They are without legal recourse. Biography is the medium through which the remaining secrets of the famous dead are taken from them and dumped out in full view of the world. See what nice clear writing? I am reading Consider the Lobster right now, and liking it, but Janet Malcolm is a breath of fresh air after the orgies of convolution perpetrated by David Foster Wallace more on him later.
You may also note that Janet Malcolm is not comfortable with the project she herself is undertaking, to write about dead people. This is a tension that runs throughout the book, and one that is not resolved to her satisfaction by the end.
So I can sympathize. It was one of those reading experiences where the book is so good that you have to keep pausing and marveling at your luck at having happened to pick up a book that is just so damn good. It was page-turnier than I would expect a book about books to be. I started reading it on the High Line and then came home on the subway because it got too windy, and finished reading it on my couch, with short breaks to shriek to Miniature Roommate about how relentlessly good it was.
The moral of this post is: Janet Malcolm is the best! I am now going to read the rest of her books in reverse order of how awesome Amazon says they are. Thank you to the wonderful Litlove for recommending this book to me much earlier this year. If you do know something bad about her, please tell me now. Do you have any idea how much I used to love Orson Scott Card? And how long it took me to accept the fact that he is a big jerk? This includes manipulating facts and their sources, and peddling personal details, particularly of the sexual and salacious kind.
Damningly, Bate does not emphasize this. Because Malcolm has never discouraged subjectivity; on the contrary, she relies on it. In a Janet Malcolm work of life writing—and The Silent Woman is life writing, with the subtitle Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes —you might not get as solid a portrait of the subject as you think you want, but you get Janet Malcolm. This result is exponentially more thrilling. Is Janet Malcolm asking us to be nice? The answer is no, and it took me a moment to realize that I could simply look to Plath for the reason why.
A deserving reproach to be reminded of her, again. Minimum monthly payments are required. In a book full of interviews he is conspicuously the Silent Man, though he looms large in her imagination jajet haunts the narrative like a hulking ghost. Shipping to: Worldwide.
Since that tragedy. The name field is required. Table of contents. Please choose whether or not you want other users to be able to see on your profile that this library is a favorite of yours. Finding libraries that hold this item You may have already requested this item. Enter your email address Continue Continue Please enter an email address Email address is invalid Fill out this field Email address is invalid Email already exists? Hughes, bibliographies and reviews: or, Ted.
Create lists! Independent Premium app. Please enter 5 or 9 numbers for the ZIP Code. The name field is required! Part Two: Chapter II.
In an astonishing feat of literary detection, one of the most provocative critics of our time and the author of In the Freud Archives and The Purloined Clinic offers an elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography.
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