If you would have to divide serious literary writing in two broad categories, style versus message would be a good one, the talented word magicians (Nabokov, Marquez, Flaubert) versus the socially committed (Hugo, Tolstoj, Allende), the writers’ writers versus the mass favorites. If you prefer the first over the latter, like the Zac, you have to admire the Tzumprize. The Tzumprize hands out a yearly award for the most eloquent sentence produced that year in the Dutch world of fiction. The prize is worth the number of words in euros. Last year was a record, with a winning sentence by Jeroen Brouwers .
Archive for the ‘Quotes’ Category
Style über Message
Thursday, September 4th, 2008On the Verge of a Simple Solution
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
“He seemed to be quite unexpectedly (for human despair seldom leads to great truths) on the verge of a simple solution of the universe but was interrupted by an urgent request.” Vladimir Nabokov, Pnin.
According to the Literary Encyclopedia, Pnin is the most accessible of Nabokovs novels. I personally found it rather boring, but even in his less interesting works (again, a subjective matter) little beauties can be found.
Antonio Lobo Antunes
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
When fellow Portuguese writer, Jose Saramago, won the Nobel prize in 1998, many people called to congratulate him, after they had called Lobo Antunes to tell him that the prize should have gone to him instead.
It is hard to find anything worthwhile in English on the Portugese writer Antonio Lobo Antunes. Luckily the writer Gonzalo Bar made up for this great loss on his own blog; Gonzalo Bar, all rights reserved
Isn’t it funny?
Monday, August 25th, 2008 
A royal personage was making a tour through his provinces and noticed a man in the crowd who bore a striking resemblance to his own exalted person. He beckoned to him and asked: “Was your mother at one time in service in the Palace?” “No, your Highness,” was the reply, “but my father was.”
Mary Beard discusses two books on laughter and jokes in the NYRB?Cartoon by SCHOT
Ink and Spit
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
Joseph Brodsky reminded us in his acceptance speech: “Lenin was literate, Stalin was literate, so was Hitler; as for Mao, he even wrote verse. What all these men had in common, though, was that their hit list was longer than their reading list.” Literature’s power, like dynamite, depends on those who use it.
John Sutherland looks at past acceptance speeches in The Guardian
No thanks
Friday, September 14th, 2007
In a two-year stretch beginning in 1955, Knopf turned down manuscripts by Jean-Paul Sartre, Mordecai Richler, and the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Barbara Tuchman, not to mention Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (too racy) and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (“hopelessly bad”).
More on Knopf’s rejection record at The NY Times
New work by Coetzee
Friday, July 6th, 2007
Machiavelli says that if as a ruler you accept that your every action must pass moral scrutiny, you will without fail be defeated by an opponent who submits to no such moral test. To hold on to power, you have not only to master the crafts of deception and treachery but to be prepared to use them where necessary.
The full excerpt can be read at The New York Review of Books which has published an excerpt from Coetzee’s new novel the Diary of a Bad Year, to be published in January 2008.
Pennicilin
Thursday, June 14th, 2007
“Pennicilin keeps New York looking cleaner. No faces gnawed by syphilis, with gaping noseholes as in ancient times”
Quote from Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow
More on Saul Bellow at the Saul Bellow Society