As admirable and courageous as the film’s Atticus is, this lionization goes way too far in construing the novel’s Atticus in our memory as some sort of social reformer.
All of this is surprisingly interesting, even addictive, as has often been pointed out in reviews. But no one can pinpoint precisely why. A striking element in the praise of Knausgaard—and he has garnered almost uniform praise in the English-speaking press—is the recourse to vocabulary not normally considered complimentary. “Boring” comes up an enormous amount.
As we discussed some of his favorite authors—from Heinrich von Kleist and Virginia Woolf to Jack Kerouac and Jayne Anne Phillips—Doctorow asked: “What can you steal from these writers?”
Whereas the proto–science fiction of a century past (H. G. Wells, Octavia E. Butler, Edgar Rice Burroughs) looked to a bright if complex future, we can now scarcely imagine one that’s not irredeemably awful.
Freedom Forgotten and Remembered. By Helmut Kuhn. University of North Carolina Press. $2.50. The Freedom to Be Free. By James Marshall. The John. Day Company. $2.50. The Machiavellians. By James Burnham. The John Day Company. $2.50.
"IT IS ludic [...]
How New Will the Better World Be? By Carl L. Becker. Alfred A. Knopf. $2.50. Unfinished Business. By Stephen Bonsai. Doubleday, Doran ami Company. $3.00. Victory zvilhout Peace. By Roger Burlingame and Alden Stevens. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2 [...]
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. HarperCollins, May 2007. $26.95“You haven’t read any Michael Chabon?” said some guy in some bar in New York, in the twilighty summerland before 9/11. I’d landed in the city five min [...]
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