nyny

Harold Brodkey rocks

My current favorite author is without a doubt Harold Brodkey. I'm reading "Stories In An Almost Classical Mode," and even though I'm only a little over 100 pages into a 600 page book, I already know that it will join the ranks of my all-time faves.

I don't remember the last time I have fallen completely in love with an author's writing after reading only a page or two of his work. The first story in this collection is called "The Abundant Dreamer," and it is incredibly well-written. I was immediately drawn into this wonderful world Brodkey created.

If you're looking for a new book to read, this is definitely a viable option. And it's a book of stories, so you don't have to read the whole book at once. Here's a little teaser...the first half of the first paragraph:

Marcus Weil has said he is chiefly concerned with virtue and death in the movies he makes, but the truth is that his usual theme is that we are not capable of much virtue because we are afraid of death. He would have us believe that we flee from logic and order because they remind us that we must die, while illogic and disorder soothe us by proving that nothing makes sense, that nothing is certain, not even death. In his movie "La Nouvelle Cleopatre en Avignon," the narrator says, "Do not be cross because our characters do not always have the same faces; they are being true to life and death." The narrator says, "We hope to demonstrate not Euclidean but mortal geometry, the grand trickery of theorems we place in nature and find there for our own delight."

posted by becka @ 8:32 PM