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>Literary Cultivation and Style
>John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet is poignant and elegant. I had read little of Berger’s work but got drawn in by Geoff Dyer’s enthusiasm. This is Berger’s description of being cultivated by an...
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>Proust Questionnaire
> Publisher Assouline sent me an intriguing link to what they are marketing as Marcel Proust’s Questionnaire. Marcel Proust’s Questionnaire is one of the best-known interview devices used in the...
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Bloom on Castorp
Harold Bloom writing of one of my favourite novels Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain: When I was a boy, first reading fiercely, some sixty years ago, Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain was widely received as...
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In Search of More Proust
When you’ve read A la recherche du temps perdu there is yet more you can do to fuel the Proustian Obsession. Filed under: 20th Century, Fiction, French Literature, Modernism, Translation, Verbals...
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>Mostly Bellow, Some Roth
>Saul Bellow disappeared off the edge of my literary radar. Perhaps he caught the tailwind of my growing disenchantment with the novels of Philip Roth. Gabriel Josipovici’s brilliant essay on Saul...
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Gerald Murnane’s Barley Patch
What do I recall of reading Remembrance of Things Past? Many years later, I remember characters, scenes, moods, but I am unable to quote a sentence. I recall that, in Combray, and in the salon of...
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Influential Books
List time: books that influenced me. Influence is defined as either life-changing or transformative in reading patterns (which equates to the same thing). These are roughly in time order. Later I may...
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Helen DeWitt’s Lightning Rods
Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor...
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Book List
In no particular order, this is a list of my favourite writers/books. Of course, it is incomplete. Vladimir Nabokov’s Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, Pale Fire and Speak, Memory and literary lectures...
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Brian Dillon’s “I Am Sitting in a Room”
Brian Dillon’s I Am Sitting in a Room is the first in Cabinet’s 24-Hour Book series. Dillon’s book explores the scenography and architecture of writing itself. Inspired in part by Georges Perec’s...
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