Vladislav Davidzon
By Vladislav Davidzon
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Culture Interpreting the Holocaust Dreams of Literary Puzzle Master Georges Perec
● La Boutique Obscure By Georges Perec Translated from the French by Daniel Levin Becker Melville House, 214 pages, $18.95 The Anglophone world is currently undergoing one of its periodical revivals — this time, of the panegyric experimentalism and formalist frolics of the French avant-garde literary collective Oulipo. The Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), a…
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Culture Sigmund Freud’s Best Pupil and His Descent Into Madness
WHERE’S THE TRUTH? Letters and Journals, 1948-1957 By Wilhelm Reich edited by Mary Boyd Higgins and Brian Boyd Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 288 pages, $40 Being a prophet is an arduous profession, and one should by all means steer one’s children away from it. It is lonely, the hours are long, the pay is shabby…
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Culture Fan and Critic Both
Reading for My Life: Writings, 1958–2008 By John Leonard Viking Press, 401 pages, $35 In beginning to compose a review of “Reading for My Life,” the latest and possibly final collection of John Leonard’s essays and criticism, one must confront the obvious absurdity of writing a book review of a collection of book reviews. Though…
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Culture After Memories, Modernism
Parallel Stories By Péter Nádas Translated by Imre Goldstein Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1,152 pages, $40 Published in 1986, during the waning days of János Kádár’s stewardship of Hungarian communism (and translated into English in 1997), Péter Nádas’s “A Book of Memories” represented for Susan Sontag the culmination of her hopes for the high modernist…
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The Schmooze How To Ask for a Raise, Over and Over Again
The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise By George Perec, translated by David Bellos Verso, $16.95, 96 pages Like Jorge Louis Borges and his fellow OULIPIAN (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) writer Italo Calvino, Georges Perec stands apart from lesser and more pedantic riddlers with his superior craftsmanship. Also like Calvino and Borges, Perec…
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The Schmooze Monument to Isaac Babel Erected in Odessa
Courtesy of The World Odessit Club Eighty-five years after bestowing “The Odessa Tales” and “Red Cavalry” to both the Russian and the Jewish modernist literary canons; 71 years after a 20-minute show trial resulted in execution by firing squad; 54 years after his posthumous rehabilitation by Soviet authorities, and several decades after plans were first…
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The Schmooze Hungarian Modernist László Krasznahorkai’s Inner Animal
For almost a decade now, [New Directions Publishing][1] has doggedly been bringing the late, late Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai’s novels of impassioned decrepitude and finely cadenced apocalypticism into English. Next year will see the much-anticipated translation of his “Satantango.” To tide us over until then we now have the publication in the Cahiers Writing and…
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Culture Mind Your ‘L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’
MEMOIR AND ESSAY By Michael Gottlieb Faux Press, 170 pages $16 Poets of the Language School (aka the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E group, tendency, faction or sociological phenomena — the occasionally rancorous debate continues) have risen to become the dominant avant-garde of modern American poetics. The first generation (including Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Bruce Andrews, Lyn…
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