Saturday, June 17, 2006

A rather wonderful review

in the NYTBR by Harold Bloom of Rebecca Goldstein's 'Betraying Spinoza', a book I definitely want to read (but the review also takes me back to the days of the Bloom Shakespeare seminar I took in grad school, it was quite amazing & I can still in my mind's ear hear him reading Edmund's bastard soliloquy in that flat and yet somehow also quite perspicuous voice, Bloom's way of reading aloud is completely unactorly and yet lets some meaning of the words come through that would be worse served by more eloquent reading); also, Sean Wilsey praises Alison Bechdel's 'Fun Home'.

2 comments:

  1. Rebecca Goldstein is also a recent 'discovery' of mine. I'm in the midst of her first novel The Mind-Body Problem, and I think she's someone you may enjoy. Or perhaps you've already read her earlier novels? I plan to work my way forward.

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  2. Patrick Kurp also writes about Rebecca Goldstein’s Betraying Spinoza, and finds it "compulsively readable" as she "dramatizes the degree to which Spinoza remains so threatening an apostate in certain quarters, despite having died in 1677":

    Defending Spinoza

    Defending Spinoza, Part 2

    Defending Spinoza, Part 3

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