I bet all the UK and Australian rare birds have an opinion of
Clive James, and could be fed up with him. He's not so well
known in Canada nor, I think, the US. Apparently he has a new
book out called RELIABLE ESSAYS: THE BEST OF CLIVE JAMES, and
in the review in the Globe and Mail last Saturday, the
reviewer (Heather Mallick, a columnist who seems fairly
sensible) said of James:
| He has knack for quotation. Reviewers know to their sorrow
that any
| authorial quote hauled out for praise will end up sounding
a bit thin,
| but when James writes the definitive essay on Raymond
Chandler in
| RELIABLE ESSAYS, and gives us this, it works.
|
| "The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the
gutters, and
| big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot
of fun
| carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little
rubber boots
| across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing."
|
| This is from Chandler's short story, "Killer in the Rain."
But then
| when James goes on to write, in praise of Chandler,
"Flaubert liked
| tinsel better than silver because tinsel possessed all
silver's
| attributes plus one addition--pathos," he explains
Chandler's essence.
| He gave a halo, albeit a fluoreschent one, to
cheapness.
I'm suspicious of "the definitive essay," and Chandler did a
hell of a lot more than give a halo to cheapness (did he, in
fact, even do that?). That's Mallick talking, though. Has
anyone read this essay?
Bill
-- William Denton : Toronto, Canada : http://www.miskatonic.org/ : Caveat lector.
-- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : 27 Sep 2001 EDT