国产热热热精品,亚洲视频久久】日韩,三级婷婷在线久久,99人妻精品视频,精品九热人人肉肉在线,AV东京热一区二区,91po在线视频观看,久久激情宗合,青青草黄色手机视频

Culture

Science or art? Author relishes fine points of reading

By Dwight Garner in New York ( China Daily ) Updated: 2014-08-06 07:19:25

Science or art? Author relishes fine points of reading

Thumbing across America with John Waters 

Science or art? Author relishes fine points of reading

Love's possibilities unwrapped in French novel 

He means mental robbery, of course, the sort that all film adaptations of novels commit. He observes, in what's not an original thought but a vital one: "One should watch a film adaptation of a favorite book only after considering, very carefully, the fact that the casting of the film may very well become the permanent casting of the book in one's mind. This is a very real hazard."

This book's midpoint, in fact, is about where you realize that Mendelsund does several things well. He has a wide range of reference, taking core samples from the work of Joyce, Dickens, Nabokov and Woolf, among others, and he quotes with care. This line from Oliver Sacks sums up some of this book's subject matter: "One does not see with the eyes; one sees with the mind."

Mendelsund notes that we can read novels quickly, as if driving through them, or slowly, as if walking, and have distinct experiences. About this he notes, "The best book for me: I drive through it quickly but am forced to stop on occasion, to pull over and marvel."

He can be a canny close reader. He prints a few descriptive sentences of a couple walking together from Wharton's House of Mirth, and mentally X-rays them. "It is helpful that we are told about the shape of this character's hair and the thickness of her lashes," he writes. "But what is truly being communicated to us is a rhythm. The rhythm, in turn, conveys a young man's elation at walking alongside a young woman."

You read this and you think: Yes.

To his credit, Mendelsohn keeps his tone light while thinking deliberately about fundamental things. He moves from a remembered family trip along a river, for example, to a sense that, as he writes, "Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader."

A gifted designer, Mendelsund is more alert that most to inflection and innuendos. He's the man, after all, who designed the dust jacket for Stieg Larsson's The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.

His humbleness is another of this book's good qualities. "I am a visual person (so I am told)," he says. "I am a book designer, and my livelihood depends not only on my visual acuity in general, but on my ability to recognize the visual cues and prompts in texts. But when it comes to imagining characters, daffodils, lighthouses, or fog: I am as blind as the next person."

Previous Page 1 2 Next Page

 
Editor's Picks
Hot words
Most Popular
 
...
喀喇沁旗| 黄石市| 浦江县| 嘉兴市| 运城市| 蒙自县| 济南市| 民丰县| 尉氏县| 沿河| 三门峡市| 永年县| 古丈县| 墨江| 光泽县| 麻栗坡县| 宝山区| 翁源县| 布尔津县| 青阳县| 垫江县| 乐亭县| 萍乡市| 云浮市| 萨迦县| 玉屏| 万荣县| 巢湖市| 郧西县| 博罗县| 瓮安县| 固原市| 凉山| 唐海县| 应用必备| 靖安县| 平顶山市| 五华县| 佛冈县| 澄迈县| 云梦县|