Bob Gill
A Christmas Card
(Designed to send in January)
From Bob Gill: Illustration
And here's one last look back at 2010, from Edwin Frank, the editorial director of the series. We figure if the B&N Review can post Robert Christgau's look back at the year in January, then it's not too late for us.
The books I most enjoyed reading this year were books I reread: Chekhov’s great novella “Three Years” (incidentally available in the NYRB Classics collection Peasants and Other Stories), which rings the changes on the cliché time will tell until it resonates anew but—this is the bleak beauty of it—always and only as a cliché; and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, the intensity, courage, and undiminished freshness of which beggar my powers of description. Just read it. I was also happy to revisit Jean Rhys’s dismal-hued but sullenly seductive Voyage Into the Dark, about a woman slipping from actress to prostitute: Rhys charts her decline with relishable grimness. (For much the same reason, David Plante’s amazing memoir of Rhys at the end of her life in his book Difficult Women is also worth checking out.) New to me was Henry Green’s Back, the story of an invalid soldier returning from World War II to England: a mixture of fairy tale, Shakespeare, Hollywood romance, office comedy, and plain madness that is thoroughly bizarre and quite wonderful. Finally, the movie Black Swan has to be seen to be believed. It is much more alive (not to be confused with true to life) and much more fun than any recent fiction I know of.
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