When you are actually in America, America hurts, because it has a powerful disintegrative influence upon the white psyche. It is full of grinning, unappeased aboriginal demons, too, ghosts, and it persecutes the white men, like some Eumenides, until the white men give up their absolute whiteness. - D. H. Lawrence, 1922

Когда вы в самой Америке, ( Read more... )

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Машлер на днях говорил об отсутствии стиля у Грэма Грина. Но насколько я понимаю, Грин пытается изгонять стиль как средство самовыражения - иначе говоря, создавать стиль прозрачный, как стекло. Мне кажется, это совсем не так просто, как выглядело со слов Машлера. Для <писателя> соблазн использовать редкие или нераспространенные слова, придумывать ( Read more... )

In the pocket of his waterproof coat was a novel from the circulating library. It was not one of the hundred best books, nor was it a detective story. It was a circulating-library novel of exactly that sort that many intellectual people nowadays despise so amazingly. And yet it was probably a book in which an educated gentlewoman had shown a very ( Read more... )

Am reading The Heart of the Matter, a chapter at a time. It has everything in it that makes literature except verve, wit, gusto, music and magic.

- Raymond Chandler

Я часто встречаюсь с Леонидом Леоновым - и любуюсь его великолепным характером. [...] Это породистый и хорошо организованный человек, до странности лишенный доброты, но хороших кровей, в нем много поэзии,- типический русский характер ( Read more... )

I began to read - here and there - and, finally, overcome by nausea, I felt positively ill; and quickly drank several glasses of port in the hope of neutralizing my disgust. I have never yet read an author that nauseated me to such an extent. <...> The literary adjective to describe it accurately is - fucking awful! <...> She presents us with a ( Read more... )

Розина Бульвер Литтон считала, что викторианские мужчины отращивали усы, бороды и бакенбарды, чтобы скрыть следы морального разложения на лицах. “One has only to look at [Lord Lytton’s] hideous face and that of that other brute Dickens to see that every bad passion has left the impress of its cloven hoof upon their fiendish lineaments.”

[His] mind is the mind of a nice child - he hates and fears all problems, all speculation, all originality or novelty of view. His spirit is both timid and unadventurous. He is much abler than I am, much better, much more effective - yet I feel that he is a kind of child.

- A. C. Benson on M. R. James