem has only been translated into English a few times in the past half
century, with wildly differing results, and the Iranian-American poet Sholeh Wolpé’s
new translation now brings it for the first time into the third millennium.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It’s
impossible to discuss <i>The Conference of
the Birds</i> without spoiling its surprise ending, which is by far the poem’s main
feature and selling point. In brief, a conference of the world’s birds meets to
decide upon who should be their king, and their avian adviser the Hoopoe tells
them of the Simorgh, a legendary bird whose name means “thirty birds.” The
Simorgh was first spotted soaring over China, where a single one of its
feathers fell to earth and “triggered a titanic tumult in every land.” A single
drawing of the feather that was mounted in China’s national art gallery subsequently
became the wellspring of all wisdom, and also of all the world’s confusion:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Had the image
of that feather not been recorded,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">all of the
world’s agitation would not have occurred.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">All of science
and art is but the impression<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin-left: 1.0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">of that single
feather.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vOib6YgUFuY/W41NwIeX3yI/AAAAAAAABvY/UBI3kH36M40vh9fVnLb0bokPRnVWVarJgCLcBGAs/s1600/simorgh.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="642" data-original-width="880" height="232" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vOib6YgUFuY/W41NwIeX3yI/AAAAAAAABvY/UBI3kH36M40vh9fVnLb0bokPRnVWVarJgCLcBGAs/s320/simorgh.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Negar Gari (miniature painting) of the Simorgh<br />
by contemporary artist <a href="http://www.nadiaartgallery.com/about" target="_blank">Nadia Ostovar</a>.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Because nobody can comprehend even the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">drawing</i>’s attributes—let alone the feather itself—the Hoopoe urges
the birds to seek the Simorgh themselves on the distant Mount Qaf, an emerald
crag that surround the world and is the place where the sun both rises and
sets. The birds all offer up excuses and objections, and after a lengthy
harangue from the Hoopoe instructing them on the Sufi path of self-abnegation,
the Wayfarers set out to traverse the seven valleys that purify them and ready
them to meet their Beloved. Each valley strips away an impeding aspect of their
ego, purging the birds of their worldly attachments and radically thinning out
the wayfaring flock at each step. Finally, of the initial group of 100,000 only
a remaining core of thirty purified birds reaches Mount Qaf to discover that
they, the thirty birds, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> the
Simorgh.</span></div>
</div>
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<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Like King Oedipus,
they were the very one that they’d been seeking, but like Dorothy in Oz, they first
needed to make the journey toward the emerald horizon in order to discover this
fact. It’s not conceivable that Dante could have read this Persian poem, but its
similarities to his <i>Comedy</i> are
striking, and since much of the thinking of Europe’s high Middle Ages derived
from Arabic commentary upon Aristotle and other classics, perhaps the two poems
evolved from similar influences. The most startling similarity is how, like Attār’s
seven valleys, Dante’s Purgatory cleanses the pilgrim in seven distinct steps
of each of the seven deadly sins, leaving him immaculate and ready for
the stars. As a crowning pinnacle, and as an encircling frame, Mount Qaf also
fascinatingly prefigures both the peak of Mount Purgatory and the <i>Paradiso</i>’s heavenly Empyrean, which
exists outside of space and time and is at once the epicenter and the universe’s
encompassing outer limit.</span></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HohPTc1lWnY/W41PcW5jhOI/AAAAAAAABvk/ticuQkHijH85E7REJ0Xfx64U1VsTrfMswCLcBGAs/s1600/ku%25C5%259Flar_meclisi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="340" data-original-width="750" height="144" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-HohPTc1lWnY/W41PcW5jhOI/AAAAAAAABvk/ticuQkHijH85E7REJ0Xfx64U1VsTrfMswCLcBGAs/s320/ku%25C5%259Flar_meclisi.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">From
Peter Sis’s 2011 illustrated version</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: 9.5pt; line-height: 107%;">of <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conference-Birds-Peter-Sis/dp/0143124242/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1535987618&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Conference+of+the+Birds+peter+sis" target="_blank">The Conference of the Birds</a></i></span><o:p></o:p></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Despite Attār’s brilliantly inspired concept for this poem, its composition and execution unfortunately fall far short of its Florentine counterpart. Attār shows remarkable resourcefulness in his parabolic approaches to the poem’s themes and concepts, and his tone and mindset are also much more sympathetic and welcoming than Dante’s harsh obsession with rules, but Attār lacks a dramatic and descriptive and organizational power that would continuously thrust the enthralled reader toward the poem’s astonishing end. The first two hundred pages (in Wolpé’s translation) are all preamble, with the Hoopoe first countering the birds’ complaints and objections and then answering their questions about the nature of their Beloved Simorgh. Then the seventy-or-so pages that address the seven purifying valleys of their journey are also all prospective preamble, describing what they’ll be <i>like </i>rather than actually describing their advent. Then the birds’ journey itself only fills a page and a half, followed by ten precious pages describing their transcendent transformation. These few dozen mind-bending lines make the entire poem, though. Attār then ends with a fascinating exploration of his own ego, vacillating between shocking artistic braggadocio and profoundly humble self-effacement, a meditation that revealingly illustrates the paradox of the ambitious sage who preaches humility. It’s like that old <i>Onion </i>article about the cocky yogi who declares, “<a href="https://www.theonion.com/monk-gloats-over-yoga-championship-1819563855" target="_blank">I am the serenest!</a>”</span></div>
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<a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j0qbL74tSyU/W41RNOpi_UI/AAAAAAAABv8/M7onU45Lgx4YgbHy5Qa4NKdLOcFxRjnQQCLcBGAs/s1600/51vjoBUl-EL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="333" height="400" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j0qbL74tSyU/W41RNOpi_UI/AAAAAAAABv8/M7onU45Lgx4YgbHy5Qa4NKdLOcFxRjnQQCLcBGAs/s400/51vjoBUl-EL._SX331_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="266" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Compared to the two most readily
available English translations of <i>The
Conference of the Birds</i>, Wolpé’s
version alights somewhere between Dick Davis & Afkham Darbandi’s 1984
Penguin edition and Peter Avery’s more scholarly 1998 version. Davis &
Darbandi’s translation mimics Attār’s rhymed couplets with English rhymed couplets, to distractingly
sing-song effect, and it also unfortunately elides Attār’s self-examining/self-praising epilogue.
The more meticulous Avery includes the entire poem and thankfully eschews rhyme
while sticking to a strictly lined verse translation, and he also provides extraordinarily
helpful and thorough notes. Wolpé
varies her translation’s format between verse for the narrative and prose for
the Hoopoe’s parables, breaking each section up in a way that’s helpful for uninitiated
readers but not exactly faithful to the original. She also elides Attār’s opening invocation to Allah,
which Avery includes to gorgeous effect. In all, Wolpé has crafted a fine reading
experience with her new translation, breaking up some of the monotony of the
poem’s first three quarters with format shifts and chapter breaks and rubric
descriptions that keep the reader turning the pages. Her version of <i>The Conference of the Birds</i> may not be absolutely
true to the poem’s totality, but it serves as an exceptional initiation for
modern lay readers into the Path of the Wayfarer.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">—David
Wiley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-53614776300881930472017-03-01T14:28:00.000-06:002018-03-01T14:29:56.292-06:00Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b>A Review of</b><b><br /></b><b><br /></b></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Company-Paris-History-Heart/dp/B01EL38QUW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519934304&sr=8-1&keywords=Shakespeare+and+Company%2C+Paris%3A++A+History+of+the+Rag+%26+Bone+Shop+of+the+Heart" target="_blank">Shakespeare and Company, Paris:</a></b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Company-Paris-History-Heart/dp/B01EL38QUW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519934304&sr=8-1&keywords=Shakespeare+and+Company%2C+Paris%3A++A+History+of+the+Rag+%26+Bone+Shop+of+the+Heart" target="_blank"><b><br /></b></a><b><br /></b></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Company-Paris-History-Heart/dp/B01EL38QUW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519934304&sr=8-1&keywords=Shakespeare+and+Company%2C+Paris%3A++A+History+of+the+Rag+%26+Bone+Shop+of+the+Heart" target="_blank">A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart</a></b></h2>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Originally published in the</b></div>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a>, Spring 2017</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Company-Paris-History-Heart/dp/B01EL38QUW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519934304&sr=8-1&keywords=Shakespeare+and+Company%2C+Paris%3A++A+History+of+the+Rag+%26+Bone+Shop+of+the+Heart" target="_blank">Shakespeare and Company, Paris:</a></i></b><br />
<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Shakespeare-Company-Paris-History-Heart/dp/B01EL38QUW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1519934304&sr=8-1&keywords=Shakespeare+and+Company%2C+Paris%3A++A+History+of+the+Rag+%26+Bone+Shop+of+the+Heart" target="_blank">A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart</a></i></b><br />
<b>Edited by Krista Halverson</b><br />
<b>Shakespeare and Company Paris, $34.95</b><br />
<div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 200%;"></span></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VjhQLry_yyQ/WphXVTMSOrI/AAAAAAAABsE/BwDHd97ajeAxhoYOZpa0R1A6WiVxhRpjACEwYBhgL/s1600/51K0ZOB59wL._SX330_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="332" height="400" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VjhQLry_yyQ/WphXVTMSOrI/AAAAAAAABsE/BwDHd97ajeAxhoYOZpa0R1A6WiVxhRpjACEwYBhgL/s400/51K0ZOB59wL._SX330_BO1%252C204%252C203%252C200_.jpg" width="265" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="line-height: 200%;">Any
young writer who’s passed through Paris at any time over the past six decades
and didn’t stay at least a few nights at the English-language bookstore
Shakespeare and Company has simply not done Paris correctly. Founded in 1951 by
American expat George Whitman and evolving through a series of names and
incarnations until eventually being rechristened after the bookstore that first
published James Joyce’s <i>Ulysses </i>in
1922, Shakespeare and Company has housed more than thirty thousand writers and
wannabe writers as they explored the City of Lights at invaluable leisure, as
well as in considerable squalor. In exchange for free lodging in the upstairs
library’s makeshift bunks—or, in the high season, on the floor of the store
itself—George only asked for an hour or two of volunteer work per day, a
two-page autobiography for inclusion in </span>his
vast files, and a commitment to reading one book for each night spent in his
sanctuary. Most Shakespeareans stayed for two or three nights, but many stayed
for weeks or months, and a few inmates remained in some guise or other for
years. George offered these accommodations as a form of forward payment for the
hospitality that he’d received in his early years of tramping all over globe,
and with his Left Bank bookstore’s Seine-side view of Notre-Dame cathedral he
gave more than half a century of writers an inestimable gift of time and space.
Virtually every one of his guests has written about the store in some form, and
now that George has passed away and the store has been taken over by his daughter,
Sylvia (who was named after the founder of the original Shakespeare and
Company, Sylvia Beach), an official history has finally appeared: <i>Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of
the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart</i>.</span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WcEMq9KdSTc/WphZdpOe2RI/AAAAAAAABsM/icd_74j1O38_11OhmWMU0oBboBkGB15jQCLcBGAs/s1600/d88e977640f6f2949a0ac725b37660fdee15a024.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="475" data-original-width="286" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WcEMq9KdSTc/WphZdpOe2RI/AAAAAAAABsM/icd_74j1O38_11OhmWMU0oBboBkGB15jQCLcBGAs/s400/d88e977640f6f2949a0ac725b37660fdee15a024.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A Young George Whitman</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Edited by Shakespearean Krista Halverson,
this multifaceted and multi-genre history collects nearly a century of material
about George and his bookstore, including an account of Beach’s original
Shakespeare and Company, a selection of George’s early travel journals, clips
of newspaper and magazine articles about the man and his freeform Paris utopia,
narratives by scores of store denizens—including an introduction by Jeanette
Winterson—several exemplary (and often bizarre) volunteer bios, poems by some
of the more well-known store associates, excerpts from an unsurprisingly
diverse number of authors mentioning George and his store, and decades of
evocative and beautifully laid-out photographs. Threading it all together,
Halverson’s exceptionally well-researched and deftly crafted narrative paints a
portrait not just of George and his store, but of a city and a country and a
century, in rich and informed perspective. Many of the writers and publications
associated with the store over the decades have been notoriously shoddy, and
Halverson manages to capture the slapdash flavor of the place and its people
while transcending the first-draft quality of many of its past exemplars.
Perhaps a large part of this book’s gleaming polish can be attributed to the
influence of George’s daughter, Sylvia, who inherited the bookstore in 2011
when George passed away at the age of ninety-eight, and who brought it into the
twenty-first century while somehow managing to retain much of its original
bohemian integrity. Straddling several overlapping and contrasting worlds, this
book captures the madness and squalor of the place while being in no way
squalid itself, which is a seriously impressive feat.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Qpr6WfDaQ_M/WpheTEfaKBI/AAAAAAAABss/xvrhuXUO4oIjSc0ghfIFeMw1Hd8MOVhjgCLcBGAs/s1600/bcd1f175fe21b4593e1fcc205ae55bb1f953081b.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="411" data-original-width="475" height="276" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Qpr6WfDaQ_M/WpheTEfaKBI/AAAAAAAABss/xvrhuXUO4oIjSc0ghfIFeMw1Hd8MOVhjgCLcBGAs/s320/bcd1f175fe21b4593e1fcc205ae55bb1f953081b.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sylvia Whitman, her partner David Delannet,<br />and editor Krista Halvorson</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The most valuable
part of this book for people who knew George is the selection of his early
travel journals, because it captures his mind and voice in a way that was
almost totally inaccessible to even most of his best friends. As the book’s
narrative mentions, George was not at all a conversationalist, and his
essentially solitary personality often seemed miles away from the store, even
as he stormed through its center. In fact, many Shakespeareans doubted that
this mad King Lear even knew anything about literature, often judging him by
the sub-literate Beat and wanna-Beat writers who abused his hospitality, and
it’s enlightening to see how extraordinarily well read and sophisticated and
intellectually resourceful he was—as well as how good a writer he was, his
early voice very quickly maturing in the most curious directions. If this book
serves its central character as well as he deserves, it will spawn a fuller
collection of his journals, as well as an in-depth biography. These pages are a
revelation, but they also seem like a preface to deeper volumes, because it
would be a tragedy to let this fascinating man fade away into mere cameo
appearances in books by the writers he hosted and inspired.</span></span></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="line-height: 200%;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span></span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nRiuOGrBmkY/WphfCHQScQI/AAAAAAAABs0/u34eC9PTBpQJI_A1Fa5Llxin5SKEIHbowCLcBGAs/s1600/whitman.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="440" data-original-width="579" height="241" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nRiuOGrBmkY/WphfCHQScQI/AAAAAAAABs0/u34eC9PTBpQJI_A1Fa5Llxin5SKEIHbowCLcBGAs/s320/whitman.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Sylvia and George Whitman</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">That’s
not to say that this great man was also a really great guy. Halverson’s
narrative dances around his personality by referring to him as “irascible” and
“cantankerous” while illustrating with kid gloves a few slight shades of how
abusive he could be. For a more gloves-off portrait (that’s still entirely
loving and grateful), see Jeremy Mercer’s 2005 memoir <i>Time Was Soft There</i>. Clearly in the employ of Sylvia Whitman, who has
a deeply moving last word here in a heartrending afterword that more than makes
up for the book’s gentle circumlocutions, Halverson has her hands tied in what
she can convey in this history, but despite what got left on the editing-room
floor (or what was perhaps hidden from her), </span><span style="font-family: Times, "Times New Roman", serif;">Halverson </span><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">mirrors George’s complex
sophistication in how she juggles so much competing information and influence
to create a document that feels both so satisfyingly full and so tantalizingly
suggestive of what’s missing. Halverson is so adroit an editor and writer that for
readers who don’t know the bookstore’s ins and outs she only leaves one gaping
lacuna in the book’s surface: the relationship between George and his
daughter’s mother, who’s never named or described or even alluded to in this
book, even when narrating Sylvia’s unconventional upbringing. Like an
Old-Testament patriarch, George was nearly seventy when Sylvia was born, but
the girl’s mother is completely and conspicuously elided from these pages.
Nearly perfectly balancing her dual duties as hired editor and truth-telling
chronicler—and outshining any quibbling critique of her herculean efforts—Halverson
satisfies insider and outsider alike with this book, creating a work that
serves as a brilliant standalone history while simultaneously inspiring untold
future volumes. With so many thousands of writers in George Whitman’s prodigious
debt, surely this is not the end of his story.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<o:p><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">—David Wiley<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-11720344474661905202017-01-22T01:16:00.000-06:002017-12-01T01:01:50.781-06:00Jim Walsh’s Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b>A Review of Jim Walsh’s</b></h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Experience-Following-Prince-90s/dp/1517902584/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485068796&sr=8-1&keywords=Gold+Experience%3A+Following+Prince+in+the+%E2%80%9990s" target="_blank"><b><i>Gold Experience: </i></b><b><i>Following Prince in the ’90s</i></b></a><b><br /></b><b><br /></b><b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b></h2>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b><b>Originally published in the <i><a href="http://www.startribune.com/review-gold-experience-following-prince-in-the-90s-by-jim-walsh/411259075/" target="_blank">Minneapolis StarTribune</a></i></b><b><br /></b></h4>
<div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<h4 style="text-align: center;">
<b>on January 22nd, 2017</b></h4>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Experience-Following-Prince-90s/dp/1517902584/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485068796&sr=8-1&keywords=Gold+Experience%3A+Following+Prince+in+the+%E2%80%9990s" target="_blank">Gold Experience:</a></i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Gold-Experience-Following-Prince-90s/dp/1517902584/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485068796&sr=8-1&keywords=Gold+Experience%3A+Following+Prince+in+the+%E2%80%9990s" target="_blank">Following Prince in the ’90s</a></i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>By Jim Walsh</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b>University of Minnesota Press, 200 pages, $16.95</b></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
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Minneapolis native Prince was perhaps the last American pop
musician who could legitimately be compared to such prime movers as Elvis
Presley or James Brown or Jimi Hendrix. Arriving almost fully formed as a
teenage recording artist in the late 1970s, he drew upon a particularly vibrant
circle of musical scenes, absorbing the exuberance of disco, the edginess of
punk rock and new wave, the fervor of Michael Jackson, and the pyrotechnic
thrills of Van Halen and heavy metal, transforming it all into a body of work
that was as accomplished as it was ambitious. He flashed through the 1980s in a
delirious purple dream, besting himself so often and so brilliantly that he
quickly became his only competition, thrusting himself into the 1990s as
virtually the only musician left standing, which is the position Jim Walsh’s
new book <i>Gold Experience: Following Prince in the ’90s</i> finds him in.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a class="image" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Prince_logo.svg" style="background: none rgb(255, 255, 255); color: #0b0080; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none;"><img alt="Prince logo.svg" data-file-height="153" data-file-width="130" height="20" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Prince_logo.svg/17px-Prince_logo.svg.png" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Prince_logo.svg/25px-Prince_logo.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Prince_logo.svg/34px-Prince_logo.svg.png 2x" style="border: none; margin: 0px; vertical-align: middle;" width="17" /></a></td></tr>
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Walsh covered Prince for the St. Paul <i>Pioneer Press </i>between
1994 and 2002, and this book collects all of his articles about the little
purple guy as he attempts to continue surging forward. Adding very few
editorial comments to this collection of clips—and presumably making no
revisions, capturing both writer and subject, who were the same age, in
journalistic amber—Walsh eschews hindsight perspective and delivers the reader
right into the drama of each moment, making it possible to experience Prince’s development
during these years with a sense of urgent suspense. His maniacal energy and
challenging diversity suddenly beginning to lose traction in a cultural landscape
that would rather be sedated by Seattle’s stultifying borecore or L.A.’s mellow
stoner rap, Prince struggled to maintain purpose and relevance in the 1990s,
and Walsh documents his wavering trajectory in observant and sometimes painful
detail. At the book’s outset Prince had recently changed his name to an
unpronounceable symbol, and it’s telling that for almost the whole era that
this book documents Walsh refers to him as “the former Prince.” Nearly every
new step seems to herald a return to Prince’s golden age, with Walsh cheering
him on (and occasionally lecturing him), but as the decade slacks toward
millennium it gradually becomes clear that Prince won’t be reinstating his
purple reign in time to celebrate 1999.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jim Walsh</td></tr>
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Following Prince as he tries to recapture his astonishing
prime, Walsh’s <i>Gold Experience</i> is in fact a chronicle of the artist’s silver
age, and as such it serves more as a record of the journalist’s emotional journey
than as a vital document of a crucial time. With his hero going astray again and
again, Walsh struggles with acceptance as he’s forced to compare this
fluctuating luminary to the dimmest bulbs of the era. It’s astonishing to see
Walsh refer to the monochromatic Beck as “state of the art” in comparison to
anything that Prince could do, but that’s just how far pop musicianship had
descended into dreary incompetence, leaving little room for a true polymath to shine.
Vividly capturing the hope and heartbreak of this waning musical epoch, Walsh’s
<i>Gold Experience</i> paints a poignant portrait of the artist formerly known as
Prince.<o:p></o:p></div>
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—David Wiley<o:p></o:p></div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-412097266402666252016-09-01T13:11:00.000-05:002017-09-06T13:23:29.067-05:00Rikki Ducornet’s Brightfellow<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
A Review of Rikki Ducornet’s</h2>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<br /><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1566894409/sr=8-1/qid=1504720125/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1504720125&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Brightfellow</a></i></h2>
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Originally published in the</h4>
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<br /><i><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Fall 2016</h4>
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<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1566894409/sr=8-1/qid=1504720125/ref=olp_product_details?_encoding=UTF8&me=&qid=1504720125&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Brightfellow</a></i></b></div>
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<b>By Rikki Ducornet</b></div>
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<b>Coffee House Press ($15.95)</b></div>
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Novelist, poet, essayist, illustrator, children’s-book
author, and all-around magical artificer Rikki Ducornet has been dazzling
readers for more than four decades with her wildly inventive literary
landscapes, her variegated works often eliciting comparisons to such polymaths
as Jorge Luis Borges, the Marquis de Sade, Lewis Carroll, and Angela Carter.
Her best works—especially her second novel, <i>Entering
Fire</i>, and her two turn-of-the-millennium novels, <i>The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition</i> and <i>Gazelle</i>—defy
even these affinities, as all great books must. Ducornet’s is an uneven genius,
however, and her misfires can be disconcerting. Her newest novel, <i>Brightfellow</i>, swerves between highs and
lows, offering her devotees a number of precious glimpses into her inspired
inner regions while frustrating readers who might not know where to put their
foot down in such an oddly balanced topography.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Brightfellow</i>
follows a wounded boy named Stub through his precarious childhood—which
includes a formative episode when his parents stick him with a mentally ill
nanny who introduces him to the work of a bizarre semi-mystical writer/artist
named Verner Vanderloon—and then into young adulthood, when he runs away to
live as a transient on the local university campus. Perhaps too coincidentally,
Vanderloon had been a professor at the school and upon retirement had left his
papers in a special collection in its library. Further chance brings the
circumspect Stub into contact with emeritus professor Billy Sweetbriar, who
knew Vanderloon. Within days he offers Stub—who upon meeting Billy chooses to
call himself Charter Chase—a place to stay at his house while Stub/Charter
works on his ostensible Fulbright project. Amazingly, Stub’s room at Billy’s
house affords him a direct view into the bedroom of the eight-year-old girl
he’s been fascinated with above all the other “campus brats,” a girl named Asthma
who’s conspicuously in the Dantean ninth year of her life.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ducornet breezes through these coincidences blithely, but
what really rankles is how she treats Stub/Charter’s existence as a kind of
game. As anyone who’s been homeless knows, unstable subsistence is far more
dangerously uncertain than any linguistic juggling act. Stub becomes a
brilliant thief, but despite Ducornet’s exuberant inventiveness, the
practicalities of his day-to-day survival are totally unconvincing and keep the
reader from investing in the gravity of his struggle. The worst turn comes
when, finally in the luxurious cradle of Billy’s campus house, Stub/Charter
decides to improvise a fraudulent research project for which he invents an
entire Pacific-island people for Vanderloon to have discovered and documented,
fabricating reams of notes and creating an entire language and mythology that
he regales Billy with over dinners—as if any homeless person would ever play
games with his meal ticket, or with his very ability to remain in his university
universe, especially when his host is a Romance-language specialist who would
easily see through his half-baked philological extemporizations. Ducornet has
always brilliantly thumbed her nose at traditional realism, but this novel’s
momentum simply doesn’t pull off the magic to bend its reality like this, the
flippancy of its development betraying a classist bent that assumes that its
readers have never been hungry.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Reviewing <i>Brightfellow</i>
from end to beginning, as we’re meant to, a different pattern emerges. As in
G.K. Chesterton’s <i>The Man Who Was
Thursday</i>, Charter’s pursuit of Vanderloon compels him through a series of
escalations that vacillate between reverence and blasphemy, to arrive at
an elusive prime mover whose surprise appearance somehow works as an <i>ex post facto</i> reconciliation of the
book’s impossible progressions. Mocking and aping his deity (or is his creator
merely a gnostic demiurge?), Charter has renamed himself and has even created
his own apocryphal testament, but he inexorably charts and chases his
inspiration toward ends that may or may not justify the novel’s tortuous means.
As in Cormac McCarthy’s Chestertonian <i>Blood
Meridian</i>, the mystical denouement reconfigures the entire novel, and the
results are similarly mixed.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Brightfellow</i>’s
success or failure doesn’t just hinge on whether this back-to-front redirection
works, of course. Ducornet’s prose almost always transcends her narrative
missteps, and her twistedly inspired reflections upon this novel’s field of
play make for a brilliantly illuminating funhouse to get lost in. As Charter surreptitiously
observes his darling Asthma—his stolen-spyglass furtiveness like a fusion of
Vladimir Nabokov’s creepers Humbert Humbert and Charles Kinbote—his influence on her escapes his fumbling grasp so drastically that he’s several steps behind when
he finally realizes that Asthma’s been observing and imitating him, nearly to
the point of exposure. Readers who don’t worry about things like being hungry
and who see life and literature as a mere series of signs will titter knowingly
at his trip with Asthma and her friend to view a screening of <i>Rear Window</i>, but Charter’s fantastic
final flight resonates profoundly as he searches for someplace like home and is
magically ushered along to the ending in search of, in Vanderloon’s words, “<i>just what it is you are wanting</i>.”<o:p></o:p></div>
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—David Wiley</div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-16136169049154149922016-04-18T05:52:00.000-05:002017-12-01T01:18:43.032-06:00Neel Mukherjee’s A Life Apart<b><br /></b>
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b><b>A Review of <span style="text-align: justify;">Neel Mukherjee’s</span></b></h2>
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<span style="text-align: justify;"><b><br /></b></span><i style="text-align: justify;"><b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Life-Apart-Novel-Neel-Mukherjee/dp/0393352102/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462618134&sr=8-1&keywords=a+life+apart" target="_blank">A Life Apart</a></b></i></h2>
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<b>Originally published in the <i><a href="http://www.startribune.com/review-a-life-apart-by-neel-mukherjee/375773491/" target="_blank">Minneapolis StarTribune</a></i></b></div>
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<b>on April 18th, 2016</b></div>
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<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Life-Apart-Novel-Neel-Mukherjee/dp/0393352102/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1462618134&sr=8-1&keywords=a+life+apart" target="_blank">A Life Apart</a></i></b><br />
<b>By Neel Mukherjee</b><br />
<b>W.W. Norton, 371 pages, $16.95</b><br />
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After the enormous success of Indian-British writer Neel
Mukherjee’s epic second novel, <i>The Lives of Others</i>, his American publisher is
now bringing out his award-winning debut, <i>A Life Apart</i>, a much less ambitious
work, but nonetheless a richer and more rewarding read. While <i>The Loves of
Others</i> offers an encyclopedic panorama of Mukherjee’s home city and
countryside, <i>A Life Apart</i> focuses on just two intertwining counterpoints: the
life of Ritwik Ghosh, a Bengali expatriate trying to make his way in 1990s London,
and the imagined life of Miss Maud Gilby, a minor character in Bengali polymath
Rabindranath Tagore’s polemical 1915 novel, <i>The Home and the World</i>. Like
Ritwik in London, Miss Gilby is an expatriate in India living “a life apart”
among world events that ultimately overwhelm her intricately small experience
as an observer and bit player.</div>
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Miss Gilby is a British woman hired as a companion and tutor
for Bimala, the main character of Tagore’s novel, and in Mukherjee’s version it
fairly quickly becomes clear that Ritwik is writing Miss Gilby’s back story as
a kind of exploration of his own outsider experience. Like any good symbiotic author/character
relationship, the two narratives influence and warp each other as they evolve
and encompass more and more of the life around them. Needing a place to stay
after finishing his university exams and failing to renew his visa, Ritwik
moves in with and begins taking care of Anne Cameron, an elderly woman who he
discovers had lived in India as a young woman. Her slowly unfolding history,
explored through the personal memorabilia that Ritwik digs up and asks her
about, subtly yet dramatically adds texture and substance to Miss Gilby’s
evolution as a character and as a part of her estranged society in India. While
Tagore dispenses with Miss Gilby in his book’s first chapter, Ritwik’s version sifts
entirely through her rich interior reflections, which are of course also complex
reflections of Ritwik’s own expatriate experience.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Mukherjee’s second novel likewise features a parallel
narrative written by a young male protagonist, and while part of that novel’s drama
is in discovering the secondary narrative’s intended audience—a real-life
relationship that beautifully bends the reader’s understanding of the novel’s
stratified world—Mukherjee’s intertwining of author and creator in <i>A Life
Apart</i> is far more dazzling and effective. Not especially gifted at
characterization, Mukherjee exceeds far more as a prose stylist who weaves
brilliant interiors, and <i>A Life Apart</i> is by far his best writing so far.
Ritwik’s own climactic experiences are somewhat haphazard and unconvincing compared
to Miss Gilby’s more orchestrated denouement—as well as to the far better
plotted <i>The Lives of Others</i>—but this novel’s supple prose absolutely outshines
any other consideration to create an unforgettably penetrating work of art.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<span style="text-align: justify; text-indent: 48px;">—David Wiley</span><br />
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-36906453361601843582015-12-27T12:58:00.000-06:002016-05-07T06:12:24.113-05:00José Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b>A Review of José Eduardo Agualusa’s</b></h2>
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<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Oblivion-Eduardo-Agualusa/dp/0914671316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451415135&sr=8-1&keywords=A+General+Theory+of+Oblivion" target="_blank">A General Theory of Oblivion</a></i></b></h2>
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<b>Originally published in the Minneapolis <i><a href="http://www.startribune.com/review-a-general-theory-of-oblivion-by-jose-eduardo-agualusa-translated-by-daniel-hahn/363423741/" target="_blank">StarTribune</a></i></b></div>
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<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/General-Theory-Oblivion-Eduardo-Agualusa/dp/0914671316/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1451415135&sr=8-1&keywords=A+General+Theory+of+Oblivion" target="_blank">A General Theory of Oblivion</a></i></b></div>
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<b>By José Eduardo Agualusa</b></div>
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<b>Translated by Daniel Hahn</b></div>
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<b>Archipelago Books, 244 pages, $18</b></div>
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Like the Portuguese Fernando Pessoa and the Argentinian
Jorge Luis Borges, the Portuguese-Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa is a literary trickster who
dazzles with his artificial fictional creations, but unlike his headier forebears,
his work is rooted in the more complicated and bloody everyday world of
colonial and postcolonial Africa. Basing his new novel, <i>A General Theory of Oblivion</i>, on the story of a woman named
Ludovica Fernandes Mano, who bricks herself into an eleventh-floor apartment
building on the eve of Angolan independence and stays there for almost thirty
years, Agualusa claims to extrapolate his “pure fiction” narrative from her
notebooks and from photographs of the writing she did on her walls, but he in
fact invents the entire thing. Any Internet search about any aspect of her
story comes up empty (mirroring the fruitless web-sleuthwork depicted in a
later section of the novel), yet this brilliant work isn’t any less emotionally
moving or politically weighty because of its fakery.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Looping through a series of spirographic
circles, Agualusa’s unconcentric narrative draws the story of Ludo’s self-confinement
into the starry revolving sphere of her adopted country’s revolutionary and
counterrevolutionary growing pains, encompassing diamond smugglers, government
assassin/torturers, disappearing poets, and redeemed mercenaries within its scintillating
web. An agoraphobe whose tragic history isn’t revealed until the end, Ludo came
to Angola with her sister Odete and brother-in-law Orlando, who works for a
diamond company, and when intrigues cause the other two to disappear, Ludo has
nowhere to go and barricades herself in against the various agents who want to
root out Orlando’s stolen diamonds. Every practical aspect of her
self-sequestration is totally unbelievable, from how she eats and goes to the
bathroom (a problem that’s never mentioned) to even the relationship between
the building and its surroundings, but Agualusa hilariously seems to thumb his
nose while daring the reader to call his bluff.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">An outlandishly orchestrated series
of coincidences brings all the revolving characters together into a
confrontation outside of Ludo’s recently opened door, like a parody of the
culminations at the end of each book of John Dos Passos’ </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">USA Trilogy</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, yet the resulting resonances are as profound and
affecting as that in any conventional flesh-and-blood chronicle. Agualusa is a
master of varied genre structure, and he has great fun shifting from spy novel
to pastoral narrative to interior reflection, but his heart is deeply invested
in his characters, and each individual’s unique story burns itself into the
reader to make us reconsider our capacity for empathy and understanding.
Finally finding human connectedness after so many years, Ludo also unwittingly facilitates
connection between the revolving cast around her, creating in this highly
artificial novel a profoundly satisfying and merciful sense of human family.</span><br />
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">—David Wiley</span><br />
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-49512445198942089042015-12-01T12:01:00.000-06:002017-12-01T13:52:57.534-06:00Silvina Ocampo’s Thus Were Their Faces<h2 style="text-align: center;">
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A Review of Silvina Ocampo’s</h2>
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<br /><i style="text-align: start;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thus-Were-Their-Faces-Selected/dp/1590177673/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481909408&sr=8-1&keywords=silvina+ocampo+thus+were+their+faces" target="_blank">Thus Were Their Faces</a></i></h2>
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Originally published in the</h4>
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<i><br /></i><i><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Winter 2015</h4>
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<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Thus-Were-Their-Faces-Selected/dp/1590177673/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1481909408&sr=8-1&keywords=silvina+ocampo+thus+were+their+faces" target="_blank"><b>Thus Were Their Faces</b></a></i><br />
<b>By Silvina Ocampo</b><br />
<b>Translated by Daniel Balderston</b><br />
<b>Preface by Jorge Luis Borges</b><br />
<b>New York Review Books ($17.95)</b><br />
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As a short-story writer, poet, and translator in
twentieth-century Argentina, Silvina Ocampo lived and wrote within several long
shadows. Virtually synonymous with that time and place, Jorge Luis Borges
loomed large over every aspect of its literature and left little for anyone
else to do, or even think of. Ocampo’s oldest sister, Victoria—the founder and
editor of <i>Sur</i>, the journal and publishing house that brought South American
Modernism to the fore—was also a domineering figure of her era. Married to
Borges’s friend and occasional collaborator Adolfo Bioy Casares, who was the author
of the brilliantly chilling novel <i>The
Invention of Morel</i>, the youngest Ocampo sister was surrounded by the giants
of her milieu, and if Bioy Casares and Victoria Ocampo worked in Borges’s
penumbra, Silvina Ocampo worked within his centermost umbra. Time has not
reversed these relationships, but as Borges’s apotheosis has transformed him
into a fixed star in the literary firmament, his spreading radiance has brought
even some of his lesser-known colleagues’ faces to light. New York Review
Books’ recent compendium of Ocampo’s fiction, <i>Thus Were Their Faces</i>,
collects more than forty of her short stories from the 1930s to the 1980s and
attempts to distinguish her as a unique voice while very clearly illustrating
her tertiary position during those Borgesian decades.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ocampo originally trained as a painter, studying with de
Chirico and Fernand Legér in Paris when she was a young woman, and when she
returned to Buenos Aires and dedicated herself entirely to writing, she brought
a visual sensibility and an eye for detail to her work that fills its pages
with a teeming and tactile mass. In her long story “The Impostor,” which presents
itself as the journal of a young man who may or may not be the imagined alter
ego of another young man who ends up killing himself, she recounts an almost
senselessly meticulous progression of occurrences among the densely object-rich
summer estate where the two distrustfully circle each other. Ocampo describes
every room and every object on the shelves and in the closets, overloading the
reader with front-end details while very slowly allowing the characters’
background realities to warp into bizarrely repeating patterns. It’s an
interesting idea, and there’s a lot to look at and notice in it, but despite
her visual sharpness, Ocampo has a very dull writing hand. The key Borgesian
influence here is Henry James, who often comes up with ingeniously twisted
ideas but ends up larding them with the most tedious narrative textures and
very quickly loses interest in their meat as he dutifully draws out their
flesh. Borges had the magic ability to extract all the best influences from his
masters while discarding all their chaff, and in his hands James mixes with
Kafka and Chesterton and countless others to bloom into works that were as
beautiful as objects as they were interesting as concepts. In Ocampo’s fiction,
the influences are largely untransformed, and her often fascinating ideas don’t
ever rise up into self-realized flowers that the reader can savor.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Ocampo translated Poe, Melville, Swedenborg, and Dickenson—a
thoroughly Borgesian grouping of authors—and she very closely follows her more
illustrious colleague in how she absorbs them into her own work, but to much
less effect. She loves the obsession and intricacy of Poe, attempting in her
story “The Perfect Crime” to create a water-tight murder plot in much the same
way that Borges did in his story “Emma Zunz,” but she merely produces a trick
while Borges’s story mirrors Poe’s true psychosexual grotesquerie. Transforming
Melville’s overwhelming prolix, Borges creates “The Library of Babel” and “The
Aleph,” in which he crafts endless Melvillian enumeration into tiny, dazzling
snowglobes, while Ocampo merely lists everything in a child’s bedroom, without
stacking it into any kind of artfully composed arrangement. Reflecting
Swedenborg’s inspired mysticism, Borges creates “The Writing of the God,” in
which an imprisoned Mayan priest discerns in the patterns of a jaguar the
secret divine words that can set him free, while in “Report on Heaven and Hell”
Ocampo explains how angels and demons will try to entice and trick the dying
into following in their respective directions, the two-page story serving more
as a brief musing than as a miniature world. Ocampo attempts to channel
Dickinson’s interior weirdness more overtly than does Borges, but while Borges
reflects Dickenson’s Shakespearean fireworks with his own dazzling and densely inventive
thrills, Ocampo merely seems sadly downbeat, with her stories’ weirdness merely
described and implied rather than surreally conveyed.<o:p></o:p></div>
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While much of Ocampo’s imagination and style exists as a
kind of Borgesian subset, there are several key differences between the two
that may entice readers who are interested in a different perspective on the
emerging magical realism of the period. Ocampo is a much more domestic writer
than Borges, focusing on interior drama and development rather than on
paradoxes and theoretical imaginings, and her Dickensonian isolation is much
more traditionally personal than his. Ocampo also dispenses almost entirely
with displays of erudition, allowing her characters’ consciousness to fix the
stories’ parameters rather than having it all sifted through the infinite
Borgesian kaleidoscope, making her more appealing to readers who are alienated
by Borges’s dizzying library of Babel. Yet while Ocampo is more interested in
characters exploring the limits of their sanity than in cosmic librarians
exploring the limits of the known universe, her work is paradoxically much
colder and much less emotionally engaging. Borges isn’t at all a character
writer, but he gives a lot of himself in his work and centers it all with his
own generous and vulnerable humanity, while Ocampo’s characters are more like
sad, distant zombies. Entirely lacking Borges’s vivacious shimmer, Ocampo’s
world and voice are ruminative rather than exploratory, seeming to exemplify
Cynthia Ozick’s lament that, “after Kafka, after Borges, what is there to do
but mope?” If Borges’s infinitesimal labyrinths can be likened to Bach’s
endlessly inventive <i>Goldberg Variations</i>,
Ocampo’s fictions are more like sad, slow, minor-key dirges, with an emphasis
on the word <i>minor</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
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—David Wiley<o:p></o:p></div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-85526070955936492112015-11-22T10:02:00.000-06:002015-12-01T08:08:03.209-06:00Vladimir Nabokov’s Letters to Véra<br />
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<b>A Review of Vladimir Nabokov’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Letters-V%C3%A9ra-Vladimir-Nabokov/dp/0307593363/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1448380801&sr=8-1&keywords=letters+to+vera" target="_blank">Letters to Véra</a></i></b></h2>
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<b>Originally published in the Minneapolis <i><a href="http://www.startribune.com/review-letters-to-v-xe9-ra-by-vladimir-nabokov/351910411/" target="_blank">StarTribune</a></i></b></div>
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<b>on November 22nd, 2015</b></div>
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<b>By Vladimir Nabokov</b><br />
<b>Edited and translated by Olga Voronina and Brian Boyd</b><br />
<b>Alfred A. Knopf, 864 pages, $35</b><br />
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Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov, author of the
seminally twisted novel <i>Lolita</i>, dazzled readers in any genre he took up,
including among his dozens of volumes of fiction, poetry, translation,
criticism, and memoirs a heartbreakingly moving and entertaining collection of
letters that he exchanged with the American writer and critic Edmund Wilson.
His more general <i>Selected Letters</i> also paints a rich portrait of his
extraordinary mind and life, but that volume omitted nearly all of his letters
to his singularly brilliant wife, Véra.
From their initial masked-ball meeting in 1923 until his death in 1977, Véra was Nabokov’s sole
intended reader for every book that he wrote, and any biographical account
invariably employs the word “genius” to describe her, and so the
decades-awaited <i>Letters to Véra</i> fills in much of the missing texture of the love-relationship that Nabokov described
as “cloudless.”</div>
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Co-edited
by Brian Boyd, whose two-volume biography serves as the gold standard for
Nabokov studies, <i>Letters to Véra</i> follows the couple’s early romance as Russian émigrés in 1920s Berlin, which
they fled for Paris in 1937 to escape the Nazis, and then to America in 1940 to
escape the Nazis again, and then to international fame after the publication of <i>Lolita</i> in the 1950s. The greatest mass of letters recounts Nabokov’s brilliant
literary tours through 1920s and 1930s Europe, along with his concurrently
exhausting searches for work to support his family and his writing. The most
illuminating batch of letters, from the spring and summer of 1926, recounts in minute
detail his everyday reading and writing and teaching and eating schedule,
written at Véra’s
request to keep her informed and amused as she attempted to gain weight and
manage her anxiety in a German sanatorium, giving the reader a glimpse of some
of the accompanying pain that this loving couple endured.</div>
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The most
excruciating batch of letters recounts his search for work in 1930s Paris while
he was also having an affair, his stress-exacerbated psoriasis nearly driving
him to suicide as Véra
kept her distance with their young son, Dmitri. Illuminating all of this with a
nearly Nabokovian brilliance himself, co-editor Boyd fills in all the
background details in a staggering two-hundred pages of endnotes that
relentlessly track down nearly every person or book or butterfly that Nabokov mentions.
Boyd and co-editor/co-translator Olga Voronina have also rendered Nabokov’s
Russian into a supple and agile English that sounds startlingly like the master’s
own playful pyrotechnics, often coining ingenious cross-language puns with a literary
mimesis comparable to the butterfly mimicry that lepidopterist Nabokov relentlessly
traced throughout both art and nature.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">As Nabokov finally finds success
after decades of intense and precarious labor, he’s separated from V</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">é</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">ra less and less,
causing this collection to peter out rapidly, but the encompassing silence of
the final years speaks volumes about the couple’s ultimate closeness and
connectedness. Not simply cloudless, Vladimir and V</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">é</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">ra’s full-spectrum love is one of literature’s
greatest stories, and incorporating nearly every aspect of for-better-or-worse,
this monumental volume wildly surpasses its every expectation.</span></div>
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—David Wiley<o:p></o:p></div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-35624820001897127672015-09-01T06:06:00.000-05:002017-12-01T06:38:07.208-06:00Jean Findlay’s Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<b><br /></b><b>A Review of Jean Findlay’s</b></h2>
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<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Lost-Time-Moncrieff-Translator/dp/0374119279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472727943&sr=8-1&keywords=chasing+lost+time" target="_blank">Chasing Lost Time:</a></i></b></h2>
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<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Lost-Time-Moncrieff-Translator/dp/0374119279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472727943&sr=8-1&keywords=chasing+lost+time" target="_blank">The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff:</a></i></b></h2>
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<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Lost-Time-Moncrieff-Translator/dp/0374119279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472727943&sr=8-1&keywords=chasing+lost+time" target="_blank">Soldier, Spy, and Translator</a></i></b><b><br /></b><b><br /></b><b><br /></b><b>Originally published in the</b></h2>
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<b><i><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i>, Fall 2015</b></h2>
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<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Lost-Time-Moncrieff-Translator/dp/0374119279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472727943&sr=8-1&keywords=chasing+lost+time" target="_blank">Chasing Lost Time:</a></i></b></div>
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<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Lost-Time-Moncrieff-Translator/dp/0374119279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472727943&sr=8-1&keywords=chasing+lost+time" target="_blank">The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff:</a></i></b></div>
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<b><i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Chasing-Lost-Time-Moncrieff-Translator/dp/0374119279/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1472727943&sr=8-1&keywords=chasing+lost+time" target="_blank">Soldier, Spy, and Translator</a></i></b></div>
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<b>Jean Findlay</b></div>
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<b>Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, $30</b></div>
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Discussing Marcel Proust’s vast novel <i>In Search of Lost
Time</i> in his <i>Lectures on Literature</i>, Vladimir Nabokov wrote that C.K.
Scott Moncrieff “died while translating the work, which is no wonder.” At more
than 1.2 million words and running into seven overflowing volumes, this
multi-faceted mega-novel contains such an overwhelming portrait of the interior
and exterior world that no individual English translator has ever taken it on
again. In 1981, Terence Kilmartin revised Scott Moncrieff’s translation
according to the 1954 French edition, and then in the late eighties D.J.
Enright revised it again, this time according it to the new <i>Pléiade</i>
edition, and then in the late nineties Penguin books forsook Moncrieff altogether and broke the task up among seven new translators, one for each volume. Each subsequent translation
has brought the novel closer to Proust’s actual words and intentions, which is
arguably the most important consideration, but none has captivated the
imagination the way that Scott Moncrieff’s did in the 1920s. One of the truly
magical reading experiences available to English-language readers, his version,
called <i>Remembrance of Things Past</i> after Shakespeare’s Sonnet 30, largely
paraphrases and recasts Proust’s labyrinthine sentences into an English that’s
meant to mirror the original in ambience rather than in exactitude, and
although it’s become obsolete, his was the version that dramatically altered
the course of English and American Modernism. While he’s been rightfully
accused of “prettifying” Proust’s original, Scott Moncrieff still did an
immense service to the English language, and a new biography by his grand-niece
Jean Findlay largely sets the record straight about this remarkable translator.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i>Chasing Lost
Time: The Life of C.K. Scott Moncrieff: Soldier, Spy, and Translator</i> is in
equal parts literary biography, intricate family chronicle, brutal war
narrative, spy novel, spiritual examination, sex farce, and entirely
all-compassing portrait of a lost era. Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff (Scott
Moncrieff is his compound family name) was by most standards a complicated and
contradictory figure—a gay Catholic soldier, writer/critic/translator, aesthete,
and spy—but in this searching and thoroughgoing biography, all his parts adhere
together into an integrity rarely seen in our modern age of fractured meaning.
Not at all a family apologia, this is instead a richly layered excavation of
the spiraling strata of letters, diaries, writings, documentary records, and
reminiscences about a man for whom life had purpose and sense, and who created
a time and place in the universe for himself that he genuinely loved. A friend
and colleague of Joseph Conrad, T.S. Eliot, the Waugh family, Robert Graves,
Noël Coward, and Wilfred Owen, among countless others, Scott Moncrieff cast an
enormous figure in the literature and mind of his time, and Findlay does a
seriously impressive job of drawing together every imaginable mention of him in
the era’s ceaselessly proliferating remembrances of things past.</div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_PKLQKVYR30/V8gMoPFNFsI/AAAAAAAABjQ/F8jz8U3iRNgERt3U3LxVvmAwu3kCIFOIQCLcB/s1600/Edward_Stanley_Mercer_-_Charles_Kenneth_Scott-Moncrieff.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-_PKLQKVYR30/V8gMoPFNFsI/AAAAAAAABjQ/F8jz8U3iRNgERt3U3LxVvmAwu3kCIFOIQCLcB/s400/Edward_Stanley_Mercer_-_Charles_Kenneth_Scott-Moncrieff.jpg" width="303" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">C.K. Scott Moncrieff,<br />
painted by Edward Stanley (1919)</td></tr>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Like Proust, Scott Moncrieff was
born into an upper-middle-class family devoted to public service and was a
sensitive child who as a young man leaned toward literary dandyism. Both
writers immersed themselves in poetry and art, and both were fascinated by
Catholic iconography and significantly found an early idol in aesthetic art
critic John Ruskin. Unlike Proust, though, who due to infirmity was barely able
to fulfil his obligatory military service, Scott Moncrieff was thrust into the
darkest pit of the First World War, where he fully embraced Catholicism and
maintained a shockingly indefatigable spirit among all the horror. Findlay
reconstructs battles with extraordinary vividness and rigor, digging as deep
into the military archives as she does into personal memoirs, giving as
comprehensive a view of Scott Moncrieff’s battalion within the ever-shifting
military theater as she does of his own individual war experience. Although she
thankfully doesn’t try to ape Proust’s style, she follows threads in the same
way he does, and the details that she focuses on form a Proustian trail of
scintillating imagery, such as the shards of the destroyed Ypres cathedral’s
stained glass that he found and carried with him and then passed parts of to
another fellow-soldier, or the Bible in which he dutifully noted every time and
place he took communion while serving, forming an intricate military and
spiritual itinerary across Europe.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Although very seriously wounded in
battle, Scott Moncrieff remained largely unfazed by the terribleness of it all,
unlike so many of his friends who were stricken with what we today call
post-traumatic stress disorder. Seeing innumerable fellow combatants devoured
by this unprecedented new kind of war, he actually seemed to have a positive
experience as a soldier. Part of this was because of his new faith, which made
everything seem magical and sacred—a common phenomenon during times of extreme terror—but
part of it was that he was simply blessed with solid mental health, and it’s thoroughly
remarkable to read the biography of a literary person who just didn’t suffer
the way </span><span style="text-indent: 48px;">that</span><span style="text-indent: 48px;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">so many other sensitive people do. He does grow quite a bit,
however, especially after nearly losing his leg in battle. Serving from the
home front after a very long recuperation, he attempted to steer his friends
and fellow poets to safer assignments, and his inability to keep the remarkable
Wilfred Owen alive marked a serious turning point for him. Having been one of
the poet-critics to foster and tutor the budding new poet, encouraging him to
explore the assonance and consonance of the Old French martial epic </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">the <i>Song
of Roland</i></span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, which Scott Moncrieff was translating into English as a kind of
solace for no longer being able to fight himself, he saw Owen’s lightning-like
artistic development far eclipse his own, and it’s after the junior poet’s
death in battle that he stopped thinking of himself as a poet anymore.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Turning toward translation after
the success of his version of the </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Song of Roland</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, he followed it with
the similarly bellicose </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Beowulf</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, and then he found his true purpose:
Proust. For many people, reading Proust for the first time is a nearly
religious experience, and to see Scott Moncrieff become totally consumed with
it is a similarly thrilling experience. At the same time he took an assignment
as a low-level spy for England in Mussolini’s Italy under the cover of the
passport office, a job he’d partly created when he was at the War Office, and
combining this with his translation fees, he was able to support an
ever-expanding network of family and non-family dependents. Living in fascist
Italy also allowed him a much freer sex life than he’d had in Edwardian
England—a terrible irony if there ever was one—and he recounted it all in
hilarious detail in his life-long correspondence with Vyvyan Holland, one of
Oscar Wilde’s sons. As gleefully promiscuous a translator as he was a lover,
his insatiable interests often took him away from Proust as he became sidetracked
by Stendahl and then discovered Pirandello, who was his other major
contribution to English letters. Part of this was foot-dragging over the
translation of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Sodom and Gomorrah</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, fearing that Proust’s frank
depictions of homosexuality would run him afoul of English obscenity laws, and
unfortunately this cost him a lot of time and resulted in an even more
euphemistically paraphrased translation, which is one of this remarkable
biography’s only true bummers.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Jean Findlay</td></tr>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Regarding Scott Moncrieff’s faith
and sexuality, Findlay makes the extraordinary point that part of Catholicism’s
appeal for him was that it offered him perpetual forgiveness, which was a stark
contrast to the unbending Protestantism of his native Scotland. For him Catholicism
was a religion that actually </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">allowed and expected </i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">him to be a sinner.
Although seemingly a nonbeliever herself, Findlay’s portrait of her
great-uncle’s faith experience is imbued with the magic of a G.K. Chesterton or
Graham Greene novel, making his rapid life and death (at age forty, from
cancer, with a volume of Proust left to go) feel nonetheless whole and satisfying,
because that’s how it felt to him. Entirely humbled by greater writers and
having recognized his own intermediate role, as his translations swept England
and America he even turned down an advance to write a novel of his own. Not at
all unctuous or self-aggrandizing, he was simply a happy servant of literature
and life whose individualized niche allowed him to shine in his own way.
Similarly, this surprisingly luminous biography highlights its subject without
drawing excessive attention to itself, yet it nonetheless glows too. Findlay holds Scott
Moncrieff up to our fascinated attention, and after a while the reader begins
to notice Findlay’s own varied and intricate attentiveness just as much. As
with Proust, the reader marvels at how much and how well she notices, and at
her seemingly limitless resourcefulness. Unlike Scott Moncrieff and Proust
himself, who were both unable to finish their lives’ work, Findlay seems with
this book to have actually recaptured lost time.</span></div>
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—David Wiley<o:p></o:p></div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-82883963733870846312015-06-01T09:29:00.000-05:002016-06-01T09:58:46.642-05:00Jorge Luis Borges’ Conversations, Volume 1<i><br /></i>
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A Review of Jorge Luis Borges’</div>
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<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-1-Jorge-Luis-Borges/dp/0857421883/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464791433&sr=8-1&keywords=borges+conversations" target="_blank">Conversations, Volume 1</a></i></div>
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Originally published in the</div>
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<i style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a></i><i>, </i>Summer 2015</div>
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<i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Conversations-1-Jorge-Luis-Borges/dp/0857421883/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1464791433&sr=8-1&keywords=borges+conversations" target="_blank">Conversations, Volume 1</a></i><br />
Jorge Luis Borges & Osvaldo Ferrari<br />
Translated by Jason Wilson<br />
Seagull Books, $27.50<br />
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In his prologue to the newly translated <i>Conversations, Volume 1</i>, Jorge Luis Borges wrote that “the best event recorded in universal history happened in Ancient Greece some 500 years before the Christian era, namely, the discovery of dialogue,” adding that, “remote in space and time, this volume is a muffled echo of those ancient conversations.” Borges as a short-story writer, essayist, and poet often posited himself as the only real character in his work—he himself was the lonely cosmic librarian, the vast rememberer, the existential detective, and the sole repository of awful knowledge—but in a very happy paradox, he was also a brilliant conversationalist who could engage in genuine dialogue with anyone lucky enough to be in his presence. Starting in the spring of 1984, Borges appeared on a weekly radio show with fellow poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari to discuss anything that came to their minds, ranging from literature and philosophy to history and culture to politics, travel, the tango, and far beyond, and the result is a three-volume series of conversations that are just now being translated into English.</div>
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<i>Conversations, Volume 1</i> collects the first forty-five of these conversations, begun when Borges was nearing eighty-five, and the series presumably covers a bit less than a year per volume until his death in 1986. Consequently, the ideas and reflections and conjectures documented in these pages are a kind of last word from one of literature’s true sages. Borges had been blind for three decades at this point, and so his speech is wholly unprepared by any kind of agenda or notes and follows a discursive route that often strays far from the chosen topic that Ferrari springs on him each week. Answering a question about a particular poet or book or idea, Borges spirals out from the intricate particulars of the person or volume at hand to address metaphysical conjectures about authorship to Buddhism to Japanese customs to the fact that the Old English and Old Norse poets had read and were trying to write their own <i>Aeneid</i>, zeroing in on the exact three lines from <i>Beowulf </i>that are direct translations of Vergil—and almost never back again until Ferrari repeatedly imposes his refrain, “to return to the idea of….”</div>
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As a master lecturer and raconteur, Borges invariably shapes his narrative arcs in the form of parabolae rather than hyperbolae and carefully plots how to curve back to the initial inspiration as he brilliantly creates each looping outward thread, but unfortunately these radio conversations have temporal limits that rarely allow him to complete the full texture of his thoughts. Battling time, Ferrari too often pulls Borges back to the original topic and thus retards the full bloom of what Borges was trying to create with him. Other interview collections, such as Richard Burgin’s two books of conversations with Borges—one featuring a wide variety of interviewers, and the earlier, better collection featuring just him and Borges—offer a much freer range of play that more fully captures Borges’ dazzling but warm conversational sparkle. Ferrari also often tends to agree with his master too quickly, rapidly justifying and synthesizing whatever Borges says in a way that sometimes seems sentimental, as if the two poets were maudlin old codgers talking their way toward peace with the world. At other times he simply seems to be trying to rein the old coot in.</div>
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To be fair, the still young Ferrari has a seriously impressive range of specific and general knowledge and is almost always able to react with genuine understanding and insight into whatever ancient or modern poem Borges happens to be reciting from memory. He recognizes everything Borges brings to light and often offers exceptionally well pointed examples from his own immersion in poetry and philosophy, serving if not as a perfect foil for Borges, then at least as a worthy sparring partner. He tends too much toward philosophy and generalization to match Borges’ full rainbow genius and is clearly unable to reconcile the inherent battle between conversational depth and real-time radio space, but despite these limitations he throws so much more into the mix than most other interviewers that at times the two actually do approach the ideal of Platonic dialogue. It’s also important to reflect that in today’s impoverished media landscape, these conversations could never happen, especially as a popular weekly feature, and that confronted with the paucity of intelligence on modern radio waves, Ferrari would come off as Borges himself.</div>
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Gazing up at Borges’ towering mind through the lens of these stereoscopic conversations, one of the sad truths that this volume reveals again and again is that <i>genius in not democratic</i>. All writers are not created equal, and although Borges’ profound humanity mostly employs his innate status among the .001% of the world’s intellectual elite for the purpose of exceptional good, he can also fall victim to its myopia and prejudice. Compared to the disdainful snobbery of, say, Vladimir Nabokov, Borges is entirely gracious and thoughtful, but he nevertheless has old-fashioned biases about the relationship between culture and virtue and occasionally speaks quite regrettably in these conversations about “the people” and “the poor.” He makes an excellent case against ignorance, however, advocating for learning as a way of banishing evil, and so even though this collection won’t make him any more attractive to readers who consider him “too academic,” his own example of putting his gifts to good use is utterly inspiring. As a Latin American, Borges invigorated an entire literature and brought it to the world stage, and while he may profess a modest cluelessness about his influence in these conversations, his reflective dialogue with Ferrari repeatedly points out how he rewrote the rules of literature and how countless other writers have been illuminated and inspired to create in ways that had not existed before him, illustrating the fact that art is not a zero-sum game. Borges in his dotage may not be a model citizen for all to emulate, but in these dialogues—as in any other genre he attempted—the fundamental unfairness of his outrageous talent is almost always a wonder and a delight.</div>
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—David Wiley</div>
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-46927749061708204662015-05-17T07:18:00.000-05:002015-11-21T02:44:38.542-06:00Vladimir Pištalo’s Tesla: A Portrait with Masks<br />
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<b>A Review of <span style="line-height: 32px; text-align: justify;">Vladimir Pištalo</span><span style="line-height: 32px; text-align: justify;">’s</span></b></h2>
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<b><i style="line-height: 32px; text-align: justify;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tesla-Portrait-Masks-Vladimir-Pistalo/dp/1555976972/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445431905&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=A+Portrait+With+Masks+Vladimir+Pi%C5%A1talo" target="_blank">Tesla: A Portrait with Masks</a></i></b></h2>
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<b>Originally published in the <i><a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/entertainment/literature/20150517_Vladimir_Pitalo_s__Tesla___Electrifying_art-bio_of_a_founder_of_modern_age.html" target="_blank">Philadelphia Inquirer </a></i>on May 17th, 2015</b></div>
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<b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tesla-Portrait-Masks-Vladimir-Pistalo/dp/1555976972/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1445431905&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=A+Portrait+With+Masks+Vladimir+Pi%C5%A1talo" target="_blank">Tesla: A Portrait with Masks</a></b><br />
<b>By Vladimir Pištalo</b><br />
<b>Graywolf Press</b><br />
<b>452 pp. $18</b><br />
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<span style="line-height: 200%;">Among the
late-nineteenth-century luminaries who accelerated the world into irreversible
modernity, few were as literally electrifying as the Serbian-American inventor
and engineer Nikola Tesla. A futurist, showman, and quintessential mad
scientist, Tesla was the main impetus behind alternating current, which allowed
energy to be transferred easily over long distances, and his public persona
dramatically engaged a world that was eager to be dazzled by shimmering
spectacle, forcefully rushing the age of the horse and buggy toward both
enlightenment and calamity. With his newly translated novel <i>Tesla: A
Portrait with Masks</i>, Serbian writer Vladimir Pištalo takes on the man and
the myth to create a novel of scintillating luster and wide-ranging resonance.</span><span style="line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 32px; text-align: justify;">Vladimir Pištalo</span></td></tr>
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<span style="line-height: 200%;">Rounding up all the usual <i>fin de siècle</i> suspects—Thomas
Edison, George Westinghouse, Mark Twain, Sigmund Freud, and dozens of others—Pištalo
charts Tesla’s rainbow arc from obscurity to international fame and almost
completely back again, infusing the historical happenings with rich poetry and
unique vision. Structurally, this is a fairly conventional historical novel, written
almost entirely in short declarative sentences, but Pištalo casts it through a
dreamy and often surreal inner reflectiveness that weaves it all into a
dazzling yarn. Like Tesla, who didn’t believe in Einstein’s relativity, Pištalo
never truly bends time/space in his narrative, and so despite the modernist
subject matter, the novel’s greatest pleasures are actually in his time-tested
approaches to character and development, at which he excels. The repulsive
Edison, the warmly doddering Twain, the terrifying J.P. Morgan, and the
brilliant, bizarre, and baffling Tesla all come alive and spark off of each
other to luminous effect, taking the reader on a grand tour of the electric
age’s highlights.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Pištalo
doesn’t just dwell among the stars, however. His most vivid and moving
portrayals are of the under-side of life, of the people left behind in Europe,
and especially of the workers toiling in the sewers beneath the towers of the
American wealthy. After being swindled by Edison and then squeezed out of his
own company by unscrupulous backers, Tesla finds himself digging ditches in New
York, and his vivid, loving, brutal, and unsentimentally drawn fellow laborers
approach a Twain-like richness of humanity and tragedy. Mirroring all of this,
Tesla’s own under-side shadows him constantly, repeatedly pulling him down from
the heights that he can’t help from destructively overshooting. Likewise, he
can’t restrain the modern world that he’s helped to call into existence and that
to his horror is rushing toward unprecedented global conflict.</span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8epHTEmJUWY/VieLrk_zNYI/AAAAAAAABBE/nPv8L7GbNLw/s1600/Nikola-Tesla-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="251" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-8epHTEmJUWY/VieLrk_zNYI/AAAAAAAABBE/nPv8L7GbNLw/s320/Nikola-Tesla-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: small; line-height: 32px; text-align: justify;">Nikola Tesla</span></td></tr>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">While
Pištalo’s grasp of the time period’s movements and undercurrents are deeply
nuanced, his portrayals of Tesla’s actual scientific advances aren’t always
entirely convincing. In lieu of technical detail, he loads the narrative with
metaphor, focusing on the philosophical and literary resonances of each new
development. At turns Tesla is a cypher for Prometheus, the biblical Jacob, Don
Quixote, Milton’s Satan, Byron’s Manfred, and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,
which can all be a bit much as Pištalo begins simply referring to Tesla by
these names. Nevertheless, as a meditation on humanity’s dually creative and
self-destructive nature, this highly polished novel serves as a classic literary
mirror of who we are and where we’re heading.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 200%;">—David Wiley</span><br />
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-27512914471918830922013-12-01T02:34:00.000-06:002015-11-21T02:45:26.588-06:00Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Pleasure<h2>
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<b>A Review of Gabriele D’Annunzio</b><b>’</b><b>s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Penguin-Classics-Gabriele-DAnnunzio/dp/0143106740/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421741742&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=gabrielle+d+annunzio+pleasure" target="_blank">Pleasure</a></i></b></div>
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<b><br /></b>
<b>Originally published in the <a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a>, Winter 2013/2014</b></div>
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<i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pleasure-Penguin-Classics-Gabriele-DAnnunzio/dp/0143106740/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1421741742&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=gabrielle+d+annunzio+pleasure" target="_blank"><b>Pleasure</b></a></i><br />
<b>Gabriele D’Annunzio</b><br />
<b>translated by Lara Gochin Raffaelli</b><br />
<b>Penguin ($17)</b><br />
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<span style="line-height: 32px;">The Italian writer and statesman Gabriele D’Annunzio largely gave up literature for politics when Italy entered into the First World War, and his books and reputation have never fully recovered. A fervent nationalist whom many—including Mussolini himself—saw as a forerunner of fascism, D’Annunzio was a larger-than-life figure whose importance now seems absurdly dated and whom modernity would simply prefer to forget. In the English-speaking world, his original impact has often seemed entirely baffling, because Victorian translations excised the seminal gist of his true contribution, leaving a refined shell whose brittleness quickly desiccated and disappeared from the larger literary consciousness. </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">His first novel, </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Pleasure</i><span style="line-height: 200%;">, shocked its original
readers with a frank and even devious focus on sexual seduction, but its 1898
translation into English as </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">The Child of Pleasure </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">cut out all the sex,
rendering the novel into a neutered virtuoso piece, leaving many
readers—including myself—with the impression that D’Annunzio was just a pallid
reflection of the English Aesthetic movement. </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">The Child of Pleasure </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">read
like a frangible novelization of Walter Pater’s imitators, leaving very little
pleasure in its narrative portrayal or in its effect on the reader, but
arriving at the 150th anniversary of D’Annunzio’s birth, Lara Gochin
Raffaelli’s new translation of </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Pleasure </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">will perhaps single-handedly
resuscitate D’Annunzio as a world writer and place this glimmering first novel
in its key spot among Europe’s great works of Decadent literature.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">The
novel opens with the main character, Andrea Sperelli, a young aristocratic
writer and artist, awaiting the return of an estranged lover in a room suffused
with her memory. <i>Pleasure </i>then plunges the reader into a world of reminiscence
and desire and longing, where objects take on the essences of the humans who
touch them and where humans themselves serve as objects on which to play out
the obsessive interior dramas lurking beneath the surface of each new
interaction. Sperelli is a dissolute aesthete raised by a father who initiated
him from a young age into the cult of beauty, indoctrinating him with the most
spurious sophism and leaving him with no fundamental grounding at all. While
Sperelli serves in part as a mirror of D’Annunzio himself, who took on much of
his character’s persona in subsequent years, the play of the novel is in making
the reader descend into this depravity at the closest range, perhaps a bit like
Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert seducing us into the ultra-sophisticated world of his
sickness, with the ironic distance only implied through extra-textual
references. The exceptional Raffaelli provides generous notes to her translation
to delineate some of these subtleties, but the overall thrust of Sperelli’s
seductions is clear even without them.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">With
this new translation, the influence on the subsequent century’s literature is
now shockingly apparent. Both Marcel Proust and James Joyce were great admirers
of D’Annunzio’s work, and the influence especially on Proust’s </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">In Search of
Lost Time </i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">makes itself retrospectively evident on nearly every page. Both
Sperelli and Proust’s narrator are monsters of obsessive narcissism, but even
more strikingly, D’Annunzio’s mingling of art and objects and essences opens a
key passageway into the infinitely interconnected world of Proust, where the
sound of a spoon knocking against a plate or the feel of uneven stones beneath
the narrator’s feet or the taste and smell of a madeleine cookie dipped in tea
can call up a universe of internal associations. More than Proust, however,
D’Annunzio immerses the reader in the material experience of making art—at
least when not consumed with seduction and memory; the passages describing the
thrillingly intricate processes of etching and printmaking outshine even the
book’s most sensuous and associative passages, prefiguring the relentlessly
detailed artistic methods described in William Gaddis’s <i>The </i></span><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><i>Recognitions</i></span><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">,
which also seems in this novel’s debt.</span></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o0Uc8DH4BfM/VL4S2beY7mI/AAAAAAAAAy4/AYsBnd4D5ts/s1600/gabriel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-o0Uc8DH4BfM/VL4S2beY7mI/AAAAAAAAAy4/AYsBnd4D5ts/s1600/gabriel.jpg" width="263" /></a></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Yet
while <i>Pleasure </i>may be a great precursor to many of the past century’s key works
of literature, it fails in one respect. Rather than making Rome his own, or
even absorbing ancient or medieval or renaissance Rome into his own personal
iconography, D’Annunzio very much lived in the Rome of Goethe, which for
writers of the nineteenth century </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">was </i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">modern Rome. Goethe occupied a
place in his age that not even Proust or Joyce occupy in our own, so the
influence is understandable, but to have the narrative—and Sperelli himself—so
constantly quote his German master is to make a terrific refusal to be
original. Part of this is for effect—Goethe informs the narrative when Sperelli
is with his main lover, Elena, which is most of the time, and when he’s with
his secondary lover, Maria, it’s Shelley whose works fix the key—and it’s
actually a pretty neat effect, but it leaves a huge void by living in the
shadow of these towering high Romantics. D’Annunzio’s Sperelli is meant to strike for his
age a figure as symbolic and representative as Goethe’s Werther was for his,
and although he succeeded in making Sperelli a metonym for the age of
Decadence, much like Jay Gatsby is for our own shoddier decadence in America,
perhaps part of D’Annunzio’s desuetude lay in not creating a lasting foundation
for himself—or in not transforming a classical myth into a modern one the way
that Joyce did with </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Odyssey </i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">and Fitzgerald did with </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">The Satyricon</i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">.
Still, <i>Pleasure </i>is truly a pleasure, and its potency is its own. D’Annunzio’s
characters may be steeped in their age, but his methods and vision are
strikingly original, and this novel confidently announces itself not just as a
mere echo or harbinger, but as a fully fledged advent of its own.</span></div>
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—David Wiley<o:p></o:p><br />
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-48633287101495333232013-12-01T02:04:00.000-06:002015-11-21T02:46:09.284-06:00Italo Calvino’s Letters 1941–1985<div style="text-align: center;">
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<b>A Review of Italo Calvino</b><b>’</b><b>s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Italo-Calvino-Letters-1941-1985/dp/0691162433" target="_blank">Letters 1941–1985</a></i></b></h2>
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<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>Originally published in the <a href="http://raintaxi.com/" target="_blank"><i>Rain Taxi Review of Books</i></a>, Winter 2013/2014</b></div>
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<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Italo-Calvino-Letters-1941-1985/dp/0691162433" target="_blank">Letters 1941–1985</a></i></b><br />
<b>Italo Calvino</b><br />
<b>Translated by Martin McLaughlin</b><br />
<b>Selected and introduced by Michael Wood</b><br />
<b>Princeton ($39.50)</b><br />
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Although Italo
Calvino was a deeply convicted artist and intellectual, he was not a man of
great personal passions. His fiction, like that of his Argentine master Jorge
Luis Borges, weaves dazzling conceptual fantasies that explore the mind and the
universe and the written word in books that sometimes fall in on themselves to
become their own central subject, but he leaves out all the lonely sadness of
Borges—and foregoes altogether the fervor of his other, earlier master, Ernest
Hemingway. He instead employs the cold codes of Hemingway as he plumbs the
interior labyrinths of his imagined worlds and leaves blank the self-portrait
that Borges suggested that his own creations outlined in intimate detail.
Mirroring this aspect of his fiction, and in fact magnifying it, his personal
and professional correspondence explores a world of art and ideas and politics
almost entirely divorced from the human feelings that underlie them.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%;">Selected by Calvino scholar Michael
Wood from an Italian edition twice its size (which itself collects just a
fraction of Calvino’s lifetime of correspondence), the English-language edition
of Italo Calvino’s </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Letters 1941–1985 </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">serves as a kind of intellectual
and artistic biography of postwar Italy—of which Calvino was a prime
representative—if not as a biography of Calvino himself. Translator Martin
McLaughlin provides relentlessly informative notes to the letters, some of them
translated from the original Italian edition and some of them his own work,
tracking down in painstaking detail every political or artistic reference and
noting the exact publication information of every book or article that Calvino
discusses or refers to or is reacting to. It’s a seriously impressive piece of
sleuthery, and it illuminates the texture of Calvino’s world almost as much as
Calvino does with his own words.</span></div>
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Beginning when Calvino was eighteen
and at college fearing conscription into Mussolini’s army, the letters follow
him into hiding with the Resistance and then into a postwar environment in
which he’s a devout Communist trying to keep his party relevant and still
connected to the actual proletariat, a struggle that bitterly disappoints him
as it increasingly fails. In tandem with his political involvement, Calvino’s
literary career attempts to bridge two competing urges: the commitment to
writing illustrative political works filled with types and goals and progress,
and the overwhelming desire to follow his imagination into the ether.
Ultimately, politics frustrate him and he quits the Communist Party in a
drastic and unexpected letter that reads like the self-divestment of a priest
stepping down from the church but still vowing utter faith to all of its fundamental
tenets. His pen then largely unfettered by any programmatic fealty, his fiction
takes off, and his letters document his evolving ideas and intentions and
aesthetic interests.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
Calvino was ever the public intellectual,
however, and his correspondence records a mind still very much in thrall with
the modish ideas of his time, and a great many of his letters read like
incredibly tedious recitations of the latest theory or article of intellectual
faith. Often new concepts will enter and inspire him, as when he applies
semiotics to the universe for his <i>Cosmicomics </i>series of tales, but just
as often he’s simply spinning his wheels. He also had to devote much of his
energy to his job in publishing, and it’s both fascinating and depressing to
see him expend so much attention on other people’s works and ideas and
artistry.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Calvino’s
interdisciplinary interests brought him in touch with some of the most
cutting-edge creative minds of his time, including the filmmakers Michelangelo
Antonioni and Pier Paulo Pasolini and the composers Luigi Nono and Luciano
Berio, even working on a collaboration with the latter composer. In fact, some
of Calvino’s most captivating letters describe his reactions to some of these
artist’s work, such as his intense dislike of Pasolini’s films, and one letter
finds him riffing brilliantly on the theme of sounds and silence in battle
after hearing the debut of Nono’s great </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">A floresta é jovem e cheja de vita</i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">What’s
disappointing is that these passages are the exceptions and not the rule.
Calvino is not a writer who likes to regale his friends with his reactions to
the wonders of his reading or listening or seeing, and when he occasionally
reveals some of his vast erudition, it’s often surprising to see the names of
authors and books come up, as if from hiding, when he’s never divulged any sort
of initial revelation about having encountered them in the first place. These
are simply not the letters of Keats or Kafka or Flannery O’Connor, where the
reader takes a trip through the realms of gold with the author and marvels
along with each new discovery. The personal element of these great
letter-writers is entirely missing from Calvino’s correspondence too, with
virtually no </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">dramatis personae </i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">crowding in from either his or his
correspondents’ lives. He only mentions his wife a handful of times, never
telling the story of meeting her when he was in Cuba, and it’s nearly
impossible to tell his correspondents apart from the way he writes to them.
There’s no Kafka’s Felice or O’Connor’s “A” to be found anywhere in these
letters. In the end, this volume will serve as a sourcebook for understanding
Calvino’s works and days, and some of it is actually quite interesting and
informative, but it will never count as having much intrinsic value as a
collection itself.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
—David Wiley<o:p></o:p><br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify; text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-48989657498591046542013-11-15T21:46:00.000-06:002015-11-21T02:46:23.517-06:00Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge<div style="text-align: justify;">
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b></h2>
<div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b>A Review of Thomas Pynchon’s <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bleeding-Edge-Thomas-Pynchon/dp/1594204233/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=" target="_blank">Bleeding Edge</a></i></b></h2>
<div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>Originally published in the Minneapolis <i><a href="http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/230697611.html" target="_blank">StarTribune</a></i></b><br />
<b>on November 15th, 2013</b></div>
</div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bleeding-Edge-Thomas-Pynchon/dp/1594204233/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=" target="_blank"><b><i>Bleeding Edge</i></b></a><br />
<b>Thomas Pynchon</b><br />
<b>The Penguin Press ($28.95)</b><br />
<div>
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
Like his 1973 magnum opus, <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i>, Thomas Pynchon’s new
novel, <i>Bleeding Edge</i>, takes place
over approximately nine crucial months of world history and offers a more complex
alternative to the typical “us and them” narrative that many have adopted as
the official story. Focusing on the New York of 2001 and early 2002, <i>Bleeding Edge</i> is a new kind of
historical novel, delving into the radical shifts in human consciousness
brought about by the Internet, video games, quake films, digital espionage,
cyber exploration, and other “bleeding-edge” technologies that just twelve
years later now actually seem generations old. Hilarious references to Netscape
and Final Fantasy abound, but 9/11 looms large, and the stakes here are real.</div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;">Maxine
Tarnow is a fraud investigator in New York who’s lost her license and is
working rogue, and when a colleague asks her to look into some cooked
accounting in the books of Gabriel Ice and his giant
Microsoft/Halliburton-style megafirm, her researches lead her into the Deep Web
and back up again to a world where paranoia is the norm and where reality is
often merely an avatar for the cyber systems that lay just a few clicks away.
While the premise may be something of a rehash of Pynchon’s second novel, </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">The Crying of Lot 49</i><span style="line-height: 200%;">, the real-world
consequences here are much more pressing, and the swirl of elusive meanings have an
urgency that the earlier novel’s symbol-based conspiracies only play at.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
Maxine
and her family, friends, and colleagues are also surprisingly rich and well
developed as individual characters who stand for something much more human than
some of the cardboard cutouts of Pynchon’s early works. This new earnestness
comes at an artistic cost, though, making this novel almost entirely
conventional in terms of how it works and what it offers to the reader. Pynchon’s
world is always complexly plotted, but the threads in this novel all make
perfect sense and find relatively harmonious resolution in the end, and while
the book offers us an alternate view of who we are in the new millennium, its
answers to the problems it explores still seem simpler than they should be.
Perhaps 9/11 has made Pynchon grow up, for better or worse.</div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
That’s
not to say that Pynchon has become dull at all. His prose is uproariously
vibrant and compelling and is filled with relentless poetry and play, spouting
outlandish neologisms and novel imagery at every turn. While the current state
of Pynchon’s art may not be pushing the bleeding edge in the ways that <i>Gravity’s Rainbow</i> did, his comic vision
is nearly as absurd as ever and is never satisfied unless it outdoes itself,
and as a result <i>Bleeding Edge</i> is a
seriously funny book that’s also deadly serious.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<br /></div>
<div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
—David Wiley<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
</div>
David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-50679841840961304032013-09-01T20:51:00.000-05:002015-11-21T02:47:04.589-06:00Jorge Luis Borges’ Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b>A Review of Jorge Luis Borges’</b></h2>
<div>
<b><br /></b></div>
<h2 style="text-align: center;">
<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Borges-Course-English-Literature/dp/0811222748/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409794719&sr=8-1&keywords=professor+borges" target="_blank">Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature</a></i></b></h2>
<div>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>Originally published in the <a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a>, Fall 2013</b></div>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Borges-Course-English-Literature/dp/0811222748/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409794719&sr=8-1&keywords=professor+borges" target="_blank"><i><b>Professor Borges</b></i></a><br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Professor-Borges-Course-English-Literature/dp/0811222748/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1409794719&sr=8-1&keywords=professor+borges" target="_blank"><i><b>A Course on English Literature</b></i></a><br />
<b>Jorge Luis Borges</b><br />
<b>Edited by Martín Arias and Martín Hadis</b><br />
<b>Translated by Katherine Silver</b><br />
<b>New Directions ($24.95)</b><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Someone should
have had a tape recorder on Jorge Luis Borges at all times. Unlike his great
contemporary, Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote out every word of his university
lectures and insisted on composing all of his interviews in solitude, Borges
had a great gift for conversation and for spontaneous connection with his
readers and students. Two books of interviews attest to his simultaneously warm
and dazzling engagement with ideas, with language, and with the people who
flocked to his accessible and welcoming brilliance. The essay collection <i>Seven Nights </i>transcribes seven
extraordinary lectures that he delivered without notes or preparation in 1977,
and the book (and accompanying four-CD set) <i>This
Craft of Verse </i>preserves a series of talks he gave on the art and craft of
poetry. Each of these is a goldmine. With almost any other author, all of these
posthumous publications would have caused a glut, but Borges’ library-of-babel
erudition made it so that his every public utterance offered some invaluable
insight or reflection worthy of scriptural copyists. The newest release, <i>Professor Borges</i>, transcribes an entire
course he gave on English literature, and while some may scoff at the Borges
industry for heaving more laundry lists and toenail clippings at his adoring
public, this may be the most brilliant and revealing offering yet.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;">In addition to heading Argentina’s
National Library, Borges was a professor of English and North American
literature at the University of Buenos Aires, despite never having received a
university degree himself, and the present volume comes to us via students who taped
and transcribed the lectures for a course he gave on English literature in
1966. The process of editing this book for print is like a Borges story in
itself. While each transcription bore the religiously scholastic phrase “a
faithful version” at its end, the students’ outrageous and often hilarious
mishearings of author names and etymological discussions and foreign terms made
for a truly Borgesian hunt on the part of editors Martín Arias and Martín Hadis
in their quest to nail down a genuinely faithful text. So far-flung are Borges’
casual references that many of the students’ phonetic spellings led to
unfathomable amounts of research in trying to come up with the correct medieval
place-name or Anglo-Saxon kenning. The editors’ work serves the reader well,
and they augment their faithful version with extremely helpful and fascinating
endnotes, which will undoubtedly create very long reading-lists for even the
most erudite of Borgesians.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;">Like almost all of the blind Borges’
talks, these twenty-five lectures were given without notes and simply followed
the internal logic of Borges’ own curiosity that day. The first seven classes focus on
the origins of English literature, starting with the Anglo-Saxons and </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Beowulf</i><span style="line-height: 200%;">
and progressing through Caedmon and the Christian poets and then to the
Icelandic sagas and the Battle of Hastings. Given Borges’ special interest in
Old English and Old Norse, these lectures are simply thrilling in their
illumination of what Borges loves about each subject. He was possibly as great
a talker as he was a writer, and his explications swerve from peak to peak and
then swoop in to pause upon all the most poignant and mind-bending moments of
literature and language and history, and all with a density of specific detail and
reference that would outshine any composed narrative by any other imaginable
scholar. Imagine Noam Chomsky as an epic poet singing a song of songs, and you
have an idea.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;">After leaving King Harold dead on
the battlefield with his discarded lover Edith Swaneshals (Edith “Swanneck”)
searching to identify his body, Borges incomprehensibly leaps in a few swift
paragraphs to Samuel Johnson, resuming the course with </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Rasselas</i><span style="line-height: 200%;"> and
slowly making his way in the subsequent lectures from the late eighteenth
century to around the time of his own birth in 1899. It’s not at all clear why
Borges would skip the three greatest writers in the English language—Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Milton, each of whom he loved profoundly and could </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">explore and unfold </span><span style="line-height: 200%;">to no end—let alone pass over the flowering of the English Renaissance and the
Metaphysical Poets and the first English novelists, but such is the whim of a
great mind. Perhaps some other professor covered those years.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EKMKQI8GTKc/VAfGIKVx_iI/AAAAAAAAAwA/xWyI3_wXVNg/s1600/download.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-EKMKQI8GTKc/VAfGIKVx_iI/AAAAAAAAAwA/xWyI3_wXVNg/s1600/download.jpg" width="260" /></a></div>
<span style="line-height: 200%;">Through Borges’ vivid and
detail-filled lens, the reader encounters a Johnson and Boswell who are as rich
and as full of life and as inextricably linked as Don Quixote and Sancho Panza,
and then it’s on to the Romantics, who Borges treats as characters as much as
he does as authors. As with modern readers’ conception of Borges himself, every
author he talks about in these lectures has a unique drama that heightens the
pleasure of the works, with Borges giving frank and forgiving assessments of
each writer’s successes and failures, both artistic and personal. Coleridge in
particular comes across as a lost soul, but Borges lovingly focuses on his few
magical early works, leaving an impression on the reader that’s nearly as sharp
and as affecting as the poems themselves.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;">The book bogs down a bit in the last
third, however, with ten of the twenty-five lectures dedicated to the
Victorians—and with five of those spent on just two of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Borges’ close readings offer sparkling observations, but as he gets closer and
closer to these minor writers’ work, the deep focus seems aimed in a direction
that misses many much more profound riches. With Borges casually examining
every intricate aspect of English literature that his mind comes across, these
lectures could have gone in any direction, and here the reader wishes for that
focus to have passed its eye across </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Paradise Lost </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">or </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Gulliver’s
Travels </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">instead. Being born in 1899, the seemingly eternal Borges is here
locked in his era, which itself is a lesson in literature. Even more than </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Seven
Nights </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">and </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">This Craft of Verse</i><span style="line-height: 200%;">, the lectures in </span><i style="line-height: 200%;">Professor Borges </i><span style="line-height: 200%;">give
us the clearest picture yet of the man in his own words, because here he’s at
his most deliberate and generous and lovingly idiosyncratic.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span lang="EN">– David Wiley<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span lang="EN"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN"><br /></span></div>
David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-79071143008651244652013-06-28T22:15:00.000-05:002015-11-21T02:47:18.725-06:00Thomas Heise’s Moth; or how I came to be with you again<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<br />
<h2>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b>A Review of Thomas Heise</b><b>’s</b><br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moth-how-came-you-again/dp/193674757X" target="_blank">Moth; or how I came to be with you again</a></i></b></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b></div>
</h2>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<b><br /></b>
<b>Originally p</b><b><b>ublished in the Minneapolis <i><a href="http://www.startribune.com/entertainment/books/213386731.html" target="_blank">StarTribune </a></i>on June 28th, 2013</b></b></div>
<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><br /></b>
<b><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moth-how-came-you-again/dp/193674757X" target="_blank">Moth; or how I came to be with you again</a></i></b><br />
<b>Thomas Heise</b><br />
<b>Sarabande Books ($15.95)</b><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
Poet and academic critic Thomas
Heise’s new novel, <i>Moth; or how to be
with you again</i>, follows an idiosyncratic and deeply self-involved aesthetic
program that could easily have led it far astray, but instead the book reads
like a dream. Composed in densely lyrical sections of two to six pages, <i>Moth</i> flutters through the narrator’s
life and memory to impart a highly imagistic vision of his intermingling past
and present. The novel’s exoskeleton is spare, with little definite information
about who the narrator is or what quotidian elements make up his life, focusing
instead on his ever-unfolding interior existence, employing a shimmering web of
words to weave together the disparate aspects of his memories and reflections.</div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">As the book
progresses, the reader slowly gleans a few facts about the narrator’s parents,
about his childhood abandonment and subsequent time in an orphanage, and about
his difficulty connecting to life as an adult, but the real substance of the
novel is in the texture of the words themselves. Heise has a gift for creating
an airy, floating sense in the reader that defers meanings and expectations
while at the same time making each line as clear and palpable and memorable as
possible. Heise’s imagery is extremely precise, and his language is sharp and
tactile, offering much for the reader to absorb and creating an interior logic
that feels as satisfying as any concrete narrative.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">While there’s
not much in terms of plot for the reader to tease out or piece together, the
book’s design itself yields rich pleasures to unfold and decode. The various
sections all utilize different sorts of imagery and narrative strategies and
densities of language, and at first these differences simply seem to follow the
arbitrary, wandering path of each section’s flutterings, but as section follows
section, symmetries begin to come clear. Many of the sections are headed with a
place-name and date that would ordinarily signal where and when the action
takes place but that here seems to have almost no bearing at all on the story.
Instead the headings draw lines of connectedness to other similarly structured
sections, creating an elegant game of pattern and repetition, as with a
lepidopterist tracing arrangements of mimicry on moths’ wings.</span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoBodyText" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: justify;">
<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">For all the
pleasures that </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Moth</i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"> affords through
its innovation, its major missing element is the characterization and human
interaction that a more traditional narrative might provide. At a certain
point, the reader wishes for a conversation, or for a kiss. But at just 160
pages, </span><i style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;">Moth</i><span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"> fills its contents with
enough riches that it’s over long before it gets old. This is a book that will
haunt and intrigue and will almost certainly inspire an immediate second
reading.</span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 32px; text-indent: 0.5in;">—David Wiley</span><br />
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6289172949129607339.post-63535278733354622202013-06-01T05:08:00.000-05:002015-11-21T02:47:49.241-06:00Vladimir Nabokov’s The Tragedy of Mister Morn<div style="text-align: justify;">
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<b>A Review of Vladimir Nabokov’s</b><br />
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<b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Mister-Morn-Vintage-International/dp/0307950662/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406714231&sr=8-1&keywords=nabokov+tragedy" target="_blank"><i>The Tragedy of Mister Morn</i></a></b></div>
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<b>Originally p</b><b style="text-align: justify;"><b>ublished in the <a href="http://www.raintaxi.com/" target="_blank">Rain Taxi Review of Books</a>, Summer 2013</b></b></div>
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<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tragedy-Mister-Morn-Vintage-International/dp/0307950662/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1406714231&sr=8-1&keywords=nabokov+tragedy" target="_blank"><b><i>The Tragedy of Mister Morn</i></b></a></div>
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<b>Vladimir Nabokov</b></div>
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<b>Translated by Thomas Karshan and Anastasia Tolstoy</b></div>
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<b>Knopf ($26)</b></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IAGxxV5av5k/U9jB0Q0zm9I/AAAAAAAAAvY/ly7Q82axUkA/s1600/41Yi+Cm1GYL.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IAGxxV5av5k/U9jB0Q0zm9I/AAAAAAAAAvY/ly7Q82axUkA/s1600/41Yi+Cm1GYL.jpg" width="224" /></a></div>
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In a 1941 lecture entitled “The Tragedy of Tragedy,”
Vladimir Nabokov posed the idea to students at Stanford University that the theater
as we know it is severely hampered by nearly ineradicable conventions that
prevent any innovation that could lead to artistic transcendence: “The highest
achievements in poetry, prose, painting, showmanship are characterized by the
irrational and illogical, by that spirit of free will that snaps its rainbow
fingers in the face of smug causality. But where is the corresponding
development in drama?” He points to a few magical plays, notably <i>Hamlet </i>and
<i>King Lear</i>, which he calls “dream-tragedies” and which he declares are
the rare exceptions that can be named alongside “the numberless glories of
novels and short stories and verse produced during these last three or four
centuries.” Nabokov always opted for complete artistic freedom, which he found
and exploited to amazing effect in the modern novel, while his forays into the
theater achieved and encompassed significantly less. He also famously disliked
novels with a lot of dialogue, favoring in his own works to have the narrative
tunnel its way through outrageous labyrinths that no character could ever
actually say, and with drama being virtually <i>all</i> dialogue, it’s no
wonder that he found the theater encumbered by its own form.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Nabokov had two periods of
involvement with the Russian émigré theater, the first in the mid-1920s, when
he was still largely a poet and had not yet begun writing novels, and the
second in the late 1930s, soon before he abandoned Russian and began writing in
English. These were times of transition for Nabokov, and in each of the plays from
these periods the reader can sense a yearning for connection—to Russia, to his
fellow émigrés, to the audience, to the dramatic form itself—that’s much less
present in his other work. Only in his screenplay for the film version of </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Lolita
</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">does he seem the supremely confident artist enjoying his complete
faculties, even though the script is much more of a literary creation than it
is a feasible dramatic work (which may be why director Stanley Kubrick
completely ignored it, simply using Nabokov’s name as the screenwriter to add
prestige to the film). Nabokov the playwright is always surprisingly
self-conscious and gimmicky, and this tentativeness may be why he only allowed
one of his plays to be translated into English during his lifetime: the 1938
political farce </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Waltz Invention</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, which was translated in 1966 by
Nabokov’s son, Dmitri. Seven years after Nabokov’s death Dmitri translated a
collection of four plays entitled </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Man from the USSR and Other Plays</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,
leaving only a few early plays untranslated, most notably the five-act verse
drama </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Tragedy of Mister Morn</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, which only exists in incomplete form
in two slightly different copies. Leaving almost no Nabokov unpublished,
however, Knopf has finally edited and released this missing work in English,
lacunae and all.</span></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dSGXCBB7jWU/U9jD9djcOZI/AAAAAAAAAvk/-7XsKoDOFSA/s1600/Young-Nabokov1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dSGXCBB7jWU/U9jD9djcOZI/AAAAAAAAAvk/-7XsKoDOFSA/s1600/Young-Nabokov1.jpg" width="254" /></a></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Written in the winter of 1923/4,
when Nabokov was only twenty-four, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Tragedy of Mister Morn</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> finds
Nabokov at his most mimetic. Channeling Shakespeare almost shamelessly, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The
Tragedy of Mister Morn</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> is a semi-fantastical political drama in which the
personal machinations of a few warped individuals play out on the stage of an
unnamed and idealized kingdom. Morn is a mysterious and benevolent monarch who
rules behind a mask and mixes with his subjects as an ordinary man, and Tremens
is a brutal revolutionary who yearns much more for destruction than for
positive change, and when Morn falls into a not very believable dispute with
Ganus, another would-be revolutionary, over his wife, Midia, the stage is set
for Tremens to strike. Written in a much stricter iambic pentameter than
Shakespeare ever employed (and translated into loose and readable five-stress
lines by Anastasia Tolstoy and Thomas Karshan), the play’s five acts work
around the clock to emulate their Shakespearean model. Each interaction is a
chance for Nabokov’s characters to mouth soul-stirring conceits, and even the
most walk-on characters have something profound to say about the human
condition. At the end of Act II, Scene I, a servant cleaning up after the other
characters ends his eleven-line mumblings with these thoughts on aging:</span></div>
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O,
how my bones ache, how they ache! Cook<o:p></o:p></div>
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shoved
some ointment at me,—says, try it,<o:p></o:p></div>
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rub
some on . . . Try arguing . . . That’s all I need . . .<o:p></o:p></div>
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Old
age isn’t some ugly mug daubed on<o:p></o:p></div>
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a
fence, you can’t just paint over it.<o:p></o:p></div>
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There are some lovely observations jammed into these characters’
speeches, but Nabokov often forces the profundity to the point of accidental
comedy. His stagy masques also amuse with their overt playness, and while his
Shakespearean referents (especially <i>Othello</i>) are very well woven into
the drama, he’s just way too overawed by his British master, which is all to be
expected in a young and inexperienced playwright trying to find his voice.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Prefiguring the
personal/political nightmares of his later novels </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Invitation to a Beheading</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">,
</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Bend Sinister</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, and </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Pale Fire</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Tragedy of Mister Morn </i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">finds
Nabokov already transforming his lost Russia into a dreamscape overcome by
madness. While Morn’s benevolence may be a bit too facile and uncomplicated for
real tragedy, and with Tremens’s brutal nihilism strangely echoing the
dismissive way that Dostoyevsky portrays Raskolnikov’s revolutionary ideas in </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Crime
and Punishment </i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">(a comparison that Nabokov would doubtless reject outright),
</span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The Tragedy of Mister Morn</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> doesn’t serve as a very sophisticated
examination of power, but like the </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Lolita </i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">screenplay, it is a very good
piece of writing. Like Iago, Tremens has no motive for his atrocities other
than criminal mischief, and while this works less for Nabokov than it does for
Shakespeare, the density and lyricism of Nabokov’s verse work far better here
than it does in his lyric poetry. Nabokov needed a larger and more
forward-moving vehicle for his poetic ideas at the time, and because he
idolized Shakespeare so much, verse-drama was a natural progression for him.
Thankfully he soon moved on to the novel, which in his fifty-year career he
took to a nearly unmatched poetic level.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN" style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">—David Wiley</span><br />
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David Wileyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17417896923365365201noreply@blogger.com0