strangebedfellas reviews
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(as of Jan 06, 2025 02:49:13 UTC - Details)
West’s intellectually challenging collection of essaysâ now available as an ebook
In this collection of literary criticism, West undertakes the question of art’s value, examining the works of her contemporaries and their places in history
“The Strange Necessity,” one of the twelve essays collected here and first published in 1928, anchors West’s quest to understand why art matters and how aesthetics of every caliber can not only inspire but reveal the author’s inner world. Whether juxtaposing Ulysses’s prose with Pavlov’s research, or comparing Sinclair Lewis with actress and pianist Yvonne Printemps, West finds that a satisfying emotion overrides an artistic work’s form. Her intricately crafted essays reveal her experience in the literary circles of the twenties and thirties and the important role this question played in her own writing. West’s keenly observed criticism offers invaluable insight not only into her work but into her impressions of early twentieth century literature.
Publisher : Virago Press Limited (January 1, 1987)
Language : English
Paperback : 352 pages
ISBN-10 : 0860685047
ISBN-13 : 978-0860685043
Item Weight : 1.3 pounds
Dimensions : 5.06 x 0.72 x 7.81 inches
Reviewer: Phred
Rating: 2.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Soporific
Review: I came to Rebecca Westâs Strange Necessities having read about 2000 pages of her novels and over 1000 more in her Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. I am aware that brevity is rarely her concern. And I remain an advocate for her as a writer. But this book brought me, repeatedly to a full-on head snapping snore. I am sure that is it bejeweled with passages of wondrous text but too many of them were lost among the twitches of my Kindle paginating finger even as my eyes blurred and my eyelids succumbed, opioid leaded.The title essay Strange Necessities seemed to take forever when it fact it was just over half the 200 odd page book. Upon its completion I had hoped for text less over weaning. The strange necessity is the impulse to create art. It has to be strong enough that the presumptively male proto-artist who first inked animal hunts on cave walls forsook the chance to âwanton his womanâ at the command of the instinct to create rather than procreate.In fact, this section began with a truly funny satire on James Joyce in general and Ulysses in particular. West simply recreate his Stream of consciousness, applies it to a day she experienced on The French Riviera. Having detailed a love hate relationship that in fact admires Ulysses, except where she feels the author availed himself of short cuts. Dame West then progresses into an Odyssey of her own mind, musing on the artistic impulse. Count on it, the end of a thought is endlessly the herald of more to come.What follows are mostly reviews of various books and writers. Westâs technique depends on paragraphs arriving in mind numbing parade wherein a review may be about Hardy only to cross into compressions with Trollope, D.H. Lawrence or Dickens or maybe the one suggests the other until you are sure the review was always supposed to be about Crane (or maybe James) only to have it circle back through Swinburne to alight on one or another of the Sitwells. There is also a lovely bit about writers who ride a Tosh Horse. We need never have the expression defined because we know this is a bad thing for a writer to do and was never done by writers in the fustian earlier age when people regularly rode real horses. You know the above reproach writers like Austin.How many names can you drop before it is properly called name dumping?Along the way âoneâ sees or does or imagines whatever âoneâ see or does but not necessarily Dame West would see or do;, while Dame West is again walking the French Riviera and angling with her concierge to get adequate milk for her coffee.
Reviewer: Patrick Odaniel
Rating: 4.0 out of 5 stars
Title: Oddly Compelling
Review: The strange necessity is man's desire for aesthetic experience as both analysis and synthesis. Dame Rebecca West describes this desire as manifesting itself in a function which is both internal and external to man--a prescient forerunner of the internet (such as Tilich and the noosphere). She uses as an example James Joyce's Ulysses and provides some of the most acute criticism I have read of that book (of course, it helped that her book was written in the '20s before the hardening of the hosannas). Today, it is impossible to describe Ulysses as anything other than flawless. West agrees that it is a great book and that Joyce is a genius, but she feels that Ulysses is ultimately an unsatisfying work of art. Whether one agrees or not with this assessment, it is a refreshing change from the mindless obeisance lavished upon the work today.There are a few throw-away essays appended to this work. Most are light and frothy. Again, there are a couple of keen interest: one describing the different uses of memory in modern literature as represented by Proust and another concerning the value of criticism.All in all, a delight.