Delirium

Jeremy Harding: Arthur Rimbaud, 30 July 1998

Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 
by Charles Nicholl.
Vintage, 336 pp., £7.99, May 1998, 0 09 976771 6
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A Season in Hell and Illuminations 
by Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Mark Treharne.
Dent, 167 pp., £18.99, June 1998, 0 460 87958 8
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... on the coast in the summer of 1886, assembling a large caravan and clearing it for departure. Pierre Labatut, his original partner in the enterprise, fell ill in June – and later died – and when Rimbaud found another, he, too, was obliging enough to drop dead in September. Rimbaud set out for Shoa in October, where he met with a series of bitter ...

My Year of Reading Lemmishly

Jonathan Lethem, 10 February 2022

... voice of the scholars and autodidacts who’ve written the imaginary books, Lem’s Kinbotes and Pierre Menards. Lem Four is a kind of magic act.Lem Five​ ? He’s another major figure: prolific essayist, futurist and literary critic. A supreme armchair anythingist, he shows no hesitation in dismissing Hegel (‘a complete idiot’), Gravity’s Rainbow ...

Nothing he hasn’t done, nowhere he hasn’t been

Adam Shatz: Claude Lanzmann, 5 April 2012

The Patagonian Hare: A Memoir 
by Claude Lanzmann, translated by Frank Wynne.
Atlantic, 528 pp., £25, March 2012, 978 1 84887 360 5
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... with which Israel rushed to conquer and colonise the West Bank soon troubled Jewish liberals like Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean Daniel, the editor of the Nouvel Observateur, but Lanzmann’s attachment to Israel only grew fiercer. After the Six-Day War, Lanzmann returned to Israel. He spent time with troops on the border with Egypt during the War of ...

Is Wagner bad for us?

Nicholas Spice, 11 April 2013

... the organic life of the music, the veins and the tissues of the music.’ On the other hand, for Pierre Boulez it is precisely the organic nature of Wagner’s development of the motifs in the Ring which is a source of admiration and respect. On this, I’m with Boulez. Rather than treating the leitmotifs as a handy glossary, where we can look up meanings ...

The Ostrich Defence

Azadeh Moaveni: Trafficking Antiquities, 5 October 2023

... in the European art world, fêted by museum curators. He usually worked through the auction house Pierre Bergé, but Nedjemankh was a direct sale. Over the course of the summer, as Patch deliberated over the purchase, the dealers behaved furtively, asking Patch to handle their exchanges ‘confidentially’. She did not appear to find this odd. In emails she ...

I eat it up

Joanne O’Leary: Delmore Schwartz’s Decline, 21 November 2024

The Collected Poems 
by Delmore Schwartz, edited by Ben Mazer.
Farrar, Straus, 699 pp., £40, April 2024, 978 0 374 60430 1
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... in the habit of dropping by in search of the son who had deserted her. And he hated going to the Pierre Hotel, where Perspectives was based: ‘The elevator boys seem to think that I am an agent of the Mafia, bringing opium to the real patrons.’He was dependent by this stage on alcohol and sleeping pills but also amphetamines. His journals record the ...

The Dark Side of Brazilian Conviviality

Perry Anderson, 24 November 1994

... they were known in the world at large, came to the Faculty in São Paulo: Lévi-Strauss, Braudel, Pierre Monbeig, Roger Bastide, Claude Lefort, Michel Foucault. The deepest local imprint was left in philosophy, where a set of outstanding instructors trained a generation of thinkers, vividly memorialised in a recent work by Paulo Eduardo Arantes as Um ...

Where on Earth are you?

Frances Stonor Saunders, 3 March 2016

... of your life, the spectrum on which you, as an individual, are plotted from cradle to grave. As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon explained, you must be ‘noted, registered, enumerated, accounted for, stamped, measured, classified, audited, patented, licensed, authorised, endorsed, reprimanded, prevented, reformed, rectified and corrected, in every operation, every ...

Among the Gilets Jaunes

Jeremy Harding, 21 March 2019

... of impatience, which is the reason it was easy to dismiss it, as Macron did, as a reincarnation of Pierre Poujade’s petty bourgeois tax revolt in the 1950s. But as the protest gathered pace and ambition, the comparison began to look threadbare. Long before the gilets jaunes started blocking roundabouts and motorway tolls the geographer Christophe Guilluy was ...

Mothers

Jacqueline Rose, 19 June 2014

The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women 
by Elisabeth Badinter, translated by Adriana Hunter.
Picador, 224 pp., £10.99, June 2013, 978 1 250 03209 6
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Are You My Mother? 
by Alison Bechdel.
Jonathan Cape, 304 pp., £16.99, May 2012, 978 0 224 09352 1
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A Child of One’s Own: Parental Stories 
by Rachel Bowlby.
Oxford, 256 pp., £20, June 2013, 978 0 19 960794 5
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Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome 
by Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell.
Texas, 274 pp., £16.99, April 2013, 978 0 292 75434 8
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Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in 20th-Century England 
by Pat Thane and Tanya Evans.
Oxford, 240 pp., £24.99, August 2013, 978 0 19 968198 3
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I Don’t Know Why She Bothers: Guilt-Free Motherhood for Thoroughly Modern Womanhood 
by Daisy Waugh.
Weidenfeld, 240 pp., £12.99, July 2013, 978 0 297 86876 7
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... or at the very least the presence of war at the heart of childbirth.’2 Could it be, Jean-Pierre Vernant suggests to Loraux in conversation, that ‘giving birth is the most accomplished test of a woman’s virility?’ In which case, the act that is seen as supremely defining of a woman, as the acme of femininity, is also the moment when she leaves ...

Get a Real Degree

Elif Batuman, 23 September 2010

The Programme Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing 
by Mark McGurl.
Harvard, 480 pp., £25.95, April 2009, 978 0 674 03319 1
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... on the same form, precisely thanks to postmodernism. That’s the idea behind Borges’s story of Pierre Menard, a French Symbolist who is led by his Symbolist background to produce a text identical to Don Quixote. Borges’s story, however, relies on our historical knowledge of Cervantes’s existence. The incredibly funny, thought-provoking claim that ...

Follow-the-Leader

Colm Tóibín: Bishop v. Lowell, 14 May 2009

Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell 
edited by Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton.
Faber, 875 pp., £40, November 2008, 978 0 571 24308 2
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... situation I’ve ever had to cope with. I can’t see the way out.’ We would need Borges’s Pierre Menard to tell us how long it took Lowell to make up these four lines. Perhaps as long as it took him to copy them out, or perhaps not even as long as that. Because Bishop’s letter, written in February 1970, included the lines more or less ...

Book of Bad Ends

Paul Keegan: French Short Stories, 7 September 2023

The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol I 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 483 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46199 0
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The Penguin Book of French Short Stories: Vol II 
edited by Patrick McGuinness.
Penguin Classics, 352 pp., £30, October 2022, 978 0 241 46205 8
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... to the century in which narrative was bent into new shapes – by Alfred Jarry, Robert Desnos, Pierre Reverdy, Henri Michaux, Max Jacob and others. All of them shared the conviction that poetry no longer held a monopoly on compression, and that narrative could be used for purposes other than telling a story. As George Balanchine said, when told his ballets ...

Nation-States and National Identity

Perry Anderson, 9 May 1991

The Identity of France. Vol. II: People and Production 
by Fernand Braudel, translated by Sian Reynolds.
Collins, 781 pp., £25, December 1990, 0 00 217774 9
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... as by its early political unity. This is in effect the ease made by another Annales historian, Pierre Chaunu, who likes to dwell on the singularity of the French ‘super-state’, by the age of the Renaissance four times the size and population of the only comparable unified monarchy, its English rival. Braudel himself seems to concede as much when he ...

Literary Friction

Jenny Turner: Kathy Acker’s Ashes, 19 October 2017

After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography 
by Chris Kraus.
Allen Lane, 352 pp., £20, August 2017, 978 1 63590 006 4
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... call Great Expectations, in which she would plagiarise, among others, Dickens, Propertius and Pierre Guyotat’s monstrously abject and disjointed Algerian War memoirs. Running through the middle, as Kraus says, was a stream of grotesquely skewed autobiography: ‘the threat and promise of inheritance … like the River Styx’.It was a bit from Great ...