![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() For a novel about which many detractors have said ‘Nothing happens’ it was engaging, imaginative, full of philosophical ideas, and, as the saying goes, was hard to put down. Book 1 of À la recherche du temps perdu UPDATED: Summarizing Proust has a long history, most hilariously shown in the Monty Python sketch “Summarizing Proust Competition” in which contestants attempt to summarize all seven volumes of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ within 15 seconds:Having just finished SWANN’S WAY, my summary takes this condensed haiku form:Madeleine in teaBrings memories of lost timeMarcel is left sadNow for something completely different.SWANN’S WAY, the first of Proust’s seven-volume novel, is a joy to read. ⭐Latest English translation from French, 2002. Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website: ![]()
0 Comments
![]() ![]() He said he did not have cancer and has given up cigars. He has had two surgeries to remove them and believes his resultant voice is an improvement over how it was prior to the surgeries. He says in a December 2008 online interview that this is due to polyps in his throat which were so severe that a doctor told him he was taking in ten percent of the air he was supposed to have been getting. ![]() While Barker is critical of organized religion, he has stated that he is a believer in both God and the afterlife, and that the Bible influences his work.įans have noticed of late that Barker's voice has become gravelly and coarse. This award is presented "to an openly lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender individual who has made a significant difference in promoting equal rights for any of those communities". In 2003, Clive Barker received The Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th GLAAD Media Awards. Barker's second long-term relationship, with photographer David Armstrong, ended in 2009. It was in Liverpool in 1975 that he met his first partner, John Gregson, with whom he lived until 1986. Educated at Dovedale Primary School and Quarry Bank High School, he studied English and Philosophy at Liverpool University and his picture now hangs in the entrance hallway to the Philosophy Department. Clive Barker was born in Liverpool, England, the son of Joan Rubie (née Revill), a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Yes, thanks to a corner of my collection, future scholars won’t have to wonder just what cheesy pseudonymous thrillers Michael Crichton wrote to put himself through medical school back when he could really write, or have to guess which late-20th-Century magazine journalists felt obliged to rattle the potsherds of Thomas Pynchon’s extra-literary life. This technique would have better served Basbanes’ fundamentally sound thesis: If not for these mostly benign obsessives, many beautiful books and ideas might have wound up kindling something other than the light of learning.Īt this point, it’s probably time to turn over all the cards and reveal that I am one of these obsessives. Just pick a book or manuscript and follow it from author to collector to executor to dumpster to savior, down through the centuries. It might have been fun to follow the books more often, instead of the collectors. Likewise dozens of bibliophiles, -manes, -klepts, -clasts (who destroy books) and -phages (who eat them), most of whom trundle into view, acquire this or that volume, surrender it and disappear. Rosenbach with evident fondness, quoting his amiable correspondence and invoking his redoubtable reputation, but the man never comes anywhere near alive. Author Nicholas Basbanes returns several times to 20th-Century Philadelphia book dealer A.S.W. Blumberg is the closest thing to a fully drawn character in “A Gentle Madness,” and that’s a pity. ![]() |