Central European characters

NPR interviews Richard Rhodes about his new book, Hedy's Folly: The Life and Breakthrough Inventions of Hedy Lamarr, the Most Beautiful Woman in the World.

'Mann's Inhumanity to Mann': Frederic Raphael reviews Evelyn Juers' House of Exile: War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles. Aaron Thier reviews the same book on Heinrich Mann et al.

An excerpt from Umberto Eco's The Prague Cemetery. A review of Eco's book by Scott Kelly in the Scotsman, and one by Benjamin Balin in Haaretz: 'Conspiracy theories and intense historical settings are Umberto Eco’s forte, and here he turns his attention to one of history’s most persuasive and destructive false texts - with mixed results.'

'[Rosa] Mayreder’s title alone reads as a challenge to [Otto] Weininger’s ... woman-hating bestseller Geschlecht und Character (1903), a title rendered as Sex and Character in English but that should really be translated as Gender and Character. Mayreder took a position against Weininger in her earlier A Survey of the Woman Problem [c. 1913] as well, a position she developed further in Gender and Culture [1923] to explain misogyny in Western culture as a historical phenomenon which she based on an abhorrence of the body and sexuality that had grown out of Christianity.'

Jiri Travnicek on Brno's literary history (mostly Czech literature post WWII) -- he mentions two stories about his home town by Milan Kundera.

'Had [Czeslaw] Milosz been there, said [Artur Sebastian] Rosman, he might have repeated his claim that his readers don’t “take into account a particular, quite fundamental fact: all my intellectual impulses are religious and in that sense my poetry is religious”.'

From Astra Scheib's interview with Thomas Bernhard: 'I also cannot bear people applauding. Applause - actors are paid in such a way. They earn their money in such a way. I like it when the money from my publisher arrives on my account. But marching music, hosts of applauding people in the theater or in the concert -- I can't bear that. Nothing but disaster follows from applause.'

Thomas Bernhard as a sorcerer in Klaus Gmeiner’s Enchanted Forest (1956)

A great piece on Bernhard from last January by Richard Crary.

No great fan of Bernhard's, Peter Handke is interviewed by Cecilia Dreymüller. (I hadn't realized that Handke converted to the Orthodox Church.)

Iain Bamforth reviews a German biography of Kleist: 'Having locked himself up for a week with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, he despaired of the self’s inscrutability – it could only be seen “through green glasses”.'

'The Beastly Péter Nádas: Why you need to read the massive novels of this NSFW Hungarian writer'.

'Angelo Soliman is probably best known in his fictional incarnation as the disgraced African servant boy in The Man Without Qualities, Robert Musil’s novel about the end of the Austrian monarchy. Soliman ... arrived in Austria as a slave from western Africa, where he was born in 1721. ... He acted as a soldier and adviser in one princely household and then came to Vienna in 1753 to serve as a valet and tutor in another.'

Franz Cede compares the fall of the Habsburgs to that of the Soviets.

Reviews, anniversaries & re-issues

Antonina Pirozhkova, an engineer who designed several stations in the Moscow subway system, and who was Isaac Babel's common-law wife, and about whom I learned from Elif Batuman's funny book, The Possessed

A map of Turkey's reading culture. Among the findings: the most popular Turkish authors are Ömer Seyfettin, Ayşe Kulin and Orhan Pamuk, and people in the northern province of Tokat prefer detective novels. No word on William S. Burroughs' popularity -- one of his books is being investigated in Turkey for 'incompliance with moral norms' and 'hurting people’s moral feelings.'

The Hindu's review of Orhan Pamuk's Naive and Sentimental Novelist: the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures. Here's Alberto Manguel discussing the same book. 

There's a Nabokov Museum in St. Petersburg

An article by Gerard Smyth in the Irish Times on the centenary of Czeslaw Milosz's birth

Chandrahas Choudhury on George Szirtes' translation of Sandor Marai's Portraits of a Marriage

Marjorie Perloff reviews a new book on Georg Trakl: 'Christian Hawkey’s brilliant Ventrakl, which puts Trakl’s tragic life squarely into the poetic equation, testifies to the enormous change that has come over lyric poetry in the twenty-first century.'

A clip from Barbara Gowdy's 1993 interview with Leonard Cohen:

Robert Boyers reviews Anthea Bell's translation of Stefan Zweig's Journey into the Past.

Jesse Freedman reviews Stefan and Lotte Zweig's South American Letters

Amelia Atlas on Joseph Roth's Radetzky March

Willard Spiegelman on The Leopard: 'If one mark of a great novelist is the ability to forgive everything by understanding everything, then [Giuseppe] Tomasi [di Lampedusa]'s only rivals are George Eliot, Tolstoy and Proust.'

A review of a collection of lectures by Natsume Soseki (published by Columbia Univ Press)

Finnegan's Wake on-line, with glosses for the puzzling words and phrases

Nicholas Allen reviews R. F. Foster's Words Alone re. Yeats' intellectual origins

A newly recovered story by Daphne du Maurier 

Brendan Behan at the pub:


Jane Smiley on the re-issue of Nancy Mitford's novels

Paul Theroux on the 'the trouble with autobiography'

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Here's an extensive site by the Australian Broadcast Corporation (with several audio clips) to mark the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible 

Three talks by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Narnia