Commentary |
on “Constantine’s Sword,” a film by James Carroll and Oren Jacoby (Storyville Films)
My mother and maternal grandparents were Jewish holocaust survivors, repetitive in their reminiscences. I grew up with knowledge that the world is visited by pervasive terror. The survivors are fated to live with a looming story. This world-quality extended into my adulthood. Now I understand my chagrin on watching the crucifixion scene in Ben-Hur: I…
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from A Greener Meadow, selected poems by Luciano Erba, tr. by Peter Robinson
THE PUBLIC AND THE PRIVATE [“Il Pubblico e Il Privato”] April came inside with the blackbird whistling above washing lines wind came into the city and went over yellower fields, below bridges of iron, like the gambling flight of a first aviator’s biplane. On parapets of the overpass where men in blue have fixed some…
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on Do You Believe?: Conversations on God and Religion, by Antonio Monda (Vintage)
Literary people have long provided the most moving, entertaining, and unconventional views of institutionalized religion. Voltaire, famously: “Religion is the source of all imaginable follies and disturbances; it is the parent of fanaticism and civil discord; it is the enemy of mankind.” The Second Commandment may have freed religion from the arts of graven images,…
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on Hold Everything Dear, essays by John Berger
In his first novel A Painter of Our Time (1959), John Berger wrote, “We today pause to reflect on whether our severity may be made more severe; and in every one of those pauses the artist faces the same difficulty – it is the difficulty that unites us – the difficulty of making the intangible…
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on poetry: One Body by Margaret Gibson, Complex Sleep by Tony Tost, and Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone by Janice N. Harrington
Here are three poetry titles published in 2007 that you may have overlooked or not encountered at all. The succeeding waves of new poetry in April tend to swamp those landed the previous spring and through the year. So I wish these books an extended debut into the new year. *** One Body…
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Lost Paradise, a novel by Cees Nooteboom, translated by Susan Massotty (Grove Press)
First published in 2004 as Paradijs Verloren, Lost Paradise completes the second half of an orbit achieved by its mirrored opposite, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which is quoted or mentioned here and there. The story begins with Alma, a young Brazilian woman from an affluent family, who drives off in her mother’s car to one of…
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A View of the Ocean, a memoir by Jan de Hartog
In The Art of Time in Memoir, Sven Birkerts names three approaches to discovering “a dramatic explanatory narrative” in memoir: “For some the event-based story of the past may be paramount … for others it may be the process of discovering that there is a story … and for still others the main incentive might…
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on Conjugal Love, a novella by Alberto Moravia, translated by Marina Harss
In an interview conducted a few months before he died in 1990, Alberto Moravia said, “In persons of genius you can’t talk of heredity or determinism. It would be like saying Leopardi was a pessimist because he was a hunchback.” Yet Moravia, who considered the gloomy Leopardi his literary forebear, often began his life story,…
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on Soldier’s Heart by Elizabeth Samet
Having earned her doctorate in literature from Yale, Elizabeth Samet accepted the best teaching job she could get. “When I told my friends and acquaintances at Yale that I was going to West Point, I got a range of responses, ‘You’ll humanize them,’ said one well-meaning professor, leaving me puzzled. They had seemed pretty human…
Commentary |
The Art of the American Snapshot: 1888-1978, by Sarah Greenough and Diane Waggoner
On July 9, 1896, the New York Times ran a story alleging that the mayor of Long Island City was engaged in illicit activities. To provide evidence, the paper ran some photos, described by journalist Anthony Comstock as “snapshots.” Apparently, this is the first time “snapshot” was used to describe a photograph. The word had…
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The Bad Girl, a novel by Mario Vargas Llosa
In The Bad Girl, Ricardo Somocurcio tells the story of his lifelong love for Lily the Chilean girl, Comrade Arlette, Madame Robert Arnoux, Mrs. David Richardson, Kuriko, Otilita, and his wife Mrs. Somocurcio – the serial identities of the bad girl. She first appears as teenaged Lily, moved to Lima with her family from Santiago.…
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on “Medical Poetry”: Primary Care, an anthology of poems by physicians (Univ of Iowa Press)
Yesterday at a business meeting, I met a board member of the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. “Doctors aren’t having fun anymore,” he said. “They’re saying the profession is becoming as standardized and routine as practicing law. The insurance companies want the MD to spend just fifteen minutes with a patient. That’s all he or…
Commentary |
on Literary Influence: Make Us Wave Back, essays by Michael Collier
Writing about Roethke, William Meredith said, “All the writers who go on concerning us after their deaths are men and women who have escaped from a confused human identity into the identity they willed and consented to.” Our population is a clamor of confused human identities, so having one (or having had one) isn’t a…