A new translation by Alison Entrekin
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| Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart |
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
1.10.12
Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
27.9.12
Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova
A new title from Contra Mundum Press
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| Miklós Szentkuthy, Marginalia on Casanova |
Translated by Tim Wilkinson for the very first time into English from the original Hungarian, this publication, which has already received an award from the Petofi Literary Museum, may prove to be one of the most momentous releases of the decade.
Szentkuthy is hailed by many as the Hungarian equivalent of Joyce, Proust, and Musil and, to date, his works have been translated into French, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovakian, and Spanish. Marginalia on Casanova is the first book of Szentkuthy’s epic ten volume St. Orpheus Breviary which, as Csaba Sík noted, “represents the greatest enterprise in scope, in worth? – undertaken in the Hungarian novel.”
Marginalia on Casanova is the first volume of the St. Orpheus Breviary, Miklós Szentkuthy’s synthesis of 2,000 years of European culture. As Szentkuthy’s Virgil, St. Orpheus is an omniscient poet who guides us not through hell, but through all of recorded history, myth, religion, and literature, albeit reimagined as St. Orpheus metamorphosizes himself into kings, popes, saints, tyrants, and artists. At once pagan and Christian, Greek and Hebrew, Asian and European, St. Orpheus is a mosaic of history and mankind in one supra-person and veil, an endless series of masks and personae, humanity in its protean, futural shape, an always changing function of discourse, text, myth, and mentalité.
Through St. Orpheus’s method, disparate moments of history become synchronic, are juggled to reveal, paradoxically, mutual difference and essential similarity. “Orpheus wandering in the infernal regions,” says Szentkuthy, “is the perennial symbol of the mind lost amid the enigmas of reality. The aim of the work is, on the one hand, to represent the reality of history with the utmost possible precision, and on the other, to show, through the mutations of the European spirit, all the uncertainties of contemplative man, the transiency of emotions and the sterility of philosophical systems.”
Marginalia on Casanova relives the spiritualization of the main protagonist’s sensual adventures, though it is less his sex life and more his intellectual mission, the sole determinant of his being, which is the focus of this mesmeric book. Through his own glittering associations and broadly spanning array of metaphors, Szentkuthy analyses and views the 18th century and its notion of homogeneity from the vantage point of the 20th century, with the full armor of someone who was, perhaps, one of the last Hungarian Europeans. While a commentary on Casanova’s memoirs, it is also Szentkuthy’s very own philosophy of love.
Passion, playfulness, irony, and a whole gamut of protean metamorphoses are what characterize Marginalia on Casanova, a work in which readers will experience both profundity and a taking to wing of essay-writing that is intellectually radiant and as sensual and provocative as a gondola ride with Casanova.
Featuring an introduction by Zéno Bianu , an afterword by Maria Tompa, the literary executor of the Szentkuthy Estate, and an original cover design by noted Hungarian artist István Orosz.
About the Author & Translator
Miklós Szentkuthy (1908-1988) is the author of masterpieces such as Prae, the St. Orpheus Breviary, Testament of the Muses, and Towards the One and Only Metaphor, and is recognized as one of the most significant and prolific Hungarian writers of the 20th century. Szentkuthy composed an oeuvre both imposing and complex, centered on the conflict between art and life, or the aspiration for holiness and eroticism. In addition to his many novels, essays, short stories, and memoire-interviews, he also translated numerous texts into Hungarian including Joyce’s Ulysses, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Dickens’ Oliver Twist, and works by Twain, Poe, and many others.Tim Wilkinson has translated a number of substantial works on Hungarian history and culture including Éva Balázs, Hungary and the Habsburgs 1765-1800 (1997), Domokos Kosáry, Hungary and International Politics in 1848-1849 (2003), and others. In the literary field, he has translated works by Imre Kertész and many other contemporary prose writers. The US edition of his tr. of Fatelessness was awarded the PEN American Center’s PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (2005). His tr. of Kertesz’s Fiasco is a finalist for Three Percent’s Best Translated Book Award (2012).
Excerpts and Information:
- http://www.hlo.hu/news/zeno_bianu_boudoir_theology
- http://www.hlo.hu/news/miklos_szentkuthy_marginalia_on_casanova_excerpts
ISBN 9780983697244.
20 USD, 16 GBP, 14 €.
Bookstores can order through Ingram. Otherwise, copies can be acquired through local retailers or via Amazon and similar sites worldwide.
For a review, desk copy, or interview request, write to: info@contramundum.net
Website
Contra Mundum PressAlso at A Piece of Monologue:
12.8.12
Peter Brook on Samuel Beckett's Joy
George Hunka on the problems of using biography to interpret literature
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| Peter Brook |
Brook engages rather dangerously with the biographical fallacy (as well as misinterprets existentialism, which certainly sought to engage with society for its improvement, to the extent that many of its founding members, including Jean-Paul Sartre, were Socialists or Marxists) — that the life, in this case Beckett’s gregariousness, contains at least one primary key to the work: “I knew Beckett, and I found him a man of enormous humanity and humor and a really good companion and friend. Nothing was more enjoyable than to be with him,” Brook says. Because Beckett’s kindness, generosity and delight in some bourgeois pleasures are well documented, both critics and audiences have found this a singular means of finding that “shining thread” as evidence of a hilarious Beckettian optimism, as if Beckett himself were only a slightly more reticent Brendan Behan.Hunka is responding to comments made by Brook in an interview with the Boston Globe, in which he discusses the work of both Samuel Beckett and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. [Read More]
Arthur Schopenhauer, too, loved a good wine, a fine dinner and a good play; but does this necessarily undermine the pessimistic character of either his work or Beckett’s? Because both writers surveyed the vast spectrum of human experience, there are moments of joy and happiness to be found in the work of both writers, but do they outweigh the darker conclusions to which their writing leads? It has been my experience that those of an ordinarily melancholy disposition in their work are, as people, excellent companions: often witty, quick to find a joke in the darkest conversation, and genuinely compassionate. But it has everything to do with the man, and the way in which he believes human beings should conduct themselves among others, and not the writing, which describes the ways in which human beings normally conduct themselves among others. Especially in early Beckettian prose, let alone the early drama, there’s considerable comedy: the spectacularly unfortunate Lynch family of Watt, the apparent reference to Jonathan Swift’s feckless Lemuel Gulliver in the Lemuel that concludes Malone Dies. But I must say this “shining thread” is exceedingly hard to come by in the post-1962 plays Play, Not I, Footfalls, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby (the climactic line “fuck life” being the shining thread of joy here, I suppose), Ohio Impromptu, Catastrophe or What Where; or the post-1962 novels How It Is (especially here), Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, or Worstward Ho. These works constitute by far the majority of Beckett’s mid-career and late work; and perhaps one is reminded of film director Sandy Bates‘ frustration with an audience that is sorry that he’s stopped making movies similar to his “earlier, funnier” films. [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
7.3.12
Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination
Joyce Carol Oates reviews Atwood's new collection of essays and reviews
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| Margaret Atwood, In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination |
Margaret Atwood’s eclectic and engaging miscellany of essays, reviews, introductions, and “tributes” is a literary memoir tracing the myriad links between science fiction and literature, and relating both to those archetypal forms and structures so famously anatomized by her University of Toronto professor Northrop Frye in The Anatomy of Criticism (1957). It is simultaneously a self-portrait of the artist as an inquisitive, questing, impressionable, and avid reader since childhood of a dazzling variety of popular and esoteric entertainments—from comic strips and comic books to classics of the genre by Jonathan Swift, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, and George Orwell. Atwood’s intention is to break down the artificial distinctions between science fiction and “serious” literature by close readings of works by these writers as well as H. Rider Haggard’s She (1887), enormously popular in its time, Bryher’s Visa for Avalon (1965), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Birthday of the World and Other Stories (2002). [Read More]Also at A Piece of Monologue:
17.1.12
Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism
Exploring the influence of Oriental culture on eighteenth century writing
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| Srinivas Aravamudan, Enlightenment Orientalism: Resisting the Rise of the Novel |
Srinivas Aravamudan here reveals how Oriental tales, pseudo-ethnographies, sexual fantasies, and political satires took Europe by storm during the eighteenth century. Naming this body of fiction Enlightenment Orientalism, he poses a range of urgent questions that uncovers the interdependence of Oriental tales and domestic fiction, thereby challenging standard scholarly narratives about the rise of the novel.
More than mere exoticism, Oriental tales fascinated ordinary readers as well as intellectuals, taking the fancy of philosophers such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Diderot in France, and writers such as Defoe, Swift, and Goldsmith in Britain. Aravamudan shows that Enlightenment Orientalism was a significant movement that criticized irrational European practices even while sympathetically bridging differences among civilizations. A sophisticated reinterpretation of the history of the novel, Enlightenment Orientalism is sure to be welcomed as a landmark work in eighteenth-century studies. [Read More]
28.6.11
Will Self interviewed in The Paris Review
On walking, psychogeography, David Lynch and Jonathan Swift
In an interview with The Paris Review, Will Self discusses the genesis of his latest book, Walking to Hollywood (link via will-self.com):
Why did you start these walking tours?Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Will Self: I think it was to do with stuff in my own life—with not drinking and consciously wanting to exercise more. My father was an academic who specialized in urban and regional development, so I grew up with somebody who talked about cities. Back in 1999, I was writing a column for the British Airways flight magazine and conceived of this incredibly environmentally incorrect idea that I would fly somewhere in Britain every morning from Heathrow, or one of the London airports, then take a long country walk, then fly back in the same day, and write about that. In the last one, even with my malformed environmental consciousness, I began thinking, “This is wrong, it’s not right on all sorts of levels!” So instead, I decided to walk to Heathrow. It occurred to me when I set out to do it that this was an adventure—it really was terra incognita, probably nobody had done it since the pre-industrial era. There was something profoundly strange about this. After that, it occurred to me that I didn’t know anybody who had walked from Central London to the countryside, and I began to conceive of these ex-urban walks as a way of curing myself of the sense of dislocation that had come over me in my adult life. I’d ended up not knowing where I was in a very profound sense.[Read More]
17.10.09
J. G. Ballard's Top Ten Writers
British author lists his favourite authors, poets and dramatists
In a BBC survey at the turn of this century, J. G. Ballard listed his top ten writers of the last millenium. It's interesting to note how many of the selected are associated with twentieth-century satire and dystopian writing - authors who held a powerful influence over Ballard's own work:
1. William Shakespeare
The universal writer and poet.
2. Miguel Cervantes
Don Quixote is the first great anti-hero.
3. Jonathan Swift
The most intelligent writer who ever lived.
4. Herman Melville
Moby Dick is the greatest ocean of a novel the human imagination has ever sailed.
5. John Keats
The sweetest literary poet of all.
6. Franz Kafka
The greatest prophet of the terrifying bureaucracies of the 20th century.
7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
He is the great psychologist of the modern novel.
8. Joseph Heller
Catch 22 is the last classic novel written this century.
9. George Orwell
1984 is the prophetic novel of our time.
10. Aldous Huxley
Brave New World is a guide book to the next millennium.
More on J. G. Ballard at A Piece of Monologue:
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