This is me. This is me bowled over flat.
Nov. 28th, 2004 11:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
letterbladeI just finished one of the best damn books I've ever read.
Danilo Kis. (He's got a v-shaped accent over the s, but I don't think my machine can make it.) The Encyclopedia of the Dead. A collection of retellings of stories, ranging from biblical legends to family stories to Russian political yarns. Doesn't sound like much? He's brilliant. Utterly masterful prose, and written with a high and subtle awareness of all the tricky aesthetic and moral details of telling other people's stories. I can't even describe the effect this book had on me; it was like being transported to another, higher plane of thought.
Haven't had this much fun since Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, or possibly Coetzee's Foe.
I feel indebted to provide a quote, but it's very difficult to pick one to exemplify what I'm talking about; it's a cumulative effect, and he's often very subtle. So I'll simply have to type up a random paragraph that caught my eye--
This, as you can see, is an area of the spiritual landscape quite near to the river's mouth, where friends' and relatives' funerals follow so closely on one another that every man--even a man less inclined than my father to silent meditation--turns philosopher, insofar as philosophy is the contemplation of the meaning of human existence.
[This from the European Classics edition from Northwestern U. Press, translated by Michael Henry Heim.]
A Jewish writer--though he considered himself a writer who happened to be Jewish--from the former Yugoslavia; born in 1935 in Subotica, near the Hungarian border, died in 1989. A touchstone writer in European literature and virtually unknown in the US.
I can certainly think of a few people who should read this book, aside from everyone in the world. For example, POGREBIN, READ THIS NOW. But I don't think she reads my journal much anymore.
Actually, the Kis book that everyone in the world should read is A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, which is an exquisitely wrought, utterly respectful, and highly depressing testament to various individuals who died under the Stalinist terror--just about the most moving and humane acts of bearing witness I've ever read.
Gah. So good.
(In case you're wondering where the sudden spate of Eastern European literature came from, this is stuff I've been reading for Marguerite Feitlowitz's seminar on Kis, I. B. Singer, and Bruno Schulz. I always wind up reading mind-bogglingly good stuff in her courses, and that's one of the reasons I love 'em.)
Danilo Kis. (He's got a v-shaped accent over the s, but I don't think my machine can make it.) The Encyclopedia of the Dead. A collection of retellings of stories, ranging from biblical legends to family stories to Russian political yarns. Doesn't sound like much? He's brilliant. Utterly masterful prose, and written with a high and subtle awareness of all the tricky aesthetic and moral details of telling other people's stories. I can't even describe the effect this book had on me; it was like being transported to another, higher plane of thought.
Haven't had this much fun since Rainer Maria Rilke's The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, or possibly Coetzee's Foe.
I feel indebted to provide a quote, but it's very difficult to pick one to exemplify what I'm talking about; it's a cumulative effect, and he's often very subtle. So I'll simply have to type up a random paragraph that caught my eye--
This, as you can see, is an area of the spiritual landscape quite near to the river's mouth, where friends' and relatives' funerals follow so closely on one another that every man--even a man less inclined than my father to silent meditation--turns philosopher, insofar as philosophy is the contemplation of the meaning of human existence.
[This from the European Classics edition from Northwestern U. Press, translated by Michael Henry Heim.]
A Jewish writer--though he considered himself a writer who happened to be Jewish--from the former Yugoslavia; born in 1935 in Subotica, near the Hungarian border, died in 1989. A touchstone writer in European literature and virtually unknown in the US.
I can certainly think of a few people who should read this book, aside from everyone in the world. For example, POGREBIN, READ THIS NOW. But I don't think she reads my journal much anymore.
Actually, the Kis book that everyone in the world should read is A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, which is an exquisitely wrought, utterly respectful, and highly depressing testament to various individuals who died under the Stalinist terror--just about the most moving and humane acts of bearing witness I've ever read.
Gah. So good.
(In case you're wondering where the sudden spate of Eastern European literature came from, this is stuff I've been reading for Marguerite Feitlowitz's seminar on Kis, I. B. Singer, and Bruno Schulz. I always wind up reading mind-bogglingly good stuff in her courses, and that's one of the reasons I love 'em.)
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Date: Nov. 29th, 2004 04:09 pm (UTC)this book you recommend shall definitely, definitely be acquired by me when i see it. *adds to amazon wishlist*
<33333333333.
how is life treating you, love?