Departure(s)

Julian Barnes tells us that this is his final book, so that’s one departure accounted for – the last instalment of a writing career spanning 45 years, encompassing novels and short stories, memoirs and essays, biography, travel writing, translation and even a little pseudonymous detective fiction. Many of these works turn up here, whether obliquely or overtly, referred to through subject matter, style, tone or connotation; in the contemporary cultural argot, which Barnes is fond of examining, these writerly winks might be known as Easter eggs. Alex Clark, The Guardian

Departure(s) by Julian Barnes is published by Jonathan Cape. 

triste! 

The Banality of Kindness

In the summer of 1944, a young Tony Molho was riding with his mother on a train in Thessaloniki, Greece. Suddenly, two officers in plain clothes boarded and began to ask for everyone’s papers. Molho’s mother, who had recently returned from her escape of Nazi persecution, acted quickly, passing Molho’s little hand to that of a man standing beside them. The train stopped, and she jumped off. 

Such are the stories detailed in Molho’s memoir, Courage and Compassion: A Jewish Boyhood in German-Occupied Greece, released in the U.S. last June. The book, first published in Greek in 2023 under the title The Banality of Kindness, won the Academy of Athens’s Ouranis Prize. Rebecca Goodman, Brown Alumni Magazine

questo memoriale è uscito anche in Italia presso Viella con il titolo La gentilezza degli altri. Un bambino ebreo nella Grecia occupata. Il nome di Tony Molho mi richiama, per omonimia, quello dell’affascinante Renata Molho, che conobbi anni fa: esperta di moda, autrice di un giallo ambientato nella Milano della moda e di una biografia di Armani. La cito volentieri, in ricordo di Armani.

Joan Didion’s ‘astonishingly intimate’ diary

A journal found in Joan Didion’s home is to be published in April.

Discovered in a filing cabinet next to the American writer’s desk after her death in 2021, Notes to John is addressed to Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, who died in 2003. Its entries begin in December 1999, and recount sessions Didion was having with a psychiatrist at the time. Lucy Knight, The Guardian

Keeping a diary

By 1600 or so in England there’s a play written, Volpone by Ben Jonson, in which two of the characters talk about diaries, and one of them reads the other’s diary out loud on stage. You have that horrible emotionally naked feeling of having your feelings displayed in public, awful, by 1600, and it’s happening on stage. So, by then everyone knows what a diary is in England, but absolutely not the case in Europe. It spreads over the following century or so. John Dickerson, Slate

recensione al libro di Roland Allen, The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper (Faber) che racconta la storia dei diari e di come siano passati a essere semplicemente degli elenchi al diventare racconti di storie personali.

Jews of Discretion

Let me start with an expression I made up in Call Me by Your Name. It refers to Jews who live in an entirely gentile world and who, without concealing their Jewishness, are, nevertheless, reluctant to proclaim it. There is, or so they think, no real imperative to proclaim their religion; they may even live in a world where Christians and Jews are quite secular, may even intermarry, and have grown to tolerate each other. You are not ashamed or fearful to be Jewish but you know better than to stand out when it’s not exactly necessary to do so. You may not tell everyone you are Jewish; at best, you allow some to infer it. After at least 2,000 years of antisemitic persecution, your difference is something you learn instinctively not to say too much about. I called these Jews “Jews of discretion.” Not nervous, not even apprehensive—just discreet. Or to use another word, prudent. André Aciman, Tablet

dal discorso fatto dall'autore il 5 novembre scorso all'University of Virginia in occasione della Conference on Jewish Life in the Diaspora: Sephardic Lives

“Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?”

In 2014, The New Yorker showcased “Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant?,” an excerpt from Chast’s illustrated memoir about her parents’ challenging final years. Well into their nineties, the elder Chasts, a pair of retired Brooklyn teachers, resisted any acknowledgment of their own mortality, as well as efforts to prepare. With tenderness and humor, irritation and dismay, Chast captures a difficult stage of the child-parent relationship in a manner that will resonate with anyone who has cared for aging relatives, and with those who haven’t. The full-length version won the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and exemplifies one of Chast’s many gifts: what her colleague Adam Gopnik describes as the “weight beneath apparent whimsy” of her work. Roz Chast, The New Yorker

sempre piacevole (ri)leggere Roz Chast. 

Dogopolis

Dog mess once had medicinal uses. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, physicians used it as an astringent in the form of album Graecum (dried and whitened canine excrement).

It was hard for some observers to discuss the canine excrement that was now visible within the modern cityscape. In a letter to the Times of London, Bristol-based Dr. G. Knowles acknowledged the difficulty of discussing the foul matter: “I can only think that people have been comparatively silent regarding this disgusting nuisance out of a sense of delicacy.” Excerpt reprinted from Dogopolis: How Dogs and Humans Made Modern New York, London, and Paris by Chris Pearson, published by the University of Chicago Press. © 2021 by the University of Chicago Press. Lapham's Quarterly

Oltre alla cacca dei cani, questa settimana segnaliamo anche il cambiamento che sta avvenendo nelle autobiografie: 

Rather than prioritizing confession and catharsis, today’s authors are focusing on the question of who gets to share their version of things and interrogating the form, along with themselves.  Megan O’Grady, NYT

The Odd Woman and the City, Gornick’s brief new collection of meditations and anecdotes, shows her still wrestling in old age with the same basic problems that have always animated her work. The need for, and the impossibility of, romantic connection; the erotic embrace of the city, as a substitute for personal intimacy; the consolations and frustrations of friendship; above all, the moral struggle to make an independent self—these have been, and still are, Gornick’s great subjects. What gives Gornick’s writing its disturbing charge is the way she never comes to the end of these subjects—never achieves the kind of self-understanding or resignation that might lead to wisdom. Adam Kirsch, tablet.

Vivian Gornick, The Odd Woman and the City (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

James Wood sul suo nuovo libro

Il nuovo libro di James Wood - The Nearest Thing to Life (Jonathan Cape) - è quasi un'autobiografia: "Wood’s new book is as much autobiographical as critical: why should there be a difference, because the books whose vital “lifeness” he extols saved his own life when he was growing up as a minister’s son in Durham? The atmosphere at home was strict, high-minded, earnestly evangelical. “I was escaping from things,” Wood said, “hiding from things, but also discovering things that might be prohibited. Though my parents didn’t run a despotic regime, novels gave me a freedom to think and to be that was not found within the gospels.” Peter Conrad, guardian.

Campus Novel and More

"... the university has been the key institution in Lodge’s life, and here his biography is a microcosm of the much vaunted social mobility experienced by many of those who came to adulthood in the decades immediately after 1945. At first sight, it would be tempting to say that he is not an academic novelist but a novelist who happens to be an academic. However, that not only understates the extent to which his critical and theoretical work has informed his fiction (his skilful exposition of the role of metaphor and metonymy in Nice Work is an obvious instance): it may also misrepresent his identity. Lodge doesn’t just ‘happen to be’ an academic: he owed his writing voice to the university, just as in a more material way he owed the opportunity to establish himself as a writer to the financial security provided by his academic career". Stefan Collini su due nuovi libri di David Lodge, un'autobiografia e una raccolta di saggi, Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir (Harvill Secker), Lives in Writing: Essays (Vintage). lrb.

Fire Shut Up in My Bones

Charles Blow è il visual op-ed columnist del The New York Times. E' stato lui a ideare questa nuova forma di giornalismo. Fire Shut Up in My Bones (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) è la sua autobiografia e sembra molto interessante. Blow ha infatti un background piuttosto complesso.

"Charles Blow was only 24 when he was asked by The New York Times to direct its graphics department — apparently the youngest department head in the paper’s history. His elegant charts, distillations of political and social complexity, jolted readers with their logic, lucidity and sheer beauty. Before long, he ascended yet again, reinventing himself — and configuring a new genre of journalism — as the paper’s “visual Op-Ed columnist.”

Now Blow has written a complex bildungsroman of a memoir. “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” begins with the author’s childhood as the youngest son within a turbulent yet essentially loving household in the small, segregated town of Gibs­land, La". Patricia J. Williams, nytbooks.

(Nella foto: Charles Blow, con la camicia rossa, e i fratelli)

Woman of Valor

Lihi Lapid, Woman of Valor (Gefen Publishing House). “I realized I have two women living inside of me. One is the donut from Hanukkah, and the other is the champagne from New Year’s. The champagne wants to party all night and the donut needs to wake up tomorrow for the kids. The donut wants the kids to eat only food that she made. And the champagne stopped on the way and bought cold pizza, because she didn’t have time.” 
Lihi Lapid ha 46 anni, è israeliana ed è la moglie del ministro delle finanze di Israele. Tiene una rubrica per Yediot Aharonot che parla di ricette e aneddoti di amore e bambini (un'idea che mi piace molto).  tablet.

The Letters of J.F. Powers

J.F. Powers è un bravo scrittore americano di racconti da noi praticamente sconosciuto. Il suo interesse narrativo era soprattutto rivolto al mondo dei cattolici americani del dopoguerra, che descriveva con eleganza e una satira bonaria. E' stato collaboratore del New Yorker. Ora è uscita una raccolta di sue lettere, Suitable Accommodations: An Autobiographical Story of Family Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a cura di una dei suoi cinque figli, Katherine A. Powers. Adam Gopnik ne parla sul New Yorker, "... the book provides a wonderful picture of a now lost type: the radical-liberal Catholic of the forties and fifties, whose allegiance to the rules of the Church (all those children!) was part and parcel of his allegiance to what would now seem an extravagant, not to say extremist, egalitarian politics. Katherine Powers rightly calls this' the nearly forgotten American Catholic countercultural religious and social ferment of the mid-twentieth century'." newyorker.

Child Star

Il 23 aprile Shirley Temple compirà 85 anni. Bisognerebbe ristampare la sua autobiografia, Child Star, scritta 25 anni fa e ora fuori stampa (su Amazon ce n'è rimasta qualche copia, dai 100 dollari in su). Di essa Matt Weinstock scrive, "Celebrity autobiography has been a denigrated genre since at least 1982 (when Orson Welles and Gore Vidal spent most of the year poring over Rudy Vallee’s memoir “like a pair of Talmudic scholars” ). But “Child Star”—published twenty-five years ago, and lamentably out of print—doesn’t register as an autobiography so much as a little-girl classic that ought to be shelved alongside “Anne of Green Gables,” “Little Women,” and Laura Ingalls Wilder. It’s a bildungsroman scaled to the intellectual limitations of a child, a book that takes six months to read and becomes part of your life". newyorker.

L'ultimo libro di Sendak

L'ultimo libro di Maurice Sendak, My Brother's Book (HarperCollins), è uscito postumo lo scorso 5 febbraio. E' dedicato al fratello, Jack, morto nel 1995, scrittore per bambini e collaboratore di Maurice, e a Eugene Glynn, morto nel 2007, psicoanlista e compagno dello scrittore. Bruce Handy, di Vanity Fair, dice: "Is it possible for someone as beloved and as habitually honored as Maurice Sendak to be, at the same time, under-appreciated? His final book, the posthumous, just-published My Brother’s Book (available February 5th), makes me think yes. It’s not his best work, but what is? That’s the “curse” of having written and illustrated Where the Wild Things Are when you were 35 and In the Night Kitchen when you were 42 and then living to be 83. But My Brother’s Book is a perfect coda to a singular career, a lovely and moving distillation. It’s also, as the title implies, Sendak’s most overtly personal book. It’s the work of a man facing loss and death who still had deep reservoirs of craft, imagination, and feeling from which to draw. It’s the work not of a great children’s author and illustrator but of a great writer and artist, period". vanityfair.

I diari di Mavis Gallant

Mavis Gallant nel 1950

I diari di Mavis Gallant saranno pubblicati in un prossimo, imprecisato, futuro da Knopf, a cura di Frances Kiernan, amica della scrittrice. Deborah Treisman, del New Yorker, la intervista. 

Mavis Gallant, who will turn ninety in a few weeks, kept a diary for more than fifty years. You’ve been transcribing her notebooks with the aim of editing and publishing the diaries in book form. Can you tell us a bit about the scope of that project?

The diaries themselves are vast. Handwritten mostly, with a few typed pages, dating from 1952 through 2007—dozens and dozens of notebooks. They represent almost daily entries from a true master of the detail, and in reading these journals I have come to understand that they were a kind of flexing of her writing muscles: practice, perhaps, for the layered and complex observations in her short stories. newyorker.

The Receptionist

The Receptionist è Janet Groth, receptionist al New Yorker dal 1957 al 1978, ed è il titolo di un libro appena uscito su quella sua esperienza (Algonquin Books), che contiene molti nomi e aneddoti piccanti. Perché, come dice lei stessa, "Before signing books, she was interviewed by Foster Hirsch, a film scholar and an old friend of hers, who claimed to be shocked by those parts of the memoir which treat her private life. She patiently explained what is held to be a tenet of book publishing: “In the parts where there aren’t any famous people, there has to be a lot of sex”. newyorker.

Ancora sui diari di Susan Sontag

“I want to be good.”
“Why?”
“I want to be what I admire.”
“Why don’t you want to be what you are?”
8/7/68, Stockholm

Susan Sontag appare sempre più interessante. E molto bella in fotografia. newyorker.

F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up Essays

Interessante il saggio di Patricia Hampl su The Crack-Up di Fitzgerald e la sua influenza sulla letteratura autobiografica americana, "Whitman had set American poetry on this road a few generations earlier: the voice of 'Song of Myself' belongs to a lyric essayist, contending with himself and his time, using the personal self as the representative of the national type, fusing the individual to history. And the presence of faux memoirists as narrators in American fiction - including Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby, Hemingway's own Nick Adams, and before that the narrators of Huckleberry Finn and Moby-Dick - also betrays a preference for the first-person voice.

The 'Crack-Up' essays are a similar poetic project. Fitzgerald's strangled cry in them makes clear that a lyric impulse links the personal essay with poetry, even though essays are a prose form and seem to pose a chronic scourge (or companion) to their apparent kin  - narrative fiction. In fact, the essay inhabits an intermediate territory between story and poem. That may be its fundamental appeal. Tell a story and then think about it - all in the same work. theamericanscholar.

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?

E' il titolo dell'autobiografia, se così si può chiamare questa raccolta di vignette sulla sua vita, di Mindy Kaling, la simpatica attrice e scrittrice comica di The Office. Uscirà a giorni presso Crown Archetype. Il New Yorker intervista l'attrice:

You write in the book about some of your less positive experiences writing for “The Office.” Do you worry about what your co-writers will think?

Comedy writers have the most fragile egos. It's not that they're offended by what you say, but more that you omitted sparkling parts of their résumés. I'm used to showing everyone what I write, but this had to be more private, because, inevitably, they just wanted to see the stuff about them. newyorker.