Books
Perhaps a movie such as “The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is much more than a zany comedy, can lead us back, as director Wes Anderson may have intended, to the fabulous writing of Stefan Zweig.
“To the End of the Land” is about the devastation of war, how war erodes the human spirit, yet how that spirit is far more resilient that we may have ever suspected.
“Falling Out of Time” is a book that gives all the truth that Israeli writer David Grossman can deliver, and far more intimacy than we strangers who are his readers have earned.
What about today? Has Russia finally hit bottom and recovered? Is the political economy of vodka a thing of the past?
The books are bleak in that Pierre Michon provides no reassuring, idealistic view of the creative urge. Art leads to no transcendence, no permanent uplifting sentiment. Making poems or making pictures is a rough daily business.
The culture of American fiction is never as neatly defined as books like “MFA vs NYC” make it out to be.
“Bernard Malamud is the great sentence-maker, the great craftsman, and the sheer quality of those sentences has never perhaps been given its complete due.”
In the superb “But where is the lamb?,” James Goodman takes up the numerous ramifications, moral and otherwise, of God’s chilling command to sacrifice Isaac and Abraham’s — perhaps more chilling — acquiescence.
“The Haunted Life” is little more than an example of the staggering amount of work it takes for a writer to find his voice, a testament to the years of toil Kerouac put in before forging a style all his own.
Given all the terror and brutality we have lived through just in the thirteen years of this new, 21st century, the story of people running drugs back in the ’70s doesn’t seem to have much urgency.
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