Pedaling Toward Spring On Vashon Island
March arrives and with it comes the promise of spring. Soon the days will be warmer and brighter. Flowers will bloom. Fruit and veggies will grow. Birdsong will echo from the rooftops. All this in due time, friends. But until then, it’s still a bit dreary — at least here in the good old Northwest. To commemorate this transitional time of year, today we’re looking at literature news that’s on the move. Richard Bausch leads the push with a new collection of stories, followed by Ian McEwan, who is profiled — in all his transitory glory — by the Observer. David Shields’ Reality Hunger is sowing seeds with critics, Stephen Burt discusses the poetry of war, and the Complete Review examines a highly anticipated new translation called Hocus Bogus. Elsewhere, a journalist for the Post-Gazette recounts her inky relationship with J.D. Salinger, first edition titles garner praise from the Book Bench and the Book of Kells gets an animation job. Now that’s what we call a seasonal shift. — Kevin Murphy
– In this fine new collection, Bausch presents us with young people and old people; married, single and divorced people; straight and gay people; professional and blue-collar people; and people who are simply layabouts. They make bad choices, occasionally even deadly choices, because they can’t help themselves — and because the universe is full of peril and temptation. — Richard Bausch in the NY Times
Another Author Profile
– McEwan is too subtle a writer to employ force. Whether it’s creating the cold terror of a child’s abduction, as he did so hauntingly in The Child in Time, or a hilarious scene in which Beard fears his frozen penis has fallen off, the author uses the artful accumulation of compelling details. What makes the technique so persuasive is McEwan’s pinpoint use of language, each word cutting away at ambiguity or approximation with the exactness of a surgeon’s knife. This verbal watchfulness, McEwan said, he inherited from his mother. — Ian McEwan in the Observer
– “Reality Hunger” is an indulgent exercise, more about the author’s evolution as a thinker, reader and writer than it is about pleasing his fans. (And with nine strong books and countless articles into his career, Shields has plenty of fans.) The phrase “paradigm shift” is one that induces my gag reflex, but that’s what he’s up to here. And, dear readers, shift happens. — David Shields in the Seattle Times
– If you wanted, in 1975, to write poems about war, you could learn from, compete with, or compare yourself to Wilfred Owen, Walt Whitman, or Homer. If you wanted to mourn the dead, you could learn from, compete with, or shrink from Whitman, Dickinson, Milton, Tennyson, Yeats, Anne Bradstreet, Allen Ginsberg, or John Donne. If you wanted to write about giving birth to children; reorganizing your life around them; nursing, feeding, or coming to understand them as they turn from infants into toddlers, preschoolers, and second graders, you had a disturbingly clear field: not that there were no poems about such experiences, but there were not enough, and of the wrong kind. — Stephen Burt in the Boston Review
Bogus Not Pocus
– Pseudo, finally available in English as Hocus Bogus, is one of the oddest works of (semi-)fiction of recent times. A documentary novel (of sorts), it came about because of the circumstances its author Romain Gary got himself into. Translator David Bellos recounts the whole bizarre story in his entertaining introduction to the book: basically, in 1974 Gary — a leading literary figure of the time — started writing books under the pseudonym of ‘Émile Ajar’ — and found too much success with them. — Romain Gary in the Complete Review
– I grew up in a family of serious card-carrying library patrons with a houseful of books shelved and stacked everywhere. My parents never censored my reading. The first of Jerry’s work I read were the co-published novellas “Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters” and “Seymour: an Introduction,” which I read aloud in installments over a few weeks to my mother while she took her evening bath. (In my family, just about any setting was conducive to reading.) — C.C. Smith in the Post-Gazette
– I never thought I’d see it, but then there it was: a signed first edition of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (a particular favorite of mine). Stepping into Cathach Books, an antiquarian bookshop in Dublin, where a friend on a recent trip through the city directed me, gives you a privileged literary perspective. Walking past shelves upon shelves of first editions, which eventually became seminal works, by authors such as W. B. Yeats, Flann O’Brien, James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, to name a few, is absolutely spellbinding. — First Editions in the Book Bench
– When I say that The Secret of Kells — the Irish Oscar contender for Best Animated Feature that had everyone scratching their heads when it was announced a few weeks ago — harks back to an earlier style of drawing, I don’t just mean pre-digital animation. I mean the kind of drawing that monks did in the Middle Ages; those curlicued borders and ornate letters they hand-painted in holy books. — The Book of Kells in NPR
Video: The Secret of the Kells
