…e curtain is pulled back and we learn more and more about Allen’s characters, some leave to save themselves, others leave to save the ones they love. Memories becomes scars become gifts, tiny reminders that no matter, they are the solace needed to carry on….
…tory of literature—on the contrary. I think that the novel today is facing new challenges and new borders. It arrives with urgency, alarmed, to tell about that which pure economics or pure science cannot. I have noticed that in certain bookstores, due to the title, they’ve put my novel in the hard sciences section. Which I actually find amusing. I’ve always thought that between, say, Linnaeus and Andersen, just as between Einstein and Joyce, there…
…ion of his compulsion to finish the bag. His obsession with his work is so complete, his only living companion, his pet hamster, dies. Though he says it may have just been old age, he concedes that he may have “neglected him because I was so absorbed in my work.” In the end, however, he asserts that he has “managed to make a thing that no one else could have made.” Here, we see the egoism involved in the narrator’s creation, and also his attachmen…
…different life by the highest artistry.” In other words, the author hasn’t simply become a camera, mindlessly clicking on one image after another. The author is still and always with us, quietly, deliberately pointing the way. It’s helpful to remember that Flaubert was wary of being labeled a realist, and rightfully so. Perhaps it is better to imagine him at Croisset, at the window of his second-floor study with its big white bearskin rug and gree…
…the juxtaposition of vomiting with desire seems to have little to do with commenting on that desire, or yoking it to some sort of symbolic purging, or some metaphorical understanding of disgust. Instead, they are simply two uncontrollable urges. Salih sends many of these seamless waves of emotional backstory through the narrative. In this passage, Oscar is on an airplane flying to his hometown in Ohio for a funeral. This single sentence is remark…
…ot a guarantee of success but simply an invitation to get started. Bolaño knew tourist towns, and he knew demanding Germans from his job as a night watchman for a Costa Brava campground. He knew fascism from his own brief imprisonment during Chile’s 1973 coup. He knew the loneliness of exile, but he knew nationalism like Udo’s made him sick. And he’d doubtless read that Benjamin escaped the Nazis by killing himself in a seaside border town just ni…
…k I’ve set aside identity politics, and instead become more concerned with simply telling a compelling story full of characters with whom readers can hopefully empathize. I hear what you’re saying, but we live in America where we like us some qualifiers. Ever worry that you’ll be pigeon-holed as “that Filipino writer?” I do think about that, sure. On one hand, it could be a lucky thing to be known as “that Filipino writer”; it probably beats being…
…er than an exploration of this one tension. They are, in fact, a much more complex examination of what it is to be a man in the twenty-first century, while, all the while, navigating the space between the two aforementioned poles. Machart crafts a careful meditation on our desire to protect those whom we love: our wives, our parents, our children and, were this his final conclusion, this collection would only be traversing an already well worn pat…
…nd myself dreaming of the verbal rhythms of Augie March. I would recommend newcomers to start with either Henderson the Rain King or Seize the Day, then read The Adventures of Augie March. After that, I would recommend putting his fiction aside for a while, as I did not do, and turning to Bellow’s essays and letters, before reading the big late books, which, while unquestionably incredible works of art, contain certain potholes for the reader, as…
…as implying, then I’d never have written the book. It made me aware of the freedom that comes from writing from the diaspora. I thought about his point for a long time, but ultimately I just couldn’t agree with him. Since we’re asking personal questions: you were raised Catholic, but seemed to distance yourself from the religion at the same time that you were writing this book. The book certainly engages with religion, but ultimately seems to reac…
