Word: fictions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...universe, everywhere present and nowhere visible." All of his efforts to refine himself out of existence would prove, on the surface, futile, however: his desire for incorporeality, that the "artist must manage to make believe that he never existed," is never quite achieved in any of his fiction and completely betrayed by his published correspondence. Flaubert's letters, in which profound statements on art and deeply personal confessions coexist with mordant wit and bloodcurdling obscenity, constitute as full a self-portrait of the artist as we are likely to get from any writer...
...Academic Romance," the subtitle of Author David Lodge's seventh novel, seems at first glance a contradiction in terms. Even those who have read no more deeply in this field than Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954) know that works of fiction set on campus are supposed to be funny, not fond. As it turns out, those looking for laughs will hardly be disappointed by Small World. But Lodge, 50, who is also a critic and a literature professor at the University of Birmingham in England, sees the humor in academic life and something else besides: a number of the principal...
...with the populace and even putting on false beards. But no more than a carnival did it 'solve' anything." Vladimir Nabokov, she notes, treats the Russian language "as a national treasure the usurper Bolsheviks appropriated from him, to turn over to the rabble." She ponders the absence of important fiction in prewar Germany: "Common sense tells you the way things are, rather than the way your covetous ego or prehensile will would like them to be. And the sparsity of novels, the great carriers of the reality principle, may help to explain German defenselessness in the face of National Socialism...
Perhaps the motion is less of falling than of unfolding; the action is a controlled and graceful spreading of the hands. It is this gesture of disclosure that renders so irrelevant the particulars of time and place. To call this "Caribbean fiction" is only a gross restriction, an amputation and disfigurement of what is central: the mythical contours of the landscape, the pretences who inhabit it in the sublimated forms of colors, shapes, and sounds. Here it is a displacement by evaluation: "They come and go, walking on the damp ground in straw shoes. Their feet in the straw shoes...
...when I'm dead." He would like to impose bans on certain categories of novel: those in which a group of people, isolated by circumstance, revert to the "natural condition" of man; novels about incest; those set in Oxford or Cambridge. He would also impose a quota system on fiction set in South America, "to curb the spread of package-tour baroque and heavy irony...