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"At times the book would wash up on the beach of my life and I would hear the bottled voice of its djinn, promising everlasting bliss to puzzle hermits, inexhau
by fhood 10y ago
"At times the book would wash up on the beach of my life and I would hear the bottled voice of its djinn, promising everlasting bliss to puzzle hermits, inexhaustible cred to know-it-alls. I always forebore."
I may be in the minority, but when I read someone's thoughts on Joyce I don't particularly want to decipher a new metaphor or two per sentence. If that was my intention I would just pick up the original.
- jasim 10y agoFor me it was a supremely enjoyable sentence. The article itself is complex, and what it had to say it could've said in simpler words. But brevity need always not be the soul of wit; at least for some, these flourishes, this showmanship of language, they are a gift to savour.
- ilzmastr 10y ago"Delusions of grandeur" come to mind: At some point in the course of that year, my younger son and his classmates wrote poems about their parents, immortalizing their most salient aspects and traits, and in my son’s poem I am depicted, arrested for an instant in the midst of the eternity it must have seemed to him, “reading Finnegans Wake.” If in his poem he erected a kind of statue to his father, then Finnegans Wake was the pigeon that had come to roost on my hat. “What’s it about?” the same boy asked me, not long after the omnipresent bird had first alighted on the paternal tricorne. p.s. I didn't look at the article's author until I finished it, and I cannot believe he is the writer of something as good as "Kavalier & Clay"... Maybe Chabon wrote in an obnoxious way to mirror the obnoxiousness of FW.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]