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Blog entries on '08 November 2006'
Wednesday 08 November 2006
Nestbeschmützer
Eris Ormsby reviews Thomas Bernhard's poetry (In Hora Mortis/Under the Iron of the Moon translated by RSB-interviewee James Reidel):
The Austrian novelist and playwright Thomas Bernhard took a mordant glee in outraging his countrymen. The Austrians have a name for such troublemakers. Bernhard, they said, was a Nestbeschmützer, a man who fouls his own nest. But for Bernhard, the nest had already been fouled, and long before ... The poems are quiet, almost whispery in tone, displaying none of the virtuoso antics of the prose: no glittering cascades of insult, no manic swerves from tenderness to savagery. The shock comes from their unabashed religious fervor. Though they sound like prayers "to the unknown God," they are, nevertheless, prayers, by turns meditative, anguished, and almost perversely devotional.
(Thanks to Dave Lull for the link.)
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, poetry, rsb
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Wednesday 08 November 2006
A Mind in Mourning
Alok Ranjan's has posted Susan Sontag's essay on Sebald A Mind in Mourning on his Dispatches from Zembla blog. Alok says:
This essay by Susan Sontag is perhaps the best introduction to W.G. Sebald that I have read. It first appeared in Times Literary Supplement in 2000 and contains the appreciation of three of his books which were published at that time.
Usefully, Alok has also reproduced Cynthia Ozick's review of The Emigrants (first published in The New Republic).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: authors, blogosphere
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Wednesday 08 November 2006
Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture
Due from Fordham, around about now, is Teodolinda Barolini's Dante and the Origins of Italian Literary Culture:
The essays in the first section treat the ideology of love and desire from the early lyric tradition to the Inferno and its antecedents in philosophy and theology. In the second, Barolini focuses on Dante as heir to both the Christian visionary and the classical pagan traditions (with emphasis on Vergil and Ovid). The essays in the third part analyze the narrative character of Dante’s Vita nuova, Petrarch’s lyric sequence, and Boccaccio’s Decameron. Barolini also looks at the cultural implications of the editorial history of Dante’s rime and at what sparso versus organico spells in the Italian imaginary. In the section on gender, she argues that the didactic texts intended for women’s use and instruction, as explored by Guittone, Dante, and Boccaccio—but not by Petrarch—were more progressive than the courtly style for which the Italian tradition is celebrated.
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: book news
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Wednesday 08 November 2006
Words Without Borders: Palestine
The new Words Without Borders issue focuses on Palestine and includes fiction by Azmi Bishara, Mahmoud Darwish's diaries (translated from the Arabic by Tania Tamari Nasir and John Berger), and Adania Shibli's Silence (via Rockslinga).
Posted by Mark Thwaite
Tags: blogosphere
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