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“Now let us issue from the darkness of solitude,” said Louis. “Now let us say, brutally and directly, what is in our minds,” said Neville. “Our isolation, our preparation, is over. The furtive days of secrecy and hiding, the revelations on staircases, moments of terror and ecstasy.” As a story of friendship, especially between [...] Philosophy professor Oscar Amalfitano, unlike the critics of the first volume of 2666, is for me a highly sympathetic character. The first thing to note about The Part About Amalfitano is that it very quickly seems not to be about Amalfitano at all, but about his wife and her leaving him and their daughter. [...] Vladimir Nabokov’s book on Nikolai Gogol is my favorite sort of thing: one writer I love writing about another writer we both love. And I loved it. Nabokov is a joy to read, period, and his insights about Gogol were helpful in articulating the swirling mess of thoughts I had about him. But if [...] What could be better than a three-day weekend? A three-day weekend entirely devoted to books, of course, and mine is not—not quite. February might not be spring but cabin fever has gotten the better of me and I oscillate between hours spent paralyzed in my “reading chair” with Russians and Roberto Bolaño and frenzies [...] Reading Orlando after On Being Ill as I did, it was illness that I noticed—in a novel where I didn’t much expect it, in fact. After all, when this is the biography of a character who lives for three centuries, one doesn’t expect him to spend much time ill—and what time is there for [...] Last week, 2666 project contributor Maria Bustillos wrote about the passage in The Part About the Critics where a taxi driver is badly beaten. The scene is jarring. Three sophisticated, middle-class university professors are one moment in a taxi on their way home from a fancy restaurant; the next moment they are involved in [...] From Dylan Suher’s review of Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence at The Front Table: Orhan Pamuk’s latest novel, The Museum of Innocence, has three epigraphs. His last major work of fiction, Snow, has four epigraphs. His novel My Name Is Red also has three epigraphs. Pamuk’s love of epigraphs is significant; they are [...] Read my most recent review for The Front Table, of Swell by Ioanna Karystiani. After “The Story of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich,” The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol moves its setting from the Ukraine to St. Petersburg and with the spatial change comes a change in tone, or ambience, or something. Are the stories more Russian? Is it that they are still more concerned with [...] It’s February, and I already feel a bit less like I’m hibernating. After reading The Tales of Belkin I immediately felt the urge to go on with more Russian literature, an area I’m light on for no good reason. Seems like a good mini-theme for part of February, no? I’ve also finished up The [...] |
My Personal Canon (ongoing project) |
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