What do you think?
Rate this book
Antaeus #59: Literature as Pleasure
ANTAEUS
212 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1987
23 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 23, 2010
Essays from some writers you've heard of, many more you haven't. I found the most interesting were from Richard Ford, and Mary Kinzie. A few excerpts from Kinzie's essay "Nocturnal Habit: On Literary Addiction:"
...Kafka, vast as are his genius and his guile, is too chastening to be addictive. Isak Dinesen might also be construed as an exception, inasmuch as her long tales come close to enciphering an entire world - a world in which, owing to the tales' narcotic aimlessness, one can almost relinquish one's sense of reading lines of print. She makes you think you are at Norderney or Elsinore, listening to the cardinal or the old nursemaid. While with Katherine Anne Porter one never forgets that one is reading; indeed, one is troubled by a whiff of the arch and synthetic.
*
The rereading of novels by an addicting author must be aboveboard: No skipping, no touchstone- or favorite-chapter reading. You will sicken yourself on the dainties and eventually lose touch with the culinary variety and graduation of appetite that attracted you to novels instead of effete prose-poems or pithy essais. Addictions must be rationed....Elizabeth Bowen is...a writer I exclude from another general stricture - against indistinct characters, and a paucity of them, because her narrative style is so conscious, so tearless and dry, sails along with so much snap, that one reads hungrily on, well beyond the point of judgment. And Bowen's short stories are particularly satisfying. Like Henry James's, they have a kind of deepness that shimmers up to the surface like the cone of purple in the center of an isolated natural pool.
*
[Among crime writers:] I have found only Ngaio Marsh to be readable [footnote: She is not for a minute rereadable. The molecules break down as soon as the end of one of her books is first reached.] , although I recognize and deplore - and soon forget - Marsh's slick automatism and wooden characterization, it is not because I am able to detect the least merit in the breed as a whole. The classier exemplars, like Dorothy Sayers and, more recently, P.D. James, fairly prove the rule here, because for all their striving to blend the pleasant prurience of crime writing with the more serious architecture of moral fiction, they are both unbearably "worked up," plotted and plodded through.
*
The best novel will convincingly render the unmemorable longueurs of life, but punctuate them with illuminations, passionate excursions, and embodiments of thought, which rivet the mind and assuage the will. The balance is hard to achieve. Muriel Spark is dazzlingly overpunctuated, while Ivy Compton-Burnett is willfully drab and unmemorable, though her books are fueled by almost endless malice...
...Kafka, vast as are his genius and his guile, is too chastening to be addictive. Isak Dinesen might also be construed as an exception, inasmuch as her long tales come close to enciphering an entire world - a world in which, owing to the tales' narcotic aimlessness, one can almost relinquish one's sense of reading lines of print. She makes you think you are at Norderney or Elsinore, listening to the cardinal or the old nursemaid. While with Katherine Anne Porter one never forgets that one is reading; indeed, one is troubled by a whiff of the arch and synthetic.
*
The rereading of novels by an addicting author must be aboveboard: No skipping, no touchstone- or favorite-chapter reading. You will sicken yourself on the dainties and eventually lose touch with the culinary variety and graduation of appetite that attracted you to novels instead of effete prose-poems or pithy essais. Addictions must be rationed....Elizabeth Bowen is...a writer I exclude from another general stricture - against indistinct characters, and a paucity of them, because her narrative style is so conscious, so tearless and dry, sails along with so much snap, that one reads hungrily on, well beyond the point of judgment. And Bowen's short stories are particularly satisfying. Like Henry James's, they have a kind of deepness that shimmers up to the surface like the cone of purple in the center of an isolated natural pool.
*
[Among crime writers:] I have found only Ngaio Marsh to be readable [footnote: She is not for a minute rereadable. The molecules break down as soon as the end of one of her books is first reached.] , although I recognize and deplore - and soon forget - Marsh's slick automatism and wooden characterization, it is not because I am able to detect the least merit in the breed as a whole. The classier exemplars, like Dorothy Sayers and, more recently, P.D. James, fairly prove the rule here, because for all their striving to blend the pleasant prurience of crime writing with the more serious architecture of moral fiction, they are both unbearably "worked up," plotted and plodded through.
*
The best novel will convincingly render the unmemorable longueurs of life, but punctuate them with illuminations, passionate excursions, and embodiments of thought, which rivet the mind and assuage the will. The balance is hard to achieve. Muriel Spark is dazzlingly overpunctuated, while Ivy Compton-Burnett is willfully drab and unmemorable, though her books are fueled by almost endless malice...
Displaying 1 of 1 review