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Mixed Feelings

James Wood: Italo Svevo’s Last Cigarette, 3 January 2002

Zeno's Conscience 
by Italo Svevo, edited by William Weaver.
Everyman, 437 pp., £12.99, November 2001, 1 85715 249 2
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Memoir of Italo Svevo 
by Livia Veneziani Svevo, translated by Isabel Quigly.
Northwestern, 178 pp., $15.95, June 2001, 0 8101 6084 6
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Emilio's Carnival 
by Italo Svevo, translated by Beth Archer Brombert.
Yale, 233 pp., £22.50, October 2001, 0 300 09049 8
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... and an eye for the subtly comic. He was devoted to Witze, witty paradoxes and contradictions. When Joyce told him reprovingly that he never used coarse language but only wrote it, Svevo commented: ‘It would appear then that his works are not ones that could be read in his own presence.’ Confessions of Zeno is full of such Witze, large and small: Zeno’s ...

The Leopard

James Meek: A Leopard in the Family, 19 June 2014

... Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and it didn’t seem as though they were pulling in opposite directions (as James Leslie Mitchell, his real name, Gibbon was, after all, a socialist internationalist). For the rebellious, rebellion was still an individual, not a corporate activity; not the rebel as Mel-Gibson-as-William-Wallace plus army, but the rebel as Sid Vicious or ...

Getting on

Joyce Carol Oates, 12 January 1995

Colored People: A Memoir 
by Henry Louis Gates.
Viking, 216 pp., £16, January 1995, 0 670 85737 8
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... those lives themselves are less significant? ‘Colour is not a human or personal reality,’ James Baldwin said, ‘it is a political reality.’ Substitute ‘gender’, ‘ethnic identity’ or ‘class’ for the word ‘colour’, and one sees how far-ranging and how potentially anarchic the controversy is. And how far from being resolved, or even ...

Eat butterflies with me?

Patricia Lockwood, 5 November 2020

Think, Write, Speak: Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor 
by Vladimir Nabokov, edited by Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy.
Penguin, 576 pp., £12.99, November, 978 0 14 139838 9
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... Harris) to admit that a sentence about a character paring his fingernails was inspired by James Joyce. Admit it he does not: ‘The phrase you quote is an unpleasant coincidence.’ Cumberbatch’s sweating intensifies. His jumper has been nibbled by the only moths on earth that are beneath his idol’s notice. Vladimir toys sardonically with the ...

I want to boom

Mark Ford: Pound Writes Home, 24 May 2012

Ezra Pound to His Parents: Letters 1895-1929 
edited by Mary de Rachewiltz, David Moody and Joanna Moody.
Oxford, 737 pp., £39, January 2011, 978 0 19 958439 0
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... from St Elizabeths in 1958, and then, in 1967, his extensive and fascinating correspondence with James Joyce. But it wasn’t until the 1980s and 1990s that the archive floodgates really opened. These decades saw the appearance of volumes individually devoted to Pound’s letters not only to fellow writers such as Wyndham Lewis, E.E. Cummings, Ford ...

Apocalypse

David Trotter, 14 September 1989

The Rainbow 
by D.H. Lawrence, edited by Mark Kinkead-Weekes.
Cambridge, 672 pp., £55, March 1989, 0 521 22869 7
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D.H. Lawrence in the Modern World 
edited by Peter Preston and Peter Hoare.
Macmillan, 221 pp., £29.50, May 1989, 0 333 45269 0
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D.H. Lawrence and the Phallic Imagination: Essays on Sexual Identity and Feminist Misreading 
by Peter Balbert.
Macmillan, 190 pp., £27.50, June 1989, 0 333 43964 3
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... it in Essays in Criticism (April 1989). Yet, as H.M. Daleski points out in the same collection, Joyce has effectively eclipsed Lawrence as the representative or iconic 20th-century novelist. Commentary on Joyce far exceeds commentary on Lawrence, both in quantity and quality – commentary of all kinds too, for ...

Cold-Shouldered

James Wood: John Carey, 8 March 2001

Pure Pleasure: A Guide to the 20th Century’s Most Enjoyable Books 
by John Carey.
Faber, 173 pp., £6.99, September 2000, 0 571 20448 1
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... whole races; Virginia Woolf was a pretentious snob who said horrible things about the plebeian Joyce, and about the girls who worked at Woolworths; James Kelman acted like a barbarian at the Booker dinner, and so on. Most of these commentators imagine themselves to be writing a form of intellectual history when they are ...

An Octopus at the Window

Terry Eagleton: Dermot Healy, 19 May 2011

Long Time, No See 
by Dermot Healy.
Faber, 438 pp., £12.99, April 2011, 978 0 571 21074 9
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... and Sterne, both of whom parody mechanical materialism by hacking the mental down to the physical. Joyce sometimes does the same. Deflating and debunking are common devices in Irish prose. Bathos is one of its most recurrent tropes. Not many high-minded ideals can stand up to those sick cows and lashing rain. In 1916, the nationalist rebels produced posters ...

Marshy Margins

Frank Kermode, 1 August 1996

The True Story of the Novel 
by Margaret Anne Doody.
Rutgers, 580 pp., $44.95, May 1996, 0 8135 2168 8
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... Seven Gables and The Portrait of a Lady, or for that matter between Daphnis and Chloe and Ulysses. James admitted that there was no definite boundary between novel and romance, but he knew that in such extreme cases there was no problem telling one from the other. Of course you can argue that there is realism in Longus, and myth in ...

Possible Worlds and Premature Sciences

Roger Scruton, 7 February 1980

The Role of the Reader 
by Umberto Eco.
Indiana, 384 pp., £10.50, September 1980, 0 253 11139 0
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The Semiotics of the Built Environment 
by Donald Preziosi.
Indiana, 192 pp., £9, September 1980, 0 253 17638 7
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... is therefore ‘closed’ to aberrant interpretations. Ian Fleming is a writer of closed texts, James Joyce a writer of open texts. We have here an important critical distinction, corresponding to the more familiar distinction between mechanical contrivance and creative art. Unfortunately, semiosis soon sets in, and the distinction rots away. The text ...

High on His Own Supply

Christopher Tayler: Amis Recycled, 11 September 2003

Yellow Dog 
by Martin Amis.
Cape, 340 pp., £16.99, September 2003, 0 224 05061 3
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... Martin Amis had a few reservations about the book’s popularity with scholarly intermediaries. James Joyce, he concluded, ‘could have been the most popular boy in the school, the funniest, the cleverest, the kindest. He ended up with a more ambiguous distinction: he became the teacher’s pet.’ How is Amis getting on in this notional academy? In ...

Boys and Girls

Andrew O’Hagan: With the Child Jihadis, 8 August 2013

... Phoenix, the American base not far from the airport. The red-haired Crowley is a descendant of James Joyce with the multiple-passport-wielding aura of a Graham Greene character. He was Unicef’s man in Sudan for a long time. He feels this is a crucial moment for Afghanistan and is sure that the current situation, with rising violence and troop ...

The Paris Strangler

John Sturrock, 17 December 1992

‘L’Avenir dure longtemps’ suivi de ‘Les Faits’: Autobiographies 
by Louis Althusser.
Stock, 356 pp., frs 144, May 1992, 2 234 02473 0
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Louis Althusser: Une biographie. Vol. I: La Formation du mythe 
by Yann Moulier Boutang.
Grasset, 509 pp., frs 175, April 1992, 2 246 38071 5
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... and gifted, though she wrote almost nothing, with a verbal inventiveness greater than that of James Joyce. This is to demean by overstatement, as John Stuart Mill famously demeaned Harriet Taylor in his Autobiography by his reckless eulogising of her.Hélène was also accused by those who had known the pre-war Althusser as a decorous lycéen and good ...
... and British Navies. To be able to deal with the Admiralty, Svevo took lessons in English from James Joyce, at the time a teacher in Trieste. They became friends and Joyce assisted Svevo in finding a publisher for his works. The trade name of the anti-fouling paint was Moravia. That it is the same as the nom de ...

Six hands at an open door

David Trotter, 21 March 1991

Intertextual Dynamics within the Literary Group: Joyce, Lewis, Pound and Eliot 
by Dennis Brown.
Macmillan, 230 pp., £35, November 1990, 9780333516461
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An Immodest Violet: The Life of Violet Hunt 
by Joan Hardwick.
Deutsch, 205 pp., £14.99, November 1990, 0 233 98639 1
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... argue for the stylistic influence of the early Vorticist prose of Wyndham Lewis on key texts of Joyce, Pound and Eliot and to reaffirm Lewis’s important role within the Modernist venture’. However, his study of these texts has led him to the ‘distinctly unconventional hypothesis’ that they should be considered ‘less in terms of individual ...

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