Review 1604: The Stone of Chastity
1 hour ago
"That's the beautiful thing about government grants: you don't need to produce the final product."That's Tess, the (primary) narrator, explaining the essence of her scam in François Blais' novel Document 1. She and her roommate Jude want to take a trip from their hometown of Grand-Mère, Quebec, to Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania--they've picked it for the name--but have no money. So they decide to apply for a literary grant to write a novel and then use the money for their vacation.
"You see, this is a tale, of course, but it is also the truth."The Life of Elves (2015, 2016 for the English translation) is Muriel Barbery's third book, and her first after the enormous success of The Elegance of the Hedgehog.
"But people who employ irony with moderation, and use such occasions as are not too obvious and palpable, present an appearance of refinement."And that's my defense. From Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Chapter xiii, tr. by J. E. C. Welldon. I'm making my way through it--very, very slowly.
For never was a story of more woeWe went to see the simulcast of the new Royal Shakespeare Production of Romeo and Juliet yesterday, and I read the play first to have the language fresh in my head before seeing it.
Than this of Juliet and her Romeo.
"With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader."So begins Adam Bede, the beginning of George Eliot's career as a novelist, in 1859. There's non-fiction, translations from German, and the volume of short stories, Scenes From A Clerical Life, before this, but her career as a novelist, what we know her for now, begins here.
"She looked out of the window and she thought that it would be hard to find a more suitable setting for a vision of the end of the world than these mountains."Well, Ismail Kadare isn't winning any friends in the Albanian tourist bureau, I can tell you that.
Sincerely and earnestly hoping that this little book may do something toward throwing light on the American slave system, and hastening the glad day of deliverance to the millions of my brethren in bonds--faithfully relying on the power of truth, love, and justice, for success in my humble efforts--and solemnly pledging myself anew to the sacred cause,--I subscribe myself, FREDERICK DOUGLASS. Lynn, Mass, April 28, 1847.I think we may say he succeeded.
"I write only for fame and without any view of pecuniary emolument."Jane Austen wrote that in a letter to her sister at the age of twenty, years before any of her novels were published, and Carol Shields assumes she was being ironic. Knowing Jane Austen as we do, Carol Shields is likely right. But sometimes things work out, and deserved merit turns ironic self-deprecation into truth.
The ability to sustain long works of fiction is at least partially dependent on establishing a delicate balance between solitude and interaction. Too much human noise during the writing of a novel distracts from the cleanliness of its overarching plan. Too little social interruption, on the other hand, distracts a writer's sense of reality and allows feeling to 'prey' on the consciousness...Now, it's true, Carol Shields was writing before Twitter.
For every writer the degree of required social involvement or distance must be differently gauged, but novelists who take refuge in isolated log cabins tend to be a romantic minority, or perhaps a myth. Most novelists, knowing that ongoing work is fed by ongoing life, prize their telephones, their correspondence, and their daily rubbing up against family and friends.
Oh, what a tangled web we weaveMichael Innes' The New Sonia Wayward (1960) could be read as demonstrating that old saw as being completely true.
When first we practice to deceive.
The mouth is a weird place. Not quite inside and not quite out, not skin and not organ, but something in between: dark, wet, admitting access to an interior most people would rather not contemplate--where cancer starts, where the heart is broken, where the soul might just fail to turn up.
I encouraged my patients to floss.