Saturday, March 21, 2026
It would seem so …
… We Need to Rescue Poetry
i may start postingsome of mine gere. i don't think it will offend anybody.
Friday, March 20, 2026
Thursday, March 19, 2026
Wednesday, March 18, 2026
Teju Cole
After finding myself disappointed by Penelope Fitzgerald's Beginning of Spring, I was eager for something different, for something more complex and textured, and with, well, with far less dialogue. Enter Teju Cole's Open City, a masterful novel evocative of the work of W. G. Sebald.
Like Sebald, Cole performs a magical feat, bending fiction to its limit: indeed, Open City is a work as much of literature as it is of history, philosophy, and geography. It is a novel in pursuit of all these things. And the result is a book which functions in much the same way as Austerlitz or The Emigrants. Cole pursues extended digressions in order to explore the history lurking just below his narrative: often, of course, that history is painful or distressing. And yet, it is covered by the present, by a geography, a population aware only of itself.
Cole travels in Open City from New York to Brussels to Nigeria and back. Along the way, he interacts with intellectuals, doctors, revolutionaries, and family. He confronts his memories and is made aware, at anguished moments, of those he's forgotten. Like Sebald, Cole walks: this is his primary mode of exploration, and it is the time it takes to travel this way which allows him to reflect on these cities, these places and memories.
Ultimately, for me, Open City is a book about immigration and the movement of people: across spaces, across time, across borders. The novel ends with a poignant symbol involving the Statue of Liberty: as beacon both of hope and of injury and despair. In Open City, Teju Cole has delivered something special -- not always perfect, not always realistic -- but special all the same. Add black and white images to this novel, and you'll have chapters (or moments, certainly) approaching the storied works of Sebald. I tip my cap to Cole.
Tuesday, March 17, 2026
Good idea …
… How About a Biography of Tom Wolfe? (Hat tip, Dave Lull)
i met him once. he and I had been invited to the White House by Laura Bush to talk to some school kids. Nice guy. Quite tall. I was six-one at the time and he had to be six-five.
Monday, March 16, 2026
Sunday, March 15, 2026
Saturday, March 14, 2026
Friday, March 13, 2026
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Sunday, March 08, 2026
Saturday, March 07, 2026
Friday, March 06, 2026
Penelope Fitzgerald
I hope readers of the blog will agree that I tend to be generous in my praise of the large majority of books I review here. But having recently finished Penelope Fitzgerald's Beginning of Spring, I'll have to -- temporarily, at least -- change my tune. I was not impressed.
I came to Fitzgerald's work as a result of its praise; indeed, Spring was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. But there was very little here which moved me. For a start, this novel about Russia struck me as painfully generic. The sections about Moscow seemed superficial and could have swapped out, really, for any major city: had Fitzgerald set this book in Mexico City or Paris, I'm not sure the impact would have been profound. Nor do I think that executing that swap would have been that hard: the fabric of the novel is not so deeply set in Moscow that it cannot be untangled.
And more than that: there is far too much dialogue in Spring. And much of it, I felt, was not well staged. It was simply call and response, without scaffolding to surround it. You might argue that artifice is not necessary in a modern novel, but I'd tend to disagree: there's a fine line between a novel and a play, and some of the sections of Spring veered toward the latter.
Perhaps most disappointing for me were Fitzgerald's characters, who were, for the most part, as generic as their surroundings. By the end of this book, I didn't care much for their revelations, or realizations, or actions. They seemed two-dimensional at best, and without the wholeness that generates that connection between reader and imagined figure. This is a book about an English man named Frank, living in Moscow, caring for his children. That in itself struck me as stilted: Frank, really?
If there was a connection here with Tolstoy -- which some critics have argued -- that was lost on me, because the most interesting characters in Spring are those with the most incomplete renderings. Frank's caretaker, for instance, seems to have an intriguing arc, but what motivates or compels her remains a mystery.
All told, this is not a novel I would recommend, and it's one, truthfully, that confused me: the praise it has garnered seems to point either to portions I've misunderstood, or which have simply not moved me. Either way, I'd take a pass on Spring.
Thursday, March 05, 2026
Wednesday, March 04, 2026
Sunday, March 01, 2026
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