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Secretly Sublime

Iain Sinclair: The Great Ian Penman, 19 March 1998

Vital Signs 
by Ian Penman.
Serpent’s Tail, 374 pp., £10.99, February 1998, 1 85242 523 7
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... of marginal places, folds in the map, is that Paul Schrader, the director of a sassy remake of Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People, admired Penman’s review so much that he invited him over to Los Angeles to talk product. Penman in California was truly the vision of a man who fell to earth, a pale alien in an X Files landscape. Wasn’t that the dream they ...

No Looking Away

Tom Stammers: Solo Goya, 16 December 2021

Goya: A Portrait of the Artist 
by Janis Tomlinson.
Princeton, 388 pp., £28, October 2020, 978 0 691 19204 8
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... are holding me hostage … I cannot tolerate any more.’The recipient of his disgruntlement was Martin Zapater, who would provide a vital sounding board for his friend’s frustrations and fantasies. Zapater had experienced a difficult start in Zaragoza himself, but went on to make his fortune through the buying, leasing and selling of land, becoming so ...

Cite ourselves!

Richard J. Evans: The Annales School, 3 December 2009

The Annales School: An Intellectual History 
by André Burguière, translated by Jane Marie Todd.
Cornell, 309 pp., £24.95, 0 8014 4665 1
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... and France in the medieval and early modern periods. Among Febvre’s books were a biography of Martin Luther and a book about the Rhine. The first issue of Annales included studies of the price of papyrus in Ancient Greece, German industry in the First World War, the population problem in the Soviet Union, and the theories of Max Weber. Articles and ...

Time to Rob the Dead

Jeremy Adler: Simplicius Simplicissimus, 16 March 2017

The Adventures of Simplicius Simplicissimus 
by Johann Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen, translated by Mike Mitchell.
Dedalus, 433 pp., £13.99, April 2017, 978 1 903517 42 0
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... In poetry, drama and fiction, writers followed the new formal rules laid down by the Silesian poet Martin Opitz in his Buch von der Teutschen Poetery (1624) and brought about a national literary revival. They wrote in a vivid and dynamic style, with larger than life characters and supernatural occurrences. But the rhetorical flourishes that worked well for ...

Delay

Michael Neve, 17 October 1985

Hamlet Closely Observed 
by Martin Dodsworth.
Athlone, 316 pp., £18, July 1985, 0 485 11283 3
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Hamlet 
edited by Philip Edwards.
Cambridge, 245 pp., £15, June 1985, 9780521221511
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The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 
by Roland Mushat Frye.
Princeton, 398 pp., £23.75, December 1983, 0 691 06579 9
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... a ‘maturer self’, now able to deal with them. The catch, of course – or, for the inimitable Jacques Lacan, the joke – is that the version that the later self will allow into consciousness cannot be anything other than a translation, an alteration, even a new story. The history of maturation depends upon deferred action, upon the deferred rather than ...

Desperado as Commodity

Alex Harvey: Jean-Patrick Manchette, 26 May 2022

The N’Gustro Affair 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
NYRB, 180 pp., £12, September 2021, 978 1 68137 512 0
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No Room at the Morgue 
by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Alyson Waters.
NYRB, 188 pp., £12, August 2020, 978 1 68137 418 5
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... Chandler, the novel draws on 1940s film noir (the narrative flashback in Otto Preminger’s Laura, Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, the recorded confession in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity). There’s also a nod to Camus’s self-confessing narrator in The Fall. In the context of the French crime novel, however, it appeared wildly original. Instead of ...

Diary

Adam Shatz: Ornette Coleman, 16 July 2015

... No one mentioned the atrocity in Charleston explicitly; no one had to. We were in the church where Martin Luther King declared his opposition to the Vietnam War in 1967. We were honouring the life of America’s leading free jazz musician in a dramatic week for freedom in America. The Supreme Court had ruled five to four in favour of gay marriage; at the ...

Nothing but the Worst

Michael Wood: Paul de Man, 8 January 2015

The Paul de Man Notebooks 
edited by Martin McQuillan.
Edinburgh, 357 pp., £80, April 2014, 978 0 7486 4104 8
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The Double Life of Paul de Man 
by Evelyn Barish.
Norton, 534 pp., £25, September 2014, 978 0 87140 326 1
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... opposite: ‘I consciously came across “deconstruction” for the first time in the writings of Jacques Derrida’; ‘Derrida used the term and put it on the map.’ And still less did he, in Evelyn Barish’s words, ‘create a new philosophy, a way of looking at the world that redefined America’s cultural point of view’. But several of the writings ...

Bounce off a snap

Hal Foster: Yve-Alain Bois’s Reflections, 30 March 2023

An Oblique Autobiography 
by Yve-Alain Bois, edited by Jordan Kantor.
No Place, 375 pp., £15.99, December 2022, 978 1 949484 08 3
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... meaning and then be able to divert, to alter it.’ Bois also learned this approach directly from Jacques Derrida, whom he read in high school and met during his studies in Paris: ‘First overturn a hierarchical opposition, then dispel its binarism by the introduction of a new concept.’ Derrida commissioned the 21-year-old Bois to write an essay on ...

Boulez in progress

Paul Driver, 25 June 1987

Orientation 
by Pierre Boulez, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, translated by Martin Cooper.
Faber, 541 pp., £25, July 1986, 9780571138111
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... France in 1981 (revised 1985), is available, in a rearranged format with a translation by the late Martin Cooper, under the title Orientations. It is a pity that we do not have both collections freshly to hand, for any consideration of Boulez’s importance as a composer-writer needs to take into account the major items in Notes of an Apprenticeship. There is ...

Faulting the Lemon

James Wood: Iris Murdoch, 1 January 1998

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature 
by Iris Murdoch.
Chatto, 546 pp., £20, July 1997, 0 7011 6629 0
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... and experimental forms, but can create neither vivid caricatures nor daring experiments. Martin Amis seems to want to borrow that very faculty – soul – about which he is most naturally, and most amusingly, ironic. And Iris Murdoch has written repeatedly that the definition of the great novel is the free and realised life it gives to its ...

Making a Break

Terry Eagleton: Fredric Jameson’s Futures, 9 March 2006

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions 
by Fredric Jameson.
Verso, 431 pp., £20, September 2005, 1 84467 033 3
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... passes over. A specifically Jewish vein of it, stretching from Ernst Bloch and Gustav Landauer to Martin Buber and Herman Cohen, has recently been excavated by Russell Jacoby in Picture Imperfect.* Curiously, neither Jacoby nor Jameson mentions the latest Jewish thinker to inherit this tradition, Jacques Derrida. Theodor ...

A Toast at the Trocadero

Terry Eagleton: D.J. Taylor, 18 February 2016

The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England since 1918 
by D.J. Taylor.
Chatto, 501 pp., £25, January 2016, 978 0 7011 8613 5
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... is also predictably philistine about literary theory. He seems, for example, to believe that Jacques Derrida declared that there was nothing outside the text, a myth as widespread as the claim that the Inuit have a great many words for snow. Nor is he greatly enamoured of feminist criticism, which receives one rather surly reference. American feminist ...

Peas in a Matchbox

Jonathan Rée: ‘Being and Nothingness’, 18 April 2019

Being and Nothingness: An Essay in Phenomenology and Ontology 
by Jean-Paul Sartre, translated by Sarah Richmond.
Routledge, 848 pp., £45, June 2019, 978 0 415 52911 2
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... a team of contributors that included Alain-Fournier, Paul Claudel, Jean Giraudoux, Valery Larbaud, Jacques Rivière, Jean Schlumberger and Paul Valéry. Gide then proposed that they branch out into publishing ‘beautiful books’. Neither he nor his colleagues had the means to run a publishing house, but their friend Gallimard had time on his hands and plenty ...

Whereof one cannot speak

George Steiner, 23 June 1988

Wittgenstein. A Life: Young Ludwig 1889-1921 
by Brian McGuinness.
Duckworth, 322 pp., £15.95, May 1988, 0 7156 0959 9
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... of certitude. The number, if not the quality, of such commentaries is now increasing steadily. Jacques Bouveresse’s minutely analytic examinations of Wittgenstein on mathematics and on formal logic are an encouraging instance. The second possibility was that of an entirely frank biography, of a ‘life of Ludwig von Wittgenstein’ which would deal with ...

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