Life Sentences
Literary Judgments and Accounts
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A dazzling new collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers.
It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers (among them Kafka, Nietzsche, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Proust). He writes about a few topics equally burning but less loved (the Nobel Prize–winner and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun; the Holocaust).
Finally, Gass ponders theoretical matters connected with literature: form and metaphor, and specifically, one of its genetic parts—the sentence.
Gass embraces the avant-garde but applies a classic standard of writing to all literature, which is clear in these essays, or, as he describes them, literary judgments and accounts.
Life Sentences is William Gass at his Gassian best.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist, novelist, and literary critic Gass (Cartesian Sonata) looks back on a long life of sentences in this thoroughly engaging book. In the quietly humorous "Slices of Life in a Library," Gass recalls learning "what provisions to smuggle in by briefcase" and his moral dilemma over whether to steal an overlooked first edition of Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons. An academic air persists throughout, and though occasionally sentimental, Gass grounds each anecdotal essay in a germane world event, disposition, human flaw, or intellectual concern. Infused with a wistful melancholy, "Retrospection" sees Gass resuscitating some very early, amusing, poetical pursuits while musing on his own authorial habits, among them "jingling" and "whoring and metaphoring." In addition to ruminations on his own writing life, Gass also gives the greats good and bad their due, genially and deftly deconstructing Proust, exploring the appeal of the mad philosopher by putting Nietzsche under the philological microscope, and offering his own take on the life of the controversial Nobel Prize-winning "Nordic Nazi" Knut Hamsun. "The Biggs Lectures in the Classics" are intimate and detailed in evaluating more abstract topics, such as form and metaphor. While these and other lectures are successful on the whole, one senses that some of the charm of occasion and place must have been lost in transcription. Though lacking a sense of flow, the erratic nature and unconventional narrative arc is appealing and not only warrants, but rewards revisiting.
