topics: |  literature | modern | critic

A collection of sharp observations on Russian, French and 
South American novelists. 

Snippets

Unsafe conduct :         Pasternak, Boris Leonidovich (1890-1960)
	Pasternak's prose, even in translation, has the present clarity
	ofnotes struck on the keys of a piano. p.10

	The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the
	unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that
	this unknown was once part of its nature. (p. 14)

	[Pasternak's last published work under the Russian regime was the
	autobiographical fragment, Safe Conduct (1931).  After this he ran
	foul of the Union of Soviet Writers]

Gulag circle :           Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isaevich (1918-2008)
A doctor :               Chekhov, Anton Pavlovich (1860-1904)
Despot :                 Tolstoy, Leo, graf (1828-1910)
Dream of a censor :      Goncharov, Ivan Aleksandrovich (1812-1891)
Early Dostoevsky :       Dostoyevsky, Fyodor (1821-1881)
Founding father :        Pushkin, Aleksandr Sergeevich (1799-1837)
A bolting horse :        Strindberg, August (1849-1912)
Estranged :              Kafka, Franz (1883-1924)

Modern Nihilist :        Genet, Jean (1910- A)
	Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are
	ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic
	duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually
	dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual
	smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals
	humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where
	categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot
	be readily matched in England or America. (p. 102)

Zola's life :            Zola, Émile (1840-1902)
George Sand :            Sand, George (1804-1876)

Quotidian :              Flaubert, Gustave (1821-1880)
	The nineteenth century will colonize; so, in its fantasies, did the
	nineteenth century soul. When Emma [Bovary] turns spendthrift and
	buys curtains, carpets and hangings from the draper, the information
	takes on something from the theme of the novel itself: the material
	is a symbol of the exotic, and the exotic feeds the Romantic
	appetite. It will lead to satiety, bankruptcy and eventually to
	nihilism and the final drive towards death and nothingness. (p. 130)

An early outsider :      Stendhal (1783-1842)
A Portuguese diplomat :  Queirós, Eça de (1845-1900)
A Spanish Balzac :       Pérez Galdós, Benito (1843-1920)
A Brazilian :            Machado de Assis (1839-1908)
Mythmakers :             García Márquez, Gabriel (1928- )

Medallions :             Borges, Jorge Luis (1899-1986)
	Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of
	violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The
	camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our
	minds, nor in time. (p. 178)

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