Nota Bene

Here, in his most full-throated fashion, Kundera sets forth his central thesis that art—and the novel, in particular—operate above and beyond History. I don’t begrudge him the point, at least as it pertains to history with a capital H. But he’s wrong, I believe, to suggest that a novelist can escape the duty to hold [...]

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In the Hopper

This weekend, I plan to attend the new, mammoth Edward Hopper exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. I’ll be going with friends—which may not be entirely apt, given the common image of Hopper as American painting’s poet laureate of loneliness. To me, the image seems accurate enough: Hopper imparts mystery and even a [...]

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Nota Bene

Another passage from the new Kundera book.
We will understand nothing about the novel if we deny that it has its own muse, if we do not see it as an art sui generis, an autonomous art. It has its own genesis . . . its own history . . . its own morality (Hermann Broch [...]

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Unquiet on the Western Front

Historical mysteries, especially those set in the early decades of the last century, have been a staple of my reading diet over the past year or so. In the end, Wings of Fire disappointed me slightly. (But, then, most mystery novels do. They must operate on so many levels, and with so many moving parts, [...]

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Same Page Next Week

For a while now, the editors of the New York Times Magazine have been contracting well-known fiction masters to write serialized works whose carefully doled-out segments, presumably, will give readers a spot of relief from reports on Darfur and advertisements for lingerie. This past Sunday, the magazine published the first chapter of an art-heist caper [...]

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Nota Bene

This week, I’m reading The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts, by Milan Kundera. The book, fresh from the presses (the New Yorker published excerpts from it earlier this year), is Kundera’s latest attempt to construe a poetics of prose—a deep theory of the novel as a distinct art form. Here, he begins to make [...]

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Fair—and Foul

My mom recommended that I read The Devil in the White City in advance of my recent trip to Chicago. So I did. And I liked it. Crime, history, architecture, the seam-bursting vitality of a great city: What’s not to like? Since the book sold quite well, a wave of copycat works—books that use criminous [...]

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The “Importance” of Being Ugly

You can’t fight City Hall. But you can fight over City Hall. And now, it seems, a squabble is unfolding in Boston over whether to raze and replace the current seat of the city’s government—the wretched, Sixties-era slab that squats in Government Center Plaza, like an ugly concrete frog on a forbidding concrete lily pad. [...]

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Idol Threat

Would you mess with this fellow? He is Shiva—Shiva the Destroyer, to you and me. In the Mahabharata (according to Priya Hemenway, author of Hindu Gods), he bears no less than 1,008 names, a different one for each of his many incarnations: the Lord of Sleep, the Lord of Songs, the Lord of Fire, the [...]

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Windy City, Winding Trail

Here’s a review of the classic PI novel from which I quoted a while back.
HOWARD BROWNE, Halo in Blood (1946).
Circles. A halo is a circle. The Chicago Loop, where private investigator Paul Pine keeps an office, is a circle. Around the inner circle of the Loop are ringed outer circles, extending to Oak Park and [...]

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