I like living with books for a long time. I can read a book over years, without feeling a pressure to finish. Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was the last book that made me laugh though it was the absurd laughter of the heartbrokenīetween Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975. There’s an image – a single, vast boulder “shaped roughly like a throne or seat”, carried over centuries to the hidden recesses of a cave and finally lifted by storm waves above the water – that reminded me of the dignity and loneliness, the beautiful light and devastating sorrow, of my father’s life. Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places, which I read at the bedside of my beloved father as he was dying. She shows so many things, including that the novel as an art form – capable of astonishing dialogic power and polyphony, unafraid of conflicting ways of thinking – is an art form we will always need. The incompatibility can be shattering, and it remakes you.ĭoris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, feminism in all its complexity. Like Doris Lessing and Alice Munro, he writes with the seemingly incompatible qualities of passionate coldness and desperate passion. The works of Hannah Arendt and the poetry of Bei Dao.Ĭees Nooteboom’s All Souls’ Day. Philosophy, history, story, aesthetics and language beauty and warning.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |