At the Daily Beast William Giraldi reviews Adam Kirsch’s Why Trilling Matters.
At a time when many American publications employ pedestrian reviewers to scribble personal-pronoun-obsessed book reports, Adam Kirsch remains a blesséd throwback to the great poet-critic-intellectuals of yore—T.S. Eliot, Robert Penn Warren, Randall Jarrell, Conrad Aiken, R.P Blackmur, Yvor Winters—who brought to bear in every essay what Hyman nicely dubbed “a fearful assumption of personal capacity.”
For Tablet Adam Kirsch reviews Howard Jacobson’s The Mighty Walzer.
For Tablet Adam Kirsch reviews Fiasco by Imre Kertész.
All this metafictional apparatus serves Kertész as a way of getting to the problem at the heart of this first section: What is Holocaust writing for? How can the imagination deal with facts and stories that we all too thoughtlessly call unimaginable? Even being a Holocaust survivor does not make Kertész immune to the odd unreality of reading about the Holocaust.
In Bookforum Adam Kirsch reviews The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk.
The corollary to Pamuk’s denigration of character is his insistence that the novel is, or should be, essentially a visual medium. It makes sense that a writer who started out wanting to be a painter should think that “a novel exerts its influence on us mostly by addressing our visual intelligence—our ability to see things in our mind’s eye and to turn words into mental pictures.” Words, for Pamuk, are just vehicles for carrying those pictures from the writer’s mind to the reader’s, and writing is more a matter of l’image juste than le mot juste.
At Slate Adam Kirsch reviews Günter Grass’s fictional memoir.
The conceit of The Box is that, rather than write directly about his experience of fatherhood, Grass allows his children to speak on their own behalf. In each chapter, he imagines a group of his offspring getting together for a meal and talking into a tape recorder about their early lives. The voices come out in a jumble, usually unattributed, without quotation marks; as a result, it is hard to disentangle their individual stories. They become “the children,” a chorus or jury, setting down evidence and passing judgment on their famous father.
