The Departed

[Mark Kohut]

Yes.....TRP would only be in the Snday Times Book Review......
still open is whether TRP will ever review another Bolano?

More books still to come in English. 


--- On Sat, 11/8/08, Bruce Appelbaum <brucea at bestweb.net> wrote:

> From: Bruce Appelbaum <brucea at bestweb.net>
> Subject: Re: The Departed
> To: markekohut at yahoo.com
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, November 8, 2008, 6:48 PM
> Lethem did the review in the Sunday Book Review.  They use
> their own  
> reviewer staff for weekdays, so it is unlikely that TRP
> will be  
> reviewing 2666 for the Times.
> 
> 
> Bruce
> 
> > "If they can get you asking the wrong questions,
> they don't have to  
> > worry about answers."
> 
>         --- Thomas Pynchon
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Nov 8, 2008, at 12:24 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> 
> >
> > The editor of the Times Book Review implied by what he
> said in a  
> > note, that they have asked TRPjr to review Bolano, as
> he once did  
> > Marquez, memorably.
> >
> > No seems to be the answer so far...
> >
> >
> >
> > --- On Sat, 11/8/08, Bruce Appelbaum
> <brucea at bestweb.net> wrote:
> >
> >> From: Bruce Appelbaum <brucea at bestweb.net>
> >> Subject: Re: The Departed
> >> To: "Dave Monroe"
> <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> >> Cc: "pynchon -l"
> <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> >> Date: Saturday, November 8, 2008, 10:12 AM
> >> The local Barnes and Noble had copies of the
> 3-volume boxed
> >> paperback set last night. Started on the first
> part.  The
> >> fictional author who is the subject of the four
> critics'
> >> attention has more than a passing resemblance to 
> another
> >> non-fictional writer.
> >>
> >>
> >> Bruce
> >>
> >>> "If they can get you asking the wrong
> questions,
> >> they don't have to worry about answers."
> >>
> >>       --- Thomas Pynchon
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Nov 7, 2008, at 3:21 PM, Dave Monroe wrote:
> >>
> >>> The Departed
> >>> By JONATHAN LETHEM
> >>> Published: November 9, 2008
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> In Philip K. Dick's 1953 short story
> "The
> >> Preserving Machine," an
> >>> impassioned inventor creates a device for
> >> "preserving" the canon of
> >>> classical music — the sacred and, he fears,
> >> impermanent beauties of
> >>> Schubert, Chopin, Beethoven and so forth —
> by
> >> feeding it into a device
> >>> that transforms the compositions into living
> >> creatures: birds, beetles
> >>> and animals resembling armadillos and
> porcupines.
> >> Outfitting the
> >>> classic pieces in this manner, then setting
> them free,
> >> the inventor
> >>> means to guarantee their persistence beyond
> the
> >> frailties of human
> >>> commemoration, to give them a set of defenses
> adequate
> >> to their value.
> >>> Alas, the musical-animals become disagreeable
> and
> >> violent, turn on one
> >>> another and, when the inventor attempts to
> >> reverse-engineer his
> >>> creations in order to prove that the music has
> >> survived, reveal
> >>> themselves as a barely recognizable cacophony,
> nothing
> >> like the
> >>> originals. Or has the preserving machine
> revealed true
> >> essences —
> >>> irregularities, ferocities — disguised
> within the
> >> classical pieces to
> >>> begin with?
> >>>
> >>> Dick's parable evokes the absurd yearning
> embedded
> >> in our reverence
> >>> toward art, and the tragicomic paradoxes
> >> "masterpieces" embody in the
> >>> human realm that brings them forth and gives
> them
> >> their only value. If
> >>> we fear ourselves unworthy of the sublimities
> glimpsed
> >> at the summit
> >>> of art, what relevance does such exalted stuff
> have to
> >> our grubby
> >>> lives? Con versely, if on investigation such
> works,
> >> and their makers,
> >>> are revealed as ordinary, subject to the same
> >> provisions and defects
> >>> as the rest of what we've plopped onto the
> planet
> >> — all these cities,
> >>> nations, languages, histories — then why get
> worked
> >> up in the first
> >>> place? Perfect or, more likely, imperfect, we
> may
> >> suspect art of being
> >>> useless in either case.
> >>>
> >>> Literature is more susceptible to these doubts
> than
> >> music or the
> >>> visual arts, which can at least play at
> abstract
> >> beauty. Novels and
> >>> stories, even poems, are helplessly built from
> the
> >> imperfect stuff:
> >>> language, history, squalid human incident and
> dream.
> >> When so many
> >>> accept as their inevitable subject the long
> odds the
> >> universe gives
> >>> the aspirations of our species, degraded as it
> finds
> >> itself by the
> >>> brutalities of animal instinct and time's
> >> remorseless toll, books may
> >>> seem to disqualify themselves from grace: how
> could
> >> such losers cobble
> >>> together anything particularly sublime?
> >>>
> >>> The Chilean exile poet Roberto Bolaño, born
> in 1953,
> >> lived in Mexico,
> >>> France and Spain before his death in 2003, at
> 50, from
> >> liver disease
> >>> traceable to heroin use years before. In a
> burst of
> >> invention now
> >>> legendary in contemporary Spanish-language
> literature,
> >> and rapidly
> >>> becoming so internationally, Bolaño in the
> last
> >> decade of his life,
> >>> writing with the urgency of poverty and his
> failing
> >> health,
> >>> constructed a remarkable body of stories and
> novels
> >> out of precisely
> >>> such doubts....
> >>>
> >>>
> >>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/books/review/Lethem-t.html
> >>>
> >
> >
> >
> >