Proust’s Jewish Question

At some point in his later years, Marcel Proust wrote to a friend that he had stopped visiting the graves of his maternal ancestors:

There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so many years to lay a stone on his parents’ grave.

This enigmatic sentence has been cited by dozens of scholars as evidence of something essential about Proust’s relationship to his Jewishness. But what exactly does it indicate? Does it reveal his desire to sever connections with his family’s Jewish past? Or does it show a nostalgia for Jewish ritual and a regret about the factors—illness, assimilation, the passage of time—that led to its loss? Maurice Samuels, The New York Review of Books

Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries

Il titolo completo di questo articolo è "What Hot Dragon-Riders and Fornicating Faeries Say About What Women Want Now" e il sottotilo, ‘Romantasy’ novels are booming when romance in general is in decline.

Riusciranno elfi sexy, cavalcatori di draghi scatenati e fate vogliose a salvare l’editoria? Il romantasy oggi genera 20 milioni di copie all’anno. Anna Louie Sussman, The Wall Street Journal

The many Machiavellis

Up to a point, to understand him [Machiavelli, n.d.r.] is to understand the Renaissance. But understanding Machiavelli has never been easy. Philosophers as different as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Carl Schmitt, and Antonio Gramsci all claimed him as a predecessor, but each seemed to embrace a different Machiavelli. To Rousseau, he was a republican; to Schmitt, a realist; to Gramsci, a guide for revolutionaries. All agreed, however, that his searching investigations of human agency had launched a new epoch in political thought. Julianne Werlin, The Chronicle of Higher Education

recensione al libro di Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age, uscito di recente per University of Chicago Press 

Edmund White

After the news of White’s death, here is a guide to a foundational writer of gay lives and elder statesman of American queer literary fiction. Neil Bartlett, The Guardian

ci piace ricordarlo in questa foto, davanti ai suoi libri 

Italiani in traduzione

I have never been honest with myself. It’s an attribute that has always disturbed me. I can’t accept even the most basic truths. What I am good at is coming up with excuses; it’s easy for me to invent excuses. And Giuseppe Trevisani, wonderful guy, is my favorite excuse of all. Many years ago, Trevisani, a translator, wrote an ending to a short story that, when I read it at the age of sixteen, led me to believe that the evil I felt inside me might actually be the mark of an exceptional character. Domenico Starnonte, "Tortoiseshell," The New Yorker

 

I read “Perfection” in a single hypnotized sitting. Time disappeared, as it does for Anna and Tom. In the following days, I described the book to myself with words like “flat” and “clinical” and “affectless.” I thought of it as a “case study” or a “kind of ethnography.” Reading it again a week later, I had the impression of meeting a beautiful, well-dressed person for the second time and realizing only then, with some embarrassment, that they were smart and funny and sensitive. “Perfection” is dense with ideas, feelings, political insights, beautiful turns of phrase, unexpected observations about ordinary occurrences—all the qualities I look for (and appreciate in real time) when reading fiction but which had, in this case, been obscured by proper nouns and mimetic precision. This is intentional, of course. Alice Gregory, The New Yorker 

il romanzo di Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection è stato pubblicato da Fitzcarraldo Editions e tradotto da Sophie Hughes

The Most Beautiful Words in the English Language

If you were to ask 100 different people to pick the most beautiful word in the English language, you’d probably get 100 different answers. There’s a seemingly endless list to choose from, as some words evoke pleasant memories, while others sound mellifluous to the ear. While there’s no way to reach a universal consensus, many esteemed linguists have favorites of their own. These are a few of them.

Ailurophile

Accomplished linguist Dr. Robert Beard compiled a list of what he personally considers to be the 100 most beautiful English words. Up first — at least alphabetically — is “ailurophile,” which appropriately sounds quite alluring. The word, which essentially means “cat lover,” is derived from the Greek ailuros, meaning “cat,” and phile, meaning “lover.” Its origins date back to the 1910s, though the word continues to make the hearts of linguists purr today. Not only does it sound pleasant, but it also evokes the beautiful connection that humans have with their beloved pets.

più sorprendente, secondo me:

Cellar Door

We’d be remiss if we left off what some consider to be the most beautiful pairing of words in the English language: “cellar door.” Many have praised this combo for its euphonious sound. Journalist H. L. Mencken called it “intrinsically musical, in clang-tint and rhythm,” while Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien was a noted fan of its beauty. In 1963, author C. S. Lewis admitted his astonishment when he saw the phrase written as “Selladore,” which he found an “enchanting proper name.” Bennett Kleinma, Word Smarts