ellauri109.html on line 509: Over time, he took on vast themes—love, lust, loneliness, marriage, masculinity, ambition, community, solitude, loyalty, betrayal, patriotism, rebellion, piety, disgrace, the body, the imagination, American history, mortality, the relentless mistakes of life—and he did so in a variety of forms: comedy, parody, romance, conventional narrative, postmodernism, autofiction.
xxx/ellauri068.html on line 219: So what did I do? I chose to remember that Borges is not a writer of the era of Facebook and autofiction; that it is not true that he hides in his texts, speaks little about himself (in fact, the opposite is true: how often in his work does his double appear, the character called Borges?); he simply does not do it the way in which we are accustomed today; that, like his friend Alfonso Reyes, Borges learned the classical notion of decorum, which is a set of rules of style when writing and also a certain principle of discretion, an obligation not to say absolutely everything that is very likely inconceivable to many people today.
xxx/ellauri125.html on line 428: From the start, critics complained about the ostensible sameness of Roth’s books, their narcissism and narrowness—or, as he himself put it, comparing his own work to his father’s conversation, “Family, family, family, Newark, Newark, Newark, Jew, Jew, Jew.” Over time, he took on vast themes—love, lust, loneliness, marriage, masculinity, ambition, community, solitude, loyalty, betrayal, patriotism, rebellion, piety, disgrace, the body, the imagination, American history, mortality, the relentless mistakes of life—and he did so in a variety of forms: comedy, parody, romance, conventional narrative, postmodernism, autofiction. In each performance of a self, Roth captured the same sound and consciousness. in nearly fifty years of reading him I’ve never been more bored. I got to know Roth in the nineteen-nineties, when I interviewed him for this magazine around the time he published “The Human Stain.” To be in his presence was an exhilarating, though hardly relaxing, experience. He was unnervingly present, a condor on a branch, unblinking, alive to everything: the best detail in your story, the slackest points in your argument. His intelligence was immense, his performances and imitations mildly funny. “He who is loved by his parents is a conquistador,” Roth used to say, and he was adored by his parents, though both could be daunting to the young Philip. Herman Roth sold insurance; Bess ruled the family’s modest house, on Summit Avenue, in a neighborhood of European Jewish immigrants, their children and grandchildren. There was little money, very few books. Roth was not an academic prodigy; his teachers sensed his street intelligence but they were not overawed by his classroom performance. Roth learned to write through imitation. His first published story, “The Day It Snowed,” was so thoroughly Truman Capote that, he later remarked, he made “Capote look like a longshoreman.”
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