Refusing the burdens of life
The new issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction looks very interesting. It’s guest-edited by Damion Searls (you remember his translations of Walser’s “The New Novel” and “The Great Talent”) and the main theme is “a lost work from Melville’s major period.”
The issue includes a capsule review of The Tanners, courtesy of Gary Lain, who calls the novel “a curious sort of bildungsroman.” After recounting the main characters in the novel, Lain observes:
These relationships are dynamic, however: characters rise and fall from riches as in Smollett, including, ultimately, and most movingly, Klara herself. This is one indicator of modernity: social fluidity as opposed to a vestigial aristocracy; any other markers for modernism in The Tanners are more thematic than formal, as the novel is episodically structured, and its prose, while beautifully rendered (as translated by Susan Bernofsky), poses no real formal challenges. In the final analysis, Simon’s cheerful refusal to acknowledge the pain and suffering inherent in human social life is a refusal to assume the emotional and spiritual burdens of life as officially constituted, framing these burdens as normative rather than intrinsic to human experience. Simon is in his way courageous: the unassuming hero of a remarkable and compelling novel.
Read it all here. (Hat tip once again to Mr. Lull.)
Sam :: Sep.02.2009 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »
