Word: flaubert
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...apply to people who say I must go on living,'' says Sampedro. ``I ask, `Swap places with me. Would you want to?' They admit they wouldn't.'' With a beautiful smile and a sense of humor tuned by long hours of reading--his shelves hold translations of Swift, Wilde, Flaubert--Sampedro says if he cannot have his life ended in predominantly Roman Catholic Spain, one option is to be taken to the Netherlands...
There's no mistaking the reference; Schami is flogging his heritage to American publishers. He capitalizes on the romantic nation of Arab story-telling, as thousands have before him. But Schami boasts an advantage that Nerval or Flaubert could never attain: he is an Arab. He understands what makes Damascenes tick, and embues his account with a wealth of genuine detail that French Orientalists could only dream of (when they weren't dreaming about those slave-girls they bought in Cairo). At the same time, he knows his surroundings well enough to misrepresent them subtly: Damascus appears slightly trated...
...testimony to the increasingly schizophrenic character of the Brown New Yorker. Literary gems like Francine du Plessix Gray's review of the Flaubert-Sand epistolary relationship as documented by assorted biographers share pages with tawdry baubles such as John Seabrook's near-hagiographic piece on an obscure art director (whose 15 minutes are ticking rapidly away). And why, oh why do we need to learn anything more about Kate Moss, the waifish model with the look of utter imbecility...
This is not to deny that academics dominate daily life at Harvard In my four year here my eyes have opened ever wider. I have thought and puzzled and breathed literature and politics and theory and life--had an "ejaculation of the soul" as Flaubert once said--with new insights and knowledge and curiosity exploding nearly every...
Merwin defers repeatedly to the masters--to Flaubert, to Shakespeare, to Dante. He hardly mentions his latest book, Travels, his speech for the Nieman Journalism Fellows, or his reading at the Poet's Theater--the occasion for his visit to Cambridge...