From Publishers Weekly
In 30 impassioned essays, reviews and orations, Ozick ( Bloodshed ; The Pagan Rabbi ) interprets fiction as a moral battleground. She reads Primo Levi's restrained, lucid testament to Nazi atrocities as a sifting of the criminal imagination and J. M. Coetzee's novelistic portrayal of South Africa as evidence of the hoaxes and self-deceptions of stupidity. She admires Henry James, who is "more and more our contemporary," as well as Chekhov, Cyril Connolly, Italo Calvino, William Gaddis and Saul Bellow. The biblical Book of Ruth, Sholem Aleichem, S. Y. Agnon and Chaim Bialik serve as springboards for her soaring meditations on Jewish identity and culture. Topical pieces broach the problems of translating poetry, American speech patterns, the value of little magazines, postmodernism. Culled from the New York Times Book Review , Partisan Review , New Republic , Harper's and elsewhere, the selections reflect Ozick's interests and commitments.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
From Library Journal
Readers of Ozick's fiction and previous book of essays ( Art & Ardor , Knopf, 1983) will be prepared for the range and tone of this new collection: appreciation of writers as disparate as Dreiser and Gaddis, a special interest in Jewish themes (Bialik, Agnon, Levi), a recurrent brooding on the relationship of creativity and morality, personal reminiscence, and that special heritage that Ozick has created for herself--an uneasy but fruitful daughterhood of Old Testament covenant and Henry James. The tone will also be familiar: a passionate intelligence energized by language, made manifest in language, and aimed ultimately at language. Occasionally the word -passion becomes self-indulgent and flabby and sometimes the intelligence stiffens into a cold rigidity. But when the passion and the intelligence merge--as they frequently do--Ozick's essays achieve an incandescence that is both heat- and light-bearing.
- Earl Rovit, City Coll., CUNYCopyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to the
Hardcover
edition.
