In his Travels in England Nikos Kazantzakis talks about “rhythm.”
“Τι είναι λοιπόν ρυθμός; Μια κεντρική κίνηση όλο αρμονία, που κυβερνάει το στοχασμό και την πράξη μας.”
“What is rhythm, then? A single central movement, all harmony, that governs our goals and actions.”
My first response to this is that Kazantzakis’s “rhythm” is equivalent to will. To a […]

Love - romantic, passionate, erotic love - is often portrayed, understood, or lived as a type of madness. Scientists reveal chemical imbalances, psychologists classify it with various disorders, but while reading an old interview with Martha Nussbaum called “The Ethics of Literature” (sorry, no reference, it just exists as a dog-eared photocopied text found in […]

This past summer I was given Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire in its Greek incarnation - Ο Έρωτας θα ανατείλει ξανά. When I first opened the package and saw the title - Love Will Rise Again - I tried not to cringe at what on first look seemed like a melodramatic Greek romance novel. I […]

My friend, Angel, sent me a link to a Guardian piece in which Brian Aldiss, author of Brothers of the Head (”the 1977 novel about conjoined twins who are exploited as a pop act [which] has now been made into a film”) looks at “the question of where creative ideas emerge from.”
Aldiss writes:
It’s all wrapped […]

A great novelist is essentially tolerant, that is, displays a real apprehension of persons other than the author as having a right to exist and to have a separate mode of being which is important and interesting to themselves.
- Iris Murdoch
(I have no idea where this comes from. I’ve scribbled it on some paper and […]

Interesting piece in The Age about Kate Grenville’s The Secret River.
Novelist Kate Grenville has upset historians by claiming her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River is a new form of history writing.
…begins the report by Jane Sullivan. While researching the story, Grenville came across “dispatch from Governor Arthur Phillip, written a few months after the First […]

 
A review of the novel in the manner of the novel
In my hands, you have to imagine how it feels, this copy of Roger Morris’s Taking Comfort. It all starts with how it feels in my hands.
It’s a hardcover edition of the novel. I always appreciate hardback editions and I’m more willing than most to […]

The Dictionary.com Word of the Day for Thursday, May 18, 2006 was:
palimpsest \PAL-imp-sest\,
noun: 1. A manuscript, usually of papyrus or parchment, on which more than one text has been written with the earlier writing incompletely erased and still visible.
2. An object or place whose older layers or aspects are apparent beneath its surface.
Palimpsest is from […]

Malcolm Bradbury: Novels 
From his intro (2000) to Murdoch’s The Philosopher’s Pupil:
[In the 1950s] Novels had meanings. Novelists had minds and consciences, not personalities, and a vision of life, not a life-style.
The novel could keep company with significant matters: the labyrinths of freedom, the nature of consciousness, the problems of perception and of picturing consciousness and […]

When I face the desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write on page and then another. One day’s work is all I can permit myself to contemplate.
John Steinbeck