Word: bookings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...book moves slowly, as it’s meant to. Kemal preserves moments in his memory as meticulously as the objects in his museum, cataloguing them in careful and loving detail. Pamuk himself completed this novel over a period of six years, spending at least 10 hours each day alone writing in a flat overlooking old Istanbul, and the sense of that isolation drifts throughout his painstaking dissection of heartbreak. More than any other novelist today, Pamuk has laid claim to the dispassionate prose style and layered, self-reflective inheritance of Proust. At one point, he follows a numbered list...
...central crisis, Axler’s loss of the ability to act, becomes a symbol—thin though it may seem—for a world coming apart at its very fabric. “The Humbling,” Roth’s thirtieth book and his fourth novel in as many years, is a brief and anguished meditation on the social, physical, and mental decay of an individual whose identity is ripped out from beneath him. Axler’s life, constituted by ability to perform on and off the stage, proffers itself as transient. His only...
...unforeseeable contingency.” For Axler, this consummate performance, this total surrender of the self in the acknowledgement of the world’s pervasive spectacle, is an act of transcendence. Within the novel, however, it reads more simply; as desperate, as derivative, as meaningless. This is the book Roth has delivered: the rules don’t just prevent you from winning; they prevent you from even playing...
...already- (or almost-) deceased narrator who must recount and scrutinize the events that lead to his expulsion from Winesburg College and a death sentence at the front lines of the Korean War. Like in “The Humbling,” the thematic and narrative concerns of that book seemed more important to Roth than the construction of an illuminating or sympathetic relationship with the character. The ambiguity that permeates “The Humbing”—of age, of gender, of morality—and the subtlety and variety with which it?...
...doubtless a project only made possible by a genius like Roth’s—this fascination never translates to enjoyment. Nor does the admiration one may hold for Roth’s vaunted corpus ever translate to a redemptive case for yet another joyless, featherweight book from one of America’s greatest novelist. In 2004, the author, now 76, selected a biographer, in a gesture that suggests, like Gabriel García Márquez, that Roth is aware of his own mortality on the horizon. Though he already has another novel scheduled for publication next...