The Road, Cormac McCarthy
The Muse Asylum, David Czuchlewski
Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson
Last Evenings on Earth, Roberto Bolano
District and Circle, Seamus Heaney
The world is a desolate place. Do we need constant reminder of this? Through desert, dislocation, and strife, we still find hope and humor. God speaks through us. This is the thing we call humanity. And this?
I'm still not sold on the consequence of Cormac McCarthy's The Road as a parable of hope in troubled times. Does it shine a light of truth into the shadows of despair, showing us something we don't know or have forgotten? I have my reservations. But as a novel, both as entertainment, and as a spectral vision to haunt our dreams, I can only sing its praises. Where the story's spiritual conversation may not have found purchase with me, the landscape in which it is rendered is simply captivating. As I have written, from picking up The Road, I was not once in a position where I could put it down, even to sleep, without the greatest of reluctance. And, of course, if you can't take my word for it, there is always Oprah's.
David Czuchlewski's The Muse Asylum is a slim, smart, and breezy read about two recent college graduates, one an aspiring journalist, the other insane, who unravel a grand literary mystery that may or may not exist. In an advanced creative writing, I'm sure the novel gives way to layers of meaning and reference -- on the subway, it serves, as well, but more as entertainment. Not amazing, but accomplished for a first novel, and worth the read.
If the poet's job is to convey to us that the world is not only the prose we encounter every day (or, in that prose, there exist deeper avenues to meaning), Seamus Heaney consistently does the job. He does write in a foreign tongue, derived, I'd guess, from his love of an English language no longer practiced, and from the provincial world he inhabits and adores, deeply tinted in amber hues of a slightly more agrarian yesteryear that has not, in fact, entirely faded away. District and Circle is a neat set, in which each poem illustrates the poet as master of both language and something else: history, mechanics, or memory. Taken by the handful in the urban milieu of New York, the poems are transporting, a looking glass through which a simpler but more well understood world is apparent.
Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is an outstanding novel about war and life. You should read it.
Why Roberto Bolano has commanded so much of the literary world's attention in the last year still escapes me. Not that his writing isn't deserving, simply that the timing of the interest in his work, and the appearance of a number of high-profile works in translation is unclear to me. The collection of short stories Last Evenings on Earth is a perfectly good place to start (although, I have no other reference for Bolano), and of interest to any reader with a keen interest in the literary inheritance of the exiled artistic youth of Latin America's many dictatorships in the 70s and 80s, or for any reader with a taste for the spiritual children of Kafka and Borges.
The Muse Asylum, David Czuchlewski
Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson
Last Evenings on Earth, Roberto Bolano
District and Circle, Seamus Heaney
The world is a desolate place. Do we need constant reminder of this? Through desert, dislocation, and strife, we still find hope and humor. God speaks through us. This is the thing we call humanity. And this?
I'm still not sold on the consequence of Cormac McCarthy's The Road as a parable of hope in troubled times. Does it shine a light of truth into the shadows of despair, showing us something we don't know or have forgotten? I have my reservations. But as a novel, both as entertainment, and as a spectral vision to haunt our dreams, I can only sing its praises. Where the story's spiritual conversation may not have found purchase with me, the landscape in which it is rendered is simply captivating. As I have written, from picking up The Road, I was not once in a position where I could put it down, even to sleep, without the greatest of reluctance. And, of course, if you can't take my word for it, there is always Oprah's.
David Czuchlewski's The Muse Asylum is a slim, smart, and breezy read about two recent college graduates, one an aspiring journalist, the other insane, who unravel a grand literary mystery that may or may not exist. In an advanced creative writing, I'm sure the novel gives way to layers of meaning and reference -- on the subway, it serves, as well, but more as entertainment. Not amazing, but accomplished for a first novel, and worth the read.
If the poet's job is to convey to us that the world is not only the prose we encounter every day (or, in that prose, there exist deeper avenues to meaning), Seamus Heaney consistently does the job. He does write in a foreign tongue, derived, I'd guess, from his love of an English language no longer practiced, and from the provincial world he inhabits and adores, deeply tinted in amber hues of a slightly more agrarian yesteryear that has not, in fact, entirely faded away. District and Circle is a neat set, in which each poem illustrates the poet as master of both language and something else: history, mechanics, or memory. Taken by the handful in the urban milieu of New York, the poems are transporting, a looking glass through which a simpler but more well understood world is apparent.
Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke is an outstanding novel about war and life. You should read it.
Why Roberto Bolano has commanded so much of the literary world's attention in the last year still escapes me. Not that his writing isn't deserving, simply that the timing of the interest in his work, and the appearance of a number of high-profile works in translation is unclear to me. The collection of short stories Last Evenings on Earth is a perfectly good place to start (although, I have no other reference for Bolano), and of interest to any reader with a keen interest in the literary inheritance of the exiled artistic youth of Latin America's many dictatorships in the 70s and 80s, or for any reader with a taste for the spiritual children of Kafka and Borges.
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