By Steven G. Kellman
The most powerful passion in Irene Nemirovsky’s novel is her love for France. The writer embraced the language and religion of a country that spurned and eventually killed her.
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By Steven G. Kellman
It is not obligatory for an Israeli novelist to double as national prophet, but it helps secure publication in the United States, where translations constitute less than 3% of books. Writing about and against public injustice, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Václav Havel and Reinaldo Arenas found American readers. Compatriots who pursued private themes did not.
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By Steven G. Kellman
It is a great desk — an enormous, ornate escritoire equipped with 19 drawers — rather than a “Great House” that connects the characters in Nicole Krauss’s ambitious third novel, following “Man Walks Into a Room” (2002) and “The History of Love” (2008). Like one of those anthology movies, such as “Tales of Manhattan” (1942), “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” (1964) or “The Red Violin” (1998), that binds its separate stories through ownership of a single item, whether a black tailcoat, an automobile or a violin, “Great House” uses a desk to link strangers scattered in New York, London, Jerusalem and Santiago, Chile.
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By Steven G. Kellman
Many recently released novels have been written by authors who are unavailable for interviews, on account of their posthumous status. But even more thrilling than the publication of works by Roberto Bolaño, Ralph Ellison, Stieg Larsson, Vladimir Nabokov and Henry Roth was the recovery of “Suite Française,” an ambitious project that Irène Némirovsky was working on when deported to Auschwitz in 1942.
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By Steven G. Kellman
Imminence of the end concentrates the craft. German critics employ the term
Altersstill — late style — to designate the tendency of such aging masters as Poussin, Beethoven and Beckett to focus their energies on essentials. Once the
enfant terrible of American Jewish literature, Philip Roth (Long may he live!) is now 76, and in “Everyman” (2006), “Exit Ghost” (2007) and “Indignation” (2008), the virtuoso of boisterous provocations has taken on the urgent task of confronting mortality. “The Humbling” extends that project.
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