tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14194283.post115659945434618583..comments2024-02-01T14:03:35.442+01:00Comments on El Rincón de Alvy Singer: NATASHA Y LAS HISTORIAS MAXIMALISTASEl Miope Muñozhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15591688901639385097noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14194283.post-1156675606816703462006-08-27T12:46:00.000+02:002006-08-27T12:46:00.000+02:00Alvy, lleno de lecturas necesarias y con comentari...Alvy, lleno de lecturas necesarias y con comentarios personales y sugerentes. A veces vengo tarde, pero todos tus textos los leo. Un saludo.Francisco Ortizhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01399696449915737035noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-14194283.post-1156605596677492262006-08-26T17:19:00.000+02:002006-08-26T17:19:00.000+02:00Alvin, te dejo un fragmento de una elogiosa reseña...Alvin, te dejo un fragmento de una elogiosa reseña de James Wood al libro de DB. La primera frase me parece genial. <BR/><BR/>A Long Day at the Chocolate Bar Factory<BR/>James Wood<BR/>‘Natasha’ and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis • <BR/><BR/>Chekhov may be divine, but he is responsible for much sinning on earth. The contemporary short story is essentially sub-Chekhovian. It is most obviously indebted to what Shklovsky called Chekhov’s ‘negative endings’: the way his stories expire into ellipses, or seem to end in the middle of a thought – ‘It was starting to rain.’ This is so invisibly part of the grammar of contemporary short fiction that we no longer notice how peculiarly abrupt, how monotonously fragmentary much of what we read has become. Consistent with this abruptness is the contemporary idea that the short story should present itself as a victim of its own confusion, a poised bewilderment, in which nothing can really be sorted out; the necessary vehicle for this bewilderment is the first-person narrator, who must get along amid modern confusions without the help of an all-knowing, third-person authorial patron. Chekhov’s simpleness and lucidity – it is easier to see his lucidity than to sense his complexity and lyricism – seem to cast their shadow over the quick, skinned, blank language of so much American short fiction: a prose whose thin roof often houses, unsurprisingly, characters who are themselves rather blank and affectless, as if stunned by the hammer blows of the age. And Chekhovian irony also finds its debased correspondence in contemporary writing; though where Chekhov’s irony is often savage, modern irony is often merely all-nullifying.<BR/><BR/>It says much for David Bezmozgis’s considerable talents that his apparently skinny, crafty, ironic stories, narrated entirely in the first person in simple, unmetaphorical prose, and fond of abrupt closures, should seem to dip so obviously into the common pool and yet avoid, on the whole, the commonest failings. These tales sometimes surrender to an easy irony or a convenient blankness of narration, but the best of them are passionately full of life: above all, they are true examples of storytelling. Here, Bezmozgis’s great advantage, other than his literary skills – remarkable for a 31-year-old writer publishing his first book – is his material: he writes exclusively about recent Russian-Jewish immigrants to Canada, trailing with ardent curiosity his own world and the world of his parents and grandparents. (Bezmozgis was born in Riga in 1973, and moved to Canada in 1980: the stories are chronologically loyal to that history and dedicated to his parents.)Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12966354516294572322noreply@blogger.com