“All courses start in the fall, when a man has to start something, turn things around, survive. It’s always great in the beginning, but there’s a point with people like him, people who never make a second payment for their German, karate, creative writing, yoga…” From a short prose piece – “All Courses Start In […]
It’s all Czech poet Pavel Šrut all week in B O D Y, beginning with Monday’s essay by translator Deborah Garfinkle “Remembering Pavel Šrut’s Worm-Eaten Light” and continuing with her translations of his poetry and a review of his work. Worm-Eaten Light is the work Šrut published in 1969 following the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia […]
“He had always had vague, artistic visions, that is to say, he was a daydreamer. Because of this, at the age of fifty he had no house of his own, no wife (she had divorced him and he couldn’t say that he didn’t understand why), no steady work.” Do you remember that feeling when you […]
“This was a symphony inside the sea, yes, inside the sea, for only now did I realize that we had, in fact, come to the seaside, complete with waves and the wind, that everything around was music and that somewhere in the distance a man was swimming, swimming in the waves and in the music, […]
“Shirting asked her to read her essay aloud: My teacher is some small wildebeest. He is a name John Shirting. My name is Monika. He is the baddest person in this world. I feed him the cats. He is my darling. Dear Monika. The way she pronounced her w’s as v’s, calling him a vildebeest […]
With the much anticipated publication of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Blinding imminent the Romanian author is engaged in a North American tour, with appearances in Minnesota, Chicago, Boston, New York and Toronto. You can see the full schedule here. Translated into English by Sean Cotter the novel isn’t any easier to read than his Nostalgia but like the […]
“As far as I’m aware, none of the big shots in the Third Reich was a sadist. All four committed suicide. Hitler and Goebbels did so even before Germany capitulated. Himmler followed when he realized his captors weren’t going to treat him as an important statesman but rather as a criminal, while the hedonist Goering […]
Last month B O D Y published an excerpt from Argentine writer Carlos Busqued’s debut novel Under This Terrible Sun, just recently published in Megan McDowell’s English translation. Now, I have written a review of the book for this week’s Friday Pick. Read the review, read the excerpt, read the novel – not necessarily in […]
“Those are just rungs, you poor people, rungs in the pecking order; I scaled them carefully, on my guard, one at a time, onwards towards the top. Push down whoever is beneath you, lick the heels of whoever is above, lick until he stumbles, then see him down, and you can continue one rung further […]
“One Autumn evening I was sitting at home, writing a story about love. Simply about love. About love and nothing but. A young man meets a girl. Through the narrow alleys of some little seaside town, they reach the sea and plod along the beach… Deserted. Dusky. Empty of people. Because it’s already November. Winter. […]
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