Book notes

Month: March 2007

  • The Penelopiad by Margaret AtwoodCanongate, 2005

    The story of Homer’s Odyssey, retold: a feminist take that focuses on Penelope (who narrates, from the underworld) and the story of the twelve hanged maids (who are killed by Telemachus and Odysseus, after the slaughter of the suitors) . Clever, sometimes forcedly so, but well-written. The device of the maids-as-chorus, delivering interludes in varying…

  • Italian Hours by Henry James, edited by John AuchardPenguin, 1995

    Not as vivid as James’s fiction, but still enjoyable: pleasingly sinuous sentences, and impressions of light, of color, of landscape—ilex and cypress, canals and frescoes and dimly-lighted churches, the slower pace of travel in the late 1800s and early 1900s.

  • Facing the Night by Ned RoremShoemaker & Hoard, 2006

    This book is, as the subtitle says, “A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings”—but, not surprisingly, there’s a lot of overlap. Rorem writes about music in his diary, and bits of those thoughts about music (and the state of it in America today) end up in his speeches, letters-to-the-editor, and program notes for his own pieces.…

  • It by Inger Christensen, trans. Susanna NiedNew Directions, 2006

    “Like Hesiod,” writes Anne Carson, in her introduction to this volume, “Inger Christensen wants to give an account of what is—of everything that is and how it is and what we are in the midst of it” (ix). Which seems promising, as does the structure of the poem: prologos, logos, epilogos, and within logos, three…