![]() Rave The New York Times Mammoth, definitive and sublime, Richard Zenith’s new biography, Pessoa, gives us a group portrait of the writer and his cast of alternate selves - along with a perceptive reading of what it meant for Pessoa to multiply (or did he fracture?) like this. It is a complicated offering, this book, and the artifact of a great love. brings this past into a kind of balance: He shows how to hold it, all together, in one eye - a people and a place in all their promise and corruption. Kapur has his talents - the story is suspensefully structured, and I consumed it with a febrile intensity - but he has a deadly attraction to cliché. Some of the most vivacious prose in the book can be found in his letters (extended quotation comes with its perils). Walker, on the other hand, not only left a cache of correspondence but proved to be an uncommonly interesting writer. The contours of her faith, desires, personality are not easy to trace, and her contradictions impossible to reconcile - she who let young Auralice be raised by neighbors but insisted on spoon-feeding the girl into her teens? She is a sphinx, reduced mostly to the extraordinary fact of her beauty. A louder, more troubling omission is Maes herself. For a book that is so diligent about context, however, Kapur’s lack of interest in the colonial legacy of Auroville is surprising, and his description of the land itself - \'a fitting tabula rasa for the new world,\' this, in the teeming state of Tamil Nadu - genuinely took me aback. It’s not an unusual story, perhaps - there’s always been a fine line between utopia and dystopia (see Jonestown) - but it is told with a native son’s fondness, fury, stubborn loyalty, exasperated amusement. ![]() Positive The New York Times Kapur weaves together memoir, history and ethnography to tell a story of the desire for utopia and the cruelties committed in its name. The novel is an intransigently private form, and this may be the real story of the book: McGurl’s surprise and delight as he ventured to the so-called margins of literary life and found more than he expected. For all the ways McGurl anatomizes the novel as a commodity in the age of Amazon, one is left observing something else entirely-all the ways in which the novel cannot be commodified. Everything and Less tells one story while seeming to enact another. Even McGurl’s opening argument hinges on an error.revealing McGurl’s eagerness to establish Amazon as a \'literary endeavor\' in its own right. Inconsistencies and small mistakes begin to gather underfoot. He makes himself cozy in the conditional mode, from which he can spin out thought experiments and later state them as fact. He does not argue he insinuates, teases, tousles, wrinkles. McGurl’s aim, to be sure, is provocation more than persuasion. Nor do we hear about writers who feel ambivalent about using Amazon as a platform to begin with, or who feel cheated or exploited. Never before have so many people made so little from their writing. I wondered, too, at his notion of the \'success\' of K.D.P. I found myself writing sternly in the margins: \'Not every orgy is a ‘collective.\' \'. McGurl’s claims themselves have an inviting weirdness-if not always coherence. ![]() Mixed The New Yorker McGurl unearths inviting weirdness, surreal experimentation, kinky political utopias, and even sweetness.
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