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Saramago in Hell

José Saramago came to me last night in a dream. He told me not to worry, that literature would be all right. I asked him how it was that he appeared before me, because I was afraid that I was myself now dead. He said again not to worry, but the state of death allowed him to move from place to place, across space and time in ways that he couldn’t in life. He was old, not the young man whom I’ve…

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Reading in a Time of Plague

While going through some files on my computer recently, I came across something I forgot I had written. Reading it now, I am struck by the sense of frustration and almost hopelessness of the first few paragraphs. The Camus text I mention is not the latest translation by Laura Marris, so I was unaware at the time just how much The Plague would mean to me in the future as well, and how Marris’…

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Close Encounters of the Literary Kind, Part XIII: Juan Gabriel Vásquez

Juan Gabriel Vásquez is taller than I expected. He moves into the room with the cool swagger of a movie star, sure of himself, but in no way arrogant. He’s clearly comfortable in his own skin. He’s dressed in jeans and a black shirt, casually unbuttoned and as hip as hell. He waits patiently at the front of the room while the rest of us get our wine and take our seats. 

I had gone to hear…

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Sunday Evenings

On Sunday evenings I like to sit in my library and pick up books at random, reading a sentence or two here and there, not really concentrating on the reading to any serious degree. I’ll go into the room looking for something specific, often a quote I’ve read in one of the books or written down on a scrap of paper; I have scraps of papers with quotes all over the house. If I’m lucky enough to find…

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Bread on Sunday

It’s not unusual for children to be given certain responsibilities while still very young. One way parents can instill in their children a sense of responsibility is to give them chores around the house, and in exchange those children are often awarded with an “allowance,” be it monetary or in some other form. I believe that, for the most part, children want to be helpful to the adults in their…

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On the Corso Re Umberto

On the Corso Re Umberto

Not so long ago I found myself taking the train from Milan to Turin for what was supposed to be a preliminary scouting trip of a city that had haunted me for some time. I only had a day to spare (I was attending a literary conference in Milan) so I carefully mapped out my itinerary in order to make the most of the few hours I would have. I recall watching the Italian countryside go by on the…

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Tennis

There was a time in my life, not insignificant, when tennis occupied a place of prestige. During the summer, I would wake up, eat breakfast, and run to the tennis courts just a few blocks from my childhood home. Not much can compare with the sound of the opening of a new can of tennis balls on an early morning summer day. I would buy new balls every few weeks just to hear that sound, and to smell…

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Liner Notes

It has been quite some time since I purchased a physical CD or vinyl album. It’s been over two decades since I purchased a cassette tape. We won’t even mention 8-track. Needless to say, the space in my home once occupied by CDs and albums has been almost entirely eliminated. During my last move I donated nearly all of my remaining CDs to Goodwill, keeping just my Miles Davis collection, some…

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Coffee and Cake

“The Past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.” –L. P. Hartley

When I was a kid I can remember clearly that whenever we had someone stop by our house (we always called it “company” in those days) my mother would serve coffee and some kind of cake or sweet, but never candy, unless it was the holidays and we had an abundance of those long, striped ribbons of…

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Pavese at the Trident

Pavese at the Trident

I saw a man at the Trident Bookstore on Newbury Street yesterday who looked a lot like Cesare Pavese, but without the glasses. He was wearing a dark colored suit, open at the colIar with no tie. I attempted to get a closer look, but the bookstore was packed, and people kept bumping into me, knocking me about. I stopped and picked up a book at random to browse through, while trying not to look as…

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The Routine of Daily Life

The Routine of Daily Life

I’ve spent the last few months reading Claudio Magris. Most recently, I’ve immersed myself in his latest collection of travel writing, Journeying,skillfully translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel. Magris is an author of some renown in Europe, but, like countless other authors who do not write in English, is still relatively unknown in the United States. He is a writer whose name always…

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I Will Write No More Forever: On Philip Roth

I Will Write No More Forever: On Philip Roth

This is a post I first published a few years ago, but I’ve just added a postscript on Roth’s passing.

The big news on Twitter last Friday, at least on the Twitter feeds that I subscribe to, was the announcement that Philip Roth admitted to not having written anything in three years and announced that he was retiring from writing. This came as a shock, since Roth is a prolific writer with 37…

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Sinner

“Bless me father, for I have sinned.”

This phrase is one that has haunted me most of my life. As a child, I went through a long phase where I thought that I had to constantly ask for God’s forgiveness and beg for his love. This is one of the tenets of the Catholic faith in which I was brought up: we are born in sin and must seek, for the rest of our lives, to free ourselves from its chains. Of…

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The Other Bolaño

There is another Roberto Bolaño, one that is different from the man I read. The Bolaño I read is vicious in his prose, and relentless in his poetry. He is an artist, but one who seems to have willfully abandoned celebrity for his art. He tried to cheat death by searching for immortality on the page, but try justifying that to his children. Still, his writing is a gift to those who did not know…

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There are all kinds of chairs I would not like to find myself occupying: the defendant chair in a trial, a juror chair in someone else’s trial, the chair facing police or governmental interrogators, the doctoral dissertation chair (I’ve already done that once, and although my doctoral defense went well, the anxiety leading up to the day was almost more than I could take), and especially the…

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Dog Ownership

I’m pushing fifty years of age and for the first time in my life I’ve become a dog owner. We’ve had pets before, two cats, both of whom died at an early age, a few goldfish, one that lasted nearly two years, but for the better part of a year our two children have been pushing for us to get a dog. When our last cat died of heart failure at the age of seven, combined with the hurricane in Houston,…

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Bring Out Your Lanterns

Dig us up from this grave, Father And wipe the dirt from our eyes You who are so old, so ancient, so cold Yet, you still retain life, like an eternal relic Bring us to the clearing and remind us of the song.

Bring out your lanterns and pick up your spades Call out to your neighbors, your lovers, your slaves We must not remain forgotten and alone, Lost in the shadows of time Retrieve us from these…