Author Archive
Becoming One’s Mother: Tove Ditlevsen’s Copenhagen Trilogy
Devastatingly, Tove Ditlevsen’s three-part memoir suggests that acquiring a room of one’s own and becoming a successful writer does not preclude sharing the fate of one’s mother.
Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Mirror
The final book in Hilary Mantel’s award-winning trilogy completes the suggestion that time is the mirror in which we see ourselves, and that the uncertain reflections we cast change according to the source and quality of the light.
The Morning Star and Endings
Karl Ove Knausgaard’s new work compels readers to pay attention to the dissolution of animal life and our reliance on it, to the ends of relationships, to the shortness of the human life span, and to the book’s own looming narrative endpoint. In this novel, all things have an
Piranesi’s Disenchanted World
Susanna Clarke’s 2020 novel speaks both to the impossibility of truly reenchanting the world and the desperate desire to do so.
Beauty in the Ordinary
In James Salter’s 1975 novel, style is a form of truth, or at least one of the more direct means of apprehending truths. In the rhythms of his descriptive passages, one gets a sense that he has conveyed a sense of the world as it really is.
Jenny Erpenbeck’s Lost Edens
Erpenbeck’s 2008 novel, centered on the history of a small parcel of land on the edge of the German lake known as the Märkisches Meer, is a sophisticated retelling of the Creation and Fall stories from the biblical book of Genesis.
Max Blecher’s Landscapes of Illness
Illness is not Blecher’s subject as much as it is the occasion that forces his protagonists into a world of previously unavailable experience—a world that makes it impossible for those who fall ill to ever be “cured” of the way of being, seeing, and thinking into which they have
Summer’s True Fictions
It is the subjective “us,” that most basic of true fictions that we use to explain our existence in the present, and, more generally, in time, that interests Ali Smith.
Maria Popova’s Figurations of Inner Life
It almost does not matter what someone does or what happens to them. Rather, what matters is what someone thinks they have experienced. As Popova suggests, the true changes in our lives are cognitive as much as they are biographical—or, rather, if they are biographically significant, it is only
Reading Letters Summer 1926: Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, Rainer Maria Rilke
In the summer of 1926, Rilke, Pasternak, and Tsvetayeva are poised on the brink of disaster, but instead of anticipating it, or of dwelling on what may come, they write. Their letters attest to a febrile, almost frenzied creative period.
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