Marco Koskas’s latest novel, which he published himself on Amazon, has been longlisted for the Prix Renaudot in France. French booksellers are up in arms. The choice not only “does a disservice to the author himself”—which is news to Koskas, I’m sure—it threatens their livelihood. “Do they want us to pay our most ferocious competitor? To give him money so he can kill us?” a bookseller asked. Dear me. The novel itself sounds interesting. It’s about contemporary Jews who leave France because of antisemitism to settle in Israel.
A. M. Juster reviews a recent translation of The Aeneid: “Ferry’s Aeneid has many strengths. He avoids over-the-top images not fairly located in the text, and sticks close to the prose translations he cites in his introductory comments. He also tries to include everything of significance in the original, avoiding egregious cuts made to improve the aesthetics of a line or the narrative flow. The language and syntax are generally straightforward, and it is easy to imagine using this translation in a classroom. Presumably toward that end, the University of Chicago Press includes a useful ‘The World of the Aeneid’ map on the inside covers of the book. Finally, there are sections, particularly in the conversations and Book VI’s trip to the underworld, where Ferry’s talents mesh well with Virgil’s powerful language. Unfortunately, the work does not consistently live up to the standard Ferry has established for himself over more than six decades of increasingly impressive work. The most surprising shortcoming is that his translation lacks the precise line breaks of his earlier work. More than a hundred times he ends a line with ‘and’—the weakest word possible. He also ends hundreds of lines by splitting prepositional, adjectival, and verb phrases: to / Compose; in / Her; for / Their; they / Move; with / The; with / a; dear / Mother’s. There is no obvious reason why these lines should consistently end so awkwardly.”
Tired of your job and bored with America? There’s an English bookstore in Florence for sale. It’s located “on the ground floor of a beautiful, historic, well-maintained building in the very center of Florence—literally in the shadow of the Duomo.” Sounds delightful.
Colleges regularly require incoming freshmen to participate in a First-Year Experience program. These usually begin with “a common read” and include various seminars and activities. The point, many parents are told, is to help incoming students succeed at college and build community. In reality, John Tierney writes, they are light on college success and heavy on indoctrination: “Seventy percent of the common reads are nonfiction, much of it mediocre. If the theme is gender, students will read Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist, or Janet Mock’s transgender memoir, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More, instead of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. As the NAS report sums up, the common-read genre is not introducing students to great literature, but then, that’s not the point. To an ambitious first-year administrator, assigning the common read to freshmen is just the beginning. The book’s message and other progressive themes must be amplified in ‘cocurricular programming’ that fosters ‘peer-to-peer dialogue’ and ‘civic engagement’ through a ‘social-justice-based learning experience,’ to quote from the PowerPoint presentations in San Antonio.”
Revisiting the life and work of Maeve Brennan: “At the New Yorker, with her ‘longshoreman’s mouth’ and ‘tongue that could clip a hedge’, she made her opinions known. Daphne du Maurier was ‘witless’, Jean Stafford a ‘bête noire’. Brennan immediately set her sights on grander things than the fashion notes and short reviews she’d been hired to write. In 1952, her first story appeared; two years later, she had a piece in ‘The Talk of the Town’, the section of the magazine over which Shawn kept the tightest of reins. Brennan’s male colleagues, including Addams, Joseph Mitchell and Brendan Gill (all of them her lovers at one time or another), joked that she had served her apprenticeship in hemlines. But it was the ability to spot the difference between ‘beige’ and ‘bone’ at fifty yards that made her a natural diarist. John Updike said her ‘Talk of the Town’ pieces ‘helped put New York back into the New Yorker’.”
On Jane Austen’s juvenilia: “Like many of Austen’s youthful writings, The Beautifull Cassandra experiments vigorously with literary conventions—with dedication, with stock diction, characters, and incidents, with sentence structure, and, of course most strikingly, with chapter length. Indeed virtually every sentence plays parodically upon our expectations concerning what we’re reading.”
David Bomberg’s modernism: “Bomberg’s work, first deemed too radical by many established critics of the time, would later gain the reputation of being too conservative. Bomberg’s entire career can seem like a litany of failure. Labeled an ‘English Cubist’ or ‘Jewish Futurist,’ he exhibited with Britain’s home-grown modernists, the Vorticists, but never joined a movement. His shifts in style baffled critics, he was considered an outsider in his own country, and his attempts to serve as an official war artist were largely rejected. He died in obscurity. Sixty years after Bomberg’s death, however, he is gaining recognition as one of Britain’s most important twentieth-century artists.”
Essay of the Day:
In Modern Age, Scott Beauchamp considers Russell Kirk’s metaphysical horror:
“Lovecraft’s wholly materialistic fiction, his disgust at being fettered by the vicissitudes of the natural world, is made radiant with the knowledge that, though things exist, their existence is entirely arbitrary. He gets us coming and going, in other words. He’s disgusted by the sheer fact of existence, and simultaneously horrified that it carries no meaning beyond itself. This is the pure nihilism of gore and the animating pathos of films such as Hostel and Saw.
“When it comes to this kind of horror, human institutions are merely a thin film protecting us from the truly revolting nature of life. Materialist horror operates by peeling back the pathetically flimsy protections of culture to reveal the naked and vast horror of what it considers pure existence. The horror itself results from life being completely denuded of its mystery, or perhaps from finding mystery to be an inadequate illusion we use to spare ourselves from the bare facts of existence…
“Opposing The Thing, the bare fact, is The Presence. Kirk’s fiction is rich with it. Though his output was relatively modest, comprising in total some twenty-two stories along with three novels that were written predominantly in short bursts throughout the ’60s and ’70s, Kirk’s fiction burns even more incandescently for its brevity and focus. Collected and recollected in books such as Ancestral Shadows and The Surly Sullen Bell, Kirk’s fiction isn’t always easy to acquire. Special orders and calls to book dealers are occasionally necessary for a few of the more rare collections, yet he always remains timely: the dynamics of The Presence being echoed in both the subject matter of the works themselves and their occasionally enigmatic physical existence, suggesting a constant interplay between the ephemeral and eternal.
“Kirk’s fiction is suffused with The Presence. You find it sensed by both the older man and younger boy in ‘An Encounter by Mortstone Pond.’ The Presence haunts Stoneburner in ‘What Shadows We Pursue.’ We’re almost tricked into thinking the eponymous Presence has betrayed itself by materializing in ‘Uncle Isaiah.’ Old House of Fear is absolutely permeated with Presence. But what is it? It might help to think of The Presence as the exact inverse of The Thing. If The Thing is horrible because it exists, and because it implies a nihilistic void in which the material world is all that exists, then The Presence is summarized by T. E. Hulme’s phrase ‘Nothing suggests itself.’ The Presence, a sense of something that can’t quite be acquired by the senses, intimates a metaphysical order lying outside the material world that also gives that world coherence.”
Photo: Bukovina
Poem: Robert W. Crawford, “The Hawks in the Leaves”
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