James Wood on Guardian Unlimited talks about character:
But how to push out? How to animate the static portrait? Ford Madox Ford writes wonderfully about getting a character up and running - what he calls “getting a character in”. Ford and his friend Joseph Conrad loved a sentence from a Guy de Maupassant story: “He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway.” Ford comments: “that gentleman is so sufficiently got in that you need no more of him to understand how he will act. He has been ‘got in’ and can get to work at once.”
And again, in a quest to answer the question, What is character?
The truth is that the novel is the great virtuoso of exceptionalism: it always wriggles out of the rules thrown around it. And the novelistic character is the very Houdini of that exceptionalism. There is no such thing as “a novelistic character”. There are just thousands of different kinds of people, some round, some flat, some deep, some caricatures, some realistically evoked, some brushed in with the lightest of strokes.
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In this 1936 essay, the novelist recollects working in a second-hand bookshop “on the frontier between Hampstead and Camden Town” and tells how the experience caused him to lose his love of books:
Like most second-hand bookshops we had various sidelines. We sold second-hand typewriters, for instance, and also stamps — used stamps, I mean. Stamp-collectors [...]
A taster:
I had in a drawer an illuminated parchment on which was written in elegant characters that on Primo Levi, of the Jewish race, had been conferred a degree in Chemistry summa cum laude. It was therefore a dubious document, half glory and half derison, half absolution and half condemnation. It had remained in that [...]
Robert Fulford in the National Post discusses why art is his religion. The cons and the pros.
. . . we also can’t claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. I knew a man who had Shakespeare, Verdi, Beethoven and the rest of the [...]
Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, is using BitTorrent and other filesharing networks as a way to promote his work. His publishers weren’t too happy about giving away free copies of his books, so he’s taken matters into his own hands.
On his website, Pirate Coelho, you are allowed to download his novels for free.
Coelho’s view [...]
Denis Donoghue in The Chronicle Review maintains that, unlike rhetoric, eloquence never sent any soldier to be killed in a foreign field.
This is a recollection of his time at University College Dublin in the 1940s:
I was alert to the fact that there were a few cult books that we expected one another to know by [...]
The German film, The Lives of Others has been released as a DVD. Paul Cantor has an extensive review of it in Christianity Today, claiming it to be the best feature film début by a director since Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. My own review is here.
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Do read Alex Witchel’s piece in The New York Times. [...]
A taster:
It’s a lousy Napoleon cake. The cream should be a pale yellowish white and light, but this one is feverish yellow and sticky. I eat just the top and leave the rest on the plate. I ought to complain, hold the cake up in front of the lady at the counter and say: “This [...]
Several books on terrorism have been banned in the UK, either published and then removed from the shelves or refused publication altogether. In some instances, the books were thrown into pulping machines so that all evidence of their existence was destroyed.
According to Spiked Magazine books by British, American and French authors have suffered this fate. [...]
The Dear Author site has Sandra Schwab’s positive review of a new Cybook e-book reader.
So far I’ve read 1½ books on the Cybook and I have to say it makes for very comfortable reading indeed, I haven’t experienced any sort of eyestrain whatsoever: the screen isn’t really white, but more grayish in colour (like a [...]
