Lately all these arts and culture posts have been artsy in a visual way. That’s fine in itself, except it’s a symptom of a greater malady. And no, not being sick of hearing about the presidential election. It’s that I can’t dig my teeth into any new book. True, I could be to blame. I did try to read up on medieval history and found my enthusiasm waned quickly. There were no pictures. But I also took out a collection of short stories by Russian author Isaac Babel, whose style is excellent and subjects are humorous and folksy. He has a great short story, Guy de Maupassant, and it inspired me to go for the whole oeuvre at once. Sigh…bad idea.
I went to the New York Public library online. It’s hard to search their catalogs, and I ended up almost ordering a dozen old favorites. However, the point is that I want new contemporary fiction. After my Milan Kundera phase, I want a new pet author. And I do not want this to became a fall of Dostoevsky or a winter of Proust. Dear god, I want to get through the winter without committing suicide. Classics thought they may be, my mind doesn’t seem to be up for a challenge.
So I went to Borders looking for a cure. Tragic. The books they put on those shelves did not inspire me to read, but to finish my novel in a hurry, while the general reading public has no taste. Maybe then my project would survive on the turbulent waters of publishing.
What else has fallen beside the wayside? Poetry. I love the 17th century British poets, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent-Millay, and of course Lord Byron. Lately, nothing has moved me.
Any suggestions to stir me out of this apathy? Anything? I’m on the library website now…
you might want to try “The Gosta Berling Saga” by Selma Lagerlof? (first woman to receive Nobel Prize for literature)
Thanks, that sounds like a good recommendation. -Art
Hey, what’s wrong with Proust?
Maybe for winter you should read something from the tropics…V.S. Naipaul. Choose from excellent short stories or excellent novels. Even though his new biography reveals that he’s pretty much an evil monster of a man (see http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=15793&R=13CD537152), his writing is still great.