London Review of Books

Der Jazz des Linguas

Matthew Reynolds: Diego Marani, 8 November 2012

New Finnish Grammar
by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry.
Dedalus, 187 pp., £9.99, May 2011, 978 1 903517 94 9Show More

The Last of the Vostyachs
by Diego Marani, translated by Judith Landry.
Dedalus, 166 pp., £9.99, May 2012, 978 1 907650 56 7Show More

Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot
by Diego Marani.
Dedalus, 138 pp., £6.99, July 2012, 978 1 907650 59 8Show More

“... Diego Marani works in the Directorate-General for Interpretation at the European Commission, and he writes fiction full of ideas prompted by his day job. New Finnish Grammar, translated last year, is heavy with fear at what it might be like to lose language altogether. The hero is discovered in Trieste in 1943, with no words, memory or identity ...”

Breathing in Verse

Theodore Ziolkowski: A rich translation of Hölderlin, 23 September 2004

Poems and Fragments
by Friedrich Hölderlin, translated by Michael Hamburger.
Anvil, 823 pp., £19.95, March 2004, 0 85646 360 4Show More

“... Friedrich Hölderlin was rescued from oblivion by a young German scholar called Norbert von Hellingrath, who wrote a dissertation on Hölderlin’s translations of Pindar and began the first historical-critical edition of his works. In 1915, a year before he died at Verdun, Hellingrath delivered a lecture describing Hölderlin as ‘the most German of Germans’, whose luminous hymns confide their message ‘only to the select few’ and remain ‘perhaps never penetrable to non-Germans ...”

Acrostics, the Ouija Board, a Picture Puzzle, Amateur Theatricals, Garden Parties

Edmund White, 22 August 1996

Selected Poems
by James Merrill.
Carcanet, 152 pp., £9.95, April 1996, 1 85754 228 2Show More

“... That the English have been slow to recognise James Merrill as the best poet in the language after Elizabeth Bishop has long seemed strange to Americans. Come to think of it, British recognition of Bishop herself was belated; for decades she was upstaged by Robert Lowell, probably because he lived in England and behaved in a way that seemed more certifiably poetic ...”

Diary

Megan Vaughan: Kenneth Mdala, 16 November 2000

“... of Africa through which Livingstone trod or was carried, defined for strangers by its long, thin lake lying in the Rift Valley and by the ravages of the slave trade. Mdala came from a chiefly family and belonged to an ethnic group known as the Yao, who ...”

Education and Exclusion

Sheldon Rothblatt, 13 February 1992

Hutchins’ University: A Memoir of the University of Chicago 1929-1950
by William McNeill.
Chicago, 194 pp., $24.95, October 1991, 0 226 56170 4Show More

Robert M. Hutchins: Portrait of an Educator
by Mary Ann Dzuback.
Chicago, 387 pp., $24.95, November 1991, 0 226 17710 6Show More

Jews in the American Academy 1900-1940: The Dynamics of Intellectual Assimilation
by Susanne Klingenstein.
Yale, 248 pp., £22.50, November 1991, 0 300 04941 2Show More

“... the multiversity can absorb dreamers and utopians without exciting affection. The ‘idea’ of a multiversity is that it has no conception of ‘essence’. The multiversity has a long nave with plentiful seating and many smaller circumjacent chapels. In the next decade, David Riesman ...”

Reflections on the Independence Referendum

“... Scotland has long been a nation. We shall soon find out whether its citizens now wish that nation to become a state. I hope they do. It will not only open up new opportunities for their own country but will break up the atrophied, decaying British state and reduce its efficacy as a US vassal ...”

Francis Wyndham talks about himself to Alan Hollinghurst

Francis Wyndham, 4 August 1988

“... AH: I was thinking about the unusual shape of your career as an author – having written a collection of stories during the war when you were in your late teens and not published them for thirty years, then later publishing two books, one of which is almost entirely about the period of the war ...”

Little England

Patrick Wright: The view through a bus window, 7 September 2006

Great British Bus Journeys: Travels through Unfamous Places
by David McKie.
Atlantic, 359 pp., £16.99, March 2006, 1 84354 132 7Show More

“... In 2000 the Royal Institute of British Architects hosted a public meeting at which various contenders for the new office of London mayor were invited to argue their case for election. If the event remains memorable, it’s thanks largely to the Conservative candidate, Lord Archer, who betrayed no inkling of the perjury charges that would soon ditch his campaign and carry him off to jail ...”

The Truth about Consuela

Tim Parks: Death and Philip Roth, 4 November 2010

Nemesis
by Philip Roth.
Cape, 280 pp., £16.99, October 2010, 978 0 224 08953 1Show More

“... These books, which abandoned observation of society for concerns with ageing and sex, did not get a good press and have since disappeared from the shelves, while Moravia’s earlier work will be a part of Italian education for decades to come. Translating, I was struck by the almost cavalier perfunctoriness of the late ...”

I am a severed head

Colin Burrow: Iris Murdoch’s Incompatibilities, 11 August 2016

‘The Sea, the Sea’; ‘A Severed Head’
by Iris Murdoch.
Everyman, 680 pp., £14.99, March 2016, 978 1 84159 370 8Show More

“... The word ‘parodiability’ is not in the OED, but it is a significant literary attribute. Iris Murdoch certainly had it. Malcolm Bradbury’s Murdochian parody ‘A Jaundiced View’ has Sir Alex Mountaubon watching his daughter Flavia beneath a ‘dark and contingent cedar tree … sitting on a white wooden seat, in her unutterable otherness, her pet marmoset on her shoulder, her cap of auburn hair shining like burnished gold on her head ...”

Ghosting

Hal Foster: Dead to the World, 29 July 2021

Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons
by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
Zone, 320 pp., £28, April 2021, 978 1 942130 47 5Show More

“... are declared dead? Do you have any civil rights during this interval – which some societies set at the biblical seven years – or are you merely the target of legal action? What happens if you return and your spouse has remarried or the kids have sold the farm? Do you have any recourse apart from revenge? In Absentees, a ...”

Like Leather, like Snakes

Julian Bell: Vermeer and Leeuwenhoek, 30 March 2017

Eye of the Beholder: Johannes Vermeer, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and the Reinvention of Seeing
by Laura Snyder.
Head of Zeus, 448 pp., £14.99, December 2016, 978 1 78497 025 3Show More

“... Frogs could be heard croaking, one hot spring day in 1688, in a ditch beside a meadow where Antoni van Leeuwenhoek liked, as he put it, to wander ‘for my amusement’. Peering down, he glimpsed spawn clinging to the pondweed. A servant must have been at hand, for Leeuwenhoek wrote: ‘I then had some of this green plant to which these Eggs were attached brought to my house ...”

Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse

Marilyn Butler, 6 August 1992

The Lyrical Ballads: Longman Annotated Texts
edited by Michael Mason.
Longman, 419 pp., £29.99, April 1992, 0 582 03302 0Show More

Strange Power of Speech: Wordsworth, Coleridge and Literary Possession
by Susan Eilenberg.
Oxford, 278 pp., £30, May 1992, 0 19 506856 4Show More

The Politics of Nature: Wordsworth and Some Contemporaries
by Nicholas Roe.
Macmillan, 186 pp., £35, April 1992, 0 333 52314 8Show More

“... original version of 1798, which was anonymous, caught on less well than the second (1800), twice as long, and firmly attributed to Wordsworth alone. The two authors worked on four editions, appearing over seven years, further proof that there was no ‘historical moment but a sequence of moments’. Mason passes over the ...”

Infatuated Worlds

Jerome McGann, 22 September 1994

Thomas Chatterton: Early Sources and Responses
Routledge/Thoemmes, £295, July 1993, 0 415 09255 8Show More

“... in August 1770. He was not yet 18 years old. With little formal education – seven years in a provincial school, followed by less than three years as a lawyer’s apprentice – he left his native Bristol to make his way as a writer in London, where he died only four ...”

Poor Rose

Christian Lorentzen: Against Alice Munro, 6 June 2013

Dear Life
by Alice Munro.
Chatto, 319 pp., £18.99, November 2012, 978 0 7011 8784 2Show More

“... by asserting her goodness, her greatness, her majorness or her bestness, and then quickly adopt a defensive tone, instructing us in ways of seeing as virtues the many things about her writing that might be considered shortcomings. So she writes only short stories, but the stories are richer than most novels. Over ...”

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