Articles by Lydia Kiesling
March 5, 2010
Modern Library Revue: #80 Brideshead Revisited 7
Evelyn Waugh is your bi-curious hipster boyfriend.
January 29, 2010
Proust’s Arabesk: The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk 10
For all that Orhan Pamuk the citizen has been embroiled in legal struggles with the Turkish state, he strikes me in one sense as an elemental patriot. To chronicle something obsessively is a form of love, and Pamuk documents the details of his Istanbul obsessively.
January 20, 2010
Modern Library Revue: #72 A House for Mr. Biswas 4
I don’t tend to condemn books solely because the writer was some variety of wretch. But I have done so if I think it will create a smoke-screen for the fact that I did not understand the book.
December 31, 2009
The Berlin Stories: A Book for Year’s End 3
The Berlin Stories is two short novels, published separately in the 1930s. It was an inspired pairing. Together they flesh out the world Isherwood describes: Berlin of the very early 1930s, imperfect in the extreme, but a paradise for Isherwood’s hitherto uneven talent.
December 21, 2009
Modern Library Revue: #17 The Heart is a Lonely Hunter 4
Carson McCullers attains a level of virtuosity on many fronts, but I was most taken with her depiction of relationships, many of which balance on a knife edge of propriety, wavering back and forth between the lovely and the weird and the outright perverse.
December 8, 2009
Best Last Lines 1
The American Book Review has a list (pdf) of the 100 best last lines from novels. I can’t think of mine; I keep getting “last line” confused with “end.” Thoughts? (Thanks Shakesville).
