Book of the Week Archive
Books of the Week: Monday, July 14, 2008
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Marguerite Duras
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Books of the Week: Monday, July 07, 2008
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Russell Jacoby
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Alain Robbe-Grillet
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Books of the Week: Monday, June 30, 2008
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Marguerite Duras
Yann Andrea Steiner (in a new translation from the French by Mark Polizzotti) is a haunting dance between two parallel stories of love and solitude: the love between the reminiscing Duras and the young, sensitive Yann Andrea, and a seaside romance witnessed—or imagined—by the narrator between a camp counselor and an orphaned camper: a Holocaust survivor who witnessed his sister's murder at the hands of a German soldier. Through this mix of memory and desire, the summer of 1980 flows into 1944 in an enigmatic journey through history, creation, and raw emotion.
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John Edgar Wideman
A philosopher, psychiatrist, and political activist, Frantz Fanon was a fierce, acute critic of racism and oppression. Born of African descent in Martinique in 1925, Fanon fought in defense of France during World War II but later against France in Algeria’s war for independence. His last book, The Wretched of the Earth, published in 1961, inspired leaders of diverse liberation movements: Steve Biko in South Africa, Che Guevara in Latin America, the Black Panthers in the States. Wideman’s novel is disguised as the project of a contemporary African American novelist, Thomas, who undertakes writing a life of Fanon. The result is an electrifying mix of perspectives, traveling from Manhattan to Paris to Algeria to Pittsburgh. Part whodunit, part screenplay, part love story, Fanon introduces the French film director Jean-Luc Godard to the ailing Mrs. Wideman in Homewood and chases the meaning of Fanon’s legacy through our violent, post-9/11 world, which seems determined to perpetuate the evils Fanon sought to rectify. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, June 23, 2008
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Joseph Stiglitz
The $3 Trillion War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict is a devastating reckoning of the true cost of the Iraq war - quite apart from its tragic human toll - which the Bush administration has estimated at $50 billion, but which Stiglitz and Bilmes show underestimates the real figure by approximately sixty times. The authors expose the gigantic expenses which have so far not been officially accounted for, including not only big ticket items like replacing military equipment (being used up at six times the peacetime rate) but also the cost of caring for thousands of wounded veterans - for the rest of their lives. Shifting to a global perspective, the authors investigate the cost in lives and damage within Iraq and the Middle East generally. They calculate what the money spent on the war would have produced had it been further invested in the growth of the economy, in the US and around the world, and in infrastructure building. Stiglitz and Bilmes write in simple language, which makes the details they present, and the sums they add up, all the more disturbing. This book will change forever the way we think about the Iraq war - and about the cost of war generally.
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Eva Figes
In the spring of 1939, six-year-old Eva Unger (later Figes) came to settle in London. Born in Berlin, her middle-class Jewish family managed to get out of Nazi Germany, leaving behind friends, relatives and their penniless, orphan housemaid, Edith. Ten years later, with Eva assimilated into post-war British society, word arrived from Edith in Palestine, asking for her old job back in the bosom of the only family she ever knew. At the kitchen table, Edith told the curious schoolgirl Eva of her miraculous survival in wartime Berlin, and her post-war life in the city's ruins, until she was persuaded to go to Palestine. Here she found herself treated with bitter contempt as a despised German Jew, and at the centre of another war, between Arab and Jew.Through Edith's story, Figes argues that continuing anti-Semitism at the end of the century's worst catastrophe led to the creation of Israel. Part memoir, part polemic Journey to Nowhere is a highly charged and profoundly moving account of post-war displacement and a fierce attack on America's role in the Middle East. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, June 16, 2008
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Cees Nooteboom
Alma and Almut share a fascination for Australia and its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings and body paintings. After Alma suffers a traumatic attack, they board a cheap flight from Sao Paulo to Sydney, and together begin their journey across their secret continent. Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, and both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover. In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before and with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city and she was dressed as an angel.
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John J. Mearsheimer
Does America's pro-Israel lobby wield inappropriate control over US foreign policy? This book has created a storm of controversy by bringing out into the open America's relationship with the Israel lobby: a loose coalition of individuals and organizations that actively work to shape foreign policy in a way that is profoundly damaging both to the United States and Israel itself. Israel is an important, valued American ally, yet Mearsheimer and Walt show that, by encouraging unconditional US financial and diplomatic support for Israel and promoting the use of its power to remake the Middle East, the lobby has jeopardized America's and Israel's long-term security and put other countries - including Britain - at risk.
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Books of the Week: Monday, June 09, 2008
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Marek Kohn
Trust -- whether between parents and children, merchants and shoppers, or citizens and their government -- lies at the very heart of our relationships, our society, and our everyday lives. This vividly written compact book reveals how modern thinkers -- scientists, social scientists, and philosophers -- have shed much light on the nature of trust. Beginning with some fascinating evolutionary puzzles about the origins of trust; for instance, how cooperation can evolve among individuals pursuing their own selfish interests, Marek Kohn incorporates many different perspectives from the fields of science, sociology, economics, and politics, to draw out the wider implications for trust in human society today. The book discusses trust in gods and how people have sought to reinvest this trust as religious faith has diminished; the effect of low social trust on economic development; and the loss of trust between mutually antagonistic communities, each warming itself by the flames of its hostility to the other. He shows how Communism relied on distrust, and devoted much of its energy to seeding it among its subjects, and Liberal democracy is also based on distrust, but in the opposite direction: it is founded upon the suspicion that the powerful will be tempted to abuse their power, and so must be subject to checks and balances. Perhaps most important, he shows that if we understand what makes trust possible, and why it matters, then we will live better lives in a fast-moving, fast-changing, global society.
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Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Recognized during his life as "a people's poet", he is considered one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. The Hands of Day - at long last translated (by William O'Daly) into English in its entirety - pronounces Neruda's desire to take part in the great human making of the day. Moved by the guilt of never having worked with his hands, Neruda opens with the despairing confession, "Why did I not make a broom? / Why was I given hands at all?" The themes of hands and work grow in significance as Neruda celebrates the carpenters, longshoremen, blacksmiths, and bakers-those laborers he admires most - and shares his exuberant adoration for the earth and the people upon it in this handsome bilingual edition. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, June 02, 2008
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Kevin P. Spicer
Shaken by military defeat and economic depression after War World I, Germans sought to restore their nation’s dignity and power. In this context the National Socialist Party, with its promise of a revivified Germany, drew supporters. Among the most zealous were a number of Catholic clergymen known as “brown priests” who volunteered as Nazi propagandists. Some brown priests, particularly war veterans, advocated National Socialism because it appealed to their patriotic ardor. Others had less laudatory motives: disaffection with clerical life, conflicts with Church superiors, or ambition for personal power and fame. Whatever their individual motives, they employed their skills as orators, writers, and teachers to proclaim the message of Nazism. Especially during the early 1930s, when the Church forbade membership in the party, these clergymen strove to prove that Catholicism was compatible with National Socialism, thereby justifying their support of Nazi ideology. While a handful of brown priests enjoyed the forbearance of their bishops, others endured reprimand or even dismissal; a few found new vocations with the Third Reich. After the fall of the Reich, the most visible brown priests faced trial for their part in the crimes of National Socialism, a movement they had once so earnestly supported.
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Ferenc Karinthy
A linguist flying to a conference in Helsinki has landed in a strange city where he can't understand a word anyone says. As one claustrophobic day follows another, he wonders why no one has found him yet, whether his wife has given him up for dead, and how he'll get by in this society that looks so familiar, yet is so strange. In a vision of hell unlike any previously imagined, Budai must learn to survive in a world where words and meaning are unconnected. A suspenseful and haunting Hungarian classic.
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Books of the Week: Monday, May 26, 2008
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Susan George
George Bush leaves the White House in January 2009 and the United States goes back to "normal", right? Wrong, argues Susan George in this fascinating, thorough and often chilling account of the decades-long transformation of American society and political culture. Using the four "Ms" - money, media, marketing, management - but above all with a keen sense of mission, the American secular and religious right has made its "long march through the institutions" and changed the way Americans think. As the left went about its business in blissful ignorance, convinced that its policies, programmes and projects spoke for themselves and would always prevail; the right's well-oiled machine of foundations, lobbies, think-tanks, publications, political cadres, lawyers and activist organisations slowly and strategically took over. A broad alliance of neo-liberals, neo-conservatives and the religious right successfully manufactured a new common sense, assaulted Enlightenment values and targeted the top of society where culture is created and legitimised, because they knew that ideas have consequences - and not just in the United States. For all those who hope for a different America in the future, the first step is to hold the present one up to the light and understand how it got that way.
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Tom Engelhardt
TomDispatch.com has established itself as the go-to blog for contemporary US politics, and the favored web platform for radical commentators from Noam Chomsky to Howard Zinn. Its powerful, no-holds-barred features draw a huge response from the public and resonate throughout the global media, acting as a touchpaper for debates which subsequently become headline news. This comprehensive volume offers readers a chance to catch up on some of the finest political analysis of our age, including trenchant accounts of the two Bush administrations: catastrophic imperial adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq; Guantánamo, extraordinary rendition and its apologists; and Hurricane Katrina, global warming, black gold and the rise of Hugo Chávez. Introduced, arranged and with additional commentary throughout by the blog’s founder Tom Engelhardt, The World According to Tomdispatch is the essential primer for anyone seeking illumination and guidance along the highways and byways of our post-9/11 world.
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Books of the Week: Monday, May 19, 2008
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Nicholas Murray
At the height of the British Empire, countless travellers set off to explore the globe, at the very same moment that the phenomenon of mass tourism was being launched by a certain Mr Thomas Cook. Their reasons for leaving Britain were many and various. They were searching for knowledge, for adventure, for fame, for exotic animals to kill. Some hoped to be the first to stamp their mark upon a lake, a river source or an unknown inland sea, while others dreamed of finding untold natural riches or ancient works of art. Some were soldiers, sailors, spies, scholars or scientists, and some wished to convert the heathen and spread their religion. And some travelled, as people have always done, for no reason at all except the sheer marvellous enjoyment of it. Drawing on the travellers’ own unique and colourful accounts, from Livingstone and Stanley in Africa, Darwin aboard the Beagle and Richard Francis Burton on the road to Mecca to less well-known but equally intrepid explorers, A Corkscrew is Most Useful is a fascinating odyssey. |
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Werner Hofmann
Caspar David Friedrich, now viewed as the leading German Romantic artist of the nineteenth century, was described by one contemporary as the pioneer of a new genre: ‘the tragedy of landscape.’ Here, Werner Hofmann considers Friedrich’s principal achievement, the invention of ‘landscape as icon’, and vividly demonstrates the artist’s extraordinary ability to reproduce the natural world in faithful detail, while at the same time imbuing it with spiritual and religious significance. Carefully placing the artist in a wider context, Hofmann examines contemporary judgments and influences on Friedrich’s work and his difficult relationship with critics such as Goethe, as well as the way that his religious and political beliefs informed his art, and his unique place within the framework of European Romanticism as a whole. The beautiful illustrations include many of Friedrich’s drawings and watercolours as well as over ninety of his works in oils. Friedrich extended an invitation for others to read multiple meanings into his pictures. Hofmann’s ideas cast a remarkable new light on Friedrich’s work, yet at the same time leave it open to individual interpretation.
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Books of the Week: Monday, May 12, 2008
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Stefan Zweig
The logic of capitalism, boom and bust, is unremitting and unforgiving. But what happens to human feeling in a completely commodified world? In The Post-Office Girl (translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg), Stefan Zweig, a deep analyst of the human passions, lays bare the private life of capitalism. Christine toils in a provincial post office in post–World War I Austria, a country gripped by unemployment. Out of the blue, a telegram arrives from Christine's rich American aunt inviting her to a resort in the Swiss Alps. Christine is immediately swept up into a world of inconceivable wealth and unleashed desire. She feels herself utterly transformed: nothing is impossible. But then, abruptly, her aunt cuts her loose. Christine returns to the post office, where yes, nothing will ever be the same. Christine meets Ferdinand, a bitter war veteran and disappointed architect, who works construction jobs when he can get them. They are drawn to each other, even as they are crushed by a sense of deprivation, of anger and shame. Work, politics, love, sex: everything is impossible for them. Life is meaningless, unless, through one desperate and decisive act, they can secretly remake their world from within. Left unpublished at the time of his death. The Post-Office Girl transforms our image of a modern master's achievement. |
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Paul Verhaeghen
Moving back and forth between the main stages of the past century, Omega Minor (translated from the Dutch by the author himself) is a tale of the survival of the soul. A novel of big ideas, the book's whirlwind plot is set between Berlin, Boston, Los Alamos and Auschwitz, and takes in neo-Nazis, a physics professor who returns to Potsdam to atone for his sins, an Italian postdoctorate who designs an experiment that will determine the fate of the universe and a Holocaust survivor, who tells his tale to the willing ear of a young psychologist. Omega Minor is Paul Verhaeghen's second novel and his first to be translated from Dutch into English. Aside from his writing career, Verhaeghen also works as a cognitive psychologist; his work focuses on memory and the basic aspects of cognitive ageing. He currently resides in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is associate professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, May 05, 2008
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Nicholson Baker
At a time when the West seems ever more eager to call on military aggression as a means of securing international peace, Nicholson Baker's provocative narrative exploring the political misjudgements and personal biases that gave birth to the terrifying consequences of the Second World War could not be more pertinent. With original and controversial insights brought about by meticulous research, Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, The End of Civilization re-evaluates the political turning points that led up to war and in so doing challenges some of the treasured myths we hold about how war came about and how atrocities like the Holocaust were able to happen. Baker reminds us, for instance, not to forget that it was thanks in great part to Churchill and England that Mussolini ascended to power so quickly, and that, before leading the United States against Nazi Germany, a young FDR spent much of his time lobbying for a restriction in the number of Jews admitted to Harvard.Conversely, Human Smoke also reminds us of those who had the foresight to anticipate the coming bloodshed and the courage to oppose the tide of history, as Gandhi demonstrated when he made his symbolic walk to the ocean -- for which he was immediately imprisoned by the British. |
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Mike Marqusee
If I Am Not For Myself is a passionate, thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be Jewish in the twenty-first century. It traces the author’s upbringing in 1960s Jewish-American surburbia, his anti-war and pro-Palestinian activism on the British left, and life as a Jew among Muslims in Pakistan, Morocco, and Britain. Interwoven with this are the experiences of his grandfather’s life in Jewish New York of the 1930s and 40s, his struggles with anti-Semitism and the twists and turns that led him from anti-fascism to militant Zionism. In the course of this deeply personal story, Marqusee refutes the claims of Israel and Zionism on Jewish loyalty and laments their impact on the Jewish diaspora. Rather, he argues for a richer, more multi-dimensional understanding of Jewish history and identity, and reclaims vital political and personal space for those castigated as “self-haters” by the Jewish establishment.
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Books of the Week: Monday, April 28, 2008
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Gregor von Rezzori
The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from the farther reaches of the defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. In five psychologically fraught episodes, he revisits his past, from adolescence to middle age, a period that coincides with the twentieth century's ugliest years. Central to each episode is what might be called the narrator's Jewish Question. He is no Nazi. To the contrary, he is apolitical, accommodating, cosmopolitan. He has Jewish friends and Jewish lovers, and their Jewishness is a matter of abiding fascination to him. His deepest and most defining relationship may even be the strange dance of attraction and repulsion that throughout his life he has conducted with this forbidden, desired, inescapable, imaginary Jewish other. And yet it is just this relationship that has blinded him to — and makes him complicit in — the terrible realities of his era. Lyrical, witty, satirical, and unblinking, Gregor von Rezzori's most controversial work is an intimate foray into the emotional underworld of modern European history.
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Iain MacDonald
Adorno and Heidegger explores the conflictual history of two important traditions of twentieth-century European thought: the critical theory of Theodor W. Adorno and the ontology of Martin Heidegger. As is well known, there has been little productive engagement between these two schools of thought, in large measure due to Adorno’s sustained and unanswered critique of Heidegger. Stemming from this critique, numerous political and philosophical barriers have kept these traditions separate, such that they have rarely been submitted to scrutiny, let alone questioned. The essays making up this collection are fresh and original attempts at coming to terms with the nuances and difficulties that these two towering figures have bequeathed to the history of European thought. The volume’s authors deal with a variety of issues ranging from epistemology to esthetics, to ethics, to intellectual history and modernity, providing the reader with detailed insight into a thorny debate in the history of recent European thought.
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Books of the Week: Monday, April 21, 2008
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David Norton
David Norton has re-edited the King James Bible for Cambridge University Press, and this book arises from his intensive work on that project. Here he shows how the text of the most important Bible in the English language was made, and how, for better and for worse, it changed in the hands of printers and editors until, in 1769, it became the text we know today. Using evidence as diverse as the manuscript work of the original translators, and the results of extensive computer collation of electronically held texts, Norton has produced a scholarly edition of the King James Bible for the new century that will restore the authority of the 1611 translation. This book describes this fascinating background, explains Norton's editorial principles and provides substantial lists and tables of variant readings. It will be indispensable to scholars of the English Bible, literature, and publishing history. |
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Robin J. Maconie
The German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen was arguably the most influential figure of the European postwar avant-garde, and unquestionably the most elusive and enigmatic musical thinker of a generation that includes Pierre Boulez, John Cage, and Luciano Berio. His radically new electronic and instrumental music converted Igor Stravinsky to serialism in the 1950s, and has continued to inspire young composers for over fifty years. Other Planets draws on over forty years of the author's close study of Stockhausen and functions as a catalogue raisonee of Stockhausen's complete output. With plentiful citations from the history of radio, film, and sound recording, as well as from contemporary science and technology, the book is laid out in strictly chronological order and contains unusually ample commentary on the composer's sources of inspiration. Each composition is also fully documented within the text, giving full information of each work's publisher, catalogue number, instrumentation, duration, and authorized compact disc. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, April 14, 2008
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Robert Bird
The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia’s novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and Sacrifice, has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. This book is a comprehensive, well-illustrated and much-needed account of Tarkovsky’s entire film output. Robert Bird’s analysis is centred around a detailed account of Tarkovsky’s technique, which provides the best interpretive guide to both the director’s films and his theoretical speculations. Integrating his idiosyncratic ideas with his films’ irresistible sensuality, Bird highlights Tarkovsky’s fascination with the elusive correlation between cinematic representation and the more primeval perception of the world. The book examines Tarkovsky’s films elementally, grouping them into four sections: Water, Fire, Earth, and Air. It also discusses Tarkovsky’s works for the radio, theatre and opera, and how he was in addition an accomplished actor, screenwriter, film theorist and diarist. The author’s claim, however, is that Tarkovsky was a filmmaker before all else, and this book examines what Tarkovsky’s cinema reveals about the medium in which he worked.
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Alberto Manguel
What is the role of the storyteller in 21st Century society? Do stories possess the power to change the world we live in? In this most original and stimulating study Alberto Manguel, award winning author of A History of Reading, sets out to investigate the ways in which stories can lend an identity to a whole society. From Gilgamesh to the Bible, from Don Quixote to The Fast Runner, Manguel explores how books can hold the secret to what binds us together. His thesis is argued here in an engrossing and highly personal book that encompasses narratives of autobiography, mythology, history and theology. He also raises concerns that technological developments – the internet, for one – may well fatally undermine the publishing industry and threaten the survival of the individual around whom the entire literary industry was originally constructed: the beleaguered author. Do innovations like CD-Rom replace creative readers with passive viewers? This book is also about the art of reading, at a time when Manguel argues that it is still possible for stories to change us and the world we live in.
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Books of the Week: Monday, April 07, 2008
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Brigitte Le Juez
Samuel Beckett lectured on modern French literature at his old university, Trinity College, in 1930-31 but those lectures are not widely known and have rarely been studied. This is one of the least known periods of his life. He had just returned from Paris where he had met James Joyce and had started his literary career but had not yet written his first novel. In 1930, Rachel Burrows studied French at Trinity College and her notes of Beckett's lectures have recently been found in the archives of Trinity College. Brigitte Le Juez is the first writer to fully study these lectures, the most complete record of Beckett the young intellectual, and a valuable guide to the inspirations behind his work and concept of literature. They answer many of the questions about Beckett's work. How did he define the modern novel of his day? What should literature strive to achieve, or more properly, what should it not be? They reveal the writers he studied and was influenced by and the notebooks demonstrate that Racine is the writer most frequently praised by Beckett while Balzac is the target of his fiercest criticism. Other writers studied by Beckett include Proust, Flaubert and Stendhal, Dostoyevsky and Andre Gide. Beckett before Beckett: Samuel Beckett's Lectures on French Literature reveals Beckett's own history of French literature and his understanding of the origins of the modern literature of his time. |
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Pascal Richet
The quest to pinpoint the age of the Earth is nearly as old as humanity itself. For most of history, people trusted mythology or religion to provide the answer, even though nature abounds with clues to the past of the Earth and the stars. In A Natural History of Time, geophysicist Pascal Richet tells the fascinating story of how scientists and philosophers examined those clues and from them built a chronological scale that has made it possible to reconstruct the history of nature itself. Richet begins his story with mythological traditions, which were heavily influenced by the seasons and almost uniformly viewed time cyclically. The linear history promulgated by Judaism, with its story of creation, was an exception, and it was that tradition that drove early Christian attempts to date the Earth. Until the mid-eighteenth century, such natural timescales derived from biblical chronologies prevailed, but, Richet demonstrates, with the Scientific Revolution geological and astronomical evidence for much longer timescales began to accumulate. Fossils and the developing science of geology provided compelling evidence for periods of millions and millions of years — a scale that even scientists had difficulty grasping. By the end of the twentieth century, new tools such as radiometric dating had demonstrated that the solar system is four and a half billion years old, and the universe itself about twice that, though controversial questions remain. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, March 31, 2008
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Johann Gottfried Herder
Without Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), we simply would not understand Shakespeare in the way we do. In fact, much literature and art besides Shakespeare would neither look the same nor be the same without the influence of Herder's Shakespeare (1773). One of the most important and original works in the history of literary criticism, this passionate essay pioneered a new, historicist approach to cultural artifacts by arguing that they should be judged not by their conformity to a set of conventions imported from another time and place, but by the effectiveness of their response to their own historical and cultural context. Rejecting the authority of a dominant and stifling French neoclassicism that judged eighteenth-century plays by the criteria of Aristotle, Herder's Shakespeare signaled a break with the Enlightenment, the approach of Romanticism, and the arrival of a distinctly modern form of aesthetic appreciation. |
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Michael Hofmann
This new Selected Poems is a retrospective on a poetic career which includes four Faber collections: Nights in the Iron Hotel (1983), which won the Cholmondeley Award; Acrimony (1986), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Corona, Corona (1993) and Approximately Nowhere (1999). Michael Hofmann's poems have been widely admired, notably for their gift of compressed and vividly pointed reportage, and the collision course of words and dictions that his poetry characteristically provokes. His subject matter has been equally individual, including his remarkable and complex series of 'father-poems', his subtle portraiture of the lives of others, East and West, together with his acerbic impressionism of contemporary England, and his exploration of Adorno's injunction that 'it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home'. Michael Hofmann has written to date some of the boldest, frankest and most searching poetry of our time. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, March 24, 2008
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Christa Knellwolf
This ninth volume in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism presents a wide-ranging survey of developments in literary criticism and theory during the last century. Drawing on the combined expertise of a large team of specialist scholars, it offers an authoritative account of the various movements of thought that have made the late twentieth century such a richly productive period in the history of criticism. The aim has been to cover developments which have had greatest impact on the academic study of literature, along with background chapters that place those movements in a broader, intellectual, national and socio-cultural perspective. In comparison with Volumes Seven and Eight, also devoted to twentieth-century developments, there is marked emphasis on the rethinking of historical and philosophical approaches, which have emerged, especially during the past two decades, as among the most challenging areas of debate. |
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Gennady Aygi
Lifelong Aygi translator and friend Peter France wrote in The Guardian: "Aygi wrote from a deep awareness of the losses and destructions of the 20th century." Field-Russia is a book of poems arranged shortly before Aygi's death, which in his view occupied a central place in his work. The collection opens with an informal conversation about poetry, and is followed by a series of little lyric "books"— Field-Russia, Time of the Ravines, and Final Departure—that form a part of Aygi's "life-book." Like Ahkmatova and Celan before him, Aygi has left us with these most necessary words to dwell in—a quiet, spiritual poetry in a time of uprootedness and despair. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, March 17, 2008
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Anthony Uhlmann
Beckett often made use of images from the visual arts and readapted them, staging them in his plays, or using them in his fiction. Anthony Uhlmann sets out to explain how an image differs from other terms, like 'metaphor' or 'representation', and, in the process, to analyse Beckett's use of images borrowed from philosophy and aesthetics. This is the first study to carefully examine Beckett's thoughts on the image in his literary works and his extensive notes to the philosopher Arnold Geulincx. Uhlmann considers how images might allow one kind of interaction between philosophy and literature, and how Beckett makes use of images which are borrowed from, or drawn into dialogue with, philosophical images from Geulincx, Berkeley, Bergson, and the ancient Stoics. Uhlmann's reading of Beckett's aesthetic and philosophical interests provides a revolutionary new reading of the importance of the image in his work.
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Peter Szendy
In this intimate meditation on listening, beautifully translated by Charlotte Mandell, Peter Szendy examines what the role of the listener is, and has been, through the centuries. The role of the composer is clear, as is the role of the musician, but where exactly does the listener stand in relation to the music s/he listens to? What is the responsibility of the listener? Does a listener have any rights, as the author and composer have copyright? Szendy explains his love of musical arrangement (since arrangements allow him to listen to someone listening to music), and wonders whether it is possible in other ways to convey to others how we ourselves listen to music. How can we share our actual hearing with others? Along the way, he examines the evolution of copyright laws as applied to musical works and takes us into the courtroom to examine different debates on what we are and aren’t allowed to listen to, and to witness the fine line between musical borrowing and outright plagiarism. Finally, he examines the recent phenomenon of DJs and digital compilations, and wonders how technology has affected our habits of listening and has changed listening from a passive exercise to an active one, whereby one can jump from track to track or play only selected pieces.
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Books of the Week: Monday, March 10, 2008
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James Simpson
James Simpson focuses on a critical moment in early modern England, specifically the cultural transformation that allowed common folk to read the Bible for the first time. Widely understood and accepted as the grounding moment of liberalism, this was actually, Simpson tells us, the source of fundamentalism, and of different kinds of persecutory violence. His argument overturns a widely held interpretation of sixteenth-century Protestant reading -- and a crucial tenet of the liberal tradition. After exploring the heroism and achievements of sixteenth-century English Lutherans, particularly William Tyndale, Burning to Read turns to the bad news of the Lutheran Bible. Simpson outlines the dark, dynamic, yet demeaning paradoxes of Lutheran reading: its demands that readers hate the biblical text before they can love it; that they be constantly on the lookout for unreadable signs of their own salvation; that evangelical readers be prepared to repudiate friends and all tradition on the basis of their personal reading of Scripture. Such reading practice provoked violence not only against Lutheranism's stated enemies, as Simpson demonstrates; it also prompted psychological violence and permanent schism within its own adherents. |
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Jose Saramago
On the first day of the New Year, no one dies. This understandably causes great consternation amongst religious leaders – if there’s no death, there can be no resurrection and therefore no reason for religion – and what will be the effect on pensions, the social services, hospitals? Funeral directors are reduced to arranging funerals for dogs, cats, hamsters and parrots. Life insurance policies become meaningless. Amid the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration: flags are hung out on balconies and people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity – eternal life. But will death’s disappearance benefit the human race, or will this sudden abeyance backfire? How long can families cope with malingering elderly relatives who scratch at death’s door while the portal remains firmly shut? Then, seven months later, death returns, heralded by purple envelopes informing the recipients that their time is up. Death herself is now writing personal notes giving one week's notice. However, when an envelope is unexpectedly returned to her, death begins to experience strange, almost human emotions.
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Books of the Week: Monday, March 03, 2008
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Joseph Joubert
The elusive French luminary Joseph Joubert is a great explorer of the mind's open spaces. Edited and translated by Paul Auster, this selection from Joubert's notebooks introduces a master of the enigmatic who seeks "to call everything by its true name" while asking us to "remember everything is double." "Joubert speaks in whispers," Auster writes. "One must draw very close to hear what he is saying."
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Darian Leader
What happens when we lose someone we love? A death, a separation or the break-up of a relationship are some of the hardest times we have to live through. We may fall into a nightmare of depression, lose the will to live and see no hope for the future. What matters at this crucial point is whether or not we are able to mourn. In this important and groundbreaking book, acclaimed psychoanalyst and writer Darian Leader urges us to look beyond the catch-all concept of depression to explore the deeper, unconscious ways in which we respond to the experience of loss. In so doing, we can loosen the grip it may have upon our lives.
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Books of the Week: Monday, February 25, 2008
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Angela Morgan Cutler
Auschwitz: a place where millions were killed and which thousands now visit each year. A mass grave – and a tourist destination. The focus of this work of autobiographical fiction is on the sightseers – the curious that are drawn to visit. It is a book that questions our need to look: what is there to uncover, other than the difficulty of peering into such a place and into a subject that has been obsessively documented, yet can never really be understood? How to write about Auschwitz in the twenty-first century, in a time when the last generation of survivors is soon to be lost? This is also a book that searches for a personal story. It opens on a local bus that takes Angela, her husband En (whose mother survived the holocaust where most of her family did not) and their two sons to Auschwitz sixty years after the holocaust, and ends in a pine forest outside Minsk where En’s grandparents were shot in May 1942. The backbone of Auschwitz is a series of e-mails between the author and acclaimed American writer Raymond Federman. At the age of 14, Federman (now approaching 80) was hastily thrust into the small upstairs closet of their Paris apartment by his mother just before she, his father and two sisters were taken to Auschwitz, where they were killed. Federman also has spent a lifetime trying to find a language appropriate for the enormity of the holocaust and his part in its legacy, ultimately espousing laughterature – laughter as a means of survival. |
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Sherman Young
Sometime in the late twentieth century the book died. Sherman Young, passionate book lover and a consumer and producer of digital technology, is on a mission to make book culture matter again. Shirking nostalgia and without apology, The Book is Dead (Long Live the Book) investigates the economics and technological demands of publishing, making a case for books and reading all the while. His bold and exciting book will inspire readers, non-readers and publishers to put books centre-stage again, even if they’re not books as we now know them. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, February 18, 2008
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Witold Gombrowicz
A Kind of Testament is part autobiography and part justification of the life’s work of one of Poland’s most important novelists and playwrights. Written in France in 1968, this personal testimony is more than just a life history or a critique of his work. A Kind of Testament stands as a testament to how Gombrowicz came to be the person and writer that he was and overlap between the two.
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Carolin Duttlinger
Throughout his life, Franz Kafka was fascinated by photography, a medium which for him came to encapsulate both the attractions and the pitfalls of modern life. Kafka's personal engagement with the medium - as a keen viewer and collector of photographs as well as an amateur photographer - is reflected in his writings, which explore photography from a variety of different perspectives. This study not only explores photography's recurrence as a theme within his texts but it is also the first to take systematic account of Kafka's use of photographs as literary source material. Kafka and Photography presents one of the most important modern writers from an entirely new perspective; it sheds new light on familiar works and uncovers unexplored aspects of Kafka's engagement with his time and context. Its detailed textual analyses are set against a richly documented historical context which illustrates Kafka's interest in contemporary culture through a range of visual material taken from public as well as private sources - some of which has only recently become available. As this book demonstrates, photography had a profound impact on Kafka's literary imagination and as such helps to explain the mesmerizing intensity of enigmatic visual detail which is a hallmark of his narratives. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, February 11, 2008
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Neil Shubin
Your Inner Fish tells the extraordinary history of the human body. Why do we look the way we do? When did we first evolve the features that we have? Why are we still able to do all the different things we do? And, finally, why do we fall ill in the way that we do? Neil Shubin draws on the latest genetic research and his huge experience as an expeditionary palaeontologist to show the incredible impact the 3.5 billion year history of life has had on our bodies. It turns out that many of our most distinctive features evolved when we were still swimming in the oceans. Shubin takes readers on a fascinating, unexpected journey and allows us to discover the deep connection to nature in our own bodies.
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Eric G. Wilson
More than any other generation, we seem to believe in the transformative power of positive thinking. But who says we’re supposed to be happy? Where does it say that in the Bible, or in the Constitution? In Against Happiness, Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation—and that it is the force underlying original insights. Francisco Goya, Emily Dickinson, Marcel Proust, and Abraham Lincoln were all confirmed melancholics. So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let’s embrace our depressive sides as the wellspring of creativity. What most people take for contentment, Wilson argues, is living death, and what the majority takes for depression is a vital force. It’s time to throw off the shackles of positivity and relish the blues that make us human. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, February 04, 2008
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Fred Wander
He grew up on the street, a high school dropout. In 1938 he left his mother and sister behind in Vienna and fled on foot to France, where later he was put on a train to Auschwitz. Transported from camp to camp, Fred Wander was haunted for twenty-five years by the crystalline, episodic stories that chronicle the plight of his fellow inmates. Only after the tragic death of his little daughter did these voices pour forth. The result was this novel, published in East Germany in 1970. Finally it appears in English in this masterful translation, its haunting cadences evoking Levi and Celan, its backstory as heartrending as Suite Française. Wander demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise. The Seventh Well, named after the well of truth, recalls Dante’s Inferno with its mesmerizing descent into evil. Its existence is a miracle. |
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Mark Booth
In this groundbreaking new work, Mark Booth embarks on an enthralling intellectual tour of our world’s secret histories. Starting from a dangerous premise — that everything we’ve been taught about our world’s past is corrupted, and that the stories put forward by the various cults and mystery schools throughout history are true — Booth produces nothing short of an alternate history of the past 3,000 years. History is more than a list of things that have happened; it’s a measure of consciousness and experience. And in The Secret History of the World, Booth’s take on history is relentless, charging through time and space and thought in interdisciplinary fashion; embracing cognitive science, religion, psychology, historiography, and philosophy, a new timeline is drawn, and a huge swath of our cultural heritage that has for long been hidden is restored. From Greek and Egyptian mythology to Jewish folklore, from Christian cults to Freemasons, from Charlemagne to Don Quixote, from George Washington to Hitler-Booth shows without a doubt that history as we know it needs a revolutionary rethink, and he has 3,000 years of hidden wisdom to back it up. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, January 28, 2008
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Esther Leslie
The work of Walter Benjamin, critic, essayist, translator, philosopher – one of the twentieth century’s most influential intellectuals – continues to stimulate a profusion of responses in the form of new novels, operas, films and artworks, as well as a never-abating production of academic texts. In this new biography, the first to be written in over a decade, author Esther Leslie uses the recently published entirety of Benjamin’s correspondence, drawing on his numerous diaries and autobiographical works, in order to provide a careful account of his circumstances and thoughts. Benjamin had many interests: he cherished childhood and its trappings; had a passion for the displacement and novelty of travel; toys; cities; trick-books; and ships; all are given due attention as the author weaves Benjamin’s wayward apperceptions into the narrative of a life lived. She follows Benjamin as he travels from Berlin to Capri, Ibiza, Riga, Moscow, Paris, and finally the Spanish border where he died in 1940. The author acknowledges Benjamin’s thesis that personal histories can be traced only in the context of social milieus, economic forces, technological shifts, and historical events, and seamlessly interweaves biographical details with an accessible yet concentrated account of Benjamin’s intellectual development, drawing a colourful portrait of a capacious intellect trapped in increasingly hostile circumstances.
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Marguerite Duras
The really special thing about this edition or Marguerite Duras's Wartime Notebooks is that understated subtitle and other texts. This truly is a compendious collection of Duras's unpublished writing and publisher Quercus are to be congratulated for producing such a lovely -- and important -- book. Duras -- most famous for her exquisite novel The Lover -- was one of the leading intellectuals and writers of post-war France. Her novels are all very autobiographical, but don't let that make you think that that takes anything away from her skill as a writer. How she uses her life, how she wrote and rewrote and explored all the facts and facets of it, are what make her so exceptional. Wartime Notebooks contains the contents of four notebooks kept "in a blue closet in her country home in France ... until now no one recognised just how important was the material she had written between 1943 and 1949." The Pink Marbled Notebook, devoted to her childhood, includes, amongst much other material, rough drafts of The Sea Wall; the 20th Century Press and Hundred-Page Notebooks contain a rough draft of The War; and the Beige Notebook contains -- again, amongst much other great diary material -- a rough draft of The Sailor from Gibraltar. In addition, the book has fifty pages of additional texts. Essential. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, January 21, 2008
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Slavoj Zizek
The premise of Zizek’s theory is that the subjective violence we see – violence with a clear identifiable agent – is only the tip of an iceberg made up of ‘systemic’ violence, which is essentially the catastrophic consequence of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems. With the help of Marx, Engels, Sartre, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Lacan, Brecht and many more, Zizek examines the hidden causes of violence, delving into the supposed ‘divine violence’ which propels suicide bombers and the unseen ‘systemic’ violence which lies behind outbursts, from Parisian suburbia to New Orleans. For Zizek, the controversial truth is that sometimes doing nothing is the most violent thing you can do. He calls for a forceful confrontation with the vacuity of today’s democracies – using an unconventional plethora of references: Hitchcock, Orwell, Fukuyama, Freud and more. |
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David W. Anthony
Roughly half the world's population speaks languages derived from a shared linguistic source known as Proto-Indo-European. But who were the early speakers of this ancient mother tongue, and how did they manage to spread it around the globe? Until now their identity has remained a tantalizing mystery to linguists, archaeologists, and even Nazis seeking the roots of the Aryan race. The Horse, the Wheel, and Language lifts the veil that has long shrouded these original Indo-European speakers, and reveals how their domestication of horses and use of the wheel spread language and transformed civilization. Linking prehistoric archaeological remains with the development of language, Anthony identifies the prehistoric peoples of central Eurasia's steppe grasslands as the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European, and shows how their innovative use of the ox wagon, horseback riding, and the warrior's chariot turned the Eurasian steppes into a thriving transcontinental corridor of communication, commerce, and cultural exchange. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, January 14, 2008
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Giorgio Bassani
Jamie McKendrick new translation of this haunting, elegiac novel which captures the mood and atmosphere of Italy (and in particular Ferrara) in the last summers of the thirties, focusing on an aristocratic Jewish family moving imperceptibly towards its doom. Vittorio De Sica turned the book into a film in 1970, winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1974.
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Philip Gourevitch
A second volume of fascinating interviews from one of the world's best loved literary magazines. The encounters between The Paris Review and the world's leading writers have elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. Entertaining and thought-provoking, it is essential reading for anyone who cares about writers and writing. Includes interviews with Graham Greene, William Faulkner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Philip Larkin, Raymond Carver, Philip Roth and Toni Morrison.
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Books of the Week: Monday, January 07, 2008
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Irmre Kertesz
As readers, we are accustomed to reading stories of war and injustice from the victims' point of view, sympathising with their plight. In Detective Story, the tables have been turned, leaving us in the mind of a monster, as Kertész plunges us into a story of the worst kind, told by a man living outside morality. Now in prison, Antonio Martens is a torturer for the secret police of a recently defunct dictatorship. He requests and is given writing materials in his cell, and what he has to recount is his involvement in the surveillance, torture, and assassination of Federigo and Enrique Salinas, a prominent father and son whose principled but passive opposition to the regime left them vulnerable to the secret police. Preying upon young Enrique’s aimless life, the secret police began to position him as a subversive and then targeted his father. Once this plan was set into motion, any means were justified to reach the regime’s chosen end—the destruction of an entire liberal class. Inside Martens’s mind, we inhabit the rationalising world of evil and see first-hand the inherent danger of inertia during times of crisis. |
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Dino Buzzati
Giovanni Drogo is a young army officer who is posted to Fort Bastiani, a remote and almost forgotten outpost that looks out over the desert and mountains of the steppe and onto the barren reaches of the Northern Kingdom. There is a vague possibility that acrimonious relations with the Northern Kingdom could, at any time, descend into war. There is an even vaguer chance that if war were to come it would arrive over the inhospitable steppe. Whilst younger officers, like Drogo, keep their spirits up with constant chatter about the possibility of such an attack, the older officers know better. They have spent a lifetime waiting, they've succumbed to many a false hope but, in their hearts, they know that no-one will attack, certainly not over the steppe, and that their chance to prove themselves as valiant soldiers has slowly died over the course of many years pointlessly waiting for something to happen. Drogo is astute enough to see this. As soon as he arrives at the Fort he asks to be posted somewhere else, but is persuaded to stay for a few months. Those months turn into years. The years quickly turn into a lifetime.
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Books of the Week: Monday, December 31, 2007
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Enrique Vila-Matas
The narrator of Montano's Malady is a writer named Jose who is so obsessed with literature that he finds it impossible to distinguish between real life and fictional reality. Part picaresque novel, part intimate diary, part memoir and philosophical musings, Enrique Vila-Matas has created a labyrinth in which writers as various as Cervantes, Sterne, Kafka, Musil, Bolano, Coetzee, and Sebald cross endlessly surprising paths. Trying to piece together his life of loss and pain, Jose leads the reader on an unsettling journey from European cities such as Nantes, Barcelona, Lisbon, Prague and Budapest to the Azores and the Chilean port of Valparaiso. Exquisitely witty and erudite, it confirms the opinion of Bernardo Axtaga that Vila-Matas is "the most important living Spanish writer. |
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Pawel Huelle
Picking up on a throwaway line in The Magic Mountain, Castorp tells the story of Hans Castorp’s student years in Gdansk, long before the adventures in Davos described in Thomas Mann’s novel. Pawel Huelle skilfully creates a credible scenario for this influential period in Hans Castorp’s development, imagining what happened when the rational German student was exposed to the Slavonic eastern edge of the Prussian empire. He comes across people, events and ideas that anticipate some of the encounters he will experience in years to come, including an enigmatic Polish woman who becomes his obsession. Set at the dawn of the twentieth century, Castorp faithfully recreates the atmosphere of central Europe as the storm began that would lead to two world wars. Beautifully written, full of humour, mystery and eccentricity, this is a moving tribute to a masterpiece of European literature. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, December 17, 2007
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Pierre Bayard
In this mischievous and provocative book, already a runaway bestseller in France, Pierre Bayard contends that in this age of infinite publication, the truly cultivated person is not the one who has read a book, but the one who understands the book's place in our culture. Drawing on examples from works by Graham Greene, Umberto Eco, Oscar Wilde, Montaigne (who couldn't remember books he himself had written), and many others, he examines the many kinds of 'non-reading' (forgotten books, unknown books, books discussed by others, books we've skimmed briefly) and the many potentially nightmarish situations in which we are called upon to discuss our reading with others (with our loved ones, with the book's author, etc.) At heart, this is a book that will challenge everyone who's ever felt guilty about missing some of the Great Books to consider what reading means, how we absorb books as part of ourselves, and how and why we spend so much time talking about what we have, or haven't, read.
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Tim Parks
The title piece of Tim Parks' The Fighter addresses D.H. Lawrence’s fundamental belligerence and how all the significant relationships in his life, including those with his readers and critics, were characterized by intense intimacy and ferocious conflict. Elsewhere there are literary essays on tension and conflict in the work of Beckett and Hardy, Bernhard and Dostoevsky, amongst others. Parks is known for his acerbic chronicles of Italian life and here are essays on Mussolini, Macchiavelli and the Medici. Besides discussing questions of history, politics and literature, The Fighter also takes on the serious issue of World Cup football. These are essays whose ideas and themes call to each other in the most unexpected and ironic ways. From the wide variety of subjects emerges a consistent and convincing picture of a world that forever resists the writer’s embattled attempts to wrap it up in language. |
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Books of the Week: Monday, December 10, 2007
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Charles Taylor
What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age? Almost everyone would agree that w | | |