Posts

Books Ex Libris A love letter written to reading.

Image
Books Ex Libris A love letter written to reading. By George Steiner March 10, 1997 Save this story View this story as it originally appeared » The mere fact that you are reading this review shows that you belong, however casually, to the book world. We forget how limited that world is, in space, in historical time—how specialized an act reading is. Much the greater portion of mankind has belonged to cultures of orality, of the spoken word. They are far more ancient than those of writing and reading. Definitions of basic literacy are themselves in dispute; but even today reading skills among hundreds of millions remain rudimentary. The outward literacies of the privileged, industrially developed West are deceptive. Numerous men and women read only for immediate utilitarian ends, or, perhaps, one book a year. The range of habits that separate the obsessive reader, the book-possessed, for whom, as Flaubert said, reading is life, from the men or women who decipher a tabloid headline or gla...
Post a Comment
Read more

Death of a Poet

Image
  Death of a Poet A review of “Hope Against Hope,” by Nadezhda Mandelstam, translated by Max Hayward. This summary is AI-generated. Learn More » By George Steiner December 19, 1970 Save this story View this story as it originally appeared » “Impertinent”: the dictionary gives two meanings. The word signifies “irrelevant” and “mildly injurious,” or “insulting.” Obviously, the two senses relate’: to consider a thing in terms inappropriate to it, without exact and needed bearing, is to cause it offense. It is, in both meanings, impertinent to “review” Nadezhda Mandelstam’s “Hope Against Hope” (Atheneum), which reads beautifully in the translation by Max Hayward. Nothing one can say will either communicate or affect the genius of the book. To pass judgment on it is almost insolence—even judgment that is merely celebration and homage. There is a mall number of books, of articulate lives—these do not often coalesce— about which one keeps one’s mouth shut or says only, “Read this, and the...
Post a Comment
Read more