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This is my translation. El tunel, Ernesto Sabato (Seix Barral, 1948):
"My theory," he explained, "is as follows: in the 20th century, the political novel represents what the chivalry novel did in Cervantes’s time. Moreover: I think you could make something equivalent to Don Quixote: a satire of political novels. Imagine an individual who has passed his life reading political novels and has become crazy with the belief that the world functions like a novel by Nicholas Blake or Ellery Queen. Imagine that at length this poor . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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From Jorge Luis Borges’s "Prologue" to The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, trans. Ruth L.C. Simms (University of Texas Press, 1964; republished by NYRB Classics, 2003):
There are pages, there are chapters in Marcel Proust that are unacceptable as inventions, and we unwittingly resign ourselves to them as we resign ourselves to the insipidity and the emptiness of each day. The adventure story, on the other hand, does not propose to transcribe reality: it is an artificial object, no part of which lacks justification. It . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Edith Wharton, A Backward Glance, (London, 1972), p. 173 as quoted in Wayne Booth, A Rhetoric of Irony, (Chicago, 1974) p. 13:
Perhaps it was our common sense of fun that first brought about our understanding. The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights. I have had good friends between whom and myself that bond was lacking, but . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Via Alex Ross:
Al Pacino on the subject of playing Michael Corleone in The Godfather: "…the thing that I was after was to create some kind of enigma…. You see Michael in some of those scenes wrapped up in a kind of trance, as if his mind were completely filled with thoughts; that’s what I was doing. I was actually listening to Stravinsky on the set, so I’d have that look."
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Excerpted from the Harper’s Index from the June 2007 issue of Harper’s.
Minimum number of different books sold in the U.S. last year, as tracked by Nielsen BookScan: 1,446,000
Number of these that sold fewer than 99 copies: 1,123,000
Number that sold more than 100,000: 483
The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross (FSG, 2007). pg. 246.
Besieged Leningrad heard the symphony on August 9, 1942, under the most dramatic circumstances imaginable. The score was flown in by military aircraft in June, and a severely . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Leonid Grossman, as quoted in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. M.M. Bakhtin (University of Minnesota, 1984), pp. 41-2:
Dostoevsky himself pointed out this compositional vehicle [of a musical type--M.B.] and once drew an analogy between his structural system and the musical theory of "modulations" or counter-positions. He was writing at the time a short novel of three chapters, each with a different content, but internally unified. The first chapter was a monologue, polemical, and philosophical; the second was a dramatic episode, which prepared the way for the catastrophic . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Lectures on Literature, Vladimir Nabokov (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1982), pg. 217:
One essential difference exists between the Proustian and the Joycean methods of approaching their characters. Joyce takes a complete and absolute character, od-known, Joyce-known, then breaks it up into fragments and scatters these fragments over the space-time of his book. The good rereader gathers these puzzle pieces and gradually puts them together. On the other hand, Proust contends that a character, a personality, is never known as an absolute but always as a comparative one. He does . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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The Irresponsible Self by James Wood (Picador, 2005), pg. 27:
It is a shame that many readers never get to [Don Quixote's] stupendous second book, which is both funnier and more affecting than its first. A rough analysis of the action in the second book might go like this: Jesus Christ is wandering around first-century Palestine trying to convince people that he is the true Messiah. it is a difficult task, because John the Baptist, instead of preparing the way for the Messiah, has claimed that he is . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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The Rhetoric of Fiction, Wayne Booth, footnote to page 301:
Finnegans Wake (Compass Books ed., 1959), pp. 534, 542. The novel was first published in 1939, though fragments of Work in Progress appeared throughout the preceding decade. If I dropped the point here I could no doubt leave some readers convinced that I have read Finnegans Wake. But I must confess that I have not; I do read in it, from time to time, with great delight until boredom sets in. Will someone, by the way, someone who . . . continue reading, and add your comments
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it. |
A Note on Links
More Essays by Milan
Speaking of Distraction
The Shallows by Nicholas Carr
Another Review of The Novel: An Alternative History
The Orange Eats Creeps
The Unconsoled and the Annihilation of Plot
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
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