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The Nearest Thing to Life (Paperback)
Loot Price: R580
Discovery Miles 5 800
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The Nearest Thing to Life (Paperback)
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Loot Price R580
Discovery Miles 5 800
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the
noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on
the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the
arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the shape of our
lives and to rescue the texture of those lives from death and
historical oblivion. The act of reading is understood here as the
most sacred and personal of activities, and there are brilliant
discussions of individual works--among others, Chekhov's story "The
Kiss," The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald, and The Blue Flower, by
Penelope Fitzgerald. Wood reveals his own intimate relationship
with the written word: we see the development of a boy from the
provinces growing up in a charged Christian environment, the secret
joy of his childhood reading, the links he draws between reading
and blasphemy, or between literature and music. The final section
discusses fiction in the context of exile and homelessness. More
than a tightly argued little book by a man commonly regarded as our
finest living critic, The Nearest Thing to Life is an exhilarating
personal account that reflects on, and embodies, the fruitful
conspiracy between reader and writer (and critic), and asks us to
reconsider everything that is at stake when we read and write
fiction.
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