caravia/literature

Excellent site about literature and Fine Arts, well written and witty.

Love letters between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, a wonderful exchange between two tortured souls. They were among the best poets of this century, they lived for their emotions. Amazing good poetry.

Nice about the Nobelprize Saul Bellows biography, when he was Solomon Belo.

"Solomon Belo moved from Lachine, Quebec, to the Humboldt Park neighborhood when he was 9. About a decade later, shortly after publishing a short story called "The Hell It Can't" about a savage, unexplained beating, he changed his first name to Saul and his last to Bellow. If the rest isn't quite history, by now it's certainly biography.

Late in his life, Bellow reflected on spending summer nights in Humboldt Park, "on the back porch, your neighbors on their back porches all down the line, the graceless cottonwoods reaching toward you and you listened to the accordions and player pianos and harmonicas below, across the way, down the street, playing mazurkas ... One of the children was sent to the corner to bring home a pitcherful of soda pop (the druggist called it a phosphate). Over every drugstore in Chicago there swung a large mortar and pestle outlined in electric bulbs and every summer the sandflies with green light transparent wings covered the windows."

Though you get the classic Bellovian sense of motion at the end of the passage, with the children running, sandflies beating their wings against the drugstore window, the tone is calm, quiet, almost pastoral. It lacks Augie March's antic good humor, Herzog's generative sense of woundedness, Charlie Citrine's obsessing over his friend Humboldt eating a pretzel while already covered with "the dust of the grave." But it retains (to my eye and ear, at least) an essential Chicagoness -- or at least it evokes the Chicago I knew through my grandparents: a city of immigrants and first-generation Americans living close together, with an ear cocked toward the old country (accordions, mazurkas) while running toward the new (phosphates, electric bulbs)"

I love Doris Lessing!

"It turns out the 88-year-old writer was asked to become a Dame in 1992 at the behest of the then Prime Minister, John Major. But Lessing, a former member of the Communist party, and author of Memoirs of a Survivor and The Good Terrorist, turned down the offer saying that it had a whiff of "Ruritania" about it.

In a gently mocking letter written to Alex Allan, Major's principal private secretary at the time, she said: "Thank you for offering me this honour: I am very pleased. But for some time now I have been wondering, 'But where is this British Empire?' Surely, there isn't one. And now I see that I am not the only one saying the same. There is something ruritanical about honours given in the name of a non-existent Empire."

She went further, recalling her early life in South Africa, where she was born and lived until coming to London in her twenties: "When young I did my best to undo that bit of the British Empire I found myself in: that is, old Southern Rhodesia. And surely there is something unlikeable about a person, when old, accepting honours from a insitution (sic) she attacked when young?"

Excellent blog about literature and philosophy, in my favorite magazine, GOOD magazine.

"In "On Cannibals" Montaigne describes the sixteenth-century European reaction to encounters with the New World. Through his introduction to a cannibal, he comes to better understand Renaissance European mores: "Each man calls barbarism whatever is not his own practice," he writes, and later, "I think there is more barbarity in eating a man alive than in eating him dead..in roasting a man bit by bit, in having him bitten and mangled by dogs and swine (as we have not only read but seen within fresh memory, not among ancient enemies, but among neighbors and fellow citizens, and what is worse, on the pretext of piety and religion), than in roasting and eating him after he is dead."

Montaigne speculates, snickers, pontificates. He ends his essay, absurdly, with this line: "They don't wear breeches" (and sends the reader off to check out what he has to say about thumbs.)

Back to my point (one is required to ramble when writing about Montaigne). If non-fiction has been divvied up between boys and girls, and the girls are left with the essay, must those essays always be so resolutely personal? So small?"

Cool to see a dead writer achieve so much sucess!

"One of the world's most aggressive literary agencies, overseen by super-agent Andrew Wylie, scored a double coup by taking over representation of deceased Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño just as an unpublished novel by him was discovered.

Wylie's agency has been offering the manuscript of The Third Reich at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week. Publishers were said to be fighting over the novel from an author whose stock hit new highs in the English-speaking world after the success of The Savage Detectives, said by the New York Times to be one of the best 10 books last year.

The Bolaño estate's previous agent, Carmen Balcells, reportedly had no idea that the new, unpublished novel existed and said that it certainly had not been on his computer when he died in 2003. His Spanish publisher, Jorge Herralde, also had no knowledge of it.

The Third Reich is said to have been written in the early 1990s before Bolaño began to work on a computer. The Wylie agency was touting the book at Frankfurt as "a type-written, completed novel that is meticulously corrected by hand", according to Spain's El Periodico.

Described as "a man's descent into a nightmare", the book features a German wargames champion who travels to the Costa Brava to take on an American opponent. He is pursued by a private detective while a friend disappears after encountering two sinister characters."

An Indian debutant wins Booker prize, the English equivalent to the Nobelprize. Great news. The novel "The White Tiger" is not an Indian family novel but a novel about the modern India with all it's contradictions and shades. A good writer in coming.