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 [...]
Archive for the ‘Quotation’ Category
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 17 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 16 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 15 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Idol Threat
Posted in India, Quotation on 12 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
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 [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 11 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
I’m a jogger. Putting my legs through piston-like paces, revving up my heartbeat, giving the gland that secretes endorphins a good bitch slap—for me, this is a critical therapy. I do it because I need to. But for simple enjoyment, nothing beats a stately, vigorous stroll through congenial terrain. So I take Jan Morris’s point [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation, Television on 4 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
TV makes you stupid. It’s not an original insight, but back in 1980 the writer George W.S. Trow wrote an essay in the New Yorker that cast a particularly cold and waspish eye on the subject. Television, he suggested, had settled on the land like a slow, soft apocalypse, laying waste to every force in [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 1 May 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Ah, distinctions—tart little appetizers for the mind. I like this one, from Within the Context of No Context, by George W.S. Trow (1981):
A tease is a con. You press a spot because you know that it can be pressed, and while the sucker is feeling the pleasure or the pain resulting from the pressure, you [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 26 April 2007 | 1 Comment »
In my review of Brick, I commented on the retro glamour that spreads a shimmery finish across a lot of film and fiction in the noir mode, obscuring the bleak vision underneath. Scraping away that finish can be a good thing, and so it is in Brick. But the style and scenery of classic hard-boiled [...]
Nota Bene
Posted in Quotation on 23 April 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Adam Gopnik, in a piece about Kingsley Amis (“The Old Devil,” The New Yorker, April 23, 2007), adduces a transatlantic divide in favored types of satire:
The Larry David character [in "Curb Your Enthusiasm"] doesn’t mind keeping up the nice-guy act so long as he never actually has to do anything unselfish; the Amis men expect [...]
