Over at Threepenny Review, Jess Row expounds on “blandness” in the work of Haruki Murakami, and particularly in his 2.8 lb. tome 1Q84—a book tabbed by Charles Baxter in last year’s Year in Reading as the best he’d read all year. Row contemplates the way Murakami’s characters and sentences “almost never lose this placid, observant neutrality,” or “continuous monotone.”
Haruki Murakami: Master of Blandness
Dictionary Don
He grew up in Edinburgh, wears sharp suits, and added the entry for "phat" to the Oxford English Dictionary. Meet the new editor in chief of the OED, Michael Proffitt. Tom Rachman profiles him at The New York Times.
The Wildebeest
At Page-Turner, Daphne Merkin reads Catherine Lacey’s Nobody Is Ever Missing, which follows the journey of a disenchanted New Yorker as she hitchhikes her way through New Zealand. The novel, Merkin writes, features what Leslie Jamison, in her recent essay collection, termed a “post-wounded woman.”
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Postcards You Wish You Could Send
This week in book-inspired graphics, of the beautiful-but-not-necessarily-informational type: A series of postcards from fictional places.
Samuel Beckett Wears Short Shorts
From the Sentences We Thought We'd Never Write Department: Samuel Beckett shows some leg.
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Gentlemen of Your Acquaintance
“A wealthy and influential harridan disapproves of you and makes sure everyone within earshot knows it. You don’t give a fig what she thinks. You flutter your fan defiantly.” How to tell if you’re in a regency romance novel.
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William Gass, 1924-2017
“He was a glutton for books who treated each text as a plate he was required to clean.” Author and critic William Gass died this week at 93, reports The Washington Post. The recipient of three National Book Critics Circle awards for criticism and four Pushcart prizes, Gass was awarded the PEN/Nabakov Award for lifetime achievement in 2000. See our reviews of Middle C, a novel that took Gass almost 20 years to finish, and his most recent essay collection Life Sentences, which amply demonstrated his background as “a former philosophy professor, but more appropriately a philosopher of the word and an esthete.” We were also lucky enough to have him pen a Year in Reading entry for us back in 2009: “I miss the leisure that let me read just for fun, not to critique, or pronounce, or even to put on a list, but simply to savor,” Gass lamented. Nonetheless, he continued,“I do, from time to time, pick up old friends who never disappoint but will promise me a page or two of pleasure between art and ordinary life.”
How to Be a Book Critic
As part of an ongoing series, Critical Mass asks book critics to name five books that should be found in any reviewer's library -- Ruth Franklin of The New Republic posts her picks. (via Book Bench)
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