Sarah Wrote That | lit crit

ewilcox replied to your post: The House of Mirth

Can we talk about how Ethan Frome is the worst thing in the world, though?

OMG yes. Wharton could really be astonishingly bad, both conceptually and line-by-line.

I remember one critic, I don’t remember who, writing of D.H. Lawrence that he had a dreadful editorial sense of his own work (a deep-seated fear for me). Wharton seems to me more prone to lapses in standards.

Too, I agree with Isabel, and much prefer House of Mirth to Age of Innocence, which to me reads as choked on the mannerisms that are supposed to be its source of drama—the characters’ problem becomes the novel’s problem (although what a terrifying notion, to have so little personality apart from one’s sense of convention/obligation/societal norms).

"Seeing your book turned into a movie is like seeing your oxen turned into bouillon cubes."

- John Le Carré via @jackshafer (via soupsoup)

I think he intends this critically….?

Also: the Variety article that cited the (purported) quote concerns the new version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, which stars Colin Firth and Benedict Cumberbatch, among others. I’m still getting used to seeing Colin Firth cast as middle-aged/possibly frumpy.

Reblogged from Soup

"I know, at least a little bit, what it’s like to be confused with Batman"

-

Elif Batuman systematically juxtaposes the horrific and mundane, often in the same clause, a style reconciled in content and diction to tragedy, often long-past, that all it can do is point out. Line by line it might come off as callous, but mostly I find it bracing, and her circuitous routes lead us through real-life (apparent) absurdity to moments of startling pathos:

In 2008, the mayor of Batman tried to sue the producers of “The Dark Knight,” citing, among other complaints, his theory that the psychological effects of the superhero’s success were contributing to his city’s high rate of female suicides. Everyone made fun of this mayor, but I felt sorry for him. Was it because of my surname—because I know, at least a little bit, what it’s like to be confused with Batman? In any case, I had no trouble imagining how I would feel seeing one Batman raking in a billion dollars while my Batman had nothing.

[“Letter From Turkey - Natural Histories - A Journey in the Shadow of Ararat”]

"There are plenty of entertaining reads that are part of the enjoyment of life. That doesn’t make them literature. There is a simple test: ‘Does this writer’s capacity for language expand my capacity to think and to feel?’"

- Jeanette Winterson takes the Booker Prize to task

"This is perhaps the supreme offering of the short story, the reader’s feeling that some proof has been submitted that life, long or short, funny or tragic, is simple. The short story is the loaves and fishes run in reverse: many things have gone into it and mysteriously become few."

- Valerie Trueblood, in the Cork International Short Story Festival blog (originally in “What’s the Story: Aspects of the Form,” The American Poetry Review, July 2001)

[h/t @EthelRohan]

4 Sep 2011 17:34

Stunningly good narration in Larissa MacFarquhar’s profile of philosopher Derek Parfit, with a decidedly un-New Yorker-ish relentlessness and momentum; the way its pared-down phrasing shifts into Parfit’s and his wife’s points of view, it’s more like a Gordon Lish-ed up short story.

(two paragraphs above are excerpted from non-contiguous sections)

1 Sep 2011 13:28

“The implausibilities in the science fiction universe of The Help are many and wild. Certainly, that happens in most movies, especially these days. What makes these implausibilities offensive in The Help is that most of us know better. We know our history. There is not enough height in the atmosphere for us to suspend our disbelief.” →

- Roxane Gay

michellelegro:

Romola Garai, Ben Wishaw, and Dominic West are BBC reporters during the 1950’s in The Hour.

I really enjoyed the first, uh, hour of The Hour, which in an oddly unpromoted promotion, is currently free on iTunes, for those of us without cable TV.

Actually, curling up with a laptop, close-up on The Hour’s close-ups, seems about right. It’s mostly interior shots, or else night side-streets, but that doesn’t feel evasive or budget-driven the way it does (to me) with Mad Men. We’re so focused on a few characters, unmediated by the setup that so often makes premiere episodes feel like parties you attend out of a sense of duty, and perfunctorily, that establishing shots would be self-conscious. Acting is spot-on, production tactile and film-fluid (you can almost smell the dust in the Tube, the mustiness in the slant-lit rooms). But it’s the writing that makes it.

Reblogged from History will vindicate me.

17 Aug 2011 11:33

"As a writer I am really interested in the depiction of consciousness in fiction. I think the novel describes — enacts — the experience of a mind better than any other medium. I also like how a novel is relentless and inescapable the way a mind is. (I really like that you can’t click through to something else. Of course you can always throw the book across the room.) I wanted the book to be claustrophobic and distorted by emotion and doubt and subjectivity. As I worked I wanted the story to be emotional — practically deranged with emotion — but I also wanted it to be unsentimental and uneasy."

- Dana Spiotta via Dept. of Homeland Insecurities, from Edward Champion’s Stone Arabia roundtable

Reblogged from Dept. of Homeland Insecurities

A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD character map →

vintageanchor:

CANNOT STOP PLAYING WITH THIS.

This is such an interesting way to visualize plotting. In the last 100 pages of the novel, only 5 new characters are introduced. By the beginning of Chapter 3 we’ve met triple the characters we’d met in chapter 1, and despite the book’s leaps in time and place, for long stretches it returns to the characters it’s established.

Reblogged from Vintage Books & Anchor Books