Plus: Gabriele Tergit; Gothic Mania; Ben Lerner
| Today in The New York Review of Books: Hermione Lee weighs Gertrude Stein’s life and afterlife; Adam Kirsch reads a novel about three generations of German Jewish life; Beatrice Radden Keefe gets Gothic mania; a poem by Ben Lerner; and, from the archives, William H. Gass goes long on Gertrude Stein. A new life of Gertrude Stein treats her as a philosopher of language to trust, not explain—and gathers force from archival discoveries and intriguing plots of her reception and reputation. Gabriele Tergit’s Effingers chronicles how one prosperous German Jewish family struggled to answer the question: When is it time to leave? At the turn of the twentieth century, a Gothic fever swept Europe as artists searched for meaning in a lost age. Free from the ArchivesIn our February 12 issue, Hermione Lee writes about a new biography of Gertrude Stein, by Francesca Wade, “that will forever be an essential tool for anyone studying” the modernist writer. For some readers, Lee says, Stein may be on a knife-edge between “the most remarkable creative experimentalist of her century” and “a ludicrously self-inflated, intolerably repetitive, and dead-end mannerist.” In the Review’s May 3 and May 17, 1973, issues, William H. Gass—decidedly in the former camp regarding Stein’s talents—wrote a two-part essay about her, arguing that she was possessed of “revolutionary zeal” while on a “restless quest for truth [that] would cause her to render some aspects of reality with a ruthlessness rare in any writer, and at a greater risk to her art than most.” “[In Stein’s Three Lives] the rhythms, the rhymes, the heavy monosyllabic beat, the skillful rearrangements of normal order, the carefully controlled pace, the running on, the simplicity, exactness, the passion…in the history of language no one had written like this before, and the result was as striking in its way, and as successful, as Ulysses was to be.” “Gertrude Stein did more with sentences, and understood them better, than any other writer ever has. Not all her manipulations are successful, but even at their worst, most boring, most mechanical, they are wonderfully informative. And constantly she thought of them as things in space, as long and wiggling and physical as worms.” New Subscriber Benefit!Subscribers are now able to share unlocked versions of our articles with friends, family, and social media channels. When signed in to your account, look for this gift box icon in any of our articles. “Trump’s unilateral actions against Venezuela were entirely unprovoked. The implication of the administration’s reasoning is that countries can use military force anytime they are unhappy with how another country regulates or fails to regulate conduct within its borders that could have injurious effects elsewhere. But this is ludicrous. By the administration’s logic, Canada could start shooting Americans suspected of carrying drugs over the US–Canada border, or bomb buildings in the US that it claimed were being used to manufacture the drugs.” “David Szalay’s sixth book, Flesh, is partly about the encounter between a definitively unbookish mind and the intractable realities of experience. A male mind, crucially. And a hetero mind: this too is relevant. Unbookish straight men are a Szalay specialty. He writes with great formal rigor about the foot soldiers of contemporary blokedom.” You are receiving this message because you signed up
for email newsletters from The New York Review. The New York Review of Books
207 East 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016-6305 |
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario