redirections of sensibility

[rich]

I read it, Heikki--

Wright can write and he nails down the spirit of the times (particularly a
gruesome battle that Liberty participates in) but over all I'd say I was
disappointed

too much fluff for a story that's been told a thousand times already, at
least IMHO

rich


On 2/21/06, Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> wrote:
>
>
>
> An excerpt from Albert Mobilio's review of the new Stephen Wright novel,
> _The Amalgamation Polka_ (http://www.bookforum.com/mobilio.html):
>
> "In previous books, Wright has proven himself a master of intricate
> metaphor and the deftly cantilevered sentence. But all in the service of a
> very contemporary, often drug-soaked, fictional world populated by porn
> magnates, flying saucer charlatans, and, say, a wedding chapel's lesbian
> employees who tattoo one another's asses as a prelude to sex. That he has
> put his stylistic intelligence to profitable work in an altogether
> different medium - the vocabulary, intonation, and phraseology of the
> nineteenth-century novel - is impressive enough; that he has done so to
> describe canal boat captains, plantation masters, and Union Army grunts
> testifies to an even more significant redirection of sensibility - one
> very much along the lines of Pynchon's _Mason & Dixon_."
>
>
> Anyone managed to read the book yet? Stephen Wright did attend an M&D
> event in NYC when M&D came out, didn't he?
>
> I really liked _Going Native_, even heard Mr Wright reading passages from
> it at the Twentieth Century Literature conference in Louisville back in
> 1996. (Wish I could be there again with you guys, John!) To top it off,
> I went and talked to him at the conference dinner; in that jet-lagged
> and boozed-up frenzy, I must have struck him as one of his characters...
>
>
>
> Heikki
>
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