Wednesday, November 24, 2010

Great strange machines

Perhaps it is only because I am rereading James Joyce's Dubliners alongside a rereading of Thomas Bernhard's Gathering Evidence: a memoir -- not obvious companions in the pile of books beside my bed but such is the happenstance of reading -- that I notice just how much the material for each author has stuck in his craw -- the sourness, the bodies, the small flutterings of inept kindliness -- which, stewing there, fuels the great strange machines of their work.

2 comments:

  1. Have you ever read anything by Jules Romain, a famous French author of the early 20th century? Most notably: The Death of a Nobody, and Verdun.

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  2. No I haven't, but will certainly look out for his work in secondhand bookshops and libraries. Thank you for that.

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