ellefsens

J H Sværen og H Press i «Bok i P2″, 27. januar.

Nadine Gordimer, anmeldt i Morgenbladet.

Tenk å ha sett dette: Philip Seymor Hoffman leste fra Roths Everyman til musikk av Arvo Pärt og Philip Glass!

Mr. Hoffman, seated on a high chair, his face almost buried in a paperback copy of the book, found an ideal balance between narrative objectivity and vivid characterization in his readings of these extended excerpts. His voice was conversational and intimate. Yet he deftly calculated his pacing, tone and emphasis. In the scene between the protagonist and the gravedigger, for example, he subtly distinguished the two personalities without resorting to dialect or actorly flourishes.

Between the excerpts the Takacs played short, bittersweet works by Mr. Part, the Estonian composer whose music combines a kind of Eastern European Minimalism with neo-medieval mysticism. In this context the chantlike elements of his “Psalom” came across with a ritualistic, almost Hebraic quality. Another fitting choice was Mr. Glass’s String Quartet No. 2, an eight-minute work that originated as four musical interludes for a dramatized reading of Samuel Beckett’s short novel “Company.” Like Mr. Roth’s book “Company” tells of a nameless man looking back on his empty life.

Roth on Updike:

our time’s greatest man of letters – as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne. His death constitutes a loss to our literature that is immeasurable.

Times Online

En times intervju med Updike. Gjort av David Remnick. Nedlastbart og avspillbart her.

Remembering Updike, i The New Yorker.

John Updike er dessverre død. Jeg har akkurat lest Rabbit Run og Bech: A Book, to bøker som viser bredden i forfatterskapet hans. Han skrev 50 romaner, kunstkritikk for NYRB og litteraturkritikk for The New Yorker. Utrolig. Han var i alle henseender a man of letters. Hans sterkeste bidrag til USA-litteraturen er hans romaner om Rabbit Angstrom og det som, gjennom de bøkene, ble til en «aesthetic of the ordinary man»:

The writer must face the fact that ordinary lives are what most people live most of the time, and that the novel as a narration of the fantastic and the adventurous is really an escapist plot; that aesthetically the ordinary, the banal, is what you must deal with.

Det mest fantastiske, og uvanlige, er at han oppnådde dette med enorm eleganse og stilsikkerhet. De fleste av middelklassens prosaister er for prosaiske.

Ny biografi om Benjamin Disraeli anmeldt i NYT, «Judaism’s Redefiner»:

The anti-Semites of his day insisted that Disraeli was bogus in every respect but his identification with Jews and Judaism. A superficial reading of Kirsch’s book might conclude that its author agrees with this judgment. But that would be mistaken. First, because Kirsch shows that on the specifically political issues, Disraeli was promoting British interests, rather than anything that could be identified as a “Jewish” interest. And second, because Kirsch also demonstrates that Disraeli’s engagement with Jews and Judaism was an almost entirely literary affair. It was in his fiction, not in his political judgments, that he endeavored to counter “the myth of Jewish vulgarity and greed with an empowering myth of Jewish talent and influence.” “Disraeli’s imagination of Jewishness did what he needed it to,” Kirsch concludes. “It gave him the confidence to compete with the best-born men in England.”

Fint om hender i dette diktet, «Back Roads», av Barry Goldensohn:

After a brief violent storm toppled trees,
deep rooted ones, splayed crowns
across the roads, root balls,
the buried double of the crowns
pulled up as walls of loam in air,
and young ones blown down too,
I drove out to meet my wife and found
most roads blocked, but I knew
the country threeway and fourway roads
like the veins on the back of my hands,
rivers on a map, and I found my way
by zigzag and backtrack till I arrived.

As a child I stared at my father’s hands
in fascination at his bulging veins.
With trivial variations this design
is the common one—rivers that join
at the wrist and tangle up the forearm.
That I can tell my own from anyone’s
is the clinging illusion of uniqueness
given the superior child, the first son,
the golden son. I still navigate by this.

I would:
Kjøre rundt på subwayen i New York og lese i en bok. Det hadde vært noe.