The Nearest Thing to Life
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- $24.99
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- $24.99
Publisher Description
In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant discussions of individual works—among others, Chekhov’s story “The Kiss,” The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, and The Blue Flower, by Penelope Fitzgerald. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship with the written word: we see the development of a boy from the provinces growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret joy of his childhood reading, the links he draws between reading and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. More than a tightly argued little book by a man commonly regarded as our finest living critic, The Nearest Thing to Life is an exhilarating personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write fiction.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Relating literature to life and vice versa, the four essays collected in this volume from Wood (The Fun Stuff) the first three originally written for Brandeis University's Mandel Lectures series provide virtuoso displays of eloquence and insight. In "Why?" death is presented as a bookend to life that encourages us to find structure in the moments lived between the beginning and end of being, just as a well-wrought work of fiction creates a sense of meaning in the events between its beginning and end. "Serious Noticing" uses Chekhov's short story "The Kiss" as a touchstone for studying the times in a life that "represent those moments in a story where form is outlived, canceled, evaded." "Using Everything" is a delightful remembrance of the author's youthful discovery of criticism that is more "passionate redescription" than academic analysis, and that deploys literature's own "language of metaphor and simile." Wood often draws on his personal life, as in "Secular Homelessness," wherein he likens watching his children grow up American in a country where he is not a naturalized citizen to reading about fictional characters. His prose is rich in verbal artistry and laced with references to an abundance of writers. These essays are clearly the work of someone who has read widely and with infectious enthusiasm. 73 illus.
