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Saturday 05 July 2008

Figes's Journey to Nowhere reviewed

My review of Eva Figes' Journey To Nowhere: One Woman Looks for the Promised Land is in the Telegraph today.

The review begins:

Eva Figes wrote Journey to Nowhere as a grandmother. Her head was "full of stories about the past" that were forced to the surface by the impertinent questions of her grandchildren, whose function, she suggests, is to draw such forgotten, forbidden tales into the light.

So, here is a memoir of Edith, the orphan housemaid of Figes's childhood, coupled with a polemic against Israel.

Although herself a secular Jew, Figes shares the view held by some of the ultra-Orthodox that the Jewish state should never have been created: "I do not think there was ever a time when I did not think that the creation of Israel was a historic mistake."

All nation states have founding myths, stories about the past that need unearthing and investigating, but the idea that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land" was particularly questionable (more...)

Tomorrow, I have two very small (160 word) "At a Glance" reviews in the Sunday Times. Sadly, I kinda hated both the books I was asked to comment on. David James Smith's One Morning In Sarajevo was scrappy and The Book of Dead Philosophers no more than a miscellany. I was hugely disappointed by the latter as I'm normally a pretty big fan of author Simon Critchley.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review

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Friday 04 July 2008

Lost Book Club

The Lost Book Club is a "very elegant and slick site [...] supposed to be the 'home to any and all literary references made on the show — from Stephen King to Kurt Vonnegut.' (Or Adolfo Bioy Casares to Vladimir Nabokov.)" Via Three Percent.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, internet

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Wednesday 02 July 2008

Henwood on Klein

Doug Henwood reviews Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine:

The Shock Doctrine is organized around a conceit: “shock” and its cousin “disaster” explain the political economy of the last several decades. One ur-figure is Dr. Ewen Cameron, a ghoulish psychiatrist who worked under contract with the CIA during the 1950s, devising methods to extract information and remake personalities through the use of drugs and torture. His information-extraction techniques became the templates for Gitmo and Abu Ghraib, and the personality renovation became the psycho-political template for the neoliberal restructuring of much of the globe. And the other ur-figure is Milton Friedman, the University of Chicago economist who wrote the playbook for the policy innovations themselves. The two came together in Chile, via Gen. Augusto Pinochet, when a whole society was remade, in no small part through literal torture techniques, in accordance with the Chicago School’s radical free-market dogma. Modern capitalism, says Klein, was born in the Southern Cone, and Pinochet was its midwife.

[...] Clearly, there’s some truth here, but the list of instances is so varied that they don’t always merit a single theory. Even if you limit the theory to the idea that there’s nothing “free” about the free market, it’s strange to see that notion presented as the revelation of a secret history. What is called the “free market” has always been inseparable from state coercion; there was never anything spontaneous about it at all. This has been true at least since the enclosure movement in England privatized previously common lands starting in the sixteenth century, give or take a century or two. In more modern times, the role of U.S. imperial power in promoting the so-called free market has long been a central theme of Noam Chomsky, a writer who doesn’t lack for readers.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, politics

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Wednesday 02 July 2008

Flannery O'Connor speaks

Flannery O'Connor:

I am often asked if universities stifle writers. My view is that they don't stifle enough of them.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, quotations

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Wednesday 02 July 2008

Banville on Celan and Heidegger

Apropos the publication of his play Conversation in the Mountains (which Pierre Joris described here on RSB as "absolute awful drivel"), TEV asks John Banville "What first inspired you to write about the meeting between Celan and Heidegger?"

Well, I’ve always been fascinated by the thought of these two extraordinary figures encountering each other—the philosopher who had been a Nazi, the poet whose parents had been destroyed in a Nazi work camp—at the famous “hut” in the Black Forest. The meeting took place on July 25th, 1967, the day after a reading by Celan in Freiburg which Heidegger had attended. The conversation in the hut was not recorded, and neither man gave an account of it. Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philosopher, later reported that Heidegger had told him that “in the Black Forest, Celan was better informed on plants and animals than he himself was.” Besides the flora and fauna, did they talk about the war, about Nazism and Heidegger’s refusal publicly to account for, much less apologise for, his membership of the Party? I could not resist speculating (more...)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy, poetry, theatre

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Wednesday 02 July 2008

James Wood critiqued

Good, long review of Wood's How Fiction Works in The Australian (via 3Quarks):

In How Fiction Works Wood holds up Flaubert as the turning point in the novel's becoming modern: for introducing, all in one package, acute visualisation, a lack of sentimentality, unshowy narration and, above all, an instinct for "truth", no matter how unpalatable. For Wood, this is a moral mission. Flaubert is bent upon a scrupulous investigation of how people really are. But the problem is that Flaubert also seems to represent the novel's endgame for Wood. As a yardstick, Wood's strictly defined ideal of the real leaves him a restricted space in which to move as a critic, and the novel little wriggle room to develop further. It is not nearly as flexible as Kundera's more historical understanding of the novel, as a kind of enlightened mindset, which leaves room for its form to shift and evolve. For in spite of the fact that Wood's books pay lip-service to (and borrow much of their gravitas from) Kundera's two chief preoccupations, scepticism and humour, Wood lacks his cannier understanding that novels are also always strategic. (No wonder Wood, who never openly acknowledges his debt to Kundera, and who differs so fundamentally on the issue of an author's freedoms to self-consciously reflect upon such matters in his work, distances himself from that author at the beginning of How Fiction Works with a snide comment about the lack of "inkiness" in The Art of the Novel.)

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: internet, literary criticism

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Tuesday 01 July 2008

The Best of the Booker

I'm talking at the London Literature Festival this coming Saturday:

To celebrate the shortlist for The Best of the Booker Prize, our distinguished panel of writers champion the novel they think should win. Featuring Edna O’Brien on JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, Kamila Shamsie on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Peter Kemp on Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road and Mark Thwaite on JM Coetzee’s Disgrace. Other guests discuss Nadine Gordimer’s TheConservationist and Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. The panel read short extracts from the books, followed by their own critical appraisal. At the end of the evening the audience are asked to cast their vote.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: events, personal

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Friday 27 June 2008

The Story of a Marriage review

My review of Andrew Sean Greer's highly-praised, certainly proficient, but in fact mawkish tapestry of cliché, The Story of a Marriage, can be read in the Independent newspaper today.

My review begins:

"It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs." So begins Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar, set in 1953 at the height of McCarthyite anti-communism. This is also the year in which cracks begin to appear in the marriage at the centre of Andrew Sean Greer's accomplished and humane domestic drama. An old pal of Pearlie Cook's husband unexpectedly turns up, announcing: "'Hello, ma'am, I hope you can help me.' With those ordinary words, everything would change" (more).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book review, personal

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Thursday 26 June 2008

The Unfortunates reviewed

A new review of an old classic: Thomas McGonigle takes a look at B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates ("the British author's experimental novel is made up of sections that can be changed at random so that no two readings are the same).

McGonigle's review begins:

The writer B.S. Johnson was one of a handful of modern authors -- among others, Alan Burns, Ann Quin, Zulfikar Ghose -- who extended the range of the English novel by moving beyond the innovations of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Johnson was trivialized by a ferociously traditional British literary establishment wedded to the conventional realistic novel. He committed suicide in 1973, but thanks to his very loyal readers, his novels continue to be reprinted because they are so deeply human, formally innovative and pay microscopic attention to detail.

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, book review, internet

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Thursday 26 June 2008

Žižek on Liberal Utopia

The Secret Clauses of the Liberal Utopia by Slavoj Žižek, the text of his Law and Critique Keynote Lecture given at the 2007 Critical Legal Conference at Birkbeck on the 13th September 2007, is now online (via Continental Philosophy).

Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere, philosophy

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