Paromita’s Reviews > The Art of Flight > Status Update

In The Art of Flight, Pitol writes, “Translating allows one to enter fully into a work, to know its bones, its structure, its silences.”

... Everything between them would seem to belong to different worlds. But in the world of great literature profound coincidences are often recorded. Those differences that the idle and foolish delight in pointing out are almost always superficial. Art, when it is worthy of receiving that name, is a testament to having reached its ultimate limit, of reaching resolutely the goal that bears the sign of the extreme."

...,sleepwalkers. Mann is the subject of tributes attended by heads of state, crowned heads, hundreds of prestigious guests. Kafka meets with a few close friends in café Arco, a modest locale in Prague. The thought that someone might host a banquet in his honor could only occur to him in a fever-induced dream...

"Mann’s characters embody the greatness of our species: Joseph, Jacob, biblical heroes; Goethe; a medieval pope who becomes a saint; Adrian Leverkühn, a composer who transforms contemporary music. They are all eagles who soar in the highest heaven. Kafka’s, on the other hand, barely have names, some only receive an initial. They move through streets as oppressive as the sewer drains. They move like moles, puppets...

"Reading is a secret game of approximations and distances. It is also a lottery. One arrives at a book by unusual means; one stumbles upon an author by apparent coincidence only to never be able to stop reading him."

"Writing for me has meant—if I may borrow a phrase from Bakhtin—leaving a personal testimony of the world’s constant mutation."

...In our century, this type of novel, whose composition has always been associated with Chinese boxes or Russian matryoshka dolls, and which today theorists call mise en abyme (placed into abyss), has found a legion of fans. Allow me to cite three remarkable titles: Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier, Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Garden of Forking Paths by Jorge Luis Borges."