quips and clips

“(as in the picture where the eye perceives a white vase or an hourglass or a chalice, until the mind–or is it the will?–discovers that this vase is an empty space, negative, hence an illusion, and there is only one positive, that is, real thing in the picture, is the two profiles turned toward each…

just finished reading all available translated works by Danilo Kis, lastly his novel (or song cycle, as i prefer to think of it, formally) Early Sorrows, the first of his triptych of novels, his ‘family cycle’ centered on his early childhood, and his father’s removal to Auschwitz. Kis is the most poetic and beautiful writer…

just finished reading one of Danilo Kis’ early novels, Psalm 44. it takes shape in the musings and flashbacks of a mother in Auschwitz as she waits in the dark for the cue to flee in the middle of the night, the escape coming late in the war as the thunder of advancing Allied troops…

just finished reading Homo Poeticus: Essays and Interviews by Danilo Kis, edited and with an introduction by Susan Sontag. an indispensable guide and inspiration to his work. “I believe that literature must correct History: History is general, literature concrete; History is manifold, literature individual. History shows no concern for passion, crime, or numbers. What is…

just finished reading, in the midst of my Danilo Kis binge, his collection of short stories, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, all of which celebrate the power and life of the word, each of which is suffused with the variegated transmutation from fiction to history and back again. a profoundly poetic and essential writer.

just finished reading, as part of my Danilo Kis binge, the last available set of short stories (written in the 80’s, prior to his death of lung cancer in Paris in 1989; we still are iceberg-tip as far as untranslated material goes), THE LUTE AND THE SCARS, all of which are coloured by the two…

just finished reading, in the midst of an unplanned Danilo Kis binge, his novel, GARDEN, ASHES; narrated by the child of a Hungarian Jew father taken to the death camps, like Kis’ own father, this is a Holocaust novel that communicates the tragic enormity through the minutiae, the miniscule, the intimate cusp of memory and…

just finished reading Serbian author Danilo Kis’s first novel, The Attic, an artist-as-young-Bohemian novel wherein we read and witness the writing of this surreal and poetic story, replete with Kis’s habitual cribbing (this time from Mann’s The Magic Mountain), obsessive lists, miniaturist and hallucinatory prose, antic humour and philosophy. it is easy to see the…

just finished reading Nikolai Grozni‘s memoir of his four years as a Buddhist monk, TURTLE FEET, as much a memoir as it is a philosophical novel in the grand tradition of Milan Kundera, but here with far better comic timing, and more hard-won truths. a beautiful book, and one which must be read, along with…

just finished reading the shortest of the great 20th Century novels: A TOMB FOR BORIS DAVIDOVICH by the Yugoslav, Danilo Kis. William T. Vollmann’s essay of this novel as perhaps the single most formative and inspiring to his own work appeared in the volume i recently read, EXPELLED FROM EDEN: A WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN READER,…