Reviews — Music & Literature
László Krasznahorkai's <i>Seiobo There Below</i>

Share

László Krasznahorkai's Seiobo There Below

Review by Adam Z. Levy

Published in Hungarian in 2008, nearly twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, László Krasznahorkai’sSeiobo There Below depicts a search for the sacred in a sprawling, indifferent, borderless world in its current moment of decay...

Share

Thomas Pynchon's <i>Bleeding Edge</i>

Share

Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge

Review by Jonathan Sudholt

Bleeding Edge is Thomas Pynchon’s 9/11 novel, and he turns his attention to a “post-late capitalist” military-industrial complex that is all grown up...

Share

Javier Marías's <i>The Infatuations</i>

Share

Javier Marías's The Infatuations

Review by Morten Høi Jensen

As a character in Javier Marías's The Infatuations likes to remind us, it is not the plot of a novel that is important—what happens is so easily forgotten—but rather the “possibilities and ideas that the novel’s imaginary plot communicates to us and infuses us with”...

Share

Steven Moore's <i>The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–1800</i>

Share

Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600–1800

Review by Jeff Bursey

The cover of Steven Moore's The Novel: An Alternative History, 1600-1800 may entice. It’s of a young woman happily reading a book while lying nude on her bed. No men disturb her bedroom pursuit of pleasure...

Share

Anne Carson's <i>Red Doc></i>

Share

Anne Carson's Red Doc>

Review by Madeleine LaRue

Anne Carson's Red Doc>, though populated by visionaries and prophets, is in part about the undoing of that youthful action, about learning not to see...

Share

Iva Bittová

Share

Iva Bittová

Review by Ian Patterson

Iva Bittová’s eclecticism is evident on her debut as leader for ECM, an intimate solo performance where her voice blends with violin and kalimba in an intoxicating brew that is both ethereal and invigoratingly rootsy...

Share

Mikhail Shishkin’s <i>Maidenhair</i>

Share

Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair

Review by Christiane Craig

Beneath the surface chaos of its many narratives, Mikhail Shishkin’s Maidenhair would appear fractal in its logic...

 

Share

George Szirtes's <i>Bad Machine</i>

Share

George Szirtes's Bad Machine

Review by Bethany W. Pope

How do we distinguish, George Szirtes asks in Bad Machine, between the physical form, which passes away, and the spark—or, according to one poem, smoke—that sets us apart from other animals?

Share

Charles Rosen’s Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature

Share

Charles Rosen’s Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature

Reviewed by Taylor Davis-Van Atta

How we interpret art—as individuals and as a public—is influenced by a complex of inherited and learned sensibilities peculiar to our time, and also by prior knowledge one brings to the experience: a book is read against the tapestry of all previously read books; within a piece of music wisps of prior recordings or performances, or even entirely other pieces of music, are heard; meanwhile, innate political, cultural, and aesthetic understandings are altering our perceptions and tastes. All of this input informs and heightens our experience of art, but it can also hinder the pure pleasure of an experience. Even a desire to understand or find meaning in art can itself be a limiting factor—a paradoxical idea when one considers that the main function of art may ultimately be to liberate us from the entrapments of meaning and/or from an antiquated understanding of the world around us. Having inherited modern sensibilities implicit in our time and culture, and limited by an incomplete knowledge of the conditions of past eras out of which some of our most enduring art emerged, we might raise a central question: to what degree are we, as individuals and as a public, able to exercise free will over our own interpretations and appreciation of art?

Share

Share

An Interview with the Founder and Editor of M&L

"Rather than covering new books and music as they are released, Music & Literature will, over the years, offer its own canon, its own peculiar taste in art..."

Share