Word: musil
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Memos for the Next Millenium is a slim and dense book. Calvino discusses every form of narrative, from the prose poems of Francis Ponge and the micro-essays of Jorge Luis Borges (quickness) to the encyclopedic and incomplete novels of Robert Musil and Carlo Emilio Gadda (multiplicity). He addresses a variety of literary problems. In his essay on visibility, for example, he contrasts visual and verbal imaginations, examining the prefabricated images of the mass media and their control over how we create pictures from words and words from pictures...
Perhaps these values will be more helpful to an understanding of the literature of the 20th century than to the foundation of a new literature for the 21st. For example, Calvino's comments about the encyclopedic Musil and Gadda, who were both trained as engineers, may shed light on Thomas Pynchon here in America. Also, Calvino has provided a reading list of modern and post-modern European and Latin American writers...
...architecture, the mythic roots and Nazi uses of German romantic imagery -- dark woods, lonely travelers, ecstatic moral conversions in the face of nature -- and much more besides. Among Kiefer's spiritual heroes are Richard Wagner, Frederick II, Joseph Beuys, Painters Arnold Bocklin and Caspar David Friedrich and Novelist Robert Musil. Kiefer is not an artist of ordinary ambitions. But his ambitions are not bound up in the cult of celebrity that has riddled the art world in the '80s. He shuns publicity, permits virtually no photographs and spends most of his time behind the locked gates of his studio...
...announce that he was defecting to join the Washington Capitals. "My ambition is to play in the National Hockey League," said Pivonka. "I can hardly wait for the season to begin." He was the second Czechoslovak hockey player to defect in a week: four days earlier, Defenseman Frantisek Musil had joined the Minnesota North Stars...
These problems, however, must be weighed against the other parts of the book, many of which are dazzling. Kundera seems to work well in the artful and engaging tradition of Robert Musil: this book is worth reading and re-reading...