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on The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, a novel by Alina Bronsky, translated from the German by Tim Mohr
The story: In a Russian city located many hours away from Moscow by train, Rosalinda Achmetowna lives with her dejected husband Kalganow and her “deformed” daughter Sulfia. It is 1978. They share the communal apartment with a woman named Klavdia. Rosa begins the tale of her adulthood through the end of the 20th century: …
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Never Any End to Paris, a fictional memoir by Enrique Vila-Matas, translated by Anne McLean
In his electric and endearing fictional memoir, Never Any End to Paris, Enrique Vila-Matas mentions Andre Gide’s advice about autobiography: “An artist shouldn’t recount his life exactly as he’s lived it, but rather live it exactly as he is going to recount it.” But this sage-like counsel turns out to be practically useless to the…
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on Radial Symmetry, poems by Katherine Larson
Niels Bohr said that the purpose of describing nature “is not to disclose the real essence of physical objects but only to track down, so far as it is possible, relations between the manifold aspects of experience.” And so, the question: how far is it possible? The describer is embedded in the phenomena – is…
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on The Future of History by John Lukacs
After an early Sunday evening dinner at my grandparents’ apartment, my family often watched “The Twentieth Century” on CBS at 6:30. First aired in 1957 and narrated by Walter Cronkite, the half-hour show ran for 107 episodes through the early ‘60’s. Verdun, Lindbergh, the Depression, the Enola Gay, Nuremberg, Korea. My parents and grandparents had…
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on Netsuke, a novel by Rikki Ducornet and Day of the Oprichnik, a novel by by Vladimir Sorokin
We forlornly ask about ourselves, Is this what it means to be human? Knowing we do this, novelists create unlikeable narrators in order to expand our consciousness of the squalid and the vile. New novels by Rikki Ducornet and Vladimir Sorokin extend this ignobly noble literary tradition. Their limited first-person narrators simply assume that we…
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on The Long Goodbye, a memoir by Meghan O’Rourke
Two days after his mother died in October, 1977, Roland Barthes wrote on a slip of paper, “Everyone guesses – I feel this – the degree of a bereavement’s intensity. But it’s impossible (meaningless, contradictory signs) to measure how much someone is afflicted.” The unstated question provoking his fragmentary responses is: What form does my…
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Nineteen Poets Recommend New & Recent Titles
Welcome to the Seawall’s fourth annual spring poetry feature. Below, nineteen poets write briefly on some of their favorite new and recent collections. The material includes: Lisa Russ Spaar on Space, In Chains by Laura Kasischke Nick Sturm on Destroyer and Preserver by Matthew Rohrer Hank Lazer on Luminous Epinoia by Peter O’Leary Jericho Brown…
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on In The Train, a novel by Christian Oster, translated by Adriana Hunter
French novelist Christian Oster has published five novels since Dans le train appeared in 2002, the same year Claude Berri released his film Une femme de ménage (“A Cleaning Woman”) based on Oster’s 2001 novel of that title. In 2007, Random House published his novel The Unforeseen (L’Imprévu, 2005). Now sixty-two, Oster is a major…
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on Otherwise Elsewhere, poems by David Rivard
There is an astonishing density to the world imagined in Otherwise Elsewhere, David Rivard’s fifth book of poems. Tricked out with enigmas that won’t yield to the probes of the poet, this world provides a glut of substance for meditation and easeful enjoyment – but also, an implacable cache of cancelling impediments. His poem “Vigorish”…
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on How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer, by Sarah Bakewell
Michel de Montaigne was still revising his essays when he died at age fifty-nine in 1592. One of his favorite philosophers, the Skeptic physician Sextus Empiricus, had doubted whether anything is objectively knowable and preferred to suspend judgment. Revisions clarified and enlarged Montaigne’s perceptions while erasing narrow conclusions. An open question demanded a response: How…
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New Non-Fiction: Neuro-Magic, Public Toilets, and the Sublime
Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions, by Stephen L. Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde (Henry Holt) In Hiding the Elephant (2003), Jim Steinmeyer writes, “The magician and author Henry Hay noted that the decline of the waistcoat has affected magic more than the invention of communications satellites.” Steinmeyer’s history…
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on The Cloak of Dreams, fairy tales by Béla Balázs, translated by Jack Zipes
In 1919, Béla Balázs escaped to Vienna from Budapest when the six-month old Hungarian Soviet Republic was crushed by Romanian and Czechoslovakian forces supported by the United States, France and England. Born Herbert Bauer in 1884 to Jewish parents who identified with German culture, Balázs was a leader of the Hungarian arts renaissance, producing plays,…
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on Solo, a novel by Rana Dasgupta
Born in Canterbury (his mother is English), Rana Dasgupta has been living in Delhi for the past decade but does not speak Bengali (his father is Bengali). He studied French literature at Oxford and earned a graduate degree in Media Studies at the University of Wisconsin. He worked for a marketing consultancy in Kuala Lumpur,…
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on Sobbing Superpower, poems by Tadeusz Różewicz, translated from the Polish by Joanna Trzeciak
Born in 1921, Tadeusz Różewicz was eighteen when Germany invaded Poland, the catastrophe that ended a briefly euphoric period of freedom for the Poles whose country had been partitioned for 150 years by Austrian, Russian and German rule. He fought in the underground in 1943-44. His brother was arrested and shot by the Gestapo. Wartime…