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An anthology of his texts that he himself made in life is published in Spain. The volume also includes unpublished that had never seen the light
★★★★★
Jesus FERRER
About a year ago George Steiner died. With him disappeared the awareness of the emancipatory value of reading, the humanist intellectual versed in multiple knowledge, the voice of intercultural tolerance and the liberal exponent of the best European identity. An insightful literary critic, an ironic commentator on reality, a determined defender of the pedagogical recovery of the Greco-Latin world, his characteristic bonhomie was evidence of an independent spirit of uncompromising ethical integrity. Essays such as “After Babel”, “Real Presences” or “The Idea of Europe” constitute a solid intellectual legacy to which we can now add the publication of “A Reader”, which includes unpublished texts.
Steiner selects fragments that constitute the warp of his most representative cultural obsessions: the moral significance of the arts, the varied human significance of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, his fascination for music – Schönberg above all -, Tolstoian nihilism, the shocking Nazi affiliation of Heidegger, the initial closeness and subsequent critical distance towards Luckacs’ theories, the lights and shadows of literary translation, the creative power of language, his misgivings about psychoanalysis or his ironic skepticism about the theater of the absurd, among other references.
The human condition
And always with the insistent idea that culture has a spiritual projection, that it must represent the best excellence of the human condition. This is how he details it: “Can we advance much more in our poetics of understanding, in our common search for the identification, interpretation and transmission of what is indispensable in literature and the arts without recognizing its significance?”
The multidisciplinary nature of his knowledge makes this essayist a standard-bearer of contemporary humanism, reminiscent of the Renaissance intellectual and the enlightened philosopher. A pioneer of comparative literature studies, an expert in the aesthetic drift of Linguistics, a staunch defender of the civil value of education and a popularizer of intricate theoretical questions, his work vindicates that Europe of Zweig’s “yesterday’s world”, because it is in a culture of artistic excellence and human rights where, for Steiner, European identity lies. This book stands as a beacon and symbol of that mentality that should be defended at all costs.
The extraordinary expository clarity and that the author knows how to combine amenity and rigor in equal measure
Nothing remarkable in these texts of who is already a classic contemporary essayist
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Maggie O’Farrell signs a round work of enormous beauty, which is a tribute to the English bard and delves into his mysteries
★★★★★
Sagrario FERNÁNDEZ-PRIETO
The historical archives of the town of Stratford record the marriage of William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway and the birth of their three children: Susanna and later the twins Hamnet and Judith, a boy and a girl. Maggie O’Farrell has investigated these and other files on the great English bard and found important gaps and sometimes something more striking: those footnotes that provide data that do not seem relevant enough to be incorporated into the body of the text.
Masterfully connecting fiction and reality, O’Farrell breathes new life into Shakespeare’s wife, named Agnes here, and creates for her an absolutely plausible pre-wedding story, as well as a later one, when her husband he had already left and was triumphing on the London stage. There he premiered “Hamlet” four years after his son Hamnet died at 11. Four years and a letter of difference between the death of a son and what is for many the best dramatic work in the history of literature.
Maggie O’Farrell has created, in short, a great story, enormously moving, that rightly explores grief and loss with a skill and a simply masterful sensitivity. The author confesses her eternal fascination for the unknowns that lie behind Shakespeare’s plays. And this is the suggestive result of that attraction that you have always felt.
The empathy that its reading awakens thanks to some close characters drawn with enormous nuances
You cannot put a single but to a work that also highlights a vivid recreation of the time
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Andrew Doyle, who is behind the pseudonym Titania McGrath, writes a delightful book that breaks with the established by the new puritanism of the left
★★★★★
Lluís FERNÁNDEZ
Two ideas prevail when reading the satirical book on ideology “Woke” by Titania McGrath, pseudonym of the English comedian Andrew Doyle: the end justifies the means and gender performativity. Judith Butler’s mocking critique of nonsense about her theory of the anti-essentialist deconstruction of sexuality touches on its very foundations: “Gender and sex are performances, performative acts that are modalities of authoritarian discourse.” Another delirious, Beatriz Preciado, adds her “queer-arty” touch: “The genre would be the retroactive effect of the ritualized repetition of” performances. “
Result, the “gender tourist”, who goes from the endocrinologist to the surgeon in a drift in search of the “ontological status” lost and found imaginatively in successive trans “performances” in order to make a wrong body coincide with a non-existent soul. Take ontology!
For these crazy people of identity politics – race, gender and sex – those who dare to oppose it are the worst. They do not understand that biology is above ideology and that reality is a cultural construct. Which is why John Austin’s performative act, “to say something is to do something,” acquires its full meaning. The force of the “performative statement” is that black magic of the act of speech that by the act of being enunciated the enunciated action is carried out. Big mistake, because the act of speech only does it in the statement, not outside of it. However, for “Woke” activism, wishing for something is a real fact. Clarifying example from Titania: «Feelings don’t care about your facts. If you feel that something is true, then it is true. To be an activist «Woke», he adds, «you just have to add a rainbow flag to your profile or reprimand an older person who doesn’t understand what ‘non-binary’ means, and you’re already improving the world», and «you can’t consider feminist if you do not demonstrate for rights that you already have.
The “scourge” of being white
In essence, it makes fun of heteropatriarchy, “of course”, and whiteness, that scourge of being white, hetero and binary. The corollary is as accurate as the Feminazi pamphlet of the equality law: “We will only achieve true equality when women are valued more than men.” The uniqueness of “Woke” is that it is written by antiphrase, it says the opposite of what is thought. Against all evidence, the woke utopia has been established. And against all rationality it remains. Corollary: “Hating someone because of the color of their skin is not racist if that person is white.”
It is one of the funniest “best-sellers” of the moment that highlights the nonsense of gender
The best is the worst. Just one quote: “If it entertains, it is entertainment. If it offends, it is hate speech »
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After being left out of the prestigious list of nominees for the Gouncourt Prize, the controversial work of the French writer sees the light
★★★★★
Angeles LÓPEZ
We say, those of us who love him, that in each Carrère book you will find the best Carrère. The ultimate. But after so many years, it has arrived, if not his great work, then the most legitimate. It’s called “Yoga,” but it’s not about yoga. It addresses the “literature of the real,” but lies by omission. It can be defined by saying what it is not: neither documentary novel, nor chronicle, nor non-fiction. Perhaps it is an autofiction but it also transcends the concept … Go ahead, it is not “The Kingdom” either, but it tells a lot about who has written these pages that generated a scandal with his ex-wife, which left him out of Goncourt and it granted the right to censor paragraphs that spoke of it before its publication. Therefore, the author had to invent a character. The result: his most metaliterary text.
He starts with the intention of writing a book on meditation and ends up leading to his partner, Islamist terrorism or refugees … He explains how his mental health worsens until he is admitted to a hospital because of his Type II Bipolar Affective Disorder. Our man, “narcissistic, unstable, overwhelmed by the obsession of being a great writer”, builds an analysis on madness and fragility where he resorts to Montaigne, Proust, Houellebecq and a good list of “functional neurotic” artists. A bipolar work that, like Buddha, seeks the “middle way” between spiritual freedom.
That it is a strong, instinctive and dizzying book about the hard profession of living
Perhaps the author’s excessive ego may even overshadow his own work
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