Chekhov's Mistress
Silliman on Sorrentino
Sorrentino’s Lunar Follies was one I found myself passing around to friends. I never managed to write about it, but Ron Silliman has articulated with his usual depth more than I could say anyway. He discusses the book’s form, but in this excerpt says what I think is what shows what a great talent Sorrentino was:
Yet each piece, like the [quoted] above, is perfectly capable of standing on its own, and indeed without any knowledge as to its indirect or sly references. There is nothing to suggest any inherent continuity between sections, at least at the level of content. For example, there is nothing to suggest that the same authorial voice stands behind each piece – in fact, there is a lot to suggest otherwise, as the tone seems to lunge from one vocabulary & diction to another. Lurking behind all of these is a lifetime of reading critical prose & art prose intensely, understanding where they fit together &, even more important, where they merely pretend to do so.
Do read the rest – Silliman calls it the book scrumptious!
comments
thanks for signalling this, Bud—Lunar Follies is a great one!
– Laird Hunt (10/12 at 01:56 PM)
I saw Sorrentino wandering around
his Brooklyn neighborhood several months before he died. He looked like he owned the borough and he did, one of the finest literary landlords ever. For a brief while, Emmet Grogan did too. Does anyone still read him?
– jon curley (10/18 at 08:09 PM)
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About this Post
- Posted by: Bud Parr
- Date: October 12, 2006
- Filed Under:
Wise Men Fish Here: Literature
- Comments:2
- Links to this Post: Technorati
