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
 
...
嵩明县| 新闻| 湖北省| 区。| 洛扎县| 渝中区| 惠东县| 靖安县| 丰镇市| 且末县| 京山县| 平遥县| 乐至县| 婺源县| 手游| 成都市| 蒙城县| 双江| 郴州市| 陈巴尔虎旗| 团风县| 古交市| 桂东县| 保亭| 邵阳县| 阜平县| 电白县| 阳曲县| 商河县| 永宁县| 齐齐哈尔市| 白河县| 东丰县| 华容县| 蓝田县| 武川县| 通许县| 道孚县| 定西市| 武川县| 方正县|