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on The Patagonian Hare, a memoir by Claude Lanzmann
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on Divorce Islamic Style, a novel by Amara Lakhous, translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein
In his only essay, Guy de Maupassant stated that the role of the novelist of realism “is not to tell a story, to amuse us or to appeal to our feelings, but to compel us to reflect, and to understand the darker and deeper meaning of events.” The arrival of history written as entertaining literature…
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Twelve Writers on New and Recent Fiction
I asked a dozen prose fiction writers to comment briefly on new and recent titles. The Seawall has been hosting similar multi-poet features in the spring and fall since 2008, but this is the first such post focused on fiction (and also, this time, on a memoir). I’m grateful to the twelve writers who contributed…
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Seventeen Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles
Welcome to the Seawall’s annual spring poetry feature. This season, seventeen poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent collections. This multi-poet/title feature is posted here in April and December. The commentary includes: Lisa Russ Spaar on Nitro Nights by W.S. Di Piero (Copper Canyon) Marilyn Hacker on Child: New and Selected…
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on The Guardians, a memoir by Sarah Manguso
Mimi Alford’s JFK memoir, Once Upon A Secret, is now a New York Times bestseller. The author says, “Talking about it is really helping me. It’s making me feel whole.” Feeling whole, she has written. The memory of soaking in a post-coital bathtub with the president is now a cooled-off, discrete object she can describe…
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on Varamo, a novel by César Aira ((New Directions)
The Argentinean novelist César Aira claims that each morning he ambles down to a local café, takes his usual seat, savors a cup of coffee, and then writes a single page of prose for a novel-in-progress. With that, his work is done for the day, or so he has said in several interviews. In this…
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on The Loss Library and Other Unfinished Stories by Ivan Vladislavić (Seagull Books/University of Chicago Press)
One day in 1992, Ivan Vladislavić looked at a photograph of Robert Walser lying dead in the snow. The picture was taken on Christmas day in 1956; Walser was 78. The image suggested a story to Vladislavić: “The writer on his last walk, a solitary Spaziergang through a winter landscape. He is going towards his…
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on Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam, by Lewis Sorley (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Lewis Sorley’s histories of the Vietnam War are routinely described as “revisionary.” He firmly asserts that the war was won in 1970. Why should that matter now, especially if you believe that the United States should not have gone to war in Indochina in the first place? But Richard Nixon “revised” Lyndon Johnson’s foreign policies…
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on Walther Rathenau, a biography by Shulamit Volkov
Walther Rathenau, the only Jew to serve as foreign minister of Germany, is most famous for having been assassinated in his open car by anti-Weimar extremists in 1922. Otto Friedrich devoted a chapter to Rathenau in Before The Deluge (1972), his jaunty account of Berlin in the 1920’s, in which he focused on the assassins’…
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Short Stories: Power Ballads by Will Boast and Round Mountain by Castle Freeman
Lately I’ve been listening to my Paul Desmond LPs. “In his music, as in his life, the absurd cohabited with the familiar,” wrote Nat Hentoff. “His was the realm of an urbane dreamer all too aware of how close yearning is to feeling ridiculous.” One hears a longing grown sophisticated to challenge a blunt awareness…
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Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, by Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole
On January 23, 2012, Reuters reported that 150 ancient Jewish scrolls and documents had been discovered in Afghanistan “and most likely smuggled” to private dealers in London. Dating from the 11th century, the cache’s commercial records appear to be written in a Judeo-Persian language associated with merchants who worked the Silk Road trade. Judicial decrees,…
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on poetry by Rusty Morrison, Leonardo Sinisgalli, and Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Book of the Given, poems by Rusty Morrison (Noemi Press) There is a poetry deeply troubled by the relation between speaker and listener – so disturbed that the relation becomes its primary subject. To those who take this relation for granted as stable and managed by conventions of intelligibility, this poetry may seem too enthralled…
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on Coma by Pierre Guyotat, translated from the French by Noura Wedell
Although Pierre Guyotat’s Coma comes packaged between two fiery anti-memoir statements -- by Gary Indiana in his introduction and by translator Noura Wedell in an afterword – it is nevertheless a personal narrative. But conscience compels him to question and redeploy the genre’s conventions. On one level, Coma follows Guyotat’s life in the late 1970s…
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on Dante In Love by A. N. Wilson
Summing up why Dante’s Commedia was neglected between the Renaissance and the Romantics, Robert Lowell said that changes in literary styles had eclipsed Dante’s status as a forerunner. “Something too in his character must have awed and scared men off by its arrogance,” he wrote. “He was too mystical for other men of letters, too…