Welcome to this week’s blog, and our roundup of your comments and photos from last week. Judging from the sombreness of the week’s suggestions, many TLS contributors share conedison’s feelings: “I believe this is the saddest I’ve ever felt on a Fourth of July, but anyway - to whom it may concern - Happy Independence Day.”
One discussion turned to Night, a classic account of the Holocaust from Elie Wiesel, the writer and Nobel pleace laureate who died last week at the age of 87.
“I read Elie Wiesel’s Night in college, one of the first two books I ever read about the Holocaust,” wrote conedison.
The other was Kosinski’s Painted Bird, which was presented as a novel. Painted Bird depressed me, but Night did far more - it frightened me. Wiesel’s prose was so clear, so unadorned, an unblinking How-To booklet from Earth become Hell. I believed it, you see. Elie Wiesel proved no escape hatch. The only thing you could do was to close the book and never open it again.
Another Holocaust-based book, Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning, was the subject of a discussion between katcalls and lucarelli, who agreed that it had become “one of those book perpetually passed on between friends, co-workers, family members but in a low-key way. Perhaps it was all the rage and had great fanfare when it was first released but now, 50 + years later, it’s just something passed around quietly by people it affects.”
TimHannigan ’s remark that poetry was the only literary form that could hold its own in a a Brexit-scale crisis led to a bit of a Yeats love-in. As Sara Richards remarked: “And a beast slouches towards Westminster? Fiction at its best couldn’t come anywhere near the twists and turns of the plotting this week.”
On a more cheerful note, everythingsperfect posted this response to our June reading group choice The Master and Margarita
And roadwaterlady felt inspired by Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent: “Such eloquent and disciplined writing I am savouring each sentence. I am entranced and so grateful for distraction from the unpleasantness surrounding us today.” (The Guardian books team is with you on that, roadwaterlady. So much so that we just ordered in a box of copies for our own inhouse pre-Booker longlist readathon, at the urging of fiction ed Justine Jordan).
Finally, Swelter turned the tables on the critics, looking at Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day through the filter of its reviewers, and boldly concluding that “in reading the reviews, I notice a few differences in interpretation from my reading.” Which all goes to show, yet again, what a lively, confident and unpredictable space TLS is.
Interesting links about books and reading
Publisher Picador has put together a reading list for the semifinals of Euro 2016.
Geoffrey Hill, who died last week, discusses the art of poetry with The Paris Review.
The (other) TLS remembers Geoffrey Hill, via a selection of his poems.
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