Exit Ghost has arrived

Just received my copy of Philip Roth’s latest novel, Exit Ghost. Here is the review from the Times. (sorry I’m so late on this one, life is a bit slower across the pond.) I haven’t read any of the reviews — Roth is one of the few authors whose books I buy once they come out.

I’d been alone these past eleven years in a small house on a dirt road in the deep country, having decided to live apart like that some two years before the cancer was diagnosed. I see few people. Since the death, a year earlier, of my neighbor and friend Larry Hollis, two, three days can go by when I speak to no one but the housekeeper who comes to clean each week and her husband, who is my caretaker. I don’t go to dinner parties, I don’t go to movies, I don’t watch television, I don’t own a cell phone or a VCR or a DVD player or a computer. I continue to live in the Age of the Typewriter and have no idea what the World Wide Web is. I no longer bother to vote. I write for most of the day and often into the night. I read, mainly the books that I first discovered as a student, the masterpieces of fiction whose power over me is no less, and in some cases greater, than it was in my initial exciting encounters with them. Lately I’ve been rereading Joseph Conrad for the first time in fifty years, most recently The Shadow Line, which I’d brought with me to New York to look through yet again, having read it all in one go only the other night. I listen to music, I hike in the woods, when it’s warm I swim in my pond, whose temperature, even in the summer, never gets much above seventy degrees.

Also, for those of you who would like to take up the Zuckerman trilogy from the beginning, the Library of America has published the first four novels (out of how many? five, with Everyman? Six now with Exit Ghost?) in the latest volume of his collected works.

Reading War and Peace

The nytimes book section has just started an online discussion of War and Peace. The introductory article is by Richard Peaver, the translator of most of the important recent translations.

Beginning Oct. 15, a monthlong discussion of “War and Peace” will appear in the online edition of The Times. The panelists will include Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times; Stephen Kotkin, the director of Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University; and Francine Prose and Liesl Schillinger, both frequent contributors to the Book Review. The moderator will be Sam Tanenhaus, the editor of the Book Review. Readers can find the discussion at nytimes.com/books.

Did I mention that I recently finished Moby Dick? I suppose W&P would now be appropriate; at least that way I could wipe that self-congratulatory grin of my little brother’s face..

Paris Review of Books?

Listening to the radio last week, I discovered that there is a new literary review in France, La revue internationale des livres et des idées, ostensibly based on the New York Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. I bought the first issue and found it well worth reading — long articles by a number of academics and critics on serious, difficult books.

Nous sommes nombreux à regretter l’absence en France de véritables lieux publics où la critique littéraire, savante et politique pourrait s’exercer et s’épanouir. Nous sommes nombreux à regretter l’espace toujours plus réduit et intermittent que lui accordent la plupart des grands médias. C’est pourquoi nous lançons aujourd’hui La Revue internationale des livres et des idées, qui voudrait introduire dans le monde francophone, en la renouvelant, la tradition que le Times Literary Supplement, la New York Review of Books, la London Review of Books et, plus récemment, Bookforum ont contribué à inventer, à maintenir et à développer dans le monde anglophone.

I’m glad to see one of my all-time favorite formats (NYRB’s) in a French forum. Unfortunately, most of the content is paper-only.