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"Pynchon novels, like certain dishes, tend to suffer only from excessive explanation. I advocate surrender to Pynchon; letting your mind toss on the wild currents of his language is a lot more enjoyable than treating his novels like puzzles, wondering where the pieces fit: Who is Rachel Owlglass? Why are we in Egypt? Just enjoy the bumps—or try to."
— Alexander Nazaryan looks back at Thomas Pynchon’s first novel, “V.” as it turns fifty: http://nyr.kr/16mlGZv(Source: newyorker.com)
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"What is the use of a book without pictures?"
—- “Alice in Wonderland,” Lewis Carroll
Sam Sacks looks at the history of illustrated novels, and urges their revival: http://nyr.kr/13ttzsy
(Source: newyorker.com)
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"The most beloved novel in the language was written by a rural parson’s daughter with no formal education, in ten months, between the ages of twenty and twenty-one… Elizabeth Bennet’s story was largely composed by someone Elizabeth Bennet’s age."
— Happy 200th birthday, “Pride and Prejudice”! William Deresiewicz celebrates the wittiest of all novels: http://nyr.kr/14p51U4(Source: newyorker.com)
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“Light” plays out almost entirely at the Monet residence, but the man of the house is often offscreen. For every passage describing his battle, waged on canvas, with the “luminous cloud of changing light” in which we all live, there are two passages showing us how the day looks and feels to the people around him: his wife, Alice; Alice’s children from a previous marriage; her grandchildren; Monet’s children from a previous marriage; their servants and visitors—for these people, Giverny was not a component of their lifework but, instead, a place where they happened to be employed, or to live some years of their lives. By moving between these perspectives, Figes attempts to bring Giverny to life—real life…
Peter C. Baker on the real world of Claude Monet portrayed in Eva Figes’s novel, “Light”: http://nyr.kr/Wwa3b1
Painting by Claude Monet/National Gallery of Art
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Reading Your Friends’ Novels
A friend of yours has just written a novel? You pick it up gingerly, as if it were a supermarket squash whose weight you mean to assess…
Brad Leithauser on the perils of reading your friends’ novels: http://nyr.kr/THqvYW
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"…the release of the new film is one of the truly cheering events of the Christmas season. Cheering because it suggests that what the boys in the quarterlies used to call ‘a continuity of culture’ persists, that old stories can still be the best stories. We insist that this is so to our students and our kids often enough, but only when a big entertainment conglomerate is willing to make a box-office bet on it… does it seem truly so."
— Adam Gopnik on the persistent greatness of “Les Miserables”: http://nyr.kr/VljfPQ(Source: newyorker.com)
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Books of the Year→
James Wood recommends his books of the year: http://nyr.kr/WkKJXA
An end-of-year bouquet like this one offers a chance to pick some flowers that I didn’t get to this year. So in addition to re-recommending some of the fiction I reviewed in the last twelve months (namely, Hilary Mantel’s “Bring up the Bodies,” Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?,” Edward St. Aubyn’s “At Last,” and Per Petterson’s “I Curse the River of Time”), I want to mention two books of fiction that I wish I had written about…
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"Petterson is remarkably gifted at capturing not so much randomness or irrelevance (habitual catchments of the stream of consciousness) as the staggered distances of memory: one detail seems near at hand, while another can be seen only cloudily; one mental picture seems small, while another seems portentous. Yet everything is jumbled in the recollection, because the most proximate memory may be the least important, the portentous detail relatively trivial. Petterson’s interest is pictorial and spatial rather than logical and interrogative. His sentences yearn to fly away into poetry; it is rare to find prose at once so exact and so vague…"
— James Wood reads the novels of Norwegian writer Per Petterson: http://nyr.kr/YfZYG9 -
"Most of us want extraordinary things, after a while, to quit being extraordinary—to end. The stone fell in the water. The ripples ran. Now they should stop. The surface should be smooth again."
— Joan Acocella considers why many of the world’s best novels, from “David Copperfield” and “Wuthering Heights,” to “Huckleberry Finn,” have bad endings: http://nyr.kr/UVcXaA(Source: newyorker.com)
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If Food Could Talk→
On this week’s podcast, Calvin Trillin and Amelia Lester discuss what our food says about our culture.
This week in the magazine, Calvin Trillin writes about the eating pleasures to be had in Oaxaca, Mexico. Here, Trillin joins Lester and Sasha Weiss to talk about current food trends, what they look for in a restaurant, and how the Immigration Act of 1965 revolutionized eating in America. Also, Joan Acocella on why so many good novels end badly.
