Yes, sometime around 1984 when I worked at a store. The store was empty and in came a Hindu woman. She looked like a princess and well could have been one. She bought some hanging costume jewelry from me. I was at the point of fainting. She had copper skin, long red hair, and the rest of her was perfect. A timeless beauty. When I had to charge her, I felt embarrassed. As if saying she understood and not to worry, she smiled at me. Then she disappeared and I have never again seen anyone like her. Sometimes I get the impression that she was the goddess Kali, the patron saint of thieves and goldsmiths, except Kali was also the goddess of murderers, and this Hindu woman was not only the most beautiful woman on earth, but she seemed also to be a good person — very sweet and considerate.

It was what he most held against Mrs Forrester: that she was not willing to immolate herself, like a widow of all these great men, and die with the pioneer period to which she belonged; that she preferred life on any terms. In the end, Niel went away without bidding her goodbye. He went away with weary contempt for her in his heart.

And this short novel reminding me, as it did of other short novels – Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Erskine Caldwell’s Gretta - delivers a portrait of an individual in such a way that you feel as though the author has taken a knife and cut through flesh to reveal the soul of the subject.

In the end the novels of Fitzgerald and Caldwell are both superior to Willa Cather’s, because she allows the insidious drip of sentimentality to stain her pages. This is a great pity, but certainly not enough for any intelligent reader to miss the experience of Mrs Forrester. She’ll be with you for a long time after you’ve finished reading the book.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship – be it JC or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles – is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things – if they are where you tap real meaning in life – then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already – it’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness. Worship power – you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart – you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

Thanks to Tom for pointing this one out

It made you very self-conscious. . . But we couldn’t really say anything after a while – I mean after a certain age; I imagine at three I didn’t mind – but at a certain age we couldn’t speak without being aware of how we were saying something, how it was being phrased, as well as what we were saying. So if we made a sort of clumsy repetition, one of them might very well point out, sort of lightly with a smile, but it was a very language saturated household . . .

. . . my father would consider very carefully what I had said and that made me feel very insecure. I don’t know if this is a good example, but I remembered it just the other day. When he was in the nursing home – you know how you want to say the things that you don’t want to have forgotten to say . . . our family was not, as you can imagine, given to spontaneity – I said to him, “You’ve been a very good father,” I just wanted him to know that, and he said, “In what respect?”

Source: Brick Magazine

Significant human activity is usually considered to take place where the cultural arbiters and publishers are. But in the long run, you know, I’ve felt that they weren’t quite figuring out what it was I was trying to do. I’ve read impossible reviews of my work and I’ve thought, What are they reading? In the long run it seems to level out. You know when Faulkner was at the height of his career Newsweek magazine still referred to him as a farmer. When Melville died, his wife put on his gravestone, “Herman Melville, writer.” And everybody thought it was touching that she actually thought he was a writer! They were so moved by it, they said, “Now, that’s real loyalty!” [laughter] In the short haul, I don’t really think you can be expect to be understood. And you shouldn’t worry too much about it if you’re allowed to go on and publish. I remember Updike saying that in any case, the reviews are inexorably mixed. So it is. When you’re younger and your ego is fragile, you just get devastated. But I just reviewed a new book in the New York Times by a Norwegian writer named Per Petterson. His book is called Out Stealing Horses, and it’s a great book. It sold more than 230,000 hardcover books in Europe and he couldn’t find a publisher here. It then won the International Impac Dublin Literary Award – which is the most remunerative fiction prize in the world – won the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, won a whole bunch of things, and until now everybody was saying, “Who wants to read about Scandinavia?” Now it’s out, it’s got a kind of boutique publisher, but it’s gradually been taken notice of. Categorically, it was considered as being too out of town to be of any interest, and those days are over. But anyway, it’s very tough in literature these days. When T.S. Eliot came to the U.S. in the fifties to read, they had to put him in a football stadium, that was the only thing that would hold the crowd. If he came now he couldn’t fill this room.

*

“I write one page of masterpiece to ninety one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.”

*

Gaële Chojnowicz writes about Carson McCullers:

Walter Allen said of Carson McCullers; “Faulkner apart, the most remarkable novelist the South has produced seems to me Carson McCullers.”

SPIEGEL: Are you a fan?
Pamuk: I was in my childhood. . . . . .

and later:

Radio reporters taught me to listen to something and imagine something at the same time. In the late 18th century, Goethe traveled to Italy, where he saw Leonardo da Vinci’s “Last Supper.” At the time, people in Germany had heard of the painting but had no visual concept of it. He returned to Germany and wrote about it. There is a Greek term for this called “ekphrasis,” or expressing an image in words. Football reporting on the radio works the same way. Of course, it’s also clear that the reporter always lags behind the event itself and therefore constantly has to edit his words. Football is faster than words.

and later still:

SPIEGEL: What does Turkish football say about the condition of the country today?
Pamuk: The former Portuguese dictator (Antonio) Salazar also used football as a tool to control his country. He treated the game as opium for the masses, as a way of preserving the peace. It would be nice if it were that way in our country. Here football is no opium, but rather a machine to produce nationalism, xenophobia and authoritarian thinking. I also believe that it isn’t victories but defeats that promote nationalism.
SPIEGEL: How so?
Pamuk: Nationalism stems from catastrophes, whether they are caused by earthquakes or lost wars. In his novels, Tolstoy writes about how the war against Napoleon helped shape the Russian identity. A 0:8 loss against England is a similar catastrophe.

But there’s much more to the interview. Go see.

Deep within me, however, was a wondrous joy at receiving this Prize, and I tried to dispel my anxiety by thinking of those who would rejoice at my good fortune. There were my good friends, my brothers and sisters and, first and foremost, my old mother who, sitting back home, was happy to have lived to see this day.
But then I thought of my father and felt a deep sorrow that he should no longer be alive, and that I could not go to him and tell him that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize. I knew that no one would have been happier than he to hear this. Never have I met anyone with his love and respect for the written word and its creators, and I wished that he could have known that the Swedish Academy had bestowed on me this great Prize. Yes, it was a deep sorrow to me that I could not tell him.
Anyone who has ever sat in a train as it rushes through a dark night will know that sometimes there are long minutes when the coaches slide smoothly along without so much as a shudder. All rustle and bustle cease and the sound of the wheels becomes a soothing, peaceful melody. The coaches no longer seem to run on rails and sleepers but glide into space. Well, that is how it was as I sat there and thought how much I should like to see my old father again. So light and soundless was the movement of the train that I could hardly imagine I was on this earth. And so I began to daydream: «Just think, if I were going to meet Father in Paradise! I seem to have heard of such things happening to other people – why, then, not to myself?» The train went gliding on but it had a long way to go yet, and my thoughts raced ahead of it. Father will certainly be sitting in a rocking chair on a veranda, with a garden full of sunshine and flowers and birds in front of him. He will be reading Fritjofs saga, of course, but when he sees me he will put down his book, push his spectacles high up on his forehead, and get up and walk toward me. He will say, «Good day, my daughter, I am very glad to see you», or «Why, you are here, and how are you, my child», just as he always used to do.

Selma Lagerlöf will be remembered for a book she wrote as a primer for elementary schools, now recognised as one of the world’s most charming children’s books: Nils Holgerssons underbara resa genom Sverige (1906) (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils).