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David Denby on “The Great Gatsby”: “Luhrmann’s vulgarity is designed to win over the young audience, and it suggests that he’s less a filmmaker than a music-video director with endless resources and a stunning absence of taste.” http://nyr.kr/1414CXu
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Postscript E.L. Konigsburg: “Konigsburg taught, in her famous novel, that “happiness is excitement that has found a settling down place, but there is always a little corner that keeps flapping around.” She may be gone, but her books still teach that lesson.” http://nyr.kr/ZH0v2q
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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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"Give Me Everything You Have,” by James Lasdun, was one of those books that made me grateful for subway delays, so much did I want the excuse to keep reading it. It begins as an account of Lasdun’s alarming experience of being stalked by a one-time student—a premise for a book that no writer would envy—and ends up a rigorous and moving and very elegantly wrought examination of obsession, relentlessness, power, envy, and ambition. It’s a brave and measured book about being in the power of something utterly unmeasured, the terrible threat of losing one’s reputation; and it’s also, not incidentally, a book about the enduring power a work of literature can have in one’s life. I’ll never read “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” in the same way again, if I ever read it again, and after reading Lasdun, I just might. —Rebecca Mead"
— Notes from the New Yorker staff on their literary engagements of the week: http://nyr.kr/YEWpas(Source: newyorker.com)
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Judith Thurman on “a startling literary coincidence” in the work of Margaret Fuller and Emily Dickinson: http://nyr.kr/15Q9EoV
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Patrick Radden Keefe on the slippery questions raised by “In Cold Blood” and the obsessive interest in its making: “For years, Alvin Dewey insisted that ‘In Cold Blood’ was factual, and the humble lawman’s stamp of approval was evinced, by those who were inclined to believe the book, as a badge of its accuracy. He had furnished Capote with the access and materials to tell the true parts of his story, and had permitted the author to stretch the truth, in making, of Dewey, a hero. He was, in this subtle sense, a co-conspirator.” Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/Xv4xH9
Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum.
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Two Hells→
What is the temperature in Hell? Is it hot or cold?
Brad Leithauser writes about hot Hells and cold Hells, from Dante to Robert Frost: http://nyr.kr/15woO2r
The heat I’m talking about has little to do with traditional hellfire. It’s the hell of overheated emotions. Wind is a prevailing weather condition: gusts of storming rage. Molten waves of unrequited lust break and sprawl on its rocky shores. It’s a place where rationality collapses. Nothing is predictable. You can’t count on your adversary for anything—even to act in his own self-interest. His fury may be such that he’d embrace mutual destruction before seeing you escape his wrath…
The evil genius of Cold Hell typically takes the form of a designing schemer. It’s a spider—or a wizened, dark, spidery wizard. It’s Sherlock Holmes’s nemesis, Moriarty. It’s Fu Manchu. It’s the flattering, unctuous creature that proffers a tainted apple, whether the Bible’s serpent or Snow White’s witch…
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When the Money Gets Too Big
George Packer on Anthony Trollope’s London in “The Way We Live Now,” and our New York: http://nyr.kr/Zx2EMM
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Video Games and Storytelling
Maria Bustillos interview Tom Bissell, who wrote Gears of War, about the potentialities of video games as literature: http://nyr.kr/15YCl57
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Welcome Back, Renata Adler
“The novels don’t let you get away with a narcissistic surface reading.” Meghan O’Rourke on Renata Adler: http://nyr.kr/YeqmNz
