Qualche aneddoto sull'uso del pluralis maiestatis: "Only three types of individual were entitled to such usage: ‘The head of a sovereign state, a schizophrenic and a pregnant woman", "there are three classes of people who always say 'we' instead of 'I.' They are emperors, editors and men with a tapeworm" (questo forse di Mark Twain) e, forse di Thoreau, "We is used by royalty, editors, pregnant women and people who eat worms". Ben Zimmer, On Language, nytmag.
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| Colm Tóibín |
Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family: Stories (Viking). "The nine stories in Tóibín's new collection, The Empty Family, explore similar themes: of exile and return, death and loss, irreconcilable love affairs and conflicting loyalties, the differences between the families we're born into and those we choose for ourselves, or would if we could". Thomas Jones, g/o.
Michael Cunningham, By Nightfall (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). L'arrivo del bellissimo fratellino della moglie sconvolge gli equilibri familiari di una coppia di newyorkesi. nytbr.
Antonya Nelson, Bound (Bloomsbury). La morte di un'amica dei tempi dell'adolescenza fa riflettere Catherine, la protagonista del romanzo, sulle follie compiute negli anni giovanili. nytbr.
Lorrie Moore analizza The Wire, una serie televisiva molto popolare, dura e bella (anche secondo Moore), andata in onda negli USA qualche anno fa e mai approdata, a quel che mi sembra, in Italia. Dice Moore, facendo anche una lezione di scrittura, "So confident are Simon and Burns [gli autori] in their enterprise that they have with much justification called the program 'not television' but a 'novel.' Certainly the series's creators know what novelists know: that it takes time to transform a social type into a human being, demography into dramaturgy, whether time comes in the form of pages or hours. With time as a medium rather than a constraint one can show a profound and unexpected aspect of a character, and discover what that character might decide to do because of it. With time one can show the surprising interconnections within a chaotic, patchworked metropolis". nybooks.
Elif Batuman racconta il suo viaggio in Israele alla ricerca di un bandolo nel groviglio legale che si è creato intorno alle carte di Kafka salvate da Brod (Etgar Keret così riassume il garbuglio - cito dall'articolo di Batuman - "Kafka, on the other hand, might be O.K. with it: 'The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?'").
E lo racconta con la consueta eleganza e un gran gusto nel vagare, prendere differenti sentieri narrativi ispirandosi a dettagli, intuizioni, scoperte marginali lungo il percorso principale. Un bel pezzo di letteratura. nytmagazine. (Nella foto, una pagina del Processo)
Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia. Human Rights in History (The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press). "The modern concept of human rights, - secondo Moyn, professore di storia alla Columbia - differs radically from older claims of rights, like those that arose out of the American and French Revolutions. ... human rights in their current form - applicable to all and internationally protected - can be traced not to the Enlightenment, nor to the humanitarian impulses of the 19th century nor to the impact of the Holocaust after World War II. Instead, he sees them as dating from the 1970s, exemplified by President Jimmy Carter's effort to make human rights a pillar of United States foreign policy". nytbr.
Graham Fuller, A World Without Islam (Little, Brown). Graham Fuller sostiene che l'animosità tra parti del mondo musulmano e gli USA non è dovuta all'Islam o al fervore religioso, ma ha radici storiche. lat.
Steven Kasher, Max’s Kansas City: Art, Glamour, Rock and Roll (Abrams Image). Il mitico luogo di incontro dei personaggi del rock e dell'arte a NYC negli anni Sessanta. (Nella foto Paul Morrissey, Andy Warhol, Janis Joplin, e Tim Buckley al Max's l'8 marzo del 1968.) nymag.
Novità in casa della Paris Review: un nuovo direttore, Lorin Stein, e un nuovo web site per il numero d'autunno.
Recentemente è stato ristampato The Magician of Lublin (FS&G), il romanzo di Isaac Bashevis Singer uscito cinquant'anni fa, di cui Harold Bloom dice: "The book set the formula for all his narratives long or short. They are prurient sagas of the flesh and of repentance, marked by the ambivalences of a vegetarian satyr". nybooks.
David Brooks, che non è un critico letterario, ma un fine osservatore della società americana e un politologo moderatamente di destra, editorialista del New York Times, commenta il nuovo romanzo di Jonathan Franzen, Freedom come emblematico dello stato del romanzo in America, e dice cose molto interessanti (questo articolo è da leggere insieme a quello di Batuman sulle scuole di scrittura creativa), tra cui: "Sometime long ago, a writer by the side of Walden Pond decided that middle-class Americans may seem happy and successful on the outside, but deep down they are leading lives of quiet desperation. This message caught on (it’s flattering to writers and other dissidents), and it became the basis of nearly every depiction of small-town and suburban America since. If you judged by American literature, there are no happy people in the suburbs, and certainly no fulfilled ones. ...
By now, writers have become trapped in the confines of this orthodoxy. So even a writer as talented as Franzen has apt descriptions of neighborhood cattiness and self-medicating housewives, but ignores anything that might complicate the Quiet Desperation dogma. ... The serious parts of life get lopped off and readers have to stoop to inhabit a low-ceilinged world. Everyone gets to feel superior to the characters they are reading about (always pleasant in a society famously anxious about status), but there’s something missing.
Social critics from Thoreau to Allan Bloom to the S.D.S. authors of The Port Huron Statement also made critiques about the flatness of bourgeois life, but at least they tried to induce their readers to long for serious things. Freedom is a brilliantly written book that is nonetheless trapped in an intellectual cul de sac - overly gimlet-eyed about American life and lacking an alternative vision of higher ground. nyt.
Emma Donoghue, Room (Little, Brown & Company). Bellissimo libro narrato da un bambino di 5 anni relegato in una camera con la madre. nytbr.
Joyce Carol Oates, Sourland. Stories (Ecco/HarperCollins). Raccolta di racconti in cui Oates esplora il tema di donne in lutto che diventano facilmente preda di violenza. nytbr.
Yiyun Li (nella foto), Gold Boy, Emerald Girl (Random House). "While the circumstances in which Yiyun Li’s characters find themselves have much to do with the strictures and the simultaneously casual and calculated cruelties of an authoritarian regime, the feelings these men and women must endure — longing, regret, loneliness, the desperate desire to bridge the gap that divides them from others — will be familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to everyone, everywhere. Indeed, the damage inflicted on these hapless souls by their political history — a professor is made to clean toilets, a girl enamored of English literature is drafted into the army — begins to seem emblematic of the misfortunes and unjust turns of fate that are beyond human control, regardless of the economic system under which one happens to live", dice Francine Prose di questo libro. nytbr.
