Saul Bellow, serial marrier

Saul Bellow e sua moglie Janis nel 2002

Le lettere di Saul Bellow, a cura di Benjamin Taylor, usciranno il prossimo 4 novembre presso Penguin Classics. Rachel Cooke, dell'Observer, intervista la vedova, Janis Freedman Bellow. "When they began their relationship, Bellow had already chalked up four ex-wives: Anita Goshikin, Alexandra Tsachacbasov, Susan Glassman and Alexandra Ionescu Tulcea. He was also in possession of three grown-up sons. Wasn't she wary? 'You'd think that I ought to have been,' she says. 'But all that receded. I wasn't in any way wary. He wasn't really a bad boy. He was a serial marrier, but it had to do with a strange desire on his part to be intimate, to have love at the centre of his life. That was part of the daring I saw in him. He was audacious! What would it take to start over again [at that time in your life]? He was hungry in his soul. 'I'm going to have that,' he thought."

Chi c'è dietro una grande copertina

Intervista a Rodrigo Corral, del Rodrigo Corral Design, l'artista che ha disegnato le copertine di libri di Nabokov, Sartre, Borges, Bolaño, e, recentemente, dell'ultimo spassoso romanzo di Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story.  Q. After you’ve agreed to work on a project, how do you begin the design process? A. Reading is always part of the process when we’re working on a book jacket or cover for fiction. I read, I take notes, I take breaks. I’ll stop on the title, re-read it, and think about how it plays into the book and its overall message and intent. It’s rare to be able to illustrate the tone of the entire story by only depicting one moment from the book, so I prefer using a new image or design that I feel represents the story accurately. newyorker.

Leggere Lolita a 12 anni

"At least Nabokov was teaching me fresh vocabulary. I had to look up nates, of course, but another new word, nymphet, was helpfully defined throughout the book. Suddenly I saw the world through wiser eyes. Who among my seventh-grade classmates, I wondered with a frisson, was such a creature? What girl had that “soul-shattering, insidious charm” that, while invisible to me, made the antennae of certain adult males tremble?" Nick Antosca parisreview. 

Lezioni di traduzione

Istruttivo il blog che Lydia Davis ha tenuto sulla Paris Review mentre traduceva Madame Bovary (a proposito, la sua traduzione è appena uscita presso Viking). Particolarmente interessante il rapporto con le precedenti traduzioni: "Each version will be quite distinct from all of the others. How many ways, for instance, has even a single phrase (bouffées d’affadissement) from Madame Bovary been translated: gusts of revulsion/ a kind of rancid staleness/ stale gusts of dreariness/ waves of nausea/ fumes of nausea/ flavorless, sickening gusts/ stagnant dreariness/ whiffs of sickliness/ waves of nauseous disgust.
One truism I would argue with, however. Wise people like to say, wisely: Every generation needs a new translation. It sounds good, but I believe it isn’t necessarily so: If a translation is as fine as it can be, it may match the original in timelessness, too—it may deserve to endure". parisreview.

Royal We

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.

Tóibín, Cunningham e Nelson

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.

The Accidentalist

Michale Greenberg, autore di Il giorno in cui mia figlia impazzì (Rizzoli), ha iniziato recentemente a tenere una sorta di diario su Bookforum. Questa sua rubrica si chiama The Accidentalist. Il primo articolo parla di una strana infezione che lo ha colpito e di come l'abbia indotto a fare insolite riflessioni su se stesso; il secondo di un viaggio a Tbilisi, in Georgia, e delle insolite riflessioni evocate dalla fatiscenza della città: "Far from being grim, the decay seemed an expression of Tbilisi's singular vulnerability. They were natural dadaists, the Tbilisians, I thought, with an instinctive way of making the accidental seem preordained. There were sculptures everywhere amid the rubble, skewed human figures that reminded me in turn of Giacometti, Botero, Picasso, Henry Moore, yet that were unlike the work of any of these artists. They most resembled the living beggars on the main shopping drag who wore suits like characters from a De Sica movie, gripping your attention while avoiding your eyes". bookforum.

The Wire

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 e l'ultimo processo di Kafka

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)

Diritti umani, islamismo e rock and roll

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.