Saturday 22 December 2018

Pieces of My Mind

Finished December 9
Pieces of My Mind: Essays and Criticism 1958-2002 by Frank Kermode

This collection of essays and criticism turned out to be a lot more academic than I expected, causing me to keep a dictionary nearby to look up various words, and to read it slowly over many months.
Included here are a number of essays, most around books, authors, and artists. Some of them are from presentations given at conferences and other academic events.
There are nineteen long essays on subjects such as Diaghilev; Time and Eternity; Solitary Confinement; The English Novel; Hawthorne; Wuthering Heights; The Man in the Macintosh; Wallace Stevens; Secrets and Narrative Sequence; Botticelli; Cornelius and Voltemand; The Plain Sense of Things; Mixed Feelings; Eros; Memory; Forgetting; Cambridge; Literary Criticism; and Shakespeare and Boito.
There is a section of shorter essays about various people: Raymond Carver; James Lees-Milne; Auden on Shakespeare; Don DeLillo; Martin Amis; Ian McEwan; and Tom Paulin.
All in all it was a very interesting read, but definitely a stretch for me.

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