Reviews and News:
How Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment remade the novel: “If anything, Crime and Punishment was more notable as the favoured anti-model, a how-not-to guide, for the novel’s leading theorists and practitioners. James said he was unable to finish it. Conrad wrote a novel-length riposte – Under Western Eyes. Why? The handling of point of view was taken as an index of a writer’s literary credentials, as defined by James, whose call for a balance between form and reality, life and art, pattern and freedom, was reflected in the phrase ‘a deep-breathing economy’. Dostoevsky’s novels, by contrast, were what James called ‘fluid puddings’, all life, all reality, and yet worthless as such without the countervailing forces of ‘composition’ and ‘architecture’. A description of Dostoevsky’s writing was offered as a straightforward takedown, when in fact he simply possessed different priorities. Crime and Punishment, for all the clockwork of its plotting, is an assertively rugged piece of work, unabashed in the pursuit of the big moments. A torrent of telling, its barely papered-over coincidences (‘How strange this was!’) and confessedly turgid speeches (‘Raskolnikov had long been wanting to leave’) constitute a snubbed nose to the ideals of proportion and refinement.”
Albert Camus’s correspondence with one Maria Casarès show us “a man we thought we knew, but find we did not, and a woman most of us never knew, and are richer now that we do.”
Are notes on a 16th-century source text for Hamlet Shakespeare’s own?
Jordan Peterson talks to The Weekly Standard: “That’s what culture does. Real culture does that. It gives you images and languages to understand and express the universality and particularity of your individual experience.”
Will Sweden be the first country to go cashless?
Revisiting Paris’s Left Bank: “For a book that is crammed with adulteries, alcoholism, betrayals, broken friendships, deportations, deprivation, drug addiction, executions, humiliation, illicit abortions, imprisonment, murder, Nazi atrocities, starvation, torture chambers (on the avenue Hoche, passers-by could hear the screams coming up from the cellars’ air vents), treason and worse, Agnès Poirier’s Left Bank is a remarkably exhilarating read.”
David L Ulin on Denis Johnson writing under the shadow of death: “All the deaths, all the ghosts and manifestations, the assertions of the dying—what do they mean, how are they heightened, when the teller, too, is dying, if not exactly in the context of the tale? This is a tricky path to travel and it returns us to the idea of The Largesse of the Sea Maiden as last thing, a reminder of its author’s mortality, if not exactly (or entirely) an expression of such.”
Essay of the Day:
In The Claremont Review of Books, Joseph Epstein extols the frivolity of P. G. Wodehouse:
‘The object of all good literature,’ thinks Sue Brown, a chorus girl and a character in P.G. Wodehouse’s novel Summer Lightning, ‘is to purge the soul of its petty troubles.’ Something to it, quite a bit actually, though Céline, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, and a number of other modern writers who pass for serious would strenuously have disagreed. The writing of P.G. Wodehouse—the author of some 95 books of fiction and three of memoir, recently republished in a handsome hardbound collection by Everyman’s Library in London and The Overlook Press in New York—was not merely unserious but positively anti-serious, and therein lay much of his considerable charm.
“As for that anti-seriousness, who other than Wodehouse would describe a figure in one of his novels by saying that ‘if he had been a character in a Russian novel, he would have gone and hanged himself in a barn?’ Who but Wodehouse could mock the moral tradition of the English novel in a single phrase by writing in a novel of his own of ‘one of those unfortunate misunderstandings that are so apt to sunder hearts, the sort of thing that Thomas Hardy used to write about?’ Who but he, through the creation in his novel Leave it to Psmith of a poet named Ralston McTodd, would find humor in the hopeless obscurity of much modern poetry? Only Wodehouse would have the always-to-be trusted Jeeves instruct Bertie Wooster about Nietzsche: ‘He is fundamentally unsound, sir.’ Or have Bertie disqualify a young woman because after 16 sets of tennis and a round of golf she expected one in the evening ‘to take an intelligent interest in Freud.’ Who but Wodehouse would say about a character whom he clearly doesn’t admire that he ‘was an earnest young man with political ambitions given, when not slamming [tennis balls] over the net, to reading white papers and studying social conditions’—thus flicking off politics as a time-wasting, if not altogether fatuous, preoccupation. At a lower level of anti-seriousness, Wodehouse amusingly mocked crime fiction, crossword puzzles, and antique collecting.”
Photo: Mammatus cloud
Poem: Anthony Madrid, “Poem” (HT: A. M. Juster)
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