Whenever I come back from the supermarket and they were sold out of something I say to my partner “it’s broken Britain” so I’m excited to get to speak about this more widely.
Yes I had to delete that and post it again because I’d tagged the wrong people. No I am not confident I’ve got it right this time.
We just get the same sort of ambient books content endlessly regurgitated. I read a Christian Lorenzen piece this week where he said that literary culture is in flight from the literary - I think that’s perfectly put.
Everyone agrees that “articles about books” and “reading” are Very Important but everyone also agrees that actual literary criticism is Very Boring, and so we’re stuck with a literary discourse that looks like this.
Love to be “prescribed” some reading so I can feel “full up.”
For some reason it had rather passed me by, and I’ve not read Roth for a long time. Now I think it among his very best - knotty and wrestling with its own contradictions, sharply amused yet generous towards the targets of its mockery. Couldn’t be more timely and relevant.
Every time you've made up your mind what's happening in that film, the rug gets pulled from under you and you have to reconsider. It's amazing.
His observation that syntax is too often repackaged “for an audience whose reading experience is assumed to be limited to Time, Newsweek, The New York Times or The Times of London, and the internet” applies to contemporary literature and style much more widely I think.
And here an example of the difference - Alter’s translation set against the Revised English version.
