Did I want to come to her apartment and listen to records? Another flare lighted her face; it was need, not hate, but it was as strong as the hate had been. I was very uncomfortable now, and felt that she was too. But her need flared unabated, like a pounding drum that pulls you along to its beat and overrules your own emotions. I said yes, I would drop by her apartment at eight o'clock the next evening.
...But I saw there in the kitchen with my boyfriend, eating cheesecake from a tin and watching his huge black-and-white TV until I sank into a torpor. From there, the German woman's loud drum was hard to hear. I pictured sitting with her on a nice pillow in front of her stereo. Lots of records would be scattered about - she would have a huge selection. She would go through them with her long manicured hands and then put one on and listen to it dully, like she couldn't hear. Just picturing it made me feel heavy and tired. The gray figures running around on the TV screen made me feel heavy and tire too, but in a comforting way. Eight o'clock came and I thought I'd sit in my heavy comfort just ten minutes more and then go. At 8:30 I pictured her sitting alone, going through her records, need and hate surging under her stiff face. She would still be waiting for me to arrive. By nine o'clock, I realized I wouldn't go. I felt bad - I felt like I was deserting a person who was sick or starving. But I still didn't go.
About six months later, I saw her on the street again. I was dressed better then; I'd streaked my blond hair platinum and wore platform shoes Maybe that's why the German woman didn't recognize me, or maybe she pretended not to see me, or maybe she didn't see me. She didn't seem to see anything. She was walking alone, her arms wrapped around her torso. Her clothes were ill-kempt and didn't fit her right because she had lost a lot of weight. Her eyes were hollow and she stared fixedly before her, as if she were walking down an empty corridor. I wanted to stop her, but I didn't know what to say.
I had seen loneliness before that and had felt it, too. But I had never seen or felt it so raw. Thirty years later, I still remember it. Only now I am not bewildered. Now I understand that a person can be wild with loneliness...
My music was more private, and I didn't play it loudly. I crouched down by it, sucking it into my ears...
...Downstairs, my father watched TV or lstened to his music while my mother did the housework or drew paper clothes for the cardboard paper dolls she still made for us, even though we no longer played with them. I loved them like you love your hand or your liver, without thinking about it or even being able to see it. But my music made that fleshly love feel dull and dumb, deep, slow, and heavy as stone. Come, said the music, to joy and speed and secret endlessness, where everything tumbles together and attachments are not made of sad flesh.
I didn't know it, but my father was doing the same thing, sitting in his padded rocking chair, listening to opera or to music from World War II. Except he did not want tumbling or endlessness. He wanted more of the attachment I despised - he just didn't want it with us. My father had been too young to enlist when World War II started; his brother joined the army right away. When my dad was finally old enough to enlist in the navy, he sent his brother a picture of himself in his uniform with a Hawaiian girl on his lap; he wrote, "Interrogating the natives!" on the back. A week before the war ended, it was returned to my father with a letter saying his brother was dead. Thirty years later, he was a husband, father, and administrator in a national tax-office chain. But sometimes when I walked past him sitting in his chair, he would look at me as if I were the cat or a piece of furniture, while inside he searched for his brother...
He bounced a rubber ball on the pavement, caught it, and bounced it again. "I'm a pimp." His face was like lava turned into cold rock. But inside him, it was still running hot; you coudl smell it: pride, rage, and shame boiling and ready to spill out his cock and scald you.
...Hapiness shines on his dullard sadness and makes it scratch its head and blink with wonder.
...My mother came in wearing a pantsuit that was too short for her high heels. Her eyes looked like her leaping voice, and she walked like she was trying to go three ways at once.
Tech and telecom stocks tumbling again. Good year on that front at least: accounting scandals, fear of terrorism, current administration's economic policy, all battering nicely at the markets. Even Intel's sinking. I shorted it at forty and again at thiry; now it's under twenty. Feels like betting on gravity, or on death.
Fantastic freshness in the air up at the quarry. This autumn vigor that feels so like the energy of life, growth. Trees still a dusty, steely, end-of-summer green, but on a slope below me there was a single maple with half its leaf dome turned scarlet - splash! - like some trendsetter's bold new fashion statement; this year's embroidered shawl or silk pashmina.
This state of affairs continued for perhaps a year. I was aware that it was unhealthy, to say the least, but at the same time it seemed inconceivable that it could be otherwise. It had come about by a process of invicible logic. on e that I myself was complicit in, even if I hadn't initiated it, and for all its unwholesomeness, I recognized in its textures, its particular twists and turns, something that felt peculiarly me-like. I had created this strange, convoluted, existence, as a sea creature creates the shell peculiar to itself. The distinguishing feature of this particular shell - to pursue the analogy - turned out to be its steady strangulation of its inhabitant. By the time I was feed from it, I was more dead than alive.
There was a marked difference between the vanity of Adorno and that of Canetti. Canetti's was linked to his ambition to act as a categorical accuser and sole judge of the world. Of course the symbolical role that he was aspiring to, and perhaps already trying to furnish with sacerdotal and majestic dignity, escaped more accurate definition - being located in the no-man's-land between literature and philosophy, art, and religion, between severe criticism of the epoch and exalted life...This doesn't seem the language of a man who wishes to popularize literature.
After lunch Helene Weigel took me to one side for a private word. To welcome Brecht I had written a short article for one of the main Warsaw dailies, the German translation of which, as I now learned, had immediately been handed to Brecht at the railway station by a representative of the GDR embassy. He had, Helene Weigel said, like the article a lot. Small wonder, I thought to myself, as I had generously praised and lauded the visitor. Unfortunately, she went on, he could not receive anyone. But he would make an exception for me. Would I report to Room 93 at the Hotel Bristol at 5 p.m.? There I would be granted the interview I had asked for.There is another memorable episode of Ranicki and his wife being invited to a reception in 1973 honoring the publishing of his colleague Joachim Fest's biography of Hitler. At it, the clueless host greets them warmly and promptly introduces them to Albert Speer - sentenced to 20 years imprisonment at the Nuremberg trials for his collaboration with Hitler. Reich-Ranicki describes both the episode and his own response to it precisely-it's a bit chilling - but his analysis of his host's motives are humane and understanding - related without hysteria or sensationalism.
This was fine by me and I turned up on the dot. To my surprise I found an acquaintance of mine outside the door to Brecht's hotel room, a man who worked as a translator from German. I looked around and saw another acquaintance, a publisher, likewise waiting to be admitted. And somebody was already with Brecht - a theatrical producer. No doubt every one of us had been told that he alone would be received - and now we were queuing up. Eventually my turn came.
I stepped into the room and was amazed by what I saw. Brecht was sitting behind a talbe on which stood a large bowl - and in that bowl were things that simply did not exist in Warsaw in 1952 - oranges, bananas and grapes. Brecht had either brought the fruit with him from Berlin or the GDR embassy had arranged for it to be put there. He did not offer any of this fruit to his visitors.
These coveted delicacies, however, created a distance, a gulf, between him and his guests. Had he, in expectation of his visitors, deliberately left that bowl of fruit standing on the table of his hotel room? No, it was probably a coincidence. Yet the fact that it even occurred to me that he might have used the bananas and oranges as useful stage props was typical of the atmosphere that Brecht, deliberately or otherwise, invariably created. I had the impression that he was always acting.
His apparel also contributed to that impression. In Warsaw he wore the seemingly proletarian, strikingly simple dark-grey jacket that, it was rumoured, had been tailor-made for him from the best English cloth...
It is quite true that I have tried to concentrate as much power in my hands as I thought necessary - and this is true not only of my work on the paper. My participation in literary life during those years went far beyond Franfurter Allgemeine...
But permit me to ask: was this a good thing or a bad thing for literature? For whose benefit did I, for fifteen years, run this big department of Frankfurter Allgemeine? I imagined, and I still believe, that it was to the advantage of literature.
I worked from early morning till late at night - partly at the newspaper's office and partly at home.l I practically never had a free weekend; I only reluctantly, and then not in full, took the leave I was entitled to. I worked hard, enormously hard. Why did I? No one expected me to, let alone asked me to. Much of what I was doing I did not have to do myself; I could have delegated it. So why this great effort, this ceaseless hard work? For the sake of literature? Yes, certainly. Was it my ambition to continue the tradition of Jews in the history of German literary criticism in a leading post before the eyes of the public? Certainly. Did my passion have anything to do with my longing for a home, the home that I lacked and that I believed I had found in German literature? Yes - and perhaps to a great degree than I realized.
All these answers are correct, yet none of them quite hits the spot. If I am being honest, I must also admit that behind my workaholism, because that is what it was, there was nothing but the pleasure which my work on Frankfurter Allgemeine gave me from day to day. My hobby and my job, my passion and my profession, coincided completely.
But there is an entirely different factor that may have contributed to my success as a critic. At the risk of being accused of arrogance I must say here what I profoundly believe: literature is my awareness of life. That, I believe, emerges from all my views and judgements on writers and books, perhaps even from mistaken and erroneous ones. Ultimately it is this love of literature, this occasionally monstrous passion, that enables the critic to practise his profession, to discharge his duty. And sometimes it may well be just this love that makes the persona of the critic bearable, and in exceptional cases even attractive, to others. It cannot be repeated too often: without love of literature there can be no criticism.
He stands by the window, watching the sky that is like a mosaic pieced together from the broken shards of a thousand mirrors, each one tinted a different shade of gray. The winter sky of southeastern Alaska is a Talmud of gray, an inexhaustible commentary on a Torah of rain clouds and dying light. Uncle Hertz has always been the most competent, self-assured man Landsman knows, neat as an origami airplane, a quick paper needle folded with precision, impervious to turbulence. Accurate, methodical, dispassionate.. There were always hints of shadow, or irrationality and violence, but they were contained behind the wall of Hertz's mysterious Indian adventures, hidden on the far side of the Line, covered over by him with the careful backward kicks of an animal concealing its spoor. But now a memory surfaces in Landsman from the days following his father's death, of Uncle Hertz sitting crumpled like a wad of tissue in a corner of the kitchen on Adler Street, Shirttails hanging, no order to his hair, shirt misbuttoned, the dwindling contents of a bottle of slivovitz on the kitchen table beside him marking like a barometer the plummeting atmosphere of his grief.
Alison was a woman who seemed to fill a room, even when she wasn't in it. She was of an unfeasible size, with plump creamy shoulders, rounded calves, thighs and hips that overflowed her chair; she was soft as an Edwardian, opulent as a showgirl, and when she moved you could hear (though she did not wear them) the rustle of plumes and silks. In a small space, she seemed to use up more than her share of the oxygen; in return her skin breathed out moist perfumes, like a giant tropical flower. When you came into a room she'd left - her bedroom, her hotel room, her dressing room backstage - you felt her as a presence, a trail. Alison had gone, but you would see a chemical mist of hairspray falling through the bright air. On the floor would be a line of talcum powder, her scent - Je Reviens - would linger in curtain fabric, in cushions and in the weave of towels. When she headed for a spirit encounter, her path was charged, electric; and when her body was out on stage, her face - cheeks glowing, eyes alight - seemed to float still in the dressing-room mirror.
In the centre of the room Colette stooped, picked up Al's shoes. For a moment she disappeared from her own view. When her face bobbed back into sight in the mirror, she was almost relieved. What's wrong with me? she thought. When I'm gone I leave no trace. Perfume doesn't last on my skin. I barely sweat. My feet don't indent the carpet.
'It's true,' Alison said. 'It's as if you wipe out the signs of yourself as you go. Like a robot housekeeper. You polish your own fingerprints away.'
...Well, when you think about it, their lives [famous people's] are always the same, they never change, they appear, they talk, they show themselves off, they smile for the photographers, they're always arriving or departing, Just like us, Not like me, Like you and me and everyone, we all show ourselves off in various places, we talk, we leave our homes and come back, sometimes we even smile, the difference is that no one takes any notice of us, We can't all be famous, Just as well, imagine if your collection were as big as the Central Registry, It would have to be even bigger, the Central Registry only wants to know when we're born and when we die, and that's about it, Whether we marry, get divorced, widowed or remarried, the Central Registry has absolutely no interest in finding out if we were happy or unhappy while all that was going on, Happiness and unhappiness are just like famous people, they come and they go, the worst thing about the Central Registry is that they're not interested in what we're like, for them we're just a piece of paper with a few names and dates on it...
all of us are capable only of those improvisations we make in response to our circumstances - some of which work out, some of which do not, most of which end in ambiguity, in, as we might say, mixed reviews...
I thought what a terrible thing I had done; not the political aspect of it, because maybe that was correct; bit it didn't matter now, correct or not; all that mattered was the human side of the thing;...I felt no political cause was worth hurting any other human for. What good deeds were stimulated by what I'd done? What villains exposed? How is the world better for what I did? It had just been a game of power and influence, and I'd been taken in and twisted from my true self.
I don't want to be reductive about his politics. Although you and I might feel he made a mistake, neither you nor I was around in that period. And although you and I might think we would not have made that mistake, we didn't have to make that choice.This is a marvelously insightful and sensitive statement and it is not surprising it came from an actor because it is so descriptive of what it means to really get inside someone's skin and walk around in it. It is the way you have to contemplate the act of a person before you can play him.
Direction was not "what the Group director seem to think it is, a matter of coaching actors. It is turning psychological events into behavior, inner events into visible, external patterns of life on stage."
Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes's jet black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest mid-summer morning, and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage staircase, against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale, that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool, while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot everywhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty, and always shut, unless coerced. This accounts for the phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.
Out of three thousand mothers who delivered babies at the hospital where Semmelweis worked, six hundred or more died of the disease each year - a horrifying 20 percent maternal death rate. Of mothers delivering at home, only 1 percent died. Semmelweis concluded that doctors themselves were carrying the disease between patients, and he mandated that every doctor and nurse on his ward scrub with a nail brush and chlorine between patients. The puerperal death rate immediately fell to 1 percent - incontrovertible proof, it would seem, that he was right. Yet elsewhere, doctors' practices did not change. Some colleagues were even offended by his claims; in was impossible to them that doctors could be killing their patients. Far from being hailed, Semmelweis was ultimately dismissed from his job.
It is unsettling to find how little it takes to defeat success in medicine. You come as a professional equipped with expertise and technology. You do not imagine that a mere matter of etiquette could foil you. But the social dimension turns out to be as essential as the scientific...
It belies the promise that we make to patients: that they can count on the medical system to give them their very best chance. It also contradicts the belief nearly all of us have that we are doing our job as well as it can be done.
one of the first women to be admitted to the surgical residency at Columbia University college of Physicians and Surgeons in 1933...She wasn't just a talented violinist; she also made her own instruments. She began flying single-engine planes at the age of fifty-nine...
What is more likely to save [a life] - investment in laboratory science or in efforts to improve how existing medical care performs?
The answer most people would come to is investment in laboratory science - the search for a cure....To be sure, we need innovations to expand our knowledge and therapies...but we have not effectively used the abilities science has already given us. And we have not made remotely adequate efforts to change that. When we've made a science of performance, however - as we've seen with hand washing, wounded soldiers, child delivery - thousands of lives have been saved. Indeed, the scientific effort to improve performance in medicine - an effort that at present gets only a miniscule portion of scientific budgets - can arguably save more lives in the next decade than bench science...the stakes could not be higher.
Having a machine is not the cure; understanding the ordinary, mundane details that must go right for each particular problem is.
"And it is a remarkable example of the confusion into which the present age has fallen; of the obliteration of landmarks, the opening of floodgates, and the uprooting of distinctions," says Sir Leicester with stately gloom; "that I have been informed by Mr. Tulkinghorn that Mrs. Rouncewell's son has been invted to go into Parliament."
Miss Volumnia utters a little sharp scream.
"Yes, indeed," repeats Sir. Leicester. "Into Parliament."
"I never heard of such a thing! Good gracious, what is the man?" exclaims Volumnia.
"He is called, I believe - an - Ironmaster." Sir Leicester says it slowly, and with gravity and doubt, as not being sure but that he is called a Lead-mistress; or that the right word may be some other word expressive of some other relationship to some other metal.
Volumnia utters another little scream.
"In these busy times, when so many great undertaking are in progress, people like myself have so many workmen in so many places, that we are always on the flight"
Sir Leicester is content enough that the ironmaster should feel that there is no hurry there; there, in that ancient house, rooted in that quiet park, where the ivy and the moss have had time to mature, and the gnarled and warted elm, and the umbrageous oaks stand deep in the fern and leaves of a hundred years; and where the sun-dial on the terrace has dumbly recorded for centuries that Time, which was as much the property of every Dedlock - while he lasted - as the house and lands. Sir Leicester sits down in an easy chair, opposing his repose and that of Cheney Wold to the restless flights of ironmasters.
"Am I to understand, Mr. Rouncewell, and is my Lady to understand, sir, that you consider this young woman too good for Chesney Wold, or likely to be injured by remaining here?"
"Certainly not, Sir Leicester."
"I am glad to hear it." Sir Leicester very lofty indeed.
...
We have three daughters, besides this son of whom I have spoken; and being fortunately able to give them greater advantages than we had ourselves, we have educated them well; very well. It has been one of our great careas and pleasures to make them worthy of any station."
"All this is so frequent, Lady Dedlock, where I live, and among the class to which I belong, that what would be generally called unequal marriages are not of such rare occurrence with us as elsewhere. A son will sometimes make it known to his father that he has fallen in love, say with a young woman in the factory. The father, who once worked in a factory himself, will be a little disappointed at first, very possibly. It may be that he had other views for his son, 'I must be quite sure that you are in earnest here. This is a serious matter for both of you. Therefore, I shall have this girl educated for two years' ....This is such marvelous scene writing because it presents serious content - a battle between representative of two distinct classes. Dickens is chipping away at an important institution. It makes me continually wonder what will be said next. And it's really hilarious!
If at the expiration of that time, when she has so far profited by her advantages as that you may be upon a fair equality, you are both in the same mind, I will do my part to make you happy." I know of several cases such as I describe, my Lady, and I think they indicate to me my own course now."
Sir Leicester's magnificence explodes. Calmly, but terribly.
"Mr. Rouncewell," says Sir Leicester, with his right hand in the breast of his blue coat - the attitude of state in which he is painted in the gallery: "do you draw a parallel between Chesney Wold, and a - " here he resists a disposition to choke - "a factory.?"
'I need not reply, Sir Leicester, that the two places are very different; but for the purposes of this case, I think a parallel may be justly drawn between them."
Sir Leicester directs his majestic glance down one side of the long drawing-room, and up the other, before he can believe that he is awake."
"Are you aware, sir, that this young woman whom my Lady - my Lady - has placed near her person, was brought up at the village school outside the gates?"
"Sir Leicester, I am quite aware of it. A very good school it is, and handsomely supported by this family."
"Then, Mr. Rouncewell," returns Sir Leicester, "the application of what you have said is, to me, incomprehensible."
"Will it be more comprehensible, Sir Leicester, if I say," the ironmaster is reddening a little, "that I do not regard the village school as teaching everything desirable to be known by my son's wife."
I've begun Bleak House, actually I'm about half-way through, as the first book of my Summer Reading Challenge. I'm sort of re-reading it - I had to read it in an undergraduate course called Dickens and Dostoyevsky in which we had so much assigned - The Opium Eaters, Oliver Twist, Anna Karenina, Dostoyevsky's short stories, Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment AND Bleak House - that something had to go. I read half of Bleak House, which I couldn't stand at the time, and asked my friend Pam to tell me the rest of the story. If I recall right, I did at least as well as she on the final and she wasn't too happy about that. I think I'm just at the point of the story where I'm not re-reading anymore.
Now that it isn't an assignment, I am loving it! I'm struck by three things in Dickens' writing. Well more than three, but I’ll write about three:
1) He writes from passion. This man is driven by mission - he sees injustice and hypocrisy in the world and he writes about it. I can't think of a better reason to write. But he doesn't lecture us at all, he writes a great story so that we actual want to read on and find out what happens. I'm finding this one a page-turner.
“This boy,” says the constable, “although he’s repeatedly told to, won’t move on-”
“I’m always a moving on, sir,” cries the boy, wiping away his grimy tears with his arm. “I’ve always been a moving and a moving on, every since I was born. Where can I possible move to, sir, more nor I do move!”
“He won’t move on,” says the constable, calmly, with a slight professional hitch of his neck involving its better settlement in his stiff stock, “although he has been repeatedly cautioned, and therefore I am obliged to take him into custody. He’s as obstinate a young gonoph as I know. He WON’T move on.”
“O my eye! Where can I move to!” cries the boy, clutching quite desperately at his hair, and beating his bare feet upon the floor of Mr. Snagsby’s passage.
“Don’t you come none of that, or I shall make blessed short work of you!” says the constable, giving him a passionless shake. “My instructions are, that you are to move on. I have told you so five hundred times.”
“But where?” cries the boy.
“Well! Really, constable, you know,” says Mr. Snagsby wistfully, and coughing behind his hand his cough of great perplexity and doubt; “really, that does seem a question. Where, you know?”
“My instructions don’t go to that,” replies the constab le. “My instructions are that this boy is to move on.”
Do you hear, Jo? It is nothing to you or to any one else, that the great lights of the parliamentary sky have failed for some few years, in this business, to set you the example of moving on. The one grand recipe remains for you – the profound philosophical prescription – the be-all and the end-all of your strange existence upon earth. Move on! You are by no means to move off, Jo, for the great lights can’t at all agree about that. Move on!
Social criticism and humor and pathos are all wrapped up together in this one little scene. It sounds like bureaucracy hasn’t changed in 150 years.
2) The psychology of the characters and the story telling are complex and completely modern. I know some site Dickens as the ultimate caricaturist, but I think his best characters are boldly drawn but stop just short of caricatures, you really get them and can laugh out loud at their behavior.
Mr. Snagsby is sure he is being used by an influential lawyer, yet he can’t quite put his finger on how. His behavior becomes distracted. His wife, seeing her husband distracted is sure that her husband is keeping something from her:
To know that he is always keeping a secret from her; that he has, under all circumstances, to conceal and hold fast a tender double-tooth, which her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head; gives Mr. Snagsby, in her dentistical presence, much of the air of a dog who has a reservation from his mater, and will look anywhere rather than meet his eye.
Isn’t that marvelous – ‘dentistical!’ Mrs. Snagsby begins to go through her husband’s pockets, his letters, his safe, putting together a completely false story:
Mrs. Snagsby screws a watchful glance on Jo, as he is brought into the little drawing-room by Guster. He looks at Mr. Snagsby the moment he come in. Aha! Why does he look at Mr. Snagsby? Mr. Snagsby looks at him. Why should he do that, but that Mrs. Snagsby sees it all? Why else should that look pass between them; why else should Mr. Snagsby be confused, and cough a signal cough behind his hand? It is as clear as crystal that Mr. Snagsby is that boy’s father.
It proceeds from her husband being distracted to his having a secret, out-of-wedlock child, which bespeaks volumes on her character. What would a modern couples’ therapist say about this!
Sometime the character insights are profound. Richard is around 19 years-old. He has been made party of an interminable case stuck in the Court of Chancery for years and years that is at the center of this novel, because he is a descendent of one of the original plaintiffs. Knowing he will one day have money, he tries medicine, the law, and the army – beginning each with enthusiasm – knowing it will be the answer - but each one fails to live up to his expectations and he quits. His happy-go-lucky façade combined with his inability to “settle down” causes Jardynce and Esther much worry. Their heart-to-heart chats about this young man, whom they both love deeply, read like contemporary pillow-chat of 21st century parents.
It’s another modern touch that this novel presents the story not in one voice, but in two – a personable, omniscient narrator gives us a third-person view on much of the story – on London, on a tremendous number of characters who, by the half-way point in the book, are being brought closer and closer together. This tends to be the more humorous voice. But we learn most about the core of central characters – Esther,
3) Now, I mean this in a good way, by this novel reminds me of nothing so much as serialized television. It is driven by plot – i.e. you want to know what will happen next, it’s characters are oversized, it comments on the issues of the day – the corrupt Court of Chancery, the immense inequity of the way those with and without live their lives, and it’s massively entertaining. His books are assigned in school now and Dickens has achieved the ranking of “classic,” but really these are popular entertainment, and the parallels with our own day in every realm – from social injustice to the hypocrisy of human behavior – are striking.
Bernard MacLaverty's Cal - 150 pages that are as densely packed with passion and tension as any I've read in Dostoyevsky or Hardy. The 19-year-old title character lives in Northern Ireland. A Roman Catholic, he is hounded and physically attacked by the Protestant Orangemen. His friends have joined the IRA in response to the violence with which they are threatened. Cal finds the violence too much for him. The struggles of nations would not be important if they didn't effect the lives of individual people. This book is about the converging of conflicts political and personal - the political and religious struggles of an oppressed people, a first great passionate love, and the dilemmas of a sensitive and thoughtful teenager as he makes the moral choices that are going to shape his whole life. I felt deeply the greatness of these struggles as I read. Read my full rave here.
This book has everything - love, suspense, moral conflict, social criticism, psychological acuity, and crack writing. It is pitch-perfect on the a fast-paced, ostentatious, brutal beauty of Rome. Lambert's writing is rich with observations both interior and exterior that imbue character and place with clarity and instantaneous complexity. This novel, though entertaining to read, is an unambiguous critique of the moral hypocrisy that infects the powerful and the nature of crime which combines an abuse of power with the dehumanization of innocent people. Read my full rave here.
Molly Fox is a celebrated actress - a woman who delves deep into what makes up a 'self.' It is her profession to create characters from that knowledge through the medium of her self. Yet, when it comes to letting others truly know her, she does not. 'Can we ever know another?', this novel asks. The Irish novelist Deirdre Madden fashions a deep and beautiful book on this potentially abstract musing that is redolent with the pain of the distance we have from all others - even those we love most - and simultaneously rich with the rewards of the communion we can make through long acquaintance. She is particularly good at using the processes of the actor and writer to reflect on the ways we can inhabit the inherent contradiction of knowing another, but the mechanisms are so integrated with the events of this narrative that it is difficult to reveal them without ruining your reading of this book. This book is a powerful work of art with an undisturbable sense of wholeness. Read my full rave here.
The struggle to keep the champagne bubbling when it's gone flat is the action filling Evelyn Waugh's 1930 satire Vile Bodies. Stephen Fry's brilliant film adaptation, Bright Young Things released in 2003 captures the feel of a breathless, manic party. Jim Broadbent, Stockard Channing, Peter O'Toole, Simon Callow, Stephen Campbell Moore, Emily Mortimer, James Mcavoy, Imelda Stuanton, and Fenella Woolgar are some of the beautifully cast actors who maintain an understated hysteria, if you can imagine understated hysteria. The love that director and cast have for these characters is what impresses me the most. It would be so easy to show us how vile these people are - how silly, how louche, how fey - but instead they love them to death. Raveworthy. Read my full rave here.
Tell Me Everything by Sarah Salway . I opened this book last night and didn't stop reading it until I had finished it. The nearest voice I can think to compare Sarah Salway's to is Lorrie Moore's, and coming from me that is a big compliment. In it Molly experiences a few breaches of trust as a young woman that leave her seriously wounded. She closes down and protects herself by eating. When we meet her she has become one of life's castaways, seriously overweight without a job, a home, or any sense of herself. She meets five people - Mr. Roberts who gives her a job, Mrs. Roberts, Tim - a man of mystery, Liz - a librarian who recommends French authors, and Miranda, a hairdresser. With these relationships she begins to reclaim herself. The story is full of perfectly wrought descriptions, complex observations of human pain and fantasy, and cogent storytelling. Read my full rave here.
