The World (Is a Book) According to Peter LaSalle, by Ellie Simon

Book Reviews Photo by andy lapham / Flickr Whether he is recounting his nighttime drive with a late colleague and poet around the beltway of the pulsing and vibrant São Paulo—a city so full of people and culture that it seems to have its own gravitational pull—in the form of a mournful elegy, characterized by piercing prose and sorrowful nostalgia about their time teaching together; or essaying about his days abroad in Cameroon as a young, twinkly eyed bachelor, chancing upon the opportunity to interview the renowned René Philombe, “one of the most influential personalities in the new wave of creative writing in Cameroon” (Cameroon Tribune); or, after spending a week with his sweet, innocent prospective playwright of a nephew (“See more glass, cries little Sybil”), lamenting his inability to marry or set down roots in a Parisian penthouse high above the skyline; or creating his own fiction while drawing from his myriad of experiences around the planet or recounting his travel to the places in which his favorite pieces of literature were set or composed—a few of these being the ancient Carthage (modern-day Tunis) of Flaubert’s 1862 historical novel Salammbô; Buenos Aires, the proverbial cradle of the Argentine literary giant Jorge Luis Borges; or Ho Chi Minh City, home of Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, arguably the most transformative author of postwar Vietnam—Peter LaSalle, in The World Is a Book, Indeed (LSU Press, 2020),... Continue reading at 'World Literature Today'

[ World Literature Today | 2021-10-11 20:56:08 UTC ]

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