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From a Summer to an Autumn

Michael Wood: Julian Barnes, 9 May 2013

Levels of Life 
by Julian Barnes.
Cape, 118 pp., £10.99, April 2013, 978 0 224 09815 1
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... Julian Barnes invites us to visit what he calls a ‘tropic of grief’ that is wilder and bleaker than anything in the pages of Lévi-Strauss’s great memoir. But Barnes does not refuse the word ‘sad’, because, he suggests, one of the first things we should understand about grief is its banality, its need of ordinary old words that may seem flat but will not seem evasive ...

Thinking about Death

Michael Wood: Why does the world exist?, 21 March 2013

Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story 
by Jim Holt.
Profile, 307 pp., £12.99, June 2012, 978 1 84668 244 5
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... It’s easy enough to prove that the external world exists. Doors, rocks, other people, we keep running into them. But that’s not much of a proof. It doesn’t show that any particular piece of the world exists when we are not there to perceive it, and it doesn’t show why its existence should matter. It’s just in the way. The proof helps us still less with Stephen Hawking’s question, adduced on the first pages of Jim Holt’s book: ‘Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing?’ Mattering and bothering are important issues in Holt’s quest, but they tend to be treated as entailments and sidebars, marginalia to the big stuff: the ‘profound … mystery of being’, ‘the deeper question’, ‘the deepest of all questions’, namely, ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ Holt has a religious temperament, if not a religion, and he thinks the notion of God is a possible explanation of the mystery of being rather than the reverse or the refusal of one ...

Bon-hommy

Michael Wood: Émigré Words, 1 April 2021

Émigrés: French Words that Turned English 
by Richard Scholar.
Princeton, 253 pp., £25, September 2020, 978 0 691 19032 7
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... There are​ some wonderful rhymes in Cole Porter’s song ‘I get a kick out of you’: if-whiff-terrif, high-guy-sky with the first syllable of i-dea. And, even better:When I’m out on a quiet spreeFighting vainly the old ennuiAnd I suddenly turn and seeYour fabulous face.We wonder why ‘fighting vainly’ is subtly better than ‘vainly fighting’, we are pleasurably uncertain what ‘a quiet spree’ might look like, and ‘the old ennui’ impeccably captures a rather boastful world-weariness also known as the ‘mal du siècle’, whatever century you have in mind ...

Backwards is north

Michael Wood: Anne Carson’s ‘Wrong Norma’, 10 October 2024

Wrong Norma 
by Anne Carson.
Cape, 191 pp., £14.99, February, 978 1 78733 235 5
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... This is the Nile and I’m a liar.’ These are the opening words of an amazing play by Anne Carson, first performed in 2019. The statement is in one sense correct. The speaker is nowhere near Egypt and about three thousand years too late for the Trojan War. J.L. Austin listed being ‘said by an actor on the stage’ as one of the ways in which an utterance might be ‘hollow or void’, and for a moment Carson’s speaker takes exactly this line ...

Cage in Search of a Bird

Michael Wood: Kafka’s Worlds, 17 November 2022

The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka 
edited by Reiner Stach, translated by Shelley Frisch.
Princeton, 230 pp., £20, July 2022, 978 0 691 20592 2
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... of China (1999), is exactly the same as Frisch’s: ‘You are the task. No pupil far and wide.’ Michael Hofmann, in The Zürau Aphorisms of Franz Kafka (2006), has ‘task’ too, but adds the word ‘exercise’, and his pupil is a student. I did once read, though I can’t remember where and can’t find in any of the probable books, a more ordinary, less ...

Viscounts Swapping Stories

Michael Wood: Jacques Derrida, 1 November 2001

The Work of Mourning 
by Jacques Derrida, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault.
Chicago, 272 pp., £16, July 2001, 0 226 14316 3
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A Taste for the Secret 
by Jacques Derrida and Maurizio Ferraris, translated by Giacomo Donis.
Polity, 161 pp., £13.99, May 2001, 0 7456 2334 4
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... the pieces are published here in English for the first time. The editors, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, are sensitive to what might be ‘impolitic’ or ‘morbid’ about such a collection, but their introduction amply and lucidly justifies their assembly of these works, and the only snag with the book as a whole is that it makes certain rhetorical ...

Icicles by Cynthia

Michael Wood: Ghosts, 2 January 2020

Romantic Shades and Shadows 
by Susan J. Wolfson.
Johns Hopkins, 272 pp., £50, August 2018, 978 1 4214 2554 2
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... in the first part of T.S. Eliot’s first Quartet.Frost says ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood’, and recounts his regret that he ‘could not travel both/And be one traveller’. He looked at one road, then took ‘the other, as just as fair/And having perhaps the better claim,/Because it was grassy and wanted wear’. The better claim rests on ...

Doing blow

Michael Wood, 25 July 1991

You’ll never eat lunch in this town again 
by Julia Phillips.
Heinemann, 650 pp., £15.99, June 1991, 0 434 58801 6
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... Most of our current nostalgia goes to the Fifties and Sixties when it doesn’t go to some Victorian never-never land. The Seventies! How could we forget them? Or remember them? Were they anything other than time on the clock? There was a lot of supposed recovering from the Sixties, and of denying the Sixties ever happened. It was an age of narcissism, some said, but we were too self-absorbed to notice ...

Bonded by the bottle

Michael Wood, 14 June 1990

Writers in Hollywood 
by Ian Hamilton.
Heinemann, 326 pp., £14.95, June 1990, 0 434 31332 7
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... The writer, grizzled, sun-tanned, wearing only desert boots, shorts and sunglasses, sits outdoors in a wicker chair, checking a page in his typewriter. The picture appears on the covers both of Ian Hamilton’s Writers in Hollywood and of Tom Dardis’s Some Time in the Sun and instantly announces several elements of a familiar legend. Even in black and white the image is full of warm shadows, and the uncropped version fills out the legend a little further ...

Instant Depths

Michael Wood, 7 July 1994

The Cryptogram 
by David Mamet.
The Ambassador's Theatre
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A Whore’s Profession: Notes and Essays 
by David Mamet.
Faber, 412 pp., £12.99, June 1994, 0 571 17076 5
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... The earlier plays of David Mamet seemed to spring from a meeting between Arthur Miller and Harold Pinter, as if the characters from The Caretaker or The Homecoming had caught the American anxieties of Death of a Salesman. Pinter is also never far from the later plays, and he directed Oleanna in London; but other, more oblique influences now hover in the air ...

Semi-Happy

Michael Wood, 22 February 1996

James Whale: A Biography 
by Mark Gatiss.
Cassell, 182 pp., £12.99, July 1995, 0 304 32861 8
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... Movies tend not to age gracefully. If they’re not still fresh, they look decrepit, or just dead. It’s hard to distinguish between the damage done to the old Frankenstein by Young Frankenstein, to say nothing of The Munsters, and the damage done by time and change on their own. Certainly when Dwight Frye, as Frankenstein’s crippled assistant Fritz, scuttles off down a hill, doubled over his very short walking-stick, it’s hard not to think of Marty Feldman and Gene Hackman and to murmur ‘Walk this way ...

Round up the usual perverts

Michael Wood: ‘L.A. Confidential’, 1 January 1998

L.A. Confidential 
directed by Curtis Hanson.
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... Some men get the whole world,’ Kim Basinger says. ‘Others get an ex-hooker and a trip to Arizona.’ The camera pauses on the man who has got the world, an ambitious, heroic, decorated and promoted policeman. The actor is Guy Pearce, his face narrow and eager, all sharp planes and angles. He doesn’t look too pleased. The film ends. One of the many attractions of LA Confidential, a glossy, atmospheric movie based on a James Ellroy novel, is its unembarrassed pleasure in this kind of stuff ...

Out of the Lock-Up

Michael Wood: Wallace Stevens, 2 April 1998

Collected Poetry and Prose 
by Wallace Stevens, edited by Frank Kermode and Joan Richardson.
Library of America, 1032 pp., $35, October 1997, 1 883011 45 0
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... Asked in 1933 what his favourite among his own poems was, Wallace Stevens said he liked best ‘The Emperor of Ice-Cream’, from Harmonium (1923). The work ‘wears a deliberately commonplace costume’, Stevens said, ‘and yet seems to me to contain something of the essential gaudiness of poetry’. He didn’t remember much about writing the poem except ‘the state of mind from which it came’: ‘I dislike niggling, and like letting myself go ...

Not What Anybody Says

Michael Wood: James Fenton, 13 September 2012

Yellow Tulips: Poems 1968-2011 
by James Fenton.
Faber, 164 pp., £14.99, May 2012, 978 0 571 27382 9
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... One of the great attractions of James Fenton’s verse is the way it manages so often to be both plain and cryptic at once. It urges us to think about what we can’t quite know, and it favours certain strategies for doing this. ‘It is not the houses,’ Fenton writes in ‘A German Requiem’. ‘It is the spaces between the houses.’ He repeats this logical rhythm several times within the poem sequence and closes the work with it: It is not what they say ...

Angry or Evil?

Michael Wood: Brecht’s Poems, 21 March 2019

The Collected Poems of Bertolt Brecht 
translated by Tom Kuhn and David Constantine.
Norton, 1286 pp., £35, December 2018, 978 0 87140 767 2
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... you will go under if you don’t fight back Surely you must see that?It is perhaps worth having Michael Hamburger’s version here, just to hear a slightly different lilt: And I always thought: the very simplest words Must be enough. When I say what things are like Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds. That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for ...

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