Word: davenports
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...life. Of course it's not a very catchy phrase, no doubt it's slipped somebody's mind one time or another. Probably "Forget to forget" would have better endured the trials of time and competitive advertising. But either way the message is the same and Guy Davenport's Tatlin!, a collection of six stories, succeeds in exploring its resonance...
...Davenport brings a curious new genre to literature: short historical fiction. In dispensing with the burdens of longer historical novels, Tatlin! presents an exciting array of portraits including Franz Kafka, Herakleitos, an ancient Greek philosopher, Vladimir Tatlin, a Russian artist, Henry Breuil, a French anthropologist, and minor sketches of Picasso, Chagall, Lenin and Stalin...
Tatlin! is an intellectualized version of the New Journalism, and appropriately enough its subjects are safely distanced in the past. Davenport presents the necessary facts and then expands them into a believable story--a story including the "less objective data" that really make up most of our lives, a story allowing for his own interpretation of historical figures and events. Fortunately the book's relative isolation from contemporary events saves it from the dilemmas of New Journalism: the grey area between fantasy and fact is not so controversial when dealing with history...
...called the first collection of a new genre: the short story of ideas. Like the novel of ideas each story does not simply attempt to mirror reality but to create a new world of the imagination that is a separate and additional part of reality. In a way Davenport's stories are to literature what Frank Lloyd Wright's structuralist buildings are to architecture. They are both functional and graceful; their structure explains their function of preserving and discussing ideas...
...visit by Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Kafka's posthumous literary agent, and Brod's brother Otto to an air show in Italy. Most of Kafka's work was not published until after he died; he spent a good deal of his life as a lawyer specializing in insurance. Davenport is able to penetrate this shy, reflective character quite sensitively. As Kafka is traveling in a boat to Italy he thinks of Odysseus and then of his more successful relatives...