Taschen's new Caravaggio: The Complete Works is breathtaking. You can fully comprehend how controversial his paintings must have been. The web site link provides access to a "leaf-through" of the entire book.Birnbaum: The issue of the truth value we assign to fact and fiction is, I think, becoming more interesting and regularly challenged. One of your characters states, "The story of our lives is never autobiography, it's a novel."
Barnes: Fiction is the supreme fiction. And everybody's autobiography is a fiction but not the supreme fiction. I work as a novelist, and I also work as a journalist. And I am very conscious of the essential difference of the two skills. When I write a piece of journalism I want it to be completely understood at first reading as all journalism should be. In order to do that, you, of necessity, elucidate and simplify. And so the world appears more comprehensible. When I metaphorically move to the other part of my desk and write fiction, I am aware that my task is to represent complication and the fullness of the world. And to write the book, while certainly comprehensible and I hope enjoyable on first reading, would leave something in the reader's mind to invite them back. I do keep this distinction firmly in mind. It's easy, if you are doing both, for them to coalesce in some ways.
On his birthday he had made himself a set of resolutions, among which was to 'Rise as early as I can', indicating he knew well enough what ought to be done and, by writing it down three times, made a show of doing it. He also resolved 'To apply to Study' and according to Thomas Birch was 'in treaty with certain booksellers' to produce 'three papers a week, in the nature of essays like the Rambler, at the unusual rate (if my account be true) of three guineas a paper'. But Birch questioned 'whether even the temptation of so liberal a reward will awaken him from his natural indolence'. He was quite correct; Johnson may have toyed with the idea of producing more essays, just as he resolved 'To reclaim imagination' and 'To drink less strong liquours', but the reality was rather different.
I’m reading more than at almost any time in my life but spending less time reading online. The two facts have a common source – a festering impatience with shoddy writing. My literary gut, when young, was goat-like -- tough and indiscriminate. I read everything remotely of interest and felt compelled to finish every book I started. This makes sense: Everything was new, and how could I knowledgeably sift wheat from chaff without first milling, baking and ingesting? Literary prejudice, in a healthy reader, intensifies with age. I know and trust my tastes, and no longer need to read William Burroughs to figure out he wrote sadistic trash.
The list was not my idea. It was the idea of the publisher, the editor, and my agents. I fought it. I finally gave up. I hated it. I did it off the top of my head. I left out a lot of things that should be there and I probably put in a couple of things that I now would like to kick out. I kept it out of the Italian and the Swedish translations, but it’s in all the other translations—about 15 or 18 of them. I’m sick of the whole thing. All over the world, including here, people reviewed and attacked the list and didn’t read the book. So let’s agree right now, my dear. We will not mention the list.
At the tail end of the 300th anniversary of Samuel Johnson's birth, I have started reading David Noke's Samuel Johnson: A Life.lexicographer: A writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge, that busies himself in tracing the original and determining the significance of words.
oats: a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.
You do often feel when you read academic criticism, not that I do it much, or when you hear academics talking about their books, that they forget that theirs is a secondary activity. They forget that however important a critic is, a first-rate critic is always less important, and less interesting, than a second-rate writer. Their job is, firstly, to explain, but secondly to celebrate rather than diminish.I'm mostly behind Barnes's opinion but some literary criticism is first-rate writing. When I feel like reading criticism I want erudition, something cultured, digressive and preferably tendentious. This list comprises ten favourite books that stand proudly alongside first-rate fiction:
In the last years of her [Silvina Ocampo] life (she died in 1993, aged eighty-eight) she suffered from Alzheimer's and wandered through her large apartment unable to remember where or who she was. One day, a friend found her reading a book of stories. Full of enthusiasm, she told the friend (who, of course she didn't recognise, but by then she had grown accustomed to the presence of strangers) that she would read him something wonderful that she had just discovered. It was a story from one of her first and most famous books, Autobiography of Irene. The friend listened and told her she was right. It was a masterpiece.
Tigers were his emblematic beast, from his early childhood. "What a pity not to have been born a tiger," he once said . . .A few months before he died, a rich Argentine landowner invited Borges to his estancia and promised "a surprise." He sat the old man on a bench in the garden, left him there and suddenly Borges felt a large warm body next to him, and large paws resting on his shoulders. The estanciero's pet tiger had paid homage to his dreamer. Borges was unafraid. Only the hot breath that stank of raw meat bothered him. "I had forgotten that tigers are carnivorous."
Posts
All Comments
