From Dwight Garners review of a new biography about the novelist, - TopicsExpress



          

From Dwight Garners review of a new biography about the novelist, Penelope Fitzgerald: In her fiction, Fitzgerald saw herself and others plain. It’s a cliché of discourse about biographies to remark that a good one (sometimes even a bad one) will send you racing back to read the subject’s works. In this case, it happens to be true in a mighty way. This book complicates Fitzgerald, messes her up in all the right ways. Best of all, Ms. Lee makes a strong and complex case for her fiction. The finest description of that fiction came from Fitzgerald herself. She most wanted to get at, she said, “the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?” nytimes/2014/11/19/books/penelope-fitzgerald-a-life-by-hermione-lee.html?ref=books&_r=0 How, indeed?
Posted on: Wed, 19 Nov 2014 18:17:01 +0000

Trending Topics



Recently Viewed Topics




© 2015