Men of Letters   A reference for good literature.

If you’re able to read Castilian, you will enjoy this treasure trove dedicated to the writer of Don Quixote.

Richard Wilson swims in brainless anti-intellectualism.  The list is not a particularly hard one to go through.  Are some of them a bit on the precious and pretensious side?  Sure!  But it’s no excuse to chuck them for fear of not being able to handle the content within.

I feel extremely fortunate to be around these days, when a wealth of interesting books keep coming out at a rate so frequent that I’m afraid I’ll go broke, but live happily indulging my lit fix.

Gavin Menzies: mad as a snake - or a visionary?  - The London Telegraphs talks to the author of 1421. As a history major and a China buff, I’ve had the pleasure of lecturing on precisely the topic Menzies covers in his recent work, 1434. Think logically about it: of course the Chinese would have served as a catalyst for the Renaissance - it was the trade with China that made fabulously wealthy men out of those Florentine, Venetians and Romans, and that wealth created the conditions for these tycoons to show off their wealth in a competitive way. We may have the Chinese to thank for the works of Michaelangelo, following this line of thinking. Menzies is seen as a fraud, but by who? History professors with a lack of vision constrained by the specialty of history they focus on.

Prevarication Nation - Jean-Michel Rabaté’s The Ethics of the Lie is reviewed to amusing effect by Trevor Butterworth of Book Forum. He makes mention of our first “Lacanian” president, William Jefferson “B. J.” (never more appropriate choice of initials) Clinton. I can’t do the review justice, so do read the link and let us know what you think of it.

Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ and the end of the Soviet empire - Not a book review, but an essay on the turbulence of Prague in 1968. I’m especially keen on this article as it mentions the importance of personal heroes of mine in Václav Havel and the prog-weirdo group the Plastic People of the Universe. Michael Weiss pens this article for The Weekly Standard.

Peter Robinson interviews the newly-minted “conservative” author. The interview videos not up yet will be added as they come in.

The Word According to Andrew Klavan: Chapter 1 of 5
The Word According to Andrew Klavan: Chapter 2 of 5
The Word According to Andrew Klavan: Chapter 3 of 5
The Word According to Andrew Klavan: Chapter 4 of 5
The Word According to Andrew Klavan: Chapter 5 of 5

Read the list of authors in the New York Times obituary, and see what a giant we have lost in the literary world.

The Giroux part of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is praised in this household for introducing us to everyone from T. S. Eliot to Czeslaw Milosz. RIP.

For more on the company, click here.

Much respect to Adab.com for this link to Qabbani’s work:

I do not resemble your other lovers, my lady

should another give you a cloud

I give you rain

Should he give you a lantern, I

will give you the moon

Should he give you a branch

I will give you the trees

And if another gives you a ship

I shall give you the journey.

Nosemonkey’s EUtopia gives a nice eulogy for Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

Libraries say a lot about a person.  Growing up with parents and grandparents who collected everything for my brother and I from Dr. Seuss to Chinese histories was bound to have an impact on our literary tastes.  It also helped having a healthy exposure to the words of Italo Calvino, Orhan Pamuk and that quintessential librarian, Jorge Luis Borges.

It is fate, then, or at least a fortunate stumbling, that has led me to ‘The Library at Night,‘ a book in which an author glorifies the library as not merely a building housing a collection of books by as an institution unto itself.

Alberto Manguel is an Argentine writer now resides in France, but who gives glimpses of his childhood in Buenos Aires in this paean to the library as temple to a God that gave Mankind both a love and an affliction caused by the written word.  The temple can be a cruel place at times.  The ‘worship service’ is the sort that lures the congregant in the manner of a thirsty Bedouin running toward a mirage.  One can almost taste the sweet water while running to that vision, but it never seems attainable.

Manguel does a fine job writing on the madness of organizing a library, the potency of both books and language (referring poignantly to the Library of Alexandria and the Tower of Babel as metaphors for one’s wanting to have access to the impossible: all of mankind’s knowledge and the ability to speak with everyone).

The book is written in the manner of a wonderful conversation with an old man who loves his collection, and is quite pleased to share its history with you, the reader.

Yale University Press has done a great service in bringing Manguel’s work to a broad (and hopefully appreciative) audience.

For links to other reviews of this book, click here.

The best writer Russia had in the 20th Century has left us.  He found he had no place either in the East or the West, but lived without compromising his ideals.  May he rest well.

William Anthony Hay reviews a biography of William Wilberforce for the Wall Street Journal.