A Different Stripe

Stefan Zweig makes Wonkette

Woodcut by Elke Rehder, 1 of 6 inspired by Zweig's Schachnovelle (or Chess Story)

We feel it's safe to say that this is the Austrian writer's first appearance in Wonkette—and perhaps the snarkiest Zweig-related piece written to date. How did it happen?

The Financial Times publishes a brief review of The Post-Office Girl March 2nd:
"...a fascinating depiction of the effects of history on individual lives."

On the 3rd, Op-Ed columnist Richard Cohen writes a piece in The Washington Post, picking up on the above mentioned line from the FT, but more or less missing the point that the earlier reviewer was speaking about the characters in the novel, rather than of their creator. Well never mind :
"Zweig fled Austria in 1934 and made his way to England and then to America and finally, for some reason, to Brazil. He was as safe there as he had been in America, but his world — once so comfy and secure — was gone. He became a castaway, a Viennese writer deposited roughly on a Brazilian beach. History had come roaring out of Germany and flattened everything."

Finally, under the heading "Nostalgia Porn" Wonkette summarizes the Cohen column thusly:
"Also: Richard Cohen read a review of a book that sounded interesting. The book was written by a European Jew named Stefan Zweig who fled the Nazis and ended up 'for some reason' in Brazil and killed himself in despair, like a man. What’s the book about? Who knows! But the review was great."

And here we have a diagram of the media ecology of 2009. Thanks to Damion Searls for bringing this to our attention.

Menand on Trilling, Sorokin on the queue, Charles Taylor on us

The September 29th issue of The New Yorker includes a profile of Lionel Trilling by Louis Menand that is a much-expanded version of the introduction he wrote for our edition of The Liberal Imagination.

Words Without Borders reprints Vladimir Sorokin's witty and nostalgic afterword to his novel The Queue. Is there a word for poignant remembrances of the Soviet Union as nice as the one coined for East German nostalgia, ostalgie?

Charles Taylor wrote a love letter to NYRB Classics in the LA Times last week. Ok, he also mentions some other publishers too, like Europa Editions, Hard Case Crime, and Persephone who've recognized the failure of the marketplace to give real readers what they're looking for. If you don't have time to read the full piece, we suggest scanning its section headers: "Part of this Little Club," "Faulting Modern Fiction," "Threat to Establishment"—they don't exactly capture the article, but they're amusing.

The LA Times piece quotes Peter Miller of Freebird Books in Brooklyn, NY, remarking that "he displays the NYRB series near his register because 'you feel as if you're part of this little club that NYRB has curated for you.'"—which reminds us that we never linked to a roundup of Miller's NYRB favorites, complete with a photograph of Freebird's Classics shelf. And—would you look at that!—it turns out that John Wyndham's Chrysalids is the store's November book club pick. Thanks Freebirds!

Remember Angus Wilson?

Terry Teachout does and has some very nice things to say about Anglo-Saxon Attitudes and other books in the series in a recent "Contentions" column on the Commentary web site. He makes Wilson's novel sound like a natural companion to Lionel Trilling's non-fiction Liberal Imagination.

"Of special interest is the cold eye that Angus Wilson casts on humanism in all its mid-century varieties. Neither conservative nor (so far as I know) religious, Wilson was nonetheless acutely aware of the inadequacies of the secular creed to which most of his fellow liberals adhered, and skewered them with the sharpest of sticks."

The title of the novel, by the way, comes from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass  :

"All this was lost on Alice, who was still looking intently along the road, shading her eyes with one hand. 'I see somebody now!' she exclaimed at last. 'But he's coming very slowly—and what curious attitudes he goes into!' (For the Messenger kept skipping up and down, and wriggling like an eel, as he came along, with his great hands spread out like fans on each side.)"

Which is why that curious messenger illustrates our edition of Anglo-Saxon Attitudes.

 

Boldtype

If you're one of the three people who hasn't come here from the review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype, then there's a chance you didn't know that there was a review of The Invention of Morel in Boldtype. It was written by Scott Esposito of Conversational Reading and The Quarterly Conversation. Needless to say it behooves you to subscribe to Boldtype, Conversational Reading, and The Quarterly Conversation.

First, the bad news

Finally got a chance to watch the Lost season finale, in which Manservant and Maidservant was set to appear. Maybe it does. After all, the scene appeared as described in the page of script sent to us by the Lost script coordinator—in which Kate hastily grabs her gun out of a box, and in that box is a book. But alas, the book literally flies by as she tosses it aside to get to the gun. Oh well, it gave us a good reason to revel in Ivy Compton-Burnett.

Why don't we have another look at Sawyer immersed in The Invention of Morel—and what the heck, Rory Gilmore reading Monsieur Proust on the beach.

     

Freeman. Dyson.

Radiolab's bioengineering episode (So Called) Life mentioned New York Review of Books contributor and "frog prince of physics" Freeman Dyson numerous times . . . and in a stern voice reminiscent of action movie trailers, or perhaps, a headlining heavy metal band (if you download the epsiode, fast forward to 33:45). Such intonations seem entirely appropriate for the author of The Scientist as Rebel.

Update: Here is the sound clip . . . Download freeman_dyson.mp3

Update the II: Here is a remix of the sound clip Download freeman_dyson_remix.mp3 . . .

A Lost Round-up

If you missed the cameo appearance of The Invention of Morel on Lost last week, there'll be another chance to the episode tonight.

Elsewhere, the internet is abuzz with discussion about the book:
"Fugitives? Island? Anomalies? I see a pattern here!"
Wondering what else shows up on the character Ben's bookshelf?
"[The plot] sounds a bit familiar, no?"
Ever read a book just because it's appeared on Lost?
An entry on the "Lostpedia" that could use some fleshing out.
The Mother Jones blog is discussing Lost? Isn't there an election to cover?
A reader suggests a story by Bioy Casare's friend and collaborator Borges that might prove fascinating to Lost viewers: "'Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,' which is about a decades-old conspiracy to make an imaginary world 'real.'"

and so on...

In researching all of this, I uncovered another NYRB–Lost connection. A while ago, we mentioned that Frigyes Karinthy, whose memoir of surgery, A Journey Round My Skull, we'll soon be publishing, is frequently credited with the now-ubiquitous (and recently disproven?) proposition that all people are connected to each other by only six degrees. Now I see that Karinthy is mentioned in the Season 2 Bonus disk for Lost. On the disk, writer-producer Carlton Cruse, in voice-over, asks:

"Have you ever sat next to someone at a bar and felt that your paths have crossed before? Has the thought ever crossed your mind that the stranger behind you at the store would become a significant part of your life? In 1929, a Hungarian writer (Frigyes Karinthy) put forth the idea that anyone of us could name any one person among the earth's billions of inhabitants and through, at most 5 acquaintances, connect that person back to themselves. He called it 'The Theory of Centrality.'"

Hmmm. Who knows what other connections lurk in the pages of the Lostpedia?

 

Lost? Turn to The Invention of Morel

Our resident Lost insider, Chad Post, tipped us off a while ago to the presence of one of our books, The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares in the Lost episode that airs on February 21 ("Eggtown," episode 4, season 4). In fact, Chad's been talking about the similarities between Morel and Lost for some time (conspiracy theory anyone?). Today he sends something even more thrilling, a preview of the episode in which a character (Sawyer) is reading the book, and appears loath to be torn away from it. Is it because it reveals the secrets of the island?

Read a summary of The Invention of Morel  and find some links to related pages on an earlier post.

Anatomy of Melancholy and On The Media

Last weekend, On the Media discussed e-books, and the future of publishing. Daniel J. Kramer's report on the Espresso Book Machine mentioned one of our classics:

"Now, instead of spending years tracking down Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, you just print it out, go home with a copy of it in your back pocket and finally read it."

At 1424 pages, I don't know that it would be all that easy to put this wonderful tome in your pocket! Fortunately Anatomy of Melancholy is still readily available through us, and it's actually on sale for the holiday.

Sorokin Mentioned in The New Yorker

David Remnick briefly mentions Ice author Vladimir Sorokin in his article, "The Tsar's Opponent," which details the motives of chess champion Garry Kasparov’s possible bid for the Russian presidency. Remnik describes Sorokin as a writer “with a flair for surreal brutality”.

Ice certainly has a lot of both of these elements, but there's also drugs, sex, and hammers made out of cosmic ice.