From one of America's great literary figures, a new collection of essays on eminent writers and their work, and on the war between art and life. The perilous intersection of writers' lives with public and private dooms is the fertile subject of many of these remarkable essays from such literary giants as T.S. Eliot, Isaac Babel, Salman Rushdieand Henry James.
Fame & Folly: Essays
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
In this collection of essays, fiction writer and critic Cynthia Ozick has chosen to take on an important topic for all writers: how the lives and works of authors fit in with the times. It is a task she manages with more than a healthy helping of wryness. As Ozick describes it, the subject of this collection is "famous literary figures in our famously rotten century who have been associated with one sort of folly or another." With that in mind, she offers a wide-ranging set of essays on Isaac Babel; H. G. Wells and Henry James; Anthony Trollope; the American Academy of Arts and Letters' early-century disdain for modernism; and more.
From Publishers Weekly
Ozick is a spectacular essayist. In that most difficult and often self-indulgent of forms, she can make readers feel as if whole new vistas of ideas have been opened, analyzed and communicated. The first piece in this collection, "T.S. Eliot at 101," will remind college students of the 1960s of how much the poet meant and of how intently they listened to his voice. Eliot ignored and no longer taught-how can that be? Ozick is equally amazing when she spoofs literary pretension in "Helping T.S. Eliot Write Better," a piece one wants to copy and fax to friends. But like all serendipitous collections, this offering is frustratingly uneven, with fictional riffs and meetings with bibliophiles and long-dead writers adjacent to disquisitions on Henry James and attacks on the shortsighted American cultural establishment. At the risk of feeling ungrateful, the reader will wish to have encountered these pieces one at a time, in different seasons. All the same, however bumpy the ride in this collection, Ozick's insights and observations on writers such as Eliot and Saul Bellow and her intense awareness of the implications of this post-Holocaust world cannot be duplicated.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Thoughtful Essays,
By
This review is from: Fame & Folly: Essays (Paperback)
These essays are part autobiographical, part literary review, part reflection on the 20th century as a whole. The clearest example of the merging of these themes occurs in "Rushdie in the Louvre". Here we find Salman Rushdie who to Cynthia Ozick "has become, in his own person, a little Israel'; and defending whom "nowadays... places one among the stereotypes and the `Orientalists'". Here we see a man whose "right to exist is mired in the politics of anti-colonialism-and never mind the irony of this, given Rushdie's origins as a Muslim born in India." And here too we see Rushdie's work; his literary genius. But these themes (so concentrated in this one essay) are scattered throughout the rest of the book as well.
In this volume we find a touching portrait of Alfred Chester-a writer who might have been great; the first writer of her own generation Ozick meets; the man who (in many ways) gives her a hand up the ladder, even as he begins his own descent into death. Here we find the warning to our generation because we are too ready to celebrate the Now at the expense of history and culture (a warning that follows on the heels of a smile-inducing history of the Temple's fight against Modernity). And then there are some frankly personal essays. "Helping T.S. Eliot Write Better" will make any editor cringe; "Of Christian Heroism" is as much a personal rumination on human nature as it is an ode to Christians who saved Jews during the Holocaust. But no essay in this volume is impersonal. There are some themes that run through them, of course: anti-totalitarianism, anti-racism, anti-sameness, an abiding admiration for Western culture and literature and an even greater one for the creative spirit. But the author of these essays is ever present. In "Isaac Babel and the Identity Question", Cynthia Ozick decries the lack of "a valid biography of Babel." In this volume of essays, she has (I think) begun to write her own.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Our greatest essayist,
By A Customer
This review is from: Fame and Folly: Essays (Hardcover)
Having already reviewed Ozick's other essay collections, I have little to say about Fame & Folly, a wholly splendid book. But I do want to point out that the reviewer who evaluated Fame & Folly solely in terms of its author's feminism (s/he found Ozick insufficiently feminist) did a disservice to those who want some idea of the nature of the book. Fame & Folly does not aspire to be a feminist tract, despite the fact that Ozick is as liberated a woman as you could find (incidentally, her earlier collection Art & Ardor contains several essays in praise of classical feminism). It is a defense of, a hymn to, belles lettres. She writes about Henry James. She writes about Saul Bellow. She recalls her friendship with the late writer Alfred Chester. She shows, in every sentence, why she is America's foremost essayist.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Typically Excellent,
By
This review is from: Fame & Folly: Essays (Paperback)
I read most of Inna's superb output on the Internet.
If you are not familiar with her writings, do yourself a favor, buy her book. Yuval Zaliouk
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